CHAPTER XXIV

HORSES AND HOUNDS

Almost the first thing that I can remember is the duplicity of my grandfather on my behalf in the matter of the hounds. He had been forbidden by his doctor to hunt; he had also been forbidden by the ladies of his household to permit the junior lady of that establishment, then aged five, to “go anywhere near the hounds.” None the less, by a succession of remarkable accidents, not wholly disconnected with the fact that my grandfather had had the West Carbery hounds himself at one time and knew the country as well as the foxes did, he and I rarely missed a sight of them, and, on one memorable day, we cut in at a moment that bestowed upon us the finish of the run and gained for me the brush. Absurdly bestowed, of course, but none the less glorious. The glory was dimmed a little by the fact that just after the presentation had been made my pony rolled, and a kind but tactless young man picked me up, like a puppy, and deposited me on my saddle, instead of mounting me as a gentleman should mount a lady. Nevertheless, I can confidently say that the proudest moment of my life was when I rode home with the brush.

My grandfather had hunted for a few seasons, when he was a young man, with what he, after the fashion of his day, called “the Dook of Beaufort’s” hounds. He brought over a West Carbery horse, Diamond by name, a flea-bitten grey, and he earned for his owner the honourable title of “That damned Irishman.” There is an old saying, “Nothing stops a Carbery man,” and I imagine that the title aforesaid was applied with special fervour when the hunt went into the stone-wall country and Diamond began to sing songs of Zion and enjoy himself.

Hunting in West Carbery died out when I was a child, and the hounds were in abeyance for many years. Political troubles and bad times generally had led to their temporary extinction, and such hunting as came my way was in countries far from Carbery. Of the Masters of those days not one is now left. Hard goers and good sportsmen all round, and men too, many of them, of the old-fashioned classical culture. It is told of the last of that old brigade that during his last illness, a short time before he died, he said he supposed he “would d——d soon be shooting woodcock in Mars with Johnny B.” (who was another of the same heroic mould), and if his supposition was justified, the Martian cock are likely to have had a bad time of it.

In 1891 my brother Aylmer restarted the old West Carbery foxhounds, and then indeed did that madness of the chase, of which we have treated in “Dan Russel the Fox,” descend upon us all. The first step in the affair was the raising, by means of concerts, public meetings, and mendicancy generally, a sum of money; the second was the purchase of a small pack from a private owner. These arrived with the title of “B.’s Rioters,” and it is not too much to say that we rioted with them. It was, at first, all thoroughly informal and entirely delightful; later we fell into the grip of professionals, who did things as they should be done, and inflicted decorum upon us and the Rioters. The days of “Danny-O” and “Patsey Sweeny” passed, and the thrill died out of the diaries.

No longer are such items to be found as:

“Jack, Martin, and I took hounds to walk out with Patsey. Came on a hare.” (This means that we went to look for a hare, ardently and with patience.) “Ran her for two and a half hours, all on our own miserable legs. Lost her in darkness. All pretty tired when we got back to kennels.”

Or again. “Aylmer, Martin, and I went to kennels and christened the new draft, seven and a half couple of puppies. Coupled them and tried to take them out. The instant they were coupled they went stark mad and fought, mostly in the air; it looked like a battle of German heraldic eagles.”

Other entries, which I decline to make public, relate to drags, disreputably laid, for disreputable reasons, and usually dedicated to English visitors, who did not always appreciate the attention.

My brother kept the hounds going for twelve seasons, during which we had the best of sport and learned to know the people and the country in the way that hunting alone can teach. After his long term

of office had ended, a farmer summed up for me the opinion that the country people had of him:

“He was the King of the world for them! If he rode his horses into their beds they’d ask no better!”

When he gave up in 1903, I followed him in the Mastership, which I have held, with an interval of four years, ever since. “Of all sitivations under the sun, none is more enviable or ’onerable than that of a Master of fox’ounds,” Mr. Jorrocks observes, and further states that his “’ead is nothin’ but one great bump of ‘untin’!” I do not say that things have gone as far as this with me, but I will admit that the habit of keeping hounds is a very clinging one.

Many congratulations and much encouragement were bestowed upon me when I bought the hounds and took office, but warnings were not wanting. A friend, himself a Master of Hounds, wrote to me and said that it required “the patience of Job, and the temper of a saint, and the heart of a lion, to navigate a pack of foxhounds,” and there have undoubtedly been occasions when for me the value of all these attributes was conspicuously proved by their absence at need.

If Mr. Jorrocks’s estimate of the job is to be accepted, it is, from my point of view, chiefly in the kennels that the “enviable” aspect of mastership is to be found. I have spoken of three hounds, specially beloved, but the restriction of the number is only made out of consideration for those readers whose patience could stand no more. It is customary to despise the ignorant and unlearned in hound matters, but I have too often witnessed their sufferings to do aught save pity. To be a successful kennel visitor is given to so few. I have sometimes wondered which is most to be pitied, the sanguine huntsman, drawing his hounds one by one, in the ever-renewed belief that he has found an admirer who knows how to admire, ending in bitterness and “letting them all come”; or the straining visitor, groping for the right word and praising the wrong hound. In one of Mr. Howell’s books there is a certain “Tom Corey,” who, though without a sense of humour, yet feels a joke in his heart from sheer lovableness. Even so did one of my aunts feel the hounds in her heart. Her sympathy and admiration enchanted my huntsman; he waxed more and more eloquent, and all would have been well had not “Tatters,” a broken-haired fox-terrier, come into view.

“Oh!” exclaimed my Aunt S. rapturously, “what a darling little hound! I like it the best of them all!”

The disaster of a sigh too much, or a kiss too long, was never more tragically exemplified.

Subsequently she was heard describing her visit to the kennels; amongst other details she noted with admiration that L., the huntsman, and I knew the name of each hound.

“Edith is wonderful!” she said fervently, “she knows them all! If she wants one of them she just says, ‘Here, Spot! Spot! Spot!’”

One gathered that the response to this classic hound name was instant.

Huntsmen have, in their way, almost as much to put up with as writers in the matter of cross-examination.

“And do you really know them? Each one?”

“And have they all got names?”

Then, upon explanation that there are enough names to go round, “And do you absolutely know them all?”

L., like Tom Corey, was unsustained by a sense of humour, and nothing but his lovableness enabled him to fulfil that most difficult of Christian duties, to suffer fools gladly.

“Lor, Master, what silly questions they do ask!” he has permitted himself to say sometimes, when all was over. Yet, as I have said, sympathy should also be reserved for the inquirers. Insatiable as is the average mother for admiration of her young, she is as water unto wine compared with a huntsman and his hounds. Few people have put a foot deeper into trouble than I have myself, on the occasion of a visit to a very smart pack in England. I had, I hope, come respectably through a minute inspection of the hounds, and, that crucial trial safely past, the Queen of Sheba tottered, spent, but thankful for preservation, into the saddle-room, a vast and impressive apartment, there to be shown, and to express fitting admiration for, the trophies of the chase that adorned it. All round the panelled walls were masks, beautifully mounted, grinning and snarling over their silver name-plates. And I, accustomed to the long-jawed wolves that we call foxes in West Carbery, said in all good faith,

“What a number of cubs you have killed!”

The Master said, icily, that those were foxes, and the subject dropped.

Poor L. is dead now; a keener little huntsman never blew a horn, but he never quite succeeded in hitting it off with the farmers and country people; they were incomprehensible to each other, alike in speech and in spirit. L. despised anyone who got out of bed later than 5 A.M., winter and summer alike, and would boast of having got all his work done before others were out of their beds, which was trying to people with whom early rising is not a foible. He found it impossible to divine the psychology of the lads who jovially told him that they had seen the fox and had “cruisted him well” (which meant that they had stoned him back into covert when he tried to break). It is hard to kill foxes in Carbery, and L. was much exercised about the frequent disappointments that them pore ’ounds had to endure as a result of bad earth-stopping. One wet day, on arriving at the meet, I found him in a state of high indignation. The covert we were to draw was a very uncertain find, and it transpired that L. had secretly arranged with the farmer on whose land it was, that he was to turn down a bagman in it. “He said he could get one easy, and you’d ’ardly think it, Master, but the feller tells me now it was a tame fox of ’is own he was going to turn down, and now he says to me he thinks the day is too wet to bring out such a little pet! ‘A little pet!’ ’e says!”

The human voice is incapable of an accent of more biting scorn than L. imparted to his as he spoke these words. I am unable to determine if L.’s wrath were attributable to the farmer’s heartlessness in having been willing to hunt a tame fox, or to his affectation of consideration for it, or whether it was the result of rage and disappointment on behalf of the hounds. I incline to the last theory.

I have hunted with a good many packs in Ireland of very varying degrees of grandeur, and Ireland is privileged in unconventionalism; nevertheless, it was in England, with a highly fashionable Leicestershire pack, that I was privileged to behold an incident that might have walked out of the pages of Charles Lever into the studio of Randolph Caldecott.

I had brought over a young mare to ride and sell; she and I were the guests of two of the best riders in England and the nicest people in the world (which is sufficient identification for those that know the couple in question). It was my first day with an English pack and it had been a good one. Hunting for the day was at an end, and we had turned our horses for home, when the fight flared up. High on the ridge of a hill, dark against a frosty evening sky, I can still see the combatants, with their whips in the air, laying in to each other happily and whole-heartedly for quite a minute or two, before peacemakers came rushing up, and what had been a pretty, old-fashioned quarrel was patted down into a commonplace, to be dealt with by the family solicitors.

I had had my own little fracas that day. The young mare was hot, and took me over a place which included a hedge, and a wet ditch, and an old gentleman who had waited in the ditch while his horse went on. I feared, from what I could gather as I proceeded on my way, that he was annoyed, but as I had caught sight of him just in time to tell him to lie down, I could not feel much to blame.

I had an English huntsman for two or three seasons whose keenness was equalled (rather unexpectedly) by his piety. He was an extraordinarily hard man to go (“No silly joke of a man to ride,” as I have heard it put), and his excitement when hounds began to run would release itself in benedictions.

“Gawd bless you, Governor boy! Gawd bless you, Rachel my darling! Come along, Master! Come along! He’s away, thank Gawd! He’s away!”

There was a day when hounds took us across a bad bit of bog and there checked. Harry, the whipperin, also an Englishman, and not learned in bogs, got in rather deep. His horse got away from him, and while he was floundering, waist-deep in black and very cold bog-water, he saw the hunted fox creeping into a patch of furze and rocks. He holloa’d to G., who galloped up as near as was advisable.

“Where is ’e, ’Arry?” he roared.

“Be’ind o’ them rocks ’e went. I wouldn’t ’a seen ’im only for gettin’ into this somethin’ ’ole,” replied Harry, dragging himself out of the slough. “Can’t ye catch me ’orse?”

“That’s all right, ’Arry! You wouldn’t ’a viewed ’im only for the ’ole. All things works together for good with them that loves Gawd!”

With which G. laid on his hounds, and left Harry to comfort himself with this reflection and to catch his horse when he could.

G.’s word in season reminds me of a prayer that my nephew, Paddy Coghill (whose infant devotions have already been referred to), offered on his sixth birthday, one “Patrick’s Day in the morning.”

“And oh, Lord God, make it a good day for hunting, and make me sit straight on Kelpie, and show me how to hold my reins.”

He subsequently went to the meet, himself and pony so covered with shamrock that Tim C. (the then huntsman) told him the goats would eat him. I cannot now vouch for the first clause of the petition having been granted, but the R.F.A. Riding School has guaranteed that the latter ones were fulfilled.

It is impossible for me to write a chapter about hunting without speaking of Bridget, a little grey mare who is bracketed with Candy, “Equal First.” I have been so happy as to have owned many good hunters. Lottery, by Speculation, a chestnut mare who died untimely, staked by a broken bough in a gap (and, strangely enough, her brother, “Spec,” is the only other horse who has in this country, thank heaven, had the same hard fate); Tarbrush, a black but comely lady, of whom it was said that she was “a jumper in airnest, who would face up and beyond anything she could see,” and would, if perturbed in temper, go very near to “kicking the stars out of the sky”; Little Tim, a pocket Hercules, worthy to be named with George Borrow’s tremendous “Irish cob”; and Kitty, whose flippancy is such that it has been said to have consoled the country boys for a blank day. “They were well satisfied,” said a competent judge, “Kitty filled their eye.”

But, as with Candy among dogs, so, among horses, Bridget leads, the rest nowhere. Her father was a thoroughbred horse, her mother a Bantry mountain pony. She herself was very little over 15 hands 1 inch, and she succeeded in combining the cunning and goat-like activity of the spindle side of the house with all the heroic qualities of her father’s family.

“She has a plain head,” said a rival horse-coper, who had been so unfortunate as not to have seen her before I did, “but that suits the rest of her!”

I suppose it was a plain head, but anyone who had sat behind it and seen its ears prick at sight of the coming “lep” would not think much of its plainness. I hunted her for ten seasons, and she never gave me a fall that was not strictly necessary. Since her retirement from the Hunt stables she has acted as nursery governess to a succession of rising riders, and at the age of seventeen she carried Martin for a season, and thought little, with that feather-weight, of keeping where both of them loved to be, at “the top of the Hunt.”

The West Carbery Hunt was once honoured by a visit from an American hunting woman, a lady who had been sampling various British hunts and who was a critic whose good opinion was worth having. She was an accomplished rider and a very hard goer, and her enjoyment of such sport as we were able to show her was eminently gratifying. She made, however, one comment upon the country which has not been forgotten. We had a ringing fox who rather overdid his anxiety to show the visitor a typical West Carbery line. He took us round and about a particularly typical hill more often than was requisite, and he declined to demonstrate the fact that we possessed any grass country, or any sound and civilised banks. Our visitor had the hunt, such as it was, with the best, and spoke with marked enthusiasm of the agility of our horses. Later I heard her discussing the events of the day.

“We jumped one place,” said my visitor, “and I said to myself, ‘Well, I suppose that never on God’s earth shall I see a thing like that again!’ And after that,” she went on, “we jumped it five times.”

I might prolong this chapter indefinitely with stories of hunting; of old times in Meath, with Captain “Jock” Trotter, or Mr. John Watson, when Martin and I hunted there with our cousins, Ethel and Jim Penrose; of characteristically blazing gallops with the Galway Blazers, in recent years, ably piloted by Martin’s eldest brother, Jim Martin; of many a good day at home in our own country. But an end must be made, and this chapter may fitly close with a letter of Martin’s. The hunt of which she writes did not take place with the West Carbery, but the country she describes is very similar to ours, and the incidents might as well have occurred here.

The reference to “a sound horse” may be explained by the fact that owing to her exceeding short sight we insisted on her being mounted only on old and thoroughly reliable hunters, who were able to take care of her as well as of themselves; it need hardly be added that such will not invariably pass a vet.

It was ten years from the date of her bad accident before she was able to get out hunting again; this chapter may well end with what she then wrote to Mrs. Campbell.

“I have once more pottered forth with the hounds, and have had some real leps, and tasted the wine of life again.”

* * * * *

There are some whose names will never be forgotten in Carbery who will drink no more with us what Martin Ross has called the Wine of Life. For her that cup is set aside, and with her now are three of the best of the lads whose pride and pleasure it used to be to wear the velvet cap of the hunt servant, and to turn hounds in West Carbery. Gallant soldiers, dashing riders, dear boys; they have made the supreme sacrifice for their country, and they will ride no more with us.

The hunt goes on; season follows season; the heather dies on the hills and the furze blossoms again in the spring. Other boys will come out to follow hounds, and learn those lessons that hunting best can teach, but there will never be better than those three: Ralph and Gerald Thornycroft, and Harry Becher.

“Bred to hunting they was,” said the old huntsman, who loved them, and has now, like them, crossed that last fence of all, “every one o’ them. Better gentlemen to cross a country I never see.”

CHAPTER XXV

“THE IRISH R.M.”

After a time, however, congested envelopes of “press cuttings,” mostly of a reassuring character, began to arrive. Press-cuttings, received en gros, are liable to induce feelings of indigestion, and with their economy of margin and general suggestion of the waste-paper basket, their tendency is to crush the romance out of reviews; but Martin and I found them good reading. And gradually, letters from unknown readers began to reach us. Pathetic letters, one from “an Irish Exile,” thanking us for “a Whiff of Irish air,” another from Australia, proudly claiming possession of “Five drops of Irish blood,” and offering them as an excuse for “troubling us with thanks.” Serious inquiries, beginning, in one instance, “Dear Sirs or Ladies, or Sir or Lady,”—as to whether we were men or women, or both. A friendly writer, in America, informed us that legend was already “crystalising all over us.” “There is a tradition in our neighbourhood that you are ladies—also that you live at Bally something—that you are Art Students in Paris—that you are Music Students in Germany ... but my writing is not to inquire into your identity—or how you collaborate ... a cumulative debt of gratitude fell due....” The writer then proceeded to congratulate us on “having accomplished the rare feat of being absolutely modern, yet bearing no date,” and ended by saying “I think the stories will be as good in ten years or fifty (which probably interests you less) as they are to-day.” A kind forecast, that still remains to be verified. The same writer, who was herself one of the trade, went on to say that she “knew that the Author is not insulted or aggrieved on hearing that perfect strangers are eagerly awaiting the next book, or re-reading the last with complete enjoyment,” and this chapter may be taken as a confirmation of the truth of what she said. One may often smile at the form in which, sometimes, the approval is conveyed, but I welcome this opportunity of thanking those wonderful people, who have taken the trouble to write to Martin and me, often from the ends of the earth, to tell us that our writing had given them pleasure; not more, I think, than their letters have given us, so we can cry quits over the transaction.

We have been told, and the story is well authenticated, of a young lady who invariably slept with two copies of the book (like my aunt and her “Sommeliers”), one on each side of her, so that on whichever side she faced on waking, she could find instant refreshment. An assurance of almost excessive appreciation came from America, informing us that we “had Shakspere huddled into a corner, screaming for mercy.” We were told of a lady (of the bluest literary blood) who had classified friends from acquaintances by finding out if they had read and appreciated “The Real Charlotte” or no, and who now was unable to conceive how she had ever existed without the assistance of certain quotations from “The R.M.” Perhaps one of the most pleasing of these tales was one of a man who said (to a faithful hearer) “First I read it at full speed, because I couldn’t stop, and then I read it very slowly, chewing every word; and then I read it a third time, dwelling on the bits I like best; and then, and not till then, thank Heaven! I was told it was written by two women!”

An old hunting man, a friend and contemporary of Surtees and Delmé Radcliffe, wrote to us saying that he was “The Evangelist of the Irish R.M. It is the only doctrine that I preach.... It is ten years since I dropped upon it by pure accident, and, like Keats, in his equally immortal sonnet—

I am so deeply grieved that you cannot hunt. I can sympathise. It is sixty years since I began hunting, and I know how you must miss it. Now you realise the truth of John Jorrocks. ‘For hunting is like the air we breathe, if we have it not, we die.’ But don’t do that. Ever yours, etc. etc.”

We have had many letters containing inquiries of a sort that taxed both memory and invention to find replies to them. Bewildering demands for explanations, philological, etymological, zoological, of such statements as “The Divil in the Wild Woods wouldn’t content him,” or Flurry Knox’s refusal to “be seen

dead at a pig fair” in certain articles of attire. Why a pig fair? Why dead? Why everything? Martin’s elucidation of the pig fair problem appeared in the Spectator, included in a letter from the inquirer, “G.,” and is as follows:

“I have never given a necktie to a male friend, or even enemy; but a necktie was once given to me. I showed it to a person whose opinion on such matters I revere. He said at once, ‘I would not be seen dead in it at a pig-fair.’ The matter of the tie ended there; to use the valuable expression of the wife of the male friend, (in connection with a toy that might possibly prove injurious to her young,) I ‘gradually threw it away.’ That was my first experience of the pig-fair trope, and I have never ceased to find comfort in it, nor ever questioned its completeness. I am aware that nothing, presumably, will matter to me when I am dead, yet, casting my mind forward, I do not wish the beholder of my remains, casting his eye backward, to be scandalised by my taste in ties, or other accompaniments, while I was alive. I do not myself greatly care about being alive at a pig-fair, neither is it an advantage, socially or otherwise, to be dead there. Yet this odium might be enhanced, could even be transcended, in the eye of the beholder, by the infamy of my necktie. To this point I have treated the beholder as a person able to appreciate the discredit, not only of my necktie, but also of being dead at a pig-fair. There remains, however, and in a highly intensive manner, the pig-fair itself. We trust and believe the pig-jobber is critical about pigs; but we do not expect from him fastidiousness in artistic and social affairs. He will not, we hope, realise the discredit of being dead at a pig-fair, but there can be neckties at which he will draw the line. Considering, therefore, the disapprobation of the pig-jobber, joined to that of the other beholders, and finding that fore-knowledge of the callousness of death could not allay my sense of these ignominies, I gradually threw away the necktie.”

I trust “G.” will permit me to quote also the following from his letter.

“As reference has been made to the ‘R.M.’ your readers will be amused to hear that a French sportsman who had asked the name of a good sporting novel, and had been recommended the work in question, said with some surprise, ‘But I did not think such things existed in Ireland.’ He imagined the title to be ‘Some Reminiscences of an Irish Harem.’

A leading place among the communications and appreciations that we received about our books was taken by what we were accustomed to call Medical Testimonials. The number of quinzies and cases of tonsilitis that Major Yeates has cured, violently, it is true, but effectually, the cases of prostration after influenza, in which we were assured he alone had power to rouse and cheer the sufferer, cannot possibly be enumerated. We have sometimes been flattered into the hope that we were beginning to rival the Ross “Fluit-player” of whom it was said, “A man in deep concumption From death he would revive.”

We had but one complaint, and that was from a cousin, who said it had reduced her to “Disabling laughter,” which, “remembering the awful warning, ‘laugh, and grow F——!’” she had tried her utmost to restrain.

The envelopes of press cuttings became more and more congested as the months went on, and the “R.M.” continued his course round the world; and, thanks to his being, on the whole, an inoffensive person, he was received with more kindness than we had ever dared to hope for. There were, as far as I can remember, but few rose leaves with crumples in them, and even they had their compensations, as, I think, the following sample crumple will sufficiently indicate. I am far from wishing to hold this pronouncement up to derision. There was a great deal more of it than appears here, which, unfortunately, I have not space to quote. We found many of its strictures instructive and bracing, and the suffering that pulses in the final paragraph bears the traces of a genuine emotion.

“The stories were originally published in a magazine, and would be less monotonous and painful, no doubt, if read separately, and in small doses.... The picture they give of Irish life is ... so depressingly squalid and hopeless.... The food is appallingly bad, and the cooking and service, if possible, worse. No one in the book, high or low, does a stroke of work, unless shady horse-selling and keeping dirty public houses can be said to be doing work.... On the whole, the horses and hounds are far more important than the human beings, and the stables and kennels are only a degree less dilapidated and disgusting than the houses. Not a trace of romance, seriousness, or tenderness, disturbs the uniform tone of the book.

“Such is the picture of our country, given, I believe, by two Irish ladies. One, at least, is Irish—Miss Martin, a niece of the Honourable Mrs. P. A more unfeminine book I have never perused, or one more devoid of any sentiment of refinement, for even men who write horsey novels preserve some tinge of romance in their feelings towards women which these ladies are devoid of. A complete hardness pervades their treatment of the female as of the male characters.”

It is seventeen years since we first perused this melancholy indictment. Is it too late to do one act of justice and to restore to the reviewer one illusion? Martin Ross cannot claim the relationship assigned to her; the Honourable Mrs. P. leaves the court without a stain on her character.

Among the best and most faithful of the friends of the R.M., we make bold to count the Army. After the South African War, we were shown a letter in which a Staff-officer had said that he “had worn out three copies of the ‘Irish R.M.’ during the War, but it had preserved for him his reason, which would otherwise have been lost.” Another wrote to tell us of the copy of the book that had been found in General de Wet’s tent, on one of the many occasions when that stout campaigner had got up a little earlier than had been expected. Yet a third officer, no less than a Director of Military Intelligence, said that a statue should be erected in honour of the “R.M.” “For services rendered during the War.” And, as Mr. Belloc has sung, “Surely the Tartar should know!”

Much later came a letter from Northern Nigeria, telling us that “the book was ripping,” apologising for “frightful cheek” in writing, ending with the statement that “even if we were annoyed,” the writer was, “at any rate, a long way off!”

In very truth we were not annoyed. We have had letters that filled us with an almost shamed thankfulness that we should have been able, with such play-boys as Flurry Knox, and “Slipper,” and the rest, to give what seemed to be a real lift to people who needed it; and, since 1914, it is not easy to express what happiness it has brought us both to hear, as we have often heard, that the various volumes of the R.M.’s adventures had done their share in bringing moments of laughter, and, perhaps, of oblivion for a while to their surroundings, to the fighters in France and in all those other cruel places, where endurance and suffering go hand in hand, and the lads lay down their lives with a laugh.

Nothing, I believe, ever gave Martin more pleasure than that passages from the “Irish R.M.” should have been included among the Broad Sheets that the Times sent out to the soldiers. It was in the last summer of her life, little as we thought it, that this honour was paid to our stories, and had she been told how brief her time was to be, and been asked to choose the boon that she would like best, I believe that to be numbered among that elect company of consolers was what she would most gladly have chosen.

A little book was sent to me, not long ago, which was published in the spring of this year, 1917. It gives an account, worthy in its courage and simplicity of the brilliant and gallant young life that it commemorates. In it is told how Gilbert Talbot, of the Rifle Brigade, “began the plan of reading aloud in the men’s rest times, and we heard from many sources what the fun was, and the shouts of laughter, from his reading aloud of ‘Some Experiences of an Irish R.M.’ ‘Philippa’s first Foxhunt’ was a special success.” And in his last entry in his diary, he himself tells of having “read one of the old R.M. stories aloud,” and that it was “a roaring success.”

Yet one other story, and one that touches the fount of tears. It was written to me by one who knew and loved Martin; one whose husband had been killed in the war, and who wrote of her eldest son,

“I want to tell you that the R.M. helped me through what would have been D——’s twenty-first birthday yesterday. I know Violet would have been glad.”

I believe that she knows these things, and I am quite sure that she is glad.

CHAPTER XXVI

OF GOOD TIMES

The effort of writing the twelve “R.M.” stories against time, and before she had even began to recover from the effects of the hunting accident, told upon Martin more severely than we could either of us have believed possible. For the following four years, 1900 to 1903, it was impossible for her to undertake any work that would demand steady application, and it was out of the question to bind ourselves to any date for anything. In looking over our records, the fact that has throughout been the most outstanding is, how seldom she was quite free from suffering of some kind or other. For a creature who adored activity of any kind, and whose exquisite lightness of poise and perfectness of physical equipment predisposed her for any form of sport, her crippling short sight was a most cruel handicap, and in nothing was the invincible courage, patience, and sweetness of her nature so demonstrated as in the fortitude with which she accepted it.

It is said that blind people develop a sixth sense, and it was a truism with us that Martin saw and knew more of any happening, at any entertainment, than any of the rest of us, endowed though we were with sight like hawks, but unprovided with her perception, and concentration, and intuition. There have been times when her want of sight supported her, as when, at a very big Admiralty House Dinner (no matter where), an apple pie that had made the tour of the table in vain was handed to her. Unaware of its blighted past she partook, and slowly disposed of it, talking to her man the while. It was not until she was going home that a justly scandalised sister was able to demand an explanation as to why she had brought the table to a standstill, even as Joshua held up the sun at Ajalon.

But more often—far more often—it has betrayed her. Once, after a visit at a country house, the party, a large one, stood round the motor in farewell, and she, a little late for the train, as was her custom, motor-veiled, and deserted by her eye-glasses, hurriedly shook hands with all and sundry, and ended with the butler. She could never remember how far the salutation had been carried, or the point at which her eyes were spiritually opened. It was a searing memory, but she said she thought and hoped that, as with the Angel of the Darker Drink, she did not, at that last dread moment, shrink. But, she added, undoubtedly the butler did.

No one was ever such a comrade on an expedition, and many such have she and I made together. Times of the best, when we went where we would, and did what pleased us most, and had what I hold to be, on the whole, the best company in the world, that of painting people. (Yet I admit that a spice of other artists adds flavour.) Even during those years of comparative invalidism, after the traitor “Dervish” had so nearly crushed her life out of her, Martin never surrendered to the allied forces of malaise, and those attractions of idleness and comfort which may be symbolised in “The Sofa.”

She was on a horse again before many, in her case, would have been off the sofa, and when, fighting through phalanxes of friends and doctors, she went hunting again, her nerve was what it ever had been, of steel. We went to Achill Island in one of those summers, to a hotel where “The Sofa” was practically non-existent (being invariably used as a reserve bed for bagmen), and the unpunctuality of the meals might possibly have been intended to evoke an appetite that would ignore their atrocity. In this it failed, but it evoked various passages in “Some Irish Yesterdays,” and thus may be credited with having assisted us to get better dinners elsewhere.

We went to London, and stayed at the Bolton Studios, that strange, elongated habitation, that is like nothing so much as a corridor train in a nightmare. There, one night, Martin got ill, and I had to summon, post haste, the nearest doctor. He came, and was an Irishman, and was as clever as Irish doctors often are, and as unconventional. He is dead now, so I may mention that when, in the awful, echoing corridor, at dead of night, the delicate subject of his fee was broached, we discovered that there was an unprocurable sixpence between us.

He eyed me and said,

“I’ll toss ye for the sixpence!”

“Done!” called Martin, feebly, from within.

The doctor and I tossed, double or quits, sudden death. I won. And there came a faint cock-crow from the inner chamber.

That year she wrote a sketch called “A Patrick’s Day Hunt,” and I drew the illustrations for it. It was published as a large coloured picture-book, by Constable & Co., and was very well reviewed. The story is supposed to be told by a countryman to a friend, and is a remarkable tour de force, both in idiom and in realising the countryman point of view. We were afraid that it might be found too subtle a study of dialect for the non-Irish reader, so we were the more pleased when we were told of an English Quaker family, living in the very heart of their native country, who, every day, directly after prayers, read aloud a portion of “A Patrick’s Day Hunt.”

(In this connection I will quote a fragment of a letter which bears indirectly on the same point.)