Irish Memories

Another effort of what I may call the Sofa period was an account of a case that we had been privileged to see and hear in a County Galway Petty Sessions Court. We called it “An Irish Problem”; it appeared in the National Review, and is now reprinted in “All on the Irish Shore.” This book, which is a collection of short stories and articles, was published by Longmans, Green & Co. in March, 1903. The stories, etc., in it had all appeared in various serials, and one, “An Irish Miracle,” has called forth many letters and inquiries. Even during the present year of 1917 I have had a letter from a lady in Switzerland, asking for information as to how to use the charm.

In a letter from myself to Martin, written during a visit to an English country house, I have come upon a reference to it. “They have been reading ‘All on the Irish Shore’ here. It was nobly typical of Colonel D. (an old friend) to read ‘An Irish Miracle’ in silence, and then ask, grimly, how much of it was true. Nothing more. There is wonderful strength of character in such conduct—beyond most Irish people. It is all part of the splendid English gift of not caring if they are agreeable or no. Just think of the engaging anxiety of the middle-class Irishman to be simpatica to his company!”

I may here state, with my hand, so to speak, on my heart, that there is a charm, an actual form of words which may be divulged only by “a her to a him; or a him to a her.” It is of the highest piety, being based on the teaching of the Gospels, and should be used with reverence and conviction. I have heard of two occasions, and know of one, on which it took effect. Unfortunately it cannot be used in healing a horse, and whoever does so, loses henceforth the power of employing it successfully; more than this I cannot say. I learnt it in the Co. Meath, and those who would “Know my Celia’s Charms,” or any other charms, from “The Cure for a Worm in the Heart,” to “A Remedy for the Fallen Palate,” to say nothing of the Curing of Warts, and such small deer, are recommended to prosecute their inquiries in the Royal County.

In October, 1902, it was decreed that Martin should try what a rest cure would do for her. During her incarceration, and in the spring of 1903, I drew and wrote “Slipper’s A. B. C. of Fox Hunting,” which materialised as a large picture-book; it was published by Messrs. Longman, and I dedicated it, in a financial as well as a literary sense, to the West Carbery Foxhounds, of which pack, in the same spring, I became the Master.

It was while we were at Aix, that June, that we disinterred “The Irish Cousin,” and prepared it for a renewal of existence under the auspices of Messrs. Longman. Shuddering, we combed out youthful redundancies and intensities, and although we found it impossible to deal with it as drastically as we could have wished, having neither time nor inclination to re-write it, we gave it a handling that scared it back to London as purged and chastened as a small boy after his first term at a public school. During these early years of the century, my sister and I, with a solid backing from our various relations, instituted a choral class in the village of Castle Townshend. It flourished for several years; we discovered no phenomenal genius, but we did undoubtedly find a great deal of genuine musical feeling. It is worth mentioning that, in our experience, the gift of untrained Irish singers is rhythm. If once the measure were caught, and the “beat” of the stick felt, an inherent sense of time kept the choir moving with the precision that is so delightful a feature of their dancing of jigs and reels. Some pleasant voices we found, and it was noteworthy that the better and the more classical the music that we tried to teach, the more popular it was. Hardly any of them could read music, and it was the task of those who could to impart the alto, tenor, and bass of the glees to the class, by the arduous method of singing each part to its appropriate victims until exhaustion intervened. Once learnt, the iron memories of our people held the notes secure, but I shall not soon forget how one of my cousins spent herself in the task of teaching to a new member, a young farm labourer, a tenor part. L.’s own voice was a rich and mellow contralto, and the remembrance of her deep, impassioned warblings, and of her pupil’s random and bewildered bleatings, is with me still. Musical societies in small communities have precarious lives. Gradually our best singers left us, to be wasted as sailors, soldiers, servants, school teachers, and I only speak of the society now in order to justify and explain a letter of Martin’s in which is described an experience that she owed to it.

There came a spring when influenza fell upon Martin in London and could not be persuaded to release its grip of her throat. It was the second season after I took the hounds, and I was at home when, in the middle of March, Martin’s doctor commanded her to lose no time in getting as far South as was convenient. I handed over the hounds to my brother Aylmer, and started for London at a moment’s notice, with an empty mind and a Continental Bradshaw. In the train I endeavoured to fill the former with the latter, and, beginning with France, its towns and watering places, the third name on the list was Amélie-les-Bains. “Warm sulphur springs, which are successfully used in affections of the lungs. Known to the Romans. Thriving town, finely placed at the confluence of the rivers Tech and Mondony, at the foot of Fort-les-Bains. Owing to mildness of climate Baths open all the year. Living comparatively cheap.” The description was restrained but seductive, and I brooded over it all the way to Dublin.

It happened that one of the nice women, who are occasionally to be met with in trains, shared a carriage with me from Holyhead. To her I irrepressibly spoke of Amélie-les-Bains. It may or may not be believed that she had, only the previous day, studied with, she said, the utmost interest and admiration, a collection of photographs of Amélie, taken by a brother, or a sister, who had spent the time of their lives there. (I now believe that the nice woman was herself the human embodiment of Amélie.) I went next day to Cook’s; they had never heard of Amélie. No one had ever heard of it, but I clung to Bradshaw and my nice woman, and in three days we started, in faith, for Amélie, Martin with bronchitis and a temperature, and I with tickets that could not be prevailed on to take us farther than Toulouse, and with more dubiety than I admitted. As I have, since then, met but one person who had ever heard of Amélie, it may not be considered officious if I mention that it is in South-Eastern France, Department Pyrenées Orientales, and that the Pyrenees stand round about it as the hills stand round about Jerusalem, and that “the confluence of the rivers Tech and Mondony” was all and more than Bradshaw had promised.

Martin and I have wandered through many byways of the world, and have loved most of them, but I think Amélie comes first in our affections. It is thirteen years, now, since we stayed at “Les Thermes Romains” Hotel. We went there because we liked the name; we stayed there for six delightful weeks, from the middle of March to the beginning of May, and irrational impulse was justified of her children. One feature “Les Thermes Romains” possessed that I have never seen reduplicated. It was heated throughout by the Central Fires of Nature. From the heart of the mountains came the hot sulphurous streams that gurgled in the pipes in the passages, and filled hot water jugs, and hot water bottles, and regenerated the latter, if of indiarubber, restoring to them their infant purity of complexion in a way that gave us great hope for ourselves. Hannibal had passed through Amélie. He had built roads, and dammed the river, and given his name to the Grotte d’Annibale. After him the Romans had come, and had made the marble baths in which we also tried, not unsuccessfully, to wash away our infirmities, and after them the Moors had been there, and had built mysterious, windowless villages of pale stone, that hung in clusters, like wasps’ nests, on the sides of the hills, and had left some strain of darkness and fineness in the people, as well as a superfluity of X’s in the names of the places.

While we were at Les Thermes, two little Englishmen strayed in, accidentally, but all the other guests were French. Among them was an old gentleman who had been in his youth a protégé of Georges Sand. He sat beside Martin, and joined with Isidore, the old head-waiter, in seeing that she ate and drank of the best and the most typical “du pays.” “C’est du pays, Mademoiselle!” Isidore would murmur, depositing a preserved orange, like a harvest moon in syrup, upon her plate; while Monsieur P. would select the fattest of the olives and tenderest of the artichokes for “Mees Violette.” Monsieur P. was ten years in advance of his nation in liking and believing in English people. He told us that Georges Sand was the best woman in the world, the kindest, the cleverest, the most charming; he loved dogs; “Ah, ils sont meilleurs que nous!” he said, with conviction, but he excepted Georges Sand and Mees Violette.

While we were at Amélie, we wrote the beginning of “Dan Russel the Fox,” sitting out on the mountain side, amidst the marvellous heaths, and spurges, and flowers unknown to us, while the rivers Tech and Mondony stormed “in confluence” in the valley below us, and the pink mist of almond blossom was everywhere. Dan Russel progressed no farther than a couple of chapters and then retired to the shelf, where he remained until the spring of 1909 found us at Portofino with my sister and a friend, Miss Nora Tracey. We worked there in the olive woods, in the delicious spring of North Italy, and although it was finished at home, it was Portofino that inspired the setting of the final chapter. It further inspired us with a sentiment towards the German nation that has been most helpful during the present war, and has enabled us to accept any tale of barbarism with entire confidence.

Northern Italy was as much in the hands of the Huns then as at any time since the days of Attila. Even had their table manners been other than what they were, Siegfried Wagner, striding slowly and splendidly on the Santa Margherita Road, in a grey knickerbocker suit and pale blue stockings, or Gerhardt Hauptmann, the dramatist, with his aggressively intellectual and bright pink brow bared to the breeze, posing on the sea front, each attended by a little rabble of squaws, would have inspired a distaste vast enough to have included their entire nation. One incident of our stay at Portofino may be recounted. An old Russian Prince had come to the hotel, a small, grey old man, feeble and fragile, in charge of a daughter. Gradually a rumour grew that he had been a great musician. There was a pertinacious fiddle-playing little German doctor, whose singular name was Willy Rahab, in the hotel; he had the art of getting what he wanted, and one evening, having played Mozart with my sister for as long as he desired to do so, he concentrated upon the old Prince. There was a long resistance, but at last the old Russian walked feebly to the piano, and seated himself on so low a stool that his wrists were below the level of the keyboard. I saw his fingers, grey and puffy, and rheumatic, settle with an effort on the keys. He looked like an ash-heap ready to crumble into dust. I said to myself that it was a brutality. And, as I said it, the ash-heap burst into flames, and Liszt’s arrangement of “Die Walkürenritt” suddenly crashed, and stormed and swept. There was some element of excitement communicated by his playing that I have never known before or since, and we shook in it and were lost in it, as one shakes in a winter gale, standing on western cliffs with the wind and the spray in one’s face. Then, when it was all over, the old ash-heap, greyer than ever, waited for no plaudits, resigned himself to his daughter, and was hustled off to bed. As for the hotel piano, till that moment poor but upright, after that wild ride it remained prostrate, and could in future only whisper an accompaniment to Doctor “Veely’s” violin. It transpired that the Russian had been the personal friend of Wagner, of Schumann, and of Liszt, in the brave days of old at Leipsic, and was one of the few remaining repositories of the grand tradition.

We were at Montreuil, a small and very ancient town, not far from Boulogne, when “Some Further Experiences of an Irish R.M.” was published. These had appeared in the Strand and other magazines, and had gradually accumulated until a volume became possible. We had had an offer from an Irish journal, then, and, I think, still, unknown to fame, which was, in its way, gratifying. The editor offered “to consider a story” if we would “write one about better society than the people in the Experiences of an Irish Policeman.” We were unable to meet this request. For one thing, we were unable to imagine better or more agreeable society than is the portion of an Irish Policeman. Our only regret was that the many social advantages of the R.I.C. were not more abundantly within our reach.

Montreuil was “a place of ancient peace,” of placid, unmolested painting in its enchanting by-streets (where all the children, unlike those of Étaples, had been confirmed in infancy), of evenings of classical music, provided delightfully at the studios of two of our friends, who were themselves musicians, and were so happy as to have among their friends a violinist, a pianist, and a singer, all of high honour in their profession. Few things have Martin and I more enjoyed than those evenings in the high, dim-lighted studio, with a misty, scented atmosphere of flowers and coffee and cigarettes, and with the satiating beauty of a Brahms violin sonata pouring in a flood over us.

It is a temptation to me to dwell on these past summers, but I will speak of but one more, of the time we spent on the Lac d’Anneçy. We stayed for a while in the town of Anneçy, whose canals, exquisite as they are for painting, are compounded of the hundred ingredients for which Cologne is famous. From Anneçy we moved across the lake to Chavoire, whence the artist can look across the water back to Anneçy’s spires and towers, and can try to decide if they are more beautiful in the white mists of morning or when the sun is sinking behind them.

That was in September, 1911, and when we got back to London, “Dan Russel” was on the eve of coming out. An industrious niece of mine, aged some four and a half years, toiled for many months at a woolwork waistcoat, a Christmas present for her father. It was finished, not without strain, in time for the festival, and Katharine said, flinging herself into a chair, with a flourish of the long and stockingless legs with which children are afflicted, even at Christmas time,

“Now I’m going to read books, and never do another stitch of work till I die!”

So did Martin and I assure each other, though without the gesture that gave such effective emphasis to Katharine’s determination.

We stayed luxuriously at our club, and had reviews of “Dan Russel,” hot from the press, for breakfast, and I enjoyed myself enormously at the Zoo, making sketches of elephants and tigers and monkeys for a picture-book that I projected in honour of the Katharine above mentioned.

Passing pleasant it all was; alas! that the pleasure is now no longer passing, but past.

CHAPTER XXVII

VARIOUS OPINIONS

Martin and I, like our mothers before us, were, are, and always will be, Suffragists, whole-hearted, unshakable, and the longer we have lived the more unalterable have been our convictions. Some years ago we were honoured by being asked to join the Women’s Council of the Conservative and Unionist Women’s Franchise Association; she was a Vice-President of the Munster Women’s Franchise League, and I have the honour of being its President. Since speech-making, even in its least ceremonial and most confidential form, was to her, and is to me, no less appalling than would be “forcible feeding,” we can at least claim that our constitutional wing of the Movement has not been without its martyrs. The last piece of writing together that Martin and I undertook was a pamphlet, written at the request of the C.U.W.F.A., entitled “With Thanks for Kind Enquiries.” It set forth to the best of our power the splendid activities of the various suffrage societies after the Great War broke out, and it pleases me to think that our work together was closed and sealed with this expression of the faith that was and is in us.

This conscientiously and considerately condensed statement will, I trust, sufficiently dispose of the Tiger. But who could hope in half a dozen lines, or in as many volumes, to state their views about Ireland? No one, I fear, save one of those intrepid beings, wondrous in their self-confidence(not to say presumption), who lightly come to Ireland for three weeks, with what they call “an open mind,” which is an endowment that might be more accurately described as an open mouth, and an indiscriminate swallow. Some such have come our way, occasionally, English people whose honesty and innocence would be endearing, if they were a little less overlaid by condescension. It may be enlightening if I mention one such, who told us that he had had “such a nice car-driver.” “He opened his whole heart to me,” said the guileless explorer; “he told me that he and his wife and children had practically nothing to live on but the tips he got from the people he drove about!”

It was unfortunate that I had seen this heart-opening and heart-rending car-driver, and chanced to be aware that he was unmarried and in steady employment.

In my experience, Irish people, of all classes, are, as a rule, immaculately honest and honourable where money is concerned. I have often been struck by the sanctity with which money is regarded, by which I mean the money of an employer. It is a striking and entirely characteristic feature, and is in no class more invariable than in the poorest. But, to return to the car-driver, when a large, kind fish opens his mouth to receive a fly, and one sees within it a waiting coin, it is hardly to be expected that St. Peter’s example will not be followed.

As a matter of fact, the Irish man or woman does not open his or her “whole heart” to strangers. Hardly do we open them to each other. We are, unlike the English, a silent people about the things that affect us most deeply; which is, perhaps, the reason that we are, on the whole, considered to be good company. It is in keeping with the contradictiousness of Ireland that the most inherently romantic race in the British Isles is the least sentimental, the most conversational people, the most reserved, and also that Irish people, without distinction of sex or class, are pessimists about their future and that of their country. Light-hearted, humorous, cheerful on the whole, and quite confident that nothing will ever succeed.

Personally, I have a belief, unreasoning perhaps, but invincible, in the future of Ireland, which is not founded on a three weeks’ study of her potentialities. No one can “run a place,” or work a farm, or keep a pack of hounds, without learning something of those who are necessary to either of these processes. I have done these things for a good many years; the place may have walked more often than it ran, and the farm manager may have made more mistakes than money, and the M.F.H. probably owes it to her sex that she was spared some of the drawbacks that attend her office; but she has learnt some things in the course of the years, and one of them is that in sympathetic and intelligent service a good Irish servant has no equal, and another, that if you give an Irishman your trust he will very seldom betray it.

Not often does the personal appeal fail. Not in the country I know best, at any rate, nor in Martin’s. I have heard of a case in point. A property, it matters not where, west or south, was being sold to the tenants, “under the Act,” i.e. Mr. Gerald Balfour’s Land Purchase Act, that instrument of conciliation that has emulated the millennium in protecting the cockatrice from the weaned child, and has brought peace and ensued it. I remember the regret with which a woman said that she “heard that Mr. Balfour was giving up his reins”; a phrase that has something of almost Scriptural self-abnegation about it. On this property, all had been happily settled between landlord and tenants, when a sudden hitch developed itself; a hitch essentially Irish, in that it was based upon pride, and was nourished by and rooted in a family feud. A small hill of rock, with occasional thin smears of grass, divided two of the farms. It was rated at 9d. a year. Each of the adjoining tenants claimed it as appertaining to his holding. The wife of one had always fed geese on it, the mother of the other was in the habit of “throwing tubs o’ clothes on it to blaych.” A partition was suggested by the agent, and was rejected with equal contempt by James on the one hand, and Jeremiah on the other. The priest attempted arbitration; an impartial neighbour did the same; finally the landlord, home on short leave from his ship, joined with the other conciliators, and a step or two towards a settlement was taken, but there remained about fifty yards of rock that neither combatant would yield. The sale of the estate was arrested, the consequent abatement of all rents could not come into operation, and for their oaths’ sake, and the fractional value of fourpence-halfpenny, James and Jeremiah continued to sulk in their tents. At this juncture, and for the first time, the landlord’s sister, who may, non-committally, be called Lady Mary, seems to have come into the story. She interviewed James, and she held what is known as “a heart-to-heart” with Jeremiah. She even brought the latter to the point of conceding twenty yards; the former had already as good as promised that he would yield fifteen. There remained therefore fifteen yards, an irreducible minimum. Lady Mary, however, remained calm. She placed a combatant each on his ultimate point of concession. Then, in, so she has told me, an awful silence, she paced the fifteen yards. At seven yards and a carefully measured half, she, not without difficulty, drove her walking-stick into a crevice of the rock. Still in silence, and narrowly observed by the disputants, she collected a few stones, and, like a Hebrew patriarch, she built, round the walking-stick, a small altar. Then she stood erect, and looking solemnly upon James and Jeremiah,

“Now men,” she said, “In the name of God, let this be the bounds.”

And it was so.

What is more, a few Sundays later, one of the twain, narrating the incident after Mass, said with satisfaction,

“It failed the agent, and it failed the landlord, and it failed the priest; but Lady Mary settled it!”

As a huntsman I knew used to say (relative to puppy-walking), “It’s all a matter o’ taact. I never see the cook yet I couldn’t get over!”

A cousin of my mother’s, whose name, were I to disclose it, would be quickly recognised as that of a distinguished member of a former Conservative administration, and an orator in whom the fires of Bushe and Plunket had flamed anew, once told me that he had occasion to consult Disraeli on some matter in connection with Ireland. He found him lying ill, on a sofa, clad in a gorgeous, flowered dressing-gown, and with a scarlet fez on his ringlets.

“Ah, Ireland, my dear fellow,” he said, languidly, “that damnable delightful country, where everything that is right is the opposite of what it ought to be!”

There was never a truer word; Ireland is a law unto herself and cannot be dogmatised about. Of the older Ireland, at least, it can be said that an appeal to generosity or to courtesy did not often fail. Of the newer Ireland I am less certain. I remember knocking up an old postmaster, after hours, on a Sunday, and asking for stamps, abjectly, and with the apologies that were due.

“Ah then!” said the postmaster, with a decent warmth of indignation that it should be thought he exacted apologies in the matter; “It’d be the funny Sunday that I’d refuse stamps to a lady!”

My other instance, of the newer Ireland, is also of a post-office, this time in a small town that prides itself on its republican principles. A child deposited a penny upon the counter, and said to the lady in charge, “A pinny stamp, please.”

“Say-Miss-ye-brat!” replied the lady in charge, in a single sabre-cut of Saxon speech.

* * * * *

Martin had ever been theoretically opposed to Home Rule for Ireland, and was wont to combat argument in its favour with the forebodings which may be read in the following letters. They were written to her friend, Captain Stephen Gwynn, in response to some very interesting letters from him (which, with hers to him, he has most kindly allowed me to print here). Her love of Ireland, combined with her distrust of some of those newer influences in Irish affairs to which her letters refer, made her dread any weakening of the links that bind the United Kingdom into one, but I believe that if she were here now, and saw the changes that the past eighteen months have brought to Ireland, she would be quick to welcome the hope that Irish politics are lifting at last out of the controversial rut of centuries, and that although it has been said of East and West that “never the two shall meet,” North and South will yet prove that in Ireland it is always the impossible that happens.

CHAPTER XXVIII

THE LAST