Irish Memories

The crime of which this is an expression of repentance is obscure. That the repentance was not untinged by indignation with the temptation is obvious; but why should she not have “touched Dawny”? I am reminded of a companion incident. A small boy, of whom I have the honour to be godmother, was privileged to come upon a cache of carpenter’s tools, unhampered by the carpenter. He cut his fingers and was sent to bed. In the devotions which he subsequently offered up, the following clause was overheard,

“And please God, be more careful another time, and don’t let me touch Willy Driscoll’s tools.”

A very just apportioning of the blame. My cousin Nannie put it all upon Satan, who was the more fashionable deity of her period.

I remember that my aunt Florence Coghill sat up for the whole of one night, verifying from her Bible the existence of the devil; a fact that had been called in question by a reprobate nephew. She came down to breakfast wan, but triumphant, and flung texts upon the nephew, even as the shields were cast upon Tarpeia.

Martin had many stories of her mother, which, alas! she has not written down. Many of them related to the time when they were living in Dublin, and with all humility, and with apologies for possible error, I will try to remember some of them. Mrs. Martin was then a large and handsome lady of imposing presence, slow-moving, stately, and, in spite of a very genial manner, distinctly of a presence to inspire respect. It was alleged by her graceless family that only by aligning her with some fixed and distant object, and by close observation of the one in relation to the other, was it possible to see her move. (One of the stories turned on the mistake of one of her children, short-sighted like herself. “Oh, there’s Mamma coming at last!” A pause. Then, in tones of disappointment, “No, it’s only the tramcar!”)

Martin once wrote that “the essence of good housekeeping is to make people eat things that they naturally dislike. Ingredients that must, for the sacred sake of economy, be utilised, are rarely attractive, but the good housekeeper can send the most nauseous of them to heaven, in a curry, as in a chariot of fire.”

It must be admitted that neither artistic housekeeping, nor even the lower branches of the art, were my cousin Nannie’s strong suit. It is related of her that one day, returning from a tea-party, she remembered that her household lacked some minor need. Undeterred by her tea-party splendour of attire, she sailed serenely into a small and unknown grocer’s shop in quest of what she needed. The grocer, stout and middle-aged, lolled on his fat bare arms on the counter, reading a newspaper. He negligently produced the requirement, received the payment for it, and then, remarking affably, “Ta ta, me child!” returned to his paper.

My cousin Nannie, whose sense of the ridiculous could afflict her like an illness, tottered home in tearful ecstasies, and was only less shattered by the condescension of the grocer than by another tribute, somewhat similar in kind. She had a singularly small and well-shaped foot; a fact to which her son Robert was wont to attribute the peculiarity that her shoe-strings were rarely securely fastened, involving her in an appeal to the nearest man to tie them. She returned to her family one day and related with joy how, as she passed a cabstand, her shoe lace had become unfastened, and how she had then asked a cabman to tie it for her. She thanked him with her usual and special skill in such matters, and, as she slowly moved away, she was pleased to hear her cabman remark to a fellow:

“That’s a dam pleshant owld heifer!”

And the response of the fellow:

“Ah, Shakespeare says ye’ll always know a rale lady when ye see her.”

Her love for society was only matched by her intolerance of being bored. There was a recess in her bedroom, possessed of a small window and a heavy curtain. To this one day, on hearing a ring at the door, she hurriedly repaired, and took with her a chair and a book. She heard the travelling foot of the maid, searching for her. Then the curtain was pushed aside and the maid’s face appeared.

“Oh, is it there you are!” said the maid, with the satisfaction of the finder in a game of hide and seek. That her mistress did not dash her book in her face speaks well for her self-control.

It may be urged that Mrs. Martin might have spared herself this discomfiture by the simpler expedient of leaving directions that she was “Not at Home.” But this shows how little the present generation can appreciate the consciences of the last. I have known my mother to rush into the garden on a wet day, in order that the servant might truthfully say she was “out.”

“Ah, Ma’am, ’twas too much trouble you put on yourself,” said the devoted retainer for whom the sacrifice was made. “God knows I’d tell a bigger lie than that for you! And be glad to do it!” (which was probably true, if only from the artist’s point of view).

Mrs. Martin’s contempt for danger was one of the many points wherein she differed from the average woman of her time. Indeed, it cannot be said that she despised it, as, quite obviously, she enjoyed it. Martin has told of how she and her mother were caught in a storm, in a small boat, on Lough Corrib. Things became serious; one boatman dropped his oar and prayed, the other wept but continued to row; Martin, who had not been bred to boats on Ross Lake for nothing, tugged at the abandoned oar of the supplicant. Meanwhile her mother sat erect in the stern, looking on the tempest in as unshaken a mood as Shakespeare could have desired, and enjoying every moment of it. Neither where horses were concerned did she know fear. I have been with her in a landau, with one horse trying to bolt, while the other had kicked till it got a leg over the trace. Help was at hand, and during the readjustment Mrs. Martin firmly retained her seat. Her only anxiety was lest the drive might have to be given up, her only regret that both horses had not bolted. She said she liked driving at a good round pace. An outside-car might do anything short of lying down and rolling, without being able to shake her off; her son Robert used to say of her that on an outside-car his mother’s grasp of the situation was analogous to that of a poached egg on toast—both being practically undetachable.

How different was she from her first cousin, my mother, who, frankly mid-Victorian, proclaimed herself a coward, without a blush, even with ostentation. When the much-used label, “Mid-Victorian,” is applied, it calls up, in my mind at least, a type of which the three primary causes are, John Leech’s pictures, “The Newcomes,” and Anthony Trollope’s massive output. Pondering over these signs of that time, I withdraw the label from my mother and her compeers. Either must that be done, or the letter “i” substituted for the “a” in label. Let us think for a moment of Mrs. Proudie, of “The Campaigner”; of Eleanor, “The Warden’s” daughter, who bursts into floods of tears as a solution to all situations; of the insufferable Amelia Osborne. Consider John Leech’s females, the young ones, turbaned and crinolined, wholly idiotic, flying with an equal terror from bulls and mice, ogling Lord Dundreary and his whiskers, being scored off by rude little boys. And the elderly women, whose age, if nothing else, marked them, in mid-Victorian times, as fit subjects for ridicule, invariably hideous, jealous, spiteful, nagging, and even more grossly imbecile than their juniors. Thackeray and Trollope between them poisoned the wells in the ’fifties, and the water has hardly cleared yet. Nevertheless, with however mutinous a mind their books are approached, their supreme skill, their great authority, cannot be withstood; their odious women must needs be authentic. I am therefore forced to the conclusion that Martin’s mother, and mine, and their sisters, and their cousins and their aunts were exceptions to the rule that all mid-Victorian women were cats, and I can only deposit the matter upon that crowded ash-heap, that vast parcel-office, adored of the bromidic, “the knees of the Gods,” there to be left till called for.

* * * * *

There is a song that my mother used to sing to us when we were children, of which I can now remember only fragments, but what I can recall of it is so beautifully typical of the early Victorian young lady, and of what may be called the Bonnet and Shawl attitude towards the Lover, that a verse or two shall be transcribed. I believe it used to be sung at the house of my grandmother (Anna Maria Coghill, née Bushe), in Cheltenham, by one of the many literary and artistic dandies who hung about her and her handsome daughters. Lord Lytton, then Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton, was one of these, and he and my grandmother were among the first amateur experimenters in mesmerism, thought-reading, and clairvoyance, as might have been expected from the future author of “Zanoni,” and from the mother of my mother (who was wont, with her usual entire frankness, to declare herself “the most curious person in the world,” i.e. the most inquisitive).

I do not know the name of the song or of its composer. It has a most suitable, whining, peevish little tune; my mother used to sing it to us with intense dramatic expression, and it was considered to be a failure if the last verse did not leave my brother and me dissolved in tears. The song is in the form of a dialogue between the Lady and the Lover, and the Lady begins:

(The tune demands the repetition of the last two lines, but it, I regret to say, cannot be given here.)

One sees her drooping on a high chair by the window (which of course is closed), her ringlets losing their curl, her cheeks their colour. The Lover takes a high hand.

“Pooh! pooh! my dear! Dry up your tears,” he begins, arrogantly, and goes on to ask for trouble by explaining that the delay was caused by his having come “down Grosvenor Gate Miss Fanny’s eye to catch,” and he ends with defiance—

The Lady replies:

The last phrase an aside to the moved audience. “She” was his so-called “dearest Jane”! We thrilled at the perfidy, which lost nothing from my mother’s delivery.

And then poor Jane’s reproaches, and his impudent defence.

But it was always the last lines of the last verse that touched the fount of tears. Charles, with specious excuses, has made his farewells; she watches him from the window (still closed, no doubt).

he has warbled and departed. And then her cry (to the audience):

I shall never forget that absurd tune, and its final feeble wail of despair; and inextricably blended with it is the memory of how lusciously my brother and I used to weep, even while we clamoured for an encore.

CHAPTER VII

MY MOTHER

I have now forgotten many of the details, but I remember that when I read it, it irresistibly suggested to me the thought of my mother and her sisters and brothers. Tall, and fervent, and flaming, full of what seemed like quenchless vitality, their blood, if not flame, yet of that most ardent blend of Irish and English that has produced the finest fighters in the world. And now, like the splendid and puissant Alanadoths, they also have vanished (save one, the stoutest fighter of them all) into the mists that shroud the borderland between our life and the next.

They kept their youthful outlook undimmed, and took all things in their stride, without introspection or hesitation. Their unflinching conscientiousness, their violent church-going (I speak of the sisters), were accompanied by a whole-souled love of a spree, and a wonderful gift for a row. Or for an argument. There are many who still remember those great arguments that, on the smallest provocation, would rise, and stir, and deepen, and grow, burgeoning like a rose of storm among the Alanadoths. They meant little at the moment, and nothing afterwards, but while they lasted they were awe-inspiring. It is said that a stranger, without their gates, heard from afar one such dispute, and trembling, asked what it might mean.

“Oh, that!” said a little girl, with sang-froid, “That’s only the Coghills roaring.”

(As a dweller in the Hebrides would speak of a North-Atlantic storm.)

My mother was a person entirely original in her candour, and with a point of view quite untrammelled by convention. Martin and I have ever been careful to abstain from introducing portraiture or caricature into our books, but we have not denied that the character of “Lady Dysart” (in “The Real Charlotte”) was largely inspired by my mother.

She, as we said of Lady Dysart, said the things that other people were afraid to think.

“Poetry!” she declaimed, “I hate poetry—at least good poetry!”

Her common sense often amounted to inspiration. It happened one Christmas that my sister and I found ourselves in difficulties in the matter of a suitable offering to an old servant of forty years’ standing; she was living on a pension, her fancies were few, her needs none. A very difficult subject for benefaction. My mother, however, unhesitatingly propounded a suggestion.

“Give her a nice shroud! There’s nothing in the world she’d like as well as that!”

Which was probably true, but was a counsel of perfection that we were too feeble to accept.

It is indeed indisputable that my mother breathed easily a larger air than the lungs of her children could compete with. Handsome, impetuous, generous, high-spirited, yet with the softest and most easily-entreated heart, she was like a summer day, with white clouds sailing high in a clear sky, and a big wind blowing. Hers was the gift of becoming, without conscious effort, the rallying point of any entertainment. It was she who never failed to supply the saving salt of a dull dinner-party; her inveterate joie-de-vivre made a radiance that struck responsive sparkles from her surroundings, whatever they might be.

She was a brilliant pianiste, and played with the same spirit with which she tackled the other affairs of life. She was renowned as an accompanist, having been trained to that most onerous and perilous office by an accomplished and exacting elder brother—and nothing can be as relentlessly exacting as a brother who sings—and she had a gift of reading music, with entire facility, that is as rare among amateurs as it is precious.

Music, books, pictures, politics, were in her blood. Music, with plenty of tune; painting, with plenty of colour and a rigid adherence to fact; novels, compact of love-making; and politics, of the most implacable party brand. Alas! she did not live to see many of our books, but I fear that such as she did see, with their culpable economy of either love-makings or happy endings, were a disappointment to her. In her opinion the characters should leave a story, as the occupants left Noah’s Ark, in couples. I remember the indignation in her voice when, having finished reading “An Irish Cousin,” she said:

“But you never said who Mimi Burke married.”

Those who have done us the honour of reading that early work will, I think, admit that our description of Miss Mimi Burke might have exonerated us from the necessity of providing her with a husband.

My mother was one of the most thorough and satisfying letter-writers of a family skilled in that art, having in a high degree the true instinct in the matter of material, and knowing how to separate the wheat from the chaff (and—bien entendu—to give the preference to the chaff). She was a Woman Suffragist, unfaltering, firm, and logical; a philanthropist, practical and energetic.

“Where’d we be at all if it wasn’t for the Colonel’s Big Lady!” said the hungry country women, in the Bad Times, scurrying, barefooted, to her in any emergency, to be fed and doctored and scolded. She was a Spiritualist, wide-minded, eager, rejoicing in the occult, mysterious side of things, with the same enthusiasm with which she faced her sunshiny everyday life. Not that it was all sunshine. My grandfather, Thomas Somerville, of Drishane, died in 1882. With him, as Martin has said of his contemporary, her father, passed the last of the old order, the unquestioned lords of the land. Mr. Gladstone’s successive Land Acts were steadily making themselves felt, and my father and mother, like many another Irish father and mother, began to learn what it was to have, as a tenant said of himself, “a long serious family, and God knows how I’ll make the two ends of the candle meet!”

I marvel now, when I think of their courage and their gallant self-denial. The long, but far from serious, family, numbering no less than five sons and two daughters, thought little of Land Acts at the time, and took life as lightly as ever. The stable was cut down, but there were no hounds then, and I was in the delirium of a first break into oil colours, after a spring spent in Paris in drawing and painting, and even horses were negligible quantities. There was no change made in the destined professions for the sons; it was on themselves that my father and mother economised; and with effort, and forethought, and sheer self-denial, somehow they “made good,” and pulled through those bad years of the early ‘eighties, when rents were unpaid, and crops failed, and Parnell and his wolf-pack were out for blood, and the English Government flung them, bit by bit, the property of the only men in Ireland who, faithful to the pitch of folly, had supported it since the days of the Union. When the Russian woman threw the babies to the wolves, at least they were her own.

I have claimed for my mother moral courage and self-denial, and, in making good that claim, said that the stable establishment at Drishane—never a large one—had been cut down. I feel I ought to admit that this particular economy cannot be said to have afflicted her. She had an unassailable conviction that every horse was “at heart a rake.” Though she was not specially active, no rabbit could bolt before a ferret more instantaneously than she from a carriage at the first wink of one of the “bright eyes of danger.” No horse was quiet enough for her, few were too old.

“Slugs?” she has said, in defence of her carriage-horses, “I love slugs! I adore them! And slugs or no, I will not be driven by B——” (a massive sailor son). “He’s no more use on the box than a blue bottle!”

There was an occasion when she was discovered halfway up a ladder, faintly endeavouring to hang a picture, and unable to do so by reason of physical terror. She was restored to safety, and with recovered vigour she countered reproaches with the singular yet pertinent inquiry: “May I ask, am I a paralysed babe?”

Her similes were generally unexpected, but were invariably to the point. It often pleases me to try to recall some of the flowers of fancy that she has lavished upon my personal appearance. I think I should begin by saying that her ideal daughter had been denied to her. This being should have had hair of dazzling gold, blue eyes as big as mill-wheels, and should have been incessantly enmeshed in the most lurid flirtation. My eyes did indeed begin by being blue, but, as was said by an old nurse who held by the Somerville tradition of brown ones,

“By the help of the Lord they’ll change!”

They did change, but as the assistance was withdrawn when they had merely attained to a non-committal grey, neither in eyes, nor in the other conditions, did I gratify my mother’s aspirations.

I have been at a dinner-party with her, and have found, to my great discomfort, her eyes dwelling heavily upon my head. Her face wore openly the expression of a soul in torment. I knew that in some way, dark to me, I was the cause. After dinner she took an early opportunity of assuring me that my appearance had made her long to go under the dinner-table.

“Never,” she said, “have I seen your hair so abominable. It was like a collection of filthy little furze-bushes.”

Which was distressing enough, but not more so than being told on a similar occasion, and, I think, for similar reasons, that I was “not like any human young lady,” and again, she has seriously, even with agony, informed me that I was “the Disgrace of Castle Townshend!”

It was a sounding title, with something historic and splendid about it.

“The Butcher of Anjou!” “The Curse of Cromwell!” occur to me as parallel instances.

It was my privilege—sometimes, I think, my misfortune—to have succeeded my mother as the unofficial player of the organ in Castlehaven Church, and her criticisms of the music, and specially of the choir, were as unfailing as unsparing.

“They sang like infuriated pea-hens! Never have I heard such a collection of screech-cats! You should have drowned them with the great diapason!”

Not long ago, among some of her papers, I found a home-made copybook, of blue foolscap paper, with lines very irregularly ruled on it, and, on the lines, still more irregular phalanxes of “pothooks and hangers.” Further investigation discovered my own name, and a date that placed me at something under six years old; and at the foot of each page was my mother’s careful and considered judgment upon my efforts. “Middling,” “Careless,” “Bobbish,” “Naughty,” “Abominable,” and then a black day, when it was written, plain for all men to see, that I was not only abominable, but also naughty.

“Naughty and Abominable,” there it stands, and shows not only my early criminality, but my mother’s enchanting sincerity. What young mamma, of five or six and twenty, is there to-day who would thus faithfully allot praise or blame to her young. I feel safe in saying that the naughtier and more abominable the copy, the more inevitably would it be described as either killing or sweet.

In reference to this special page, I may add that, although I regard myself as a reliable opinion in calligraphy, I am unable to detect any perceptible difference between the pothooks and hangers of the occasion when I was bobbish, or those of that day of wrath when I was both naughty and abominable.

Amongst other episodes I cherish an unforgettable picture of my mother having her fortune told by her hand. (A criminal act, as we have recently learned, and one that under our enlightened laws might have involved heavy penalties.)

The Sibyl was a little lady endowed with an unusual share of that special variety of psychic faculty that makes the cheiromant, and also with a gift, almost rarer, of genuine enthusiasm for the good qualities of others, an innocent and whole-souled creator and worshipper of heroes, if ever there were one. To her did my mother confide her hand, her pretty hand, with the shell pink palm, and the blush on the Mount of Venus, that she had inherited from her mother, the Chief’s daughter.

“Intensely nervous!” pronounced the Sibyl (who habitually talked in italics and a lovable Cork brogue), looking at the maze of delicate lines that indicate the high-strung temperament. “Adores her children!”

“Not a bit of it!” says my mother, flinging up her head, in a way she had, like a stag, and regarding with a dauntless eye her two grinning daughters.

The Sibyl swept on, dealing with line and mount and star, going from strength to strength in the exposition till, at the line of the heart, she came to a dead set.

“Oh, Mrs. Somerville! What do I see? Countless flirtations!! And Oh—” (a long squeal of sympathy and excitement) “Four! Yes! One—Two—Three—Four Great Passions!”

At this the ecstasy of my mother knew no bounds. “Four, Miss X.! Are you sure?”

Miss X. was certain. She expounded and amplified, and having put the Four Great Passions on a basis of rock, proceeded with her elucidation of lesser matters; but it was evident that my mother’s attention was no longer hers.

“I’m trying to remember who the Four Passions were,” she said that evening to one of her first cousins (who might be supposed to know something of her guilty past), and to my sister, “There was Charlie B——. He’ll do for one—and L. W.——!—that’s two—and then—Oh, yes!—then there was S. B——! Minnie! Was I in love with S. B——?” She paused for an answer that her cousin was incapable, for more reasons than the obvious one, of giving.

My mother resumed the delicious inquiry.

“Well—” she said, musingly, “Anyhow, that’s only three. Now, who was the fourth?”

My sister Hildegarde, who was young and inclined to be romantic, said languishingly,

“Why, of course it was Papa, Mother!”

My father and mother’s mutual love and devotion were as delightful an example of what twenty-five years of happy married life bestows as can well be conceived, and I think Hildegarde was justified. My mother, however, regarded her with wide open blue eyes, almost sightless from the dazzle of dreams—dreams of the four reckless and dangerous beings who had galloped, hopeless and frenzied, into darkness (not to say oblivion) for love of her—dreams of her own passionate, heartbroken despair when they had thus galloped.

“What?... What?...” she demanded, bewilderedly, sitting erect, with eyes like stars, looking as Juno might have looked had her peacock turned upon her, “What do you say?”

“There was Papa, Mother,” repeated Hildegarde firmly, but not (she says) reprovingly, “He was the fourth, of course!”

“Papa??? ...”

The preposterous dowdiness of this suggestion almost deprived my mother of the power of speech.

“Papa! ... Paugh!”

* * * * *

Thus did the splendid and puissant Alanadoths dispose of the cobweb conventions of mere mortals.

CHAPTER VIII

HERSELF

“At a year old she was the prettiest child I ever saw, with her glorious dark eyes, and golden hair, and lovely colour; a dear little child, but quite unnoticed in the nursery. Charlie was the child brought forward. I think the unnoticed childhood had its effect. She lived her own life apart. Then came the reign of the Governesses, and their delight in her. I never remember the time she could not read, and she played the piano at four years old very well. (At twelve years old she took first prize for piano-playing at an open competition, held in Dublin, for girls up to eighteen.)

“Her great delight at four or five years old was to slip into the drawing-room and read the illustrated editions of the poets. Her favourite was an edition of Milton, with terrifying pictures; this she read with delight. One day there was an afternoon party, and, as usual, Violet stole into the drawing-room and was quickly engrossed in her loved Milton, entirely oblivious of the company. Later on, she was found fast asleep, with her head resting on the large volume. The scene is present with me; the rosy little face, and the golden hair resting on the book.

“I remember that Henry H—— said ‘Some day I shall boast that I knew Violet as a child!’”

She was christened Violet Florence, by her mother’s cousin, Lord Plunket, afterwards Archbishop of Dublin, in the drawing-room at Ross, the vessel employed for the rite being, she has assured me, the silver slop-basin, and at Ross she spent the first ten happy years of her life.

I, also, had a happy childhood, full of horses and dogs and boats and dangers (which latter are the glory of life to any respectable child with suitable opportunity), but after I had seen Ross I could almost have envied Martin and her brother, Charlie, nearest to her in age, their suzerainty over Ross demesne.

“I thravelled Ireland,” said someone, “and afther all, there’s great heart in the County of Cork!”, and I am faithful to my own county; but there is a special magic in Galway, in its people and in its scenery, and for me, Ross, and its lake and its woods, is Galway. The beauty of Ross is past praising. I think of it as I saw it first, on a pensive evening of early spring, still and grey, with a yellow spear-head of light low in the west. Still and grey was the lake, too, with the brown mountain, Croagh-Keenan, and the grey sky, with that spear-thrust of yellow light in it, lying deep in the wide, quiet water, that was furrowed now and then by the flapping rush of a coot, or streaked with the meditative drift of a wild duck; farther back came the tall battalions of reeds, thronging in pale multitudes back to the shadowy woods; and for foreground, the beautiful, broken line of the shore, with huge boulders of limestone scattered on it, making black blots in the pearl-grey of the shallows.

On higher ground above the lake stands the old house, tall and severe, a sentinel that keeps several eyes, all of them intimidating, on all around it. The woods of Annagh, of Bullivawnen, of Cluinamurnyeen, trail down to the lake side, with spaces of grass, and spaces of hazel, and spaces of bog among them. I have called the limestone boulders blots, but that was on an evening in February; if you were to see them on a bright spring morning, as they lie among primroses at the lip of the lake, you would think them a decoration, a collar of gems, that respond to the suggestions of the sky, and are blue, or purple, or grey, bright or sullen, as it requires of them. Things, also, to make a child delirious with their possibilities. One might jump from one huge stone to another, till, especially in a dry summer when the lake was low, one might find oneself far out, beyond even the Turf Quay, or Swans’ Island, whence nothing but one’s own prowess could ever restore one to home and family. If other stimulant were needed, it was supplied by the thought of the giant pike, who were known to inhabit the outer depths. One of them, stuffed and varnished, honoured the hall at Ross with its presence. It looked big and wicked enough to pull down a small girl as easily as a minnow.

When I first went to Ross, a grown-up young woman, I found that seduction of the boulders, and of the chain of leaps that they suggested, very potent. The attraction of the pike also was not to be denied. (We used to try to shoot them with a shot-gun, and sometimes succeeded.) What then must the lake not have meant to its own children?

I don’t suppose that any little girl ever had more accidents than Martin. Entirely fearless and reckless, and desperately short-sighted, full of emulation and the irrepressible love of a lark, scrapes, in the physical as well as the moral sense, were her daily portion, and how she came through, as she did, with nothing worse than a few unnoticeable scars to commemorate her many disasters, is a fact known only to her painstaking guardian angel. Tenants, who came to Ross on their various affairs, found their horses snatched to be galloped by “the children,” their donkeys purloined for like purposes (or the donkeys’ nearest equivalent to a gallop)—and it may be noted that the harder the victimised horses were galloped, the more profound was the admiration, even the exultation, of their owners.

“Sure,” said a southern woman of some children renowned for their naughtiness, “them’s very arch childhren. But, afther all, I dunno what’s the use of havin’ childhren if they’re not arch!”

In certain of the essays in one of our books, “Some Irish Yesterdays,” we have pooled memories of our respective childhoods, which, fortunately, perhaps, for the peace of nations, were separated by some hundred miles of moor and mountain, as well as by an interval of years. Their conditions were similar in many respects, and specially so in the government of the nursery. Our mothers, if their nurses satisfied their requirements, had a large indifference to the antecedents of the nurses’ underlings, who were usually beings of the type that is caught at large on a turf-bog and imported raw into the ministry. One such was once described to me—“An innocent, good-natured slob of a gerr’l that was rared in a bog beside me. The sort of gerr’l now that if you were sick would sit up all night to look afther ye, and if you weren’t, she’d lie in bed all day!”

I believe the nurses enjoyed the assimilation of the raw product, much as a groom likes the interest afforded by an unbroken colt, and they found the patronage among the mothers of the disciples a useful asset. In later years, Martin was discoursing of her nursery life, with her foster-mother, who had also been her nurse, Nurse B., a most agreeable person, gifted with a saturnine humour that is not infrequent in our countrywomen.

“Sure didn’t I ketch Kit Sal one time”—(the reigning nursemaid)—“an’ she bating and kicking yerself on the avenue!” Nurse B. began. She then went on to describe how she had fallen on Kit Sal, torn her hair, and “shtuck her teeth in her.”

“The Misthress seen me aftherwards, and she axed me what was on me, for sure I was cryin’ with the rage. ‘Nothin’ Ma’am!’ says I. But I told her two days afther, an’ she goes to Kit Sal, an’ says she, ‘What call had you to bate Miss Wilet?’ says she, ‘Ye big shtump!’ ‘She wouldn’t folly me,’ says Kit. ‘Well indeed,’ says the Misthress, ‘I believe ye got a bigger batin’ yerself from Nurse, and as far as that goes,’ says she, ‘I declare to God,’ says she, ‘I wish she dhrank yer blood!’ says she.”

The tale is above comment, but for those who knew Mrs. Martin’s very special distinction of manner and language, Nurse B.’s paraphrase of her reproof has a very peculiar appeal.

Nurse B. was small, spare, and erect, with a manner that did not conceal her contempt for the world at large—(with one cherished exception, “Miss Wilet”)—and a trenchancy of speech that was not infrequently permitted to express it. At Ross, at lunch one day, during the later time when Mrs. Martin had returned there, the then cat—(the pampered and resented drawing-room lady, not the mere kitchen cat)—exhibited a more than usually inordinate greediness, and Mrs. Martin appealed, with some reproach, to Nurse B., who was at that time acting—and the word may be taken in its stage connection—the part of parlour-maid.

“Nurse! Does this poor cat ever get anything to eat?”

“It’d be the quare cat if it didn’t!” replied Nurse, with a single glance at “Miss Wilet” to claim the victor’s laurel.

* * * * *

It was not until Martin and I began to write “The Real Charlotte” that I understood how wide and varied a course of instruction was to be obtained in a Dublin Sunday school. Judging by a large collection of heavily-gilded books, quite unreadable (and quite unread), each of which celebrates proficiency in some branch of scriptural learning, Martin took all the available prizes. In addition to these trophies and the knowledge they implied, she learnt much of that middle sphere of human existence that has practically no normal points of contact with any other class, either above or below it.

It was a rather risky experiment, as will, I think, be admitted by anyone who considers the manners and customs of the detestable little boys and girls who squabble and giggle in the first chapter of “The Real Charlotte.” There are not many children who could have come unscathed out of such a furnace. There is a story of a priest who was such a good man that he “went through Purgatory like a flash of lightning. There wasn’t a singe on him!”

Martin was adored, revered, was received as an oracle by her fellow scholars, and was, as was invariable with her, the wonder and admiration of her teacher. She has told me how she took part in dreadful revels, school feasts and the like, which, in their profound aloofness from her home-life, had something almost illicit about them. With her intensely receptive, perceptive brain, she was absorbing impressions, points of view, turns and twists of character wrought on by circumstance; yet, when that phase of her childhood had passed, “there wasn’t a singe on her!”

She had a spiritual reserve and seriousness that shielded her, like an armour of polished steel that reflects all, and is impenetrable. Refinement was surpassingly hers; intellectual refinement, a mental fastidiousness that rejected inevitably the phrase or sentiment that had a tinge of commonness; personal refinement, in her dress, in the exquisite precision of all her equipment; physical refinement, in the silken softness of her hair, the slender fineness of her hands and feet, the flower-bloom of her skin; and over and above all, she had the refinement of sentiment, which, when it is joined with a profound sensitiveness and power of emotion, has a beauty and a perfectness scarcely to be expressed in words.

She has told me stories of those times, and of the curious contrasts of her environment. Long, confidential walks with “Francie Fitzpatrick” and her fellows, followed by an abrupt descent from the position of “Sir Oracle,” to the status of the youngest of a number of sisters and brothers whose cleverness, smartness, and good looks filled her with awe and glory. She was intensely critical and intensely appreciative. The little slender brown-eyed girl, who was part pet, part fag of that brilliant, free-going, family crowd, secretly appraised them all in her balancing, deliberative mind, and, fortunately for all concerned, passed them sound. They taught her to brush their hair, and read her the poets while she was thus employed; they chaffed her, and called her The Little Philosopher, and unlike many elder sisters—(and I speak as an elder sister)—dragged her into things instead of keeping her out of them. It must have been a delightful house, full of good looks and good company. I was far away in South Cork, and knew of the Martins but distantly and dimly; after my eldest brother had met them and returned to chant their charms, I think that a certain faint hostility tinged my very occasional thoughts of them, which, after all, is not unusual.

The Martins’ house in Dublin was one of the gathering places for the clans of the family. Dublin society still existed in those days; things went with a swing, and there was a tingle in life. Probably there was no place in the kingdom where a greater number of pleasant people were to be met with. Jovial, unconventional, radiant with good looks, unfailing in agreeability, they hunted, they danced, they got up theatricals and concerts, they—the elder ones, at least—went to church with an equal enthusiasm, and fought to the death over the relative merits of their pet parsons.

Martin has told me of a Homeric and typical battle of which she was a spectator, between her mother and one of my many aunts, Florence Coghill. It began at tea, at the house of another aunt, with a suave and academic discussion of the Irish Episcopate, and narrowed a little to the fact that the diocese of Cork needed a bishop. My aunt Florence said easily,

“Oh—Gregg, of course!”

My cousin Nannie (Mrs. Martin) replied with a sweet reasonableness, yet firmly, “I think you will find that Pakenham Walsh is the man.”

The battle then was joined. From argument it passed on into shouting, and thence neared fisticuffs. They advanced towards each other in large armchairs, even as, in these later days, the “Tanks” move into action. They beat each other’s knees, each lady crying the name of her champion, and then my aunt remembered that she had a train to catch, and rushed from the room. The air was still trembling with her departure, when the door was part opened, the monosyllable “Gregg!” was projected through the aperture, and before reply was possible, the slam of the hall door was heard.

Mrs. Martin flung herself upon the window, and was in time to scream “Paknamwalsh!” in one tense syllable, to my aunt’s departing long, thin back.

My aunt Florence was too gallant a foe to affect, as at the distance she might well have done, unconsciousness. Anyone who knows the deaf and dumb alphabet will realise what conquering gestures were hers, as turning to face the enemy she responded,

“G!R!E!G!G!”

and with the last triumphant thump of her clenched fists, fled round the corner.

And she was right. “Gregg & son, Bishops to the Church of Ireland,” have passed into ecclesiastical history.

CHAPTER IX

MYSELF, WHEN YOUNG

Drawing and riding seem to me to go farther back into my consciousness than any other of the facts of life. I cannot remember a time when I had not a pony and a pencil. I adored both about equally, and if I cannot, even now, draw a horse as I should wish to do it—a fact of which I am but too well aware—it is not for want of beginning early and trying often.

My education in Art has been somewhat spasmodic. I think I was about seventeen when a dazzling invitation came for me from a very much loved aunt who was also my godmother, to stay with her in London and to work for a term at the South Kensington School of Art. There followed three months of a most useful breaking-in for a rather headstrong and unbroken colt. I do not know what the present curriculum of South Kensington may be; I know what it was then. From a lawless life of caricaturing my brethren, my governesses, my clergy, my elders and betters generally, copying in pen and ink all the hunting pictures, from John Leech to Georgina Bowers, that old and new “Punches” had to offer, and painting such landscapes in water colours as would have induced the outraged earth to open its mouth and swallow up me and all my house, had it but seen them, I passed to a rule of iron discipline.

1. Decoration, scrolls and ornament in all moods and tenses.

2. The meticulous study in outline of casts of detached portions of the human frame, noses, ears, hands, feet; and

3. The most heart-breaking and time-wasting stippling of the same.

I well remember how, on a day that I was toiling at a large and knubbly foot, a full-rigged Mamma came sailing round the class, with a daughter in tow. The other students were occupied with scrolls and apples and the like. The Mamma shed gracious sanction as she passed. Then came my turn. I was aware of a pause, a shock of disapproval, and then the words,

“A naked foot, my dear!”

There was a tug on the tow-rope and the daughter was removed.

I imagine it must have been near the end of my three months that my detested efforts were made into a bundle and sent up to high places with a scribble on the margin of one of them, “May Miss Somerville pass for the Antique? E. Miller.”

In due course the bundle was returned. Mr. Sparkes, a majestic and terrible being, wrapped in remoteness and in a great and waving red beard, as in a mantle of flame, had placed his sign of acquiescence after the inquiry. Miss Somerville was given to understand that she was permitted to Pass for the Antique.

This, however, Miss Somerville did not do. She was (not without deep regret for all of her London sojourn that did not include the School of Art) permitted instead to pass the portals of Paddington Station, and to return to Ireland by “The Bristol Boat,” in other words, an instrument of the devil, much in vogue at that time among the Irish of the South, that took some thirty hours to paddle across the Channel, and was known to the wits of Cork as “The Steam Roller.” It was, I fancy, on board the Steam Roller that a cousin of mine, when still deep in hard-earned slumber, and still far outside “The Heads” (i.e. the entrance of Cork Harbour), was assaulted by the steward.

“Come, get up, get up!” said the steward, shaking him by the shoulder, with the licence of old acquaintance and authority.

My cousin replied with a recommendation to the steward to betake himself to a rival place of torment, where (he added) there was little the steward could learn, and much that he could teach.

“Well,” replied the steward, dispassionately, “ye’re partly right. Ye have an hour yet.”

Thus I found myself back in Carbery again, left once more to follow my own buccaneering fancy in the domain of Art, a little straightened and corrected, perhaps, in eye, and with ideas on matters æsthetic beneficially widened. But this was due mainly to one who has ever been my patron saint in Art, that cousin who preferred reverie to Shakespeare; partly, also, to peripatetic lunches among the pictures and marvels of the South Kensington Museum; not, I say firmly, to that heavy-earned Pass for the Antique.

My next term of serious apprenticeship did not occur for four or five years, and was spent in Düsseldorf. One of my cousins (now my brother-in-law), Egerton Coghill, was studying painting there, and advised my doing the same. It was there, therefore, that I made my first dash into drawing from life, under the guidance of M. Gabriel Nicolet, then himself a student, now a well-known and successful portrait-painter. In the following spring I was there again, for singing lessons as well as for painting. This time I had Herr Carl Sohn for my professor, a delightful painter, who helped me much, but on the whole I think that I learnt more of music than of anything else while I was in Düsseldorf, and had I learnt nothing of either, I can at least look back to the concerts at the Ton Halle, and praise Heaven for the remembrance of their super-excellence. Twice a week came the concerts; it was very much the thing to go to them, and I have not often enjoyed music more than I have at those Ton Halle nights, sitting with the good friends whom Providence had considerately sent to Düsseldorf to be kind to me, in an atmosphere of rank German tobacco, listening to the best of orchestras, and enjoying every note they played, while I covered my programme with caricatures (as, also, was very much the thing to do).

My friends and I joined one of the big Gesang Vereins, and a very good two months ended in three ecstatic days of singing alto in the Rheinische Musik Fest, which, by great good luck, took place that May in Düsseldorf.

The Abbé Liszt was one of the glories of the occasion. I saw him roving through the gardens of the Ton Halle, with an ignored train of admirers at his heels; an old lion, with a silver mane, and a dark, untamed eye.

I do not regret those two springs in Düsseldorf, but still less do I regret the change of counsels that resulted in my going to Paris in the following year. “When the true gods come, the half-gods go,” and, apart from other considerations, the Düsseldorf School of Art only admitted male students, and ignored, with true German chivalry, the other half of creation.

Of old, we are told, Freedom sat on the heights, well above the snow line, no doubt, and, even in 1884, she was disposed to turn a freezing eye and a cold shoulder on any young woman who had the temerity to climb in her direction. My cousin, who had been painting in Düsseldorf, had moved on to Paris, and his reports of the studios there, as compared with the possibilities of work in Düsseldorf, settled the question for me. But the point was not carried without friction.

“Paris!”

They all said this at the tops of their voices. It does not specially matter now who they were; there are always people to say this kind of thing.

They said that Paris was the Scarlet Woman embodied; they also said,

“The IDEA of letting a GIRL go to Paris!”

This they said incessantly in capital letters, and in “capital letters” (they were renowned for writing “capital letters”), and my mother was frightened.

So a compromise was effected, and I went to Paris with a bodyguard, consisting of my mother, my eldest brother, a female cousin, and with us another girl, the friend with whom I had worked in Düsseldorf. We went to a pension in the Avenue de Villiers, which, I should imagine and hope, exists no more.

As I think of its gloomy and hideous salons, its atmosphere of garlic and bad cigars, its system of ventilation, which consisted of heated draughts that travelled from one stifling room to another, seeking an open window and finding none; when I remember the thread-like passages, dark as in a coal mine, the clusters of tiny bedrooms, as thick as cells in a wasp’s nest; the endless yet inadequate meals, I recognise, with long overdue gratitude, the devotion of the bodyguard. For me and my fellow-student nothing of this signified. For us was the larger air, the engrossing toil of the studio. It absorbed us from 8 a.m. till 5 p.m. But the wheels of the bodyguard drave heavily, and they had a poor time of it.

So poor indeed was it, that, after three weeks of conscientious sight-seeing and no afternoon tea (“Le Fife o’clock” not having then reached the shores of France), my mother decided it were better to leave me alone, sitting upon the very knee of the Scarlet Woman, than to endure the Avenue de Villiers any longer, and to fly back to what she was wont to describe to her offspring, if restive, as “your-own-good-home-and-what-more-do-you-want.” (In this connection, I remember an argument I once had with her, in which, being young and merely theoretically affaired with the matter, I furiously asserted my preference, even—as the fight warmed—my adoration, for the practice of cremation, and my unalterable resolve to be thus disposed of. My mother, who would rise to any argument, no less furiously combated the suggestion, and finally clinched the matter by saying, “Cremation! Nonsense! I can tell you, my fine friend, you shall just be popped into your own good family vault!”)

With the departure of my people, May Goodhall and I also shook off as much of the dust of the Avenue de Villiers as was possible, and moved to another pension, nearly vis-à-vis the Studio. This latter was an offshoot of the well-known Atelier Colarossi. It had been started in the Rue Washington (Avenue des Champs Elysées) in order to secure English and American clients, as well as those French jeunes filles bien élevées to whose parents the studios of the Quartier Latin did not commend themselves. Its tone was distinctly amateur; we were all “très bien élevées’ and “très gentilles,” and in recognition of this, a sort of professional chaperon had been provided, a small, cross female, who made up the fire, posed the models, and fought with les élèves over the poses, and hatred for whom created a bond of union among all who came within her orbit. One of the French girls, Mlle. La C——, fair, smart, good-looking, bestowed upon me some degree of favour. The class was wont to do a weekly composition for correction by M. Dagnan-Bouveret, who was one of the professors; the subjects he selected were usually Scriptural, and Mlle. La C—— was accustomed to appeal to me for information. She was, I remember, quite at sea about La fille de Jephté, and explained that the Bible was a book not convenable pour les jeunes filles, whereas the Lives of the Saints were most interesting, and full of a thousand delicious little horrors. Without approaching Martin’s Sunday School erudition, I presently found myself established as the exponent of the composition. I recollect one week, when the subject was “The Maries at the Sepulchre,” an obsequious German came to inquire “if eet was in ze morning zat ze holy Laties did co to ze tomb? Or did zose Laties, perhaps, co in ze efening?”

Mlle. la C——’s home chanced to be the house next but one to the Studio, and the Rue Washington was a street of a decorum appropriate to its name. None the less, a bonne came daily at 12 o’clock to escort her home for déjeuner. There came a day when the bonne failed of her mission, and on my return at one o’clock, I found my young friend (who was as old as she would ever, probably, admit to being) faint with hunger, and very angry, but too much afraid of the wrath of her family to return alone.

One wonders whether, even in provincial France, Freedom still denies herself to this extent.

In the following spring I went again to Paris, and this time, my friend May Goodhall being unfortunately unable to come with me, a very delightful American, and her friend, German by up-bringing, but of old French noble descent, allowed me to join their ménage. Its duties were divided according to our capacities. Marion A—— was housekeeper, “Ponce,” by virtue of her German training, was cook, and to me was allotted the humble rôle of scullion. We had rooms in a tall and filthy old house in the Rue Madame, one of those sinister and dark and narrow streets that one finds in the Rive Gauche, that seem as if they must harbour all variety of horrors, known and unknown, and are composed of houses whose incredible discomforts would break the spirit of any creature less inveterate in optimism than an Art student. For Marion and Ponce and I had decided to abandon the Rue Washington, and to go to what was known there as “le Colarossi là-bas,” the real, serious, professional studio (as opposed to its refined astral body, “près l’Étoile”), and we now felt ourselves Art students indeed.

I don’t know how young women manage now, but in those days I and my fellows were usually given—like the Prodigal Son—a portion, a sum of money, which was to last for as long or as short a time as we pleased, but we knew that when it ended there would be no husks to fall back upon; nothing but one long note on the horn, “Home!”, and home we should have to go. (I once ran it to so fine a point that I could buy no food between Paris and London, and when I arrived at my uncle’s house in London, it was my long-suffering uncle who paid the cabman.)

Therefore, for the keen ones, the most stringent and profound economies were the rule. Never did I reveal to my father and mother more than the most carefully selected details of that house in the Rue Madame. I paid seven francs per week for my bedroom and service, and though this may not seem excessive, I am inclined now to think that the accommodation was dear at the money. My room, au cinquième, had a tiled floor, but this was of less consequence, as its size permitted of most of the affairs of life being conducted from a central and stationary position on the bed. Thence, I could shut the door, poke the fire, cook my breakfast, and open the window, a conventional rite, quite disconnected with the question of fresh air. The outlook was into a central shaft, full of darkness and windows, remarkable for the variety and pungency of its atmosphere, and for the fact that at no hour of the day or night did it cease to reverberate with the thunderous gabble of pianos, the acrid screeches of the violin—(to which latter I contributed a not unworthy share)—and, worst of all, the solfeggi of the embryo vocalist.

The service (comprised, it may be remembered, in the daily franc) consisted in the occasional offices of a male housemaid, whose professional visits could only be traced by the diminution of our hoarded supplies of English cigarettes. Yet he was not all evil. He reminded me of my own people at home in his readiness to perform any task that was not part of his duties, and a small coin would generally evoke hot water. Marion A——, who had retained, even in the Rue Madame, a domestic standard to which I never aspired, would, at intervals, offer Léon her opinion of him and his methods. The housemaid, with one of Ponce’s cigarettes in the corner of his mouth, and one of mine behind his ear, would accept it in the best spirit possible, and once went so far as to assure her, with a charming smile, that he had now been so much and so very often scolded that he really did not mind it in the least.

Colarossi, the proprietor of the studios, was a wily and good-natured old Italian, who had been a model, and having saved money, had somehow acquired a nest of tumble-down studios in the Rue de la Grande Chaumière. He then bribed, with the promise of brilliant pupils, some rising artists to act as his “Professeurs,” and secured, with the promise of brilliant professors, a satisfactory crowd of rising pupils, and by various arts he had succeeded in keeping both promises sufficiently to make his venture a success. The studio in which I worked was at the top of the building, and was reached by a very precarious, external wooden staircase; the men-students were on the ground-floor beneath us. “Le Colarossi là-bas” was indisputably serious. The models were well managed, as might be expected, when no trick of the trade could hope to pass undetected by “Le Patron”; the students were there to work, and to do good work at that, and the women’s and men’s studios were all crowded with “les sérieux.” Raphael Collin, gloomy, pale, pock-marked, and clever, and Gustave Courtois—“Le beau Gustave”—tall and swaggering, with a forked red beard, and a furious moustache like two emphatic accents (both grave and acute), were our professors. They were both first-rate men, and were respected as much as they were feared. They went their rounds with—as it were—scythe blades on their chariot wheels, and flaming swords in their hands. It was nerve-shaking to hear the cheerful and incessant noises of “les hommes en bas” cease in an instant, as though they had all been turned to stone, and to know that the Terror that walked in the noonday was upon them. Extraordinary how that silence, and that awful time of waiting for the step on our stair, opened the eyes; everything was wrong, and it was now too late to make it right. And then, the professor’s tour of slaughter over, and the study, that was “pas assez bien construit,” looking with its savage corrections, as if someone had been striking matches on it, how feebly one tottered to the old concierge for the three sous’ worth of black coffee that was to pull one together, and enable the same office to be performed for the humiliated drawing. It may, however, be remembered to “le beau Gustave” that one élève was spared from the fire and sword to which he was wont to put the Studio. This was a small and ancient widow who arrived one Monday morning, announcing that she was eighty-two, but none the less had decided to become an artist. It was soon pathetically obvious that she would require a further eighty-two years, at least, to carry out her intention. Courtois came, regarded with stupefaction the sheet of brown paper on which she had described, in pink chalk, hieroglyphs whose purport were known only to herself, faltered “Continuez, Madame,” and hurried on. Despite this encouragement, the old lady apparently abandoned her high resolve, for on Saturday she departed, and the Studio knew her no more.

When I think of Colarossi’s, I can now recall only foreigners; many Germans, a Czech, who sang, beautifully, enchanting Volksliede of the Balkans, and whose accompaniments I used to play on a piano that properly required two performers, one to sit on the music stool and put the notes down, the other to sit on the floor and push them up again; they all stuck. There were Swiss, and Russians, and Finlandaises; there was a Hungarian Jewess, a disgusting being, almost brutish in her manners and customs, yet brilliant in her work; an oily little Marseillaise, Parthians and Medes and Elamites, dwellers in Mesopotamia (with a stress upon the first syllable), unclean, uncivilised, determined, with but one object in life, to extract the last sou of value from their abonnements (and, incidentally, also to extract from any unguarded receptacle such colours, charcoal, punaises, etc., as they were in need of, uninfluenced by any consideration save that of detection.)

The standard of accomplishment was very high. The Marseillaise, who looked like a rag-picker, did extraordinarily good work; so, as I have said, did the Jewess, whose appearance suggested an itinerant barrow and fried potatoes. (Delicious French fried potatoes! I used to buy five sous’ worth off a brazier at the corner of the Place S. Sulpice, and carry them back to the ménage wrapped in a piece of La Patrie, until Ponce, who adored animals, was told very officiously that they were fried in the fat of lost dogs, and forbade further dealings with the murderer.)

Colarossi’s never took “a day off.” Weekdays, Sundays, and holy days, the studios were open, and there were élèves at work. Impossible to imagine what has become of them, all those strange, half-sophisticated savages, diligently polishing their single weapon, to which all else had been sacrificed.

Yet when I look back to the Studio, to its profound engrossment in its intention, its single-hearted sacrifice of everything in life to the one Vision, its gorgeous contempt for appearances and conventions, I find myself thinking how good it would be to be five and twenty, and storming up that rickety staircase again, with a paint-box in one hand, and a Carton as big as the Gates of Gaza in the other.