Irish Memories

slight embarrassment that it must have gone in the other line.

“We solemnly viewed the Regalia, of which he knew the history of every stone, and the room where James VI was born, a place about as big as a dinner-table, and so on, and his information on all was petrifying. Then it was all but lunch time, but we flew into St. Giles’ on the way home to see Montrose’s tomb. A more beautiful and charming face than Montrose’s you couldn’t see, and the church is a very fine one. An old verger caught sight of us, and instantly flung to the winds a party he was taking round, and endeavoured to show us everything, in spite of A. L.’s protests. At length I firmly said, ‘Please show us the door.’ He smiled darkly, and led us to a door, which, when opened, led into an oaken and carven little room. He then snatched a book from a shelf—and a pen and ink from somewhere else.

“‘I know distinguished visitors when I see them!’ says he, showing us the signatures of all the Royalties and distinguished people, about two on each page. ‘Please write your names.’

“Andrew wrote his, and I mine, on a blank sheet, and there they remain for posterity. Andrew swears the verger didn’t know him, and that it was all the fur coat, and that our names were a bitter disappointment—why didn’t I put ‘Princess of Connemara’?

“Then to lunch. The B——s were very nice. He is tall and thin, she short, both as pleasant and unconventional and easy as nice Irish people alone are. After lunch she and Mrs. Lang tackled me in the drawing-room about the original of the Real C. I gaily admitted that she was drawn from life, and that you had known her a thousand times better than I. Then I told them various tales of her, and, without thinking, revealed her name.

CHAPTER XXII

AT ÉTAPLES

In February, 1895, I met Martin in London, and found her in considerable feather, consequent on her reviving visit to St. Andrews, and on that gorgeous review in which we had been called hard and pitiless censors, as well as sardonic, squalid, and merciless observers of Irish life. We felt this to be so uplifting that we lost no time in laying the foundations of a further “ferocious narrative.” This became, in process of time, “The Silver Fox.” It had the disadvantage, from our point of view, of appearing first in a weekly paper (since defunct). This involved a steady rate of production, and recurring “curtains,” which are alike objectionable; the former to the peace of mind of the author, while the latter are noxious trucklings to and stimulation of the casual reader. That, at least, is how the stipulated sensation at the end of each weekly instalment appeared to us at the time, and I have seen no reason for relinquishing these views. “The Silver Fox,” like most of our books, was the victim of many interruptions; it was finished in 1896, and as soon as its weekly career was careered, it was sold to Messrs. Lawrence and Bullen, who published it in October, 1897. It was a curious coincidence that almost in the same week we hunted a silver-grey fox with the West Carbery hounds. The hunt took place on Friday, the 13th of the month, we lost the fox in a quarry-hole, in which a farmer had, at the bidding of a dream, dug, fruitlessly, and at much expense, for fairy gold, and two of our horses were very badly cut. I saw the Silver Fox break covert, it was the Round Covert at Bunalun, and by all the laws of romance I ought to have broken my neck; but the Powers of Darkness discredited him, and neither he nor I were any the worse for the hunt. I do not remember ever seeing him again, and I presume he returned immediately to the red covers (without a t) of our book, from which he had been given a temporary outing.

It was in May and June, 1895, that we spent a happy and primitive fortnight in one of the Isles of Aran; we have described it in “Some Irish Yesterdays,” and it need not be further dealt with, though I may quote from my diary the fact that on “May 22. M. & I rescued a drowning child by the quay, and got very wet thereby. Several Natives surveyed performance, pleased, but calm, and did not offer assistance.”

In July, an entirely new entertainment was kindly provided for us by a General Election; our services were requisitioned by the Irish Unionist Alliance, and with a deep, inward sense of ignorance (not to say of play-acting), we sailed forth to instruct the East Anglian elector in the facts of Irish politics. It was a more arduous mission than we had expected, and it opened for us a window into English middle-class life through which we saw and learned many unsuspected things. Notably the persistence of English type, and the truth that was in George Eliot. We met John Bunyan, unconverted, it is true, but unmistakably he; cobbling in a roadside stall, full of theories, and endowed by heredity with a splendid Biblical speech in which to set them forth. Seth Bede was there, a house-painter and a mystic, with transparent, other-worldly blue eyes and a New Testament standard of ethics. Dinah Morris was there too, a female preacher and a saintly creature, who shamed for us the play-acting aspect of the affair into abeyance, and whose high and serious spirit recognised and met Martin’s spirit on a plane far remote from the sordid or ludicrous controversies of electioneering.

These few and elect souls we met by chance and privilege, not by intention. We had been given “professional” people, mainly, as our victims. Doctors, lawyers, and non-conforming parsons of various denominations. It taught us an unforgettable lesson of English honesty, level-headedness, and open-mindedness. Also of English courtesy. With but a solitary exception, we were received and listened to, seriously, and with a respect that we secretly found rather discomposing. They took themselves seriously, and their respect almost persuaded us that we were neither actors nor critics, but real people with a real message. The whole trend of Irish politics has changed since then. Every camp has been shifted, many infallibles have failed. I am not likely to go on the stump again, but I shall ever remember with pride that on this, our single entry into practical politics, our man got in, and that a Radical poster referred directly, and in enormous capital letters, to Martin and me as “IRISH LOCUSTS.”

I went to Aix-les-Bains a year or two after this. It was the first of several experiences of that least oppressive of penalties for the sins of your forefathers, if not of your own. There was one year when among the usual number of kings and potentates was one of the Austrian Rothschilds. With him was an inseparable private secretary, who had been, one would say, cut with a fret-saw straight from an Assyrian bas-relief. His profile and his crimped beard were as memorable as the example set by M. le Baron to the gamblers at the Cercle. Followed by a smart crowd in search of a sensation, the Baron and the Secretary moved to the table of “Les Petits Chevaux,” and people waited to see the Bank broken in a single coup. The Baron murmured a command to the Profile. The Profile put a franc on “Egalité.” “Egalité” won. The process was repeated until the Baron was the winner of ten francs, when the couple retired, and were seen there no more, and one began to understand why rich men are rich. There was one dazzling night with “the little horses” when I found myself steering them in the Chariot of the Sun. I could not make a mistake; where I led, the table, with gamblers’ instant adoption of a mascot, followed. I found myself famous, and won forty-five francs. Alas! I was not Baron de Rothschild, or even the Assyrian Profile, and the rest is silence.

From Aix I went to Boulogne, and meeting Martin there, we moved on to Étaples, which was, that summer (1898), the only place that any self-respecting painter could choose for a painting ground. Cazin, and a few others of the great, had made it fashionable, and there were two “Classes” there (which, for the benefit of the uninitiated, are companies of personally-conducted art-students, who move in groups round a law-giver, and paint series of successive landscapes, that, in their one-ness and yet progressiveness, might be utilised with effect as cinematograph backgrounds). We found, by appointment, at Étaples a number of our particular friends, “Kinkie,” “Madame Là-Là,” “The Dean,” Helen Simpson, Anna Richards, a pleasingly Irish-American gang, with whom we had worked and played in Paris. The two or three small hotels and boarding-houses were full of painters, and the Quartier Latin held the town in thrall. As far, at least, as bedrooms, studios, and feeding places were concerned. Sheds and barns and gardens, all were absorbed; everyone gave up everything to MM. Les Étrangers; everyone, I should say, who had been confirmed. Confirmation at Étaples was apparently of the nature of the Conversion of St. Paul in its effect upon the character. After confirmation, instant politeness and kindness to the stranger within their gates characterised the natives; prior to that ceremony, it is impossible to give any adequate impression of the atrocity of the children of the town. If an artist pitched his easel and hoisted his umbrella on any spot unsurrounded by a ten-foot wall, he was immediately mobbed by the unconfirmed. The procedure was invariable. One chose, with the usual effort, the point of view. One set one’s palette and began to work. A child strayed round a corner and came to a dead set. It retired; one heard its sabots clattering as it flew. Presently, from afar, the clatter would be renewed, an hundred-fold; shrill cries blended with it. Then the children arrived. They leaned heavily on the shoulders of the painter, and were shaken off. They attempted, often successfully, to steal his colours. They postured between him and his subject, dancing, and putting forth their tongues. They also spat.

The maddened painters made deputations to the Mayor, to the Curé, to the Police, and from all received the same reply, that méchant as the children undeniably were now, they would become entirely sage after confirmation. We did not attempt to dispute the forecast, but our contention that, though consolatory to parents, it was of no satisfaction to us, was ignored by the authorities. Therefore, in so far as was possible, we took measures into our own hands. I wrote home for a hunting-crop, and Martin took upon herself the varying yet allied offices of Chucker-out and Whipper-in. She was not only fleet of foot, but subtle in expedient and daring in execution. I recall with ecstasy a day when a wholly loathsome boy, to whose back a baby appeared to be glued, was put to flight by her with the stick of my sketching-umbrella. Right across the long Bridge of Étaples he fled, howling; the baby, crouched on his shoulders, sitting as tight as Tod Sloan, while Martin, filled with a splendid wrath, belaboured him heavily below the baby, ceasing not until he had plunged, still howling, into a fisherman’s cottage. Another boy, tending cattle on the marshes, drove a calf in front of us, and, with a weapon that might have been the leg of a table, beat it sickeningly about the eyes. In an instant Martin had snatched the table-leg from him and hurled it into a wide dyke, the next moment she had sent his cap, skimming like a clay pigeon, across it, and “Madame Là-Là” (who is six feet high), rising, cobra-like, from the lair in which she had concealed herself from the enemy, chased the calf from our neighbourhood. Later, we heard him indicate Martin to his fellows.

“Elle est méchante, celle la!”—and, to our deep gratification, the warning was accepted.

In those far-off times Paris Plage and Le Touquet were little more than names, and were represented by a few villas and chalets of fantastic architecture peppered sparsely among the sand-dunes and in the little fairy-tale forests of toy pine-trees that divided Étaples from Le Touquet. There was a villa, whose touching name of “Home, Swet Home,” appealed to the heated wayfarer, where now a Red Cross hospital is a stepping-stone to “Home,” for many a British wayfarer who has fallen by the way, and pale English boys, in blue hospital kit, lie about on the beach where we have sat and sketched the plump French ladies in their beautiful bathing dresses.

It was among Cazin’s sand-dunes, possibly on the very spot where Hagar is tearing her hair over Ishmael (in his great picture, which used to hang in the Luxembourg), that the “Irish R.M.” came into existence. During the previous year or two we had, singly and jointly, been writing short stories and articles, most of which were republished in a volume, “All on the Irish Shore.” Many of these had appeared in the Badminton Magazine, and its editor now requested us to write for it a series of such stories. Therefore we sat out on the sand hills, roasting in the great sunshine of Northern France, and talked, until we had talked Major Sinclair Yeates, R.M., and Flurry Knox into existence. “Great Uncle MacCarthy’s” Ghost and the adventure of the stolen foxes followed, as it were, of necessity. It has always seemed to us that character presupposes incident. The first thing needful is to know your man. Before we had left Étaples, we had learned to know most of the people of the R.M.’s country very well indeed, and all the better for the fact that, of them all, “Slipper” and “Maria” alone had prototypes in the world as we knew it. All the others were members of a select circle of which Martin and I alone had the entrée. Or so at least we then believed, but since, of half a dozen counties of Ireland, at least, we have been categorically and dogmatically assured that “all the characters in the R.M.” lived, moved, and had their being in them, we have almost been forced to the conclusion that there were indeed six Richmonds in every field, and that, in the spirit, we have known them all.

The illustrations to the first and second of the stories were accomplished at Etaples, and, in the dearth of suitable models, Martin, and other equally improbable victims, had to be sacrificed. One piece of luck fell to me in the matter. I wished to make an end-drawing, for the first story, of a fox, and I felt unequal to evolving a plausible imitation from my inner consciousness. It may not be believed, but it is a fact that, as, one afternoon, I crossed the Bridge of Étaples, I met upon it a man leading a young fox on a chain, a creature as mysteriously heaven-sent as was the lion to the old “Man of God.”

CHAPTER XXIII

PARIS AGAIN

It was two months before she was able again to “lift her hand serenely in the sunshine, as before,” or so much as take a pen in it, and several years before she could be said to have regained such strength as had been hers. Nothing had been broken, and she had entirely escaped disfigurement, even though the eye-glasses, in which she always rode, had cut her brow; but one of the pummels of the saddle had bruised her spine, and the shock to a system so highly-strung as hers was what might be expected. The marvel was that so fragile a creature could ever have recovered, but her spirit was undefeated, and long before she could even move herself in bed, she had begun to work with me again, battling against all the varied and subtle sufferings that are known only to those who have damaged a nerve centre, with the light-hearted courage that was so conspicuously hers.

During the second half of that black November we were writing “The Waters of Strife,” which is the fourth story of the “R.M.” series. Its chief incident was the vision which came to the central figure of the story, of the face of the man he had murdered. This incident, as it happened, was a true one, and was the pivot of the story. We had promised a monthly story, and in order to keep faith, we had written it with an effort that had required almost more than we had to give. The story now appears in our book as we originally wrote it, but on its first appearance in the Badminton Magazine a passage had been introduced by an alien and unsolicited collaborator, and “various jests” had been “eliminated as unfit” for, one supposes, the sensitive readers of the magazine. Sometimes one wonders who are these ethereal beings whose sensibilities are only shielded from shock by the sympathetic delicacy of editors. I remember once before being crushed by another editor. I had drawn, from life, for the Connemara Tour, a portrait of “Little Judy from Menlo,” a Galway beggar-woman of wide renown. It was returned with the comment that “such a thing would shock delicate ladies.” So, as the song says, “Judy being bashful said ‘No, no, no’!” and returned to private life. Another and less distinguished beggar-woman once said to me of the disappointments of life, “Such things must be, Miss Somerville, my darlin’ gerr’l!” and authors must, one supposes, submit sometimes to be sacrificed to the susceptibilities of the ideal reader.

The twelve “R.M.” stories kept us desperately at work until the beginning of August, 1899. Looking back on the writing of them, each one, as we finished it, seemed to be the last possible effort of exhausted nature. Martin hardly knew, through those strenuous months, what it was to be out of suffering. Even though it cannot be denied that we both of us found enjoyment in the writing of them, I look back upon the finish of each story as a nightmare effort. Copying our unspeakably tortuous MS. till the small hours of the morning of the last possible day; whirling through the work of the illustrations (I may confess that one small drawing, that of “Maria” with the cockatoo between her paws, was done, as it were “between the stirrup and the ground,” while the horse, whose mission it was to gallop in pursuit of the postman, stamped and raged under my studio windows). By the time the last bundle had been dispatched Martin and I had arrived at a stage when we regarded an ink-bottle as a mad dog does a bucket of water. Rest, and change of air, for both of us, was indicated. I was sent to Aix, she went to North Wales, and we decided to meet in Paris and spend the winter there.

In the beginning of October, 1899, we established ourselves in an appartement in the Boulevard Edgar Quinet, and there we spent the next four months.

Looking back through our old diaries I recognise for how little of that time Martin was free from suffering of some kind. The effects of the hunting accident, and the strain of writing, too soon undertaken, were only now beginning to come to their own. Neuralgia, exhaustion, backaches, and all the indescribable miseries of neurasthenia held her in thrall. It is probable that the bracing tonic of the Paris climate saved her from a still worse time, but she had come through her reserves, and was now going on pluck. We wrote, desultorily, when she felt equal to it, and I worked at M. Délécluse’s studio in the mornings, and, with some others, assisted Mr. Cyrus Cuneo, a young, and then unknown, American, in getting up an “illustration class” in the afternoons. Most people have seen the brilliant black and white illustrations that Mr. Cuneo drew for the Illustrated London News and other papers and magazines, and his early death has left a blank that will not easily be filled. He could have been no more than four or five and twenty when I met him, and he was already an extraordinarily clever draughtsman. He was small, dark, and exceedingly good-looking, with a peculiarly beautiful litheness, balance, and swiftness of movement, that was to some extent explained by the fact that before he took up Art he had occupied the exalted position of “Champion Bantam of the South Pacific Slope”!

At that juncture we were all mad about a peculiar style of crayon drawing, which, as far as we were concerned, had been originated by Cuneo, and about a dozen of us took a studio in the Passage Stanilas, and worked there, from the most sensational models procurable. Cuneo was “Massier”; he found the models, and posed them (mercilessly), and we all worked like tigers, and brutally enjoyed the strung-up sensation that comes from the pressure of a difficult pose. Each stroke is Now or Never, every instant is priceless. Pharaoh of the Oppression was not firmer in the matter of letting the Children of Israel go, than we were with those unhappy models. I console myself by remembering that a good model has a pride in his endurance in a difficult pose that is as sustaining as honest and just pride always is. Nevertheless, when I look over these studies, and see the tall magician, peering, on tip-toe, over a screen, and the High-priest denouncing the violation of the sanctuary, and the unfortunate Arab, half rising from his couch to scan the horizon, I recognise that for these models, though Art was indisputably long, Time could hardly have been said to be fleeting.

Mr. Whistler was at that time in Paris, and had a morning class for ladies only, and it was in their studio that we had our class. It was large, well-lighted, with plenty of stools and easels and a sink for washing hands and brushes. It also was thoroughly insanitary, and had a well-established reputation for cases of typhoid. As a precautionary measure we always kept a certain yellow satin cushion on the mouth of the sink; this, not because of any superstition as to the colour, or the cushion, but because there was no other available “stopper for the stink.” (Thus Cuneo, whose language, if free, was always well chosen.) One of our members was a very clever American girl, who had broken loose from the bondage of the Whistler class. There, it appeared from her, if you had a soul, you could not think of calling it your own. It was intensively bossed by Mr. Whistler’s Massière, on the lines laid down by Mr. Whistler, until, as my friend said, you had “no more use for it, and were just yelling with nerves.” The model, whether fair, dark, red, white, or brown, had to be seen through Mr. Whistler’s spectacles, and these, judging by the studies that were occasionally left on view, were of very heavily smoked glass. When it came to the Massière setting my American friend’s palette, and dictating to her the flesh tones, the daughter of the Great Republic

observed that she was used to a free country, and shook the dust off her feet, and scraped the mud off her palette, and retired. An interesting feature of the studio was that many sheets of paper on which Mr. Whistler had scribbled maxim and epigram were nailed on its walls, for general edification, and it might have served better had his lieutenant allowed these to influence the pupils, unsupported by her interpretations. Since then I have met some of these pronouncements in print, but I will quote one of those that I copied at the time, as it bears on the case in point.

“That flesh should ever be low in tone would seem to many a source of sorrow, and of vast vexation, and its rendering, in such circumstance, an unfailing occasion of suspicion, objection, and reproach; each objection—which is the more fascinating in that it would seem to imply superiority and much virtue on the part of the one who makes it—is vaguely based upon the popular superstition as to what flesh really is—when seen on canvas, for the people never look at Nature with any sense of its pictorial appearance, for which reason, by the way, they also never look at a picture with any sense of Nature, but unconsciously, from habit, with reference to what they have seen in other pictures. Lights have been heightened until the white of the tube alone remains. Shadows have been deepened until black only is left! Scarcely a feature stays in its place, so fierce is its intention of firmly coming forth. And in the midst of this unseemly struggle for prominence, the gentle truth has but a sorry chance, falling flat and flavourless and without force.”

No one who has not lived, as we did, the life of “The Quarter” can at all appreciate its charm. In description—as I have already had occasion to say—it is usual, and more entertaining, to dwell upon the disasters of daily life, but though these, thanks to a bonne à tout faire, and a perfidious stove, were not lacking, Martin and I, and our friends, enjoyed ourselves. Small and select tea-parties were frequent; occasionally we aspired to giving what has been called by a gratified guest in the County Cork “a nice, ladylike little dinner,” and in a letter of my own I find an account of a more unusual form of entertainment which came our way.

“A friendly and agreeable American, who works in the Studio, asked us to come and see her in her rooms, away back of Saint Sulpice. When we got there we found, as well as my American friend, a little incidental, casual mother, whom she had not thought worth mentioning before. She just said, briefly,

“‘Oh, this is Mother,’ which, after all, sufficed.

“‘Mother’ was a perfect specimen of one of the secret, serf-like American mothers, who are concealed in Paris, put away like a pair of warm stockings, or an old waterproof, for an emergency. She was a nice, shrivelled, little old thing, very kind and polite. Their room, which was about six inches square, had little in it save a huge and catafaltic bed with deep crimson curtains; the window curtains were deep crimson, the walls, which were brown, had panels of deep crimson. Hot air welled into the room through gratings. We sat and talked, and looked at picture postcards for a long time, and our tongues were beginning to hang out, from want of tea, and suffocation, when the daughter said something to the mother.

“There was then produced, from a sort of hole in the wall, sweet biscuits, and a bottle of wine, the latter also deep crimson (to match the room, no doubt). It was a fierce and heady vintage. I know not its origin, I can only assure you that in less than two minutes from its consumption our faces were tremendously en suite with the curtains. We tottered home, clinging to each other, and lost our way twice.”

We had ourselves an opportunity of offering a somewhat unusual form of hospitality to two of our friends, the occasion being nothing less than the expected End of the World. This was timed by the newspapers to occur on the night of November 15, and I will allow Martin to describe what took place. The beginning part of the letter gives the history of one of those curious and unlucky coincidences of which writing-people are more often the victims than is generally known, and for this reason I will transcribe it also.

The South African War made life in Paris, that winter, a school of adversity for all English, or nominally English, people. Each reverse of our Army—and if one could believe the French papers it would seem that such took place every second day—was snatched at by the people of Paris and their newspapers with howls of delight. Men in the omnibuses would thrust in our faces La Patrie, or some such paper, to exhibit the words “Encore un Écrasement Anglais!”, in large, exultant letters, filling a page. Respectable old gentlemen, in “faultless morning dress,” would cry “Oh yais!” as we passed; large tongues would be exhibited to us, till we felt we could have diagnosed the digestions of the Quarter. At last our turn came, and when the Matin had a line, “Capitulation de Cronjé,” writ large enough for display, Martin made an expedition in an omnibus down “The Big Boulevards” for no purpose other than to flaunt it in the faces of her fellow passengers.

To Martin, who was an intensely keen politician, the aloofness of many of the art-students whom she met, from the War, the overthrow of the French Government, from, in fact, any question on any subject outside the life of the studio, was a constant amazement.

In a letter from her to one of her sisters she releases her feelings on the subject.