at 2s. Tauchnitz then produced it; finally, not very long ago, a friend sent us a copy, bound rather like a manual of devotion, with silver edges to the pages, which she had bought, new, for 4d.; which makes one fear that Ahab’s venture had not turned out too well. It was a story of the Land League, and the actors in it were all of the peasant class. It was very well reviewed, and was, in fact, treated by the Olympians, the Spectator, the Saturday Review, the Times, etc., with a respect and a seriousness that almost alarmed us. It seemed that we had been talking prose without knowing it, and we were so gratified by the discovery that we decided forthwith to abandon all distractions and plunge solemnly, and with single-hearted industry, into the construction of the three-volume novel desired by Messrs. Bentley.

This was not, however, as simple a matter as it seemed, and the way was far from clear. I was doing illustrations for a children’s story (and a very delightful one), “Clear as the Noonday,” by my cousin, Mrs. James Penrose, and I was also illustrating an old Irish song of Crimean times, “The Kerry Recruit,” which has been more attractively brought to the notice of the public by another cousin, Mr. Harry Plunket Greene. Martin was still enmeshed in her World articles and in Ross affairs generally, and though we discussed the “serious novel” intermittently it did not advance.

Ross was by this time restored to the normal condition of Irish country houses, comfortable, hospitable, unconventional, an altogether pleasant place to be in, and with visitors coming and going, it was not as easy as it had been for the daughter in residence to devote herself to literature, especially serious literature.

During one of my many visits there, the honourable and unsolicited office of domestic chaplain had been conferred upon me. Martin has written that “Hymns and Family Prayers are often receptacles for stale metaphor and loose phraseology; out of them comes a religion clothed to suffocation in Sunday clothes and smelling of pew-openers. Tate and Brady had much to answer for in this respect; some of their verses give at once the peculiar feeling of stiff neck produced by a dull sermon and a high pew.”

In this condemnation, however, the family prayers at Ross were not included. When I knew them they took the form of selections from the Morning Service, and included the Psalms for the day; nothing more simple and suitable could be imagined; nevertheless, there were times when they might, indisputably, have been more honoured in the breach than in the observance. I have already alluded to my cousin Nannie’s sense of humour, and its power of overwhelming her in sudden catastrophe. On some forgotten occasion, one of those contretemps peculiar to the moment of household devotion had taken place, and the remembrance of this, recurring, as it did, daily, with the opening of the Prayer-book, rarely failed to render impossible for her a decorous reading of the prayers. This was the more disastrous, because, like very many of “The Chief’s” descendants, she specially enjoyed reading aloud. With much reluctance she deputed her office to Martin, but, unhappily, some aspect of the affair (which had, it may be admitted, some that were sufficiently absurd) would tickle the deputy, and prayers at Ross, which, as I have said, included the Psalms for the day, ended, more than once, at very short notice. I may say that during my tenure of the office, although I could not, like Martin, repeat all the Psalms from memory, I acquitted myself respectably, if quite without distinction. This, as far as I know, has been achieved by but one reader, who will, I trust, forgive me if I abandon, for once, the effort to refrain from mention of existing contemporaries, and quote Martin’s account of her success.

In spite of our excellent resolutions, the serious novel was again put on the shelf, and the next work we undertook was a tour on behalf of the Lady’s Pictorial. This was provoked by a guide-book to Connemara, which was sent to Martin by an English friend. She wrote to me and said, “E. H. has sent me an intolerably vulgar guide to Connemara, and suggests that you and I should try and do something to take its place. It is written as it were in description of a tour made by an ingenuous family party. ‘Jack,’ very manly; the Young Ladies, very ladylike; a kind and humorous mother, etc. ‘Jack’ is much the most revolting. The informant of the party gives many interesting facts about the disappearance of the Martins from the face of the earth, and deplores the breaking up of the property ‘put together by Cromwell’s soldier’!”

I think it was this culminating offence that decided us to supplement the information supplied to the ingenuous family. Our examination into the conditions of Connemara, and our findings on its scenery, hotels, roads, etc., were not accomplished without considerable effort. In 1890 there was no railway to Clifden, hotels were few and indifferent, means of communication scant and expensive. We hired a jennet and a governess-cart, and strayed among the mountains like tinkers, stopping where we must, taking chances for bed and board. It was uncomfortable and enjoyable, and I imagine that our account of it, which was published as a book by Messrs. W. H. Allen, is still consulted by the tourist who does not require either mental improvement or reliable statistics.

In the autumn of ’91 we went, by arrangement with the Lady’s Pictorial, to Bordeaux, to investigate, and to give our valuable views upon the vintage in that district. This developed into a very interesting expedition; we had introductions that opened to us the gloomy and historic portals of the principal “Caves”; we saw claret in all its stages (some of them horrible); we assisted at a “Danse de Vendange,” a sort of Harvest Home, at which we trod strange measures with the vintagers, feeling, as we swung and sprang to the squeals of pipes and fiddles, as though we were in comic opera; we gained a pleasing insight into the charm of French hospitality, and we acquired—and this was the tour’s only drawback—a taste for the very best claret that we have since found unfortunately superfluous.

These articles, also, were republished with the title “In the Vine Country,” Martin’s suggestion of “From Cork to Claret” being rejected as too subtle for the public. Such, at least, was the publishers’ opinion, which is often pessimistic as to the intelligence of the public.

Since I am on the subject of our tours, I may as well deal with them all. It was in June, 1893, that we rode through Wales, at the behest of Black and White. The articles, with my drawings, were subsequently published by Messrs. Blackwood, and were entitled “Beggars on Horseback.” We were a little more than a week on the road, and were mounted on hireling ponies and hireling saddles (facts that may enlist the sympathies of those who have a knowledge of such matters). I may here admit that, in spite of certain obvious advantages of a literary kind, these amateur-gipsy tours are not altogether as enjoyable as our accounts of them might lead the artless reader to imagine. They demand iron endurance, the temper of Mark Tapley, and the Will to Survive of Robinson Crusoe. I do not say that we possessed these attributes, but we realised their necessity.

Only once more, and in this same year, 1893, did we adventure on a tour. This time again on behalf of the Lady’s Pictorial, and, at our own suggestion, to Denmark. We had offered the Editor four alternatives, Lapland or Denmark, Killarney or Kiel. He chose Denmark, and I have, ever since 1914, deeply regretted that we did not insist on Kiel.

The artistic and social difficulties in dealing with this class of work have not, in my experience, been sufficiently set forth. We were provided with introductions, obtained variously, mainly through our own friends. We were given, editorially, to understand that the events, be they what they may, were ever to be treated from the humorous point of view. “Pleasant” is the word employed, which means pleasant for the pampered reader, but not necessarily for anyone else.

Well, “pleasant” things, resulting from some of these kind, private introductions, undoubtedly occurred, but it is a poor return for full-handed hospitality to swing its bones, as on a gibbet, in a newspaper. Many have been the priceless occurrences that we have had to bury in our own bosoms, or, in writing them down, write ourselves down also as dastards. It is some consolation to be able to say this here and now. For all I know, there may still be those who consider that Martin Ross and E. Œ. Somerville treated them, either by omission or commission, with ingratitude. If so, let me now assure them that they little know how they were spared.

CHAPTER XIX

OF DOGS

M. Maeterlinck has written of dogs with deep discernment, yet not, I think, in quite the right spirit. No dogs, save perhaps hounds, should speak of “Master,” or “Mistress.” The relationship should be as that of a parent; at farthest, that of a fond governess. R. L. Stevenson’s essay, “The Character of Dogs,” treats of dogs with all his enchanting perception and subtlety, and contains the matchless phrase “That mass of carneying affectations, the female dog”; yet memorable as the phrase is, I would venture to protest against the assumption that is implicit in it, namely, that affectation is a thing to be reprobated. Martin’s and my opinion has ever been that it is one of the most bewitching of qualities. I believe I rather enjoy it in young ladies; I adore it in “the female dog.” But it must be genuine affectation. The hauteur of a fox terrier lady with a stranger cad-dog is made infinitely more precious by the certainty that when the Parent’s eye is removed, it will immediately become transmuted into the most unbridled familiarity.

I recall a sunny summer morning when, on the lawn tennis ground at Drishane, Martin and I received a visit from the then parson of the parish, and from his large black retriever. Candy and Sheila, my fox terriers, ladies both, received it also, but in their case, with a dignity that we could not hope to emulate. Shortly after the interview opened, chancing to look round, I beheld two motionless round white mounds, hedgehog in attitude, super-hedgehog in sentiment, buried in profoundest slumber. Round the mounds, with faint yelps, in brief rushes, panting with adoration, with long pink tongue flapping, and white teeth flashing, fore-legs wide apart and flung flat on the grass, went the parson’s retriever. With sealed eyes the ladies slept on. Yet, when Martin and the parson and I had strayed on into the flower garden, I cannot conceal the fact that both the Clara Vere de Veres abandoned themselves to a Maenad activity that took the amazed and deeply gratified retriever as its focal point, and might have given effective hints to any impersonator of Salome dancing before King Herod.

I have ever been faithful to two breeds, foxhounds, and fox terriers, and, as I look back over a long series of Grandes Passions, I see Ranger and Rachel and Science, with their faithful, beautiful hound-faces, waving their sterns to me through the mists of memory, and The Puppet, and Dot, and, paramount among them all, the little “Head-dog,” Candy, all waiting in the past, to be remembered and praised, and petted. Mention has already been made of The Puppet’s brief but brilliant life. Martin has summed him up as “an engaging but ill-mannered little thing,” but this dispassionate assessment did not interfere with her affection for him. Some time after his early and tragic death, she sent me a little MS. book entitled “Passages in the Life of a Puppet, By its Mother, Being some Extracts from Her Correspondence.” These, with her comments, elucidatory and otherwise, I still preserve, and they are often both entertaining and instructive. They are, on the whole, of too esoteric a nature for these pages, but I may offer one extract that may be regarded as not unsuitable by that influential person, “the general reader.” This treats of The Puppet in the capacity of parent, and is endorsed by Martin, “The Puppet in his own Home Circle is unamiable, and is much disliked by his wife.”

“His attitude is one of curiosity and suspicion. When I go to see Dot and the puppies, he creeps after me, walking with the most exaggerated caution on three legs, one being held high in air, in the pose of one who says ‘Hark!’ or ‘Hist!’ Sometimes he forgets, and says it with a hind-leg, but there are never more than three paws on the ground. Meantime, the Mamma, with meek, beaming eyes fixed on me, keeps up a low and thunderous growl. At other times, he scrutinises the family from a distance, severely, sitting erect, like one of Landseer’s lions (but the pose is grander), with ears inside out, as cleared for action. I dither——” The extract ends thus, with some abruptness, and recognising the truth of the final statement, I will leave the Puppet and his Passages, with an apology for having alluded to them. We have, sometimes, thought of writing a dog-novel (being attracted by the thought of calling it “Kennel-worth”), but we were forced to recognise that society is not yet ripe for it.

In fact, the position of dogs requires readjustment. It is marked by immoderation. To declaim that dogs should be kept in their Proper Place, is merely to invite to battle. One thing I will say as touching the case of dogs whose “proper place” has been, as with myself, the bosoms of their respective owners. There comes to those owners something catastrophic, a death or a disaster, or even some such household throe as a wedding or a ball. The dogs are forgotten. The belief that has been fostered in them of their own importance remains unshaken. Their intelligent consciousness of individual life is as intense as ever. Even if the amazing stories of dog-intelligence, that were heard a few years ago, were untrue, it is impossible to deny to dogs whose minds have been humanised a share of comprehension that is practically human. Yet, when the Big Moment comes in the life of the house, the dogs are brushed aside and ignored. One is sometimes dimly, remotely aware, through one’s own misery or pre-occupation, of the lonely, bewildered little fellow-being who has suddenly become insignificant, but that is all. One gives him to eat and drink, but one has withdrawn one’s soul from him, and he knows it, and wonders why, and suffers. It is inevitable, but, like many an inevitable thing, it is not fair.

After Dot, in the succession of fox terriers, came Musk, who was unto Dot as a daughter, so much so, indeed, that I find it said in my diary that Dot, like the Abbess in the Ballad of the Nun,

Musk belonged, strictly speaking, to my sister; her name, through modifications that might interest an etymologist, but no one else, became more usually, Muck, or Pucket. As the Pucket she reigned for many years jointly with her eldest daughter, Candy, and with a later daughter, Sheila, on the steps of the throne. The Pucket had a singular fear of anyone who approached her without speaking. If, on a return after the briefest absence, the friend, or even the Mother, received her welcoming barks in silence, yet continued to advance towards her—about which there may be conceded to be something fateful—the Pucket’s voice would falter, she would retreat with ever increasing speed, and I have seen her, when further retirement was impossible, plunge herself into a bush and thence cry for help. One of her daughters will sometimes act in this way, and I have known other dogs to behave similarly. On what, then, does their apprehension of their friends rely? Not sight, nor smell; not voice, as a deaf dog recognises his friends? I can only suppose that the unwonted lack of response suggests a mental overthrow, and that Musk felt that nothing less than the failure of their reason would silence her Mother or her Aunt.

On another occasion, and a more legitimate one, I have seen Musk’s self-control overthrown. An elderly lady-guest, now dead, whose name and demeanour equally suggested the sobriquet of “The Bedlamite,” undertook one evening to sing for us. Musk, in common with all our dogs, was inured to, practically, any form of music, but when the Bedlamite advanced with a concertina to the middle of the drawing-room, and, with Nautch-like wavings of the instrument, began to shriek—there is no other word—Salaman’s entirely beautiful setting of “I arise from dreams of thee,” to the sole accompaniment of the concertina’s shrill wheezings, the Pucket, after some cautious and horrified attention, retired stealthily under the table, and uttered low and windy howls.

But there are so many points in connection with which, as it must seem to dogs, our behaviour is inscrutable. One may take the case of baths, which must daily mystify them. As I put forth to the bath-room, I can nearly always recognise in my dogs some artificiality of manner, an assumption of indifference, that they are far from feeling. They regard me with bright, wary eyes, and remain in their baskets, still as birds on eggs. “She goes,” they say, “to that revolting and unnecessary torture, known as Washy-washy. Why she inflicts it upon herself is known to Heaven alone. For our part, let us keep perfectly quiet, nor tempt the incalculable impulses that rule her in these matters.”

I have never been addicted to dachshunds, but I must make mention of one, Koko; incomparable as a lady of fashion, as a fag at lawn tennis, and as a thief. She also had a gift, not without its uses, of biting beggars. Her owner, my cousin Doctor Violet Coghill, who was in Koko’s time a medical student, had a practice in dogbites more extended than even her enthusiasm desired. Once, when a patient came to be dressed and compensated, Koko was collared, chained, and, to make assurance doubly sure, tucked under the doctor’s left arm. Thence, during the inspection of the wound, she stretched a neck like a snake, and bit the patient again. No dinner-table was safe from her depredations. “Koko is around the coasts!” parlourmaids have been heard to cry, flying to their dining-rooms, as merchant-brigs might fly to harbour upon a rumour of Paul Jones. She and another, my sister’s Max, were the first dachshunds in Carbery. I have heard Max discussed by little boys in Skibbereen.

“’Tis a daag!”

“’Tis not!”

“’Tis!”

“’Tis not! ’Tis a Sarpint!”

Another and more sophisticated critic decided that it was “a little running sofa.” But this was intentionally facetious; the serpent theory expressed a genuine conviction.

It was at one time said of my family, generally, that we were kept by a few dogs for their convenience and entertainment, and later there was a period when amongst ourselves and our cousins we could muster about fourteen, in variety, mainly small dogs. We decided to have a drag-hunt, and in order to ensure some measure of success—(I ask all serious Hound-men to turn away their eyes from beholding iniquity)—I desired my huntsman, an orderly-minded Englishman, to bring Rachel and Admiral to run the drag.

“Oh, Master, you wouldn’t ask them pore ’ounds to do such a thing?” said G.

I said I would; that they were old, and steady; in short, I apologised, but was firm.

G. asked coldly if a couple would be enough.

I said quite enough, adding that all the ladies’ and gentlemen’s dogs were coming.

G. said, “Oh, them cur-dogs——”

He then asked, with resignation, the hour of “the meet,” and retired.

At the appointed time he was there, with Rachel and Admiral, and two other couples, his principles having succumbed to the temptation of a hunt in June. The fourteen cur-dogs, ranging from griffons, through fox terriers and spaniels, to a deerhound, were there too, with a suitable number of proprietors, and the hare having been given a fair start, the pack was laid on. The run began badly, as the smallest dogs, believing the time had come to indulge their long-nourished detestation of the hounds, flung themselves upon the blameless Rachel and her party, who, for some distance, conscientiously ran the line, with cur-dogs hanging like earrings from their ears. Neither was the hare immune from difficulties. His course had been plotted to pass that old graveyard at Castle Haven whereof mention has been made, and when he arrived at it he found a funeral in progress. He lifted the drag, and tried to conceal his true character. In vain. When he had passed, and he ventured to become once more a hare, he found that there was not a man of the funeral who was not hanging over the graveyard wall, absorbed in the progress of the chase. This had been arranged to conclude at the kennels, and Candy and I, having been skirters throughout, waited at a suitable point to see the finish. First came the hare, very purple in the face, but still uncaught and undefeated, the paraffined remains of the rabbit still bouncing zealously after him. Then I heard the single, recurring note of a hound, and presently Rachel came into view at a leisurely trot; as she passed me, she smiled apologetically—she had a pretty smile that showed her front teeth—and waved her stern. I understood her to say that it was all rot, but she was going through with it. After Rachel, nothing. I was high on the hill-side above the kennels, and I heard a vague row on the road below, from which I gathered that the game had palled on the rest of the pursuers, and they were going home for tea.

I have loved many dogs. All of them have had “bits of my heart to tear,” and have torn it, but of them all, Candy comes first, and will remain so. “Wee Candy is just fearfully neat!” as her faithful friend, Madge Robertson, used to say, with the whole-hearted enthusiasm of a Highlander. Candy was a very small smooth fox terrier, eldest daughter of Muck, with a forehead as high and as full as that of the Chinese God of Wisdom, and eyes that had a more profound and burning soul in them than I have seen in the eyes of any other living thing. I pass over her nose in silence. Her figure was perfection, and her complexion, snow, with one autumn leaf veiling her right eye.

She danced at tea-parties, whirling in a gauze frock, and an Early Victorian straw bonnet trimmed with rosebuds. In this attire she would walk, or rather trip, elegantly, from end to end of a table, appraising what was thereon, and deciding by which cake to take up her position. To see her say her grace, with her little bonneted head in her paws, on her Mother’s knee, had power to make right-minded persons weep (even as one of my sisters-in-law has been seen to shed tears, when, from the top of an omnibus, she chanced to behold her eldest son, walking in boredom, yet in unflawed goodness, with his nurse).

She was the little dog who set the fashion to all her fellows, and her rules were of iron. Chief among these, was, as St. Paul might have said, to abstain from affectionate licking. This, she held, was underbred, and never done by the best dogs. She had a wounding way of carefully sniffing the face or the fingers, and then turning aside; but on some few and high occasions the ordinance has been infringed. Above and beyond all others of her race she had the power of expressing herself. It was she who organised and headed the Reception Committees that welcomed my return after absence, and I have often been told how, when my return was announced to her, she would assemble herself and her comrades in a position that commanded the point of arrival, and would lead the first public salutations and reproaches for past neglect; and, these suitably and histrionically accomplished, no other little dog could disclose so deep yet decorous an ecstasy, her face hidden in my neck, while she uttered faint and tiny groans of love. Portraits, and, still less, photographs, convey little or nothing to most dogs, but I have seen Candy stiffen up and gaze fixedly at a snapshot of a bull-terrier (very white on a dark background) that chanced to be on a level with her eyes, uttering the while small and bead-like growls.

Her unusual brain power was paid for by overstrung nerves, and any loud and sudden sound had power to terrify her. She nearly died from what would now be called shock, after a few hours spent in the inferno of Glasgow streets, in the course of a journey which she and I made to the Highlands. We were going to the Island of Mull, and there we enjoyed ourselves as, I think, only the guests of Highland hosts and hostesses can. Candy, as was invariably the case, immediately took precedence of all other beings.

“Jeanie,” said the Laird to his sister, “you’ve let the fire out.”

Jeanie, in whose lap Candy was embedded, replied, “I couldn’t help it, Duncan. Candy dislikes so intensely the noise of putting on coal.”

The Laird admitted the explanation.

Much remains to be desired in travelling facilities on steamers, but in nothing more than in provision

for dogs and children; a crèche in which to immure children and those doomed to attend them, a suitably arranged receptacle in each cabin for the passenger’s dog. On a certain cross-Channel route, between Ireland and England, I had, before the War, established myself and my dogs on a sound basis. The dear Stewardess, with whom this was arranged, is now dead, so without injury to her I can reveal the relations between us. You must picture me as lurking, with two small white dogs in a leash, in some obscure spot beneath the bridge. I have secured a cabin, and during the confusion prior to getting under way I rush into it with the dogs. I then establish them in a rug under a seat. The Stewardess enters—we converse affably. (One of these many journeys took place on the same day that Queen Victoria crossed the Irish Sea to pay her last visit to Ireland. I mentioned the fact to the Stewardess. “Why, then, I hope she’ll have a good crossing, the poor gerr’l!” replied the Stewardess, benignantly.)

To return to the dogs. They, being well trained, have instantly composed themselves for sleep. The Stewardess, equally well trained, ignores them, only, when leaving the cabin, saying firmly, “Now, I don’t see them dogs. I never seen them at all.”

Then she leaves. Later, the vessel having started, and I having retired to my berth, the door is softly opened. In the darkness I hear the Stewardess’s voice hiss, in the thinnest of whispers, “Have ye their tickets?” I reply in equally gnat-like tones, “I have!” “I’ll take them, so,” she replies. And all is well.

It was this same Stewardess, in the course of my first crossing with her, of whom I wrote to Martin as follows. The subject is not strictly within the scope of this chapter, but, as may have been observed, I have absolved myself from limitations such as this.

CHAPTER XX

“THE REAL CHARLOTTE.”

“The Real Charlotte” can claim resemblance with Homer in one peculiarity at least, that of a plurality of birthplaces. She was first born at Ross, in November, 1889, and achieved as much life as there may be in a skeleton scenario. She then expired, untimely. Her next avatar was at Drishane, when, in April, 1890, we wrote with enthusiasm the first chapter, and having done so, straightway put her on a shelf, and she died again. In the following November we did five more chapters, and established in our own minds the identity of the characters. Thenceforward those unattractive beings, Charlotte Mullen, Roddy Lambert, The Turkey-Hen, entered like the plague of frogs into our kneading-troughs, our wash-tubs, our bedchambers. With them came Hawkins, Christopher, and others, but with a less persistence. But of them all, and, I think, of all the company of more or less tangible shadows who have been fated to declare themselves by our pens, it is Francie Fitzpatrick who was our most constant companion, and she was the one of them all who “had the sway.” We knew her best; we were fondest of her. Martin began by knowing her better than I did, but, even during the period when she sat on the shelf with her fellows, while Martin and I boiled the pot with short stories and the like (that are now réchauffé in “All on the Irish Shore”), or wrote up tours, or frankly idled, Francie was taking a hand in what we did, and her point of view was in our minds.

Very often have we been accused of wresting to our vile purposes the friends and acquaintances among whom we have lived and moved and had our being. If I am to be believed in anything, I may be believed in this that I now say. Of all the people of whom we have written, three only have had any direct prototype in life. One was “Slipper,” another was “Maria,” both of whom are in “Some Experiences of an Irish R.M.,” and the other was the Real Charlotte. Slipper’s identity is negligible. So is Maria’s. She who inspired Charlotte had left this world before we began to write books, and had left, unhappy woman, so few friends, if any, that in trying to embody some of her aspects in Charlotte Mullen, Martin and I felt we were breaking no law of courtesy or of honour.

One very strange fact in connection with Charlotte I may here record. Some time after the book had been published, an old lady who had known her in the flesh met us, and said—(please try to realise the godliest and most esoteric of County Cork accents)—

“And tell me, how in the worr’ld did you know about Charlotte’s” (I may call her Charlotte) “love-affair?”

We said we had never known of such. That it had developed itself out of the story; in fact, that we had no idea that anything of the kind was possible.

“Well, ’tis pairfectly true!” replied the old lady, intensely.

And so indeed it was, as was then expounded to us. In almost every detail of Charlotte’s relations with Lambert and his wife; incredibly, even appallingly true. And we then remembered how, while we were still writing the book, a communication had come to my sister, purporting to be from the Real Charlotte, in some sphere other than this. A message of such hatred as inevitably suggested the words, “Hell holds no fury like a woman scorned.”

These are things beyond and above our comprehension; it is trying the poor old scapegoat of Coincidence very high if it is to be pressed into the service of a case as complicated, and elaborate, and identical in detail as was this one.

“The Real Charlotte” went with us through the years ’90 and ’91, and was finished during the early summer of ’92. There is an entry in my diary. “June 8, 1892. Wrote feverishly. The most agitating scenes of Charlotte. Finished Francie.”

We felt her death very much. We had sat out on the cliffs, in heavenly May weather, with Poul Ghurrum, the Blue Hole, at our feet, and the great wall of Drishane Side rising sheer behind us, blazing with yellow furze blossom, just flecked here and there with the reticent silver of blackthorn. The time of the “Scoriveen,” the Blackthorn winter, that last flick of the lash of the east wind, that comes so often early in May, was past. We and the dogs had achieved as much freedom from social and household offices as gave us the mornings, pure and wide, and unmolested. There is a place in the orchard at Drishane that is bound up with those final chapters, when we began to know that there could be but one fate for Francie. It felt like killing a wild bird that had trusted itself to you.

We have often been reviled for that, as for many other incidents in “The Real Charlotte,” but I still think we were right.

Although the book was practically finished in June, the delays and interruptions that had followed it from the first pursued it still. It was still in the roughest and most bewildering of manuscript, and its recopying involved us, as has been invariably our fate, in many alterations and additions. Interspersed with this work were short stories, visits, hunting, occasional articles called for by some casual paper or magazine. It was not until February 4, 1893, that we “actually and entirely finished off the Welsh Aunt, alias ‘The Real Charlotte,’ and sent her off. Poor old thing.”

But even then there was no rest for the sole of her foot. Bentley offered £100, neither more nor less. Our diaries remark, “wrote breathing forth fire and fury, and refused.” In March I find that the day after I had “ridden a hunt on a drunk pony,” “Bentley returned the MS.” I think the excitement of the hunt on that unusual mount took the sting out of Charlotte’s reverse. In April, “Smith and Elder curtly refused the Real C. They said their reader, Mr. James Payn, was ill. Can his illness have been the result of reading Charlotte? Or was it anticipatory?” Martin was at this time in Dublin, a sojourn thus summarised in her diary: “Dublin filled with dull, dirty, middle-aged women. Had my hair done in enormous bundle at back. Hideous but compulsory.” I joined her there and we proceeded to London and saw and heard many cheerful things. (Amongst other items in my diary, I find “Heard Mr. Haweis preach a good sermon on Judas Iscariot, with faint but pleasant suggestion of a parallel between him and Mr. Gladstone.”) We then opened negotiations with Messrs. Ward and Downey, and pending their completion, Martin and I, with my mother and my sister, paid our first visit to Oxford.

The affair opened badly. Our luggage had been early entrusted to a porter, to be deposited in the cloak-room, and the porter was trysted to meet us at a certain hour and place. At the time appointed the porter was not. Our luggage eyed us coldly across the barrier, and, the recognition being one-sided, and unsupported by tickets, remained there, while we searched for the porter and the tickets (for which he had paid). He never transpired, and his fate remains a Mystery of the Great Western. By what is known in an Irish Petty Sessions Court as “hard swearing,” we obtained possession of our property, but not before my mother had (vide my diary) “gone foaming to Oxford” without either her ducats or her daughters, coerced by the necessity of propitiating our host, a Don of Magdalen, with whom it seemed unwise to trifle.

Those days at Oxford are written in our memories in red letters, even though a party more bent on triviality and foolishness has not often disgraced the hospitality of a Scholar. He does not, I fear, forget how, after patient and learned exposition and exhibition of many colleges, one asked him, in genuine, even painstaking, ignorance, to remind her which of them had been “Waddle College”; and how he was only able to recall it to the inquirer’s memory by the mention of a certain little white dog that was sitting at the entrance gate. Nor how, when taken to the roof of the Bodleian, to be shown the surrounding glories of Oxford, the sight of one of the ventilators of its reading-room had evoked in Martin Ross an uncontrollable longing to shriek down it, in imitation of a dog whose tail has been jammed in a door. (An incomparable gift of hers, that has made the fortune of many a dull dinner-party.) I have often wondered what the grave students in that home of learning thought of the unearthly cry from the heavens, Sirius, as it were, in mortal agony. We were not permitted to wait for a sequel. Our host, with blanched face, hurried us away.

“These be toys,” but they were pleasant, and one more recollection of that time may be permitted. It was April 30th, and on May morning, as all properly instructed persons know, the choristers of Magdalen salute the rising sun from the top of Magdalen Tower. Our host, the Don, being a man having authority, determined that we were to view this ceremony; and being also a man of intelligence, decided that one of his menials should for the occasion take his office of guide and protector. Accordingly, at some four of the clock, a faithful undergraduate threw small stones at our windows in the Mitre Hotel, and, presently, with an ever increasing crowd, we ran at his heels to Magdalen Tower. We gained the spiral stone staircase with a good few on it in advance of us, and a mighty multitude following behind. Then it was, when about halfway up, and anything save advance was impossible, that the youngest and the tallest of us announced that giddiness had come upon her, and that she was unable to move. The faithful undergraduate rose to the occasion, and immediately directed her to put her arms round his waist. This she did, and, unsolicited, buried her face in his Norfolk jacket’s waist-band. Thus they arrived safely at the antechamber to the roof. There we left her, and climbed the ladder that leads to the roof. The sun rose, the white-robed choir warbled their Latin hymn, the Tower rocked, we saw its battlements sway between us and its neighbour spires, and while these things were occurring, a very long thing, like an alligator, crawled across the leads towards us—the youngest of the party, unable to be out of it, but equally unable to stand up. The faithful undergraduate renewed his attentions.

All this is long ago; the two gayest spirits, who made the fortunes of that visit, have left us. Magdalen, and its cloisters, and its music, have moved into the bright places of memory. When I think now of those May days

and I “can make reply,” falteringly,

About a fortnight after this we sold “The Real Charlotte” to Messrs. Ward and Downey for £250 and half American rights (which, as far as I can remember, never materialised). After this we devoted ourselves to the trousseau of the youngest of the party—which was a matter that had not been divulged to the faithful undergraduate, and is only mentioned now in order to justify the chronicling of two of the comments of Castle Haven on the accompanying display of wedding presents. One critic said that to see them was like being in Paradise. Another declared that it was for all the world like a circus.

Are things that are equal to the same thing equal to each other? It is a question for the Don of Magdalen to decide.

* * * * *

Not for another year did “The Real Charlotte” see the light. Various business disasters pursued and detained her; it was in May, 1894, that she at length appeared, and was received by no means with the trumpets and shawms suggested by Sir William Gregory.

One distinguished London literary paper pronounced it to be “one of the most disagreeable novels we have ever read”; and ended with the crushing assertion that it could “hardly imagine a book more calculated to depress and disgust even a hardened reader ... the amours are mean, the people mostly repulsive, and the surroundings depressing.” Another advised us to “call in a third coadjutor, in the shape of a judicious but determined expurgator of rubbish”; The Weekly Sun, which did indeed, as Martin said, give us the best, and best written, notice that we had had, ended a review of eight columns by condemning the book as “unsympathetic, hard, and harsh,” though “worthy of study, of serious thought, of sombre but perhaps instructive reflection.” A few reviewers of importance certainly showed us—as St. Paul says—no little kindness, (not that I wish it to be inferred that reviewers are a barbarous people, which would be the height of ingratitude,) but, on the whole, poor Charlotte fared badly, and one Dublin paper, while “commending the book” to its readers, even saying that Francie was “an attractive heroine,” went on to deplore the “undeniable air of vulgarity which clings to her,” and finally exclaimed, with grieved incredulity, “Surely no girl of Francie’s social position screams, ‘G’long, ye dirty fella’!”

A very regrettable incident, but, I fear (to quote kind Mr. Brown), though legendary, it is not nonsensical.

So was it also with our own friends. My mother first wrote, briefly, “All here loathe Charlotte.” With the arrival of the more favourable reviews her personal “loathing” became modified; later, at my behest, she gave me the following able synopsis of unskilled opinion.

“As you told me to give you faithfully all I heard, pro and con, about Charlotte, I will do so.

“Mrs. A. ‘Very clever, very clever, but I have no praise for it, Mrs. Somerville, no praise! The subjects are too nasty! I have no interest in such vulgar people, and I’m sure the Authors have really none either, but it is very clever of them to be able to write at all, and to get money for it!’

“Mrs. B. was extremely interested in the book and thought it most powerful, but said that nothing would induce her even to tell her sisters that such a book was to be had, as the imprecations would shock them to that extent that they would never get over it.

“Then Miss C. didn’t like it, first because of the oaths and secondly because it would give English people the idea that in all ranks of Irish life the people were vulgar, rowdy, and gave horrible parties.

“The D.’s didn’t like it either, for the same reasons, but thought if you had given ‘Christopher’ a stronger back-bone, and hadn’t allowed him to say ‘Lawks!’, that he would have been a redeeming character, and also ‘Pamela,’ had she only been brought forward more prominently, and that you had allowed her to marry ‘Cursiter.’”

From these, and many similar pronouncements, it was but too apparent to us that the Doctors were entirely agreed in their decision, and that my mother had herself summarised the general opinion, when she wrote to one of her sisters that “Francie deserved to break her neck for her vulgarity; she certainly wasn’t nice enough in any way to evoke sympathy, and the girls had to kill her to get the whole set of them out of the awful muddle they had got into!’

The authors, on receipt of these criticisms, laughed rather wanly. “Sophie pleurait, mais la poupée restait cassée.” Although we could laugh, a certain depression was inescapable.

I do not say that we had only adverse opinions from our friends. Our own generation sustained us with warm and enthusiastic approval, and we were fortified by this, despite the fact that a stern young brother wrote to me in high reprobation, and ended by saying that “such a combination of bodily and mental hideosity as Charlotte could never have existed outside of your and Martin’s diseased imaginations.” Which left little more to be said.

On the whole, the point insisted on, to the exclusion of every other aspect of the book, was the “unpleasantness” of the characters. The pendulum has now swung the other way, and “pleasant” characters usually involve a charge of want of seriousness. Very humbly, and quite uncontroversially, I may say that Martin and I have not wavered from the opinion that “The Real Charlotte” was, and remains, the best of our books, and, with this very mild commendation, the matter, as far as we are concerned, closes.

We were in Paris (with the tallest and youngest of the Magdalen Tower party) when Charlotte was published. I was working for a brief spell at the studio of M. Délécluse; Martin was writing a series of short articles, which, with the title “Quartier Latinities,” and adorned by drawings of mine, appeared in Black and White. The casual, artless, yet art-full life of “The Quarter” fascinated Martin; she had the gift of living it with zest, while remaining far enough outside it to be able to savour its many absurdities. As we said, in one of our books, and the idea was hers, “The Irishman is always the critic in the stalls, and is also, in spirit, behind the scenes.” The “English Club” for women artists, of which I was a member, soon got to know, and to accept, the slim and immaculately neat critic of the simple habits and customs of its members, and resented not at all her analysis of its psychology. Black and White had an immense vogue there; some day, perhaps, those articles, and others of Martin Ross’s stray writings, may be collected and reprinted. If the “Boul’ Miche’,” now orphaned of its artists, ever gathers a new generation under its wings, these divagations of autre-fois will have an interest of their own for those that survive of the old order.

We had rooms at a very unfashionable hotel on the Boulevard Mont Parnasse, at the corner of the Boulevard Raspail. It was mainly occupied by art students, and the flare of esprit à bruler lit its many windows at the sacred hour of le fife o’clock, or such of its windows as appertained to les Anglaises. The third member of our ménage went daily to what she spoke of as “The Louvre”—meaning the Magasin, not the Musée—and explained rather vaguely that she had “to buy things for a bazaar.” Her other occupation was that of cook. There was a day when “Ponce” (my fellow lodger, it may be remembered, in the Rue Madame) came beneath our windows at lunch time and was offered hospitality. She declined, and was then desired to “run over to Carraton’s” and purchase for the cook a dozen of eggs. This she did, and cried to us from the street below—(we were swells, living au premier)—that the eggs were there. The cook is a person of resource, and in order to save trouble, she bade Ponce wait, while she lowered to her a basket, by the apostolic method of small cords, in which she should place the eggs. Across the way was a café, dedicated to a mysterious and ever-thirsty company, “Les bons Gymnasiarques.” The attention of these beings, and that of a neighbouring cab-stand, was speedily attracted to the proceeding. Spellbound they watched the cook as she lowered the basket to Ponce. Holding their breaths, they watched Ponce entrust the eggs to the basket; as it rose, they rose from their seats beneath the awning; as the small cords broke—which of course they did, when the basket was about halfway to the window—and the eggs enveloped Ponce in involuntary omelette, the Bons Gymnasiarques cheered. I have little doubt but that that omelette helped to cement the Entente Cordiale, which was at that time still considerably below the national horizon.

I am aware that tales of French as she is spoke by the English have been many, “but each must mourn his own (she saith),” and we had a painful episode or two that must be recounted. The gentlemen of the Magasin du Louvre could, if they would, contribute some stirring stories. One wonders if one of them is still dining out on the tall young English lady who told him at the Rayon devoted to slippers that she desired for herself a pair of pantalons rouges? And if another, who presided at a lace counter, has forgotten the singular request made to him for a “Front avec des rides”? “A wrinkled forehead!” one seems to hear him murmur to himself, “In the name of a pipe, how, at her age, can I procure this for her?”

These are, however, child’s play in comparison with what befell one of my cousins, when shopping in Geneva with an aunt, a tall and impressive aunt, godly, serious, middle-aged, the Church of Ireland, as it were, embodied, appropriately, in a black Geneva gown. My aunt desired a pillow to supplement the agrémens of her hotel; one imagines that the equivalents for mattress and for pillow must have, in one red ruin, blended themselves in her mind. “Oreiller,” “sommier,” something akin to these formulated itself in her brain and sprang to her lips, and she said,

“Donnez moi un sommelier, s’il vous plait.”

“M’dame?” replied the shopman, in a single, curt, slightly bewildered syllable.

“Un sommelier,” repeated the embodiment of the Irish Church, distinctly, “Je dors toujours avec deux sommeliers——”

Here my cousin intervened.

CHAPTER XXI

SAINT ANDREWS

In January, 1895, Martin went to Scotland, and paid a very enjoyable visit to some friends at St. Andrews, a visit that was ever specially memorable for her from the fact that it was at St. Andrews, among the kind and sympathetic and clever people whom she met there, that she realised for the first time that with “The Real Charlotte” we had made a mark, and a mark that was far deeper and more impressive than had been hitherto suspected by either of us. The enjoyment of this discovery was much enhanced by the fact that Mr. Andrew Lang, whom she met at St. Andrews, was one of the firmest friends of the much-abused “Miss Mullen.”

I have some letters that Martin wrote from St. Andrews, to me, in Paris, and I do not think that I need apologise for transcribing them here, even though some of her comments and descriptions do not err on the side of over-formality. Her pleasure in the whole experience can, I think, only give pleasure in return to the people who were so kind to her, and whose welcome to her, as a writer, was so generous, and so unexpected. Brief as was her acquaintance with Mr. Lang, his delightful personality could hardly have been better comprehended than it was by her, and I believe that his friends will understand, through all the chaff of her descriptions, that he had no more genuine appreciator than Martin Ross.