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Anyone seeking to utilize +this eBook outside of the United States should confirm copyright +status under the laws that apply to them. diff --git a/README.md b/README.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..5b7f431 --- /dev/null +++ b/README.md @@ -0,0 +1,2 @@ +Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for +eBook #61336 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/61336) diff --git a/old/61336-0.txt b/old/61336-0.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 49ee1dd..0000000 --- a/old/61336-0.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,11005 +0,0 @@ -Project Gutenberg's Irish Memories, by Edith Somerville and Martin Ross - -This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with -almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or -re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included -with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org/license - - -Title: Irish Memories - -Author: Edith Somerville - Martin Ross - -Release Date: February 7, 2020 [EBook #61336] - -Language: English - -Character set encoding: UTF-8 - -*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK IRISH MEMORIES *** - - - - -Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed -Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was -produced from images available at The Internet Archive) - - - - - - - - - IRISH MEMORIES - - [Illustration: VIOLET FLORENCE MARTIN.] - - - - - IRISH MEMORIES - - BY - E. Œ. SOMERVILLE <small>AND</small> MARTIN ROSS - - AUTHORS OF “SOME EXPERIENCES OF AN IRISH R.M.,” - “THE REAL CHARLOTTE,” ETC. - - _WITH 23 ILLUSTRATIONS FROM DRAWINGS BY - E. Œ. SOMERVILLE AND FROM PHOTOGRAPHS_ - - _THIRD IMPRESSION_ - - NEW YORK: - LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO. - FOURTH AVENUE AND <small>30TH</small> STREET - 1918 - - - - -PREFACE - - -I have many people to thank, for many things, and I have an explanation -to make, but the thanks must come first. - -I offer my most sincere gratitude to Mrs. Butler and to Professor -Edgeworth, for their kindness in permitting me to print Miss Edgeworth’s -letters to Mrs. Bushe; to Lord Dunsany, for the extract from “Plays of -Gods and Men,” which has said for me what I could not say for myself; to -the Editors of the _Spectator_ and of _Punch_, for their permission to -use Martin Ross’s letter and the quatrain to her memory; to the Hon. -Mrs. Campbell, the Right Hon. Sir Horace Plunkett, P.C., Captain Stephen -Gwynn, M.P., Lady Coghill, Colonel Dawson, and other of Martin Ross’s -friends, for lending me the letters that she wrote to them; even when -these are not quoted verbatim, they have been of great service to me, -and I am very grateful for having been allowed to see them. - -I have to explain what may strike some as singular, viz., the omission, -as far as was practicable, from the letters of Martin Ross, and from -this book in general, of the names of her and my friends and relatives -who are still living. I have been guided by a consensus of the opinion -of those whom I have consulted, and also by my remembrance of Martin -Ross’s views on the subject, which she often expressed to me in -connection with sundry and various volumes of Recollections, that have -dealt with living contemporaries with a frankness that would have seemed -excessive in the case of a memoir of the life of Queen Anne. If I have -gone to the opposite extreme, I hope it may be found a fault on the -right side. - -E. Œ. SOMERVILLE. - -_September 20th, 1917._ - - - - -CONTENTS - - -CHAP. PAGE - -INTRODUCTORY 1 - -I.--THE MARTINS OF ROSS 3 - -II.--THE CHIEF 41 - -III.--MAINLY MARIA EDGEWORTH 51 - -IV.--OLD FORGOTTEN THINGS 61 - -V.--EARLY WEST CARBERY 71 - -VI.--HER MOTHER 78 - -VII.--MY MOTHER 87 - -VIII.--HERSELF 97 - -IX.--MYSELF WHEN YOUNG 106 - -X.--WHEN FIRST SHE CAME 119 - -XI.--“AN IRISH COUSIN” 128 - -XII.--THE YEARS OF THE LOCUST 140 - -XIII.--THE RESTORATION 153 - -XIV.--RICKEEN 169 - -XV.--FAITHS AND FAIRIES 181 - -XVI.--BELIEFS AND BELIEVERS 188 - -XVII.--LETTERS FROM ROSS 197 - -XVIII.--“TOURS, IDLE TOURS” 207 - -XIX.--OF DOGS 217 - -XX.--“THE REAL CHARLOTTE” 229 - -XXI.--SAINT ANDREWS 241 - -XXII.--AT ÉTAPLES 252 - -XXIII.--PARIS AGAIN 260 - -XXIV.--HORSES AND HOUNDS 272 - -XXV.--“THE IRISH R.M.” 286 - -XXVI.--OF GOOD TIMES 294 - -XXVII.--VARIOUS OPINIONS 309 - -XXVIII.--THE LAST 324 - - -APPENDICES - -I.--LETTERS FROM CHIEF JUSTICE CHARLES KENDAL -BUSHE TO MRS. BUSHE 329 - -II.--A NOTE BY CAPTAIN STEPHEN GWYNN, M.P. 335 - -III.--HER FRIENDS 337 - -IV.--BIBLIOGRAPHY 340 - - - - -LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS - - -Violet Florence Martin (_Photograph_) _Frontispiece_ - -Ross House, Co. Galway (_inset_) The Martin -Coat of Arms (_Photograph_) _Facing page_ 8 - -Castle Haven Harbour (_Photo. by Martin Ross_) “ 64 - -Carberiae Rupes (_Photo. by Sir E. B. Coghill, -Bart._) “ 64 - -From the Garden, Drishane (_Photo. by Martin -Ross_) “ 90 - -Drishane House (_Photo. by Martin Ross_) “ 90 - -Hydrangeas, Drishane Avenue (_Photo. by -Martin Ross_) “ 90 - -Dans la Rive Gauche (_Drawing by E. Œ. -Somerville_) “ 118 - -Martin Ross on Confidence (_Photograph_) “ 122 - -Edith Œnone Somerville (_Photograph_) “ 138 - -A Castle Haven Woman (_Drawing by E. Œ. -Somerville_) “ 150 - -Martin Ross (_Photo. by Lady Coghill_) “ 158 - -Ross Lake (_Photograph_) “ 158 - -E. Œ. Somerville on Tarbrush (_Photograph_) “ 184 - -E. Œ. S.--Candy--Sheila--V. F. M. (_Photo. by -Sir E. B. Coghill, Bart._) “ 210 - -Candy (_Photo. by Martin Ross_) “ 226 - -E. Œ. S. and a Dilettante (_Photo. by Martin -Ross_) “ 226 - -“Chez Cuneo” (_Drawing by E. Œ. Somerville_) “ 264 - -The West Carbery Hounds (_Photo. by Miss -M. J. Robertson_) “ 275 - -At Bunalun. “Gone to Ground” (_Photo. by -Mr. Ambrose Cramer_) “ 288 - -Waiting for the Terriers (_Photo. by Mr. Ambrose -Cramer_) “ 288 - -West Carbery Hounds at Liss Ard (_Photograph_) “ 308 - -Portofino (_Photo. by Martin Ross_) “ 308 - - - - -THE TENTS OF THE ARABS. - - -ACT II. - -KING. - -What is this child of man that can conquer Time and that is braver than -Love? - -EZNARZA. - -Even Memory.... - -He shall bring back our year to us that Time cannot destroy. Time cannot -slaughter it if Memory says no. It is reprieved, though banished. We -shall often see it, though a little far off, and all its hours and days -shall dance to us and go by one by one and come back and dance again. - -KING. - -Why, that is true. They shall come back to us. I had thought that they -that work miracles, whether in Heaven or Earth, were unable to do one -thing. I thought that they could not bring back days again when once -they had fallen into the hands of Time. - -EZNARZA. - -It is a trick that Memory can do. He comes up softly in the town or the -desert, wherever a few men are, like the strange dark conjurers who sing -to snakes, and he does his trick before them, and does it again and -again. - -KING. - -We will often make him bring the old days back when you are gone to your -people and I am miserably wedded to the princess coming from Tharba. - -EZNARZA. - -They will come with sand on their feet from the golden, beautiful -desert; they will come with a long-gone sunset each one over his head. -Their lips will laugh with the olden evening voices. - -From “_Plays of Gods and Men_,” by LORD DUNSANY. - - - - -IRISH MEMORIES - - - - -INTRODUCTORY - - -Perhaps I ought to begin by saying that I have always called her -“Martin”; I propose to do so still. I cannot think of her by any other -name. To her own family, and to certain of her friends, she is Violet; -to many others she is best known as Martin Ross. But I shall write of -her as I think of her. - - * * * * * - -When we first met each other we were, as we then thought, well stricken -in years. That is to say, she was a little over twenty, and I was four -years older than she. Not absolutely the earliest morning of life; say, -about half-past ten o’clock, with breakfast (and all traces of bread and -butter) cleared away. - -We have said to each other at intervals since then that some day we -should have to write our memoirs; I even went so far as to prepare an -illustration--I have it still--of our probable appearances in the year -1920. (And the forecast was not a flattering one.) Well, 1920 has not -arrived yet, but it has moved into the circle of possibilities; 1917 has -come, and Martin has gone, and I am left alone to write the memoirs, -with such a feeling of inadequacy as does not often, I hope, beset the -historian. - -These vagrant memories do not pretend to regard themselves as -biography, autobiography, as anything serious or valuable. Martin and I -were not accustomed to take ourselves seriously, and if what I may -remember has any value, it will be the value that there must be in a -record, however unworthy, of so rare and sunny a spirit as hers, and -also, perhaps, in the preservation of a phase of Irish life that is fast -disappearing. I will not attempt any plan of the path that I propose to -follow. I must trust to the caprice of memory, supplemented by the -diaries that we have kept with the intermittent conscientiousness proper -to such. To keep a diary, in any degree, implies a certain share of -industry, of persistence, even of imagination. Let us leave it at that. -The diaries will not be brought into court. - - - - -CHAPTER I - -THE MARTINS OF ROSS - - -A few years ago Martin wrote an account of her eldest brother, Robert, -known and loved by a very wide circle outside his own family as -“Ballyhooley.” He died in September, 1905, and in the following spring, -one of his many friends, Sir Henniker Heaton, wrote to my cousin and -begged her to help him in compiling a book that should be a memorial of -Robert, of his life, his writings, and of his very distinguished and -valuable political work as a speaker and writer in the Unionist cause. -Sir Henniker Heaton died, and the project unfortunately fell through, -but not before my cousin had written an account of Robert, and, -incidentally, a history of Ross and the Martins which is in itself so -interesting, and that, indirectly, accounts for so many of her own -characteristics, that, although much that she had meant to write remains -unaccomplished, I propose, unfinished though it is, to make it the -foremost chapter in these idle and straying recollections. - - -AN ACCOUNT OF ROBERT JASPER MARTIN, OF ROSS. BY “MARTIN ROSS” - -PART I - -My brother Robert’s life began with the epoch that has changed the face -and the heart of Ireland. It ended untimely, in strange accord with the -close of that epoch; the ship has sunk, and he has gone down with it. - -He was born on June 17th, 1846, the first year of the Irish famine, when -Ireland brimmed with a potato-fed population, and had not as yet -discovered America. The quietness of untroubled centuries lay like a -spell on Connemara, the country of his ancestors; the old ways of life -were unquestioned at Ross, and my father went and came among his people -in an intimacy as native as the soft air they breathed. On the crowded -estate the old routine of potato planting and turf cutting was pursued -tranquilly; the people intermarried and subdivided their holdings; few -could read, and many could not speak English. All were known to the -Master, and he was known and understood by them, as the old Galway -people knew and understood; and the subdivisions of the land were -permitted, and the arrears of rent were given time, or taken in -boat-loads of turf, or worked off by day-labour, and eviction was -unheard of. It was give and take, with the personal element always warm -in it: as a system it was probably quite uneconomic, but the hand of -affection held it together, and the tradition of centuries was at its -back. - -The intimate relations of landlord and tenant were an old story at Ross. -It was in the days of Queen Elizabeth that they began, when the -Anglo-Norman families, known as the Tribes of Galway, still in the high -summer of their singular and romantic prosperity, began to contemplate -existence as being possible outside the walls of Galway Town, and by -purchase or by conquest acquired many lands in the county. They had -lived for three or four centuries in the town, self-sufficing, clannish -and rich; they did not forget the days of Strong-Bow, who, in the time -of Henry II, began the settlement of Galway, nor yet the leadership of -De Burgho, and they maintained their isolation, and married and -intermarried in inveterate exclusiveness, until, in the time of Henry -VIII, relationship was so close and intricate that marriages were not -easy. They rang the changes on Christian names, Nicholas, Dominick, -Robert, Andrew; they built great houses of the grey Galway limestone, -with the Spanish courtyards and deep archways that they learned from -their intercourse with Spain, and they carved their coats of arms upon -them in that indomitable family pride that is an asset of immense value -in the history of a country. Even now, the shop-fronts of Galway carry -the symbols of chivalry above their doors, and battered shields and -quarterings look strangely down from their places in the ancient walls -upon the customers that pass in beneath them. - -It was in the sixteenth century that Robert Martin, one of the long and -powerful line of High Sheriffs and Mayors of Galway, became possessed of -a large amount of land in West Galway, and in 1590 Ross was his country -place. From this point the Martins began slowly to assimilate West -Galway; Ross, Dangan, Birch Hall, and Ballinahinch, marked their -progress, until Ballinahinch, youngest and greatest of the family -strongholds, had gathered to itself nearly 200,000 acres of Connemara. -It fell, tragically, from the hand of its last owner, Mary Martin, -Princess of Connemara, in the time of the Famine, and that page of -Martin history is closed in Galway, though the descendants of her -grandfather, “Humanity Dick” (for ever to be had in honourable -remembrance as the author of “Martin’s Act for the Prevention of Cruelty -to Animals”), have kept alive the old name of Ballinahinch, and have -opened a new and notable record for themselves in Canada. - -Of Dangan, the postern gate by the Galway river remains; of Birch Hall, -the ruins of a courtyard and of a manorial dove-cot; Ross, the first -outpost, nurse of many generations of Martins, still stands by its lake -and looks across it to its old neighbour, the brown mountain, Croagh -Keenan. - -Through a line of Jaspers, Nicholases and Roberts, the story of Ross -moved prosperously on from Robert of Elizabeth’s times, untouched even -by the hand of Cromwell, unshaken even when the gates of Galway, twelve -miles away, opened at length to Ireton. Beyond the town of Galway, the -Cromwellian did not set his foot; Connemara was a dark and barren -country, and the Martins, Roman Catholic and Royalists to the core, as -were all the other Tribes of Galway, held the key of the road. - -From that conflict Ross emerged, minus most of its possessions in Galway -town and suburbs; after the Restoration they were restored by the Decree -of Charles II, but remained nevertheless in the hands of those to whom -they had been apportioned as spoil. The many links that had bound Ross -to Galway Town seem thenceforward to have been severed; during the -eighteenth century the life of its owners was that of their -surroundings, peaceful for the most part, and intricately bound up with -that of their tenants. They were still Roman Catholic and Jacobite--a -kinsman of Dangan was an agent for Charles Edward--and each generation -provided several priests for its Church. With my great-grandfather, -Nicholas, came the change of creed; he became a Protestant in order to -marry a Protestant neighbour, Miss Elizabeth O’Hara, of Lenaboy; where -an affair of the heart was concerned, he was not the man to stick at -what he perhaps considered to be a trifle. It is said that at the end of -his long life his early training asserted itself, and drew him again -towards the Church of his fathers; it is certainly probable that he -died, as he was born, a son of Rome. - -But the die had been cast. His six children were born and bred -Protestants. Strong in all ways, they were strong Protestants, and Low -Church, according to the fashion of their time, yet they lived in an -entirely Roman Catholic district without religious friction of any kind. - -It was during the life of Nicholas, my great-grandfather, that Ross -House was burned down; with much loss, it is believed, of plate and -pictures; it had a tower, and stood beautifully on a point in the lake. -He replaced it by the present house, built about the year 1777, whose -architecture is not æsthetically to his credit; it is a tall, unlovely -block, of great solidity, with kitchen premises half underground, and -the whole surrounded by a wide and deep area. It suggests the idea of -defence, which was probably not absent from the builder’s mind, yet the -Rebellion of twenty years later did not put it to the test. In the great -storm of 1839, still known as “The Big Wind,” my grandfather gathered -the whole household into the kitchen for safety, and, looking up at its -heavily-vaulted ceiling, said that if Ross fell, not a house in Ireland -would stand that night. Many fell, but Ross House stood the assault, -even though the lawn was white with the spray borne in from the -Atlantic, six miles away. It has at least two fine rooms, a lofty -well-staircase, with balusters of mahogany, taken out of a wreck, and it -takes all day the sun into its heart, looking west and south, with tall -windows, over lake and mountain. It is said that a man is never in love -till he is in love with a plain woman, and in spite of draughts, of -exhausting flights of stairs, of chimneys that are the despair of -sweeps, it has held the affection of five generations of Martins. - -A dark limestone slab, over the dining-room chimney-piece, bears the -coat of arms--“a Calvary Cross, between the Sun in splendour on the -dexter limb, and the Moon in crescent on the sinister of the second”--to -quote the official description. The crest is a six-pointed star, and the -motto, “Sic itur ad astra,” connects with the single-minded simplicity -of the Crusader, the Cross of our faith with the Star of our hope. In -the book of pedigrees at Dublin Castle it is stated that the arms were -given by Richard Cœur de Lion to Oliver Martin, in the Holy Land; a -further family tradition says that Oliver Martin shared Richard’s -captivity in Austria. The stone on which the arms are carved came -originally from an old house in Galway; it has the name of Robuck Martin -below, and the date 1649 above. It is one of several now lying at Ross, -resembling the lintels of doorways, and engraved with the arms of -various Martins and their wives. - -The Protestantism of my grandfather, Robert, did not deter him from -marrying a Roman Catholic, Miss Mary Ann Blakeney, of Bally Ellen, Co. -Carlow, one of three beauties known in Carlow and Waterford as “The -Three Marys.” As in most of the acts of his prudent and long-headed -life, he did not do wrong. Her four children were brought up as -Protestants, but the rites of her Church were celebrated at Ross without -let or hindrance; my brother Robert could remember listening at the -drawing-room door to the chanting of the Mass inside, and prayers were -held daily by her for the servants, all of whom, then as now, were Roman -Catholics. - -“Hadn’t I the divil’s own luck,” groaned a stable-boy, stuffing his pipe -into his pocket as the prayer-bell clanged, “that I didn’t tell the -Misthress I was a Protestant!” - -[Illustration: ROSS HOUSE, CO. GALWAY. - -(_Inset_) _The Martin Coat of Arms._] - -She lived till 1855, a hale, quiet, and singularly handsome woman, -possessed of the fortunate gift of living in amity under the same roof -with the many and various relations-in-law who regarded Ross as their -home. Family feeling was almost a religious tenet with my grandfather, -and in this, as in other things, he lived up to his theories. Shrewd and -patient, and absolutely proficient in the affairs of his property, he -could take a long look ahead, even when the Irish Famine lay like a -black fog upon all things; and when he gave up his management of the -estate there was not a debt upon it. One of his sayings is so unexpected -in a man of his time as to be worth repeating. “If a man kicks me I -suppose I must take notice of that,” he said when reminded of some -fancied affront to himself, “short of that, we needn’t trouble ourselves -about it.” He had the family liking for a horse; it is recorded that in -a dealer’s yard in Dublin he mounted a refractory animal, in his frock -coat and tall hat, got him out of the yard, and took him round St. -Stephen’s Green at a gallop, through the traffic, laying into him with -his umbrella. He was once, in Dublin, induced to go to an oratorio, and -bore it for some time in silence, till the choir reiterated the theme, -“Go forth, ye sons of Aaron! Go!” “Begad, here goes!” said my -grandfather, rising and leaving the hall. - -My father, James, was born in 1804, and grew up endowed, as many still -testify, with good looks and the peculiarly genial and polished manner -that seemed to be an attribute of the Galway gentlemen of his time. He -had also a gift with his pen that was afterwards to serve him well, but -the business capacity of his father was strangely absent from the -character of an otherwise able man. He took his degree at Trinity -College, Dublin, and was intended for the Bar, but almost before his -dinners were eaten he was immersed in other affairs. He was but little -over twenty when he married Miss Anne Higinbotham. It was a very happy -marriage; he and his wife, and the four daughters who were born to them, -lived in his father’s house at Ross, according to the patriarchal custom -of the time, and my father abandoned the Bar, and lived then, as always, -the healthy country life that he delighted in. He shot woodcock with the -skill that was essential in the days of muzzle-loaders, and pulled a -good oar in his father’s boat at the regattas of Lough Corrib and Lough -Mask, as various silver cups still testify. I remember seeing him, a -straight and spare man, well on in his sixth decade, take a racing spin -with my brothers on Ross Lake, and though his stroke was pronounced by -the younger generation to be old-fashioned, and a trifle stiff, he held -his own with them. Robert has often told me that when they walked the -grouse mountains together, his father could, at the end of the day, face -a hill better than he, with all his equipment of youth and athleticism. - -Among the silver cups at Ross was a two-handled one, that often -fascinated our childhood, with the inscription: - -“FROM HENRY ADAIR OF LOUGHANMORE, TO -JAMES MARTIN OF ROSS.” - -It was given to my father in memory of a duel in which he had acted as -second, to Henry Adair, who was a kinsman of his first wife. - -My father’s first wife had no son; she died at the birth of a daughter, -and her loss was deep and grievous to her husband. Her four daughters -grew up, very good-looking and very agreeable, and were married when -still in their teens. Their husbands all came from the County Antrim, -and two of them were brothers. Barklie, Callwell, McCalmont, Barton, -are well-known names in Ireland to-day, and beyond it, and the children -of his four elder sisters are bound to my brother Robert’s life by links -of long intimacy and profound affection. - -The aim of the foregoing _résumé_ of family history has been to put -forward only such things as seem to have been determining in the -environment and heritage to which Robert was born. The chivalrous past -of Galway, the close intimacy with the people, the loyalty to family -ties, were the traditions among which he was bred; the Protestant -instinct, and a tolerance for the sister religion, born of sympathy and -personal respect, had preceded him for two generations, and a store of -shrewd humour and common sense had been laid by in the family for the -younger generation to profit by if they wished. - -My father was a widower of forty when he first met his second wife, Miss -Anna Selina Fox, in Dublin. She was then two and twenty, a slender girl, -of the type known in those days as elegant, and with a mind divided in -allegiance between outdoor amusements and the Latin poets. Her father, -Charles Fox, of New Park, Co. Longford, was a barrister, and was son of -Justice Fox, of the Court of Common Pleas. He married Katherine, -daughter of Chief Justice Bushe, and died while still a young man; his -children were brought up at Kilmurrey, the house of their mother’s -father. - -The career of the Right Honourable Charles Kendal Bushe, Chief Justice -of Ireland, is a public one, and need not here be dwelt upon; but even -at this distance of time it thrills the hearts of his descendants to -remember his lofty indifference to every voice save those of conscience -and patriotism, when, in the Irish House of Commons, he opposed the Act -of Union with all the noble gift of language that won for him the name -“Silver-tongued Bushe,” and left the walls ringing with the reiterated -entreaty, “I ask you, gentlemen, will you give up your country!” - -His attitude then and afterwards cost him the peerage that would -otherwise have been his; but above the accident of distinction, and -beyond all gainsaying, is the fact that in the list of influential -Irishmen made before the Union, with their probable prices (as -supporters of the Act) set over against them, the one word following the -name of Charles Kendal Bushe is “Incorruptible.” - -His private life rang true to his public utterances; culture and charm, -and a swift and delightful wit, made his memory a fetish to those who -lived under his roof. My mother’s early life moved as if to the music of -a minuet. She learned Latin with a tutor, she studied the guitar, she -sat in the old-fashioned drawing-room at Kilmurrey while “The Chief” -read aloud Shakespeare, or the latest novel of Sir Walter Scott; she -wrote, at eight years old, verses of smooth and virtuous precocity; at -seventeen she translated into creditable verse, in the metre beloved of -Pope, a Latin poem by Lord Wellesley, the then Viceroy, and received -from him a volume in which it was included, with an inscription no less -stately than the binding. In her outdoor life she was what, in those -decorous days, was called a “Tomboy,” and the physical courage of her -youth remained her distinguishing characteristic through life. Like the -lilies of the field, she toiled not, neither did she spin, yet I have -never known a more feminine character. - -It was from her that her eldest son derived the highly strung -temperament, the unconscious keenness of observation that was only -stimulated by the short sight common to them both, the gift of rapid -versifying, and a deftness and brilliance in epigram and repartee that -came to both in lineal descent from “The Chief.” An instance of Robert’s -quickness in retort occurs to me, and I will give it here. It happened -that he was being examined in a land case connected with Ross. The -solicitor for the other side objected to the evidence that he gave, as -relating to affairs that occurred before he was born, and described it -as “hearsay evidence.” - -“Well, for the matter of that, the fact that I was born is one that I -have only on hearsay evidence!” said Robert unanswerably. - -My mother first met my father at the house of her uncle, Mr. Arthur -Bushe, in Dublin. She met him again at a ball given by Kildare Street -Club; they had in common the love of the classics and the love of -outdoor life; his handsome face, his attractiveness, have been so often -dwelt on by those who knew him at that time, that the mention of them -here may be forgiven. In March, 1844, they were married in Dublin, and a -month later their carriage was met a couple of miles from Ross by the -tenants, and was drawn home by them, while the bonfires blazed at the -gates and at the hall door, and the bagpipes squealed their welcome. -Bringing with her a great deal of energy, both social and literary, a -kicking pony, and a profound ignorance of household affairs, my mother -entered upon her long career at Ross. That her sister-in-law, Marian -Martin, held the reins of office was fortunate for all that composite -establishment; when, later on, my mother took them in her delicate, -impatient hands, she held the strictly logical conviction that a sheep -possessed four “legs of mutton,” and she has shown me a rustic seat, -hidden deep in laurels, where she was wont to hide when, as she said, -“they came to look for me, to ask what was to be for the servants’ -dinner.” - -For the first year of her married life tranquillity reigned in house and -estate; a daughter was born, and was accepted with fortitude by an -establishment already well equipped in that respect. But a darker -possibility than the want of an heir arose suddenly and engrossed all -minds. - -In July, 1845, my father drove to the Assizes in Galway, twelve and a -half English miles away, and as he drove he looked with a knowledgeable -eye at the plots of potatoes lying thick and green on either side of the -road, and thought that he had seldom seen a richer crop. He slept in -Galway that night, and next day as he drove home the smell of the -potato-blight was heavy in the air, a new and nauseous smell. It was the -first breath of the Irish famine. The succeeding months brought the -catastrophe, somewhat limited in that first winter, a blow to startle, -even to stun, but not a death-stroke. Optimistically the people flung -their thoughts forward to the next crop, and bore the pinch of the -winter with spasmodic and mismanaged help from the Government, with -help, lesser in degree, but more direct, from their landlords. - -In was in the following summer of stress and hope that my brother Robert -was born, in Dublin, the first son in the Martin family for forty-two -years, and the welcome accorded to him was what might have been -expected. The doctor was kissed by every woman in the house, so he -assured my brother many years afterwards, and, late at night as it was, -my father went down to Kildare Street Club to find some friend to whom -he could tell the news (and there is a touch of appropriateness in the -fact that the Club, that for so many years was a home for Robert, had -the first news of his birth). - -Radiant with her achievement my mother posted over the long roads to -Ross, in the summer weather, with her precious first-born son, and the -welcome of Ross was poured forth upon her. The workmen in the yard -kissed the baby’s hands, the old women came from the mountains to -prophesy and to bless and to perform the dreadful rite of spitting upon -the child, for luck. My father’s mother, honourable as was her wont -towards her husband’s and son’s religion, asked my mother if a little -holy water might be sprinkled on the baby. - -“If you heat it you may give him a bath in it!” replied the baby’s -mother, with irrepressible lightheartedness. - -It may be taken for granted that he received, as we all did, secret -baptism at the hands of the priest. It was a kindly precaution taken by -our foster mothers, who were, it is needless to say, Roman Catholics; it -gave them peace of mind in the matter of the foster children whom they -worshipped, and my father and mother made no inquiries. Their Low Church -training did not interfere with their common sense, nor did it blind -them to the devotion that craved for the safeguard. - -A month or two later the cold fear for the safety of the potatoes fell -again upon the people; the paralysing certainty followed. The green -stalks blackened, the potatoes turned to black slime, and the avalanche -of starvation, fever and death fell upon the country. It was in the -winter of 1847, “the black ’47,” as they called it, when Robert was in -his second year, that the horror was at its worst, and before hope had -kindled again his ears must have known with their first understanding -the weak voice of hunger and the moan of illness among the despairing -creatures who flocked for aid into the yard and the long downstairs -passages of Ross. Many stories of that time remain among the old -tenants; of the corpses buried where they fell by the roadside, near -Ross Gate; of the coffins made of loose boards tied round with a hay -rope. None, perhaps, is more pitiful than that of a woman who walked -fifteen miles across a desolate moor, with a child in her arms and a -child by her side, to get the relief that she heard was to be had at -Ross. Before she reached the house the child in her arms was dead; she -carried it into the kitchen and sank on the flags. When my aunt spoke to -her she found that she had gone mad; reason had stopped in that whelming -hour, like the watch of a drowned man. - -A soup-kitchen was established by my father and mother at one of the -gates of Ross; the cattle that the people could not feed were bought -from them, and boiled down, and the gates were locked to keep back the -crowd that pressed for the ration. Without rents, with poor rate at -22_s._ 6_d._ in the pound, the household of Ross staggered through the -intimidating years, with the starving tenants hanging, as it were, upon -its skirts, impossible to feed, impossible to see unfed. The rapid pens -of my father and mother sent the story far; some of the great tide of -help that flowed into Ireland came to them; the English Quakers loaded a -ship with provisions and sent them to Galway Bay. Hunger was in some -degree dealt with, but the Famine fever remained undefeated. My aunt, -Marian Martin (afterwards Mrs. Arthur Bushe), caught it in a school that -she had got together on the estate, where she herself taught little -girls to read and write and knit, and kept them alive with breakfasts of -oatmeal porridge. My aunt has told me how, as she lay in the blind -trance of the fever, my grandfather, who believed implicitly in his own -medical skill, opened a vein in her arm and bled her. The relief, -according to her account, was instant and exquisite, and her recovery -set in from that hour. She may have owed much to the determination of -the Martins of that period that they would not be ill. My mother, -herself a daring rebel against the thraldom of illness, used to say that -at Ross no one was ill till they were dead, and no one was dead till -they were buried. It was the Christian Science of a tough-grained -generation. - -The little girls whom my aunt taught are old women now, courteous in -manner, cultivated in speech, thanks to the education that was given -them when National Schools were not. - -Our kinsman, Thomas Martin of Ballinahinch, fell a victim to the Famine -fever, caught in the Courthouse while discharging his duties as a -magistrate. He was buried in Galway, forty miles by road from -Ballinahinch, and his funeral, followed by his tenants, was two hours in -passing Ross Gate. In the words of A. M. Sullivan, “No adequate tribute -has ever been paid to those Irish landlords--and they were men of every -party and creed--who perished, martyrs to duty, in that awful time; who -did not fly the plague-reeking workhouse, or fever-tainted court.” -Amongst them he singled out for mention Mr. Martin of Ballinahinch, and -Mr. Nolan of Ballinderry (father of Colonel Nolan, M.P.), the latter of -whom died of typhus caught in Tuam Workhouse. - -When Robert was three years old, the new seed potatoes began to resist -the blight; he was nearly seven before the victory was complete, and by -that time the cards that he must play had already been dealt to him. - - -PART II - -The Famine yielded like the ice of the Northern Seas; it ran like melted -snows in the veins of Ireland for many years afterwards. Landlords who -had escaped ruin at the time were more slowly ruined as time went on -and the money borrowed in the hour of need exacted its toll; Ross held -its ground, with what stress its owners best knew. It was in those -difficult years of Robert’s boyhood, when yet more brothers and sisters -continued to arrive rapidly, that his father began to write for the -Press. He contributed leading articles to the _Morning Herald_, a London -paper, now extinct; he went to London and lived the life that the -writing of leading articles entails, with its long waiting for the -telegrams, and its small-hour suppers, and it told on the health of a -man whose heart had been left behind him in the West. It tided over the -evil time, it brought him into notice with the Conservative Party and -the Irish Government, and probably gained for him subsequently his -appointment of Poor Law Auditor. - -His style in writing is quite unlike that of his eldest son; it is more -rigid, less flowing; the sentences are short and pointed, evidently -modelled on the rhythmic hammer-stroke of Macaulay; it has not the -careless and sunshiny ease with which Robert achieved his best at the -first attempt. That facility and versification that is akin to the gift -of music, and, like it, is inborn, came from my mother, and came to him -alone of his eight brothers and sisters; in her letters to her children -she dropped into doggerel verse without an effort, rhymes and metres -were in her blood, and to the last year of her life she never failed to -criticise occasional and quite insignificant roughnesses in her son’s -poems. Of her own polished and musical style one verse in illustration -may be given. - - “In the fond visions of the silent night, - I dreamt thy love, thy long sought love, was won; - Was it a dream, that vision of delight--? - I woke; ’twas but a dream, let me dream on!” - -Robert was a nervous, warm-hearted boy, dark-eyed and romantic-looking; -the sensitive nature that expanded to affection was always his, and made -him cling to those who were kind to him. The vigorous and outdoor life -of Ross was the best tonic for such a nature, the large and healthful -intimacy with lake and woods, bog and wild weather, and shooting and -rowing, learned unconsciously from a father who delighted in them, and a -mother who knew no fear for herself and had little for her children. -Everything in those early days of his was large and vigorous; tall trees -to climb, great winds across the lake to wrestle with, strenuous and -capable talk upstairs and downstairs, in front of furnaces of turf and -logs, long drives, and the big Galway welcome at the end of them. One -day was like another, yet no day was monotonous. Prayers followed -breakfast, long prayers, beginning with the Psalms, of which each child -read a verse in due order of seniority; then First and Second Lessons, -frequently a chapter from a religious treatise, finally a prayer, from a -work named “The Tent and Altar,” all read with excellent emphasis by the -master of the house. In later years, after Robert had matriculated at -Trinity College, I remember with what youthful austerity he read prayers -at Ross, and with what awe we saw him reject “The Tent and Altar” and -heard him recite from memory the Morning Prayers from the Church -Service. He was at the same time deputed to teach Old Testament history -to his brothers and sisters; to this hour the Judges of Israel are -painfully stamped on my brain, as is the tearful morning when the Bible -was hurled at my inattentive head by the hand of the remorseless elder -brother. - -Robert’s early schoolroom work at Ross was got through with the ease -that may be imagined by anyone who has known his quickness in -assimilating ideas and his cast-iron memory. As was the case with all -the Ross children, the real interests of the day were with the workmen -and the animals. The agreeability of the Galway peasant was enthralling; -even to a child; the dogs were held in even higher esteem. Throughout -Robert’s life dogs knew him as their friend; skilled in the lore of the -affections, they recognised his gentle heart, and the devotion to him of -his Gordon setter, Rose, is a thing to remember. Even of late years I -have seen him hurry away when his sterner sisters thought it necessary -to chastise an offending dog; the suffering of others was almost too -keenly understood by him. - -Reading aloud rounded off the close of those early days at Ross, -Shakespeare and Walter Scott, Napier and Miss Edgeworth; the foundation -of literary culture was well and truly laid, and laid with respect and -enthusiasm, so that what the boy’s mind did not grasp was stored up for -his later understanding, among things to be venerated, and fine diction -and choice phrase were imprinted upon an ear that was ever retentive of -music. Everyone who remembers his childhood remembers him singing songs -and playing the piano. His ear was singularly quick, and I think it was -impossible for him to sing out of tune. He learned his notes in the -schoolroom, but his musical education was dropped when he went to -school, as is frequently the case; throughout his life he accompanied -himself on the piano by ear, with ease, if with limitations; simple as -the accompaniments were, there was never a false note, and it seemed as -if his hands fell on the right places without an effort. - -A strange feature in his early education and in the establishment at -Ross was James Tucker, an ex-hedge schoolmaster, whose long face, blue -shaven chin, shabby black clothes, and gift for poetry have passed -inextricably into the annals of the household. He entered it first at -the time of the Famine, ostensibly to give temporary help in the -management and accounts of the school which my aunt Marian had started -for the tenants’ children; he remained for many years, and filled many -important posts. He taught us the three R’s with rigour and -perseverance, he wrote odes for our birthdays, he was -controller-in-chief of the dairy; later on, when my father received the -appointment of Auditor of Poor Law, under the Local Government Board, -Tucker filled in the blue “abstracts” of the Auditor’s work in admirably -neat columns. Robert’s recital of the multiplication table was often -interrupted by wails for “Misther Tucker” and the key of the dairy, from -the kitchenmaid at the foot of the schoolroom stairs, and the -interruption was freely cursed, in a vindictive whisper, by the -schoolmaster. Tucker was slightly eccentric, a feature for which there -was always toleration and room at Ross; he entered largely into the -schoolroom theatricals that sprang up as soon as Robert was old enough -to whip up a company from the ranks of his brothers and sisters. The -first of which there is any record is the tragedy of “Bluebeard,” -adapted by him at the age of eight. As the author did not feel equal to -writing it down, it was taught to the actors by word of mouth, he -himself taking the title _rôle_. The performance took place privately in -the schoolroom, an apartment discreetly placed by the authorities in a -wing known as “The Offices,” beyond ken or call of the house proper. -Tucker was stage manager, every servant in the house was commandeered as -audience. The play met with much acceptance up to the point when -Bluebeard dragged Fatima (a shrieking sister) round the room by her -hair, belabouring her with a wooden sword, amid the ecstatic yells of -the spectators, but at this juncture the mistress of the house -interrupted the revels with paralysing suddenness. She had in vain rung -the drawing-room bell for tea, she had searched and found the house -mysteriously silent and empty, till the plaudits of the rescue scene -drew her to the schoolroom. Players and audience broke into rout, and -Robert’s first dramatic enterprise ended in disorder, and, if I mistake -not, for the principals, untimely bed. - -It was some years afterwards, when Robert was at Trinity, that a similar -effort on his part of missionary culture ended in a like disaster. He -became filled with the idea of getting up a cricket team at Ross, and in -a summer vacation he collected his eleven, taught them to hold a bat, -and harangued them eloquently on the laws of the game. It was -unfortunate that its rules became mixed up in the minds of the players -with a game of their own, called “Burnt Ball,” which closely resembles -“Rounders,” and is played with a large, soft ball. In the first day of -cricket things progressed slowly, and the unconverted might have been -forgiven for finding the entertainment a trifle dull. A batsman at -length hit a ball and ran. It was fielded by cover-point, who, bored by -long inaction, had waited impatiently for his chance. In the enthusiasm -of at length getting something to do, the recently learned laws of -cricket were swept from the mind of cover-point, and the rules of Burnt -Ball instantly reasserted themselves. He hurled the ball at the batsman, -shouting: “Go out! You’re burnt!” and smote him heavily on the head. - -The batsman went out, that is to say, he picked himself up and tottered -from the fire zone, and neither then nor subsequently did cricket -prosper at Ross. - -Then, and always, Robert shared his enthusiasm with others; he gave -himself to his surroundings, whether people or things, and, as -afterwards, it was preferably people. He had the gift of living in the -present and living every moment of it; it might have been of him that -Carlyle said, “Happy men live in the present, for its bounty suffices, -and wise men too, for they know its value.” - -Throughout Robert’s school and college days theatricals, charades, and -living pictures, written or arranged by him, continued to flourish at -Ross. There remains in my memory a play, got up by him when he was about -seventeen, in which he himself, despising the powers of his sisters, -took the part of the heroine, with the invaluable Tucker as the lover. A -tarletan dress was commandeered from the largest of the sisterhood, and -in it, at the crisis of the play, he endeavoured to elope with Tucker -over a clothes-horse, draped in a curtain. It was at this point that the -tarletan dress, tried beyond its strength, split down the back from neck -to waist; the heroine flung her lover from her, and backed off the stage -with her front turned firmly to the audience, and the elopement was -deferred _sine die_. - -Those were light-hearted days, yet they were indelible in Robert’s -memory, and the strength and savour of the old Galway times were in them -as inextricably as the smell of the turf smoke and the bog myrtle. -Nothing was conventional or stagnant, things were done on the spur of -the moment, and with a total disregard for pomps and vanities, and -everyone preferred good fun to a punctual dinner. Mingling with all were -the poor people, with their cleverness, their good manners, and their -unflagging spirits; I can see before me the carpenter painting a boat by -the old boat quay, and Robert sitting on a rock, and talking to him for -long tracts of the hot afternoon. At another time one could see Robert -holding, with the utmost zeal and discrimination, a court of arbitration -in the coach-house for the settling of an intricate and vociferous -dispute between two of the tenants. - -Life at Ross was of the traditional Irish kind, with many retainers at -low wages, which works out as a costly establishment with nothing to -show for it. A sheep a week and a cow a month were supplied by the farm, -and assimilated by the household; it seemed as if with the farm produce, -the abundance of dairy cows, the packed turf house, the fallen timber -ready to be cut up, the fruitful garden, the game and the trout, there -should have been affluence. But after all these followed the Saturday -night labour bill, and the fact remains, as many Irish landlords can -testify, that these free fruits of the earth are heavily paid for, that -convenience is mistaken for economy, and that farming is, for the -average gentleman, more of an occupation than an income. - -The Famine had left its legacy of debt and a lowered rental, and further -hindrances to the financial success of farm and estate were the -preoccupation of my father’s life with his work as Auditor of Poor Law -Unions, the enormous household waste that took toll of everything, and, -last and most inveterate of all, my father’s generous and soft-hearted -disposition. - -One instance will give, in a few sentences, the relation between -landlord and tenant, which, as it would seem, all recent legislation has -sedulously schemed to destroy. I give it in the words of one of the -tenants, widow of an eye-witness. - -“The widow A., down by the lake-side” (Lough Corrib--about three miles -away), “was very poor one time, and she was a good while in arrears with -her rent. The Master sent to her two or three times, and in the end he -walked down himself after his breakfast, and he took Thady” (the -steward) “with him. Well, when he went into the house, she was so proud -to see him, and ‘Your Honour is welcome!’ says she, and she put a chair -for him. He didn’t sit down at all, but he was standing up there with -his back to the dresser, and the children were sitting down one side the -fire. The tears came from the Master’s eyes; Thady seen them fall down -the cheek. ‘Say no more about the rent,’ says the Master, to her, ‘you -need say no more about it till I come to you again.’ Well, it was the -next winter the men were working in Gurthnamuckla, and Thady with them, -and the Master came to the wall of the field and a letter in his hand, -and he called Thady over to him. What had he to show him but the Widow -A.’s rent that her brother in America sent her!” - -It will not happen again; it belongs to an almost forgotten _régime_, -that was capable of abuse, yet capable too of summoning forth the best -impulses of Irish hearts. The end of that _régime_ was not far away, and -the beginning of the end was already on the horizon of Ross. - -My grandfather, whose peculiar capacity might once have saved the -financial situation, had fallen into a species of second childhood. He -died at Ross, and I remember the cold thrill of terror with which I -heard him “keened” by an old tenant, a widow, who asked permission to -see him as he lay dead. She went into the twilit room, and suddenly the -tremendous and sustained wail went through the house, like the voice of -the grave itself. - -It seemed as if Ross had borne a charmed life during the troubles of -the later ’sixties. The Fenian rising of 1867 did not touch it; the -flicker of it was like sheet lightning in the Eastern sky, but the storm -passed almost unheard. It had been so in previous risings; Ross seemed -to be geographically intended for peace. It is bounded on the east by -the long waters of Lough Corrib, on the west by barren mountains, -stretching to the Atlantic, on the north by the great silences of -Connemara. Within these boundaries the mutual dependence of landlord and -tenant remained unshaken; it was a delicate relation, almost akin to -matrimony, and like a happy marriage, it needed that both sides should -be good fellows. The Disestablishment of the Irish Church came in 1869, -a direct blow at Protestantism, and an equally direct tax upon landlords -for the support of their Church, but of this revolution the tenants -appeared to be unaware. In 1870 came Gladstone’s Land Act, which by a -system of fines shielded the tenant to a great extent from “capricious -eviction.” As evictions, capricious or otherwise, did not occur at Ross, -this section of the Act was not of epoch-making importance there; its -other provision, by which tenants became proprietors of their own -improvements, was also something of a superfluity. It was 1872 that -brought the first cold plunge into Irish politics of the new kind. - -In February of that year Captain Trench, son of Lord Clancarty, -contested one of the divisions of County Galway in the Conservative -interest, his opponent being Captain Nolan, a Home Ruler. It went -without saying that my father gave his support to the Conservative, who -was also a Galway man, and the son of a friend. Up to that time it was a -matter of course that the Ross tenants voted with their landlord. -Captain Trench canvassed the Ross district, and there was no indication -of what was about to happen, or if there were, my father did not believe -it. The polling place for that part of the country was in Oughterard, -about five miles away; my father drove there on the election day, and on -the hill above the town was met by a man who advised him to turn back. A -troop of cavalry glittered in the main street and the crowd seethed -about them. My father drove on and saw a company of infantry keeping the -way for Mr. Arthur Guinness, afterwards Lord Ardilaun, as he convoyed to -the poll a handful of his tenants from Ashford at the other side of -Lough Corrib to vote for Captain Trench, he himself walking in front -with the oldest of them on his arm. During that morning my father ranged -through the crowd incredulously, asking for this or that tenant, unable -to believe that they had deserted him. It was a futile search; with a -few valiant exceptions the Ross tenants, following the example of the -rest of the constituency, voted according to the orders of their Church, -and Captain Nolan was elected by a majority of four to one. It was a -priest from another part of the diocese who gave forth the mandate, with -an extraordinary fury of hatred against the landlord side; one need not -blame the sheep who passed in a frightened huddle from one fold to -another. When my father came home that afternoon, even the youngest -child of the house could see how great had been the blow. It was not the -political defeat, severe as that was, it was the personal wound, and it -was incurable. A petition against the result of the election brought -about the famous trial in Galway, at which Judge Keogh, himself a Roman -Catholic, denounced the priestly intimidation that was established in -the mouths of many witnesses. The Ballot Act followed in June, but these -things could not soothe the wounded spirit of the men who had trusted -in their tenants. - -Startlingly, the death of a Galway landlord followed on the election. He -was a Roman Catholic, and belonged to one of the oldest families in the -county; on his death-bed he desired that not one of his tenants should -touch his coffin. It was not in that spirit that my father, a few weeks -afterwards, faced the end. In March he caught cold on one of his many -journeys of inspection; he was taken ill at the Galway Club, and a slow -pleurisy followed. He lay ill for a time in Galway, and the longing for -home strengthened with every day. - -“If I could hear the cawing of the Ross crows I should get well,” he -said pitifully. - -He was brought home, but he was even then past hope. - -Some scenes remain for ever on the memory. In the early afternoon of the -23rd of April, I looked down through the rails of the well-stair case, -and saw Robert come upstairs to his father’s room, his tall figure -almost supported on the shoulder of one of the men. All was then over, -and the last of the old order of the Landlords of Ross had gone, -murmuring, - -“I am ready to meet Thee, Eternal Father!” - - -PART III - -With the death of my father the curtain fell for ever on the old life at -Ross, the stage darkened, and the keening of the tenants as they -followed his coffin was the last music of the piece. - -Two or three months afterwards the house was empty. In the blaze of the -June weather, the hall door, that had always stood open, was shut and -barred, and, in the stillness, the rabbits ventured up to the broad -limestone steps where once the talk of the house had centred in the -summer evenings. For the first time in its history Ross House was empty; -my mother and her children had embarked upon life in Dublin, and Robert, -like his father before him, had gone to London to write for the Press. - -For five or six years Robert lived in London. He belonged to the Arundel -Club, where lived and moved the Bohemians of that day, the perfect and -single-hearted Bohemians, who were, perhaps, survivals of the days of -Richard Steele, and have now vanished, unable to exist in the shadeless -glare of Borough Councils. Their literary power was unquestioned, the -current of their talk was strong, with baffling swirl and eddy, and he -who plunged in it must be a resourceful and strong swimmer. Linked -inseparably with those years of London life was my mother’s cousin, W. -G. Wills, the playwright, poet and painter, who in these early -’seventies had suddenly achieved celebrity as a dramatist, with the -tragedy of “Charles I.” If a record could be discovered of the hierarchs -of the Bohemians it would open of itself at the name of Willie Wills. -Great gifts of play-writing and portrait-painting rained upon him a -reputation that he never troubled himself about; he remained unalterably -himself, and, clad in his long grey ulster, lived in his studio a life -unfettered by the clock. Of his amazing _ménage_, of the strange and -starveling hangers-on that followed him as rooks follow the plough, to -see what they could pick up, all who knew him had stories to tell. Of -the luncheons at his studio, where the beefsteak came wrapped in -newspaper, and the plates that were hopelessly dirty were thrown out of -the window; of the appointments written boldly on the wall and -straightway forgotten; the litter of canvases, the scraps of manuscript, -and among and above these incidents, the tranquillity, the charm, the -agreeability of Willie Wills.[1] - -Robert has found him and my mother lunching together gloriously on -mutton chops, cooked by being flung into the heart of the fire. - -“Just one more, Nannie,” said the dramatist, as Robert entered, spearing -a blazing fragment and presenting it to his boon companion with a -courtly gesture. - -In the old days at Ross, Willie Wills was a frequent guest, and held the -children in thrall--as he could always ensnare and hold children--with -his exquisite story-telling. Their natural guardians withdrew with -confidence, as Willie began, with enormous gravity, the tale of “The -Little Old Woman who lived in the Dark Wood, and had one long yellow -Tooth,” and, returning after an interval, heard that “at this momentous -crisis seven dead men, in sacks, staggered into the room--!” while, in -the fateful pause that followed, the clamour of the children, “Go on, -Willie Wills!” would rise. - -Robert and Willie Wills were in many aspects of character and of gifts -unlike, yet with some cousinly points in common. Both were cultivated -and literary, yet seldom read a book; both were sensitive to criticism, -and even touchingly anxious for approval; both were delightful -companions in a _tête-à-tête_. Where sympathy is joined with -imagination, and sense of humour with both, it is a combination hard to -beat. Robert regarded routine respectfully, if from afar, and sincerely -admired the efforts of those who endeavoured to systematise his -belongings. Willie Wills was superbly indifferent to surroundings, yet -took a certain pride in new clothes. The real points of resemblance were -in heart; the chivalrous desire to help the weak, and the indelible -filial instinct that glows in natures of the best sort, and marks -unfailingly a good son as a good fellow through all the nations of the -world. - -Throughout these London days Robert wrote for the _Globe_ and other -papers, chiefly paragraphs and light articles, that ran from his pen -with the real enjoyment that he found in writing them at the last -moment. He seemed to do better when working against time than when he -had large days in hand and a well-ordered writing-table inviting his -presence. He found these things thoroughly uninspiring, and facilities -for correcting his work were odious to him. Proofs he never looked at; -he said he couldn’t face them; probably because of the critical power -that underlay his facility. - -London with Robert in it was then, as ever, for Robert’s family, a place -with a different meaning--a place of theatre tickets, of luncheons, of -newspaper news viewed from within, of politics and actors reduced to -human personalities. It was a fixed rule that he should meet his female -relatives on their arrival at Euston; it is on record that he was once -in time, but it is also recorded that on that occasion the train was -forty minutes late. The hum of London seasons filled his brain; London -may be attractive or repellent, but it will be heard, and it made strong -music for a nature that loved the stir of men and the encounter of -minds. Four hundred miles away lay Ross in the whispering stillness of -its summer woods, and the monotony of its winter winds, producing heavy -bags of woodcock after its kind, while its master “shot folly as she -flew,” and found his game in the canards of Fleet Street and -Westminster. It was inevitable as things stood, but in that alienation -both missed much that lay in the power of each to give. - -It was while Robert was living in London that the resignation of Mr. -Gladstone took place. Out of the ensuing general election in the spring -of 1873 came Isaac Butt and his lieutenants, with a party of sixty Home -Rulers behind them; Ireland had sent them instead of the dozen or so of -the previous Parliament, and it was said that Ireland had done it in the -new-found shelter of the Ballot Act. Robert knew, as anyone brought up -as he was must know, that for most of Ireland the Ballot Act could not -be a shelter. The Galway election of 1872 had shown to all in whose -hands the great power of the franchise lay. One indefensible position -had been replaced by another, feudal power by clerical, and only those -who knew Robert well, understood how hard it hit him. He shot at Ross -occasionally, he visited it now and then, and at every visit his -perceptive nature was aware that a new spirit was abroad; in spite of -the genuine and traditional feeling of the people for their old allies, -in spite of their good breeding, and their anxious desire to conceal the -rift. The separation had begun, and only those who have experienced it -will understand how strange, how wounding it is. - -It was not universal, and theoretical hostility strove always with the -soft voice of memory. My father was still to all, “The Masther, the Lord -have mercy on him”; the Martins were still “The Family,” who could do no -wrong, whose defects, if such were admitted, were revered. “The Martin -family hadn’t good sight,” said a tenant, “but sure the people say that -was a proof of their nobility.” - -There is an incident of one of Robert’s visits to Ross that is not too -small to be worth recording. He had given his Gordon setter, Rose, to a -friend who lived five miles away from Ross, and she had settled down -with resignation to her new life. Trained in the language of the -drawing-room, she may have heard it said that Robert was at Ross, or her -deep and inscrutable perceptions may have received a wave of warning of -his nearness. Whatever it was that prompted her, the old dog made her -way alone to Ross, and found her master there. - -In 1877 Robert turned his steps again to Dublin, and before the year was -out he was living with his grandmother, and was immersed in the life, -political, theatrical and social, of Dublin. - -My mother’s mother, Mrs. Fox, was, as has been said, a daughter of Chief -Justice Bushe, and was a notable member of a remarkable band of brothers -and sisters. Strongly humorous, strongly affectionate, a doughty -politician, original in every idea, and delightful in her prejudices; a -black letter authority on Shakespeare and Scott, a keen debater upon -Carlyle, upon Miss Rhoda Broughton, upon all that was worth reading. I -can see her declaiming “Henry IV” to Robert and his brethren, with -irrepressible gestures of her hand, with a big voice for Falstaff, and a -small voice for Mine Hostess, and an eye that raked the audience lest it -should waver in attentiveness. Even as clearly can I see her, as, at a -time of crisis,--it was, I think, after Gladstone’s attack on Trinity -College,--she sprang from her chair, and speechlessly wrung the hand of -someone who had rushed into her dining-room, crying, - -“Gladstone has resigned!” - -That was how she and her family took their politics. - -She loved Robert with a touching devotion, and I think those days in -Herbert Street were deeply woven into his memory. It was a quiet street, -with a long strip of grass and hawthorns, instead of houses, forming one -side of it, part of the grounds of the convent that stood at the end. -There the birds sang, and a little convent bell spelt out the Angelus -with a friendly voice; the old red-brick house, with its old furniture -and its old china, the convent bell, with its reminder of cloistered -calm, all made a suitable setting for the strictly ordered, cultured -life of the old lady who bestowed on them their appropriateness. - -In the spring of ’78 Robert was in the thick of amateur theatricals. He -was never a first-rate actor, but he was a thoroughly reliable one; he -always knew his part, though none could say how or when he learned it, -he could “gag” with confidence, and dropped on to his cue unerringly, -and he had that liking for his audience that is the shortest cut to -being on good terms with them. His gift in ready verse was not allowed -to remain idle. He wrote prologues, he arranged singing quadrilles; when -the Sheridan Club had a guest whom it delighted to honour, it was Robert -who wrote and recited the ode for the occasion; an ode that never -attempted too much, and just touched the core of the matter. - -With the close of the ’seventies came the burst into the open of the -Irish Parliamentary Party, in full cry. Like hounds hunting confusedly -in covert, they had, in the hands of Isaac Butt, kept up a certain -amount of noise and excitement, keen, yet uncertain as to what game was -on foot. From 1877 it was Parnell who carried the horn, a grim, -disdainful Master, whose pack never dared to get closer to him than the -length of his thong; but he laid them on the line, and they ran it like -wolves. - -Up to 1877 crops and prices were good, even remarkably so, and rents -were paid. Following that year came, like successive blows on the same -spot, three bad harvests that culminated in the disastrous season of -1879-80. It was in 1847 that the Famine broke the heart and the life of -O’Connell; it was the partial failure of the crop of ’79 and ’80 that -created Parnell’s opportunity--so masterful a factor has been the potato -in the destinies of Irishmen. - -In 1879 the rents began to fail. The distress was not comparable to that -of ’47, but it brought about a revolution infinitely greater. At its -close it left the Irish tenant practically owner of his land, with a -rent fixed by Government, and the feudal link with the landlord was -broken for ever. On the Ross estate a new agent had inaugurated a new -policy, excellent in theory, abhorrent to those whom it concerned, the -“striping” of many of the holdings, in order to give to each tenant an -equal share of good and bad land. Anyone who knows the Irish tenant will -immediately understand what it means to interfere with his land, and, -above all things, to give to another tenant any part of it. It was done -nevertheless. The long lines of stone wall ran symmetrically parallel -over hill and pasture and bog, and the symmetry was hateful and the -equality bitter to those most concerned. It is probable that the -discontent sank in and prepared the way for the mischief that was -coming. - -By the winter of 1879 the pinch had become severe. The tenants, by this -time two or three years in arrear, did not meet their liabilities, and -most landlords went without the greater part of their income. Robert, -among many others, began to learn what it was to be deprived of the -moderate income left to him after the charges on his estate were paid. -He never again received any. - -Three Relief Funds in Dublin coped as best they could with the distress -of the Irish poor. One of them was worked with great enthusiasm and -organising power by the Duchess of Marlborough, and by every means known -to a most capable leader of Society she lured from Society of all grades -a ready “rate in aid.” Entertainments sprang up--theatricals, bazaars, -concerts--that helped the Fund and at the same time put heart into the -flagging Dublin season, and Robert was in the thick of charitable -endeavour. His first Irish song, the leader of a long line that -culminated later in “Ballyhooly,” was written at about this time, “The -Vagrants of Erin,” a swinging tune, that marched to words National -enough for any party. - - “Give me your hand, if owld Ireland’s the land - From which you may chance to be farin’,” - -it began, with all its author’s geniality, and the Irish audience -responded to its first chords with drowning applause. Once, as he sang -it, accompanying himself, and swinging with the tune, the music stool -began to sway in ominous accord. “First it bent, and syne it brake,” and -Robert staggered to his feet, but just in time. - -“This is a pantomime song, with a breakdown in it!” he said, while the -head of the stool rolled from its broken stalk and trundled down the -stage. - -He had the gift of making friends with his audience; as he came on to -the platform to sing, his air of enjoyment, his friendly eyes, even his -single eyeglass, had already done half the business. He took them, as it -were, to his bosom, and whatever might be their grade, he did his best -for them. In spite of the liberties he took with time, words and tune, -he was singularly easy to accompany, for anyone acquainted with his -methods and prepared to cast himself (it was generally herself) adrift -with him, and trust to ear instead of to book. However far afield -Robert might range, whatever stories he told, he would surely drop back -into the key and the words, like a wild duck into the water, with a just -sufficient hint to the waiting coadjutor that his circling flight was -ending. His topical songs of those early ’eighties have died, as all of -their kind must die. He wrote down nothing, the occasion is forgotten, -and the brain in which they had their being has passed from us. One or -two points and hits remain with me. In the year that Shotover won the -Oaks, a commemorating verse ended: - - “Of course she was Shot over, - She’d a Cannon on her back!” - -In one of the songs, the explanation of the failure of the ships _Alert_ -and _Discovery_ to reach the North Pole was that “those on the Discovery -were not on the Alert.” - -In spite of the thunderous political background of the early ’eighties, -in spite of the empty pockets of those dependent on Irish rents, in -spite of the crime that drew forth the Crimes Act, the fun and the -spirit were inextinguishable in Dublin. - -But the political background was growing blacker, and the thunder more -loud. Gladstone’s Land Act of 1881 had not pacified Ireland, even though -it made the tenant practically owner of his land, even though the rents -were fixed by Government officials, whose mission was to coax sedition -to complacence, if not to loyalty. Ireland was falling into chaos. -Arrears of rent, Relief Committees, No Rent manifestoes, Plan of -Campaign evictions, Funds for Distressed Irish Ladies, outrages, -boycotting, and Parnell stirring the “Seething Pot” with a steady hand, -while his subordinates stoked the fire. Boycotting was responded to by -the Property Defence Association, and in 1882 Robert went forth under -its auspices as an “Emergency man.” His business was to visit the -boycotted landlords and farmers and to supply them with men--from the -North, for the most part--to do the farm work. Those who do not know -Ireland, and for whom the word boycotting has no personal associations, -can hardly realise what that dark time meant to its victims. The owners -of boycotted lands, unable to get food or necessaries of any kind from -the local tradespeople, imported supplies from England and the North, -and opened stores in their stable yards for such of the faithful as -stood firm. Ladies, totally unaccustomed to outdoor labour, saved crops -and herded cattle, matters that in themselves might have been found -interesting, if arduous, but the terror was over all, and in face of -bitter antagonism the task was too great. - -It was at this work that Robert knew, for the first time, what it was to -have every man’s hand against him, to meet the stare of hatred, the -jeer, and the side-long curse; to face endless drives on outside cars, -with his revolver in his hand; to plan the uphill tussle with boycotted -crops, and cattle for which a market could scarcely be found; to know -the imminence of death, when, by accidentally choosing one of two roads, -he evaded the man with a gun who had gone out to wait for him. It taught -him much of difficult men and of tangled politics, he learned how to -make the best of a bad business, and how to fight in a corner; it made -him a proficient in Irish affairs, and it added to his opinions a -seriousness based on strong and moving points. - -Gladstone had faced a dangerous Ireland with concession in one hand and -coercion in the other, and however either may go in single harness, -there is no doubt that they cannot with success be driven as a pair. -There followed the Maamtrasna murders, the extermination of the Huddy -family, the assassination in Phœnix Park of Lord Frederick Cavendish and -Mr. Burke, the attempted assassination of Judge Lawson opposite Kildare -Street Club. When Robert was entering into the deep places of his last -illness, he spoke with all his wonted grasp of details of those webs of -conspiracy. Tradesmen who came from Dublin to work in Kylemore Castle -(then the property of Mr. Mitchell Henry) infected the mind of Northern -Connemara with the idea that assassination was a fitting expression of -political opinion. The murders of the Maamtrasna district followed. The -stately mountains beheld the struggle and the slaughter, and the sweet -waters of Lough Mask closed upon the victims. - -Month by month the net of conspiracy was woven, and life was the prize -played for in wonderful silence and darkness, and murder was achieved -like a victory at chess. We know how the victories were paid for. I do -not forget the face of Timothy Kelly, as he stood in the dock and was -tried for participation in the Phœnix Park murders. There is a pallor of -fear that is remembered when once seen, and to see that sick and -desperate paleness on the face of a boy of seventeen is to feel for ever -the mystery and enormity of his crime, and the equal immensity of the -punishment. Unforgettable, too, is the moment when his mother took her -seat in the witness chair to support the _alibi_ put forward on his -behalf, and looked her boy in his white and stricken face, white and -stricken as he. Yet she did not waver, and gave her evidence quietly and -collectedly. - -A phrase or two from the speech for the defence has fixed itself in the -memory. - -“Take the scales of Justice,” said the Counsel, with a wide gesture of -appeal towards the jury; “lift them far above the reach of passion and -prejudice, into those serener regions above where Justice herself reigns -supreme----” - -Death brooded palpably over the brown and grey Court, and held the tense -faces of all in his thrall, and weighted every syllable of the speeches. -Never was the irrelevancy of murder as a political weapon made more -clear, and the fearful appropriateness of capital punishment seemed -clear too, mystery requited with mystery. - -When we came into the Court we were told that the jury would disagree, -there being at least one “Invincible” on the list, and it was so. But -with the next trial the end was reached, and the trapped creature in the -dock, with the men who were his confederates, went down into the -oblivion into which they had thrust their prey. - -Many years ago a mission priest delivered a sermon in Irish in the bare -white chapel that stands high on a hill above Ross Lake. I remember one -sentence, translated for me by one of the congregation. - -“Oh black seas of Eternity, without height or depth, bay, brink, or -shore! How can anyone look into your depths and neglect the salvation of -his soul!”[2] - -It expresses all that need now be remembered of the Phœnix Park murders. - - * * * * * - - - - -CHAPTER II - -“THE CHIEF” - - -It is a commonplace, even amounting to a bromide, to speak of the -breadth, the depth, and the length of the ties of Irish kinship. In -Ireland it is not so much Love that hath us in the net as Relationship. -Pedigree takes precedence even of politics, and in all affairs that -matter it governs unquestioned. It is sufficient to say that the -candidate for any post, in any walk of life--is “a cousin of me own, by -the Father”--“a sort of a relation o’ mine, by the Mother”--and support -of the unfittest is condoned, even justified. - -I am uncertain if the practice of deifying a relationship by the -employment of the definite article is peculiar to Munster, or even to -Ireland. “The fawther,” “the a’nt.” He who speaks to me of my father as -“The Fawther,” implies a sort of humorous intimacy, a respect just -tinged with facetiousness, that is quite lacking in the severe -directness of “your father.” - -There was once a high magnate of a self-satisfied provincial town (its -identity is negligible). An exhibition was presently to be held there, -and it chanced that a visit from Royalty occurred shortly before the -completion of the arrangements. It also chanced that a possible visit to -Ireland of a still greater Personage impended--(this was several years -ago). The lesser Royalty partook of lunch with the magnate, and the -latter broached the question of a State opening of the exhibition by the -august visitor to be. - -“When ye go back to London, now,” he beguiled, “coax the Brother!” - -How winning is the method of address! It has in it something of the -insidious coquetry of the little dog who skips, in affected artlessness, -uninvited, upon your knee. - -I have strayed from my text, which was the potency of the net of -relationship. Being Irish, I have to acknowledge its spell, and I think -it is indisputable that a thread, however slender, of kinship adds a -force to friendship. - -Martin’s mother and mine were first cousins, granddaughters of Chief -Justice Charles Kendal Bushe, and of his wife, Anne Crampton. I have -heard my mother assert that she had seventy first cousins, all -grandchildren of “The Chief,” but I think there was a touch of fancy -about this. There is something sounding and sumptuous about the number -seventy, and some remembrance of Ahab and his seventy relatives may have -been in it. In her memoir of her brother Robert, Martin has given some -suggestion of the remarkable charm and influence of these -great-grandparents of ours. The adoration that both of them inspired -distils like a perfume from every record of them. They seem to have -obliterated all their rival grandfathers and grandmothers. One reflects -that each of the seventy first cousins must have possessed four -grandparents, yet, in the radiance of this couple, the alternative -grandpapas and grandmammas appear to have been, in the regard of their -grandchildren, no more than shadows. - -They lived in a strangely interesting time, the time of the Union, when -there was room in the upper classes for each individual to be known to -each, and the proportion of those that governed, and those that were -governed, was as the players in an international cricket match to the -lookers-on; and it is not too much to boast that, out of a very -brilliant team, there was no better innings played than that of Charles -Kendal Bushe. When, as in “the ’98,” the lookers-on attempted to join in -the game, the result exemplified their incapacity and the advantages of -the existing arrangement. - -Martin had been given by her mother a boxful of old family letters; one -of those pathetic collections of letters that no one either wants, or -looks at, or feels justified in burning. I know not for how many years -they had been hidden away. We had talked, every now and then, of -examining them, but the examination had been postponed for a more -convenient season that never came. Now life is emptier, and time seems -of less value; I have read them all, and I think that some extracts from -them will not come amiss among these memories. - -It would require a sounder historian than I, and one who had specialised -in Irish affairs of the latter years of the eighteenth and the beginning -of the nineteenth centuries, to deal adequately with these old papers. -The Chief Justice and his wife lived intensely, in the very heart of the -most intense time, probably, that Ireland has ever known. They knew all -the rebel leaders, Wolfe Tone, Lord Edward Fitzgerald, and the rest of -the splendid romantics who fought and died, and lit with the white flame -of devotion one page at least of Ireland’s history. The names of -Plunket, Grattan, Saurin, later, O’Connell, and others less well known, -are found in many of these letters, and there are valentines from “Jemmy -Saurin,” apostrophising “the blue eyes of Kitty” (one of the Chief’s -daughters, and grandmother of “Martin Ross”); genuine, perhaps, but more -probably faked by the young lady’s heartless relatives; anagrams upon -the name of Charles Kendal Bushe, and an epigram, written by C. K. B. -himself, which has a very charming deftness, and shall be transcribed -here. - - TO CHLOE - (_To accompany the gift of a watch_) - - Among our fashionable Bands, - No wonder Time should love to linger, - Allowed to place his two rude hands - Where others dare not lay a finger. - -The more I investigate the contents of the old letter box the more -fascinating they prove themselves to be. - -I must, at all events, endeavour to refrain from irrelevant -quotation--(even regretfully omitting “The cure for Ellen P.’s spots. -Kate writes me word her face is now as clear as chrystal”)--and will try -to deal only with such of the contents of the box as come legitimately -within my scope. - -The Chief’s letters cover a wide period, from about 1795 (a couple of -years after his marriage) to 1837. One does not, perhaps, find in them -the brilliance that is associated with his name in public life and in -general society. Those from which I have made extracts were written to -his wife. Deeply woven in them is the devotion to her that was the -mainspring of his life, and in works of devotion one need not expect to -find epigram.[3] - -In one of them, written in 1807, he writes from Dublin, to her, in the -country, telling her of “an unfortunate business” in which he, “without -any personal ill-will to anyone,” “found it his duty to take a part.” -He deplores that “among the Members of the Bar coldness and jealousy -prevail, where there had been the utmost harmony and unanimity.” “It is -not in my nature to like such a state of things,” he says, and, I -believe, says truly, “and when I am alone my spirits are affected by it -in a way that I wou’d not for the World confess to anyone but you. I am -told that I am libell’d in the newspapers, which I dont know for I have -not read them, and which I wou’d not care about, from the same motives -that have so often, to your knowledge, made me indifferent about being -prais’d in them.... You remember on a former trying occasion how I acted -and I can never forget the heroism with which you supported me and -encourag’d me in a conduct which was apparently ruinous in its -consequences to yourself and our darling Babies. Ever since you left -this, my mind has been agitated in the way I have described to you. I am -seven years older and my nerves twenty years older than at the period of -the Union. Judge, then, the delight I feel at the prospect of seeing -again so soon, the bosom friend dearer than all, the only person upon -whose heart I can repose my own when weary--I judge of it by the -pleasure I feel in thus unburthening myself to you, and in the -consciousness that the very writing of this letter has given me the only -warm, comfortable and confidential glow of heart which I have felt since -you left me. Adieu beloved Nan--Pray _burn_ this _immediately_” (twice -underlined) “and let no human being learn anything of those thoughts -which to you alone I wou’d communicate. Ever yours C. K. B.” - -It is a hundred and more years since this injunction was written. The -paper is stained and brittle, and I think that perhaps a tear, perhaps -also a kiss or two, have contributed a little to the staining. But -though she disobeyed him I believe he has forgiven her. I hope he will -also forgive a great-granddaughter who has chanced upon this record of a -disobedience that few could blame and that any lover would extol. - -Long afterwards the same thought came in nearly the same words to -another Irishman, the poet, George Darley, and he wrote those lines that -have in them the same note of whispered tenderness that still breathes -from the discoloured page of the letter that should have been burned a -hundred years ago. - - “One in whose gentle bosom I - Can pour my inmost heart of woes, - Like the care-burthened honey-fly - That hides his murmurs in the rose.” - - * * * * * - -I have said that it was an interesting time to be alive in, this -junction of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. That the Chief’s -sympathies were, as I have already mentioned, with the men on the losing -side is very well known. In one of the early letters to his wife, he -speaks of having had “a very prosperous circuit,” and says his business -was “pretty general, not confin’d to friends or United Irishmen, tho -these latter have been no bad friends to me either.” He did not defend -their methods, but he stood by his friends, and to the end of his life -he stood by his opinions. - -In a letter written by Mrs. Bushe to their son Charles, at Castlehaven, -after the death of the Chief (that is to say, forty-three years, at -least, after the Act of Union), she speaks of the chaotic state of the -country, and the ruin caused by the arbitrary and ill-considered -enforcement of the recent Poor Law legislation. “Useless however to -complain. England has the _might_ which supersedes the right, and we are -punished now for our own folly in consenting to the _Union_! Just what -your Father predicted--‘when Ireland gives up the _rights_ that she has, -what right has she then to complain?’--How true this little squib of the -poor dear C----” (Chief). “Happy for him he did not live to see the ruin -he predicted!” - -The following account of a visit to Edgeworthstown forms part of a -letter, written at Omagh and dated Monday, August 16th, 1810. It is from -Chief Justice Bushe to his wife; the beginning portion of the letter is -printed in the Appendix I. (page 332). - -“I am not surpriz’d that you ask about Edgeworthstown, and I can only -tell you that every thing which Smyly has often said to us in praise of -it is true and unexaggerated. Society in that house is certainly on the -best plan I have ever met with. Edgeworth is a very clever fellow of -much talent, and tho not deeply inform’d on any subject, is highly -(which is consistent with being superficially) so in all. He talks a -great deal and very pleasantly and loves to exhibit and perhaps obtrude -what he wou’d be so justifiably vain of (his daughter and her works) if -you did not trace that pride to his predominant Egotism, and see that he -admires her because she is _his_ child, and her works because they are -_his_ Grand Children. Mrs. Edgeworth is uncommonly agreeable and has -been and not long ago very pretty. She is a perfect Scholar, and at the -same time a good Mother and housewife. She is an excellent painter, like -yourself, and like you has been oblig’d by producing Originals to give -up Copying: She is you know a 5th or 6th Wife and her last child was his -22d. Two Miss Sneyds, amiable old maids, live with him. They are sisters -of one of his wives, a beautiful and celebrated Honoria Sneyd, mention’d -in Miss Seward’s Monody on Major André and known by her misfortune in -having been betroth’d to that poor fellow. They are Litchfield people -of the old literary set of the Garricks Dr. Johnson Miss Seward &c. &c. -There are many young Edgeworths male and female all of promise and -talent and all living round the same table with this set among whom I -have not yet mention’d Miss Edgeworth, because I consider you as already -knowing her from her works. In such a Society you may suppose -Conversation must be good, but I was not prepared to find it so easy. It -is the only set of the kind I ever met with in which you are neither led -nor driven, but actually fall, and that imperceptibly, into literary -topics, and I attribute it to this that in that house literature is not -a treat for Company upon Invitation days, but is actually the daily -bread of the family. Miss Edgeworth is for nothing more remarkable than -for the total absence of vanity. She seems to have studied her father’s -foibles for two purposes, to avoid them and never to appear to see them, -and what does not always happen, her want of affectation is unaffected. -She is as well bred and as well dress’d and as easy and as much like -other people as if she was not a celebrated author. No pretensions, not -a bit of blue stocking is to be discover’d. In the Conversation she -neither advances or keeps back, but mixes naturally and cheerfully in -it, and tho in the number of words she says less than anyone yet the -excellence of her remarks and the unpremeditated point which she gives -them makes you recollect her to have talk’d more than others. I was -struck by a little felicity of hers the night I was there. Shakespear -was talk’d of as he always is, and I mentioned what you have lately -heard me speak of as a literary discovery and curiosity, that he has -borrow’d the Character of Cardinal Wolsey from Campion, the old -Chronicler of Ireland. This was new to them and Edgeworth began one of -his rattles-- - - “‘Well Sir, and has the minute, and the laborious, and the - indefatigable, and the prying, and the investigating Malone found - this out?’ - - “Miss Edgeworth said, almost under her breath, - - “‘It was too large for him to see!’ - - “Is not that good Epigram? I think it is. Edgeworth gave her the - advantage of taking her into France with his Wife and others of his - family during the short peace, and they were persons to improve - such an opportunity. Miss Edgeworth’s Madame Fleury, in the - Fashionable Tales is form’d on a true story which she learn’d - there. You will think this no description unless you know what her - figure is, and face &c. &c. I think her very good looking and can - suppose that she _was_ once pretty. Imagine Miss Wilmot at about 43 - years old for such I suppose Miss E. to be, with all the - Intelligence of her Countenance perhaps encreas’d and the - Sensibility preserv’d but somewhat reduc’d, the figure very smart - and neat as it must be if like Miss W’s but some of its beautiful - redundancies retir’d upon a peace Establishment. - - “Such is Miss Edgeworth but take her for all in all, there is - nothing like her to be seen, or rather to be known, for it is - impossible to be an hour in her Company without recognizing her - Talent, benevolence and worth. - - “An interesting anecdote occurs to me that Edgeworth told us and - forc’d her to produce the proof of. - - “Old Johnson of St. Paul’s Churchyard London has always been her - bookseller and purchas’d her Works at first experimentally and - latterly liberally. He died a few months ago and rather suddenly - and a few hours before his death he sent for his nephew to whom he - bequeath’d his property and who succeeded him in his business and - told him that he felt he had done Miss E. injustice in only giving - her £450 for Fashionable Tales and desir’d him to give her £450 - more. He died that day and the next the Nephew sent her an account - of the Transaction and the £450. This story only requires to be - told by Miss E. I read the original letter. - - “Adieu beloved Nan. I have scribbled very much but since I left - town I have no other opportunity of chatting to you. - -“Ever your -C. K. B.” - - - - - - -CHAPTER III - -MAINLY MARIA EDGEWORTH - - -There is a portrait of Mrs. Bushe that is now in the possession of one -of her many great-grandchildren, Sir Egerton Coghill. It is a small -picture, in pastel, very delightful in technique, and the subject is -worthy of the technique. Nancy Crampton was her name, and the picture -was probably done at the time of her marriage, in 1793, and is a record -of the excellent judgment of the future Lord Chief Justice of Ireland. - -It would be hard to find a more charming face. From below a cloud of -brown curls, deep and steady blue eyes look straight into yours from -under level brows. The extreme intellectuality of the expression does -not master its sweetness. In looking at the picture the lines come -back-- - - “One in whose gentle bosom I - Can pour my inmost heart of woes.” - -No wonder that in the troublous days of the Union, when bribes and -threats assailed the young barrister who was already a power in the -land, no wonder indeed that he often, as he says in one of his letters, -“heav’d a sigh, and thought of Nancy,” and knew “with delight” that on -her heart he could repose his own when weary. - -Here, I think, may fitly be given some lines that the Chief wrote, when -he was an old man, to accompany the gift to his wife of a white fur -tippet. - - TO A TIPPET. - - Soon as thy milk-white folds are prest - Like Wreaths of Snow about her breast, - Oh guard that precious heart from harm - Like thee ’t is pure, like thee ’t is warm. - -Love and wit are immortal, we know, but the spirit is rare that can -inspire them after nearly fifty years of married life; yet rarer, -perhaps, the young heart that can persuade them still to dwell with it -and to overlook the silver head. - -I grieve that I have been unable to find any of Mrs. Bushe’s earlier -letters. She was a brilliant creature in all ways, and had a rare and -enchanting gift as an artist, which, even in those days, when young -ladies of quality were immured inexorably within the padded cell of the -amateur, could scarce have failed to make its mark, had she not, as the -Chief, with marital complacency, observed, devoted herself to “making -originals instead of copies.” - -In her time there were few women who gave even a moment’s thought to the -possibilities of individual life as an artist, however aware they might -be--must have been--of the gifts they possessed. I daresay that my -great-grandmother was well satisfied enough with what life had brought -her--“honour, love, obedience, troops of friends.” In one of her -letters, written when she was a very old woman, she writes gaily of the -hateful limitations of old age, and says: - -“When people _will_ live beyond their time such things must be, and I -have a right to be thankful that old Time has put on his Slippers, and -does not ride roughshod over me.” - -(Which shows, I think, that marriage had subdued the artist in her, and -had, in compensation, evoked the philosopher.) - -It is clear, from the last letter in the preceding chapter, that Miss -Edgeworth and Mrs. Bushe had not met before 1810. How soon afterwards -they met, and the friendship, that lasted for the rest of their lives, -began, I cannot ascertain. In one of Miss Edgeworth’s letters (quoted in -one of the many volumes that have been written about her) she says: - -“Having named Mrs. Bushe, I must mention that whenever I meet her she is -my delight and admiration, from her wit, humour, and variety of -conversation.” - -Among the contents of the letter-box that Martin gave me are several -letters from Miss Edgeworth, and they testify to the fact that she lost -no time in falling in love with her “very dear Mrs. Bushe.” - -I recognise, gratefully, how highly I am privileged in being permitted -to include in my book these letters from the brilliant pioneer of Irish -novelists. To the readers and lovers of, for example, “Castle Rackrent,” -they may seem a trifle disappointing in their submission to the -conventions of their period, a period that decreed a mincing and -fettered mode for its lady letter-writers, and rigorously exacted from -its females the suitable simper. - -The writing is pale, prim, and pointed, undeniably suggestive of prunes, -and prisms, and papa (that inveterate papa of Maria’s); yet, in spite of -the fetters of convention, the light step is felt, and although the -manner may mince, it cannot conceal the humour, the spirit, and the -charm of disposition. - -Miss Edgeworth was born in the same year as Chief Justice Bushe, and -died six years later than he, in 1849. Her friendship with Mrs. Bushe -remained unbroken to the last, and their mutual admiration continued -unshaken. In such of Miss Edgeworth’s letters to my great-grandmother -as I have seen, she speaks but little of literary work. One of the later -letters, however (dated 1827), accompanied a present of one of her -books; the date would make it appear that this was one of the sequels to -“Early Lessons”--(in which the unfortunate Rosamond is victimised by the -dastardly fraud of the Purple Jar, and Harry gets no breakfast until he -has made his bed, although the fact that his sole ablutions consist in -washing his hands is in no way imputed to him as sin. But this, also, is -of the period). - -MISS MARIA EDGEWORTH TO MRS. BUSHE. - - -“EDGEWORTH’S TOWN -“_July 12. 1827_. - - “How can I venture to send such an insignificant little child’s - book to Mrs. Bushe?--Because I know she loves me and will think the - smallest offering from me a mark of kindness--of confidence in her - indulgence and partiality. - - “My sister Harriet has given me great pleasure by writing me word - how kindly you _speak_ of me, dear Mrs. Bushe, and as I know your - sincerity, to speak and to think kindly with you are one and the - same. Believe me I have the honour to be like you in this. In every - thing that has affected you since we parted (that has come to my - knowledge) I have keenly sympathised--Oh that we could meet again. - I am sure our minds would open and join immediately. After all - there is no greater mistake in life than counting happiness by - pounds shillings and pence--You and I have never done this I - believe--We ought to meet again. Cannot you contrive it? - - “I am glad at least that my sister Harriet has the pleasure which I - have not. Your penetration will soon discover all my father’s heart - and all his talents in her. Remember me most respectfully and most - affectionately to the Chief Justice and believe me - -“Most truly your -“Affectionate friend -“MARIA EDGEWORTH. - - - -“Harriet did not know this little vol was published or that I intended -publishing it when you spoke to her. - -“I had amused myself with the assistance of a confederate sister at home -in getting them printed without her knowing it for the Wise pleasure of -surprising her as she had always said I could not print anything without -her knowledge--These little wee wee plays were written ages ago in my -age of happiness for birthday diversions and Harriet added the cross -Prissy 16 years ago!” - -MISS MARIA EDGEWORTH TO MRS. BUSHE -Kilmurrey, Thomastown, Co. Kilkenny. - -“EDGEWORTH’S TOWN -“_June 18th 1815_. - -“MY VERY DEAR MRS. BUSHE, - - “This letter is dictated by my father as you might guess by the - bold appellation with which I have begun. He projects a migration - southward this ensuing month--towards Cork where Mrs. Edgeworth’s - brother is fatly and fitly provided for in the Church. In his route - my father glances sideways to the real pleasure of having an - opportunity of seeing you free from all the shackles of high - station and high fashion, in the retirement which your wise husband - prefers to both. Tell us when he will be at home and when at home - whether it will be _convenient_ (we are vain to think it would be - _agreeable_ you perceive) to receive us for a day and a night. - There will be three of us, papa, mama and self. Though we were - _Foxites_ we cannot sleep ‘_three in a bed_.’ As the circuit will - probably engage the Sol. gen[4] for some time to come our prospect - looks to the period when he may return. - - “So far _from_ my father--now _of_ him. This day he is much better - and we are all in high spirits. And he will not let me add one word - more. - -“Dear Mrs. Bushe, -“Affectionately yours -“MARIA EDGEWORTH.” - - - - * * * * * - -“FROM MISS MARIA EDGEWORTH -TO MRS. BUSHE, Kilmurrey, Thomastown, -Co. Kilkenny - -“EDGEWORTH’S TOWN -_Augt. 26th 1832_. - -MY DEAR MRS. BUSHE - - “Did you ever form any idea of the extent of my assurance-- - - “If you did I have a notion I shall now exceed whatever might have - been your estimate. - - “I am about to ask you--to ask you, plunging without preface or - apology--to go to work for me, and to give _me_, only because I - have the assurance to ask for it, what every body would wish to - have from you and nobody who had any pretence to modesty (out of - your own family and privileged circle of dears) would venture to - think of asking for. - - “A bag if you please of your own braidwork my dear Mrs. - Bushe--Louisa Beaufort who has just come to visit us tells me that - your braid work is so beautiful that I do covet this souvenir from - you. The least _Forget me not_--or _Heartsease_ will fulfil all my - wishes--if indeed you are so very kind as to listen to me. I have - your Madonna over the chimney piece in our library and often do I - look at her with affection and gratitude. I wish dear Mrs. Bushe we - could ever meet again, but this world goes so badly that I fear our - throats will be cut by order of O’Connell & Co very soon, or we - shall be beggars walking the world, and walking the world - _different_ ways. It is good to laugh as long as we can, however - and whenever we can--between crying times--of which there are so - many too many now a days. - - “I hear sad tidings of my much loved, more loved even than admired, - friend Sir Walter Scott. His body lives and is likely to live some - time--his mind oh such a mind! is gone forever. His temper too - which was most charming and most amiable is changed by disease. - Mrs. Lockhart that daughter who so admires him is more to be pitied - than words can express. His mind was a little revived by the first - return to Abbotsford--but sunk again--Of all afflictions surely - this is the worst that friends can have to endure--death a - comparative blessing. - - “I find the love of garden grow upon me as I grow older more and - more. Shrubs and flowers and such small gay things, that bloom and - please and fade and wither and are gone and we care not for them, - are refreshing interests, in life, and if we cannot say never - fading pleasures, we may say unreproved pleasures and never - grieving losses. - - “I remember your history of the bed of tulips or anemones which the - Chief Justice fancied he should fancy and which you reared for him - and he walked over without knowing. - - “Does your taste for flowers continue. We have some fine - carnations--if you could fancy them. Some way or other they should - get to you. If not by a flying carpet by as good a mode of - conveyance or better--the frank of Sir W. Gapes or Right Hon. C. - G. S. Stanley. - - “To either of which direct for me anything of whatever size or - weight (barring the size of the house or so) and it will be - conveyed to me swift and sure as if the African Magician himself - carried the same. - - “I more much more wish to hear from you my dear Mrs. Bushe, and to - know from your own self how you are going on than to have all the - braided bags however pretty that could be given to me. That is the - truth of the matter. So pray write to me and tell me all that - concerns you--for - -“I am very sincerely and affectionately -“Your little old friend -“MARIA EDGEWORTH. - - “Will you present my affectionate respects to the Chief Justice. I - wish his country were more worthy of him--or rather I wish his - country were allowed to be and to show itself more worthy of such a - Chief Justice and such a private character as his. - - “I am convinced that if the Scotch maxim of Let well alone were - pursued in Ireland we should do well enough. But to the rage of - obtaining popularity in a single individual must the peace of a - country be sacrificed.[5] - - “What can the heart of such a man be made of? And however great his - talents how infinitely little and nauseously mean must his Mind be! - - “He is too clever and clear sighted not to know too well what he is - about and what his own motions are. It is my belief however that he - could not now be quiet if he would he has such a Mob-omania upon - him. - - “We are quiet enough here--as yet.” - -“THE LORD CHIEF JUSTICE OF IRELAND -“17 Upper Mount Street, Dublin. - -FROM MISS MARIA EDGEWORTH. - - A proverb goes--(I love it well) - Of “Give an inch and take an ell” - ’Tis lady’s law--and, to be brief - Now must be mine, my dear Lord Chief - - “The case is this-- - - “May I beg your Lordship not to shake your head irrevocably before - you have heard me out-- - - “SUPPOSE.... I only modestly say _suppose_ ... which leaves the - matter just as it was, in case your Lordship is determined to - _oppose_--<small>SUPPOSE</small> now, in short, you could contrive to come down to - us a day--a day or <small>TWO</small>--(pray dont start off!) or if you _could_ - possibly bear _3_--days before the assizes? You could get--say - here--without hurry to dinner at 7--or--name your hour--and you - should have coffee comfortably without being obliged to enter an - appearance in the drawing room, and should retire to rest at - whatever hour you like--and I do humbly concieve that your bed and - all concerns, might be as comfortably arranged here as at Mullingar - Hotel--(though I wd not disparage sd Hotel)--But double bedded or - single room and room for friend and servant adjoining--and a whole - apartment with backstairs of its own shut out from the rest of the - house is at your Lordship’s disposal--And as to invalid habits - unless you have the habit of walking in your sleep all over the - house I don’t see how they could incommode or be incommoded. - - “If you mean that you like to lie in bed in the morning late-- Lie - as late as ever you please. - - “No questions asked. No breakfast waiting for you below, or thought - of your appearance till you please to shine upon us. Breakfast - waiting your bell’s touch, in your bed, or out of it at any hour - you please--And no worry of Company at dinner (unless you bespeak - the world and his wife--But if you did we should not know where to - find them for you). - - “We have only our own every-day family party and should only wish - and hope to add to it, to meet you, a sister, who in happy days - knew and admired you, even from her childhood (Mrs. Butler née - Harriet Edgeworth) and her husband, whom you knew in happy days - too, at the late Bishop of Meath’s. Thank you my dear Lord for - promising to look for the Bishop’s verses. - - Now pray let me thank you in my heart for your answer to this - letter. - - “Mrs Bushe if she likes me as well as I most humbly believe she - does, will put in a good word for us--and her good words can never - be said in vain--and must be followed by good deeds. - -“I am my dear Lord -with more respect than appears here -And all the sincerely affectionate -regard that has been felt for you (we need not say how many years)-- - -“Your--to be obliged--humble servant -“MARIA EDGEWORTH - -“EDGEWORTH TOWN - -“_Feb. 1st 1837_” - - - - - - -CHAPTER IV - -OLD FORGOTTEN THINGS - - -Chief Justice Bushe died in 1843, and Maria Edgeworth in 1849, but Mrs. -Bushe lived on till 1857, a delight and an inspiration to her children -and grandchildren. To her, even more than to the Chief, may be ascribed -the inevitable, almost invariable turn for the Arts, in some form, -frequently in all forms, that distinguishes their descendants, and to -her also is attributed a quality in story-telling known as “Crampton -dash,” which may be explained as an intensifying process, analogous to -the swell in an organ. - -But few of their grandchildren, that potent and far-reaching first -cousinhood of seventy, now remain. Bushes, Plunkets, Coghills, Foxes, -Franks, Harrises, they were a notable company, and I imagine that in the -middle and later years of the last century they made a clan of no small -power and influence. “Dublin is my washpot, over Merrion Square will I -cast out my shoe,” they might have said, possibly did say, in their -arrogant youth, when “The Family,” good-looking, amusing, and strenuous, -“took the flure” in the Dublin society of the ’fifties. From among them -came no luminary in Art, specially outstanding, yet there was scarcely -one of them without some touch of that spark which is lit by a coal -taken from the altar, and is, for want of a better term, called -originality; and although the reputations of neither Shakespeare nor -Michael Angelo were threatened, they could have provided a club -dedicated to “Les Quatz’ Arts” with a very useful selection of members. - -(Yet the mention of Shakespeare, and the wish to be sincere, force me to -recall a tale of two of these first cousins of Martin’s mother and mine, -the one an artist of delightful achievement, the other, amongst her many -gifts, an astronomer and writer. The latter reproached the former for -her neglect of Shakespeare, and announced her intention of reading aloud -to her one of his plays. The artist replied with a high and -characteristic tranquillity, “Shakespeare was a coarse man, my dear, but -you may read him to me if you like. I can go into a reverie.”) - -It is not out of place to mention here that the first writing in which -Martin and I collaborated was a solemnly preposterous work, a dictionary -of the words and phrases peculiar to our family, past and present, with -derivations and definitions--the definitions being our opportunity. It -might possibly--in fact I think some selections would--entertain the -public, but I can confidently say it will never be offered to it; -Bowdler himself would quail at the difficulties it would present. - - * * * * * - -Martin has, in her memoir of her brother Robert, given a sketch of life -at Ross as it was in the old days, in its patriarchal simplicity, its -pastoral abundance, its limitless hospitality, its feudal relations with -the peasants. Its simplicity was, I imagine, of a more primitive type -than can be claimed for any conditions that I can personally remember in -my own country. The time of which she has written was already passing -when she arrived on the scene, and she had to rely mainly on the -records of her elders. The general atmosphere there and in my country -was much the same, but a certain degree of sophistication may have set -in a little earlier here, and when I say “here,” I speak of that fair -and far-away district, the Barony of West Carbery, County Cork, the -ultimate corner of the ultimate speck of Europe--Ireland. You will not -find West Carbery’s name in the atlas, but Cape Clear will not be -denied, and there is nothing of West Carbery west of Cape Clear, unless -one counts its many sons and daughters who have gone even farther west, -to the Land of the Setting Sun. - -The Ireland that Martin and I knew when we were children is fast leaving -us; every day some landmark is wiped out; I will try, as she has done, -to recapture some of the flying memories. - -To begin with - - -CASTLE TOWNSHEND. - -Castle Townshend is a small village in the south-west of the County of -Cork, unique in many ways among Irish villages, incomparable in the -beauty of its surroundings, remarkable in its high level of -civilisation, and in the number of its “quality houses.” “High ginthry -does be jumpin’ mad for rooms in this village,” was how the matter was -defined by a skilled authority, while another, equally versed in social -matters, listened coldly to commendation of a rival village, and -remarked, “It’s a nice place enough, but the ginthry is very light in -it. It’s very light with them there entirely.” - -I hasten to add that this criticism did not refer to the morals of the -gentry, merely to their scarcity--as one says “a light crop.” - -Castlehaven Harbour, to whose steep shores it adheres, defiant of the -law of gravity, by whose rules it should long since have slipped into -the sea, has its place in history. The Spanish Armada touched _en -passant_ (touched rather hard in some places), one of Queen Elizabeth’s -admirals, Admiral Leveson, touched too, fairly hard, and left -cannon-ball bruises on the walls of Castlehaven Castle. The next -distinguished visitors were a force of Cromwell’s troopers. Brian’s -Fort, built by Brian Townshend, the son of one of Cromwell’s officers, -still stands firm, and Swift’s tower, near it, is distinguished as the -place where “the gloomy Dean; (of _autre fois_) wrote a Latin poem, -called “Carberiae Rupes.” A translation of this compliment to the Rocks -of Carbery was printed one hundred and seventy years ago in Smith’s -“History of the Co. Cork.” It was much admired by the historian. A -quotation from it may be found in “A Record of Holiday,” in one of our -books, “Some Irish Yesterdays,” but candour compels me to admit that -four of its lines, descriptive of the coast of Carbery-- - - “Oft too, with hideous yawn, the cavern wide - Presents an orifice on either side; - A dismal orifice, from sea to sea - Extended, pervious to the god of day.” - ---might be taken as equally descriptive of its readers. - -The _Titanic_ passed within a few miles of Castlehaven on her first and -last voyage; I saw her racing to the West, into the glow of a fierce -winter sunset. It was from Castle Townshend that the first warnings of -the sharks that were waiting for the _Lusitania_ were sent; and into -Castlehaven Harbour came, by many succeeding tides, victims of that -tragedy. Let it be remembered to the honour of the fishermen who -harvested those sheaves of German reaping, that the money and the -jewels, which most of the drowned - -[Illustration: CASTLEHAVEN HARBOUR. - -V. F. M. -] - -[Illustration: CARBERIAE RUPES. - -E. B. C. -] - -people had brought with them, were left with them, untouched. - -It must have been eighty or ninety years ago that the first member of -“The Chief’s” family reached Castlehaven. This was his second son, the -Rev. Charles Bushe, who was, as Miss Edgeworth says of her stepmamma’s -brother, “fatly and fitly provided for” with the living of Castlehaven. -Somervilles and Townshends had been living and intermarrying in -Castlehaven Parish, with none to molest their ancient solitary reign, -since Brian Townshend built himself the fort from which he could look -forth upon one of the loveliest harbours in Ireland, and the Reverend -Thomas Somerville, the first of his family to settle in Munster, took to -himself (by purchase from the representatives of the Earl of -Castlehaven) the old O’Driscoll Castle, and lies buried beside it, in -St. Barrahane’s churchyard, under a slab that proclaims him to have been -“A Worthy Magistrate, and a Safe and Affable Companion.” The two clans -enjoyed in those days, I imagine, a splendid isolation, akin to that of -the Samurai in Old Japan, and the Rev. Charles Bushe, an apostle of an -alien cultivation, probably realised the feelings of Will Adams when he -was cast ashore at Osaka, may, indeed, have felt his position to be as -precarious as that of the first missionary at the Court of the King of -the Cannibal Islands. - -My great-uncle Charles was for forty years the Rector of Castlehaven -Parish, and the result of his ministry that most directly affects me was -the marriage of my father, Colonel Thomas Henry Somerville, of Drishane, -to the Rev. Charles’s niece, Adelaide Coghill. (That she was also his -step-sister-in-law is a fact too bewildering to anyone save a -professional genealogist for me to dwell on it here. I will merely say -that my mother’s father was Admiral Sir Josiah Coghill, and her mother -was Anna Maria Bushe, daughter of the Chief Justice.)[6] - -There is a picture extant, the work of that artist to whom I have -already referred, in which is depicted the supposed indignation of the -Aboriginal Red men, _i.e._, my grandfather Somerville and his household, -at the apostasy of my father, a Prince of the (Red) Blood Royal, in -departing from the family habit of marrying a Townshend, and in allying -himself with a Paleface. In that picture the Red men and women are armed -with clubs, the Palefaces with croquet mallets. It was with these that -they entered in and possessed the land. My grandmother (_née_ Townshend, -of Castle Townshend), a small and eminently dignified lady, one of my -great-aunts, and other female relatives, are profanely represented, -capering with fury, clad in brief garments of rabbit skin. The Paleface -females surge in vast crinolines; the young Red man is encircled by -them, as was the swineherd in Andersen’s fairy tale, by the Court -ladies. My grandfather swings a tomahawk, and is faced by my uncle, Sir -Joscelyn Coghill, leader of the second wave of invasion, with a -photographic camera (the first ever seen in West Carbery) and a tripod. - - * * * * * - -I think I must diverge somewhat farther from my main thesis in order to -talk a little about the Ancient Order of Hibernians (if I may borrow the -appellation) who were thus dispossessed. For, as is the way all the -world over, the missionaries ate up the cannibals, and the Red men have -left only their names and an unworthy granddaughter to commemorate their -customs. - -Few South Pacific Islands are now as isolated as was, in those days,--I -speak of ninety or one hundred years ago--Castle Townshend. The roads -were little better than bridle-paths; they straggled and struggled, as -far as was possible, along the crests of the hills, and this was as a -protection to the traveller, who could less easily be ambushed and -waylaid by members of the large assortment of secret societies, -Whiteboys, Ribbonmen, Molly Maguires, Outlaws in variety, whose spare -moments between rebellions were lightened by highway robbery. I have -heard that my great-grandmother’s “coach” was the only wheeled vehicle -that came into Castle Townshend. My great-grandfather used to ride to -Cork, fifty-two miles, and the tradition is that he had a fabulous black -mare, named Bess, who trotted the journey in three hours (which I take -leave to doubt). All the heavy traffic came and went by sea. The pews of -the church came from Cork by ship. They have passed now, but I can -remember them, and I should have thought that their large simplicity -would not have been beyond the scope of the local carpenter. There was a -triple erection for the pulpit; the clerk sat in the basement, the -service was read _au premier_, and to the top story my great-uncle -Charles was wont to mount, in a black gown and “bands,” and thence -deliver classic discourses, worthy, as I have heard, of the son of -“silver-tongued Bushe,” but memorable to me (at the age of, say, six) -for the conviction, imparted by them anew each Sunday, that they were -samples of eternity, and would never end. My eldest brother, who shared -the large square pew with our grandfather and me, was much sustained by -a feud with a coastguard child, with whom he competed in the emulous -construction of grimaces, mainly based, like the sermons, on an -excessive length of tongue, but I had no such solace. Feuds are, -undoubtedly, a great solace to _ennui_, and in the elder times of a -hundred years or so ago they seem to have been the mainstay of society -in West Cork. Splendid feuds, thoroughly made, solid, and without a -crack into which any importunate dove could insert so much as an -olive-leaf. - -Ireland was, in those days, a forcing bed for individuality. Men and -women, of the upper classes, were what is usually described as “a law -unto themselves,” which is another way of saying that they broke those -of all other authorities. That the larger landowners were, as a class, -honourable, reasonably fair-minded, and generous, as is not, on the -whole, disputed, is a credit to their native kindliness and good -breeding. They had neither public opinion nor legal restraint to -interfere with them. Each estate was a kingdom, and, in the -impossibility of locomotion, each neighbouring potentate acquired a -relative importance quite out of proportion to his merits, for to love -your neighbour--or, at all events, to marry her--was almost inevitable -when matches were a matter of mileage, and marriages might be said to -have been made by the map. Enormous families were the rule in all -classes, such being reputed to be the will of God, and the olive -branches about the paternal table often became of so dense a growth as -to exclude from it all other fruits of the earth, save, possibly, the -potato. - -Equally vigorous, as I have said, was the growth of character. There was -room in those spacious days for expansion, and the advantage was not -wasted. There was an old lady who lived in West Carbery, and died some -fifty years ago, about whom legend has accumulated. She lived in a gaunt -grey house, that still exists, and is as suggestive of a cave as -anything as high and narrow, and implacably symmetrical, can be. Tall -elms enshroud it, and rooks at evening make a black cloud about it. It -has now been civilised, but I can remember the awe it inspired in me as -a child. She was of distinguished and ancient family (though she was -born in such remote ages that one would say there could have been -scarcely more than two generations between her and Adam and Eve). She -was very rich, and she was a miser of the school of comic opera, showy -and dramatic. Her only son, known, not without reason, as “Johnny Wild,” -is said, after many failures, to have finally extracted money from her -by the ingenious expedient of inveigling her into a shed in which was a -wicked bull, and basing a claim for an advance on the probability that -the bull would do the same. She lost ten shillings on a rent day, and -raised it among her tenants by means of a round-robin. Her costume was -that of a scarecrow that has lost all self-respect, yet--a solitary -extravagance--when she went in a train she travelled first-class. It is -said that on a journey to Dublin she was denounced to the guard as a -beggar-woman who had mistaken the carriage. It happened that the -denouncer was a lady with a courtesy-title derived from a peerage of -recent and dubious origin. The beggar-woman threatened to recite their -respective pedigrees on the platform, and the protest was withdrawn. -Naturally she fought with most of her neighbours, specially her -kinsfolk, and, as a result of a specially sanguinary engagement, -announced that she would never again “set foot” in the village sacred to -her clan (and it may be noted that the term “to set foot” invariably -implies something sacrificial, a rite, but one always more honoured in -the breach than in the observance) “until the day when she went into it -with four horses and her two feet foremost,” which referred to her final -transit to the family burying-ground. On her death-bed, a cousin, not -unnaturally anxious as to her future welfare, offered to read to her -suitable portions of the Bible, but the offer was declined. - -“Faith, my dear, I’ll not trouble ye. I know it all by heart; but I’m -obliged to ye, and I wish I had a pound that I might give it ye, but I -haven’t so much as a ha’penny.” - -She shortly afterwards died, and there was found in her bedroom, in a -desk, £500, and a further £20 was discovered rolled up in an old bonnet, -a black straw bonnet with bright green ribbons. - - - - -CHAPTER V - -EARLY WEST CARBERY - - -I have already commented on the social importance, and value, of the -feuds of a century ago. Fights were made, like the wall-papers, the -carpets, the furniture, to last. Friendships too, I daresay, but though -it was possible to dissolve a friendship, the full-fledged fight, beaked -and clawed, was incapable as an eagle of laying down its weapons. - -Such a fight there was between two sisters, both long since dead. They -were said to have been among “The Beauties of the Court of the -Regent”--delightful phrase, bringing visions of ringlets and rouge, and -low necks and high play--and both were famed for their wit, their charm, -and their affection for each other. Still unmarried, their mother -brought them home to Castle Townshend (for reasons not unconnected with -the run of the cards), not quite so young as they had been--in those -days a young lady’s first youth seems to have been irrevocably lost at -about three and twenty--yet none the less dangerous on that account. -Most feuds originate in a difference of opinion, but this one, or so it -has always been said, was due to a disastrous similarity in taste. -Legends hint that a young cousin, my grandfather, then a personable -youth fresh from Oxford, was the difficulty. But whatever the cause (and -he married the elder sister) peace was not found in sixty years; the -combatants died, and the fight outlived the fighters. - -In these feebler days the mental attitude of that time is hard to -realise. The stories that have come down to us only complicate the -effort to reconstitute the people and the period, but they may -help--some of them--to explain the French Revolution. A tale is told of -one of these ex-beauties, noted, be it remembered, for her charm of -manner, her culture, her sense of humour. Near the end of her long life -she went to the funeral of a relative, leaning decorously upon the arm -of a kinsman. At the churchyard a countryman pushed forward between her -and the coffin. She thereupon disengaged her arm from that of her -squire, and struck the countryman in the face. It is no less -characteristic of the time that the countryman’s attitude does not come -into the story, but it seems to me probable that he went home and -boasted then, and for the rest of his life, that old Madam ---- had “bet -him a blow in the face.” - -There is yet another story, written in a letter to a young cousin, by my -father’s cousin, the late Mrs. Pierrepont Mundy, a very delightful -letter-writer and story-teller, who has taken with her to the next world -a collection of anecdotes that may possibly cause her relatives there to -share the regret of her friends here that she did not leave them behind -her. - -“One more link in the chain of events,” she writes, - -“Grandmamma’s sister-in-law married her brother, ‘Devil Dick,’ who was -violent to madness. His mother alone was not afraid of him. She had a -spirit of her own. On one occasion she went over a ship at Cork, -intending to make purchases from contraband goods. She set aside chosen -ones, but was stopped by the _Excisemen_. She looked at the basket -full, raised her tiny foot (which you and I, dearest A., inherit) and -kicked the whole collection overboard into the Sea! - -“That same foot she released from her high-heeled shoe on arriving, -driven from Cork in a ‘Jarvey,’ and, when the _Cocher_ said ‘Stop Madam, -you haven’t paid!’ she threw the money on the ground, and with her shoe -she dealt him a smart box on the ear and said, - -“‘Take _that_ before the Grand Jury!’ (meaning _she_ could do anything -and would not get fined.) - -“_Une maïtresse femme!_” - -Thus my cousin concludes her story, not without a certain approbation of -our ancestress. - -Indisputably the coming of the Palefaces slackened the moral fibre of -Castle Townshend; the fire has gone out of the fights and the heat out -of the hatreds. I do not claim for the later generations a higher -standard; peace is mainly ensued by lack of concentration; it is not so -much that we forgive, as that we forget. I regret that these early -histories do not present my departed relatives in a more attractive -light, but personal experience has taught me how infinitely boring can -be the virtues of other people’s families. - -A strange product of these high explosives was my father, who, as was -said of another like unto him, was “The gentlest crayture ever came into -a house.” He had no brothers and but one sister, a fact that did not, I -think, distress my grandparents, who were in advance of their period in -considering the prevalent immense families ill-bred; and even had the -matter been for them a subject of regret, they had at least one -consolation--a consolation offered in a similar case to a cousin of -Martin’s--“Afther all,” it was said, “if ye had a hundhred of them ye -couldn’t have a greater variety.” - -An only son, with a solitary sister, brought up in the days when the -difference between the sexes was clearly defined by the position of the -definite article, “an only son” being by no means in the same case, -grammatical or otherwise, with “only a daughter,” it would not have been -surprising had he developed into such a flower of culture as had -blossomed in “Johnny Wild.” I expect that the rare and passionate -devotion of his father to his mother taught him a lesson not generally -inculcated in his time. In truth, his love and consideration for his -mother and sister amounted to anachronism in those days, when chivalry -was mostly relegated to the Eglinton Tournament, and unselfishness was -bracketed with needlework as a graceful and exclusive attribute of the -Ministering Angel. - -Mrs. Pierrepont Mundy, once defined the two men of her acquaintance whom -most she delighted to honour as - -“_Preux Chevaliers!_ Christian gentlemen, who feed their dogs from the -dinner-table!” - -I find it impossible to better this as a description of my father. I -recognise the profound conventionality of saying that dogs and children -adored him, yet, conventional though the statement may be, it is -inflicted upon me by the facts of the case. In him children knew, -intuitively, the kindred soul, dogs recognised, not by mere intuition, -but by force of intellect, their slave. I can see him surreptitiously -passing forbidden delicacies from his plate to the silent watchers -beneath the surface, his eyes disingenuously fixed upon the window to -divert my mother’s suspicions, and I can still hear his leisurely -histories of two imaginary South African Lion-slayers, named, with a -massive simplicity, Smith and Brown, whose achievements were for us, as -children, the last possibility of romance. - -Children alone could extract from him the tales of various feats of his -youth, feats in which, one supposes, the wild blood that was in him -found its outlet and satisfaction; of the savage bull on to whose back -he had dropped from the branch of a tree, and whom he had then ridden in -glory round and round the field; of the bulldog who jumped at the nose -of a young half-trained Arab mare when my father was riding her, and -caught it, and held on. And so did my father, while the mare flung -herself into knots (and how either dog or man “held their howlt” it is -hard to imagine). The bulldog was finally detached with a pitchfork by -one Jerry Hegarty, who must himself have shown no mean skill and courage -in adventuring into the whirl of that nightmare conflict, but my father -sat it out. It was a daughter of that mare, named Lalla Rukh, a lovely -grey (whom I can remember as a creature by me revered and adored, above, -perhaps, any earthly thing), who was being ridden by my father through a -town when they met a brass band. Lalla Rukh first attempted flight, but -such was her confidence in her rider that, in the end, she let him ride -her up to the big drum, and, in further token of devotion, she then, -heroically, put her nose on it. One imagines that the big drummer was -enough of a gentleman to refrain from his duties during those tense -moments, but the rest of the band blazed on. My father was a boy of -seventeen when he got his commission and was presently quartered at -Birr, where he acted as Whip to the regimental pack of hounds. There is -an authentic story of a hound, that my grandfather sent to Birr, by -rail and coach, escaping from the barracks, and making his way back to -the kennels at Drishane. Birr is in King’s County, and the journey, even -across country, must be over a hundred miles. (These things being thus, -it is hard to understand why any dog is ever lost.) - -My father was in the Kaffir wars of 1843 and 1849, and fought right -through the Crimean campaign, being one of the very few infantry -officers who won all the clasps with the Crimean medal. One of his -brother officers in the 68th Durham Light Infantry has told (I quote -from an account published by the officer in question) “of an incident -that shows the coolness and ready daring that characterised him. On the -morning of the battle of Inkermann, 5th Nov., 1854, the 68th saw a body -of troops moving close by. Owing to the fog it was impossible to -distinguish if these were Russian or English. It was of the utmost -importance, and the Colonel of the 68th exclaimed, ‘What would I give to -be able to decide!’ - -“Without a pause Henry Somerville said, ‘I’ll soon let you know!’ And, -throwing open his grey military great-coat, he showed the scarlet -uniform underneath. - -“In a second a storm of rifle bullets answered the momentous question, -thus speedily proving that enemies, and not friends, formed the -advancing troops.” - -There is another story of my father’s turning back, during a retirement -up hill under heavy fire, at the battle of the Alma, to save a wounded -private, whom he carried on his back out of danger. But not from him did -we hear of these things. One of the few soldiering stories that I can -recollect hearing from him was in connection with the fighting -proclivities of his servant, Con Driscoll, a son of a tenant who had -followed him into the regiment. Con had been in a row of no small -severity; his defence, as is not unusual, took the form of reflections -upon the character of his adversary, and an exposition of his own -self-restraint. - -“If it wasn’t that I knew me ordhers,” he said, “and the di-_ship_lin’ -of the Sarvice, I wouldn’t lave him till I danced on his shesht!” - - - - -CHAPTER VI - -HER MOTHER - - -I have spoken of that first cousinhood of seventy, the grandchildren of -the Chief Justice, of whom my mother and Martin’s were not the least -notable members. I want to say something more of these two, and if such -tales as Martin and I have remembered may seem sometimes to impinge upon -the Fifth Commandment, I would, in apology, recall the old story of the -masquerade at which Love cloaked himself in laughter, and was only -discovered when he laughed till he cried, and they saw that the laughter -was assumed, but the tears were real. - -I have come upon a letter of my cousin Nannie’s, undated, unfortunately, -but its internal evidence, indicating for her an age not far exceeding -seven years, would place it in or about the year 1830. - -“_To Mrs. Charles Fox_: - -“MY DEAR MAMA, - - “I am very sorry for touching that stinking little cat. I’ll try - to-morrow and Teusday if I can do as happy and as well without - touching Dawny. I had once before my birthday a little holiness in - my heart and for two days I was trying to keep it in and I exceeded - a little in it but alas one day Satan tempted me and one day I kept - it out of my heart and then I did not care what I did and I ware - very bold. One day the week after that I tried without touching - Dawny and I thought myself every bit as much happy but I was - tempted tempted tempted another day: but I hope to-morrow morning I - may be good Mama and that there will be one day that I may please - Mama - -“Your affectionate daughter -“NANNIE FOX.” - - - -The crime of which this is an expression of repentance is obscure. That -the repentance was not untinged by indignation with the temptation is -obvious; but why should she _not_ have “touched Dawny”? I am reminded of -a companion incident. A small boy, of whom I have the honour to be -godmother, was privileged to come upon a _cache_ of carpenter’s tools, -unhampered by the carpenter. He cut his fingers and was sent to bed. In -the devotions which he subsequently offered up, the following clause was -overheard, - -“And please God, be more careful another time, and don’t let me touch -Willy Driscoll’s tools.” - -A very just apportioning of the blame. My cousin Nannie put it all upon -Satan, who was the more fashionable deity of her period. - -I remember that my aunt Florence Coghill sat up for the whole of one -night, verifying from her Bible the existence of the devil; a fact that -had been called in question by a reprobate nephew. She came down to -breakfast wan, but triumphant, and flung texts upon the nephew, even as -the shields were cast upon Tarpeia. - -Martin had many stories of her mother, which, alas! she has not written -down. Many of them related to the time when they were living in Dublin, -and with all humility, and with apologies for possible error, I will try -to remember some of them. Mrs. Martin was then a large and handsome lady -of imposing presence, slow-moving, stately, and, in spite of a very -genial manner, distinctly of a presence to inspire respect. It was -alleged by her graceless family that only by aligning her with some -fixed and distant object, and by close observation of the one in -relation to the other, was it possible to see her move. (One of the -stories turned on the mistake of one of her children, short-sighted like -herself. “Oh, there’s Mamma coming at last!” A pause. Then, in tones of -disappointment, “No, it’s only the tramcar!”) - -Martin once wrote that “the essence of good housekeeping is to make -people eat things that they naturally dislike. Ingredients that must, -for the sacred sake of economy, be utilised, are rarely attractive, but -the good housekeeper can send the most nauseous of them to heaven, in a -curry, as in a chariot of fire.” - -It must be admitted that neither artistic housekeeping, nor even the -lower branches of the art, were my cousin Nannie’s strong suit. It is -related of her that one day, returning from a tea-party, she remembered -that her household lacked some minor need. Undeterred by her tea-party -splendour of attire, she sailed serenely into a small and unknown -grocer’s shop in quest of what she needed. The grocer, stout and -middle-aged, lolled on his fat bare arms on the counter, reading a -newspaper. He negligently produced the requirement, received the payment -for it, and then, remarking affably, “Ta ta, me child!” returned to his -paper. - -My cousin Nannie, whose sense of the ridiculous could afflict her like -an illness, tottered home in tearful ecstasies, and was only less -shattered by the condescension of the grocer than by another tribute, -somewhat similar in kind. She had a singularly small and well-shaped -foot; a fact to which her son Robert was wont to attribute the -peculiarity that her shoe-strings were rarely securely fastened, -involving her in an appeal to the nearest man to tie them. She returned -to her family one day and related with joy how, as she passed a -cabstand, her shoe lace had become unfastened, and how she had then -asked a cabman to tie it for her. She thanked him with her usual and -special skill in such matters, and, as she slowly moved away, she was -pleased to hear her cabman remark to a fellow: - -“That’s a dam pleshant owld heifer!” - -And the response of the fellow: - -“Ah, Shakespeare says ye’ll always know a rale lady when ye see her.” - -Her love for society was only matched by her intolerance of being bored. -There was a recess in her bedroom, possessed of a small window and a -heavy curtain. To this one day, on hearing a ring at the door, she -hurriedly repaired, and took with her a chair and a book. She heard the -travelling foot of the maid, searching for her. Then the curtain was -pushed aside and the maid’s face appeared. - -“Oh, is it _there_ you are!” said the maid, with the satisfaction of the -finder in a game of hide and seek. That her mistress did not dash her -book in her face speaks well for her self-control. - -It may be urged that Mrs. Martin might have spared herself this -discomfiture by the simpler expedient of leaving directions that she was -“Not at Home.” But this shows how little the present generation can -appreciate the consciences of the last. I have known my mother to rush -into the garden on a wet day, in order that the servant might truthfully -say she was “out.” - -“Ah, Ma’am, ’twas too much trouble you put on yourself,” said the -devoted retainer for whom the sacrifice was made. “God knows I’d tell a -bigger lie than that for you! And be glad to do it!” (which was probably -true, if only from the artist’s point of view). - -Mrs. Martin’s contempt for danger was one of the many points wherein she -differed from the average woman of her time. Indeed, it cannot be said -that she despised it, as, quite obviously, she enjoyed it. Martin has -told of how she and her mother were caught in a storm, in a small boat, -on Lough Corrib. Things became serious; one boatman dropped his oar and -prayed, the other wept but continued to row; Martin, who had not been -bred to boats on Ross Lake for nothing, tugged at the abandoned oar of -the supplicant. Meanwhile her mother sat erect in the stern, looking on -the tempest in as unshaken a mood as Shakespeare could have desired, and -enjoying every moment of it. Neither where horses were concerned did she -know fear. I have been with her in a landau, with one horse trying to -bolt, while the other had kicked till it got a leg over the trace. Help -was at hand, and during the readjustment Mrs. Martin firmly retained her -seat. Her only anxiety was lest the drive might have to be given up, her -only regret that both horses had not bolted. She said she liked driving -at a good round pace. An outside-car might do anything short of lying -down and rolling, without being able to shake her off; her son Robert -used to say of her that on an outside-car his mother’s grasp of the -situation was analogous to that of a poached egg on toast--both being -practically undetachable. - -How different was she from her first cousin, my mother, who, frankly -mid-Victorian, proclaimed herself a coward, without a blush, even with -ostentation. When the much-used label, “Mid-Victorian,” is applied, it -calls up, in my mind at least, a type of which the three primary causes -are, John Leech’s pictures, “The Newcomes,” and Anthony Trollope’s -massive output. Pondering over these signs of that time, I withdraw the -label from my mother and her compeers. Either must that be done, or the -letter “i” substituted for the “a” in label. Let us think for a moment -of Mrs. Proudie, of “The Campaigner”; of Eleanor, “The Warden’s” -daughter, who bursts into floods of tears as a solution to all -situations; of the insufferable Amelia Osborne. Consider John Leech’s -females, the young ones, turbaned and crinolined, wholly idiotic, flying -with an equal terror from bulls and mice, ogling Lord Dundreary and his -whiskers, being scored off by rude little boys. And the elderly women, -whose age, if nothing else, marked them, in mid-Victorian times, as fit -subjects for ridicule, invariably hideous, jealous, spiteful, nagging, -and even more grossly imbecile than their juniors. Thackeray and -Trollope between them poisoned the wells in the ’fifties, and the water -has hardly cleared yet. Nevertheless, with however mutinous a mind their -books are approached, their supreme skill, their great authority, cannot -be withstood; their odious women must needs be authentic. I am therefore -forced to the conclusion that Martin’s mother, and mine, and their -sisters, and their cousins and their aunts were exceptions to the rule -that all mid-Victorian women were cats, and I can only deposit the -matter upon that crowded ash-heap, that vast parcel-office, adored of -the bromidic, “the knees of the Gods,” there to be left till called for. - - * * * * * - -There is a song that my mother used to sing to us when we were -children, of which I can now remember only fragments, but what I can -recall of it is so beautifully typical of the early Victorian young -lady, and of what may be called the Bonnet and Shawl attitude towards -the Lover, that a verse or two shall be transcribed. I believe it used -to be sung at the house of my grandmother (Anna Maria Coghill, _née_ -Bushe), in Cheltenham, by one of the many literary and artistic dandies -who hung about her and her handsome daughters. Lord Lytton, then Sir -Edward Bulwer Lytton, was one of these, and he and my grandmother were -among the first amateur experimenters in mesmerism, thought-reading, and -clairvoyance, as might have been expected from the future author of -“Zanoni,” and from the mother of my mother (who was wont, with her usual -entire frankness, to declare herself “the most curious person in the -world,” _i.e._ the most inquisitive). - -I do not know the name of the song or of its composer. It has a most -suitable, whining, peevish little tune; my mother used to sing it to us -with intense dramatic expression, and it was considered to be a failure -if the last verse did not leave my brother and me dissolved in tears. -The song is in the form of a dialogue between the Lady and the Lover, -and the Lady begins: - - “So so so, Sir, you’ve come at last! - I thought you’d come no more, - I’ve waited with my bonnet on - From one till half-past four! - You know I hate to sit at home - Uncertain where to go, - You’ll break my heart, I know you will, - If you continue so!” - -(The tune demands the repetition of the last two lines, but it, I regret -to say, cannot be given here.) - -One sees her drooping on a high chair by the window (which of course is -closed), her ringlets losing their curl, her cheeks their colour. The -Lover takes a high hand. - -“Pooh! pooh! my dear! Dry up your tears,” he begins, arrogantly, and -goes on to ask for trouble by explaining that the delay was caused by -his having come “down Grosvenor Gate Miss Fanny’s eye to catch,” and he -ends with defiance-- - - “I won’t, I swear, I _won’t_ be made - To keep time like a watch!” - -The Lady replies: - - “What! Fanny Grey! Ah, now indeed - I understand it all! - I saw you making love to her - At Lady Gossip’s ball!” - “My life, my soul! My dearest Jane! - I love but you alone! - I never _thought_ of Fanny Grey! - (How tiresome she’s grown!) - I _never_ thought of Fanny Grey! - (How _tiresome_ she’s grown!)” - -The last phrase an aside to the moved audience. “She” was his so-called -“dearest Jane”! We thrilled at the perfidy, which lost nothing from my -mother’s delivery. - -And then poor Jane’s reproaches, and his impudent defence. - - “Oh Charles, I wonder that the earth - Don’t open where you stand! - By the Heaven that’s above us both, - I saw you kiss her hand!” - “You didn’t dear, and if you did, - Supposing it is true, - When a pretty woman shows her rings - What _can_ a poor man do!” - -But it was always the last lines of the last verse that touched the -fount of tears. Charles, with specious excuses, has made his farewells; -she watches him from the window (still closed, no doubt). - - “Goodbye, goodbye, we’ll meet again - On one of these fine days!” - -he has warbled and departed. And then her cry (to the audience): - - “He’s _turned_ the street, I knew he would! - He’s gone to Fanny Grey’s! - He’s turned the street, I _knew_ he would, - He’s gone--to Fanny Grey’s!” - -I shall never forget that absurd tune, and its final feeble wail of -despair; and inextricably blended with it is the memory of how -lusciously my brother and I used to weep, even while we clamoured for an -encore. - - - - -CHAPTER VII - -MY MOTHER - - -The men and women, but more specially the women, of my mother’s family -and generation are a lost pattern, a vanished type. - -I once read a fragment, by John Davidson, that appeared some years ago -in the _Outlook_. I grieve that I have lost the copy and do not remember -its date. It was called, if I am not mistaken, “The Last of the -Alanadoths,” and purported to be the final page of the history of a -great and marvellous tribe, whose stature was twice that of ordinary -beings, whose strength was as the strength of ten, and in whose veins -blue and glittering flame ran, instead of blood. These, having in -various ways successfully staggered ordinary humanity, all finally -embarked upon an ice-floe, and were lost in the Polar mists. “Thus -perished,” ends the chronicle, “the splendid and puissant Alanadoths!” - -I have now forgotten many of the details, but I remember that when I -read it, it irresistibly suggested to me the thought of my mother and -her sisters and brothers. Tall, and fervent, and flaming, full of what -seemed like quenchless vitality, their blood, if not flame, yet of that -most ardent blend of Irish and English that has produced the finest -fighters in the world. And now, like the splendid and puissant -Alanadoths, they also have vanished (save one, the stoutest fighter of -them all) into the mists that shroud the borderland between our life and -the next. - -They kept their youthful outlook undimmed, and took all things in their -stride, without introspection or hesitation. Their unflinching -conscientiousness, their violent church-going (I speak of the sisters), -were accompanied by a whole-souled love of a spree, and a wonderful gift -for a row. Or for an argument. There are many who still remember those -great arguments that, on the smallest provocation, would rise, and stir, -and deepen, and grow, burgeoning like a rose of storm among the -Alanadoths. They meant little at the moment, and nothing afterwards, but -while they lasted they were awe-inspiring. It is said that a stranger, -without their gates, heard from afar one such dispute, and trembling, -asked what it might mean. - -“Oh, _that_!” said a little girl, with _sang-froid_, “That’s only the -Coghills roaring.” - -(As a dweller in the Hebrides would speak of a North-Atlantic storm.) - -My mother was a person entirely original in her candour, and with a -point of view quite untrammelled by convention. Martin and I have ever -been careful to abstain from introducing portraiture or caricature into -our books, but we have not denied that the character of “Lady Dysart” -(in “The Real Charlotte”) was largely inspired by my mother. - -She, as we said of Lady Dysart, said the things that other people were -afraid to think. - -“Poetry!” she declaimed, “I _hate_ poetry--at least _good_ poetry!” - -Her common sense often amounted to inspiration. It happened one -Christmas that my sister and I found ourselves in difficulties in the -matter of a suitable offering to an old servant of forty years’ -standing; she was living on a pension, her fancies were few, her needs -none. A very difficult subject for benefaction. My mother, however, -unhesitatingly propounded a suggestion. - -“Give her a nice shroud! There’s nothing in the world she’d like as well -as that!” - -Which was probably true, but was a counsel of perfection that we were -too feeble to accept. - -It is indeed indisputable that my mother breathed easily a larger air -than the lungs of her children could compete with. Handsome, impetuous, -generous, high-spirited, yet with the softest and most easily-entreated -heart, she was like a summer day, with white clouds sailing high in a -clear sky, and a big wind blowing. Hers was the gift of becoming, -without conscious effort, the rallying point of any entertainment. It -was she who never failed to supply the saving salt of a dull -dinner-party; her inveterate _joie-de-vivre_ made a radiance that struck -responsive sparkles from her surroundings, whatever they might be. - -She was a brilliant pianiste, and played with the same spirit with which -she tackled the other affairs of life. She was renowned as an -accompanist, having been trained to that most onerous and perilous -office by an accomplished and exacting elder brother--and nothing can be -as relentlessly exacting as a brother who sings--and she had a gift of -reading music, with entire facility, that is as rare among amateurs as -it is precious. - -Music, books, pictures, politics, were in her blood. Music, with plenty -of tune; painting, with plenty of colour and a rigid adherence to fact; -novels, compact of love-making; and politics, of the most implacable -party brand. Alas! she did not live to see many of our books, but I fear -that such as she did see, with their culpable economy of either -love-makings or happy endings, were a disappointment to her. In her -opinion the characters should leave a story, as the occupants left -Noah’s Ark, in couples. I remember the indignation in her voice when, -having finished reading “An Irish Cousin,” she said: - -“But you never said who Mimi Burke married.” - -Those who have done us the honour of reading that early work will, I -think, admit that our description of Miss Mimi Burke might have -exonerated us from the necessity of providing her with a husband. - -My mother was one of the most thorough and satisfying letter-writers of -a family skilled in that art, having in a high degree the true instinct -in the matter of material, and knowing how to separate the wheat from -the chaff (and--_bien entendu_--to give the preference to the chaff). -She was a Woman Suffragist, unfaltering, firm, and logical; a -philanthropist, practical and energetic. - -“Where’d we be at all if it wasn’t for the Colonel’s Big Lady!” said the -hungry country women, in the Bad Times, scurrying, barefooted, to her in -any emergency, to be fed and doctored and scolded. She was a -Spiritualist, wide-minded, eager, rejoicing in the occult, mysterious -side of things, with the same enthusiasm with which she faced her -sunshiny everyday life. Not that it was all sunshine. My grandfather, -Thomas Somerville, of Drishane, died in 1882. With him, as Martin has -said of his contemporary, her father, passed the last of the old order, -the unquestioned lords of the land. Mr. Gladstone’s successive Land Acts -were steadily making themselves felt, and my father and mother, like -many another Irish father and mother, began to learn what it was to -have, as a tenant said of himself, “a long serious family, and God knows -how I’ll make the two ends of the candle meet!” - -[Illustration: FROM THE GARDEN, DRISHANE. - -V. F. M. -] - -[Illustration: DRISHANE HOUSE. - -V. F. M. -] - -[Illustration: HYDRANGEAS, DRISHANE AVENUE. - -V. F. M. -] - -I marvel now, when I think of their courage and their gallant -self-denial. The long, but far from serious, family, numbering no less -than five sons and two daughters, thought little of Land Acts at the -time, and took life as lightly as ever. The stable was cut down, but -there were no hounds then, and I was in the delirium of a first break -into oil colours, after a spring spent in Paris in drawing and painting, -and even horses were negligible quantities. There was no change made in -the destined professions for the sons; it was on themselves that my -father and mother economised; and with effort, and forethought, and -sheer self-denial, somehow they “made good,” and pulled through those -bad years of the early ‘eighties, when rents were unpaid, and crops -failed, and Parnell and his wolf-pack were out for blood, and the -English Government flung them, bit by bit, the property of the only men -in Ireland who, faithful to the pitch of folly, had supported it since -the days of the Union. When the Russian woman threw the babies to the -wolves, at least they were her own. - -I have claimed for my mother moral courage and self-denial, and, in -making good that claim, said that the stable establishment at -Drishane--never a large one--had been cut down. I feel I ought to admit -that this particular economy cannot be said to have afflicted her. She -had an unassailable conviction that every horse was “at heart a rake.” -Though she was not specially active, no rabbit could bolt before a -ferret more instantaneously than she from a carriage at the first wink -of one of the “bright eyes of danger.” No horse was quiet enough for -her, few were too old. - -“Slugs?” she has said, in defence of her carriage-horses, “I _love_ -slugs! I adore them! And slugs or no, I will _not_ be driven by B----” -(a massive sailor son). “He’s no more use on the box than a blue -bottle!” - -There was an occasion when she was discovered halfway up a ladder, -faintly endeavouring to hang a picture, and unable to do so by reason of -physical terror. She was restored to safety, and with recovered vigour -she countered reproaches with the singular yet pertinent inquiry: “_May_ -I ask, _am_ I a paralysed babe?” - -Her similes were generally unexpected, but were invariably to the point. -It often pleases me to try to recall some of the flowers of fancy that -she has lavished upon my personal appearance. I think I should begin by -saying that her ideal daughter had been denied to her. This being should -have had hair of dazzling gold, blue eyes as big as mill-wheels, and -should have been incessantly enmeshed in the most lurid flirtation. My -eyes did indeed begin by being blue, but, as was said by an old nurse -who held by the Somerville tradition of brown ones, - -“By the help of the Lord they’ll change!” - -They did change, but as the assistance was withdrawn when they had -merely attained to a non-committal grey, neither in eyes, nor in the -other conditions, did I gratify my mother’s aspirations. - -I have been at a dinner-party with her, and have found, to my great -discomfort, her eyes dwelling heavily upon my head. Her face wore openly -the expression of a soul in torment. I knew that in some way, dark to -me, I was the cause. After dinner she took an early opportunity of -assuring me that my appearance had made her long to go under the -dinner-table. - -“Never,” she said, “have I seen your hair so abominable. It was like a -collection of filthy little furze-bushes.” - -Which was distressing enough, but not more so than being told on a -similar occasion, and, I think, for similar reasons, that I was “not -like any human young lady,” and again, she has seriously, even with -agony, informed me that I was “the Disgrace of Castle Townshend!” - -It was a sounding title, with something historic and splendid about it. - -“The Butcher of Anjou!” “The Curse of Cromwell!” occur to me as parallel -instances. - -It was my privilege--sometimes, I think, my misfortune--to have -succeeded my mother as the unofficial player of the organ in Castlehaven -Church, and her criticisms of the music, and specially of the choir, -were as unfailing as unsparing. - -“They sang like infuriated pea-hens! Never have I heard such a -collection of screech-cats! You should have drowned them with the great -diapason!” - -Not long ago, among some of her papers, I found a home-made copybook, of -blue foolscap paper, with lines very irregularly ruled on it, and, on -the lines, still more irregular phalanxes of “pothooks and hangers.” -Further investigation discovered my own name, and a date that placed me -at something under six years old; and at the foot of each page was my -mother’s careful and considered judgment upon my efforts. “Middling,” -“Careless,” “Bobbish,” “Naughty,” “Abominable,” and then a black day, -when it was written, plain for all men to see, that I was not only -abominable, but also naughty. - -“Naughty and Abominable,” there it stands, and shows not only my early -criminality, but my mother’s enchanting sincerity. What young mamma, of -five or six and twenty, is there to-day who would thus faithfully allot -praise or blame to her young. I feel safe in saying that the naughtier -and more abominable the copy, the more inevitably would it be described -as either killing or sweet. - -In reference to this special page, I may add that, although I regard -myself as a reliable opinion in calligraphy, I am unable to detect any -perceptible difference between the pothooks and hangers of the occasion -when I was bobbish, or those of that day of wrath when I was both -naughty and abominable. - -Amongst other episodes I cherish an unforgettable picture of my mother -having her fortune told by her hand. (A criminal act, as we have -recently learned, and one that under our enlightened laws might have -involved heavy penalties.) - -The Sibyl was a little lady endowed with an unusual share of that -special variety of psychic faculty that makes the cheiromant, and also -with a gift, almost rarer, of genuine enthusiasm for the good qualities -of others, an innocent and whole-souled creator and worshipper of -heroes, if ever there were one. To her did my mother confide her hand, -her pretty hand, with the shell pink palm, and the blush on the Mount of -Venus, that she had inherited from her mother, the Chief’s daughter. - -“_Intensely_ nervous!” pronounced the Sibyl (who habitually talked in -italics and a lovable Cork brogue), looking at the maze of delicate -lines that indicate the high-strung temperament. “_Adores_ her -children!” - -“Not a bit of it!” says my mother, flinging up her head, in a way she -had, like a stag, and regarding with a dauntless eye her two grinning -daughters. - -The Sibyl swept on, dealing with line and mount and star, going from -strength to strength in the exposition till, at the line of the heart, -she came to a dead set. - -“Oh, Mrs. Somerville! _What_ do I see? _Count_less flirtations!! And -Oh--” (a long squeal of sympathy and excitement) “_Four!_ Yes! -One--Two--_Three_--FOUR Great Passions!” - -At this the ecstasy of my mother knew no bounds. “Four, Miss X.! Are you -_sure_?” - -Miss X. was certain. She expounded and amplified, and having put the -Four Great Passions on a basis of rock, proceeded with her elucidation -of lesser matters; but it was evident that my mother’s attention was no -longer hers. - -“I’m trying to remember who the Four Passions were,” she said that -evening to one of her first cousins (who might be supposed to know -something of her guilty past), and to my sister, “There was Charlie -B----. He’ll do for one--and L. W.----!--that’s two--and then--Oh, -yes!--then there was S. B----! Minnie! _Was_ I in love with S. B----?” -She paused for an answer that her cousin was incapable, for more reasons -than the obvious one, of giving. - -My mother resumed the delicious inquiry. - -“Well--” she said, musingly, “Anyhow, that’s only three. Now, _who_ was -the fourth?” - -My sister Hildegarde, who was young and inclined to be romantic, said -languishingly, - -“Why, of course it was _Papa_, Mother!” - -My father and mother’s mutual love and devotion were as delightful an -example of what twenty-five years of happy married life bestows as can -well be conceived, and I think Hildegarde was justified. My mother, -however, regarded her with wide open blue eyes, almost sightless from -the dazzle of dreams--dreams of the four reckless and dangerous beings -who had galloped, hopeless and frenzied, into darkness (not to say -oblivion) for love of her--dreams of her own passionate, heartbroken -despair when they had thus galloped. - -“What?... What?...” she demanded, bewilderedly, sitting erect, with -eyes like stars, looking as Juno might have looked had her peacock -turned upon her, “_What_ do you say?” - -“There was Papa, Mother,” repeated Hildegarde firmly, but not (she says) -reprovingly, “_He_ was the fourth, of course!” - -“_Papa???_ ...” - -The preposterous dowdiness of this suggestion almost deprived my mother -of the power of speech. - -“_Papa!_ ... Paugh!” - - * * * * * - -Thus did the splendid and puissant Alanadoths dispose of the cobweb -conventions of mere mortals. - - - - -CHAPTER VIII - -HERSELF - - -“It was on a Sunday, the eleventh day of a lovely June,” her sister, -Mrs. Edward Hewson, has written, “that Violet entered the family. A time -of roses, when Ross was at its best, with its delightful old-fashioned -gardens fragrant with midsummer flowers, and its shady walks at their -darkest and greenest as they wandered through deep laurel groves to the -lake. She was the eleventh daughter that had been born to the house, and -she received a cold welcome. - -“‘I am glad the Misthress is well,’ said old Thady Connor, the steward; -‘but I am sorry for other news.’ - -“I think my father’s feelings were the same, but he said she was ‘a -pretty little child.’ My mother comforted herself with the reflection -that girls were cheaper than boys. - -“At a year old she was the prettiest child I ever saw, with her glorious -dark eyes, and golden hair, and lovely colour; a dear little child, but -quite unnoticed in the nursery. Charlie was the child brought forward. I -think the unnoticed childhood had its effect. She lived her own life -apart. Then came the reign of the Governesses, and their delight in her. -I never remember the time she could not read, and she played the piano -at four years old very well. (At twelve years old she took first prize -for piano-playing at an open competition, held in Dublin, for girls up -to eighteen.) - -“Her great delight at four or five years old was to slip into the -drawing-room and read the illustrated editions of the poets. Her -favourite was an edition of Milton, with terrifying pictures; this she -read with delight. One day there was an afternoon party, and, as usual, -Violet stole into the drawing-room and was quickly engrossed in her -loved Milton, entirely oblivious of the company. Later on, she was found -fast asleep, with her head resting on the large volume. The scene is -present with me; the rosy little face, and the golden hair resting on -the book. - -“I remember that Henry H---- said ‘Some day I shall boast that I knew -Violet as a child!’” - -She was christened Violet Florence, by her mother’s cousin, Lord -Plunket, afterwards Archbishop of Dublin, in the drawing-room at Ross, -the vessel employed for the rite being, she has assured me, the silver -slop-basin, and at Ross she spent the first ten happy years of her life. - -I, also, had a happy childhood, full of horses and dogs and boats and -dangers (which latter are the glory of life to any respectable child -with suitable opportunity), but after I had seen Ross I could almost -have envied Martin and her brother, Charlie, nearest to her in age, -their suzerainty over Ross demesne. - -“I thravelled Ireland,” said someone, “and afther all, there’s great -heart in the County of Cork!”, and I am faithful to my own county; but -there is a special magic in Galway, in its people and in its scenery, -and for me, Ross, and its lake and its woods, is Galway. The beauty of -Ross is past praising. I think of it as I saw it first, on a pensive -evening of early spring, still and grey, with a yellow spear-head of -light low in the west. Still and grey was the lake, too, with the brown -mountain, Croagh-Keenan, and the grey sky, with that spear-thrust of -yellow light in it, lying deep in the wide, quiet water, that was -furrowed now and then by the flapping rush of a coot, or streaked with -the meditative drift of a wild duck; farther back came the tall -battalions of reeds, thronging in pale multitudes back to the shadowy -woods; and for foreground, the beautiful, broken line of the shore, with -huge boulders of limestone scattered on it, making black blots in the -pearl-grey of the shallows. - -On higher ground above the lake stands the old house, tall and severe, a -sentinel that keeps several eyes, all of them intimidating, on all -around it. The woods of Annagh, of Bullivawnen, of Cluinamurnyeen, trail -down to the lake side, with spaces of grass, and spaces of hazel, and -spaces of bog among them. I have called the limestone boulders blots, -but that was on an evening in February; if you were to see them on a -bright spring morning, as they lie among primroses at the lip of the -lake, you would think them a decoration, a collar of gems, that respond -to the suggestions of the sky, and are blue, or purple, or grey, bright -or sullen, as it requires of them. Things, also, to make a child -delirious with their possibilities. One might jump from one huge stone -to another, till, especially in a dry summer when the lake was low, one -might find oneself far out, beyond even the Turf Quay, or Swans’ Island, -whence nothing but one’s own prowess could ever restore one to home and -family. If other stimulant were needed, it was supplied by the thought -of the giant pike, who were known to inhabit the outer depths. One of -them, stuffed and varnished, honoured the hall at Ross with its -presence. It looked big and wicked enough to pull down a small girl as -easily as a minnow. - -When I first went to Ross, a grown-up young woman, I found that -seduction of the boulders, and of the chain of leaps that they -suggested, very potent. The attraction of the pike also was not to be -denied. (We used to try to shoot them with a shot-gun, and sometimes -succeeded.) What then must the lake not have meant to its own children? - -I don’t suppose that any little girl ever had more accidents than -Martin. Entirely fearless and reckless, and desperately short-sighted, -full of emulation and the irrepressible love of a lark, scrapes, in the -physical as well as the moral sense, were her daily portion, and how she -came through, as she did, with nothing worse than a few unnoticeable -scars to commemorate her many disasters, is a fact known only to her -painstaking guardian angel. Tenants, who came to Ross on their various -affairs, found their horses snatched to be galloped by “the children,” -their donkeys purloined for like purposes (or the donkeys’ nearest -equivalent to a gallop)--and it may be noted that the harder the -victimised horses were galloped, the more profound was the admiration, -even the exultation, of their owners. - -“Sure,” said a southern woman of some children renowned for their -naughtiness, “them’s very arch childhren. But, afther all, I dunno -what’s the use of havin’ childhren if they’re not arch!” - -In certain of the essays in one of our books, “Some Irish Yesterdays,” -we have pooled memories of our respective childhoods, which, -fortunately, perhaps, for the peace of nations, were separated by some -hundred miles of moor and mountain, as well as by an interval of years. -Their conditions were similar in many respects, and specially so in the -government of the nursery. Our mothers, if their nurses satisfied their -requirements, had a large indifference to the antecedents of the -nurses’ underlings, who were usually beings of the type that is caught -at large on a turf-bog and imported raw into the ministry. One such was -once described to me--“An innocent, good-natured slob of a gerr’l that -was rared in a bog beside me. The sort of gerr’l now that if you were -sick would sit up all night to look afther ye, and if you weren’t, she’d -lie in bed all day!” - -I believe the nurses enjoyed the assimilation of the raw product, much -as a groom likes the interest afforded by an unbroken colt, and they -found the patronage among the mothers of the disciples a useful asset. -In later years, Martin was discoursing of her nursery life, with her -foster-mother, who had also been her nurse, Nurse B., a most agreeable -person, gifted with a saturnine humour that is not infrequent in our -countrywomen. - -“Sure didn’t I ketch Kit Sal one time”--(the reigning nursemaid)--“an’ -she bating and kicking yerself on the avenue!” Nurse B. began. She then -went on to describe how she had fallen on Kit Sal, torn her hair, and -“shtuck her teeth in her.” - -“The Misthress seen me aftherwards, and she axed me what was on me, for -sure I was cryin’ with the rage. ‘Nothin’ Ma’am!’ says I. But I told her -two days afther, an’ she goes to Kit Sal, an’ says she, ‘What call had -you to bate Miss Wilet?’ says she, ‘Ye big shtump!’ ‘She wouldn’t folly -me,’ says Kit. ‘Well indeed,’ says the Misthress, ‘I believe ye got a -bigger batin’ yerself from Nurse, and as far as that goes,’ says she, ‘I -declare to God,’ says she, ‘I wish she dhrank yer blood!’ says she.” - -The tale is above comment, but for those who knew Mrs. Martin’s very -special distinction of manner and language, Nurse B.’s paraphrase of her -reproof has a very peculiar appeal. - -Nurse B. was small, spare, and erect, with a manner that did not conceal -her contempt for the world at large--(with one cherished exception, -“Miss Wilet”)--and a trenchancy of speech that was not infrequently -permitted to express it. At Ross, at lunch one day, during the later -time when Mrs. Martin had returned there, the then cat--(the pampered -and resented drawing-room lady, not the mere kitchen cat)--exhibited a -more than usually inordinate greediness, and Mrs. Martin appealed, with -some reproach, to Nurse B., who was at that time acting--and the word -may be taken in its stage connection--the part of parlour-maid. - -“Nurse! _Does_ this poor cat _ever_ get _anything_ to eat?” - -“It’d be the quare cat if it didn’t!” replied Nurse, with a single -glance at “Miss Wilet” to claim the victor’s laurel. - - * * * * * - -It was not until Martin and I began to write “The Real Charlotte” that I -understood how wide and varied a course of instruction was to be -obtained in a Dublin Sunday school. Judging by a large collection of -heavily-gilded books, quite unreadable (and quite unread), each of which -celebrates proficiency in some branch of scriptural learning, Martin -took all the available prizes. In addition to these trophies and the -knowledge they implied, she learnt much of that middle sphere of human -existence that has practically no normal points of contact with any -other class, either above or below it. - -It was a rather risky experiment, as will, I think, be admitted by -anyone who considers the manners and customs of the detestable little -boys and girls who squabble and giggle in the first chapter of “The Real -Charlotte.” There are not many children who could have come unscathed -out of such a furnace. There is a story of a priest who was such a good -man that he “went through Purgatory like a flash of lightning. There -wasn’t a singe on him!” - -Martin was adored, revered, was received as an oracle by her fellow -scholars, and was, as was invariable with her, the wonder and admiration -of her teacher. She has told me how she took part in dreadful revels, -school feasts and the like, which, in their profound aloofness from her -home-life, had something almost illicit about them. With her intensely -receptive, perceptive brain, she was absorbing impressions, points of -view, turns and twists of character wrought on by circumstance; yet, -when that phase of her childhood had passed, “there wasn’t a singe on -her!” - -She had a spiritual reserve and seriousness that shielded her, like an -armour of polished steel that reflects all, and is impenetrable. -Refinement was surpassingly hers; intellectual refinement, a mental -fastidiousness that rejected inevitably the phrase or sentiment that had -a tinge of commonness; personal refinement, in her dress, in the -exquisite precision of all her equipment; physical refinement, in the -silken softness of her hair, the slender fineness of her hands and feet, -the flower-bloom of her skin; and over and above all, she had the -refinement of sentiment, which, when it is joined with a profound -sensitiveness and power of emotion, has a beauty and a perfectness -scarcely to be expressed in words. - -She has told me stories of those times, and of the curious contrasts of -her environment. Long, confidential walks with “Francie Fitzpatrick” and -her fellows, followed by an abrupt descent from the position of “Sir -Oracle,” to the status of the youngest of a number of sisters and -brothers whose cleverness, smartness, and good looks filled her with awe -and glory. She was intensely critical and intensely appreciative. The -little slender brown-eyed girl, who was part pet, part fag of that -brilliant, free-going, family crowd, secretly appraised them all in her -balancing, deliberative mind, and, fortunately for all concerned, passed -them sound. They taught her to brush their hair, and read her the poets -while she was thus employed; they chaffed her, and called her The Little -Philosopher, and unlike many elder sisters--(and I speak as an elder -sister)--dragged her into things instead of keeping her out of them. It -must have been a delightful house, full of good looks and good company. -I was far away in South Cork, and knew of the Martins but distantly and -dimly; after my eldest brother had met them and returned to chant their -charms, I think that a certain faint hostility tinged my very occasional -thoughts of them, which, after all, is not unusual. - -The Martins’ house in Dublin was one of the gathering places for the -clans of the family. Dublin society still existed in those days; things -went with a swing, and there was a tingle in life. Probably there was no -place in the kingdom where a greater number of pleasant people were to -be met with. Jovial, unconventional, radiant with good looks, unfailing -in agreeability, they hunted, they danced, they got up theatricals and -concerts, they--the elder ones, at least--went to church with an equal -enthusiasm, and fought to the death over the relative merits of their -pet parsons. - -Martin has told me of a Homeric and typical battle of which she was a -spectator, between her mother and one of my many aunts, Florence -Coghill. It began at tea, at the house of another aunt, with a suave and -academic discussion of the Irish Episcopate, and narrowed a little to -the fact that the diocese of Cork needed a bishop. My aunt Florence -said easily, - -“Oh--Gregg, of course!” - -My cousin Nannie (Mrs. Martin) replied with a sweet reasonableness, yet -firmly, “I think you will find that Pakenham Walsh is the man.” - -The battle then was joined. From argument it passed on into shouting, -and thence neared fisticuffs. They advanced towards each other in large -armchairs, even as, in these later days, the “Tanks” move into action. -They beat each other’s knees, each lady crying the name of her champion, -and then my aunt remembered that she had a train to catch, and rushed -from the room. The air was still trembling with her departure, when the -door was part opened, the monosyllable “Gregg!” was projected through -the aperture, and before reply was possible, the slam of the hall door -was heard. - -Mrs. Martin flung herself upon the window, and was in time to scream -“Paknamwalsh!” in one tense syllable, to my aunt’s departing long, thin -back. - -My aunt Florence was too gallant a foe to affect, as at the distance she -might well have done, unconsciousness. Anyone who knows the deaf and -dumb alphabet will realise what conquering gestures were hers, as -turning to face the enemy she responded, - -“G ! R ! E ! G ! G !” - -and with the last triumphant thump of her clenched fists, fled round the -corner. - -And she was right. “Gregg & son, Bishops to the Church of Ireland,” have -passed into ecclesiastical history. - - - - -CHAPTER IX - -MYSELF, WHEN YOUNG - - -I have deeply considered the question as to how far and how deep I -should go in the matter of my experiences as an Art student. Those brief -but intense visits to Paris come back to me as almost the best times -that life has given me. To be young, and very ardent, and to achieve -what you have most desired, and to find that it brings full measure and -running over--all those privileges were mine. I may have taken my hand -from the plough, and tried to “_cultiver mon jardin_” in other of the -fields of Paradise, but if I did indeed loose my hand from its first -grasp, it was to place it in another, in the hand of the best comrade, -and the gayest playboy, and the faithfullest friend, that ever came to -turn labour to pastime, and life into a song. - -I believe that those who have been Art students themselves will -sympathise with my recollections, and I trust that those who were not -will tolerate them. If neither of these expectations is fulfilled, this -chapter can be lightly skipped. The damage done on either side will be -inconsiderable. - -Drawing and riding seem to me to go farther back into my consciousness -than any other of the facts of life. I cannot remember a time when I had -not a pony and a pencil. I adored both about equally, and if I cannot, -even now, draw a horse as I should wish to do it--a fact of which I am -but too well aware--it is not for want of beginning early and trying -often. - -My education in Art has been somewhat spasmodic. I think I was about -seventeen when a dazzling invitation came for me from a very much loved -aunt who was also my godmother, to stay with her in London and to work -for a term at the South Kensington School of Art. There followed three -months of a most useful breaking-in for a rather headstrong and unbroken -colt. I do not know what the present curriculum of South Kensington may -be; I know what it was then. From a lawless life of caricaturing my -brethren, my governesses, my clergy, my elders and betters generally, -copying in pen and ink all the hunting pictures, from John Leech to -Georgina Bowers, that old and new “Punches” had to offer, and painting -such landscapes in water colours as would have induced the outraged -earth to open its mouth and swallow up me and all my house, had it but -seen them, I passed to a rule of iron discipline. - -1. Decoration, scrolls and ornament in all moods and tenses. - -2. The meticulous study in outline of casts of detached portions of the -human frame, noses, ears, hands, feet; and - -3. The most heart-breaking and time-wasting stippling of the same. - -I well remember how, on a day that I was toiling at a large and knubbly -foot, a full-rigged Mamma came sailing round the class, with a daughter -in tow. The other students were occupied with scrolls and apples and the -like. The Mamma shed gracious sanction as she passed. Then came my turn. -I was aware of a pause, a shock of disapproval, and then the words, - -“A _naked_ foot, my dear!” - -There was a tug on the tow-rope and the daughter was removed. - -I imagine it must have been near the end of my three months that my -detested efforts were made into a bundle and sent up to high places with -a scribble on the margin of one of them, “May Miss Somerville pass for -the Antique? E. Miller.” - -In due course the bundle was returned. Mr. Sparkes, a majestic and -terrible being, wrapped in remoteness and in a great and waving red -beard, as in a mantle of flame, had placed his sign of acquiescence -after the inquiry. Miss Somerville was given to understand that she was -permitted to Pass for the Antique. - -This, however, Miss Somerville did not do. She was (not without deep -regret for all of her London sojourn that did _not_ include the School -of Art) permitted instead to pass the portals of Paddington Station, and -to return to Ireland by “The Bristol Boat,” in other words, an -instrument of the devil, much in vogue at that time among the Irish of -the South, that took some thirty hours to paddle across the Channel, and -was known to the wits of Cork as “The Steam Roller.” It was, I fancy, on -board the Steam Roller that a cousin of mine, when still deep in -hard-earned slumber, and still far outside “The Heads” (_i.e._ the -entrance of Cork Harbour), was assaulted by the steward. - -“Come, get up, get up!” said the steward, shaking him by the shoulder, -with the licence of old acquaintance and authority. - -My cousin replied with a recommendation to the steward to betake himself -to a rival place of torment, where (he added) there was little the -steward could learn, and much that he could teach. - -“Well,” replied the steward, dispassionately, “ye’re partly right. Ye -have an hour yet.” - -Thus I found myself back in Carbery again, left once more to follow my -own buccaneering fancy in the domain of Art, a little straightened and -corrected, perhaps, in eye, and with ideas on matters æsthetic -beneficially widened. But this was due mainly to one who has ever been -my patron saint in Art, that cousin who preferred reverie to -Shakespeare; partly, also, to peripatetic lunches among the pictures and -marvels of the South Kensington Museum; not, I say firmly, to that -heavy-earned Pass for the Antique. - -My next term of serious apprenticeship did not occur for four or five -years, and was spent in Düsseldorf. One of my cousins (now my -brother-in-law), Egerton Coghill, was studying painting there, and -advised my doing the same. It was there, therefore, that I made my first -dash into drawing from life, under the guidance of M. Gabriel Nicolet, -then himself a student, now a well-known and successful -portrait-painter. In the following spring I was there again, for singing -lessons as well as for painting. This time I had Herr Carl Sohn for my -professor, a delightful painter, who helped me much, but on the whole I -think that I learnt more of music than of anything else while I was in -Düsseldorf, and had I learnt nothing of either, I can at least look back -to the concerts at the Ton Halle, and praise Heaven for the remembrance -of their super-excellence. Twice a week came the concerts; it was very -much the thing to go to them, and I have not often enjoyed music more -than I have at those Ton Halle nights, sitting with the good friends -whom Providence had considerately sent to Düsseldorf to be kind to me, -in an atmosphere of rank German tobacco, listening to the best of -orchestras, and enjoying every note they played, while I covered my -programme with caricatures (as, also, was very much the thing to do). - -My friends and I joined one of the big Gesang Vereins, and a very good -two months ended in three ecstatic days of singing alto in the -Rheinische Musik Fest, which, by great good luck, took place that May in -Düsseldorf. - -The Abbé Liszt was one of the glories of the occasion. I saw him roving -through the gardens of the Ton Halle, with an ignored train of admirers -at his heels; an old lion, with a silver mane, and a dark, untamed eye. - -I do not regret those two springs in Düsseldorf, but still less do I -regret the change of counsels that resulted in my going to Paris in the -following year. “When the true gods come, the half-gods go,” and, apart -from other considerations, the Düsseldorf School of Art only admitted -male students, and ignored, with true German chivalry, the other half of -creation. - -Of old, we are told, Freedom sat on the heights, well above the snow -line, no doubt, and, even in 1884, she was disposed to turn a freezing -eye and a cold shoulder on any young woman who had the temerity to climb -in her direction. My cousin, who had been painting in Düsseldorf, had -moved on to Paris, and his reports of the studios there, as compared -with the possibilities of work in Düsseldorf, settled the question for -me. But the point was not carried without friction. - -“Paris!” - -They all said this at the tops of their voices. It does not specially -matter now who they were; there are always people to say this kind of -thing. - -They said that Paris was the Scarlet Woman embodied; they also said, - -“The <small>IDEA</small> of letting a <small>GIRL</small> go to PARIS!” - -This they said incessantly in capital letters, and in “capital letters” -(they were renowned for writing “capital letters”), and my mother was -frightened. - -So a compromise was effected, and I went to Paris with a bodyguard, -consisting of my mother, my eldest brother, a female cousin, and with us -another girl, the friend with whom I had worked in Düsseldorf. We went -to a _pension_ in the Avenue de Villiers, which, I should imagine and -hope, exists no more. - -As I think of its gloomy and hideous _salons_, its atmosphere of garlic -and bad cigars, its system of ventilation, which consisted of heated -draughts that travelled from one stifling room to another, seeking an -open window and finding none; when I remember the thread-like passages, -dark as in a coal mine, the clusters of tiny bedrooms, as thick as cells -in a wasp’s nest; the endless yet inadequate meals, I recognise, with -long overdue gratitude, the devotion of the bodyguard. For me and my -fellow-student nothing of this signified. For us was the larger air, the -engrossing toil of the studio. It absorbed us from 8 a.m. till 5 p.m. -But the wheels of the bodyguard drave heavily, and they had a poor time -of it. - -So poor indeed was it, that, after three weeks of conscientious -sight-seeing and no afternoon tea (“Le Fife o’clock” not having then -reached the shores of France), my mother decided it were better to leave -me alone, sitting upon the very knee of the Scarlet Woman, than to -endure the Avenue de Villiers any longer, and to fly back to what she -was wont to describe to her offspring, if restive, as -“your-own-good-home-and-what-more-do-you-want.” (In this connection, I -remember an argument I once had with her, in which, being young and -merely theoretically affaired with the matter, I furiously asserted my -preference, even--as the fight warmed--my adoration, for the practice of -cremation, and my unalterable resolve to be thus disposed of. My mother, -who would rise to any argument, no less furiously combated the -suggestion, and finally clinched the matter by saying, “Cremation! -Nonsense! I can tell you, my fine friend, you shall just be popped into -your own good family vault!”) - -With the departure of my people, May Goodhall and I also shook off as -much of the dust of the Avenue de Villiers as was possible, and moved to -another _pension_, nearly _vis-à-vis_ the Studio. This latter was an -offshoot of the well-known Atelier Colarossi. It had been started in the -Rue Washington (Avenue des Champs Elysées) in order to secure English -and American clients, as well as those French _jeunes filles bien -élevées_ to whose parents the studios of the Quartier Latin did not -commend themselves. Its tone was distinctly amateur; we were all “_très -bien élevées_’ and “_très gentilles_,” and in recognition of this, a -sort of professional chaperon had been provided, a small, cross female, -who made up the fire, posed the models, and fought with _les élèves_ -over the poses, and hatred for whom created a bond of union among all -who came within her orbit. One of the French girls, Mlle. La C----, -fair, smart, good-looking, bestowed upon me some degree of favour. The -class was wont to do a weekly composition for correction by M. -Dagnan-Bouveret, who was one of the professors; the subjects he selected -were usually Scriptural, and Mlle. La C---- was accustomed to appeal to -me for information. She was, I remember, quite at sea about _La fille de -Jephté_, and explained that the Bible was a book not _convenable pour -les jeunes filles_, whereas the Lives of the Saints were most -interesting, and full of a thousand delicious little horrors. Without -approaching Martin’s Sunday School erudition, I presently found myself -established as the exponent of the composition. I recollect one week, -when the subject was “The Maries at the Sepulchre,” an obsequious German -came to inquire “if eet was in ze morning zat ze holy Laties did co to -ze tomb? Or did zose Laties, perhaps, co in ze efening?” - -Mlle. la C----’s home chanced to be the house next but one to the -Studio, and the Rue Washington was a street of a decorum appropriate to -its name. None the less, a _bonne_ came daily at 12 o’clock to escort -her home for _déjeuner_. There came a day when the _bonne_ failed of her -mission, and on my return at one o’clock, I found my young friend (who -was as old as she would ever, probably, admit to being) faint with -hunger, and very angry, but too much afraid of the wrath of her family -to return alone. - -One wonders whether, even in provincial France, Freedom still denies -herself to this extent. - -In the following spring I went again to Paris, and this time, my friend -May Goodhall being unfortunately unable to come with me, a very -delightful American, and her friend, German by up-bringing, but of old -French noble descent, allowed me to join their _ménage_. Its duties were -divided according to our capacities. Marion A---- was housekeeper, -“Ponce,” by virtue of her German training, was cook, and to me was -allotted the humble _rôle_ of scullion. We had rooms in a tall and -filthy old house in the Rue Madame, one of those sinister and dark and -narrow streets that one finds in the Rive Gauche, that seem as if they -must harbour all variety of horrors, known and unknown, and are composed -of houses whose incredible discomforts would break the spirit of any -creature less inveterate in optimism than an Art student. For Marion and -Ponce and I had decided to abandon the Rue Washington, and to go to -what was known there as “_le Colarossi là-bas_,” the real, serious, -professional studio (as opposed to its refined astral body, “_près -l’Étoile_”), and we now felt ourselves Art students indeed. - -I don’t know how young women manage now, but in those days I and my -fellows were usually given--like the Prodigal Son--a portion, a sum of -money, which was to last for as long or as short a time as we pleased, -but we knew that when it ended there would be no husks to fall back -upon; nothing but one long note on the horn, “Home!”, and home we should -have to go. (I once ran it to so fine a point that I could buy no food -between Paris and London, and when I arrived at my uncle’s house in -London, it was my long-suffering uncle who paid the cabman.) - -Therefore, for the keen ones, the most stringent and profound economies -were the rule. Never did I reveal to my father and mother more than the -most carefully selected details of that house in the Rue Madame. I paid -seven francs per week for my bedroom and _service_, and though this may -not seem excessive, I am inclined now to think that the accommodation -was dear at the money. My room, _au cinquième_, had a tiled floor, but -this was of less consequence, as its size permitted of most of the -affairs of life being conducted from a central and stationary position -on the bed. Thence, I could shut the door, poke the fire, cook my -breakfast, and open the window, a conventional rite, quite disconnected -with the question of fresh air. The outlook was into a central shaft, -full of darkness and windows, remarkable for the variety and pungency of -its atmosphere, and for the fact that at no hour of the day or night did -it cease to reverberate with the thunderous gabble of pianos, the acrid -screeches of the violin--(to which latter I contributed a not unworthy -share)--and, worst of all, the solfeggi of the embryo vocalist. - -The _service_ (comprised, it may be remembered, in the daily franc) -consisted in the occasional offices of a male housemaid, whose -professional visits could only be traced by the diminution of our -hoarded supplies of English cigarettes. Yet he was not all evil. He -reminded me of my own people at home in his readiness to perform any -task that was not part of his duties, and a small coin would generally -evoke hot water. Marion A----, who had retained, even in the Rue Madame, -a domestic standard to which I never aspired, would, at intervals, offer -Léon her opinion of him and his methods. The housemaid, with one of -Ponce’s cigarettes in the corner of his mouth, and one of mine behind -his ear, would accept it in the best spirit possible, and once went so -far as to assure her, with a charming smile, that he had now been so -much and so very often scolded that he really did not mind it in the -least. - -Colarossi, the proprietor of the studios, was a wily and good-natured -old Italian, who had been a model, and having saved money, had somehow -acquired a nest of tumble-down studios in the Rue de la Grande -Chaumière. He then bribed, with the promise of brilliant pupils, some -rising artists to act as his “Professeurs,” and secured, with the -promise of brilliant professors, a satisfactory crowd of rising pupils, -and by various arts he had succeeded in keeping both promises -sufficiently to make his venture a success. The studio in which I worked -was at the top of the building, and was reached by a very precarious, -external wooden staircase; the men-students were on the ground-floor -beneath us. “_Le Colarossi là-bas_” was indisputably serious. The models -were well managed, as might be expected, when no trick of the trade -could hope to pass undetected by “_Le Patron_”; the students were there -to work, and to do good work at that, and the women’s and men’s studios -were all crowded with “_les sérieux_.” Raphael Collin, gloomy, pale, -pock-marked, and clever, and Gustave Courtois--“_Le beau Gustave_”--tall -and swaggering, with a forked red beard, and a furious moustache like -two emphatic accents (both grave and acute), were our professors. They -were both first-rate men, and were respected as much as they were -feared. They went their rounds with--as it were--scythe blades on their -chariot wheels, and flaming swords in their hands. It was nerve-shaking -to hear the cheerful and incessant noises of “_les hommes en bas_” cease -in an instant, as though they had all been turned to stone, and to know -that the Terror that walked in the noonday was upon them. Extraordinary -how that silence, and that awful time of waiting for the step on our -stair, opened the eyes; everything was wrong, and it was now too late to -make it right. And then, the professor’s tour of slaughter over, and the -study, that was “_pas assez bien construit_,” looking with its savage -corrections, as if someone had been striking matches on it, how feebly -one tottered to the old concierge for the three sous’ worth of black -coffee that was to pull one together, and enable the same office to be -performed for the humiliated drawing. It may, however, be remembered to -“_le beau Gustave_” that one _élève_ was spared from the fire and sword -to which he was wont to put the Studio. This was a small and ancient -widow who arrived one Monday morning, announcing that she was -eighty-two, but none the less had decided to become an artist. It was -soon pathetically obvious that she would require a further eighty-two -years, at least, to carry out her intention. Courtois came, regarded -with stupefaction the sheet of brown paper on which she had described, -in pink chalk, hieroglyphs whose purport were known only to herself, -faltered “_Continuez, Madame_,” and hurried on. Despite this -encouragement, the old lady apparently abandoned her high resolve, for -on Saturday she departed, and the Studio knew her no more. - -When I think of Colarossi’s, I can now recall only foreigners; many -Germans, a Czech, who sang, beautifully, enchanting Volksliede of the -Balkans, and whose accompaniments I used to play on a piano that -properly required two performers, one to sit on the music stool and put -the notes down, the other to sit on the floor and push them up again; -they all stuck. There were Swiss, and Russians, and _Finlandaises_; -there was a Hungarian Jewess, a disgusting being, almost brutish in her -manners and customs, yet brilliant in her work; an oily little -Marseillaise, Parthians and Medes and Elamites, dwellers in Mesopotamia -(with a stress upon the first syllable), unclean, uncivilised, -determined, with but one object in life, to extract the last sou of -value from their _abonnements_ (and, incidentally, also to extract from -any unguarded receptacle such colours, charcoal, _punaises_, etc., as -they were in need of, uninfluenced by any consideration save that of -detection.) - -The standard of accomplishment was very high. The Marseillaise, who -looked like a rag-picker, did extraordinarily good work; so, as I have -said, did the Jewess, whose appearance suggested an itinerant barrow and -fried potatoes. (Delicious French fried potatoes! I used to buy five -sous’ worth off a brazier at the corner of the Place S. Sulpice, and -carry them back to the _ménage_ wrapped in a piece of _La Patrie_, until -Ponce, who adored animals, was told very officiously that they were -fried in the fat of lost dogs, and forbade further dealings with the -murderer.) - -Colarossi’s never took “a day off.” Weekdays, Sundays, and holy days, -the studios were open, and there were _élèves_ at work. Impossible to -imagine what has become of them, all those strange, half-sophisticated -savages, diligently polishing their single weapon, to which all else had -been sacrificed. - -Yet when I look back to the Studio, to its profound engrossment in its -intention, its single-hearted sacrifice of everything in life to the one -Vision, its gorgeous contempt for appearances and conventions, I find -myself thinking how good it would be to be five and twenty, and storming -up that rickety staircase again, with a paint-box in one hand, and a -_Carton_ as big as the Gates of Gaza in the other. - -[Illustration: DANS LA RIVE GAUCHE.] - - - - -CHAPTER X - -WHEN FIRST SHE CAME - - -“Sure ye’re always laughing! That ye may laugh in the sight of the Glory -of Heaven!” - -This benediction was bestowed upon Martin by a beggar-woman in -Skibbereen, and I hope, and believe, it has been fulfilled. Wherever she -was, if a thing amused her she had to laugh. I can see her in such a -case, the unpredictable thing that was to touch the spot, said or done, -with streaming tears, helpless, almost agonised, much as one has seen a -child writhe in the tortured ecstasy of being tickled. The large -conventional jest had but small power over her; it was the trivial, -subtle absurdity, the inversion of the expected, the sublimity getting a -little above itself and failing to realise that it had taken that fatal -step over the border; these were the things that felled her, and laid -her, wherever she might be, in ruins. - -In Richmond Parish Church, on a summer Sunday, it happened to her and a -friend to be obliged to stand in the aisle, awaiting the patronage of -the pew-opener. The aisle was thronged, and Martin was tired. She -essayed to lean against the end of a fully occupied pew, and not only -fully occupied, but occupied by a row of such devout and splendid ladies -as are only seen in perfection in smart suburban churches. I have said -the aisle was thronged, and, as she leaned, the pressure increased. Too -late she knew that she had miscalculated her mark. Like Sisera, the son -of Jabin, she bowed (only she bowed backwards), she fell; where she -fell, there she lay down, and where she lay down was along the laps of -those devout and splendid ladies. These gazed down into her convulsed -countenance with eyes that could not have expressed greater horror or -surprise if she had been a boa constrictor; a smileless glare, terribly -enhanced by gold-rimmed _pince-nez_. She thinks she must have extended -over fully four of them. She never knew how she regained the aisle. She -was herself quite powerless, and she thinks that with knee action, -similar to that of a knife-grinder, they must have banged her on to her -feet. It was enough for her to be beyond the power of those horrified -and indignant and gold eye-glassed eyes, even though she knew that -nothing could deliver her from the grip of the demon of laughter. She -says she was given a seat, out of pity, I suppose, shortly afterwards, -and there, on her knees and hidden under the brim of her hat, she wept, -and uttered those faint insect squeaks that indicate the extremity of -endurance, until the end of the service, when her unfortunate companion -led her home. - -It was, as it happens, in church that I saw her first; in our own -church, in Castle Townshend. That was on Sunday, January 17, 1886. I -immediately commandeered her to sing in the choir, and from that day, -little as she then knew it, she was fated to become one of its -fundamental props and stays. A position than which few are more arduous -and none more thankless. - -I suppose some suggestion of what she looked like should here be given. -The photograph that forms the frontispiece of this book was of this -period, and it gives as good a suggestion of her as can be hoped for -from a photograph. She was of what was then considered “medium height,” -5 ft. 5-1/2 in. Since then the standard has gone up, but in 1886 Martin -was accustomed to assert that small men considered her “a monstrous fine -woman,” and big men said she was “a dear little thing.” I find myself -incapable of appraising her. Many drawings I have made of her, and, that -spring of 1886, before I went to Paris, I attempted also a small sketch -in oils, with a hope, that was futile, that colour might succeed where -black and white had failed. I can only offer an inadequate catalogue. - -Eyes: large, soft, and brown, with the charm of expression that is often -one of the compensations of short sight. Hair: bright brown and waving, -liable to come down out riding, and on one such occasion described by an -impressionable old General as “a chestnut wealth,” a stigma that she was -never able to live down. A colour like a wild rose--a simile that should -be revered on account of its long service to mankind, and must be -forgiven since none other meets the case--and a figure of the lightest -and slightest, on which had been bestowed the great and capricious boon -of smartness, which is a thing apart, and does not rely upon merely -anatomical considerations. - -“By Jove, Miss Martin,” said an ancient dressmaker, of the order -generically known as “little women,” “By Jove, Miss, you have a very -genteel back!” And the compliment could not have been better put, though -I think, from a literary standpoint, it was excelled by a commendation -pronounced by a “little tailor” on a coat of his own construction. “Now, -Mr. Sullivan,” said his client anxiously, twining her neck, -giraffe-like, in a vain endeavour to view the small of her own back, -“_is_ the back right?” - -“Mrs. Cair’rns,” replied Mr. Sullivan with solemnity, “humanity could do -no more.” - -Martin’s figure, good anywhere, looked its best in the saddle; she had -the effect of having poised there without effort, as a bird poises on a -spray; she looked even more of a feather-weight than she was, yet no -horse that I have ever known, could, with his most malign capers, -discompose the airy security of her seat, still less shake her nerve. -Before I knew how extravagantly short-sighted she was, I did not -appreciate the pluck that permitted her to accept any sort of a mount, -and to face any sort of a fence, blindfold, and that inspired her out -hunting to charge what came in her way, with no more knowledge of what -was to happen than Marcus Curtius had when he leaped into the gulf. - -It is trite, not to say stupid, to expatiate upon that January Sunday -when I first met her; yet it has proved the hinge of my life, the place -where my fate, and hers, turned over, and new and unforeseen things -began to happen to us. They did not happen at once. An idler, more -good-for-nothing pack of “blagyards” than we all were could not easily -be found. I, alone, kept up a pretence of occupation; I was making -drawings for the _Graphic_ in those days, and was in the habit of -impounding my young friends as models. My then studio--better known as -“the Purlieu,” because my mother, inveighing against its extreme -disorder, had compared it to “the revolting purlieus of some disgusting -town”--(I have said she did not spare emphasis)--was a meeting place for -the unemployed, I may say the unemployable, even though I could -occasionally wring a pose from one of them. - -[Illustration: MARTIN ROSS ON CONFIDENCE.] - -Many and strange were the expedients to which I had to resort in the -execution of those drawings for the _Graphic_. For one series that set -forth the romantic and cheiromantic adventures of a clergyman, and the -lady (Martin) of his choice, the bedroom of a clerical guest had to be -burgled, and his Sunday coat and hat abstracted, at imminent risk of -discovery. In another, entitled “A Mule Ride in Trinidad,” a brother, in -the exiguous costume of bathing drawers and a large straw hat, was for -two mornings one of the attractions and ornaments of the Purlieu, after -which he retired to bed with a heavy cold, calling down curses upon the -Purlieu stove (an _objet d’art_ of which Mrs. Martin had said that it -solved the problem of producing smoke without fire). Of another series -dealing with the adventures of a student of the violin in Paris, I find -in my diary the moving entry, “Crucified Martin head downwards, as the -fiddle girl, practising, with her music on the floor. Compelled H.” -(another female relative whose name shall be withheld) “to pose as a -Paris tram horse, in white stockings, with a chowrie for a tail.” - -These artistic exertions were varied by schooling the carriage horses -across country--in this connection I find mention of a youth imported by -a brother, and briefly alluded to by Martin as “a being like a little -meek bird with a brogue”; tobogganing in a bath chair down the village -hill (Castle Townshend Hill, which has a fall of about fifty feet in -two); “giant-striding” on the flypole in January mud; and, by the -exercise of Machiavellian diplomacy, securing Sorcerer and Ballyhooly, -the carriage horses aforesaid, for an occasional day with a scratch pack -of trencher-fed hounds, that visited the country at intervals, and for -whom the epithet “scratch” was appropriate in more senses than one. - -It is perhaps noteworthy that on my second or third meeting with Martin -I suggested to her that we should write a book together and that I -should illustrate it. We had each of us already made our _début_ in -print; she in the grave columns of the _Irish Times_, with an article on -the Administration of Relief to the Sufferers from the “Bad Times” of -which she makes mention in her memoir of her brother Robert (page 37); I -in the _Argosy_, with a short story, founded upon an incident of high -improbability, recounted, by the way, by the “little meek bird with a -brogue”; and not, I fear, made more credible by my rendering of it, -which had all the worst faults of conventionality and sensationalism. - -The literary atmosphere that year was full of what were known as -“Shilling Shockers.” A great hit had been made with a book of this -variety, named “Called Back,” and two cousins of our mothers’, Mr. W. -Wills (the dramatist, already mentioned), and the Hon. Mrs. Greene -(whose delightful stories for children, “Cushions and Corners,” “The -Grey House on the Hill,” etc., mark an epoch in such literature), were -reported to be collaborating in such a work. But I went to Paris, and -Martin put forth on a prolonged round of visits, and our literary -ambitions were stowed away with our winter clothes. - -In June I returned from Paris; “pale and dwindled,” Martin’s diary -mentions, “but fashionable,” which I find gratifying, though quite -untrue. It was one of those perfect summers that come sometimes to the -south of Ireland, when rain is not, and the sun is hot, but never too -hot, and the gardens are a storm of flowers, flowers such as one does -not see elsewhere, children of the south and the sun and the sea; tall -delphiniums that have climbed to the sky and brought down its most -heavenly blue; Japanese iris, with their pale and dappled lilac discs -spread forth to the sun, like little plates and saucers at a high and -honourable “tea ceremony” in the land of Nippon; peonies and poppies, -arums and asphodel, every one of them three times as tall, and three -times as brilliant, and three times as sweet as any of their English -cousins, and all of them, and everything else as well, irradiated for me -that happy year by a new “Spirit of Delight.” It was, as I have said, -though then we knew it only dimly, the beginning, for us, of a new era. -For most boys and girls the varying, yet invariable, flirtations, and -emotional episodes of youth, are resolved and composed by marriage. To -Martin and to me was opened another way, and the flowering of both our -lives was when we met each other. - -If ever Ireland should become organised and systematised, and -allotmented, I would put in a plea that the parish of Castle Haven may -be kept as a national reserve for idlers and artists and idealists. The -memory comes back to me of those blue mornings of mid-June that Martin -and I, with perhaps the saving pretence of a paint-box, used to spend, -lying on the warm, short grass of the sheep fields on Drishane Side, -high over the harbour, listening to the curving cry of the curlews and -the mewing of the sea-gulls, as they drifted in the blue over our heads; -watching the sunlight waking dancing stars to life in the deeper blue -firmament below, and criticising condescendingly the manœuvres of the -little white-sailed racing yachts, as they strove and squeezed round -their mark-buoys, or rushed emulously to the horizon and back again. -Below us, by a hundred feet or so, other idlers bathed in the Dutchman’s -Cove, uttering those sea-bird screams that seem to be induced by the sea -equally in girls as in gulls. But Martin and I, having taken high -ground as artists and idealists, remained, roasting gloriously in the -sun, at the top of the cliffs. - -That summer was for all of us a time of extreme and excessive lawn -tennis. Tournaments, formal and informal, were incessant, challenges and -matches raged. Martin and I played an unforgettable match against two -long-legged lads, whose handicap, consisting as it did in tight skirts, -and highly-trimmed mushroom hats, pressed nearly as heavily on us as on -them. My mother, and a female friend of like passions with herself, had -backed us to win, and they kept up a wonderful and shameless _barrage_ -of abuse between the petticoated warriors and their game, and an equally -staunch supporting fire of encouragement to us. When at last Martin and -I triumphed, my mother and the female friend were voiceless from long -screaming, but they rushed speechlessly into the middle of the court and -there flung themselves into each other’s arms. - -It was one of those times of high tide that come now and then, and not -in the Golden World did the time fleet more carelessly than it did for -all of us that summer. The mornings for sheer idling, the afternoons for -lawn tennis, the evenings for dancing, to my mother’s unrivalled -playing; or there was a coming concert, or a function in the church, to -be practised for. A new and zealous clergyman had recently taken the -place of a very easy-going cousin of my mother’s, and I find in Martin’s -diary this entry: - -“Unparalleled insolence of the new Parson, who wanted to know, _on -Saturday_, if Edith had yet chosen the hymns!” and again--“E. by -superhuman exertions, got the hymns away” (_i.e._ sent up to the reading -desk) “before the 3rd Collect. Canon ---- swore himself in.” - -Kind and excellent man! Had the organist been the subject sworn about, -no one could have blamed him. It was his hat and coat that we stole. His -wondrous gentleness and long suffering with a rapscallion choir shall -not be forgotten by a no less rapscallion organist. - -When I try to recall that lovely summer and its successor, the year of -the old Queen’s First Jubilee, 1887, I seem best to remember those -magical evenings when two or three boat-loads of us would row “up the -river,” which is no river, but a narrow and winding sea-creek, of, as we -hold, unparalleled beauty, between high hills, with trees on both its -sides, drooping low over the water, and seaweed, instead of ivy, hanging -from their branches. Nothing more enchanting than resting on one’s oars -in the heart of that dark mirror, with no sound but the sleepy chuckle -of the herons in the tall trees on the hill-side, or the gurgle of the -tide against the bows, until someone, perhaps, would start one of the -glees that were being practised for the then concert--there was always -one in the offing--and the Echo, that dwells opposite Roger’s Island, -would wake from its sleep and join in, not more than half a minute -behind the beat. - -Or out at the mouth of the harbour, the boats rocking a little in the -wide golden fields of moonlight, golden as sunlight, almost, in those -August nights, and the lazy oars, paddling in what seemed a sea of opal -oil, would drip with the pale flames of the phosphorus that seethed and -whispered at their touch, when, as Martin has said, - -“Land and sea lay in rapt accord, and the breast of the brimming tide -was laid to the breast of the cliff, with a low and broken voice of -joy.” - -These are some of those Irish yesterdays, that came and went lightly, -and were more memorable than Martin and I knew, that summer, when first -she came. - - - - -CHAPTER XI - -“AN IRISH COUSIN” - - -I think that the final impulse towards the career of letters was given -to us by that sorceress of whom mention has already been made. By her we -were assured of much that we did, and even more that we did not aspire -to (which included two husbands for me, and at least one for Martin); -but in the former category was included “literary success,” and, with -that we took heart and went forward. - -It was in October, 1887, that we began what was soon to be known to us -as “The Shocker,” and “The Shaughraun,” to our family generally, as -“that nonsense of the girls,” and subsequently, to the general public, -as “An Irish Cousin.” Seldom have the young and ardent “commenced -author” under less conducive circumstances. We were resented on so many -grounds. Waste of time; the arrogance of having conceived such a -project; and, chiefly, the abstention of two playmates. They called us -“The Shockers,” “The Geniuses” (this in bitter irony), “The -Hugger-muggerers” (this flight of fancy was my mother’s); when not -actually reviled, we were treated with much the same disapproving -sufferance that is shown to an outside dog who sneaks into the house on -a wet day. We compared ourselves, not without reason, to the Waldenses -and the Albigenses, and hid and fled about the house, with the -knowledge that every man’s hand was against us. - -Begun in idleness and without conviction, persecution had its usual -effect, and deepened somewhat tepid effort into enthusiasm, but the -first genuine literary impulse was given by a visit to an old and lonely -house, that stands on the edge of the sea, some twelve or thirteen miles -from Drishane. It was at that time inhabited by a distant kinswoman of -mine, a pathetic little old spinster lady, with the most charming, -refined, and delicate looks, and a pretty voice, made interesting by the -old-fashioned Irish touch in it; provincial, in that it told of life in -a province, yet entirely compatible with gentle breeding. She called me -“Eddith,” I remember (a pronunciation entirely her own), and she -addressed the remarkable being who ushered us in, half butler, half -coachman, as “Dinnis,” and she asked us to “take a glass of wine” with -her, and, apologising for the all too brief glimpse of the fire -vouchsafed to the leg of mutton, said she trusted we did not mind the -meat being “rare.” - -The little lady who entertained us is dead now; the old house, stripped -of its ancient portraits and furniture, is, like many another, in the -hands of farmer-people; its gardens have reverted to jungle. I wonder if -the tombstone of the little pet dog has been respected. In the shade of -a row of immense junipers, that made a sheltering hedge between the -flower garden and the wide Atlantic, stood the stone, inscribed, with -the romantic preciosity of our hostess’s youth, - - “Lily, a violet-shrouded tomb of woe.” - -But it was the old house, dying even then, that touched our -imaginations; full of memories of brave days past, when the little -lady’s great-grandfather, “Splendid Ned,” had been a leading blade in -“The County of Corke Militia Dragoons,” and his son, her grandfather, -had raised a troop of yeomanry to fight the Whiteboys, and, when the -English Government disbanded the yeomen, had, in just fury, pitched -their arms over the cliff into the sea, rather than yield them to the -rebels, and had then drunk the King’s health, with showy loyalty, in -claret that had never paid the same King a farthing. - -We had ridden the long thirteen miles in gorgeous October sunshine; -before we had seen the gardens, and the old castle on the cliff, and the -views generally, the sun was low in the sky, but we were not allowed to -leave until a tea, as colossal as our lunch had been, was consumed. Our -protests were unheeded, and we were assured that we should be “no time -at all springing through the country home.” (A suggestion that moved -Martin so disastrously, that only by means of hasty and forced -facetiousness was I enabled to justify her reception of it.) The sunset -was red in the west when our horses were brought round to the door, and -it was at that precise moment that into the Irish Cousin some thrill of -genuineness was breathed. In the darkened façade of the long grey house, -a window, just over the hall-door, caught our attention. In it, for an -instant, was a white face. Trails of ivy hung over the panes, but we saw -the face glimmer there for a minute and vanish. - -As we rode home along the side of the hills, and watched the fires of -the sunset sink into the sea, and met the crescent moon coming with -faint light to lead us home, we could talk and think only of that -presence at the window. We had been warned of certain subjects not to be -approached, and knew enough of the history of that old house to realise -what we had seen. An old stock, isolated from the world at large, -wearing itself out in those excesses that are a protest of human nature -against unnatural conditions, dies at last with its victims round its -death-bed. Half-acknowledged, half-witted, wholly horrifying; living -ghosts, haunting the house that gave them but half their share of life, -yet withheld from them, with half-hearted guardianship, the boon of -death. - -The shock of it was what we had needed, and with it “the Shocker” -started into life, or, if that is too much to say for it, its authors, -at least, felt that conviction had come to them; the insincere ambition -of the “Penny Dreadful” faded, realities asserted themselves, and the -faked “thrills” that were to make our fortunes were repudiated for ever. -Little as we may have achieved it, an ideal of Art rose then for us, far -and faint as the half-moon, and often, like her, hidden in clouds, yet -never quite lost or forgotten. - - * * * * * - -Probably all those who have driven the pen, in either single or double -harness, are familiar with the questions wont to be propounded by those -interested, or anxious to appear interested, in the craft of letters. It -is strange how beaten a track curiosity uses. The inquiries vary but -little. One type of investigator regards the _métier_ of book-maker as a -kind of cross between the trades of cook and conjurer. If the recipe of -the mixture, or the trick of its production, can be extracted from those -possessed of the secret, the desired result can be achieved as simply as -a rice pudding, and forced like a card upon the publishers. The -alternative inquirer approaches the problem from the opposite pole, and -poses respectfully that conundrum with which the Youth felled Father -William: - -“What makes you so awfully clever?” “How do you think of the things?” -And again, “How can you make the words come one after the other?” And -yet another, more wounding, though put in all good feeling, “But how do -you manage about the spelling? I suppose the printers do that for you?” - -With Martin and me, however, the fact of our collaboration admitted of -variants. I have found a fragment of a letter of mine to her that sets -forth some of these. As it also in some degree expounds the type of the -examiner, I transcribe it all. - -E. Œ. S. to V. F. M. (_circa_ 1904). - - “She was wearing white kid gloves, and was eating heavily buttered - teacake and drinking tea, with her gloves buttoned, and her veil - down, and her loins, generally, girded, as if she were keeping the - Passover. She began by discussing Archdeacon Z----’s wife. - - “‘Ah, she was a sweet woman, but she always had a very delicate, - puny sort of a colour. Ah no, _not_ strong.’ A sigh, made - difficult, but very moving, by teacake, followed by hurried - absorption of tea. ‘And the poor Archdeacon too. Ah, he was a very - clever man.’ (My countenance probably expressed dissent.) ‘Well, he - was very clever at _religion_. Oh, he was a wonderfully holy man! - Now, _that’s_ what I’d call him, holy. And he used to talk like - that. Nothing but religion; he certainly was most clever at it.’ - - “Later on in the conversation, which lasted, most enjoyably, for - half an hour, ‘Are _you_ the Miss Somerville who writes the books - with Miss Martin? Now! To think I should have been talking to you - all this time! And is it you that do the story and Miss Martin the - words?’ (etc., etc., for some time). ‘And which of you holds the - pen?’ (To this branch of the examination much weight was attached, - and it continued for some time.) ‘And do you put in everyone you - meet? No? Only sometimes? And sometimes people who you _never_ met? - Well! I declare, that’s like direct inspiration!’ - - “She was a delightful woman. She went on to ask me, - - “‘Do you travel much? I love it! I think Abroad’s very pritty. Do - you like Abroad?’ - - “She also told me that she and ‘me daughter’ had just been to - Dublin--‘to see the great tree y’know.’ By the aid of ‘direct - inspiration’ I guessed that she meant Beerbohm of that ilk, but as - she hadn’t mentioned the theatre, I think it was rather a fine - effort.” - -The question put by this lady, as to which of us held the pen, has ever -been considered of the greatest moment, and, as a matter of fact, during -our many years of collaboration, it was a point that never entered our -minds to consider. To those who may be interested in an unimportant -detail, I may say that our work was done conversationally. One or the -other--not infrequently both, simultaneously--would state a proposition. -This would be argued, combated perhaps, approved, or modified; it would -then be written down by the (wholly fortuitous) holder of the pen, would -be scratched out, scribbled in again; before it found itself finally -transferred into decorous MS. would probably have suffered many things, -but it would, at all events, have had the advantage of having been well -aired. - -I have an interesting letter, written by a very clever woman, herself a -writer, to a cousin of ours. She found it impossible to believe in the -jointness of the authorship, though she admitted her inability to -discern the joints in the writing, and having given “An Irish Cousin” a -handling far more generous than it deserves, says: - -“But though I think the book a success, and cannot pick out the -fastenings of the two hands, I yet think the next novel ought to be by -_one_ of them. I wonder by which! I say this because I thought the -conception and carrying out of ‘Willy’ much the best part of the -character drawing of the whole book. It had the real thing in it. If -Willy, and the poor people’s talk, were by one hand, that hand is the -better of the two, say I!” - -I sent this letter to Martin, and had “the two hands” collaborated in -her reply, it could not more sufficingly have expressed my feelings. - -V. F. M. to E. Œ. S. (Sept., 1889.) - - “You do not say if you want Miss ----’s most interesting letter - back. Never mind what she says about people writing together. We - have proved that we can do it, and we shall go on. The reason few - people can, is because they have separate minds upon most subjects, - and fight their own hands all the time. I think the two Shockers - have a very strange belief in each other, joined to a critical - faculty; added to which, writing together is, to me at least, one - of the greatest pleasures I have. To write with you doubles the - triumph and the enjoyment, having first halved the trouble and - anxiety.” - -On January 3rd, 1888, we had finished the first half of “An Irish -Cousin.” - -I find in my diary: “A few last revisionary scratches at the poor -Shocker, and so farewell for the present. Gave it to mother to read. She -loathes it.” - -All through the spring months we wrote and rewrote, and clean-copied, -and cast away the clean copies illegible from corrections. -Intermittently, and as we could, we wrote on, and in Martin’s diary I -find a quotation from an old part-song that expressed the general -attitude towards us: - - “Thus flies the dolphin from the shark, - And the stag before the hounds.” - -Martin and I were the dolphin and the stag. As a propitiatory measure -the Shocker was read aloud at intervals, but with no great success. Our -families declined to take us seriously, but none the less offered -criticisms, incessant, and mutually destructive. In connection with this -point, and as a warning to other beginners, I will offer a few -quotations from letters of this period. - -E. Œ. S. to V. F. M. (Spring, 1888.) - - “Minnie says you are too refined, and too anxious not to have - anything in our book that was ever in anyone else’s book. Mother, - on the other hand, complained bitterly of the want of love - interest. Minnie defended us, and told her that there was now - plenty of love in it. To which Mother, who had not then read the - proposal, replied with infinite scorn, ‘only squeezing her hand, my - dear!’ She went on to say that she ‘_liked_ improprieties.’ I - assured her I had urged you in vain to permit such, and she - declared that you were quite wrong, and when I suggested the - comments of The Family, she loudly deplored the fact of our writing - being known, ignoring the fact that she has herself blazoned it to - the ends of the earth _and_ to Aunt X.” - -Following on this, a protest is recorded from another relative, on the -use of the expression “he ran as if the devil were after him,” but the -letter ends with a reassuring postscript. - -“Mother has just said that she thought Chapter IX _excellent_, ‘most -fiery love’; though she said it had rather taken her by surprise, as she -‘had not noticed a stream of love leading up to it--only jealousy.’” - -At length, in London, on May 24th, the end, which had seemed further off -than the end of the world, came. The MS., fairly and beautifully -copied,--typewriters being then unborn,--was sent off to Messrs. Sampson -Low. In a month it returned, without comment. We then, with, as Dr. -Johnson says, “a frigid tranquillity, having little to fear or hope from -censure, or from praise,” placed it in the hands of a friend to do with -it as he saw fit, and proceeded to forget all about it. - -It was not until the following December that the dormant Shocker -suddenly woke to life. It was on Sunday morning, December 2nd, 1888, -that the fateful letter came. Messrs. R. Bentley & Son offered us £25 on -publication, and £25 on sale of 500 copies of the book, which was to be -published in two volumes at half a guinea each. - -“All comment is inadequate,” says Martin’s diary; “wrote a dizzy letter -of acceptance to Bentley, and went to church, twice, in a glorified -trance.” - -(Thus did a huntsman of mine, having slain two foxes in a morning, which -is a rarer feat in Carbery than--say--in Cheshire, present himself in -gratitude at the priest’s night-school.) - -Passing over intermediate matters, I will follow the career of the -Shocker, which was not published for six months after its assignment to -Messrs. Bentley, six months during which Martin had written several -admirable articles for _The World_ (then edited by Mr. Edmund Yates), -and I had illustrated a picture-book, “The Kerry Recruit,” and written -an indifferent short story, and we had begun to think about “The Real -Charlotte.” For some reason that I have now forgotten, my mother was -opposed to my own name appearing in “An Irish Cousin.” Martin’s _nom de -plume_ was ready to hand, her articles in _The World_ having been signed -“Martin Ross,” but it was only after much debate and searching of -pedigrees that a Somerville ancestress, by name Geilles Herring, was -selected to face the music for me. Her literary career was brief, and -was given a death-blow by Edmund Yates, who asked “Martin Ross” the -reason of her collaboration with a grilled herring; and as well as I -remember, my own name was permitted to appear in the second edition. - -This followed the first with a pleasing celerity, and was sold out by -the close of the year. Any who have themselves been through the mill, -and know what it is to bring forth a book, will remember the joys, and -fears, and indignations, and triumphings, that accompany the appearance -of a first-born effort. Many and various were the letters and -criticisms. Our vast relationship made an advertising agency of the most -far-reaching and pervasive nature, and our friends were faithful in -their insistence in the matter at the libraries. - -“_Have_ you ‘An Irish Cousin?’” was demanded at a Portsmouth bookshop. - -“No, Madam,” the bookseller replied, with _hauteur_, “I have _no_ -H’Irish relations.” - -Looking back on it now, I recognise that what was in itself but a very -moderate and poorly constructed book owed its success, not only with the -public, but with the reviewers, to the fact that it chanced to be the -first in its particular field. Miss Edgeworth had been the last to write -of Irish country life with sincerity and originality, dealing with both -the upper and lower classes, and dealing with both unconventionally. -Lever’s brilliant and extravagant books, with their ever enchanting -Micky Frees and Corney Delaneys, merely created and throned the stage -Irishman, the apotheosis of the English ideal. It was of Lever’s period -to be extravagant. The Handley Cross series is a case in point. Let me -humbly and hurriedly disclaim any impious thought of depreciating -Surtees. No one who has ever ridden a hunt, or loved a hound, but must -admit that he has his unsurpassable moments. “The Cat and Custard-pot -day,” with that run that goes with the rush of a storm; the -_tête-à-tête_ of Mr. Jorrocks and James Pigg, during which they drank -each other’s healths, and the healths of the hounds, and the _séance_ -culminated with the immortal definition of the state of the weather, as -it obtained in the cupboard; Soapey Sponge and Lucy Glitters “sailing -away with the again breast-high-scent pack”--these things are indeed -_hors concours_. But I think it is undeniable that the hunting people of -Handley Cross, like Lever’s dragoons, were always at full gallop. With -Surtees as with Lever, everyone is “all out,” there is nothing in -hand--save perhaps a pair of duelling pistols or a tandem whip--and the -height of the spirits is only equalled by the tallness of the hero’s -talk. That intolerable adjective “rollicking” is consecrated to Lever; -if certain of the rank and file of the reviewers of our later books -could have realised with what abhorrence we found it applied to -ourselves, and could have known how rigorously we had endeavoured to -purge our work of anything that might justify it, they might, out of the -kindness that they have always shown us, have been more sparing of it. - -Lever was a Dublin man, who lived most of his - -[Illustration: EDITH ŒNONE SOMERVILLE.] - -life on the Continent, and worked, like a scene-painter, by artificial -light, from memoranda. Miss Edgeworth had the privilege, which was also -ours, of living in Ireland, in the country, and among the people of whom -she wrote. Of the Irish novels of Miss Lawless the same may be said, -though the angle at which she chose to regard that many-sided and deeply -agreeable person, the Irish peasant, excluded the humour that permeates -Miss Edgeworth’s books. (One recalls with gratitude the “quality toss” -of Miss Judy McQuirk.) That Miss Edgeworth’s father was a landlord, and -a resident one, deepened her insight and widened her opportunities. -Panoramic views may, no doubt, be obtained from London; and what a -County Meath lady spoke of as a “_ventre à terre_ in Dublin” has its -advantages; but I am glad that my lot and Martin’s were cast “in a fair -ground, in a good ground, In Carbery:”--(with apologies to Mr. -Kipling)--“by the sea.” - - * * * * * - -I will not inflict the undeservedly kind comments of the reviewers of -“An Irish Cousin” upon these pages, though I may admit that nothing that -I have ever read, before or since, has seemed to me as entirely -delightful as the column and a half that _The Spectator_ generously -devoted to a very humble book, by two unknowns, who had themselves -nearly lost belief in it. - -August, 1889, was a lucky month for Martin and me. We had a “good -Press”--we have often marvelled at its goodness--we were justified of -our year of despised effort; the hunted Shockers emerged from their -caves to take a place in the sun; we had indeed “Commenced Author.” - - - - -CHAPTER XII - -THE YEARS OF THE LOCUST - - -Before I abandon these “Irish Cousin” years at Drishane, I should like -to say something more of the old conditions there. I do not think I -claim too much for my father and mother when I say that they represented -for the poor people of the parish their Earthly Providence, their Court -of Universal Appeal, and, in my mother’s case, their Medical Attendant, -who, moreover, provided the remedies, as well as the nourishment, that -she prescribed. - -The years of the ’eighties were years of leanness, “years that the -locust hath eaten.” Congested District Boards and Departments of -Agriculture had not then arisen. Successive alterations of the existing -land tenure had bewildered rather than encouraged the primitive farmers -of this southern seaboard; the benefits promised were slow in -materialising, and in the meantime the crops failed. The lowering or -remission of rents did not mean any immediate benefit to people who were -often many years in arrears. Even in normal years the yield of the land, -in the district of which I speak, barely sufficed to feed the dwellers -on it; the rent, when paid, was, in most cases, sent from America, by -emigrated sons and daughters. There was but little margin at any time. -In bad years there was hunger. - -Two or three fairly prosperous farms there were, and for the rest, a -crowd of entirely “uneconomic” holdings, a rabble of fragmentary -patches, scarcely larger than the “allotments” of this present war time, -each producing a plentiful crop of children, but leaving much to be -desired in such matters as the increase of the soil. - -The district is not a large one. It contains about eight miles of fierce -and implacable seaboard, with only a couple of coves in which the -fishermen can find some shelter for their boats, and its whole extent is -but three or four miles in length, by a little more than half as many in -depth. A great headland, like a lion couchant, sentinels it on one side; -on the other, a long and malign spike of rock, thinly clad with heather, -and furze, drives out into the Atlantic, like an alligator with jaws -turned seawards. Not few are the ships that have found their fate in -those jaws; during these past three years of war, this stretch of sea -has seen sudden and fearful happenings, but even these tragedies are -scarcely more fearful than those that, in the blackness of mid-winter -storms, have befallen many a ship on the desperate rocks of Yokawn and -Reendhacusán. - -It is hard to blame people for being ignorant, equally hard to condemn -them for thriftlessness and dirt in such conditions as obtained thirty -years ago in what are now called “Congested Districts.” Thriftlessness -and dirt were indeed the ruling powers in that desolate country. In -fortunate years, desolate and “congested” though it was, its little -fields, inset among the rocks and bogs, could produce crops in -reasonable quantity, and--as I do not wish to overstate the case--not -less luxuriant in growth than their attendant weeds. The yellow ragwort, -the purple loosestrife, the gorgeous red and orange heads of the docks, -only in Kerry can these _fleurs de mal_ be equalled, even in Kerry they -cannot be surpassed. The huge shoulder of the headland is beautiful with -heather and ling of all sorts and shades; the pink sea-thrift--would -that other forms of thrift throve with equal success!--meets the heather -at the verge of the cliffs, and looks like a decoration of posies of -monthly roses. _Osmunda Regalis_ fern fringes the streams, and the -fuchsia bushes have fed on the Food of the Gods and are become trees. On -a central plateau, high over the sea, stands one of the signal towers -that were built at the time of the French landing in Bantry. In its -little courtyard you stand “ringed by the azure world.” From west to -east the ocean is wide before you. On many days I have seen it, in -summer and winter alike lovely; a vast outlook that snatches away your -breath, and takes you to its bosom, making you feel yourself the very -apex and central point of the wondrous crescent line of fretted shore, -that swings from the far blue Fastnet Rock, looking like an anchored -battleship, on the west, to the long and slender arm of the Galley Head, -with its white lighthouse, floating like a seagull on the rim of the -horizon. Between those points, among those heavenly blues and greens and -purples, that change and glow and melt into each other in ecstasies of -passionate colour, history has been made, and unforgettable things have -happened. But standing up there in the wind and the sun, on that small -green circle of grass, hearing the sea-birds’ wild and restless cries, -watching the waves lift and break into snow on the flanks of the Stag -Rocks far below, it is impossible to remember human insanity, impossible -to think of anything save of the overwhelming beauty that encircles you. - -In that climate and that soil anything could flourish, given only a -little shelter, and a little care, and the elimination from the -cultivators of traditional imbecilities; eliminating also, if possible, -fatalism, and the custom of attributing to “the Will o’ God” each and -every disaster, from a houseful of hungry children to an outbreak of -typhus consequent on hopelessly insanitary conditions. - -“How was it the spuds failed with ye?” asked someone, looking at the -blackened “lazy-beds” of potatoes. - -“I couldn’t hardly say,” replied the cultivator, who had omitted the -attention of spraying them; “Whatever it was, God spurned them in a -boggy place.” - -Things are better now. The Congested Districts Board has done much, the -general spread of education and civilisation has done more. Inspectors, -instructors, remission of rents, land purchase, State loans, English -money in various forms, have improved the conditions in a way that would -hardly have been credible thirty years ago, when, in these congested -districts, semi-famine was chronic, and few, besides the “little -scholars” of the National Schools, could read or write, and the breeding -of animals and cultivation of crops was the affair of an absentee -Providence, and no more to be influenced by human agency than the -vagaries of the weather. - -The first of the “Famines” in which I can remember my mother’s -collecting and distributing relief was in 1880. The potatoes had failed, -and I find it recorded that “troops of poor women came to Drishane from -the west for help.” My mother lectured them on the necessity of not -eating the potatoes that had been given them for seed, and assured them, -not as superfluously as might be supposed, that if they ate them they -could not sow them. To this they replied in chorus. - -“May the Lord spare your Honour long!” and went home and boiled the -seed-potatoes for supper. - -Poor creatures, what else could they do, with their children asking them -for food? - -In that same spring came a woman, crying, and saying she was “the most -disthressful poor person, that hadn’t the good luck to be in the -Misthress’s division.” Asked where she lived, she replied, - -“I do be like a wild goose over on the side of Drominidy Wood.” - -Spring after spring, during those dark years for Ireland of the -’eighties, the misery and the hunger-time recurred. Seed-potatoes, -supplied by charity, were eaten; funds were raised, and help, public and -private, was given, but Famine, like its brother, Typhus, was only -conciliated, never annihilated. In 1891 Mr. Balfour’s Relief Fund and -Relief Works brought almost the first touch of permanence into the -alleviating conditions. My mother was among the chief of the -distributors for this parish. Desperate though the state of many of the -people was, Ireland has not yet, thank Heaven, ceased to be Ireland, and -the distribution of relief had some irrepressibly entertaining aspects -that need not wholly be ignored. - -My mother had herself collected a considerable sum of money, for buying -food and clothes (the Government fund being, as well as I recollect, -mainly devoted to the purchase of seed-potatoes). Many were her clients, -and grievous though their need was, it was impossible not to enjoy the -high absurdities of her convocations of distribution. These took place -in the kitchen at Drishane. The women came twice a week to get the food -tickets, and the preliminary gathering in the stable-yard looked and -sounded like a parliament of rooks. Incredibly ragged and wretched, but -unquenchable in spirit and conversation, they sat, huddled in dark -cloaks or shawls, on the ground in rows, waiting to be admitted to the -kitchen when “The Misthress” was ready for them. Most of them had known -nothing of the existence of the fund until told of it by my mother’s -envoys. It was my mission, and that of my brethren, to ride through the -distressed town-lands, and summon those who seemed in worst need, and in -my letters and diaries of these years I have found many entries on the -subject. - -“_Jan. 27, 1891._--Rode round the Lickowen country. Sickened and stunned -by the misery. Hordes of women and children in the filthiest rags. Gave -as many bread and tea tickets as we could, but felt helpless and -despairing in the face of such hopeless poverty.” - -“_January 30._--Jack and I again rode to the West to collect Widows for -the Relief Fund. Bagged nine and had some lepping” (an ameliorating -circumstance of these expeditions was the necessity of making -cross-country short cuts). “Numbers of women came over, some being rank -frauds ably detected by the kitchenmaid; one or two knee-deep in lies.” -“The boys walked to Bawneshal with tea, etc., for two of the worst -widows.” (The adjective refers to their social, not their moral -standing.) - -On another occasion I have recorded that my sister was sent to inquire -into the circumstances of a poor woman with a large family. The latter, -in absorbed interest in the proceedings, surrounded the mother, who held -in her arms the most recent of the number, an infant three weeks old. - -“I have seven children,” said the pale mother, “and this little one-een -that,” she turned a humorous grey eye on her listening family, “I’m -afther taking out of the fox’s mouth!” (The fox playing the part -attributed in Germany to the stork.) - -My sister, absorbed in estimating the needs of the seven little brothers -and sisters, replied absently, - -“_Poor_ little thing! It must have been very frightened!” - -Mrs. Conolly stared, and, in all her misery, began to laugh; “May the -Lord love ye, Miss!” she said compassionately yet admiringly, “May ye -never grow grey!” - -The difficulties of distribution were many, not the least being that of -steeling my mother’s heart, and keeping her doles in some reasonable -relation to her resources. I should like to try to give some idea of one -of these gatherings. Lists of those in most immediate need of help had -been prepared, I do not now remember by whom, and, in the majority of -cases, the names given were those of the males of the respective -households. Therefore would my mother, standing tall and majestic in the -middle of the big, dark, old kitchen at Drishane, her list in her hand, -certain underlings (usually her daughters and the kitchenmaid) in -attendance, summon to her presence--let us say--“John Collins, Jeremiah -Leary, Patrick Driscoll.” (These are names typical of this end of West -Carbery, and the subsequent proceedings, like the names, may be accepted -in a representative sense.) - -The underling, as Gold Stick-in-Waiting, would then advance to the back -door, and from the closely attendant throng without would draw, as one -draws hounds in kennel, but with far more difficulty, the female -equivalents of the gentlemen in question. - -“Now, John Collins,” says my mother (who declared it confused her if she -didn’t stick to what was written in the list), addressing a little -woman, the rags of whose shrouding black shawl made her look like the -Jackdaw of Rheims subsequent to the curse, “Now, John Collins, here’s -your ticket. Is your daughter better?” - -“Why then she is not, your Honour, Ma’am,” replies John Collins in a -voluble whine, “only worse she is. She didn’t ate a bit since.” John -Collins pauses, removes a hairpin from her back hair, and with nicety -indicates on it a quarter of an inch. “God knows she didn’t ate _that_ -much since your Honour seen her; but sure she might fancy some little -rarity that yourself’d send her.” - -There follow medical details on which I do not propose to dwell. My -mother, ever a mighty doctor before the Lord, prescribes, promises “a -rarity,” in the shape of a rice pudding, and John Collins, well -satisfied, swings her shawl, yashmak-wise, across her mouth, and pads -away on her bare feet. - -“Patrick Driscoll!” - -Patrick Driscoll, bony and haggard, the hood of her dark cloak over her -red head, demands an extra quantity, on the plea of extra poverty. - -She is asked why her husband does not get work. - -“Husband is it!” echoes Patrick Driscoll, witheringly, “What have I but -a soort of an old man of a husband, that’s no use only to stay in his -bed!” - -Other women press in through the doorway, despite the efforts of the -underlings, each eloquent of her superior sufferings. Another husband is -inquired for. - -“He’s dead, Ma’am, the Lord ha’ mercy upon him, he’s in his coffin this -minute; and Fegs, he was in the want of it!” - -Yet another has a blind husband. - -“Dark as a stone, asthore,” she says to Gold Stick, “only for he being -healthy and qu’ite, I’d be dead altogether! Well, welcome the Will o’ -God! I might be worse, as bad as I am!” - -Philosophy, resignation, piety, humour, one finds them all in these -bewildering, infuriating, enchanting people. And then, perhaps, a cry -from the heart of the crowd, - -“Sure ye’ll _not_ forget yer own darlin’ Mary Leary!” - -A heartrending appeal that elicits from the Mistress a peremptory -command not to attempt to come out of her turn. - -Nothing could be more admirable than my mother’s manner with the people. -Entirely simple, dictatorial, sympathetic, sensible. She believed -herself to be an infallible judge of character, but “for all and for -all,” as we say in Carbery, her soft heart was often her undoing, and -her sterner progeny found her benevolence difficult to control. She was, -in fact, as a man said of a spendthrift and drunken brother, “too -lion-hearted for her manes” (means). - -“No wonder,” said one of her supplicants, “Faith, no wonder at all for -the Colonel to be proud of her! She’d delight a Black!” - -Whether this imputed to the Black a specially severe standard of taste, -or if it meant that even the most insensate savage would be roused to -enthusiasm by my mother’s beauty, I am unable to determine. - -I have a letter from my companion Gold Stick, from which I think a few -quotations, in exemplification, may be permitted. - -HILDEGARDE SOMERVILLE to E. Œ. S. (Feb., 1891.) - - “The women have swarmed since you left. I really think I know every - one of them now, by voice, sight, and smell, notably Widow - Catherine Cullinane, who has besieged us daily. Her voice is not - dulcet, especially when raised in abusive entreaty, but she has not - got anything out of me yet. It is as well that C. (a brother) and I - are here to manage the show, as Mother is, to say the least, - lavish. I was out one day when a woman called, a Mrs. Michael - Kelleher; she has the most magnificent figure, walk, and throat - that I have ever seen. She is tall, and her throat is exactly like - the Rossetti women’s throats, long and round, and like cream. She - would make a splendid model for you. I had seen her before, and - proved her not deserving,” (O wise young judge of quite nineteen!) - “her husband being a caretaker with a house and 4s. a week, and the - use of two cows, besides a daughter out as a nursemaid. She really - did not exactly beg, but came to see if she had ‘a shance of the - sharity.’ Her eldest boy, aged eleven, had fallen off the cowhouse - roof on to a cow’s back (neither hurt!), and we gave her Elliman, - which cured him. But the day I was out, Mother saw her, and - although I had given _full particulars_ in the book as to her - means”--(her princely affluence in fact, as compared with her - fellows)--“she gave her bread, tea, sugar, and meal, simply because - she had a baby the other day and had a child with a bad cold.” - - Regarding the matter dispassionately, and from a distance, I should - say that either affliction amply justified my mother’s action, but - H. did not then think so. - - “I don’t think this will happen again,” she resumes, severely, “as - Mother now regrets having done it. All the same, I had the greatest - difficulty in stopping her from clothing an entire family with the - Dorcas things, (which are lovely) as I told her, there are not 100 - things, and there are over 200 people, and it seems wicked to - clothe one family from top to toe, so I prevailed. E. says the - Balfour Fund will help very few of our women.” (E. was my cousin - Egerton Coghill, who, like Robert Martin, had given his services to - the Government as a distributor of the Fund, and, in the south and - west of the County Cork, had some of the worst districts in - Ireland under his jurisdiction.) - - “No one with less than a quarter of an acre of land is entitled to - get help,” my sister’s letter continues, “as they can get Out-door - Relief from the Rates, and no one with one ‘healthy male’ able to - work on the Balfour road can have it, in fact, only those with sick - husbands, or widows with farms, are eligible. As the fund is over - £44,000, and I have estimated that £150 would keep our Western - women going for 6 months, it seems to me very unfair to send the - quarter-acre people on to the Rates.” - -It may be gathered from this that the difficulties of administration -were not light; it may also, perhaps, be inferred that the ancient -confidence in the landlord class (none of these people were tenants of -my father’s), which modern teaching has done its best to obliterate, was -not entirely misplaced. I do not claim any exceptional virtues for my -father and mother. Their efforts on behalf of their distressed -neighbours were no more than typical of what their class was, and is, -accustomed to consider the point of honour. It remains to be seen if the -substitutes for the old order will adopt and continue the tradition of -“_Noblesse oblige_.” - -I have heard a beggar-woman haranguing on this topic. - -“I towld them,” she cried, with, I admit, an eye on my hand as it sought -my pocket, “you were the owld stock, and had the glance of the -Somervilles in your eye! God be with the owld times! The Somervilles and -the Townshends! Them was the rale genthry! Not this shipwrecked crew -that’s in it now!” - -I may as well acknowledge at once that Martin - -[Illustration: A CASTLEHAVEN WOMAN.] - -and I have ever adored and encouraged beggars, however venal, and have -seldom lost an opportunity of enjoying their conversation; ancient -female beggars especially, although I have met many very attractive old -men. At my mother’s Famine Conversaziones many beggar-women, whose names -were on no list, would join themselves to the company of the accredited. - -“I have no certain place Achudth!” (a term of endearment), said one such -to me, “I’m between God and the people.” - -It may be said that the people, however deep their own want, are -unfailing in charity to such as she. I had, for a long time, a creature -on my visiting list, or, to be accurate, I was on hers, who was known as -“the Womaneen.” As far as I know, she subsisted entirely on “the -Neighbours,” wandering round the country from house to house, never -refused a night’s lodging and the “wetting of her mouth o’ tay” -generally given “a share o’ praties” to “put in her bag for herself.” -She was the very best of company, and the bestowal of that super-coveted -boon, an old pair of boots, had power to evoke a gratitude that shamed -its recipient. - -“Yes, Hanora,” I have said, “I believe I have a pair to give you.” - -On this the “Womaneen” opened the service of thanksgiving by clasping -her hands, mutely raising her eyes to Heaven, and opening and shutting -her mouth; this to show that emotion had rendered her speechless. She -next seized my reluctant hand, and smacked upon it kisses of a breadth -and quality that suggested the enveloping smack of a pancake when it has -been tossed high and returns to its pan. Her speech was then recovered. - -“That Good Luck may attind you every day you see the sun! That I -mightn’t leave this world until I see you well marrid!” A pause, and a -luscious look that spoke unutterable things. “Ah ha! I’ll tell the Miss -Connors that ye thrated me dacint!” A laugh, triumphing in my -superiority to the Misses Connor, followed, and I made haste to produce -the boots. - -“Oh! Oh! Oh! Me heart ’d open! Ye-me-lay, but they’ll go on me in -style!” - -Then, in a darkling whisper, and with a conspirator’s eye on the open -hall-door: “Where did you get them, asthore? Was it Mamma gave ‘em -t’ye?” (The implication being that I, for love of the “Womaneen,” must -have stolen them, as no one could have parted with them voluntarily.) -Then returning to the larger style. “That God Almighty may retch out the -two hands to ye, my Pearl of a noble lady! How will I return thanks to -ye? That the great God may lave me alive until I’d be crawlin’ -this-a-way”--(an inch by inch progress is pantomimed with two gnarled -and ebony fingers)--“and on my knees, till I’d see the gran’ weddin’ of -my fine lady that gave me the paireen o’ shluppers!” - -I think it will be admitted that this was an adequate return for value -received. - - - - -CHAPTER XIII - -THE RESTORATION - - -It was in June, 1888, that Mrs. Martin became the tenant of Ross House -and that she and her daughters returned to Galway, sixteen years, to the -very month, since they had left it. - -It would demand one more skilled than I in the unfathomable depths of -Irish Land Legislation to attempt to set forth the precise status of -Ross, its house, demesne, and estate, at this time. It is not, after -all, a matter of any moment, save to those concerned. Mrs. Martin had -been staying in Galway, and had paid a visit to Ross, with the result -that she decided to rent the house and gardens from the authorities in -whose jurisdiction they then were, and set herself to “build the walls -of Jerusalem.” The point which may be dwelt on is the courage that was -required to return to a place so fraught with memories of a happiness -never to be recaptured, and to take up life again among people in whom, -as was only too probable, the ancient friendship was undermined by years -of absence, misrepresentation, and misunderstanding. The handling of the -estate had been unfortunate; the house and demesne had been either -empty, or in the hands of strangers, careless and neglectful of all -things, save only of the woodcock shooting, and the rabbit-trapping. -When Mrs. Martin proposed to become a tenant in her old home, it had -been empty for some time, and had suffered the usual indignities at the -hands of what are erroneously known as caretakers. It is possible that -caretakers exist who take care, and take nothing else, but the converse -is more usual, and I do not imagine that Ross was any exception to the -average of such cases. - -The motives that impelled my cousin Nannie to face the enormous -difficulties involved can, however, be understood, and that Martin -should have sacrificed herself to the Lares and Penates of Ross--Ross, -the love of which was rooted in her from her cradle--was no more, I -suppose, than was to be expected from her. - -From her mother had come the initiative, but it was Martin who saved -Ross. She hurled herself into the work of restoration with her own -peculiar blend of enthusiasm and industry, qualities that, in my -experience, are rarely united. Her letters became instantly full of -house-paintings, house-cleanings, mendings, repairs of every kind; what -was in any degree possible she did with her own hands, what was not, she -supervised, inventing, instructing, insisting on the work being done -right, in the teeth of the invincible determination of the workmen to -adhere to the tradition of the elders, and do it wrong. - -Looking back on it, it seems something of a waste to have set a razor to -cut down trees, and the work that was accomplished by “Martin Ross” that -year was small indeed as compared with the manifold activities of “Miss -Wilet.” - -There was everything to be done, inside and outside that old house, and -no one to do it but one fragile, indomitable girl. Ireland, now, is full -of such places as Ross was then. “Gentry-houses,” places that were once -disseminators of light, of the humanities; centres of civilisation; -places to which the poor people rushed, in any trouble, as to Cities of -Refuge. They are now destroyed, become desolate, derelict. To-day - - “The Lion and the Lizard keep - The Courts where Jamshyd gloried and drank deep; - And Bahram, that great Hunter--the Wild Ass - Stamps o’er his Head, but cannot break his Sleep.” - -But even more than the laying waste of Ross House and gardens I believe -it was the torture of the thought that the Ross people might feel that -the Martins had failed them, and that the “Big House” was no longer the -City of Refuge for its dependants in the day of trouble, that chiefly -spurred Martin on, in her long and gallant fight with every sort of -difficulty, that summer, when she and her mother began to face the music -again at Ross. - -In that music, however, there was an undertone of discord that -threatened for a while to wreck all the harmony. There are a few words -that Martin had written, in continuation of the account of her brother -Robert, that explain the matter a little, and I will quote them here. - -“The white chapel that overlooked the lake and the woods of Ross, heard -much, at about this time (_i.e._ the later years of the ’eighties), that -was not of a spiritual tendency. The Land League had been established in -the parish; the branch had for its head, in the then Parish Priest, an -Apostle of land agitation, a man whose power of bitter animosity, legal -insight, and fighting quality, would have made his name in another -profession. He made his mark in his own, a grievous one for himself. He -rose up against his Bishop, supported by the great majority of his -parish, and received the reprimand of his Church. He went with his case -to Rome, and after long intrigue there, came home, a beaten man, -dispossessed of his parish, and was received in Galway with a brass band -and a procession, the latter of which accompanied him, brokenly, but -with persistence, to his home, a distance of about fifteen miles. For -many months afterwards the strange and not unimpressive spectacle -presented itself, of a Roman Catholic Priest defying his Church, and -holding, by some potent spell, the support of the majority of his -parish. Sunday after Sunday two currents of parishioners set in -different directions, the one heading to the lawful Chapel on the hill -and the accredited priest, the other to the green and white ‘Land League -Hut,’ that had been built with money that Father Z. had himself -collected.” - -Martin’s MS. ceases here. I may add to it a little. - -I went to Ross not long after Father Z.’s return from Rome. I chanced -but once to see him, but the remembrance of that fierce and pallid face, -and of the hatred in it, is with me still. He is dead, and I believe -that his teaching died with him. The evil that men do does not always -live after them. The choice of his successor was a fortunate one for the -parish of Rosscahill. Few people out of Ireland realise how much depends -on the personality of the parish priest. Father Z. had had it in his -power to shake a friendship of centuries, but it was deeply rooted, he -could do no more than shake it. His successor had other views of his -duty; in him the people of Rosscahill and the House of Ross, alike, -found a friend, unfailing in kindness and sympathy, a priest who made it -his mission to bring peace to his parish, and not a sword. - -No one was more sensible of this friendship, or more grateful for it -than Martin. What sustained her and made the sacrifice of time, -strength, and money in some degree worth while, during that hard, -pioneer year at Ross, was the renewal of the old goodfellowship and -intimacy with the tenants. Sixteen years is a big gap, but not so big -that it cannot be bridged. Even had the gap been wider, I believe -Martin’s slender hand would have reached across it. As she has said of -the relation between the Martins and their tenants--“The personal -element was always warm in it ... the hand of affection held it -together....”[7] - -And so she and her mother proved it. It was the intense interest and -affection which Martin had in and for the “Ross people” that made -enjoyment march with what she believed to be her duty. She had a gift -for doing, happily and beautifully, always the right thing, at no matter -what cost to herself. A very unusual gift, and one of more value to -others than to its possessor. One remembers the Arab steed, who dies at -a gallop. It was not only that she was faithful and unselfish, but she -so applied her intellect to obliterating all traces of her fidelity and -her unselfishness, that their object strode, unconscious, into the soft -place that she had prepared, and realised nothing of the self-sacrifice -that had gone to its making. With her, it was impossible to say which -was the more beautiful, the gentleness of heart, or the brilliance of -intellect. I have heard that among the poor people they called her The -Gentle Lady; in such a matter, poor people are the best judges. - -In her first letters to me from Ross, the place it held in her heart is -shown, and there is shown also some of the difficulties, the -heartrendings, the inconveniences, the absurdities, of those first -months of reclamation. No one but Martin herself will ever know what -courage and capacity were required to cope with them. She overcame them -all. Many times have I been a guest at Ross, and more wholly enjoyable -visits seldom fall to anyone’s lot. But the comfort and restored -civilisation of the old house had cost a high price. - -V. F. M. to E. Œ. S. (Ross, July, 1888.) - - “It is a curious thing to be at Ross. But it does not seem as if we - were--not yet. It takes a long time to patch the present Ross, and - the one I remember, on to each other. It is, of course, smaller, - and was, I think, disappointing, but it is _deeply_ interesting, as - you can imagine. It is also heartrending.... Everything looks - ragged and unkempt, but it is a fine free feeling to sit up in this - window and look abroad. There are plenty of trees left, and there - is a wonderful Sleeping-Beauty-Palace air about everything, - wildness, and luxuriance, and solitude. As to being lonely, or - anything like it, it does not enter my mind. The amount of work to - be done would put an end to that pretty fast.... The garden is, as - the people told me, ‘the height o’ yerself in weeds,’ not a walk - visible. The hot-house, a sloping jungle of vines run wild; the - melon pit rears with great care a grove of nettles, the stable-yard - is a meadow. We inhabit five rooms in the house, the drawing-room - having been made (by the caretakers) a kitchen. I could laugh and I - could cry when I think of it. There is a small elderly mare here - -[Illustration: MARTIN ROSS. - -H. A. C. -] - -[Illustration: ROSS LAKE.] - - (belonging to the estate) whom we shall use. A charming creature, - with a high character and a hollow back. I spent this morning in - having her heels and mane and ears clipped, and it took two men, - and myself, to hold her while her ears were being done. Car or - conveyance we have none, at present, but we have many offers of - cars. I drive Mama on these extraordinary farmers’ cars, and oh! - could you but see the harness! Mouldy leather, interludes of twine - in the reins--terrific!” - - There follow particulars of the innumerable repairs required in the - house. - - “My hand is shaking from working on the avenue, I mean cutting the - edges of it, which will be my daily occupation for ever, as by the - time I get to the end, I shall have to begin again, and both sides - mean a mile and a quarter to keep right.... The tenants have been - very good about coming and working here for nothing, except their - dinners, and a great deal has been done by them. It is, of course, - gratifying, but, in a way, very painful. The son of the old - carpenter has been making a cupboard for me, also all for love. He - is a very smart person and has been to America, but he is still the - same ‘Patcheen Lee’--(I have altered most of the names - throughout--E.Œ.S.)--“whom Charlie and I used to beat with sticks - till he was ‘near dead,’ as he himself says proudly. - - “We have many visits from the poor people about, and the same - compliments, and lamentations, and finding of likenesses goes on. - This takes up a lot of time, and exhausts one’s powers of - rejoinder. Added to this, I don’t know yet what to make of the - people.... Of course some are really devoted, but there is a - change, and I can feel it. I wish you had seen Paddy Griffy, a very - active little old man, and a beloved of mine, when he came down on - Sunday night to welcome me. After the usual hand-kissings on the - steps, he put his hands over his head and stood in the doorway, I - suppose invoking his saint. He then rushed into the hall. - - “‘Dance Paddy!’ screamed Nurse Barrett (my foster-mother, now our - maid-of-all-work). - - “And he did dance, and awfully well too, to his own singing. Mama, - who was attired in a flowing pink dressing-gown, and a black hat - trimmed with lilac, became suddenly emulous, and, with her spade - under her arm, joined in the jig. This lasted for about a minute, - and was a never-to-be-forgotten sight. They skipped round the hall, - they changed sides, they swept up to each other and back again, and - finished with the deepest curtseys.... I went down to the - Gate-house after dinner, and there discoursed Nurse Griffy for a - long time.” (At Ross, and probably elsewhere in the County Galway, - the foster-mothers of “the Family” received the courtesy-title of - “Nurse,” and retained it for the rest of their lives. I have been - at Ross when the three principal domestics were all ceremoniously - addressed as “Nurse,” and were alluded to, collectively, as “the - Nursies.” After all, at one time or another, there were probably - twelve or fourteen ladies who had earned the title.) “I was amused - by a little discourse about the badness of the shooting of the - tenants here last winter” (_i.e._ the Englishmen who took the - shooting). “Birds were fairly plenty, but the men couldn’t hit - them. - - “‘’Tis no more than one in the score they got!’ says Paddy Griffy, - who was one of the beaters, with full-toned contempt. - - “‘Well, maybe they done their besht,’ says Kitty Hynes, the - Gate-house woman, who is always apologetic. - - “‘You spoke a thrue word,’ says Paddy Griffy, ‘Faith, they done - their besht, Mrs. Hynes! I seen a great wisp o’ shnipes going up - before them, and the divil a one in it that didn’t go from them! - But you may believe they done their besht!’ - - “This wants the indescribable satisfaction of the speaker, and the - ecstasy of Kitty Hynes at finding that she had said something - wonderful.” - -This is a part of her first letter. To those unversed in Ireland and her -ways, the latter may appear incredible, “nay, sometimes even terrible,” -as Ruskin says of the pine-trees; but as I think that enlightenment is -good for the soul, I shall continue to give the history of the renewal -of Ross, as set forth in Martin’s letters, and these may present to the -English reader (to whom I would specially commend the incident of the -children’s tea-party, in all its bearings) a new and not uninteresting -facet in the social life of the most paradoxical country in the world. - -V. F. M. to E. Œ. S. (July ’88. Ross.) - - “I had not heard of F.’s death. It was a shock. He seemed a - thoroughly alive and practical person. I don’t know why it should - be touching that he should rave of his hounds to the end, but it - is. I suppose any shred of the ordinary interests is precious in a - strange unnatural thing, like dying. I think often of a thing that - a countrywoman here said to me the other day, apropos of her sons - going away from her to America. - - “‘But what use is it to cry, even if ye dhragged the hair out o’ - yer head! Ye might as well be singin’ an’ dancin’.’ - - “She was crying when she said it, and was a wild-looking creature - whom you would like to paint, and the thing altogether stays in my - mind. (And now abides in the mouth of Norry the Boat, in “The Real - Charlotte.”) - - “Your letter spent 2 hours after its arrival in Nurse Barrett’s - pocket, while I entertained some thirty of the children about here. - Tea, and bread and jam, and barm bracks”--(a sort of sweet loaf, - made with barm, and “_brack_” _i.e._ “spotted,” with currants)--“in - the lawn, and races afterwards. I had a very wearying day. Cutting - up food in the morning, and then at luncheon I received a great - shock. I had asked a girl who teaches a National School to bring 12 - of her best scholars, and besides these, we had only invited about - half a dozen. At luncheon in comes the teacher’s sister to say that - the teacher had gone to Galway ‘on business,’ and that no children - were coming. Boycotted, I thought at once. However I thought I - would make an effort, even though I was told that the priest must - have vetoed the whole thing, and I sent a whip round to the near - villages, which are loyal, and away I went myself to two more. I - never had such a facer as thinking the children were to be kept - away, and with that I nearly cried while I was pelting over the - fields. I could only find six children, of whom three were too - young to come, and one was a Land Leaguer’s. However two were to be - had, and I pelted home again, very anxious. There I found the half - dozen I knew would come, and divil another. I waited, and after I - had begun to feel very low, I saw a little throng on the back - avenue, poor little things, with their best frocks, such as they - were. I could have kissed them, but gave them tea instead, and - before it was over another bunch of children, including babies in - arms, arrived, and there was great hilarity. I never shall - understand what was the matter about the teacher. She is a nice - girl, but they are all cowards, and she may have thought she was - running a risk. She was here to-day, with a present of eggs and - white cabbage, which was a peace offering, of course.” - - In those bad times this form of stabbing friendship in the back was - very popular. I remember how, a few years earlier, a Christmas - feast to over a hundred National School children was effectively - boycotted, the sole reason being a resolve on the part of the - ruling powers to discourage anything so unseasonable as Peace on - Earth and good will towards ladies. These dark ages are now, for - the most part, past. Possibly, some day, a people naturally - friendly and kind-hearted will be permitted to realise that - patriotism means loving their country, instead of hating their - neighbours. - - At Ross, happily, the hostile influence had but small strength for - evil. Had it been even stronger, I think it would not long have - withstood the appeal that was made to the chivalry of the people by - the gallant fight to restore the old ways, the old friendship. - - Martin’s letter continues: - - “The presents are very touching, but rather embarrassing, and last - week there was a great flow of them; they included butter, eggs, a - chicken, and a bottle of port; all from different tenants, some - very poor. An experience of last week was going to see a party of - sisters who are tenants, and work their farm themselves. In the - twinkling of an eye I was sitting ‘back in the room,’ with the - sisterhood exhausting themselves in praise of my unparalleled - beauty, and with a large glass of potheen before me, which I knew - had got to be taken somehow. It was much better than I expected, - and I got through a respectable amount of it before handing it on - with a flourish to one of my hostesses, which was looked on as the - height of politeness. I wish I could remember some of the - criticisms that went on all the time. - - “‘I _assure_ you, Miss Wilet, you are very handsome, I may say - beautiful. ‘I often read of beauty in books, but indeed we never - seen it till to-day. Indeed you are a perfect creature.’ ‘All the - young ladies in Connemara may go to bed now. Sure they’re nothing - but upstarts.’ ‘And it’s not only that you’re lovely, but so - commanding. Indeed you have an imprettive look!’ This, I believe, - means imperative. Then another sister took up the wondrous tale. - ‘Sure we’re all enamoured by you!’ - - “This and much more, and I just sat and laughed weakly and - drunkenly. Many other precious things I lost, as all the sisters - talked together, yea, they answered one to another. Custom has - taken the edge off the admiration now, I am grieved to say, but it - still exists, and the friend of my youth, Patcheen Lee, is - especially dogmatic in pronouncing upon my loveliness. I am afraid - all these flowers of speech will have faded before you get here; - they will then begin upon you.” - -Another extract from the letters of these early days I will give. The -sister whose return to Ross is told of was Geraldine, wife of Canon -Edward Hewson;[8] it is her account of Martin, as a little child, that -is given in Chapter VIII. - - “Geraldine felt this place more of a nightmare than I did. The old - days were more present with her, naturally, than with me. I pitied - her when she came up the steps. She couldn’t say a word for a long - time. There was a bonfire at the gate in her honour in the evening, - built just as we described it in the Shocker, a heap of turf, - glowing all through, and sticks at the top. Poor Geraldine was so - tired I had to drive her down to it, but she went very gallant and - remembered the people very well. There was little cheering or - demonstrativeness, but there was a great deal of conversation and - some slight and inevitable subsequent refreshment in the form of - porter. - - “I can hardly tell you what it felt like to see the bonfire blazing - there, just as it used to in my father’s time, when he and the boys - and all of us used to come down when someone was being welcomed - home, and it was all the most natural thing in the world. It was - very different to see Geraldine walk in front of us through the - wide open gates, between the tall pillars, with her white face and - her black clothes. Thady Connor, the old steward, met her at the - gate, and not in any ‘Royal enclosure’ could be surpassed the way - he took off his hat, and came silently forward to her, while - everyone else kept back, in dead silence too. Of course they had - all known her well. What with that glare of the bonfire, and the - lit circle of faces, and the welcome killed with memories for her, - I wonder how she stood it. It was the attempt at the old times that - was painful and wretched, at least I thought it so. Edward was - wonderful, in a trying position. In about two minutes he was - holding a group of men in deep converse without any apparent - effort, and he was much approved of. - - “‘A fine respectable gentleman’--‘The tallest man on the - property’--such were the comments.” - -There are two poems that were written many years ago, by one of the -tenants, one Jimmy X., a noted poet, in praise of the Martins and of -Ross, and mysteriously blended with these themes is a eulogy of a -certain musician, who was also a tenant. The first few verses were -dictated to Martin, I know not by whom; the last three were written for -her by the poet himself; his spelling lends a subtle charm. To read it, -giving the lines their due poise and balance, demands skill, the poem -being of the modern mode, metrical, but rhymeless. There is a tune -appertaining to it which offers some assistance in the matter of stress, -but it must here be divorced from its words; since, however, it is a -tune of maddening and haunting incompleteness, a tune that has “no -earthly close,” one of those tunes, in fact, that are of the nature of a -possession (in an evil and spiritual sense), this need not be regretted. - -ROSS. - - It is well known through Ireland - That Ross it is a fine place - The healthiest in climate - That ever yet was known. - - When you get up in the morning - Ye’ll hear the thrishes warbling - The cuckoo playing most charming - Which echoes the place. - - The birds they join in chorus - To hum their notes melodious - The bees are humming music - All over the demesne. - - The place it being so holy - It is there they live in glory, - Honey is flowing - And rolling there in sthrames. - -There follows a panegyric of “Robert Martin Esqur,” the Bard lamenting -his inability to “tell the lovely fatures of the noble gentleman.” - - “Indeed,” he continues, “it sprung through nature - For this gentleman being famous, - The Martins were the bravest - That ever were before. - - “With Colonels and good Majors - Who fought with many nations, - I’m sure twas them that gained it - On the plains of Waterloo.” - -Thus far the dictation; the following four verses are as they came from -the hand of their maker. - - A song composed for Robirt Martin Esqur and one of his tinants - - 1st varce - - Its now we have a tradesman - The best in any nation, - He never met his eaquils, he went to tullamore. - He played in Munstereven - The tune of Nora Chrena - But Garryown delighted the natives of the town. - - 2nd - - He can write music - Play it and peruse it - A man in deep concumption from death he revive - But from the first creation - There was never yet his eaquels - So clever and ingenious with honour and renown. - - 3rd virce - - Patrick he resayved them - So deacent and so plesant - He is as nice a man in features as I ever saw before - When they sat to his table with turkeys and bacon - With Brandy and good ale he would suplie as many more. - He got aninvetation to Dublin with they ladies - They brought him in their pheatons he was playing as they were going - He is the best fluit player from Cliften to Glasnevan - They thought he was inchanted his music was so neat. - - 4th virce - - His fluit is above mention - It is the best youtencal (_utensil_) - That ever yet was mentioned sunce the race of Man - He got it by great intrest as a presant from the gentry - It was sent to him by finvarra the rular of Nockma. - -There are many more varces (or virces) in which the glories of Ross, of -“Robirt” Martin, and of his “tinant,” are hymned with equal ardour, but -I think these samples suffice. - - - - -CHAPTER XIV - -RICKEEN - - -The journey from Drishane to Ross was first made by me in February, -1889. As the conventional crow flies, or as, on the map, the direct line -is drawn, the distance is no more than a hundred miles, but by the time -you have steered east to Cork, and north-west to Limerick, and north to -Ennis, and to Athenry, and to Galway, with prolonged changes (and always -for the worse), at each of these places, you begin to realise the -greatness of Ireland, and to regard with awe the independent attitude of -mind of her railway companies. It would indeed seem that the Sinn Fein -movement, “Ourselves Alone,” might have been conceived and brought forth -by any one of the lines involved in the _trajet_ from Cork to Galway. I -cannot say what are the conditions now, but there was a time when each -connecting link was separated by an interval of just as many minutes as -enabled the last shriek of the train as it left the station to madden -the ear of the traveller. Once I have been spared this trial; it was at -Limerick; a member of the staff was starting with his bride on their -honeymoon. The station palpitated; there were white satin ribbons on the -engine, a hoar-frost of rice on the platform; there was also a prolonged -and sympathetic delay, while the bride kissed the remainder of the -staff. And thus, with the aid of a fleet porter, and by travelling in -“fateful Love’s high fellowship,” I succeeded in shortening my journey -by some two hours, and in taking unawares the train at “The Junction” -(which, as everyone in Munster knows, is the Limerick Junction). - -February is a bad month for the West of Ireland, but there are places, -like people, that rely on features and are independent of complexion. -Ross was grey and cold, windy, rainy, and snowy, but its beauty did not -fail. Martin and I heeded the occasional ill-temper of the weather as -little as two of the wild duck whom we so assiduously strove to shoot. -We had been lent a boat and a gun, and there are not many pleasanter -things to do in a still February twilight than to paddle quietly along -the winding waterways among the tall pale reeds of Ross Lake; in the -thrilling solitude and secrecy of those dark and polished paths anything -may be expected, from a troop of wild swans, or the kraken, down to the -alternative thrill of the splashing, swishing burst upwards of the duck, -as the boat invades their hidden haven. We walked enormously; visiting -the people in the little villages on the estate, making exciting and -precarious short cuts across bogs; getting “bushed” in those strange -wildernesses, where hazel and blackthorn scrub has squeezed up between -the thick-sown limestone boulders of West Galway, and a combination has -resulted that makes as impenetrable a barrier as can well be imagined. -We wandered in the lovely Wood of Annagh, lovely always, but loveliest -as I saw it later on, in April, when primroses, like faint sunlight, -illumined every glade and filled the wood with airs of Paradise. We -explored the inmost recesses of Tully Wood, which is a place of mystery, -with a prehistoric baptismal “bullán” stone, and chapel, in its depths. -There are quagmires in Tully, “shwally-holes” hidden in sedge among the -dark fir-trees, and somewhere, deep in it, you may come on a tiny lake -among the big, wildly-scattered pine-stems, and a view between them over -red and brown bog to the pale, windy mountains of Connemara. - -I was having a holiday from writing, and was painting any model, old or -young, that I could suborn to my use. We searched the National Schools -for red-haired children, for whom I had a special craving, and, after -considerable search, were directed to ask in Doone for the house of one -Kennealy, which harboured “a Twin,” “a foxy Twin”; and there found “The -Twin,” _i.e._ two little girls of surpassing ugliness, but with hair of -such burnished copper as is inevitably described by the phrase “such as -Titian would have loved to paint.” - -There are few evasions of a difficulty more bromidic and more -unwarrantable. “A sunset such as Turner would have loved to paint.” “A -complexion such as Sir Joshua would have loved to paint.” The formula is -invariable. It is difficult to decide whether the stricken incapacity of -description, or the presumption of a layman in selecting for a painter -his subject, is the more offensive. - -“Oh, what a handsome sunset you have!” - -I have heard at a garden party a lady thus compliment the proprietor of -the decoration. - -“I know,” she turned to me, “that you’re delighting in it! What a pity -you haven’t your easel with you!” (Nothing else, presumably, was -required.) The attitude of mind is the same, but there is much in the -way a thing is said. - -A special joy was imparted to Martin’s and my wanderings about Ross by -the presence of the Puppet. I had brought him to Paris (and Martin and I -had together smuggled him home under the very nose of the _Douane_); he -had accompanied me on a yachting excursion (in the course of which I -walked on deck in my sleep, and very nearly walked overboard, the Puppet -following me faithfully; in which case we should neither of us have ever -been heard of again, as the tide-race in Youghal Harbour is no place for -a bad swimmer). He had paid many and various visits with me, and had -passed from a luxury into a necessity. Naturally he came with me to -Ross. He was a very small fox terrier, rather fast in manner, but -engaging; with a heart framed equally for love or war, and a snub nose. -His official name was Patsey; a stupid name, I admit, and conventional -to exhaustion, but of a simplicity that popularised him. There are a few -such names, for humans as for dogs. I need give but one instance, Bill. -(I do not refer to the Bills of humbler life, though I am not sure that -the rule does not apply there also.) The man who hails his friend as -“Bill” feels himself, in so doing, a humourist, which naturally endears -Bill to him. - -It was Fanny Currey, by the way, who called Patsey “The Puppet” (as a -variant of “The Puppy”). There are not many people with any pretensions -to light and leading who did not know Miss Fanny Currey of Lismore. She -is dead now, and Ireland is a poorer place for her loss. I will not now -try to speak of her brilliance and versatility. She was, among her many -gifts, a profound and learned dog-owner, and though her taste had been -somewhat perverted by dachshunds (which can degenerate into a very -lowering habit), it was an honour to any little dog to be noticed by -her. - -The Puppet had various accomplishments. He wept when rebuked, and, -sitting up penitentially, real tears would course one another down his -brief and innocent nose. He could walk on his fore-legs only; he could -jump bog-drains that would daunt a foxhound; even the tall single-stone -walls of Galway, that crumble at a touch, could not stop him. The -carpenter at Ross was so moved by his phenomenal activity that he -challenged me to “lep my dog agin his.” His dog, a collie, was defeated, -and the carpenter said, generously, that he “gave it in to the Puppet -that he was dam’ wise.” - -Many were the vicissitudes through which that little dog came safely. A -mad dog in Castle Haven missed him by a hair’s breadth. (The hair, one -supposes, of the dog that did _not_ bite him.) Distemper fits in Paris -were only just mastered. (It is worthy of note that the cure was -effected by strong coffee, prescribed by a noted vet. of the Quartier -Latin.) In battles often, in perils of the sea; nor shall I soon forget -a critical time in infancy, when, as my diary sourly relates, “Jack and -Hugh” (two small and savage brothers) “rushed to me in state of frantic -morbid delight, to tell me that the puppy had thrown up a huge worm, and -was dying.” - -And all these troubles he survived only to die of poison at Ross. But -this came later, during my second visit, and during that first and happy -time the Puppet and Martin and I enjoyed ourselves without let or -hindrance. - -It is long now since I have been in Galway, and I know that many of the -poor people with whom Martin and I used to talk, endlessly, and always, -for us, interestingly, have gone over to that other world where she now -is. Of them all, I think the one most beloved by her was the little man -of whom she discoursed in one of the chapters of “Some Irish Yesterdays” -as “Rickeen.” This was not his name, but it will serve. Rickeen was of -the inmost and straitest sect of the Ross tenants. His farm, which was -a very small one, was, I imagine, run by his wife and children; he, -being rightly convinced that Ross House and all appertaining to it would -fall in ruin without his constant attention, spent his life “about the -place,” in the stables, the garden, the house; and wherever he was, he -was talking, and that, usually and preferably, to “Miss Wilet.” - -The adoration that was given to her by all the people found its highest -expression in Rickeen. She was his religion, the visible saint whom he -worshipped, he gave her his supreme confidence. I believe he spoke the -truth to her. More can hardly be said. - -Rickeen was a small, dark fellow, with black whiskers, and a pale, -sharp-featured face. We used to think that he was like a London -clergyman, rather old-fashioned, yet broad in his views. He had a -passion for horses and dogs, and was unlike most of his fellows in a -certain poetic regard for such frivolous by-products of nature as -flowers and birds. I can see Rickeen on a fair May morning pulling off -his black slouch hat to Martin and me, with the shine of the sun on his -high forehead, on which rings of sparse black hair straggled, his dark -eyes beaming, and I can hear his soft-tuned Galway voice saying: - -“Well, glory be to God, Miss Wilet, this is a grand day! And great -growth entirely in the weather! Faith, I didn’t think to see it so good -at all to-day, there was two o’ thim planets close afther the moon last -night!” - -And he would probably go on to tell us of the garden o’ praties he had, -and the “bumbles and the blozzums they had on them. Faith, I’d rather be -lookin’ at them than ateing me dinner!” (The term “bumbles” referred, we -gathered, to buds.) - -Martin would contentedly spend a morning in scraping paths and raking -gravel with Rickeen, and, having a marvellous gift of memory, would -justify herself of her idleness by repeating to me, at length, one of -his recitals. Some of these, as will presently be discovered, she has -written down, but the written word is a poor thing. “When the lamp is -shattered, the light in the dust lies dead.” For anyone who knew the -perfection of Martin’s rendering of the tones of West Galway, of the -gestures, the pauses, that give the life of a story, the words lying -dead on the page are only a pain. Perhaps, some day, portable and -bindable phonography will be as much part of a book as its pictures are. - -Phonetic spelling in matters of dialect is a delusive thing, to be used -with the utmost restraint. It is superfluous for those who know, boring -for those who do not. Of what avail is spelling when confronted with the -problem of indicating the pronunciation of, for example, “Papa”; the -slurring and softening of the consonant, the flattening of the vowel -sound--how can these be even indicated? And, spelling or no, can any -tongue, save an Irish one, pronounce the words “being” and “ideal,” as -though they owned but one syllable? Long ago Martin and I debated the -point, and the conclusion that we then arrived at was that the root of -the matter in questions of dialect was in the idiomatic phrase and the -mental attitude. The doctrine of “Alice’s” friend, the Duchess, still -seems to me the only safe guide. “Take care of the sense, and the sounds -will take care of themselves.” - -There was a sunny spring afternoon at Ross, and Martin and Rickeen and I -and the Puppet went forth together to erect a wall of “scraws,” _i.e._ -sods, round the tennis ground. As soon as there was a sufficient -elevation for the purpose, we seated ourselves on the scraws, and the -business of conversation with Rickeen, that had, in some degree, been -interfered with by his labours in scraw-cutting and lifting, was given -full scope. The Puppet was a little below us, hunting young rabbits in -the dead bracken. At intervals we could see him, proceeding in -grasshopper springs through the bracken (which is the correct way to -draw heavy covert, as all truly sporting little dogs know), throughout -we could hear him. Rooks in the tall elms behind the stables, feeding -their young ones, made a pleasing undercurrent of accompaniment to the -Puppet’s soprano solo. There was a bloom of green over the larches; -scraps of silver glinting between the tree stems represented the lake. -The languor of spring was in the air, and it seemed exercise enough to -watch Rickeen’s wondrous deftness in marking, cutting, and lifting the -scraws on the blade of his narrow spade, and tossing them accurately on -to their appointed spot on the rising wall. - -Martin had a Maltese charm against the “_Mal Occhio_”; a curious silver -thing, whose design included a branch of the Tree of Life, and clenched -fists, and a crescent moon, and other symbolisms. This, and its uses, -she expounded to Rickeen, and he, in his turn, offered us his experience -of the Evil Eye, and of suitable precautions against it. - -“Look now, Miss Wilet, if a pairson ’d say ‘that’s a fine gerr’l,’ or ‘a -fine cow,’ or the like o’ that, and wouldn’t say ‘God bless him!’ that’s -what we’d call ‘Dhroch Hool.’[9] That’s the Bad Eye. Maybe, then, the -one he didn’t say ‘God bless them’ to would fall back, or dhrop down, or -the like o’ that; and then, supposin’ a pairson ’d folly the one that -gave the Bad Eye, and to bring him back, and then if that one ’d bate -three spits down on the one that was lyin’ sthritched, and to say ‘God -bless him,’ he’d be all right.” - -Strange how wide is the belief in the protective power of this simple -provision of Nature. From the llama to the cat, it is relied on, and by -the cat, no doubt, it was suggested to the human being as a means of -defiance and frustration. There was a beggar-woman who, as my mother has -told me, did not fail on the occasion of any of our christenings to -bestow upon the infant an amulet of this nature. She had a magnificent -oath, reserved, I imagine, for great occasions. - -“By the Life of Pharaoh!” she would say, advancing upon the baby, “I -pray that all bad luck may be beyant ye, and that my luck may be in your -road before ye!” - -The amulet would then be administered. - -Martin and Rickeen and I discoursed, I remember, for some time upon -these subjects. The mysterious pack of white hounds who hunt the woods -of Ross, whose music has been heard more than once, and the sight of -which has been vouchsafed to some few favoured ones, was touched on, and -Martin told of an Appearance that had come to her and some of her -brothers and sisters, one dusky evening, in the Ross avenue. Something -that was first like a woman walking quickly towards them, and then rose, -vast and toppling, like a high load of hay, and then sank down into -nothingness. - -“Ah sure, the Avenue!” said Rickeen, as one that sets aside the thing -that is obvious. “No one wouldn’t know what ’d be in it. There was one -that seen fairies as thick as grass in it, and they havin’ red caps on -them!” - -He turned from us, and fell to outlining the scraws that he was going to -cut. We watched him for a space, while the afternoon shadow of the -house crept nearer to us down the slope, and Martin began to talk of the -coach that drives to Ross when the head of the house dies. At the death -of her grandfather she had been too little to comprehend such things. - -“I can only remember ‘The Old Governor’ in snatches,” she said. - -From across the lake the rattle of the mail car on the Galway road came, -faintly, and mysterious enough to have posed as the sound of the ghostly -coach. The staccato hunting yelps of the Puppet had died down, and from -among the boughs of a small beech tree, a little hapless dwarf of a -tree, twisted by a hundred thwarted intentions, a thrush flung a spray -of notes into the air, bright and sudden as an April shower. Rickeen -paused. - -“Ye’d like to be leshnin’ to the birds screechin’,” he remarked -appreciatively; “But now, Miss Wilet, as for the coach, I dunno. There’s -quare things goin’; ye couldn’t hardly say what harm ’d be in them, only -ye’d friken when ye’d meet them.” He gave his white flannel bauneen, -which is a loose coat, an extra twist, stuffing the corners that he had -twisted together inside the band of his trousers, and entered upon his -narration. - -“I remember well the time the Owld Governor, that’s yer grandfather, -died. Your father was back in Swineford, in the County Mayo, the same -time, and the Misthress sent for me and she give me a letther for him. -‘Take the steamer to Cong,’ says she, ‘and dhrive then, and don’t rest -till ye’ll find him.’ - -“But sure Louisa Laffey, that was at the Gate-house that time, she says -to me, ‘Do not,’ says she, ‘take the steamer at all,’ says she. ‘Go -across the ferry,’ says she, ‘an’ dhrive to Headford and ye’ll get -another car there.’ - -“I was a big lump of a boy that time, twenty years an’ more maybe, and -faith, I didn’t let on, but God knows I was afraid goin’ in it. ’Twas -night on me when I got to Headford, and when I wint to th’ hotel that -was in it, faith sorra car was before me; but the gerr’l that was -mindin’ th’ hotel says, ‘D’ye see the house over with the light in it?’ -‘I do,’ says I. ‘Maybe ye’d get a car in it,’ says she. Faith, the man -that was there ruz out of his bed to come with me!” - -A pause, to permit us to recognise the devotion of the man. - -“We went dhrivin’ then,” resumed Rickeen, with a spacious gesture, -“dhrivin’ always, and it deep in the night, and we gettin’ on till it -was near Claremorris, back in the County Mayo. Well, there was a hill -there, and a big wood, and when we come there was a river, and it up -with the road, and what ’d rise out of it only two wild duck! Faith, the -horse gave a lep and threwn herself down, an’ meself was thrown a-past -her, and the man the other side, and he broke his little finger, and the -harness was broke.” - -He dwelt for a moment on the memory, and we made comment. - -“What did we do, is it?” Rickeen went on. “To walk into the town o’ -Swineford we done. ‘It’s hardly we’ll find a house open in it,’ says the -fella that was dhrivin’ me. But what ’d it be but the night before the -Fair o’ Swineford, and there was lads goin’ to the fair that had boots -for mendin’, and faith we seen the light in the shoemaker’s house when -we come into the town.” - -“That was luck for you,” said Martin. - -Rickeen turned his dark eyes on her, and then on me, with an expression -that had in it something of pity, and something of triumph, the triumph -of the story-teller who has a stone in his sling. - -“‘Twas a half door was in it,” he went on, “and when I looked over the -door, faith I started when I seen the two that was inside, an’ they -sewin’ boots. Two brothers they were, an’ they as small--!” He spread -forth his two lean brown hands at about three feet above the ground, -“an’ not as much mate on them as ’d bait a mouse thrap, an’ they as -quare--!” He turned aside, and secretly spat behind his hand. “Faith, I -wasn’t willin’ to go in where they were. ’Twasn’t that they were that -small entirely, nor they had no frump on thim----” - -“No _what_, Rick?” we ventured. - -“No frump like, on their shoulder,” Rick said, with an explanatory hand -indicating a hump; “but faith, above all ever I seen I wouldn’t wish to -go next or nigh them! - -“The man that was with me put a bag on the horse’s head. ‘Come inside,’ -says he, ‘till they have the harness mended.’ ‘I’ll stay mindin’ the -horse,’ says I, ‘for fear would she spill the oats.’ ‘I know well,’ says -he, ‘ye wouldn’t like to go in where thim is!’ ‘Well then, God knows I -would not!’ says I, ‘above all ever I seen!’” - -“And had they the Bad Eye?” said Martin. - -Rickeen again turned aside, and the propitiatory or protective act was -repeated. - -“I dunno what way was in thim,” he replied, cautiously, “but b’lieve me -’twas thim that could sew!” - -At this point a long and seemingly tortured squeal from the Puppet told -that the rabbit had at long last broken covert. I cannot now remember if -he or the rabbit had the pre-eminence--I think the rabbit--but the -immediate result was that for us the story of those Leprechaun brethren -remained unfinished, which is, perhaps, more stimulating, and leaves the -imagination something to play with. - - - - -CHAPTER XV - -FAITH AND FAIRIES - - -In our parts of Ireland we do not for a moment pretend to be too -civilised for superstition. When Cromwell offered the alternative of -“Hell or Connaught,” with, no doubt, the comfortable feeling that it was -a case of six of one and half a dozen of the other, more creatures than -he knew of accepted the latter refuge. And when, in the County Cork, the -ancient saying was proved that “Beyond the Leap”--which is a village -about twelve miles inland from the Western Ocean--was indeed “beyond the -Law,” and that the King’s writ, if it ran at all, ran for its life in -the wrong direction, sanctuary was found there, also, for more than the -hard-pressed people of the land. - -The “Fairies and Bridhogues and Witches” of the old song fled west and -south; in Galway, in Kerry and in Cork, they are still with us. Have I -not seen and handled a little shoe that was found in a desolate pass of -the Bantry mountains? It was picked up seventy or eighty years ago by a -countryman, who was crossing a pass at dawn to fetch the doctor to his -child. It is about two and a half inches long, and is of leather, in all -respects like a countryman’s brogue, a little worn, as if the wearer had -had it in use for some time. The countryman gave it to the doctor, and -the doctor’s niece showed it to me, and if anyone can offer a more -reasonable suggestion than that a Leprechaun made it for a fairy -customer, who, like Cinderella, dropped it at a dance in the mountains, -I should be glad to hear it. - -At Delphi, in Connemara, to two brothers, a Bishop and a Dean of the -Irish Church, many years before its disestablishment, when Bishops were -Lords Spiritual and Temporal, and by no means people to be trifled with, -to these, and to their sister, there came visibly down the beautiful -Erriff river a boatload of fairies. They disembarked at a little -strand--one of those smooth and golden river strands that were obviously -created in order to be danced on by fairies--and there the fairies -danced, under the eyes of “Tom of Tuam” (thus I have heard that Bishop -irreverently spoken of by my cousin Nannie Martin), and of his brother, -the Dean, and of their sister; but to what music I know not. They were -possibly related to the Ross fairies, as it was noted (by the Bishop’s -sister, I believe) that they “wore red caps, and were very small and -graceful.” - -Not half a mile from Drishane Gate there is a little wood that has not -the best of reputations. At its western end there is an opening, out of -the road that traverses it, that has been immemorially called the -Fairies’ Gap. I have in vain striven to obtain the facts as to the -Fairies’ Gap. Such information as was obtainable had no special -connection with Those People, yet was vague and disquieting. That there -was Something within in the wood, and it might come out at you when -you’d be going through it late of an evening, but if “you could have a -Friendly Ghost to be with you, there could no harm happen you.” The -thought of the friendly ghost is strangely soothing and reassuring; -perhaps oftener than one knows one has a kind and viewless companion to -avert danger. - -Only eighteen months ago I was told of an old man who was coming from -the West into Castle Townshend village to get his separation allowance. -“A decent old man he was too, and he a tailor, with a son in the army in -France. He was passing through the wood, and it duskish, and what would -he see but the road full of ladies, ten thousand of them, he thought. -They passed him out, going very quietly, like nuns they were, and there -was one o’ them, and when she passed him out, he said she looked at him -so pitiful, ‘Faith,’ says the old tailor, ‘if I had a fi’ pun note to my -name I’d give it in Masses for her soul!’” - -I was told by a woman, a neighbour of mine, of a young wife who lived -among these hills, and was caught away by the fairies and hidden under -Liss Ard Lake. “A little girl there was, of the Driscolls, that was sent -to Skibbereen on a message, and when she was coming home, at the bridge, -east of the lake, one met her, and took her in under the lake entirely. -And she seen a deal there, and great riches; and who would she meet only -the young woman that was whipped away. ‘Let you not eat e’er a thing,’ -says she to the little girl, ‘the way Theirselves ’ll not be able to -keep you.’ She told the little girl then that she should tell her -husband that on a night in the week she would go riding with the -fairies, and to let him wait at the cross-roads above on Bluidth. -Herself would be on the last horse of them, and he a white horse, and -when the husband ’d see her, he should catch a hold of her, and pull her -from the horse, and keep her. The little girl went home, and she told -the husband. The husband said surely he would go and meet her the way -she told him; but the father of the woman told him he would be better -leave her with them now they had her, as he would have no more luck -with her, and in the latter end the husband was said by him, and he left -the woman with them.” - -I know the cross-roads above on Bluidth; often, coming back from -hunting, “and it duskish,” with the friendly hounds round my horse, and -my home waiting for me, I have thought of the lost woman that was riding -the white horse at the end of the fairy troop, and of the tragic eyes -that watched in vain for the coward husband. - - * * * * * - -We have, or had, a saint in Castle Haven parish, Saint Barrahane was his -name, and his Well of Baptism is still honoured and has the usual -unattractive tributes of rag on its over-shadowing thorn-bush. The well -is in a deep, wooded glen, just above a graveyard that is probably of an -equal age with it. The graveyard lies on the shore, under the lee of -that castle that stood the bombardment from Queen Elizabeth’s sea -captains; the sea has made more than one sally to invade the precincts, -but the protecting sea wall, though it has been undermined and sometimes -thrown down, has not, so far, failed of its office. It is considered a -good and fortunate place to be buried in. All my people lie there, and I -think there should be luck for those who lie in a place of such ancient -sanctity. It is held that the last person who is buried in it has to -keep the graveyard in order, and--in what way is not specified--to -attend to the wants of his neighbours. I can well remember seeing a race -between two funerals, as to which should get their candidate to the -graveyard first. A very steep and winding lane leads down to the sea, -and down it thundered the carts with the coffins, and their following -_cortéges_. - -In the next parish to Castle Haven there is a graveyard - -[Illustration: E. Œ. SOMERVILLE ON TARBRUSH.] - -lonelier even than that of Saint Barrahane. Like most of the ancient -burial places it is situated close to the sea, probably to permit of the -funerals taking place by boat, in times when roads hardly existed. -There, at the top of the cliffs, among the ruins of a church, and among -the dreadful wreck of tombs too old even for tradition to whisper whose -once they were, there took place, not long ago, the funeral of a certain -woman, who was well known and well loved. I was told of an old -beggar-woman who walked many miles to see the last of a friend. - -“She rose early, and she hasted, and she was at the gate of the -graveyard when the funeral was coming,” another woman told me; “an’ when -she seen them, and they carrying in the corpse, she let the owld cloak -back from her. And when she seen the corpse pass her, she threw up the -hands, and says she, ‘That your journey may thrive wid ye!’” - -That journey that we think to be so long and dark and difficult. Perhaps -we may find, as in so many of our other journeys, that it is the -preparation and the setting forth that are the hardest part of it. - -In Ireland, at all events, it is certain that a warning to the -traveller, or to the friends of the traveller, is sometimes vouchsafed. -Things happen that are explainable in no commonsense, commonplace way; -things of which one can only say that they are withdrawals for an -instant of the curtain that veils the spiritual from the material. I -speak only of what I have personal knowledge, and I will not attempt to -justify my beliefs to anyone who may consider either that I have -deceived myself, or that the truth is not in me. In the spring of 1886 -one of my great-aunts died. She had been a Herbert, from the County -Kerry, and had married my grandfather’s brother, Major John Somerville. -Her age “went with the century,” and when heavy illness came upon her -there was obviously but little hope of her recovery. I went late one -afternoon to inquire for her. She lived in a small house just over the -sea, and my way to it from Drishane lay through a dark little grove of -tall trees; a high cliff shut out the light on one hand, below the path -were the trees, straining up to the height of the cliff, and below the -trees, the sea, which, on that February evening, strove, and tossed, and -growled. The last news had been that she was better, but as I went -through the twilight of the trees a woman’s voice quite near me was -lifted up in a long howl, ending in sobs. I said to myself that Aunt -Fanny was dead, and this was “Nancyco,” her ancient dairy-woman, keening -her. In a moment I heard the cry and the sobs again, such large, -immoderate sobs as countrywomen dedicate to a great occasion, and as I -hurried along that gloomy path the crying came a third time. Decidedly -Aunt Fanny was dead. Arrived at the house, it was quite a shock to hear -that, on the contrary, she was better. I asked, with some indignation, -why, this being so, Nancyco was making such a noise. I was told that -Nancyco hadn’t been “in it” all day; that she was at home, and that -there was no one “in it.” I said naught of my Banshee, but when, three -days afterwards, the old lady slipped out through that opening in the -curtain, I remembered her warning. - -Such a thing has happened thrice in my knowledge; the second time on a -lovely June night, the night of the eve of St. John, when every hill was -alight with bonfires, and one might hope the powers of evil were -propitiated and at rest. Yet, on that still and holy night, six boys and -girls, the children of some of my father’s tenants, were drowned on -their way home from a church festival that they had attended at Ross -Carbery. The party of eight young people had rowed along the coast to -Ross harbour, and of the eight but two returned. At “the mid-hour of -night” my sister, who was then only a child, came running to my room for -shelter and reassurance. She had been wakened by the crying of a woman, -in the garden under her window; the crying came in successive bursts, -and she was frightened. At breakfast the news of the drowning was -brought to my father. It had happened near an island, and it was at just -about the time that the voice had broken the scented peace of the June -night that the boatload of boys and girls were fighting for their lives -in the black water, and some of them losing the fight. - -One other time also I know of, though the warning was not, as I might -have expected, given to me personally. The end was near, and the voice -cried beneath the windows of the room in which Martin lay. The hearing -of it was, perhaps in mercy, withheld from me. The anguish of those -December days of 1915 needed no intensifying. - - - - -CHAPTER XVI - -BELIEFS AND BELIEVERS - - -There is, I imagine, some obscure connection between the Fairies and the -Evil Eye. There was “an old Cronachaun of a fellow,” who lived in the -parish of Myross, who was said to be “away with the Fairies” a great -deal, and, whether as a resulting privilege or not I cannot say, he also -had the Bad Eye. It was asserted that he could go to the top of Mount -Gabriel, which is a good twenty miles away, in five minutes. It seems a -harmless feat, but it must be said that Mount Gabriel, in spite of its -name, is not altogether to be trusted. It is the sort of place where the -“Fodheen Mara” might come on at any moment. The Fodheen Mara is a sudden -loss of your bearings, and a bewilderment as to where you are, that -prevails, like a miasma, in certain spots; but, Rickeen has told me, “if -a person ’d have as much sense as to turn anything he’d have on him -inside out, he’d know the way again in the minute.” Or the “Fare Gurtha” -might assail you, and it is even more awful than the Fodheen Mara, being -a sudden starvation that doubles you up and kills you, unless you can -instantly get food. Also, on Mount Gabriel’s summit there is a lake, and -it is well known that a heifer that ran into the lake came back to her -owner out of the sea, “below in Schull harbour,” which implies something -wrong, somewhere. - -A neighbour of the old Cronachaun (which means a dwarfish cripple), and -presumably a rival in the Black Arts, was accused by the Cronachaun’s -wife of being “an owld wicked divil of a witch-woman, who is up to -ninety years, but she can’t die because she’s that bad the Lord won’t -take her! Sure didn’t she look out of her door and see meself going by, -and says she ‘Miggera Murth’! (and that means ‘misfortune to ye’) and -the owld daughther she has, she looked out too, and she says, three -times over, ‘Amin-a-heerna!’ and after that what did I do but to fall -off the laddher and break me leg!” - -“Amin-a-heerna” is a reiterated amen. No wonder the curse operated. - -I have myself, when pursuing the harmless trade of painter, been -credited with the possession of the Evil Eye. In the Isle of Aran, -Martin has told how “at the first sight of the sketch book the village -street becomes a desert; the mothers, spitting to avert the Bad Eye, -snatch their children into their houses, and bang their doors. The old -women vanish from the door-steps, the boys take to the rocks.” We are -too civilised now in West Carbery to hold these opinions, but I can -recollect the speed with which an old man, a dweller in an unfashionable -part of Castle Townshend, known as Dirty Lane, fled before me down that -thoroughfare, declaring that the Lord should take him, and no one else -(a _jeu d’esprit_ which I cannot but think was unintentional). - -Probably - - “In the dacent old days - Before stockings and stays - Were invented, or breeches, top-boots and top-hats,” - -all illness was attributed to ill-wishers. It is certain that charms and -remedies, all more or less disgusting, are still relied on, and are -exhibited with a faith that is denied to the doctor’s remedies, and -that wins half the battle in advance. - -“Ha, thim docthors!” said a dissatisfied patient on hearing of the death -of his medical adviser. “They can let themselves die too!” - -I think it advisable, for many reasons, to withhold such recipes as I -can now recall, but I may offer a couple of samples that will possibly -check any desire for more. - -In typhoid fever: “close out” all the windows, and anoint the patient -from head to foot with sheep’s butter. - -In whooping-cough: the patient should be put “under an ass, and over an -ass”; but a better method is to induce a gander to spit down the -sufferer’s throat. - -“A lucky hand” in doctor or nurse is of more value than many diplomas. -There is an old woman whose practice has been untrammelled by the -fetters or follies of science. - -“The cratures!” she says of her clients. “They sends for me, and I goes -to them, and I gives them the best help I can. And sure the Lord -Almighty’s very thankful to me; He’d be glad of a help too.” - -She is now “pushing ninety,” but she is still helping. - -If a quack is not procurable, a doctor with a hot temper is generally -well thought of. Martin made some notes of a conversation that she had -with a countryman in West Carbery, which exemplified this fact. The “Old -Doctor” referred to was noted for his potency in language as in physic, -and it was valued. - -“Lave him curse, Ma’am!” whispered a patient to the doctor’s -expostulating wife, “For God’s sake, lave him curse!” - -“I had to wait in a hayfield at the top of the Glen,” Martin’s notes -record, “while E. was haranguing at a cottage about a litter of cubs, -whose Mamma considered that chicken, now and then, was good for them. -There was a man making the hay into small cocks, with much the same -delicate languor with which an invalid arranges an offering of flowers. -Glandore Harbour was spread forth below me, a lovely space of glittering -water, and the music of invisible larks drifted down in silver shreds -through air that trembled with heat. This, I thought, is a good place in -which to be, and I selected a haycock capable of supporting me, and the -haymaker and I presently fell into converse. The talk, I now forget why, -turned to the medical profession. - -“‘Thim Cork docthors was very nice,’ said the man, pausing from his -labours, and seating himself upon a neighbouring haycock, ‘but sure -docthors won’t do much for the likes of us, only for ladies and -gentlemen. Ye should be the Pink of Fashion for them!’ - -“He surveyed me narrowly; apparently the thickness of the soles of my -boots inspired him with confidence. - -“‘Ye’re a counthry lady, and ye have understanding of poor people. Some -o’ thim docthors would be sevare on poor people if their houses wouldn’t -be--’ he considered, and decided that the expression was good enough to -bear repetition, ‘--wouldn’t be the Pink of Fashion. Well, the Owld -Docthor was good, but he was very cross. But the people that isn’t cross -is the worst. There’s no good in anny woman that isn’t cross. Sure, you -know yourself, my lady, the gerr’l that’s cross, she’s the good -servant!’ - -“He looked to me, with his head on one side for assent. I assented. - -“‘Well, as for the Owld Docthor,’ he resumed, ‘he was very cross, but -afther he put that blast out of him he’d be very good. My own brother -was goin’ into th’ Excise, and he went to the Owld Docthor for a -certifi-cat. Sure, didn’t the Docthor give him back the sovereign! -“You’ll want it,” says he, “for yer journey.” There was an old lady -here, and she was as cross as a diggle.’ (‘A diggle,’ it may be noted, -is a euphuism by which, to ears polite, the Prince of Darkness is -indicated.) ‘She’d go out to where the men ’d be working, and if she’d -be displeased, she’d go round them with a stick. Faith she would. She’d -put them in with a stick! But afther five minutes she’d be all right; -afther she had that blast put out of her.’ - -“It gives a comfortable feeling that ‘crossness’ is of the nature of a -gas-shell, and can be eliminated from the system in a single explosion.” - - * * * * * - -Unfortunately the interview was interrupted here. - -Dean Swift says somewhere that “Good manners is the art of making those -people easy with whom we converse.” Martin had a very special gift of -encouraging people to talk to her. There was something magnetic about -her, some power of sympathy and extraction combined. Together with this -she had a singular gift of toleration for stupid people, even of -enjoyment of stupidity, if sincerity, and a certain virtuous anxiety, -accompanied it. She was wont to declare that the personal offices of a -good and dull person were pleasing to her. The fumbling efforts, the -laboured breathing of one endeavouring--let us say--to untie her veil; a -man, for choice, frightened, but thoroughly well-intentioned and humble. -This she enjoyed, repudiating the reproach of effeteness, which, in this -connection, I have many times laid to her charge. - -In dealing with Rickeen, however, allowances for stupidity (she called -it simplicity) had not to be taken into consideration. I have a letter -from her, recounting another of her conversations with Rick, in which he -discussed a “village tragedy” that occurred at Christmas time, a few -years after she had returned to Ross. (The reference at the beginning of -the letter is to the sudden death of an acquaintance.) - -V. F. M. to E. Œ. S. (Ross, January, 1894.) - - “These sudden deaths are happy for the people who die them, but - desperate for those who are left behind. Certainly it makes one - feel that the thing to desire, beyond most heavenly things, is - strength to face the dreadful thing that may be coming. For - oneself, one could wish for the passion for death that was in a - young fellow here. He disappeared on St. Stephen’s Day[10] and they - found him at last in the Wood of Annagh, in an awful pond that is - on your left, just after you get into the wood--Poulleen-a-férla. - They hooked him up from among the sunken branches of trees, and - found him by getting a boat on to the pool and staring down in all - lights. Finally they wrapped a big stone in a white flannel - ‘bauneen’ and dropped it in. They were just able to see where it - lay, and it placed things for them, so that they at last recognised - some dim companion shadow as what they were searching for, and got - it out. He was a very religious and steady young man, but his mind - was weak, and it turns out that what chiefly preyed on it was that - one day some people called him from his work and deluded him - somehow into shortening up the chain of the chapel bell, in order - that when the new priest came to hold Mass next Sunday, the bell - could not be rung. (I have told you that Father Z. has been - forbidden to officiate, and a new priest is coming.) - - “When this poor boy found out what he had done, he was miserable. - He brooded over it and his people were alarmed, and watched him, - more or less, but not enough. Never was a more bitter comment on a - parish feud, and never was there a more innocent and godly life - turned to active insanity by dastardly treatment. (The curs, who - were afraid to meddle with the Chapel themselves!)” - -Rickeen’s discussion of the matter with Martin and one of the “Nursies” -is interesting in showing the point of view of an intelligent peasant, a -man who had been to America, and who was, though illiterate, of -exceptionally sound and subtle judgment. I copy it from the notes that -Martin sent to me. - -“Rickeen and Nurse Davin and I were talking about the poor boy who is -believed to have drowned himself. Rick took up his parable. - -“‘Sure you remember of him? Red Mike’s son, back in Brahalish? Him that -used to be minding the hins for the Misthress? - -“‘Always and ever he was the same; not a word o’ talk out of him the -longest year that ever came, only talkin’ about God, and goin’ to Mass, -and very fond of the work. Sure they say the mother wouldn’t let him to -Mass this while back to Father X.’ (N.B. This is the lawful priest. -Father Z., his predecessor, was suspended by the Church, but many of the -parish still side with him.) ‘And Mortheen, the brother that’s in -Galway, got an account he was frettin’ like, and he hired a car and took -him to Galway to go to Mass there, and tellin’ him no one ’d be denyin’ -him there. Faith, sorra Mass he’d go to in it! They say before he left -home, a whileen back, himself was back in the room, and the people was -outside, talkin’, and sayin’ he should be sent to Ballinasloe’ (the -Lunatic Asylum) ‘and sorra bit but when they looked round, himself was -there, leshnin’ to them! “What did I ever do to ye?” says he, “And -aren’t ye damned fools,” says he, walkin’ over to them this way, “to -think ye’ll put me in it!” says he. And sorra word more he spoke. - -“‘The Lord save us! They’re lookin’ for him now since Stephenses Day, -and I’m sure ’tis in Poulleen-a-férla he is. He was down lookin’ at it a -while ago, and Stephenses Day they seen him runnin’ down through -Bullywawneen, and they’re afther findin’ his Scafflin and his Agnus -Di[11] on a flagstone that’s on the brink. Sure he took thim off him the -ways he’d be dhrowned. No one could be dhrowned that had thim on him. -Faith, he could not. - -“‘Didn’t ye hear talk of the man back in Malrour, that wint down to the -lake last Sunday, and jumped into it to dhrown himself? The people that -seen him they ran, and they dhragged him out, an’ he lyin’ on his back, -and the scafflin he got from the priest round his neck; and it dhry! God -help the crature!’ - -“(Nurse Davin, weeping, ‘Amin! Amin!’) - -“‘But sure what way can they find him in Poulleen-a-férla? I know well -there’s thirty feet o’ wather in it. Maybe they’d see him down through -the wather to-day, it’s that clear. God knows ’tis quare weather. The -air’s like it ’d be comin’ up out o’ the ground, and no breeze in it at -all! I’m thinkin’ it’s the weather as well as another that’s puttin’ the -people asthray in their heads.’ - -“Rick paused here to take breath, and turned to Nurse Davin, who was -peeling potatoes, and groaning at suitable intervals. - -“‘Nurse, did ye ever hear tell o’ puttin’ a shave (sheaf) o’ oats on the -wather where ye’d think a pairson ’d be dhrowned, an’ it ’ll stand up -whin it ’d be over the place where he’s lyin’? They have a shave beyant, -but it’s lyin’ on the wather always. I wouldn’t believe that at all.’ - -“Nurse Davin uttered a non-committal invocation of her favourite saint, -but offered no opinion. - -“‘Sure it was that that they coaxed him to do at the chapel that preyed -on him entirely.’ - -“‘Lord ha’ mercy on him!’ said Nurse, wiping her eyes. - -“‘When he knew then what he done,’ Rick resumed, turning to me again, -‘sorra Mass he’d ever go to again, and they knew by him he was watchin’ -his shance to make off. They follied him a few days back, when they seen -him sneakin’ off down through the wood, but sorra bit but he felt them -afther him and he turned back. - -“‘’Twas on Stephenses Day he wint cuttin’ a rope o’ ferns with his -brother, and faith when the brother was talkin’ to a man that was in it, -he shlipped away. The brother thought it was home he wint, till he got -the rope o’ ferns threwn afther him on the ground. - -“‘An’ that, now, was the time he got the shance.’ - -“Nurse Davin, who is the very salt of the earth, has felt it all very -deeply. I cheered her by giving her your Christmas messages. She was -overwhelmed with gratitude. ‘And would ye be pleased to wish her every -sort of good luck and happiness, and the blessing o’ God on her! The -crature! Indeed she was good, and clane, and quiet, and sensible! And -her little dog--so nice and so clever!’” (This was the Puppet.) “‘She -cried afther him, the crature! She could do no more.’” - -I trust I may be pardoned for quoting this encomium. The virtues -enumerated by Nurse Davin have not often been ascribed to me. - - - - -CHAPTER XVII - -LETTERS FROM ROSS - - -Taking the publication of “An Irish Cousin” as the beginning of our -literary work, its next development was a series of short articles on -Irish subjects that Martin wrote, single-handed, for the _World_. - -The sap was beginning to run up; more and more things began with her to -throw themselves, almost unconsciously, into phrases and forms. Her -thoughts blossomed in the fit words, as the life in the tree breaks in -leaves. Everything appealed to her in this new life at Ross, which was -the old, and while she weeded the flower-beds in the garden, or painted -doors in the house, or drove her mother for long miles on the outside -car, she was meditating, and phrase-making, and formulating her -impressions. These, presently, passing through her letters to me, as -through a filter, developed into an article, which was primarily -inspired by the death of one of the older retainers of Ross. - -Mr. Edmund Yates then had the _World_ at his feet, having created it not -very many years before, and that he possessed the _flair_ for good work -was evident in the enthusiasm for her writing that, from the first, he -did not attempt to conceal from Martin. - -If, in things literary, the buyer would forget his traditional pose of -saying “it is naught,” and would woo the thirsty, tremulous soul of the -artist with appreciation, the bargain would not often work out to his -disadvantage. Edmund Yates had the courage of his opinions, and the -admiration that he was too generous to withhold more than -counterbalanced the minuteness of the cheque that came from his cashier. - -The first of these articles, “A Delegate of the National League,” -appeared in July, 1889, and was received by our friends with mingled -emotions. It is my mature conviction that they were horrified by its -want of levity. That “a Shocker” should preach, that “one of the girls” -should discourse on what was respectfully summarised by a young lady of -my acquaintance as “Deep subjects of Life and Death,” was not quite what -anyone enjoyed. Mrs. H. Ward’s book, “Robert Elsmere,” had just -appeared; it was considered to be necessary to read it, and to talk -intellectually about it, and it was found wearing that Martin should -also be among the Prophets, and should write what one of her cousins -called “Potted Carlyle.” None the less, she followed up “The Delegate,” -in a month or two, with another article in the same vein, entitled -“Cheops in Connemara.” In some of her letters of this period she speaks -of these articles. - -“I weed the garden a good deal,” she says, “and give meat to my -household, and I got a sort of grip of the Education article to-day, and -hope it may continue. But I am a fraud in the way of writing. I heap -together descriptions, with a few carefully constructed moralities -interspersed, and hide behind them, so that no one shall discern my -ignorance and hesitation. - -“I am ploughing along at an article, and have a most ponderous notion in -my head for another about the poor women of the West of Ireland, their -lives, their training, their characters, all with a view as to whether -they would be the better for having votes, or would give a better or -worse vote than the men. I feel overwhelmed and inadequate. I think I -write worse every time I try” (which was obviously absurd). - -“Mama has had a most kind letter from Sir William Gregory. He has many -literary friends and so has Augusta” (Lady Gregory), “and he says they -will both do their best for The Shocker, and that he hopes his -conscience will allow him to praise it with trumpets and shawms. Poor -Mama required a little bucking up after the profound gloom in which she -was plunged by a letter from her oldest ally, Mrs. X., saying she -thought the ‘Delegate’ was ‘high-flown and verbose’--‘merely, of course, -the faults of young writing,’ says Mrs. X. Mama was absolutely -staggered, and has gone about saying at intervals, ‘Knee-buckles to a -Highlander!’ by which she means to express her glorious contempt for -Mrs. X.’s opinion of the classics.” - -The “ponderous notion” of which she spoke eventually developed into an -article which she called “In Sickness and in Health.” It first appeared -in _Blackwood’s Magazine_, and we reprinted it in “Some Irish -Yesterdays.” It is, I think, a very delightful example of a class of -writing in which she seems to me to be unequalled. - - “Erin, the tear and the smile in thine eye,” - -is a line that is entirely applicable to her, and to her outlook on the -ways of Ross and its people. She loved them and she laughed at them, and -even though she could hold Ross at arm’s length, to analyse, and to -philosophise, and to make literature of it and of its happenings, she -took it back to her heart again, and forgave what she could not approve, -for no better reason than that she loved it. - -I am aware that the prosperity of a letter, as of a jest, often lies in -the ear of him that hears, or reads. Nevertheless I propose here and now -to give a few extracts from her Ross letters. None of them have any -connection with each other, or with anything else in particular, and -anyone who fears to find them irrelevant or frivolous may, like Francie -Fitzpatrick (when she eluded Master Whitty) “give a defiant skip and -pass on.” - -V. F. M. to E. Œ. S. (Ross, 1895.) - - “Nurse B. gave, yesterday, a fine example of using the feminine for - animals to imply cunning. - - “‘Didn’t a big rat walk in the lardher windy, and me lookin’ at her - this ways, through the door, an’ she took a bit o’ bacon to dhrag - it with her. She was that long’ (indicating as far as her elbow), - ‘an’ not that high!’ (measuring half her little finger). ‘Faith, - Bridgie dhrove her the way she came!’ - - “Bridgie is of undaunted courage, runs after rats to slay them, and - fears ‘neither God nor devil, like the Black Prosbitarians.’ She is - a Topsy, lies and steals and idles, and is as clever as she can be. - Could you but see her with a pink bow in her cap, and creaking - Sunday boots, and her flaming orange hair and red eyes you would - not be the better of it. She is fifteen, and for some mysterious - reason, unknown to myself, I like her.... I am working at an - article, badly. I am very stupid, and not the least clever, except - at mending blinds, and the pump. I am tired of turning away my eyes - from iniquity that I cannot rectify, of trying to get the servants - up in the morning, of many things, but let me be thankful, I have - had the kitchen whitewashed. I laugh foolishly when I think of the - Herculaneum and Pompeii episode from which the cat and three - kittens barely escaped with their lives. The cat, being in labour, - selected as her refuge the old oven in the corner of the kitchen, a - bricked cavern, warm, lofty, and secluded. There, among bottles, - rags, and other concealments of Bridgie’s, she nourished and - brought up her young in great calm, till the day that Andy set to - work at the kitchen chimney. No one knew that the old oven had a - special flue of its own, and it was down this flue that the soot - elected to come. I was fortunately pervading space that day, and - came in time to see a dense black cloud issuing from the oven’s - mouth into the kitchen. I yelled to a vague assembly of Bridgets in - the servants’ hall, all of whom were sufficiently dirty to bear a - little more without injury, and having rushed into the gloom they - promptly slammed the door on the unfortunate family inside, on whom - then rained without intermission, soot, bricks, and jackdaws’ - nests. Having with difficulty got the door open again, the party - was disinterred, quite unhurt, but _black_, and more entirely - mortified than anything you can imagine. For the rest of the day - ‘Jubilee’ cleaned herself and her children in the coldest parts of - the house, with ostentatious fury. She was offered the top turf-box - on the back stairs, but instantly refused, and finally settled - herself in a stone compartment of the wine-cellar; a top berth this - time, you bet!” - -V. F. M. to E. Œ. S. (Ross, 1901.) - - “We did not achieve church this morning without some difficulty. I - went round to the yard after breakfast, to see that things were _en - train_, and was informed by Rickeen that he had not fed the grey - pony, as he had found a weazel in the oats, ‘and sure there’s some - kind of a pizen in thim.’ Being unable to combat this statement, I - desired that the pony should be given hay. This was done, but at - the last moment, just before she was being put into the shafts, she - ‘sthripped a shoe.’ Mama’s old pony, Killola, was again a little - lame--nothing for it but the monster Daisy, browsing in the lawn - with her foal. It was then 10.45. I had on a voile skirt of - stupendous length, with a floating train, my best gloves and other - Sunday trappings, none the less must I help Rick to harness Daisy. - Then the trouble was to shut her foal into the barn. In the barn - was already immured the donkey, filled with one fierce - determination to flee over to the White Field, where was Darcy’s - donkey. I had to hold Daisy, and combat her maternal instincts, and - endure her ceaseless shriekings; I also had to head off the donkey, - which burst from the barn, with gallopings and capers, while - Rickeen stuffed in the foal, who, like its mother, was shrieking at - the top of its voice. I also was weak with laughing, as Rick’s - language, both English and Irish, was terrific, and the donkey very - ridiculous. Rick finally flailed it into what he called ‘the - pig-shtyle,’ with many fervent ‘Hona-mig-a-dhiouls’ (Rick always - throws in ‘mig,’ for pure intensity and rhythm). Then--(‘musha, the - Lord save thim that’s in a hurry’)--the harness had to be torn off - the grey, in the loose box, ‘for fear would she rub the collar agin - the Major’ (which is what he calls the manger). Then we pitched - Mama on to the car and got off. Daisy, almost invisible under her - buffalo mane, as usual went the pace, and we got in at the First - Lesson, and all was well.” - -V. F. M. to E. Œ. S. (Ross.) - - “I had a long walk on Thursday in search of turf, to burn with - logs. A sunset, that was boiling up orange steam on to grey clouds, - kept turning me round all the way to Esker. At the turn to Pribaun - I heard a frightful ruction going on. Two men in a cart using awful - language at the tops of their voices, and Pat Lydon, on the fence, - giving it back to them, asserting with unnecessary invocations, - that there was nothing he hated like ‘thim liars.’ The men drove on - as I came up, still chewing the last mouthful of curses as they - passed, and Pat came forward with his hat off and the sweetest - smile. - - “‘What was all that about?’ said I. - - “‘Oh, thim was just tellin’ me the price o’ pigs in Ochtherard - yesterday.’ (This in a tone of the barest interest.) ‘And how’s - Mama? Divil a one in the counthry’s gettin’ fat, only Mama!’ This - was, of course, the highest compliment, and I recognised that I was - expected to enquire no more into the matter of the price of pigs. - He then advised me to go to Jimmy X. (the song-maker) for turf, and - I found him at Esker, dreamily contemplating an immense and - haggard-looking sow, on whom, no doubt, he was composing a sonnet. - He assured me that he would sell Mama a rick of turf. I asked how - much was in the rick. - - “‘Well, indeed Miss, of that matter I am quite ignorant, but Jimmy - Darcy can value it--(stand in off the road for fear anyone would - hear us!)’ (Then in a decorous whisper) ‘But him and me is not very - great since he summonsed me little girl for pullin’ grass in the - Wood of Annagh----’ - - “There followed much more, in a small and deprecating voice, which, - when told to Jim Darcy, he laughed to scorn. - - “‘There’s not a basket, no, nor a sod he doesn’t know that’s in - that rick!’ - - “The end of it was that the two Jimmys wrangled down in the Bog of - Pullagh the greater part of the next day, and nothing more than - that has been accomplished. - - “Poor old Kitty has been in trouble. I have not time now to give - you the particulars, but will only note her account of the singular - effects of remorse upon her, as unfolded to me by her, subsequent - to the interview between her and her accuser and Katie. - - “‘Faith the hair is dhroppin’ out o’ me head, and the skin rollin’ - off the soles o’ me feet, with the frettin’. Whin I heard what Mrs. - Currey said, I went back to that woman above, an’ she in her bed. I - dhragged her from the bed,’ (sob) ‘an’ she shweatin,’ (sob) ‘an’ I - brought her down to Mrs. Currey at the Big House----’ - - “I have been doctoring Honor Joyce up in Doone for some days. She - has had agonising pain, which the poor creature bore like a Trojan. - I asked her to describe it, and she said feebly, - - “‘I couldn’t give ye any patthern of it indeed, but it’s like in me - side as a pairson ’d be polishin’ a boot, and he with a brush in - his hand.’ Which was indeed enlightening. Such a house! One little - room, with some boards nailed together for a bed, in which was hay - with blankets over it; a goat was tethered a few feet away, and - while I was putting the mustard-leaf on, there came suddenly, and - apparently from the bed itself, ‘a cry so jubilant, so strange,’ - that indicated that somewhere under the bed a hen had laid an egg. - - “‘God bless her!’ says Honor, faintly. - - “Next I heard a choking cough in the heart of the blankets. It was - a sick boy, huddled in there with his mother--quite - invisible--buried in the bedclothes, like a dog.... A beautiful day - yesterday, fine and clear throughout. To-day the storm stormeth as - usual, and the white mist people are rushing after each other - across the lawn, sure sign of hopeless wet. Poor Michael (an old - tenant) died on Thursday night--a very gallant, quiet end, - conscious and calm. His daughter did not mean to say anything - remarkable when she told me that he died ‘as quiet, now as quiet as - a little fish’; but those were her words. I went up there to see - his old wife, and coming into a house black with people, was - suddenly confronted with Michael’s body, laid out in the kitchen. - His son, three parts drunk, advanced and delivered a loud, horrible - harangue on Michael and the Martin family. The people sat like - owls, listening, and we retired into a room where were whisky - bottles galore, and the cream of the company; men from Galway, - respectably drunk, and magnificent in speech.... The funeral - yesterday to which I went (Michael was one of our oldest and most - faithful friends) was only a shade less horrifying. At all events - the pale, tranced face was hidden, and the living people looked - less brutal without that terrific, purified presence----” - -One other picture, of about the same period, may be given, and in -connection with these experiences two things may be remembered. That -they happened more than twenty years ago; also, that among these people, -primitive, and proud, tenacious of conventions, and faithful to their -dead, a want of hospitality at a funeral implied a want of respect for -the one who had left them. - -Unfortunately, it has not even yet been learnt that hospitality is not -necessarily synonymous with whisky. - -V. F. M. to E. Œ. S. (Ross, 1895.) - - “William L.’s wife died suddenly, having had a dead baby, two days - ago, and was buried yesterday, up at the Chapel on the Hill. I went - to the back gate and walked with the funeral from there. It was an - extraordinary scene. The people who had relations buried there, - roared and howled on the graves, and round the grave where Mrs. L. - was being buried, there was a perpetual whining and moaning, - awfully like the tuning of fiddles in an orchestra. Drunken men - staggered about; one or two smart relations from Galway flaunted to - and fro in their best clothes, occasionally crossing themselves, - and three keeners knelt together inside the inmost ring by the - grave, with their hands locked, rocking, and crying into each - other’s hoods, three awful witches, telling each other the full - horrors that the other people were not competent to understand. - There was no priest, but Mrs. L.’s brother read a kind of Litany, - very like ours, at top speed, and all the people answered. Every - Saint in the calendar was called on to save her and to protect her, - and there poor William stood, with his head down, and his hat over - his eyes. It was impressive, very, and the view was so fresh and - clean and delightful from that height. The thump of the clods and - stones on the coffin was a sound that made one shudder, and all the - people keened and cried at it.... There have been many enquiries - for you since I came home. Rickeen thinks he never seen the like of - a lady like you that would have ‘that undherstandin’ of a man’s - work; and didn’t I see her put her hand to thim palings and lep - over them! Faith I thought there was no ladies could be as soople - as our own till I seen her. But indeed, the both o’ yee proved very - bad that yee didn’t get marri’d, and all the places yee were in!’” - - - - -CHAPTER XVIII - -“TOURS, IDLE TOURS” - - -The adverse opinion of her old and once-trusted comrade, Mrs. X., in the -matter of “The Delegate” was not the only trial of the kind that Mrs. -Martin had to face. I imagine that few things in her life had given her -as much pleasure as Violet’s success as a writer. She had a very highly -cultured taste, and her literary judgment, builded as it was upon the -rock of the classics, was as sound as it was fastidious. Had a conflict -been pressed between it and maternal pride, I believe the latter would -have been worsted. Fortunately, her critical faculty permitted her to -extend to Martin’s writing the same entire approval that she bestowed -upon her in all other regards. It is usual to make merry over a mother’s -glorying in her young, but there are few things more touching than to -see a brilliant creature, whose own glories are past, renew her youth, -and yet forget it, in the rising sun of a child’s success. - -No one expects to be a prophet in his own country, but when Martin and I -first began to write, we have sometimes felt as if a mean might have -been discovered between receiving our books with the trumpets and -shawms, suggested by Sir William Gregory, and treating them as -regrettable slips, over which a cloak of kindly silence was to be flung. -My cousin Nannie and--though in less degree--my mother, were both out -for trumpets, and the silence of their acquaintances (a silence that -Martin and I did not fail to assure them was compassionate) filled them -with wrath that only each other’s sympathy could assuage. (It is, I am -sure, unnecessary to say that each was comfortingly aware that her own -daughter had done all the work. But this did not invalidate the -sympathy.) - -The formula touching the superfluity of kneebuckles to the Highlander -was, however, sustaining; and this was fortunate, as each of Martin’s -articles, as they appeared in the _World_, called it into requisition. -If “The Delegate” had staggered the Highlanders, they literally reeled -when “Cheops in Connemara” was offered for their learning by Mrs. -Martin, who had a pathetic hope, never realised, that some day they -might find grace and understanding. - -It was of “Cheops” that a lady, who may be called Mrs. Brown, said to my -cousin Nannie, - -“Oh, Mrs. Martin, I _loved_ it! It was so _nice_! I couldn’t quite -understand it, though I read it twice over, but I showed it to Mr. -Brown, and _he_ solved the problem!” - -Wonderful man, as Martin commented when she wrote the story to me. - -It was this same Mr. Brown whose criticism of the “Irish Cousin,” wrung -from him by Mrs. Martin, was so encouraging. - -“I found it,” he wrote, “highly imaginative, but not nonsensical, -unusual in a work of legendary character. In fact, it is not bosh!” - -The singular spring from the clouds to every day’s most common slang was -typical of good Mr. Brown. He is now beyond the clouds, or, in any case, -is, I am sure, where he will not be offended if I recall one or two of -his pulpit utterances. In my diary at this time I find: “Interesting -sermon. Mr. Brown told us that ‘a sin, though very great, is not as -great as one that exceeds it; but remember that sin can only find -entrance in a heart prepared for it, even as matches strike only on the -box. And oh friends, it is useless to trust in those whose names are -fragrant in Christian society to pull you through.’” - -Martin was much attached to Mr. Brown, who was as kind a man, and as -worthy a parson, as ever was great-grandson to Mrs. Malaprop. In a -letter to me she says: - -“Last Sunday’s sermon was full of ‘jewels five words long.’ I noticed -first an allusion to Jacob’s perfidy to Esau. ‘Which of us, Beloved, -would not have blushed if we had been in--in--in the shoes in which -Jacob was then living? Or if we had been his mother?’ - -“There was something in this so suggestive of the tale of the Old Woman, -who with her family, lived in a shoe, that I found my seat in the front -row of the choir inconvenient, more especially when one recollected that -in Jacob’s time sandals were the usual wear. Mr. B. then proceeded to -tell us of ‘The Greek Chap’ who held the gunwale of the boat and ‘when -his right hand was chopped off, held it with his left, and that being -cut off, caught it in his teeth. Then his head was cut off! Think of -him, Beloved, who, when his head was cut off, still with his teeth held -the boat impossible!’ - -“The last word was doubtless the nearest he could get to ‘immoveable.’ -At this two prominent members of the choir laughed, long and -agonisingly, as did many others. I never smiled. Had you been there I -might have been unequal to the strain, but I felt sorry for poor Mr. -Brown, as it was only a slip to say ‘head’ for ‘hand.’ He got through -the rest pretty well, only saying, a little later, that we should not -‘ask the Almighty for mercies to be doled out to us, like a pauper’s -gruel, in half-pints.’ He gave us another striking metaphor, a few -Sundays ago. ‘Dear friends, to what shall I liken the Day of -Resurrection, and the rising of us, miserable sinners, from the grave? -Will it not be like poor, wretched, black chimney-sweeps, sticking their -heads up out of chimneys!’” - -Martin’s pitifulness to incapacity, whether mental or physical, could be -almost exasperating sometimes in its wide charity. Failure of any kind -appealed to her generosity. Her consideration and tenderness for the -limitations and disabilities of old age were very wonderful and -beautiful things, and no one ever knew her to triumph over a fallen foe. -For myself, I am of opinion that, with some foes, this is a mistake, -akin to being heroic at a dentist’s. However, the question need not now -be discussed. - -That “An Irish Cousin” had satisfied Messrs. Bentley’s expectations was -evidenced by a letter from Mr. R. Bentley in October, 1889, in which he -suggested that we should write a three-volume novel for them, and -offered us £100 down and £125 on the second 500 copies. We were then at -work on a short novel that we had been commissioned to write. This was -“Naboth’s Vineyard,” which, after various adventures, was first -published by Spencer Blackett, in October, 1891. The story had had a -preliminary canter in the _Lady’s Pictorial_ Christmas number as a short -story, which we called “Slide Number 42.” It was sufficiently approved -of to encourage us to fill it up and make a novel of it. As a book it -has had a curious career. We had sold the copyright without reservation, -and presently it was passed on to Mr. Blackett. We next heard of it in -the hands of Griffith and Farran. Then it appeared as a “yellow-back” - -[Illustration: - -E. Œ. S. CANDY. SHEILA. V. F. M. E. B. C. -] - -at 2_s._ 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 4_d._; 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. - -V. F. M. to E. Œ. S. (Ross, 1890.) - - “None of us were able to go to church to-day, the weather being - detestable and Mama’s eyes much inflamed by gout. So we had prayers - at home. Quite early in the morning Mama had strong convulsions at - the very thought, and I compelled her to delegate Katie for the - office of chaplain. Muriel and her English nurse, Hoskins, were - summoned, and before they came Mama stipulated that the Psalms - should be read. Katie consented, on condition that Mama should not - try to read her verse, and after some resistance, Mama gave in. In - came Hoskins, looking the picture of propriety, with a crimson - nose, and Muriel, armed with a Child’s Bible, and Katie made a - start. Will you believe that Mama could not refrain, but nipped in - with the second verse, in a voice of the most majestic gravity. The - fourth verse was her next, and in that I detected effort, and - prepared for the worst. At the sixth came collapse, and a stifled - anguish of laughter. I said in tones of ice, - - “‘I’m afraid your eye is hurting you?’ - - “‘Yes,’ gasped Mama. - - “Katie swept on without a stagger, and thus the situation was - saved. I think Hoskins would consider laughter of the kind so - incredible that she would more easily believe that Mama always did - this when her eye hurt her. Katie slew Mama, hip and thigh, - afterwards, as indeed, her magnificent handling of the affair - entitled her to do.” - -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 - - -Throughout these very discursive annals I have tried to keep in -remembrance a lesson that I learnt a few years ago from a very -interesting book of Mr. Seton Thompson’s called, I think, “In the Arctic -Prairies.” In it he began by saying that travellers’ accounts of their -sufferings from mosquitoes were liable to degenerate into a weariness to -the reader; therefore he determined to mass all he had suffered into one -chapter. Thenceforward, when the remembrance of the mosquitoes became -too poignant for endurance, a pause came in the narrative, and a -footnote said (with an audible groan), “See Chapter So and So.” Thus it -has been with me and dogs. This is Chapter So and So, and I honourably -invite the Skip of Defiance already several times advocated. - -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, - - “---- loved her more and more, - And as a mark of perfect trust - Made her the Keeper of the Ashpit.” - -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 _fear_fully 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 - -[Illustration: “CANDY.” - -V. F. M. -] - -[Illustration: E. Œ. S. AND A DILETTANTE. - -V. F. M. -] - -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. - -E. Œ. S. to V. F. M. (May, 1890.) - - “The Stewardess, in the course of much friendly converse, said, - ‘Well, and I suppose ye’re coming back from school, now?’ - - “I concealed my deep gratification at the supposition, and said - ‘No--that I was done with school for some time.’ ‘Well then, I - suppose you are too’--(clearly thinking I was offended at the - inference)--‘I suppose you’re too big now to be going to school!’ - - “Then I said I had never gone to school; whereat she put her helm - hard down, and began to abuse school-girls with much heartiness, - and said they gave more trouble than any other passengers. - - “‘Indeed, they’re great imps,’ she said. - - “I, clearly, am that woman whom you have so often and so - consistently abused, to whom Stewardesses talk--(all night, by the - light of a sickeningly swinging colza-oil lamp).” - - A friend of mine once said to this admirable woman that she - proposed to bring her dog to England, and quoted the precedent of - my dogs as to cabin privileges. - - “Is it Miss Somerville?” said the Stewardess, in a voice weary with - the satiety of a foregone conclusion. “Sure, she has nests of - them!” - - - - -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 - - “There comes no answer but a sigh, - A wavering thought of the grey roofs, - The fluttering gown, the gleaming oars, - And the sound of many bells.”[12] - -and I “can make reply,” falteringly, - - “‘I too have seen Oxford.’” - - * * * * * - -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 - - -For the remainder of the year ’94 the exigencies of family life kept -Martin and me apart, she at Ross, or paying visits, I at home, doing the -illustrations for our Danish tour, with complete insincerity, from local -models. My diary says, “Impounded Mother to pose as the -Hofjägermesterinde, and Mary Anne Whoolly as a Copenhagen -market-woman--as Tennyson prophetically said, ‘All, all are Danes.’” - -In the meantime “The Real Charlotte” continued to run the race set -before her, with a growing tide of approval from those whose approval we -most valued, and with steadily improving sales. In November I went to -Leicestershire (a visit that shall be told of hereafter), and thence I -moved on to Paris. - -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. - -V. F. M. to E. Œ. S. (St. Andrews, Jan. 16, 1895.) - - “It _is_ a long journey here from Ross, by reason of the many - changes, and by reason of my back,” (she had fallen downstairs at - Ross, and had hurt her back, straining and bruising it very badly,) - “which gave me rather a poor time. I hurt it horribly getting in - and out of carriages, and was rather depressed about it - altogether.... However it is ever so much better to-day, and none - the worse for the dinner last night. I don’t think I looked _too_ - bad, in spite of all. I was ladylike and somewhat hectic and - hollow-eyed. The Langs have large rooms, and their dinner-party was - fourteen ... an ugly nice youth was my portion, and I was put at - Andrew Lang’s left. I was not shy, but anxious. A. L. is very - curious to look at; tall, very thin, white hair, growing far down - his forehead, and shading dark eyebrows and piercing-looking, - charming brown eyes. He has a somewhat foxey profile, a lemon-pale - face and a black moustache. Altogether very quaint looks, and - appropriate. I think he is shy; he keeps his head down and often - does not look at you when speaking, his voice is rather high and - indistinct, and he pitches his sentences out with a jerk. Anyhow I - paid court to my own young man for soup and fish time, and found - him most agreeable and clever, and I _did_ talk of hunting, and he - was mad about it, so now! no more of your cautionary hints! - - “To me then Andrew L. with a sort of off-hand fling, - - “‘I suppose you’re the one that did the writing?’ - - “I explained with some care that it was not so. He said he didn’t - know how any two people could equally evolve characters, etc., that - _he_ had tried, and it was always he or the other who did it all. I - said I didn’t know how we managed, but anyhow that I knew little of - book-making as a science. He said I must know a good deal, on which - I had nothing to say. He talked of Miss Broughton, Stevenson, and - others, as personal friends, and exhibited at intervals a curious - silent laugh up under his nose.... He was so interesting that I - hardly noticed how ripping was the dinner, just as good as it could - be. I then retired upon my own man for a while, and Andrew upon his - woman; then my youth and he and I had a long talk about Oscar Wilde - and others. Altogether I have seldom been more entertained and at - ease. After dinner the matrons were introduced and were very civil, - and praised Charlotte for its ‘delightful humour, and freshness and - newness of feeling,’ and so on. One said that her son told her he - would get anything else of ours that he could lay his hands on. - Then the men again. I shared an unknown man with a matron, and then - the good and kind Andrew drew a chair up and discoursed me, and - told me how he is writing a life of Joan of Arc--‘the greatest - human being since Jesus Christ.’ He seems _wonderfully_ informed on - all subjects. To hear him reel off the historical surroundings of - the Book of Esther would surprise you and would scandalise the - Canon. He offered to give me a lesson in golf, but, like Cuthbert’s - soldier servant I ‘pleaded the ’eadache.’ I hear that I was highly - honoured, as he very often won’t talk to people and is rude; I must - say I thought he was, in his jerky, unconventional way, polite to - everyone.... This is a cultured house, and all the new books are - here.... I wish I had been walking in the moonlight by the Seine. - It is like a dream to think of it. Talking to Andrew Lang has made - me feel that nothing I could write _could_ be any good; he seems to - have seen the end of perfection. I will take my stand on Charlotte, - I think, and learn to make my own clothes, and so subside - noiselessly into middle age.” - -V. F. M. to E. Œ. S. (St. Andrews, Jan. 23, 1895.) - - “Do you know that even now the sun doesn’t rise here till 8.30 at - the best; at the worst it is not seen till about a quarter to nine! - This, and the amazing cold of the wind make one know that this is - pretty far north.... Since I last wrote various have been the - dissipations. Afternoon teas, two dinners, an organ recital, a - concert. It is very amusing. They are all, as people, more - interesting than the average, being Scotch, and they have a high - opinion of Charlotte. I am beginning to be accustomed to having - people introduced to me, and feeling that they expect me to say - something clever. I never do. I am merely very conversational, and - feel in the highest spirits, which is the effect of the air. It is - passing pleasant to hear my nice hostess tell me how she went into - an assembly of women (and this being St. Andrews, mostly clever - ones) and heard them raving of Charlotte. She then said, ‘I know - one of the authors, and she is coming to stay with me!’ Sensation! - By the bye, several people have told me that Charlotte is like ‘La - Cousine Bette,’ which is one of Balzac’s novels. I had to admit - that we have neither of us read Balzac. At one dinner-party the - host, who is an excellent photographer, showed some very good - lantern-slides, mostly ruins, old churches and the like, being - things Mr. Lang is interested in. Finally came some statuary - groups; from outside South Kensington, I think; horrible blacks on - the backs of camels, etc. On the first glimpse of these Andrew, who - had, I think, been getting bored, shuddered, and fled away into the - next room, refusing to return till all was over. - - “‘If you had any Greek statuary----’ he said, feebly, but there - was none. - - “Then I was turned on to shriek like a dog, and he was bewildered - and perturbed, but not amused. He asked me, in an unhappy way, how - I did it. I said by main strength, the way the Irishman played the - fiddle. This was counted a good jest. On that the Langs left, he - saying in a vague, dejected way, apropos of nothing, ‘If you’d like - me to take you round the town sights I’ll go--perhaps if Monday - were fine----’ he then faded out of the house. - - “On Monday no sign of him, nor on Tuesday either. I withered in - neglect, though assured that he never kept appointments, or did - anything. Yesterday he sent word that he would come at 2.30, and he - really did. The weather was furiously Arctic. - - “‘Doctor Nansen, I presume?’ said I, coming in dressed and ready. - He looked foolish, and admitted it _was_ a bad day for exploration. - (Monday had been lovely.) However we went. You will observe that I - was keeping my tail very erect. - - “In the _iron_ blast we went down South Street, where most things - are. It is a little like the High at Oxford, on a small trim scale. - Andrew was immediately very nice, and I think he likes showing - people round. Have I mentioned that he is a gentleman? Rather - particularly so. It is worth mentioning. He was a most - perished-looking one, this piercing day, with his white face, and - his grey hair under a deerstalker, but still he looks all that. I - won’t at this time tell you of all the churches and places he took - me through. It was pleasant to hear him, in the middle of the - leading Presbyterian Church, and before the pew opener, call John - Knox a scoundrel, with intensest venom. In one small particular you - may applaud me. He showed me a place where Lord Bute is scrabbling - up the ruins of an old Priory and building ugly red sandstone - imitations on the foundations. I said, - - “‘The sacred Keep of Ilion is rent - With shaft and pit;’ - - “This is the beginning of a sonnet by Andrew Lang, in the ‘Sonnets - of this Century,’ mourning the modern prying into the story of - Troy. - - “We talked of dogs, and I quoted from Stevenson’s Essay. _He_ also - has written an attack on them, having been unaware of Stevenson’s. - He keeps and adores a cat, which he says hates him.... While in the - College Library Dr. Boyd (the ‘Country Parson’) came in and spoke - to Mr. Lang. I examined the nearest bookcase, but was ware of the - C.P.’s china blue eye upon me, and he presently spoke to me. He is - like a clean, rubicund priest, with a high nose; more than all he - is like a creditable ancestor on a wall, and should have a choker - and a high coat collar. He told me that his wife is now ‘gloating - over Charlotte,’ which was nice of him, and I am to go to tea with - them to-morrow. _Why_ aren’t you here to take your share? - - “I said to Andrew that I thought of going to Edinburgh on Monday, - to see a few things, and he said he would be there and would show - me Holyrood. He said in his resigned voice, ‘I’ll meet you anywhere - you like.’ ... I am going to write to Mr. Blackwood, who has asked - me to go to see him. I will ask him if he would like the ‘Beggars.’ - Andrew L. wants to go there too, so we may go together. Now you - must be sick of A. L. and I will mention only two or three more - things about him. - - “He put a notice of Charlotte into some American magazine for which - he writes, before he knew me. I believe it is a good one, but am - rather shy of asking about it. You will be glad that she is getting - a lift in America. I hope some of your artist friends will see it. - He told me that Charlotte treated of quite a new phase, and seemed - to think that was its chiefest merit. He would prefer our writing - in future more of the sort of people one is likely to meet in - everyday life. He put his name in the Mark Twain Birthday Book, and - I told him you had compiled it. Lastly, I may remark that when he - leaves St. Andrews to-morrow, all other men go with him, as far as - I am concerned, or rather they stay, and they seem _bourgeois_ and - commonplace (which is ungrateful, and not strictly true, and of - course there are exceptions, and, chief among them, my nice host, - and Father A., who are always what one likes).... Post has come, - bringing a most unexpected tribute to the Real C. from T. P. - O’Connor in the _Weekly Sun_. It is really one of the best, and - best-written notices we have ever had. I read it with high - gratification, in spite of his calling us ‘Shoneens’--(whatever - they may be).... The Editor of _Black and White_ has written asking - for something about St. Andrews, from an Irish point of view. ‘But - what about the artist?’ says he. What indeed? And I don’t know what - to write about. Everyone has written about St. Andrews.... I saw - them play the game of ‘Curling,’ which was funny, like bowls played - on ice, with big round stones that slide. The friends of a stone - tear in front of it as it slides, sweeping the ice with twigs so as - to further its progress. When a good bowl is made they say ‘Fine - stone!’ It is in many ways absurd....” - -St. Andrews, Jan. 29. ’95. - - “...The dissipations have raged, and I have been much courted by - the ladies of St. Andrews. I shall not come back here again. Having - created an impression I shall retire on it before they begin to - find me out. It will be your turn next.... Mrs. Lang wrote to say - that the B----s, with whom the Langs were staying in Edinburgh, - wanted me to lunch there, being ‘proud to be my compatriots.’ - Professor B. is Irish, and is professor of Greek at Edinburgh - University, and Mrs. B. is also Irish.... Accordingly, yesterday I - hied me forth alone. It was a lovely hard frost here, but by the - time I was half way--(it is about two hours by train)--the snow - began. I drove to the B----s, along Princes Street, all horrible - with snow, but my breath was taken away by the beauty of it. There - is a deep fall of ground along one side, where once there was a - lake, then with one incredible _lep_, up towers the crag, three - hundred feet, and the Castle, and the ramparts all along the top. - It was foggy, with sun struggling through, and to see that thing - hump its great shoulder into the haze was fine. You know what I - think of Scott. You would think the same if you once saw - Edinburgh. It was almost overwhelming to think of all that has - happened there--However, to resume, before you are bored. - - “Andhrew he resaved me, - So dacent and so pleasant, - He’s as nice a man in fayture - As I ever seen before.” - - (_vide_ Jimmy and the Song of Ross). He is indeed, and he has a - most correct and rather effeminate profile. No one else was in. He - was as miserable about the snow as a cat, and huddled into a huge - coat lined with sable. In state we drove up to the Castle by a long - round, and how the horse got up that slippery hill I don’t know. - The Castle was very grand; snowy courtyards with grey old walls, - and chapels, and dining-halls, most infinitely preferable to - Frederiksborg. The view should have been noble; as the weather was, - one could only see Scott’s monument--a very fine thing--and a very - hazy town. It is an awful thing to look over those parapets! A - company of the Black Watch was drilling in the outer courtyard, - very grand, and a piper went strutting like a turkeycock, and - skirling. It was wild, and I stood up by ‘Mons Meg’ and was - thrilled. Is it an insult to mention that Mons Meg is the huge, - historic old gun, and crouches like a she-mastiff on the topmost - crag, glaring forth over Edinburgh with the most concentrated - defiance? You couldn’t believe the expression of that gun. I asked - Andrew L. whether it was the same as ‘Muckle-mouthed Meg,’ having - vague memories of the name. He said in a dying gasp that - Muckle-mouthed Meg was his great-great-grandmother! That was a bad - miss, but I preserved my head just enough to enquire what had - become of the ‘Muckle mouth.’ (I may add that his own is - admirable.) He could only say with some - -slight embarrassment that it must have gone in the other line. - -“We solemnly viewed the Regalia, of which he knew the history of every -stone, and the room where James VI was born, a place about as big as a -dinner-table, and so on, and his information on all was petrifying. Then -it was all but lunch time, but we flew into St. Giles’ on the way home -to see Montrose’s tomb. A more beautiful and charming face than -Montrose’s you couldn’t see, and the church is a very fine one. An old -verger caught sight of us, and instantly flung to the winds a party he -was taking round, and endeavoured to show us everything, in spite of A. -L.’s protests. At length I firmly said, ‘Please show us the door.’ He -smiled darkly, and led us to a door, which, when opened, led into an -oaken and carven little room. He then snatched a book from a shelf--and -a pen and ink from somewhere else. - -“‘I know distinguished visitors when I see them!’ says he, showing us -the signatures of all the Royalties and distinguished people, about two -on each page. ‘Please write your names.’ - -“Andrew wrote his, and I mine, on a blank sheet, and there they remain -for posterity. Andrew swears the verger didn’t know him, and that it was -all the fur coat, and that our names were a bitter disappointment--_why_ -didn’t I put ‘Princess of Connemara’? - -“Then to lunch. The B----s were _very_ nice. He is tall and thin, she -short, both as pleasant and unconventional and easy as nice Irish people -alone are. After lunch she and Mrs. Lang tackled me in the drawing-room -about the original of the Real C. I gaily admitted that she was drawn -from life, and that you had known her a thousand times better than I. -Then I told them various tales of her, and, without thinking, revealed -her name. - - - “‘Oh yes!’ says Mrs. B. in ecstasy, ‘she was my husband’s cousin!’ - - “I covered my face with my hands, and I swear that the blush - trickled through my fingers. I then rose, in strong convulsions, - and attempted to fly the house. Professor B---- was called in to - triumph over me, and said that she was only a very distant cousin, - and that he had never seen her, and didn’t care what had been said - of her. They were _enchanted_ about it and my confusion, and they - have asked me to go to their place in Ireland, with delightful - cordiality.... Andrew L. and I then walked forth to Blackwood’s, a - very fine old-fashioned place, with interesting pictures. We were - instantly shown upstairs, to a large, pleasant room, where was Mr. - Blackwood.... I broached the subject of the ‘Beggars,’ while Andrew - stuck his nose into a book. Mr. Blackwood said he would like to see - it.... Mr. Lang then spoke to him about an article on Junius that - he is writing, and _I_ put _my_ nose into a book. We then left. - There was no time to see Holyrood.... Thus to the train. My most - comfortable thought during the two hours’ journey home was that in - talking to Mrs. B. I had placed Charlotte on _your_ shoulders! - Andrew L. was very kind, and told me that if ever I wanted anything - done that he could help me in, that he would do it.... My last - impression of him is of his whipping out of the carriage as it - began to move on, in the midst of an account of how Buddha died of - eating roast pork to surfeit.” - - - - -CHAPTER XXII - -AT ÉTAPLES - - -In February, 1895, I met Martin in London, and found her in considerable -feather, consequent on her reviving visit to St. Andrews, and on that -gorgeous review in which we had been called hard and pitiless censors, -as well as sardonic, squalid, and merciless observers of Irish life. We -felt this to be so uplifting that we lost no time in laying the -foundations of a further “ferocious narrative.” This became, in process -of time, “The Silver Fox.” It had the disadvantage, from our point of -view, of appearing first in a weekly paper (since defunct). This -involved a steady rate of production, and recurring “curtains,” which -are alike objectionable; the former to the peace of mind of the author, -while the latter are noxious trucklings to and stimulation of the casual -reader. That, at least, is how the stipulated sensation at the end of -each weekly instalment appeared to us at the time, and I have seen no -reason for relinquishing these views. “The Silver Fox,” like most of our -books, was the victim of many interruptions; it was finished in 1896, -and as soon as its weekly career was careered, it was sold to Messrs. -Lawrence and Bullen, who published it in October, 1897. It was a curious -coincidence that almost in the same week we hunted a silver-grey fox -with the West Carbery hounds. The hunt took place on Friday, the 13th -of the month, we lost the fox in a quarry-hole, in which a farmer had, -at the bidding of a dream, dug, fruitlessly, and at much expense, for -fairy gold, and two of our horses were very badly cut. I saw the Silver -Fox break covert, it was the Round Covert at Bunalun, and by all the -laws of romance I ought to have broken my neck; but the Powers of -Darkness discredited him, and neither he nor I were any the worse for -the hunt. I do not remember ever seeing him again, and I presume he -returned immediately to the red covers (without a t) of our book, from -which he had been given a temporary outing. - -It was in May and June, 1895, that we spent a happy and primitive -fortnight in one of the Isles of Aran; we have described it in “Some -Irish Yesterdays,” and it need not be further dealt with, though I may -quote from my diary the fact that on “May 22. M. & I rescued a drowning -child by the quay, and got very wet thereby. Several Natives surveyed -performance, pleased, but calm, and did not offer assistance.” - -In July, an entirely new entertainment was kindly provided for us by a -General Election; our services were requisitioned by the Irish Unionist -Alliance, and with a deep, inward sense of ignorance (not to say of -play-acting), we sailed forth to instruct the East Anglian elector in -the facts of Irish politics. It was a more arduous mission than we had -expected, and it opened for us a window into English middle-class life -through which we saw and learned many unsuspected things. Notably the -persistence of English type, and the truth that was in George Eliot. We -met John Bunyan, unconverted, it is true, but unmistakably he; cobbling -in a roadside stall, full of theories, and endowed by heredity with a -splendid Biblical speech in which to set them forth. Seth Bede was -there, a house-painter and a mystic, with transparent, other-worldly -blue eyes and a New Testament standard of ethics. Dinah Morris was there -too, a female preacher and a saintly creature, who shamed for us the -play-acting aspect of the affair into abeyance, and whose high and -serious spirit recognised and met Martin’s spirit on a plane far remote -from the sordid or ludicrous controversies of electioneering. - -These few and elect souls we met by chance and privilege, not by -intention. We had been given “professional” people, mainly, as our -victims. Doctors, lawyers, and non-conforming parsons of various -denominations. It taught us an unforgettable lesson of English honesty, -level-headedness, and open-mindedness. Also of English courtesy. With -but a solitary exception, we were received and listened to, seriously, -and with a respect that we secretly found rather discomposing. They took -themselves seriously, and their respect almost persuaded us that we were -neither actors nor critics, but real people with a real message. The -whole trend of Irish politics has changed since then. Every camp has -been shifted, many infallibles have failed. I am not likely to go on the -stump again, but I shall ever remember with pride that on this, our -single entry into practical politics, our man got in, and that a Radical -poster referred directly, and in enormous capital letters, to Martin and -me as “IRISH LOCUSTS.” - -I went to Aix-les-Bains a year or two after this. It was the first of -several experiences of that least oppressive of penalties for the sins -of your forefathers, if not of your own. There was one year when among -the usual number of kings and potentates was one of the Austrian -Rothschilds. With him was an inseparable private secretary, who had -been, one would say, cut with a fret-saw straight from an Assyrian -bas-relief. His profile and his crimped beard were as memorable as the -example set by M. le Baron to the gamblers at the Cercle. Followed by a -smart crowd in search of a sensation, the Baron and the Secretary moved -to the table of “_Les Petits Chevaux_,” and people waited to see the -Bank broken in a single coup. The Baron murmured a command to the -Profile. The Profile put a franc on “_Egalité_.” “_Egalité_” won. The -process was repeated until the Baron was the winner of ten francs, when -the couple retired, and were seen there no more, and one began to -understand why rich men are rich. There was one dazzling night with “the -little horses” when I found myself steering them in the Chariot of the -Sun. I could not make a mistake; where I led, the table, with gamblers’ -instant adoption of a mascot, followed. I found myself famous, and won -forty-five francs. Alas! I was not Baron de Rothschild, or even the -Assyrian Profile, and the rest is silence. - -From Aix I went to Boulogne, and meeting Martin there, we moved on to -Étaples, which was, that summer (1898), the only place that any -self-respecting painter could choose for a painting ground. Cazin, and a -few others of the great, had made it fashionable, and there were two -“Classes” there (which, for the benefit of the uninitiated, are -companies of personally-conducted art-students, who move in groups round -a law-giver, and paint series of successive landscapes, that, in their -one-ness and yet progressiveness, might be utilised with effect as -cinematograph backgrounds). We found, by appointment, at Étaples a -number of our particular friends, “Kinkie,” “Madame Là-Là,” “The Dean,” -Helen Simpson, Anna Richards, a pleasingly Irish-American gang, with -whom we had worked and played in Paris. The two or three small hotels -and boarding-houses were full of painters, and the Quartier Latin held -the town in thrall. As far, at least, as bedrooms, studios, and feeding -places were concerned. Sheds and barns and gardens, all were absorbed; -everyone gave up everything to _MM. Les Étrangers_; everyone, I should -say, who had been confirmed. Confirmation at Étaples was apparently of -the nature of the Conversion of St. Paul in its effect upon the -character. After confirmation, instant politeness and kindness to the -stranger within their gates characterised the natives; prior to that -ceremony, it is impossible to give any adequate impression of the -atrocity of the children of the town. If an artist pitched his easel and -hoisted his umbrella on any spot unsurrounded by a ten-foot wall, he was -immediately mobbed by the unconfirmed. The procedure was invariable. One -chose, with the usual effort, the point of view. One set one’s palette -and began to work. A child strayed round a corner and came to a dead -set. It retired; one heard its sabots clattering as it flew. Presently, -from afar, the clatter would be renewed, an hundred-fold; shrill cries -blended with it. Then the children arrived. They leaned heavily on the -shoulders of the painter, and were shaken off. They attempted, often -successfully, to steal his colours. They postured between him and his -subject, dancing, and putting forth their tongues. They also spat. - -The maddened painters made deputations to the Mayor, to the Curé, to the -Police, and from all received the same reply, that _méchant_ as the -children undeniably were now, they would become entirely _sage_ after -confirmation. We did not attempt to dispute the forecast, but our -contention that, though consolatory to parents, it was of no -satisfaction to us, was ignored by the authorities. Therefore, in so far -as was possible, we took measures into our own hands. I wrote home for -a hunting-crop, and Martin took upon herself the varying yet allied -offices of Chucker-out and Whipper-in. She was not only fleet of foot, -but subtle in expedient and daring in execution. I recall with ecstasy a -day when a wholly loathsome boy, to whose back a baby appeared to be -glued, was put to flight by her with the stick of my sketching-umbrella. -Right across the long Bridge of Étaples he fled, howling; the baby, -crouched on his shoulders, sitting as tight as Tod Sloan, while Martin, -filled with a splendid wrath, belaboured him heavily below the baby, -ceasing not until he had plunged, still howling, into a fisherman’s -cottage. Another boy, tending cattle on the marshes, drove a calf in -front of us, and, with a weapon that might have been the leg of a table, -beat it sickeningly about the eyes. In an instant Martin had snatched -the table-leg from him and hurled it into a wide dyke, the next moment -she had sent his cap, skimming like a clay pigeon, across it, and -“Madame Là-Là” (who is six feet high), rising, cobra-like, from the lair -in which she had concealed herself from the enemy, chased the calf from -our neighbourhood. Later, we heard him indicate Martin to his fellows. - -“_Elle est méchante, celle la!_”--and, to our deep gratification, the -warning was accepted. - -In those far-off times Paris Plage and Le Touquet were little more than -names, and were represented by a few villas and chalets of fantastic -architecture peppered sparsely among the sand-dunes and in the little -fairy-tale forests of toy pine-trees that divided Étaples from Le -Touquet. There was a villa, whose touching name of “Home, _Swet_ Home,” -appealed to the heated wayfarer, where now a Red Cross hospital is a -stepping-stone to “Home,” for many a British wayfarer who has fallen by -the way, and pale English boys, in blue hospital kit, lie about on the -beach where we have sat and sketched the plump French ladies in their -beautiful bathing dresses. - -It was among Cazin’s sand-dunes, possibly on the very spot where Hagar -is tearing her hair over Ishmael (in his great picture, which used to -hang in the Luxembourg), that the “Irish R.M.” came into existence. -During the previous year or two we had, singly and jointly, been writing -short stories and articles, most of which were republished in a volume, -“All on the Irish Shore.” Many of these had appeared in the _Badminton -Magazine_, and its editor now requested us to write for it a series of -such stories. Therefore we sat out on the sand hills, roasting in the -great sunshine of Northern France, and talked, until we had talked Major -Sinclair Yeates, R.M., and Flurry Knox into existence. “Great Uncle -MacCarthy’s” Ghost and the adventure of the stolen foxes followed, as it -were, of necessity. It has always seemed to us that character -presupposes incident. The first thing needful is to know your man. -Before we had left Étaples, we had learned to know most of the people of -the R.M.’s country very well indeed, and all the better for the fact -that, of them all, “Slipper” and “Maria” alone had prototypes in the -world as we knew it. All the others were members of a select circle of -which Martin and I alone had the _entrée_. Or so at least we then -believed, but since, of half a dozen counties of Ireland, at least, we -have been categorically and dogmatically assured that “_all_ the -characters in the R.M.” lived, moved, and had their being in them, we -have almost been forced to the conclusion that there were indeed six -Richmonds in every field, and that, in the spirit, we have known them -all. - -The illustrations to the first and second of the stories were -accomplished at Etaples, and, in the dearth of suitable models, Martin, -and other equally improbable victims, had to be sacrificed. One piece of -luck fell to me in the matter. I wished to make an end-drawing, for the -first story, of a fox, and I felt unequal to evolving a plausible -imitation from my inner consciousness. It may not be believed, but it is -a fact that, as, one afternoon, I crossed the Bridge of Étaples, I met -upon it a man leading a young fox on a chain, a creature as mysteriously -heaven-sent as was the lion to the old “Man of God.” - - - - -CHAPTER XXIII - -PARIS AGAIN - - -We returned to Drishane in October, having by that time written and -illustrated the third story of the series. Which was fortunate, as on -the first of November, “November Day” as we call it in Carbery, we went -a-hunting, and under my eyes Martin “took a toss” such as I trust I may -never have to see again. It happened in the middle of a run; there was a -bar across an opening into a field. It was a wooden bar, with bushes -under it, and it was not very high, but firmly fixed. I jumped it, and -called to her to come on. The horse she was riding, Dervish, was a good -hunter, but was cunning and often lazy. He took the bar with his knees, -and I saw him slowly fall on to his head, and then turn over, rolling on -Martin, who had kept too tightly her grip of the saddle. Then he -struggled to his feet, but she lay still. - -It was two months before she was able again to “lift her hand serenely -in the sunshine, as before,” or so much as take a pen in it, and several -years before she could be said to have regained such strength as had -been hers. Nothing had been broken, and she had entirely escaped -disfigurement, even though the eye-glasses, in which she always rode, -had cut her brow; but one of the pummels of the saddle had bruised her -spine, and the shock to a system so highly-strung as hers was what might -be expected. The marvel was that so fragile a creature could ever have -recovered, but her spirit was undefeated, and long before she could even -move herself in bed, she had begun to work with me again, battling -against all the varied and subtle sufferings that are known only to -those who have damaged a nerve centre, with the light-hearted courage -that was so conspicuously hers. - -During the second half of that black November we were writing “The -Waters of Strife,” which is the fourth story of the “R.M.” series. Its -chief incident was the vision which came to the central figure of the -story, of the face of the man he had murdered. This incident, as it -happened, was a true one, and was the pivot of the story. We had -promised a monthly story, and in order to keep faith, we had written it -with an effort that had required almost more than we had to give. The -story now appears in our book as we originally wrote it, but on its -first appearance in the _Badminton Magazine_ a passage had been -introduced by an alien and unsolicited collaborator, and “various jests” -had been “eliminated as unfit” for, one supposes, the sensitive readers -of the magazine. Sometimes one wonders who are these ethereal beings -whose sensibilities are only shielded from shock by the sympathetic -delicacy of editors. I remember once before being crushed by another -editor. I had drawn, from life, for the Connemara Tour, a portrait of -“Little Judy from Menlo,” a Galway beggar-woman of wide renown. It was -returned with the comment that “such a thing would shock delicate -ladies.” So, as the song says, “Judy being bashful said ‘No, no, no’!” -and returned to private life. Another and less distinguished -beggar-woman once said to me of the disappointments of life, “Such -things must be, Miss Somerville, my darlin’ gerr’l!” and authors must, -one supposes, submit sometimes to be sacrificed to the susceptibilities -of the ideal reader. - -The twelve “R.M.” stories kept us desperately at work until the -beginning of August, 1899. Looking back on the writing of them, each -one, as we finished it, seemed to be the last possible effort of -exhausted nature. Martin hardly knew, through those strenuous months, -what it was to be out of suffering. Even though it cannot be denied that -we both of us found enjoyment in the writing of them, I look back upon -the finish of each story as a nightmare effort. Copying our unspeakably -tortuous MS. till the small hours of the morning of the last possible -day; whirling through the work of the illustrations (I may confess that -one small drawing, that of “Maria” with the cockatoo between her paws, -was done, as it were “between the stirrup and the ground,” while the -horse, whose mission it was to gallop in pursuit of the postman, stamped -and raged under my studio windows). By the time the last bundle had been -dispatched Martin and I had arrived at a stage when we regarded an -ink-bottle as a mad dog does a bucket of water. Rest, and change of air, -for both of us, was indicated. I was sent to Aix, she went to North -Wales, and we decided to meet in Paris and spend the winter there. - -In the beginning of October, 1899, we established ourselves in an -_appartement_ in the Boulevard Edgar Quinet, and there we spent the next -four months. - -Looking back through our old diaries I recognise for how little of that -time Martin was free from suffering of some kind. The effects of the -hunting accident, and the strain of writing, too soon undertaken, were -only now beginning to come to their own. Neuralgia, exhaustion, -backaches, and all the indescribable miseries of neurasthenia held her -in thrall. It is probable that the bracing tonic of the Paris climate -saved her from a still worse time, but she had come through her -reserves, and was now going on pluck. We wrote, desultorily, when she -felt equal to it, and I worked at M. Délécluse’s studio in the mornings, -and, with some others, assisted Mr. Cyrus Cuneo, a young, and then -unknown, American, in getting up an “illustration class” in the -afternoons. Most people have seen the brilliant black and white -illustrations that Mr. Cuneo drew for the _Illustrated London News_ and -other papers and magazines, and his early death has left a blank that -will not easily be filled. He could have been no more than four or five -and twenty when I met him, and he was already an extraordinarily clever -draughtsman. He was small, dark, and exceedingly good-looking, with a -peculiarly beautiful litheness, balance, and swiftness of movement, that -was to some extent explained by the fact that before he took up Art he -had occupied the exalted position of “Champion Bantam of the South -Pacific Slope”! - -At that juncture we were all mad about a peculiar style of crayon -drawing, which, as far as we were concerned, had been originated by -Cuneo, and about a dozen of us took a studio in the Passage Stanilas, -and worked there, from the most sensational models procurable. Cuneo was -“_Massier_”; he found the models, and posed them (mercilessly), and we -all worked like tigers, and brutally enjoyed the strung-up sensation -that comes from the pressure of a difficult pose. Each stroke is Now or -Never, every instant is priceless. Pharaoh of the Oppression was not -firmer in the matter of letting the Children of Israel go, than we were -with those unhappy models. I console myself by remembering that a good -model has a pride in his endurance in a difficult pose that is as -sustaining as honest and just pride always is. Nevertheless, when I look -over these studies, and see the tall magician, peering, on tip-toe, over -a screen, and the High-priest denouncing the violation of the sanctuary, -and the unfortunate Arab, half rising from his couch to scan the -horizon, I recognise that for these models, though Art was indisputably -long, Time could hardly have been said to be fleeting. - -Mr. Whistler was at that time in Paris, and had a morning class for -ladies only, and it was in their studio that we had our class. It was -large, well-lighted, with plenty of stools and easels and a sink for -washing hands and brushes. It also was thoroughly insanitary, and had a -well-established reputation for cases of typhoid. As a precautionary -measure we always kept a certain yellow satin cushion on the mouth of -the sink; this, not because of any superstition as to the colour, or the -cushion, but because there was no other available “stopper for the -stink.” (Thus Cuneo, whose language, if free, was always well chosen.) -One of our members was a very clever American girl, who had broken loose -from the bondage of the Whistler class. There, it appeared from her, if -you had a soul, you could not think of calling it your own. It was -intensively bossed by Mr. Whistler’s _Massière_, on the lines laid down -by Mr. Whistler, until, as my friend said, you had “no more use for it, -and were just yelling with nerves.” The model, whether fair, dark, red, -white, or brown, had to be seen through Mr. Whistler’s spectacles, and -these, judging by the studies that were occasionally left on view, were -of very heavily smoked glass. When it came to the _Massière_ setting my -American friend’s palette, and dictating to her the flesh tones, the -daughter of the Great Republic - -[Illustration: “CHEZ CUNEO.”] - -observed that she was used to a free country, and shook the dust off her -feet, and scraped the mud off her palette, and retired. An interesting -feature of the studio was that many sheets of paper on which Mr. -Whistler had scribbled maxim and epigram were nailed on its walls, for -general edification, and it might have served better had his lieutenant -allowed these to influence the pupils, unsupported by her -interpretations. Since then I have met some of these pronouncements in -print, but I will quote one of those that I copied at the time, as it -bears on the case in point. - -“That flesh should ever be low in tone would seem to many a source of -sorrow, and of vast vexation, and its rendering, in such circumstance, -an unfailing occasion of suspicion, objection, and reproach; each -objection--which is the more fascinating in that it would seem to imply -superiority and much virtue on the part of the one who makes it--is -vaguely based upon the popular superstition as to what flesh really -is--when seen on canvas, for the people never look at Nature with any -sense of its pictorial appearance, for which reason, by the way, they -also never look at a picture with any sense of Nature, but -unconsciously, from habit, with reference to what they have seen in -other pictures. Lights have been heightened until the white of the tube -alone remains. Shadows have been deepened until black only is left! -Scarcely a feature stays in its place, so fierce is its intention of -firmly coming forth. And in the midst of this unseemly struggle for -prominence, the gentle truth has but a sorry chance, falling flat and -flavourless and without force.” - -No one who has not lived, as we did, the life of “The Quarter” can at -all appreciate its charm. In description--as I have already had occasion -to say--it is usual, and more entertaining, to dwell upon the disasters -of daily life, but though these, thanks to a _bonne à tout faire_, and a -perfidious stove, were not lacking, Martin and I, and our friends, -enjoyed ourselves. Small and select tea-parties were frequent; -occasionally we aspired to giving what has been called by a gratified -guest in the County Cork “a nice, ladylike little dinner,” and in a -letter of my own I find an account of a more unusual form of -entertainment which came our way. - -“A friendly and agreeable American, who works in the Studio, asked us to -come and see her in her rooms, away back of Saint Sulpice. When we got -there we found, as well as my American friend, a little incidental, -casual mother, whom she had not thought worth mentioning before. She -just said, briefly, - -“‘Oh, this is Mother,’ which, after all, sufficed. - -“‘Mother’ was a perfect specimen of one of the secret, serf-like -American mothers, who are concealed in Paris, put away like a pair of -warm stockings, or an old waterproof, for an emergency. She was a nice, -shrivelled, little old thing, very kind and polite. Their room, which -was about six inches square, had little in it save a huge and catafaltic -bed with deep crimson curtains; the window curtains were deep crimson, -the walls, which were brown, had panels of deep crimson. Hot air welled -into the room through gratings. We sat and talked, and looked at picture -postcards for a long time, and our tongues were beginning to hang out, -from want of tea, and suffocation, when the daughter said something to -the mother. - -“There was then produced, from a sort of hole in the wall, sweet -biscuits, and a bottle of wine, the latter also deep crimson (to match -the room, no doubt). It was a fierce and heady vintage. I know not its -origin, I can only assure you that in less than two minutes from its -consumption our faces were tremendously _en suite_ with the curtains. We -tottered home, clinging to each other, and lost our way twice.” - -We had ourselves an opportunity of offering a somewhat unusual form of -hospitality to two of our friends, the occasion being nothing less than -the expected End of the World. This was timed by the newspapers to occur -on the night of November 15, and I will allow Martin to describe what -took place. The beginning part of the letter gives the history of one of -those curious and unlucky coincidences of which writing-people are more -often the victims than is generally known, and for this reason I will -transcribe it also. - -V. F. M. to Mrs. Martin. (Nov. 23, 1899.) - - “...The story for the Christmas number of the _Homestead_ came to - a most untimely end; not that it was untimely, as we were at the - very limit of time allowed for sending it in. It was finished, and - we were just sitting down to copy it, when I chanced to look - through last year’s Xmas No. (which, fortunately, we happened to - have here,) in order to see about the number of words. I then made - the discovery that one of the stories last Christmas, by Miss Jane - Barlow, no less! was built round the same idea as ours; one or two - incidents quite startlingly alike, so much so that one couldn’t - possibly send in ours. It read like a sort of burlesque of Miss - Barlow’s, and would never have done. There was no time to re-write - it, so all we could do was to write and tell the Editor what had - happened, and make our bows. E. sent him a sketch, as an _amende_, - which he has accepted in the handsome and gentlemanlike spirit in - which it was offered, and I sent him a little dull article[13] - that I happened to have here, on the chance that it might do to - fill a corner, and it is to appear with E.’s sketch. But I am - afraid, though he was very kind about it, that these things have - not at all consoled the Editor, who wanted a story like the - ‘R.M.’s.’ - - “Nothing very interesting has happened here since the night of ‘The - Leonids,’ the Shower of Stars that was to have happened last week. - There was much excitement in Paris, at least the newspapers were - excited. On my way to the dentist a woman at the corner of the - boulevard was selling enormous sheets of paper, with ‘_La Fin du - Monde, à trois heures!_’ on them, and a gorgeous picture of Falbe’s - comet striking the earth. It was then 1.30, but I thought I had - better go to the dentist just the same. I believe that lots of the - poor people were very much on the jump about it. The Rain of - Meteors was prophesied by the Observatory here for that night, and - Kinkie, and the lady whom we call ‘Madame Là Là,’ arranged to spend - the night in our sitting room (which has a good view of the sky in - two aspects). We laid in provender and filled the stove to - bursting, and our visitors arrived at about 9.30 p.m. It really was - very like a wake, at the outset. The stipulation was that they were - to call us if anything happened; I went to bed at 10.30, E. at - midnight, and those unhappy creatures sat there all night, and - _nothing_ happened. They saw three falling stars, and they made tea - three times (once in honour of each star), and they also had - ‘Maggi,’ which is the French equivalent for Bovril, and twice as - nice. During the night I could hear their stealthy steps going to - and fro to the kitchen to boil up things on the gas stove. In the - awful dawn they crept home, and, I hear, turned up at the Studio - looking just the sort of wrecks one might have expected. - - “I believe that they did see a light go sailing up from the Dome of - the Observatoire, (which we can see from here) and that was a - balloon, containing a lady astronomer, Mademoiselle Klumpke, (who - is, I believe an American) and others. She sailed away in the - piercing cold to somewhere in the South of Switzerland, and I - believe she saw a few dozen meteors. Anyhow, two days afterwards, - she walked into Kinkie’s studio, bringing a piece of mistletoe, and - some flowers that she had gathered when she got out of the balloon - down there.” - -The South African War made life in Paris, that winter, a school of -adversity for all English, or nominally English, people. Each reverse of -our Army--and if one could believe the French papers it would seem that -such took place every second day--was snatched at by the people of Paris -and their newspapers with howls of delight. Men in the omnibuses would -thrust in our faces _La Patrie_, or some such paper, to exhibit the -words “_Encore un Écrasement Anglais!_”, in large, exultant letters, -filling a page. Respectable old gentlemen, in “faultless morning dress,” -would cry “Oh yais!” as we passed; large tongues would be exhibited to -us, till we felt we could have diagnosed the digestions of the Quarter. -At last our turn came, and when the _Matin_ had a line, “_Capitulation -de Cronjé_,” writ large enough for display, Martin made an expedition in -an omnibus down “The Big Boulevards” for no purpose other than to flaunt -it in the faces of her fellow passengers. - -To Martin, who was an intensely keen politician, the aloofness of many -of the art-students whom she met, from the War, the overthrow of the -French Government, from, in fact, any question on any subject outside -the life of the studio, was a constant amazement. - -In a letter from her to one of her sisters she releases her feelings on -the subject. - -V. F. M. to Mrs. Cuthbert Dawson. -(Paris, Nov. 29, 1899.) - - “The French papers are realising that a mistake has been made in - the attacks on the Queen, and the better ones are saying so. But - the _Patrie_, the _Libre Parole_, and all that fleet of halfpenny - papers that the poor read, have nailed their colours to the mast, - and it seems as if their idea is to overthrow their present - Government by fair means or foul. As long as this Government is in - there will be no quarrel with England, but it might, of course, go - out like a candle, any day. I daresay you have heard the _Rire_ - spoken of as one of the papers that ought to be suppressed. We - bought the number that was to be all about the English, and all - about them it was, a sort of comic history of England since the - Creation, with Hyde Park as the Garden of Eden. The cover was a - hauntingly horrible picture of Joan of Arc being burned. The rest - of the pictures were dull, disgusting, and too furiously angry to - be clever. We had pleasure in consigning the whole thing to the - stove.... The students here, with exceptions, of course,--appear - deaf and blind to all that goes on, and Revolutions in Paris, and - the War in the Transvaal, are as nothing to them as compared with - the pose of the model. In every street are crowds of them, scraping - away at their charcoal ‘academies’ by the roomful, all perfectly - engrossed and self-centred, and, I think, quite happy. Last Sunday - we went to a mild little tea-party in a studio, where were several - of these artist-women, in their best clothes, and somewhere in the - heart of the throng was a tiny hideosity, an American, (who has a - studio in which R. B. once worked,) fat, bearded, and unspeakably - common, but interesting.[14] Holding another court of the women was - a microbe English artist, an absurd little thing to look at, but, I - believe, clever; I hear that on weekdays he dresses like a French - workman and looks like a toy that you would buy at a bazaar. No one - talked anything but Art, except when occasionally one of the - hostesses (there were four) hurriedly asked me what I thought of - the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyám, or _how_ two people managed to write - together, just to show what good hostesses they were, while all the - while they tried to listen to the harangues of the microbe or the - hideosity. Poor things, it was very nice of them, and I was - touched. There are about half a dozen, that I know here, who take - an English paper; it is a remarkable thing that they are nearly all - Irish and Scotch, and have baths.” - - - - -CHAPTER XXIV - -HORSES AND HOUNDS - - With Flurry’s Hounds, and you our guide, - We learned to laugh until we cried; - Dear Martin Ross, the coming years - Find all our laughter lost in tears. - --_Punch_, Jan. 19, 1916. - - -I have thought of leaving it to our books to express and explain the -part that hunting has played in Martin’s life and mine; but when I -remember (to quote once again those much-quoted lines) how much of the -fun that we have had in our lives has been “owed to horse and hound,” I -feel an acknowledgment more direct and deliberate is due. - -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 - -[Illustration: THE WEST CARBERY HOUNDS. - -M. J. R. -] - -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 <small>A.M.</small>, 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 _af_ter 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. - -V. F. M. to the Hon. Mrs. Campbell. (December.) - - “We had an unusual sort of hunt the other day, when the hounds, - unattended, put a fox out of a very thick wood and up a terrible - hill; when we caught them up there ensued much scrambling and - climbing; there were even moments when, having a bad head, I was - extremely frightened, and, in the middle of all this, a fallow doe - joined up from behind, _through the riders_, and got away over the - hill-top. To the doe the hounds cheerfully attached themselves, and - we had much fun out of it, and it was given to us to see, as they - went away, that one hound had a rabbit in his mouth. It is not - every day that one hunts a fox, a deer and a rabbit at the same - moment. It was like old hunting scenes in tapestry. C., the old - huntsman, and his old white horse went like smoke in the boggy, - hilly country. It was pleasant to see, and the doe beat the hounds - handsomely and got back safely to the wood, to which, in the - meantime, the fox had strolled back by the avenue. - - “Last week we drew another of the minor mountains of this district, - and the new draft got away like lightning after a dog! who fled - over a spur of the hill for his paternal home. All went out of - sight, but the row continued. C. sat and blew his horn, and the - poor Whip nearly burst himself trying to get round them. Then they - reappeared, half the pack by this time, going like mad, and _no_ - dog in front of them! We then had a vision of an old humpbacked man - with a scythe, like the conventional figure of ‘Time,’ set up - against a furzy cliff, mowing at the hounds in the full belief that - they were going to pull him down. They swept on up the hill and - disappeared, having, in the excursion with the dog, put up a fox! - E. had divined it and got away with them. By cleaving to C. I - caught them all right, otherwise I should have been left with - everyone else at the bottom of the hill, saying funny things about - the dog. It was touching to hear C. saying to E. in triumph, ‘Where - are your English hounds now, Miss?’ She had praised the United, and - this sank into the soul of C., and indeed it was his beloved - black-and-tan Kerry beagles and Scalliwags who were in front, and - the rest not in sight. The new English draft were probably occupied - in crossing themselves instead of the country--for which I don’t - blame them. Personally, however, I feel as if an open grass - country, and a smart pack, and a sound horse, would be very - alarming.” - -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.” - - -As had been the case with “The Real Charlotte,” so were we also in Paris -when “Some Experiences of an Irish R.M.”--to give the book its full and -cumbrous title--was published by Messrs. Longman in November, 1899. - -It was probably better for us both that we should be where, beyond the -voices, there was peace, but it meant that most of the fun of publishing -a book was lost to us. The thrill, for example, of buying a chance -paper, and lighting upon a review in it. One might buy all the papers in -Paris without a moment of anxiety. - -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-- - - ‘Then felt I like some watcher of the skies - When a new planet swims into his ken,’ - -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 - -[Illustration: AT BUNALUN. “GONE TO GROUND.” - -A. C. -] - -[Illustration: WAITING FOR THE TERRIERS. - -A. C. -] - -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 - -IN A SWISS VALLEY. - - Silver and blue the hills, and blue the infinite sky, - And silver sweet the straying sound of bells - Among the pines; their tangled music tells - Where the brown cattle wander. From on high - A glacier stream leaps earthward, passionately, - A white soul flying from a wizard’s spells. - And still above the pines one snow-drift dwells, - Winter’s last sentinel, left there to die. - From the deep valley, while the waterfall - Charms memory to sleep, I see the snow - Sink, conquered, on the pine trees’ steady spears. - A waft of flowers comes to me. Dearest, all - Our happy days throng back, and with the flow - Of that wild stream, there mingle alien tears. - - - * * * * * - -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.) - -E. Œ. S. to V. F. M. (Spring, 1903.) - - “---- I have also heard of a very smart lady, going to Ireland for - the first time, who invested in an R.M., saying, ‘I have bought - this book. I want to see how one should talk to the Irish.’ - - “‘Blasht your Sowl!’ replied my friend Slipper. - - “‘May the Divil crack the two legs undher ye!’ (See any page, - anywhere, in the Irish R.M.)” - -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. - -V. F. M. to E. Œ. S. (Dublin, October (year uncertain).) - - “Miss K. ceaselessly flits from Committee to Lecture and from - Lecture to Convention, and would hound me to all. She is much - wrapped up in the _Feis Ceoil_, of which a meeting, about Village - Choral Societies, was held in the Mansion House on Friday. She - begged me to go, and see the Lord Mayor preside, and hear much - useful information, so, in the interests of the C.T. Choral Class I - went. It was five o’clock before I approached, for the first time - in my life, the portals of the Mansion House, and in the hall I - could see nothing but a dirty bicycle and a little boy of about - ten, who murmured that I was to write my name in a book, which I - did with a greasy pencil from his own pocket. He told me that I was - to go to the stairs and take the first to the left. I did so, and - found myself in a pitch dark drawing-room. I returned to the boy, - who then told me to go _up_ the stairs and turn to my left. - - “I climbed two flights, of homely appearance, and found a quite - dark landing at the top. As I stood uncertain, something stirred in - the dark. It was very low and dwarfish, and my flesh crept; it said - nothing, but moved past, no higher than my waist. It seemed, in the - glimmer that came from the foot of the stairs, to be some awful - little thing carrying a big bundle on its back or head. I shall - never know more than this. - - “There was light down a passage, and making for it I came to a room - with little and big beds jammed up side by side, obviously a - nursery. There was also a nurse. I murmured apologies and fled. The - nurse, if it were indeed a nurse and not an illusion, took not the - faintest notice. After various excursions round the dark landing, - during which the conviction grew upon me that I was in a dream, I - went back to the nursery passage and there met a good little - slut-tweenie, without cap or apron, who took me downstairs and put - me right for the meeting, which I entered in a state bordering on - hysterics. That died away very soon under the influence of a very - long speech about the hire of pianos. Very practical, but deadly. - The room was interesting, panelled with portraits around, and the - audience was scanty.... On the whole I think the information I - obtained is entirely useless to you, but the mysterious life into - which I stumbled was interesting, and had a pleasing Behind the - Looking Glass bewilderment in it.... This morning I had a tooth out - under gas. I am quite sure that all gassings and chloroformings are - deeply uncanny. One dies, one goes off into dreadful vastness with - one’s astral body. That was the feeling. A poor little clinging <small>ME</small>, - that first clung to the human body that had decoyed it into B----’s - chair, was cast loose from that, and then hung desperately on to - an astral creature that was wandering in nightmare - fastnesses,--(even as I wandered in the Mansion House)--quite - separate--then that was lost, and that despairing <small>ME</small> said to itself - quite plainly, ‘I am forsaken--I have lost grip--I don’t know how I - am behaving--I must just endure.’ Long afterwards came an effect as - of the gold shower of a firework breaking silently over my head. - Then appeared a radiant head in a fog--B----’s. Delightful - relaxation of awful effort at self-control, and sudden realisation - that the brute was out. Then the usual restoration to the world, - tipped B----, put on my hat, and so home. I am sure these visions - happen when one dies, and I am convinced of the existence of an - innermost self, who just sits and holds on to the other two.” - -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. - -[Illustration: WEST CARBERY HOUNDS AT LISS ARD.] - -[Illustration: PORTOFINO. - -V. F. M. -] - - - - -CHAPTER XXVII - -VARIOUS OPINIONS - - -While I have been writing this book the difficulty of deciding between -the things that interested Martin and me, and those that might -presumably interest other people, has been ever before me. In the path -of this chapter there is another and still more formidable lion, -accompanied--as a schoolchild said--by “his even fiercer wife, the -Tiger.” By which I wish to indicate Irish politics, and Woman’s -Suffrage. I will take the Tiger first, and will dispose of it as briefly -as may be. - -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 9_d._ 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. - -V. F. M. to CAPTAIN STEPHEN GWYNN, M.P. - -“DRISHANE HOUSE, -“SKIBBEREEN. -“_Feb. 1, 1912._ - - “...The day after ---- was here I rode on a large horse, of mild - and reflective habit, away over a high hill, where farms reached up - to the heather. We progressed by a meandering lane from homestead - to homestead, and the hill grass was beautifully green and clean, - and the sun shone upon it in an easterly haze. There was ploughing - going on, and all the good, quiet work that one longs to do, - instead of brain-wringing inside four walls. I wondered deeply and - sincerely whether Home Rule could increase the peacefulness, or - whether it will not be like upsetting a basket of snakes over the - country. These people have bought their land. They manage their own - local affairs. Must there be yet another upheaval for them--and a - damming up of Old Age Pensions, which now flow smoothly and balmily - among them, to the enormous comfort and credit of the old people? - (And since I saw my mother’s old age and death I have understood - the innermost of that tragedy of failing life.) - - “My Cousin and I, in our small way, live in the manner that seems - advisable for Ireland. We make money in England and we spend it - over here. We are sorry for those who have to live in London, but - Ireland cannot support us all without help. - - “You will understand now how badly I bored your friend, and how - long-suffering he was.” - -From CAPTAIN STEPHEN GWYNN, M.P., to V. F. M. - -“HOUSE OF COMMONS. -“_Feb. 8th, 1912._ - - “Your letter filled me with a desire to talk to you for about 24 - hours, concerning Ireland. Why snakes?... what demoralisation is - going to come to your nice country-side because they send ---- or - another, to sit in Dublin and vote on Irish affairs, which he - understands less or more, instead of hanging round at St. Stephens? - - “We have too much _abstract_ politics in Ireland, we want them real - and concrete. Take Old Age Pensions, for instance. I don’t for an - instant believe that the pension will ever be cut down, but I do - think that an Irish Assembly ought to decide whether farmers should - qualify for it by giving their farms to their sons. I do think that - we ought to be able to pass a law enabling us to put a ferry across - Corrib with local money; it is now impossible because of one - Englishman’s opposition. I think we ought to be able to tackle the - whole transit question, including the liberation of canals from - railway control, and including also the Train Ferry and All Red - Route possibilities. In 1871 Lord Hartington said it was a strong - argument for Home Rule that a Royal Commission had reported in 1867 - for the State control of Irish railways, forty years ago, and - nothing has been done but to appoint another Commission. Poor Law, - the whole Education system--all these things want an assembly of - competent men, with leisure and local knowledge. You think we can’t - get them? That is the trouble with people like you. You know the - peasantry very well; you don’t know the middle class.... There are - plenty of men in Ireland--men of the Nationalist party--brilliant - young men, like Kettle,[15] who has also courage and enterprise. He - once gave us all a lead in a very ugly corner with a crowd. - - “Devlin is to my thinking as good a man as Lloyd George, and that - is a big word. Redmond and Dillon seem to me more like statesmen - than anyone on either front bench. Of course, in many cases here - you feel the want of an educated tradition behind. No one can count - the harm that was done by keeping Catholics out of Trinity Coll., - Dublin. But beside the Nationalists there will be no disinclination - to employ other educated men, witness Kavanagh. Some of our fiercer - people wanted to stop his election, right or wrong, but we reasoned - them over, and once he got into the party no man was better - listened to, even when, as sometimes happened, he differed with the - majority.... He would be in an Irish Parliament, in one house or - the other, and a better public man could not be found.... To my - mind the present System _breeds_ what you have called ‘snakes.’ In - Clare, among the finest people I ever met in Ireland, you have the - beastly and abominable shooting, and no man will bring another to - justice. They are out of their bearings to the law, and will be, - till they are made to feel it is their own law. And the scandal of - bribery in ‘Local Elections’ will never be put down till you have a - central assembly where things will be thrashed out without any - fear of seeming to back ‘Dublin Castle’ against a ‘good - Nationalist.’ - - “For Gentlefolk (to use the old word) who want to live in the - country, Ireland is going to be a better place to live in than it - has been these thirty years--yes, or than before, for it is bad for - people to be a caste. They will get their place in public business, - easily and welcome, those who care to take it, but on terms of - equality, with the rest. Don’t tell me that Ireland isn’t a - pleasanter place for men like Kavanagh or Walter Nugent, than for - the ordinary landlord person who talks about ‘we’ and ‘they.’ - - “Caste is at the bottom of nine-tenths of our trouble. A Catholic - bishop said to me, drink did a lot of harm in Ireland, but not half - as much as gentility. Everybody wanting to be a clerk. Catholic - clerks anxious to be in Protestant tennis clubs, Protestant tennis - clubs anxious to keep out Catholic clerks, and so on, and so on. My - friend, a guest for anybody’s house in London, in half of Dublin - socially impossible. - - “I am prophesying, no doubt, but I know, and you, with all your - knowledge and your insight _don’t_ know--what is best worth knowing - in Ireland, better even than the lovely ways of the peasant folk. - I’ve seen and rubbed shoulders with men in the making. - - “You don’t, for instance, know D. E., who used to drive a van - in ---- and was a Fenian in arms, and the starved orphan of a ---- - labourer first of all,--and is now the very close personal friend - of a high official personage. Now, if ever I met Don Quixote I met - him in the shoes of D. E.; if you like a little want of training to - digest the education that he acquired, largely in gaol, but with a - real love of fine thoughts. If Sterne could have heard D. E. and - another old warrior, E. P. O’Kelly--and a very charming, shrewd old - person--quoting ‘Tristram Shandy’ which they got by heart in - Kilmainham, Sterne would have got more than perhaps he deserved in - the way of satisfaction. - - “This inordinate epistle is my very embarrassing tribute. You know - so much. You and yours stand for so much that is the very choice - essence of Ireland, that it fills me with distress to see you all - standing off there in your own paddock, distrustful and not even - curious about the life you don’t necessarily touch. - - “You and I will both live, probably, to see a new order growing up. - I daresay it may not attract you, and may disappoint me, only, for - heaven’s sake, don’t think it is going to be all ‘snakes.’ - - “And do forgive me for having inflicted all this on you. After all, - you needn’t read it--and very likely you can’t!...” - -V. F. M. to CAPTAIN GWYNN, M.P. - -“DRISHANE HOUSE, -“SKIBBEREEN, -“_Feb. 10, 1912._ - - “I do indeed value your letter, and like to think you snatched so - much from your busy day in order to write it.... By ‘snakes’ in - Ireland, I mean a set of new circumstances, motives, influences, - and possibilities acting on people’s lives and characters, and - causing disturbance. My chief reason for this fear that I have is - that Irish Nationalism is not one good solid piece of homespun. It - is a patch work. There are some extremely dangerous factors in it, - one of the worst being the Irish-American revolutionary. The older - Fenianism lives there, _plus_ all that is least favourable in - American republicanism.... (These) will look on Ireland as the - depot and jumping-off place for their animosity to England. Apart - from America there is much hostility to England, dormant and - theoretical, innate and inherited--and it is fostered by certain - Gaelic League teachings. Here again I speak only of what I know - personally. I have seen the prize book of Irish poetry given at a - ‘Feis’ to a little boy as a prize for dancing. A series of war - songs against England.... You see what I am aiming at. There are - dangerous elements in Ireland, and strong ones, Irish-American, - Gaelic League, Sinn Fein, and what I feel very uncertain about is - whether straight and genuine and tolerant people, like you, will - have the power to control them. With the Home Rule banner gone, - what is to keep them in hand?... I am sure that you will despise - this feeling on my part. You feel that the Church of Rome is with - you, and that with its help all will fall into line. And you feel - that men of high and practical talent are with you and must - prevail.... A Roman Catholic ascendancy and government will bring - Socialism, because now-a-days Socialism is the complementary colour - of R.C. government or ascendancy. America will play its part - there--the general trend of the world will continue; the priesthood - knows it, and I am sorry for them. I do not want to see them - dishonoured and humiliated. I know their influence for good as well - as I know the danger of the policy of their Church. That is my - second point. A Vatican policy for Ireland it will have to be, - under Home Rule, or else the Priesthood is shouldered aside, and - that is an ugly and demoralising thing. The religious question is - deep below all others, and we all are aware of that. There is - perfect toleration between the Protestants and Catholics - individually (except for the North). All, as far as I have ever - known, is give and take and good-breeding on the subject. We accept - the Holydays of the R.C. Church (which are still in full force in - the West) and they go to early Mass in order that they may drive us - to church later in the day. There is no trouble whatever, and we go - to each other’s funerals, etc.! But the larger policy of the Church - of Rome is a different thing, and a dangerous--and Socialism is its - Nemesis.... - - “I wish that I did know the men you speak of. I am sure they are - tip-top men, and no one realises more than I do the talent and the - genius that lie among the Irish lower and middle classes. I am not - quite clear as to what either you or I mean by ‘middle classes,’ I - think of well-to-do farmers, and small professional people in the - towns. We know both these classes pretty well down here.... Last - year we had a middle-class man at luncheon here, an able business - man, working like a nigger, and an R.C. and Home Ruler. We - discussed the matter. He said, as all you genuine people say and - believe, that once Home Rule was granted, the good men among - Protestant Unionists would be selected, and the wasters flung - aside. I said, and still say, that the brave and fair thing would - be to select them _beforehand_, show trust in them, give them - confidence, and then indeed there would be a strong case for Home - Rule. His argument was that they must keep up this artificial, - feverish, acrid agitation, or their case falls to the ground. Two - exactly opposite points of view. - - “The people that I am most afraid of are the town politicians. I am - not fond of anything about towns; they are full of second-hand - thinking; they know nothing of raw material and the natural - philosophy of the country people. As to caste, it is in the towns - that the _vulgar_ idea of caste is created. The country people - believe in it strongly; they cling to a belief in what it should - stand for of truth and honour--and there the best classes touch the - peasant closely, and understand each other. ‘A lady’s word.’[16] - How often has that been brought up before me as a thing - incorruptible and unquestionable, and it incites one, and humbles - one, and gives a consciousness of deep responsibility. - - “I think the social tight places you speak of exist just as tightly - in England, Scotland, and Wales. Social ambition is vulgarity, of - course, and even a republican spirit does not cure it--witness - America. It is not Ireland alone that is ‘sicklied o’er with the - pale thought of caste!’ ... I venture to think that your friend - looks on me with a friendly eye, especially since I told him that - my foster-mother took me secretly, as a baby to the priest and had - me baptised. It was done for us all, and my father and mother knew - it quite well, and never took any notice. I was also baptised by - Lord Plunket in the drawing-room at Ross, so the two Churches can - fight it out for me!...” - -V. F. M. to CAPTAIN GWYNN. - -“DRISHANE, -“_Nov. 8, 1912_. - - “It is nice of you to let the authors of ‘Dan Russel’ know that - what they said has helped[17] ... and I can assure you that it - gives us real pleasure to think of it. - - “I am very glad that you yourself like it, and feel with us about - John Michael and Mrs. Delanty. - - “One does not meet these people out of Ireland; they are a blend - not to be arrived at elsewhere. But I wish there were more John - Michaels; shyness is so nice a quality when it goes deep. In fact - all really nice people have shy hearts, I think--but their friends - enjoy the quality more than they do, ... I was up in the North - myself at the Signing of the Covenant, not in Belfast, but in the - country. I went up on a visit there, not as a journalist, but when - I saw what I saw I wrote an article about it for the _Spectator_. I - did not know the North at all.... I send you what I wrote, because - it is an honest impression. What surprised me about the place was - the feeling of cleverness, and go, and also the people struck me as - being hearty. If only the South would go up North and see what they - are doing there, and how they are doing it, and ask them to show - them how, it would make a good deal of difference. And then the - North should come South and see what nice people we are, and how we - do _that_! Your lovely Donegal I did not see, but hope to do that - next time. You need not send back the _Spectator_, because that is - a heavy supertax on the reader.” - - - - -CHAPTER XXVIII - -THE LAST - - She hid it always, close against her breast, - A golden vase, close sealed and strangely wrought, - And set with gems, whose dim eyes, mystery fraught, - Shot broken gleams, like secrets half confessed. - “One day,” she said, “Love’s perfumed kisses pressed - Against its lip their perfectness, unsought, - And suddenly the dizzy fragrance caught - My senses in its mesh, and gave them rest. - And life’s disquietude no more I feel, - For now,” she said, “my heart sleeps still and light. - Love’s Anodyne outlasts the lingering years!” - But in the darkness of an autumn night - Her heart woke, weeping, and she brake the seal. - The scent was dead; the vase was full of tears. - - -I have come to what must be the final chapter, and the thought most -present with me is that in writing it I am closing the door on these -memories of two lives that made the world a pleasant place for each -other, and I find now that although I began them with reluctance, it is -with reluctance still that I must end them. - -It has been hard, often, to leave untold so many of those trivial things -that counted for more, in the long run, than the occasional outstanding -facts of two quite uneventful lives. I fear I have yielded too much to -the temptation of telling and talking nonsense, and now there remains -only the Appendix in which to retrieve Martin’s character and mine for -intelligence and for a serious concern for the things that are serious. - -To return to our work, which for us, at all events, if for no one else, -was serious. As soon as we had recovered from “Dan Russel,” Martin set -forth on what I find entered in my diary as “a series of tribal -war-dances round the County Galway,” which meant that she paid visits, -indefatigably, and with entire satisfaction, in her own county and among -her own allies and kinsfolk. I should like to quote her account of a -visit to one of her oldest friends, Lady Gregory, at Coole Park, where -she met (and much enjoyed meeting) Mr. W. B. Yeats, and where she, -assisted by the poet, carved her initials on a tree dedicated to the -Muses, whereon A. E., and Dr. Douglas Hyde, and others of high -achievement had inscribed themselves. But I must hold to the ordinance -of silence as to living people that she herself ordained and would wish -me to observe. - -No one ever enjoyed good company more than Martin, and, as the beggars -say, she “thravelled the County Galway,” and there was good company and -a welcome before her wherever she went. - -At about this time she and I were invited to a public dinner in Dublin, -given to Irish literary women by the Corinthian Club; and, having -secured exemption from speech-making, we found it a highly interesting -entertainment, at which were materialised for us many who till then had -been among the things believed in but not seen. At this time also, or a -little later, I re-established the West Carbery Hounds, after a brief -interregnum. I only now allude to them in order to record the fact that -when the first draft of the reconstituted pack arrived, the lamented -“Slipper” (now no more) met them at the station with an enormous bouquet -of white flowers in a cavity in his coat that might have begun life as a -button-hole, and a tall hat. He cheered the six couples as they left the -station yard (accompanied, it may not be out of place to mention, -ridiculously, by two and a half gambolling couples of black and white -British-Holstein young cattle, on a herd of which magpie breed my sister -and I were embarking), and then, as the procession moved like a circus -through the streets of Skibbereen, “Slipper” renewed the task of -drinking all their healths, this time at my expense. - -The doctrine that sincere friendship is only possible between men dies -hard. It is, at last, in the fulness of time, expiring by force of fact, -and is now, like many another decayed convention, dragging out a -deplorable old age in facetious paragraphs in “Comic Corners,” where the -Mother-in-law, Mrs. Gamp and her ministrations, and the Unfortunate -Husband (special stress being laid on the sufferings endured by the -latter while his wife is enjoying herself upstairs) gibber together, and -presumably amuse someone. - -The outstanding fact, as it seems to me, among women who live by their -brains, is friendship. A profound friendship that extends through every -phase and aspect of life, intellectual, social, pecuniary. Anyone who -has experience of the life of independent and artistic women knows this; -and it is noteworthy that these friendships of women will stand even the -strain of matrimony for one or both friends. I gravely doubt that had -Jonathan outlived Uriah he would have seen much of David. - -However, controversy, and especially controversy of this complexion, is -a bore. As Martin said, in a letter to me, - -“Rows are a mistake; which is the only reason I don’t fight with you -for invariably spelling ‘practice,’ the noun, with an ‘s.’” - -Martin had a very special gift for friendship, both with women and with -men. Her sympathies were wide, and her insight into character and motive -enabled her to meet each of her many friends on their own ground, and to -enter deeply and truly into their lives, and give them a share in hers. - -In spite of the ordinance of silence, I feel as if she would wish me to -record in this book the names, at least, of some of those whom she -delighted to honour, and, with all diffidence, I beg them to understand -that in the very brief mention of them that will be found in the -Appendix, I have only ventured to do this because I believe that she -desires it. - -I suppose it was the result of old habit, and of the return of the -hounds, but, for whatever reason, during the years that followed the -appearance of “Dan Russel the Fox,” Martin and I put aside the notions -we had been dwelling upon in connection with “a serious novel,” and took -to writing “R.M.” stories again. These, six couple of them (like the -first draft of the re-established pack), wandered through various -periodicals, chiefly _Blackwood’s Magazine_, and in July, 1915, they -were published in a volume with the title of “In Mr. Knox’s Country.” - -We were in Kerry when the book appeared, or rather we were on our way -there. I remember with what anxiety I bought a _Spectator_ at the Mallow -platform bookstall, and even more vividly do I recall our departure from -Mallow, when Martin, and Ethel Penrose, and I, all violently tried to -read the _Spectator_ review of Mr. Knox at the same moment. - - * * * * * - -I will say nothing now of the time that we spent in Kerry; a happy -time, in lovely weather, in a lovely place. It was the last of many such -times, and it is too near, now, to be written of. - -I will try no more. Withered leaves, blowing in through the open window -before a September gale, are falling on the page. Our summers are ended. -“‘Vanity of vanities,’ saith the Preacher.” - -I have tried to write of the people, and the things, and the events that -she loved and was interested in. It has been a happiness to me to do so, -and at times, while I have been writing, the present has been forgotten -and I have felt as though I were recapturing some of the “careless -rapture” of older days. - -The world is still not without its merits; I am not ungrateful, and I -have many reasons that are not all in the past, and one in especial of -which I will not now speak, for gratitude. But there is a thing that an -old widow woman said, long ago, that remains in my mind. Her -husband--she spoke of him as “her kind companion”--had died, and she -said to me, patiently, and without tears, - -“Death makes people lonesome, my dear.” - - -FINIS. - - - - -APPENDIX I - -LETTERS FROM CHIEF JUSTICE CHARLES KENDAL BUSHE TO MRS. BUSHE - - -CHARLES KENDAL BUSHE to MRS. BUSHE. - -WATERFORD. (Undated.) -Probably July or August, 1798. - - “Within this day or two the United Irishmen rose in the Co Kilkenny - and disarm’d every gentleman and man in the County except Pierce - Butler. O’Flaherty, Davis, Nixon, Lee, and Tom Murphy was not - spar’d and they even beat up the Quarters of Bob’s Seraglio, but he - had the day before taken the precaution to remove his arms, and - among them my double barrell’d Gun, to Pierce Butler’s as a place - of safety, so that no arms remain’d but the arms of his Dulcinea, - but what they did in that respect Bob says not.... The United men - have done one serious mischief which is that they have discredited - Bank notes to such a degree that in Wexford no one wd give a Crown - for a national note or take one in payment and here tho they take - them they wont give Change for them so that at the Bar Room we are - oblig’d to pass little promissory notes for our Dinner and pay them - when they come to a Guinea. I assure you if you ow’d 17 shillgs - here no one wou’d give you four and take a Guinea. As to Gold it is - vanish’d. I have receiv’d but 2 Gold Guineas in £133.0.0 since I - came on Circuit. There is a good deal of Alarm about these United - Men every where.” - -Another letter, written at about the same time as the above, is dated -“Wexford, July twenty sixth, 1798.” It seems to have been written while -on circuit, a short time after the suppression of the Rebellion. - -CHARLES KENDAL BUSHE to MRS. BUSHE. - -“My dearest Nancy, - - “We return by Ross” (Co. Wexford) “both for greater safety and that - we may see the scene of the famous battle.” (This probably was - Vinegar Hill). “From every observation I can make it appears to me - that this Country is completely quieted; if you were to hear all - the different anecdotes told here you wou’d suppose you were - reading another Helen Maria Williams. I shall give you but - one--Col. Lehunte who is very civil to us was a prisoner to the - Rebels and tolerably well treated as such till one day in the - tattering (_sic_) of his house a Room--furnish’d with antique - ornaments in black and _orange_ was discover’d a small Skreen in - the same colours with heathen divinities on it. This Skreen was - carried instantly by the enrag’d mob thro the town as a proof of an - intended Massacre by the Orange Men. This Skreen, says the famous - fury Mrs. Dixon, was to be the standard of their Cavalry. This, - (Hope) is the anchor on which the Catholic sailors were to be - roasted alive--This, (Jupiter’s Eagle) is the Vulture that was to - pick out the Catholic Children’s Eyes--She went thro the Mythology - of the Skreen in this rational Exposition and entirely convinc’d - the Mob. In a moment Col. Lehunte was dragg’d out to Execution, - and his life was sav’d in the same manner his house was, by the - number of disputants who shou’d take it. He received three pike - wounds and was beat almost to death with sticks and the end of - firelocks and at last taken back for a more deliberate Execution in - the morning, being thrown for the night into a Dungeon where he lay - wounded on fetters, bolts, and broken Bottles. This is a venerable - old Gentleman, near 70 years old. - - “We hear many such stories. The Bridge is deep stain’d with blood. - -“Ever yours, my darling Nancy, - -“C. K. BUSHE.” - - - -The temptation to quote extensively from these early letters of “the -Chief” cannot be too freely indulged in, but I may include an account, -written from Clonmel, in about 1797, to his wife, giving an account of -what he calls “a most novel and extraordinary and disgusting species of -crime”; which is a moderate way of defining the comprehensive atrocity -of the act in question. - -CHARLES KENDAL BUSHE to MRS. BUSHE. - -CLONMEL. (_circa 1797._) - - “...The woman was clearly convicted and will be exemplarily - punish’d for it. She robb’d a churchyard of the hand of a dead man - which she put into all the milk she churn’d. Butter making is a - great part of the trade of the Country and the unfortunate Wretch - was persuaded that this hand drawn thro the Milk in the devil’s - name would give a miraculous quantity of butter, and it seems _she - has long_ made it a practice.” - -From CHIEF JUSTICE BUSHE to MRS. BUSHE. - -“OMAGH. _Monday August 16. 1810._ - -“My dearest Nan, - - “By making a forc’d march with Smyly here I have arrived some hours - before the other Judge, Cavalcade &c. and I have for the first time - since I left town sat down in a room by myself with something like - tranquillity, at least that negative Repose that consists in the - absence of stress or clamour fuss and hurry. The day has - fortunately been good and without stopping we rode here, 21 miles - across the mountains. This I found pleasant and indeed necessary - after the Confinement and bad weather which we have had - uninterruptedly since we left Dublin. You have no notion of such a - den as Cavan is. It is no wonder that poor Smyly us’d to get fever - in it, I am only astonish’d that I ever got out of it for I was not - for a moment well. It lies at the bottom of a Bason form’d by many - hills closing in on each other, and is surrounded by bogs and - lakes. The Sun can scarcely reach it, you look up at the heavens as - you do out of a jail yard that has high walls and I was glad to - have a large Turf fire in my Room. The Water is quite yellow and - deranges the stomach &c. so that my poor head was a mass of - confusion and my Spirits were slack enough.... After breakfast, bad - as the day was, I got a boat and went on the lake (Lough Erne) and - sail’d to the Island of Devenish where there is a curious Ruin of - an antient place of worship and a Round Tower in as perfect - preservation as the day it was built.... Short as the time was if - the weather had been favourable I was determined upon seeing Lough - Derg and St. Patrick’s purgatory which is in a small island in the - middle of it and which is in its history certainly one of the - greatest Curiosities in Europe.[18] It has maintained its Character - as the principal place of penance in the World since the first - Establishment of Christianity in Ireland and is as much frequented - now by Pilgrims from all Countries as it was in what we are in the - habit of calling the darker ages, as freely as if our own was - enlighten’d. Miller’s house is about ten miles from it and he has - by enquiries from the Priests and otherwise ascertained that the - average number of pilgrims during the season which begins with the - Summer and ends with the first of August exceeds ten thousand. This - last Season in this present year the number was much greater. They - all perform their journey barefooted and in mean Dress but those - of the upper Class are discover’d by the delicacy of their hands - and feet. There is a large ferry Boat which from morning to night - is employ’d in transporting and retransporting them. Each Pilgrim - remains 24 hours in the Island performing Devotions round certain - stone altars call’d Stations, at which five Priests perpetually - officiate. All this time and for some time before they strictly - fast, and on leaving the Island the Priest gives them what is - called Bread and Wine, that is Bread and Lake water which they - positively assert has the Taste of wine and the power of refreshing - and recovering them....” - -The end of this letter, giving a description of a visit to -Edgeworthstown, appears in the book, Chapter II, page 47. - - - - -APPENDIX II - - The following is written by CAPTAIN STEPHEN GWYNN, M.P., Member for - Galway City, who has very kindly permitted me to include it among - these memories. - - -Probably no one can have really known “Martin Ross” who did not spend -some time in her company either in Connemara or West Cork. I, to my -sorrow, only met her once, at a Dublin dinner table. That hour’s talk -has left on my mind a curiously limited and even negative impression. -She looked surprisingly unlike a person who spent much of her life in -the open air; and it was hard to associate her with the riotous humour -of many “R.M.” stories. What remains positive in the impression is a -sense of extreme fineness and delicacy, qualities which reflect -themselves in the physical counterparts of that restraint and sure taste -which are in the essence of all that she signed. - -That one meeting served me well, however, because out of it arose -casually an intermittent correspondence which passed into terms of -something like friendship. Once at all events I traded, as it were, on a -friend’s kindness; for when a boy of mine lay sick abroad, and I was -seeking for acceptable things to bring to his bedside, I wrote -repeatedly to Martin Ross, provoking replies from a most generous -letter-writer--letters very touching in their kindness. - -But most of our communications had their source in the prompting which -urged her to speak her mind to a Nationalist Member of Parliament, -concerning happenings in Ireland. These letters show how gravely and -anxiously she thought about her country, and events have written a grim -endorsement on certain of her apprehensions. She was never of those who -can be content to regard Ireland as a pleasant place for sport, full of -easy, laughable people; or she would never have understood Ireland with -that intensity which can be felt even in her humour. If her letters show -that she was often angry with her countrymen, they show too that it was -because she could not be indifferent to the honour of Ireland. - -_September, 1917._ - - - - -APPENDIX III - -HER FRIENDS - - -In trying to include in these divagations the names of some of the chief -among the friends of Martin Ross, I am met at once by the thought of her -brothers and sisters. These were first in her life, and they held their -place in it, and in her heart, in a manner that is not always given to -brothers and sisters. Two griefs, the death of her eldest brother, -Robert, and of the sister next to her in age, Edith Dawson, struck her -with a force that can best be measured by what the loss of two people so -entirely lovable meant to others less near to them than she. Handsome -and amusing, charming and generous, one may go on heaping up adjectives, -yet come no nearer to explaining to those who did not know Edith what -was lost when she died. Many of the times to which Martin looked back -with most enjoyment were spent with Edith and her husband, Cuthbert -Dawson. Colonel Dawson was then in the Queen’s Bays, and Martin’s -stories of those soldiering days were full of riding, and -steam-launching, and motoring (the last at an early period in history, -when, in Connemara at all events, a motor was described by the poor -people as “a hell-cart,” and received as such). All these things, and -the more dangerous the better, were what she and Edith found their -pleasure in, with the spirit that took all the fun that was going in -its stride, and did not flinch when trouble, suffering, and sorrow had -to be faced. - -Of Robert, she has herself written, and now but one brother and one -sister of all that brilliant family remain; Mr. James Martin, the Head -of the House, and Mrs. Hamilton Currey, whose husband, the late -Commander Hamilton Currey, R.N., was a distinguished writer on naval -matters, and was one whose literary opinion was very deeply valued by -Martin. - -She was, as Captain Gwynn has said, “a generous letter-writer,” and I -have been allowed by him and by one of her very special friends, Mrs. -Campbell, to make extracts from some of her letters to them. Her -letters, as Mrs. Campbell says, “have so much of her delightful self in -them,” that I very much regret that, for various reasons, I have not -been able to print more of them. - -Another of her great friends was Miss Nora Tracey, with whom she was -staying in Ulster at the tremendous moment of the signing of the Ulster -Covenant. Few things ever made a deeper political impression upon Martin -than did that visit, and the insight that she then gained into Ulster -and its fierce intensity of purpose did not cease to influence her -views. Whatever political opinions may be held, and however much the -attitude of No Compromise may be regretted, the impressiveness of Ulster -has to be acknowledged. No one was more sensitive to this than Martin, -and an article that, at this time, she wrote and sent to the _Spectator_ -was inspired by what she saw and heard in the North during that time of -crisis. - -Name after name of her friends comes to me, and I can only feel the -futility of writing them down, and thinking that in so doing it is -possible to explain her talent for friendship, her fine and faithful -enthusiasm for the people whom she liked; still less to indicate how -much their affection, and interest, and sympathy helped to fill her -life, and to make it what it was, a happy one. - -A few names at least I may record. - -Mr. and Mrs. Edmund Helps, Rose Helps, Mr. C. L. Graves, Lady Gregory, -Mrs. Wynne (who is one of Lord Morris’s daughters, and is one of a -family of old Galway friends and neighbours), Miss Gertrude Sweetnam, -Miss A. S. Kinkead, Sir Horace Plunkett, Fan Morris, “Jem” Barlow, and -Martin Ross’s kinsman, Mr. Justice Archer Martin, Justice of Appeal, -Victoria, B.C. - -It is of no avail to prolong the list, though I could do so (and I ask -to be forgiven for unintentional omissions), and I will do no more than -touch on her many friends among our many relations. Rose Barton, Ethel -Penrose (my own oldest friend, loved by Martin more than most), Violet -Coghill, Loo-Loo Plunket, Jim Penrose (that “Professor of Embroidery and -Collector of Irish Point” to whom she dedicated the “Patrick’s Day -Hunt”), and, nearest of all after her own family, my sister and my five -brothers, to all of whom she was as another sister, only, as the Army -List says, “with precedence of that rank.” - -An end must come. I am afraid I have forgotten much, and I know I have -failed in much that I had hoped to do, but I know, too, however far I -may have come short, that the memory of Martin Ross is safe with her -friends. - - - - -APPENDIX IV - -BIBLIOGRAPHY - - -“An Irish Cousin.” 1889: R. Bentley & Son; - 1903: Longmans, Green & Co. - -“Naboth’s Vineyard.” 1891: Spencer Blackett. - -“Through Connemara in a Governess Cart.” - 1892: W. H. Allen & Co. - -“In the Vine Country.” 1893: W. H. Allen & Co. - -“The Real Charlotte.” 1895: Ward & Downey; - 1900: Longmans, Green & Co. - -“Beggars on Horseback.” - 1895: Blackwood & Sons. - -“The Silver Fox.” 1897: Lawrence and Bullen; - 1910: Longmans, Green & Co. - -“Some Experiences of an Irish R.M.” - 1899: Longmans, Green & Co. - -“A Patrick’s Day Hunt.” - 1902: Constable & Co. - -“Slipper’s A B C of Foxhunting.” - 1903: Longmans, Green & Co. - -“All on the Irish Shore.” - 1903: Longmans, Green & Co. - -“Some Irish Yesterdays.” - 1906: Longmans, Green & Co. - -“Further Experiences of an Irish R.M.” - 1908: Longmans, Green & Co. - -“Dan Russel the Fox.” 1911: Methuen & Co., Ltd. - -“The Story of the Discontented Little Elephant.” - 1912: Longmans, Green & Co. - -“In Mr. Knox’s Country.” - 1915: Longmans, Green & Co. - - -PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY R. CLAY AND SONS, LTD., -BRUNSWICK STREET, STAMFORD STREET, S.E. 1, AND BUNGAY, SUFFOLK. - - -FOOTNOTES: - -[1] Robert has told me how, hearing from Willie Wills that “the -money-market was tight,” he went to proffer assistance. In Willie’s -studio he was about to light a cigarette with a half-burned “spill” of -paper, when he became aware that the “spill” was a five-pound note, an -unsuspected relic of more prosperous times, that had already been used -for a like purpose. E. Œ. S. - -[2] This sentence was subsequently introduced in the article “At the -River’s Edge,” by Martin Ross, _The Englishwoman’s Review_. - -[3] In these, and all the following letters, I have left the spelling, -punctuation, etc., unchanged. - -[4] Solicitor-General. - -[5] Daniel O’Connell. - -[6] Among the letters in the old letter-box of which I have spoken -was a paper, the contents of which may be offered to the professional -genealogist. They are as follows: - -“By the marriage of Charles Bushe to Emmeline Coghill, (daughter of -Sir J. Coghill Bt. by his first wife,) the lady becomes neice (_sic_) -to her husband, sister to her mother, and daughter to her grandmother, -aunt to her sisters and cousins, and grandaunt to her own children, -stepmother to her cousins, and sister-in-law to her father, while her -mother will be at the same time aunt and grandmother to her nephews and -neices.” I recommend no one to try to understand these statements.--E. -Œ. S. - -[7] Throughout these recollections I have, as far as has been possible, -refrained from mentioning those who are still trying to make the -best of a moderate kind of world. (Far be it from me to add to their -trials!) I wish to say, however, in connection with the subject of -this chapter, that in the struggle for life which so many of the Irish -gentry had at this period to face, Martin’s brothers and sisters were -no less ardently engaged than were their mother and their youngest -sister. In London, in India, in Ceylon, the Martins were doing “their -country’s work,” as Mr. Kipling has sung, and although the fates at -first prevented their taking a hand in person in the restoration of -Ross, it is well known that “The Irish over the seas” are not in the -habit of forgetting “their own people and their Father’s House.” - -[8] Mrs. Hewson died July, 1917. - -[9] I think it best to spell all the Irish phrases phonetically. - -[10] December 26th. - -[11] Scapular and Agnus Dei. - -[12] “_Et in Arcadia Ego_,” E. L. in the _Spectator_. August 25, 1917. - -[13] This article was subsequently incorporated in Martin Ross’s sketch -“Children of the Captivity” and is reprinted in “Some Irish Yesterdays.” - -[14] Of this same American a tale is told which might, I think, had she -known it, have mitigated Martin’s disapproval. One of the more futile -of his pupils showed him a landscape that she had painted. He regarded -it for some time in silence, then he said: - -“Did you see it like that?” - -“Oh yes, Mr. L----!” twittered the pupil. - -“And did you feel it like that?” - -“Oh yes, Mr. L----, indeed I did!” - -“Wal,” said Mr. L----, smoothly, “the next time you see and feel like -that, _don’t paint_!” - -[15] Professor Kettle was killed, fighting in France, in the Royal -Dublin Fusiliers at Ginchy, in September, 1916. - -[16] To this may be added a companion phrase. “A Gentleman’s bargain; -no huxthering!” - -[17] See Appendix II. - -[18] “Evidence of the widespread fame of St. Patrick’s Purgatory, -Lough Derg, Co. Donegal, in mediaeval days is furnished by a document -recently copied from the Chancery treaty roll of Richard II. This is -a safe conduct issued on the 6th September, 1397, to Raymond Viscount -of Perilleux, Knight of Rhodes, a subject of the King of France, who -desired to make the pilgrimage. It was addressed to all constables, -marshals, admirals, senechals, governors, bailiffs, prefects, -captains, castellans, majors, magistrates, counsellors of cities and -towns, guardians of camps, ports, bridges and passways, and their -subordinates--in a word, to all those who under one title or another -exercised some authority in those days--and recited that Raymond -‘intends and purposes to come into our Kingdom of England and to cross -over and travel through the said Kingdom to our land of Ireland, there -to see and visit the Purgatory of St. Patrick, with twenty men and -thirty horses in his company.’ The conduct went on to enjoin that any -of the little army of officials mentioned above should not molest the -said Raymond during his journey to Lough Derg, nor during his return -therefrom, nor as far as in them lay should they permit injury to him, -his men, horses or property; provided always that the Viscount and his -men on entering any camp, castle or fortified town, should present the -letter of safe conduct to the guardians of the place, and in purchasing -make fair and ready payment for food or other necessaries. The safe -conduct was valid until the Easter of the following year. Besides -showing that over five hundred years ago foreigners were anxious to -make the pilgrimage which so many make in the present age, the document -is interesting inasmuch as it gives an indication of the difficulties -under which a pilgrim or tourist travelled in the fourteenth century.” -(_Cork Examiner_, August 8, 1917.) - - - - - - - - -End of Project Gutenberg's Irish Memories, by Edith Somerville and Martin Ross - -*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK IRISH MEMORIES *** - -***** This file should be named 61336-0.txt or 61336-0.zip ***** -This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: - http://www.gutenberg.org/6/1/3/3/61336/ - -Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed -Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was -produced from images available at The Internet Archive) - - -Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions -will be renamed. - -Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no -one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation -(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without -permission and without paying copyright royalties. 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You may copy it, give it away or -re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included -with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org/license - - -Title: Irish Memories - -Author: Edith Somerville - Martin Ross - -Release Date: February 7, 2020 [EBook #61336] - -Language: English - -Character set encoding: UTF-8 - -*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK IRISH MEMORIES *** - - - - -Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed -Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was -produced from images available at The Internet Archive) - - - - - - -</pre> - -<hr class="full" /> - -<div class="figcenter"> -<a href="images/cover_lg.jpg"> -<img src="images/cover.jpg" width="335" height="500" alt="" /></a> -</div> - -<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" summary="" -style="border: 2px black solid;margin:auto auto;max-width:50%; -padding:1%;"> -<tr><td> - -<p class="c"><a href="#CONTENTS">Contents.</a></p> -<p class="c"><a href="#LIST_OF_ILLUSTRATIONS">List of Illustrations</a><br /> <span class="nonvis">(In certain versions of this etext [in certain browsers] -clicking on the image will bring up a larger version.)</span></p> - -<p class="c">(etext transcriber's note)</p></td></tr> -</table> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_i" id="page_i">{i}</a></span> </p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_ii" id="page_ii">{ii}</a></span> </p> - -<p class="c">IRISH MEMORIES</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_iii" id="page_iii">{iii}</a></span></p> - -<div class="figcenter"><a name="ill_1" id="ill_1"></a> -<a href="images/ill_001_lg.jpg"> -<img src="images/ill_001_sml.jpg" width="383" height="541" alt="[Image unavailable.]" /></a> -<div class="caption"><p>VIOLET FLORENCE MARTIN.</p></div> -</div> - -<h1> -IRISH MEMORIES</h1> - -<p class="c"> -BY<br /> -E. Œ. SOMERVILLE <small>AND</small> MARTIN ROSS<br /> -<br /><small> -AUTHORS OF “SOME EXPERIENCES OF AN IRISH R.M.,”<br /> -“THE REAL CHARLOTTE,” ETC.</small><br /> -<br /> -<i>WITH 23 ILLUSTRATIONS FROM DRAWINGS BY<br /> -E. Œ. SOMERVILLE AND FROM PHOTOGRAPHS</i><br /> -<br /> -<i>THIRD IMPRESSION</i><br /> -<br /> -NEW YORK:<br /> -LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO.<br /> -FOURTH AVENUE AND <small>30TH</small> STREET<br /> -1918<br /></p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_iv" id="page_iv">{iv}</a></span> </p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_v" id="page_v">{v}</a></span> </p> - -<h2><a name="PREFACE" id="PREFACE"></a>PREFACE</h2> - -<p><span class="smcap">I have</span> many people to thank, for many things, and I have an explanation -to make, but the thanks must come first.</p> - -<p>I offer my most sincere gratitude to Mrs. Butler and to Professor -Edgeworth, for their kindness in permitting me to print Miss Edgeworth’s -letters to Mrs. Bushe; to Lord Dunsany, for the extract from “Plays of -Gods and Men,” which has said for me what I could not say for myself; to -the Editors of the <i>Spectator</i> and of <i>Punch</i>, for their permission to -use Martin Ross’s letter and the quatrain to her memory; to the Hon. -Mrs. Campbell, the Right Hon. Sir Horace Plunkett, P.C., Captain Stephen -Gwynn, M.P., Lady Coghill, Colonel Dawson, and other of Martin Ross’s -friends, for lending me the letters that she wrote to them; even when -these are not quoted verbatim, they have been of great service to me, -and I am very grateful for having been allowed to see them.</p> - -<p>I have to explain what may strike some as singular, viz., the omission, -as far as was practicable, from the letters of Martin Ross, and from -this book in general, of the names of her and my friends and relatives -who are still living. I have been guided by a consensus of the opinion -of those whom I have consulted, and also by my remembrance of Martin -Ross’s views on the subject, which she often expressed<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_vi" id="page_vi">{vi}</a></span> to me in -connection with sundry and various volumes of Recollections, that have -dealt with living contemporaries with a frankness that would have seemed -excessive in the case of a memoir of the life of Queen Anne. If I have -gone to the opposite extreme, I hope it may be found a fault on the -right side.</p> - -<p class="r"> -E. Œ. SOMERVILLE.<br /> -</p> - -<p><i>September 20th, 1917.</i><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_vii" id="page_vii">{vii}</a></span></p> - -<h2><a name="CONTENTS" id="CONTENTS"></a>CONTENTS</h2> - -<table border="0" cellpadding="1" cellspacing="0" summary=""> - -<tr><td><small>CHAP.</small></td><td> </td> -<td><small>PAGE</small></td></tr> - -<tr><td valign="top" class="rt"> </td><td valign="top"><a href="#INTRODUCTORY"><span class="smcap">Introductory</span></a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_1">1</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td valign="top" class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_I">I.</a></td><td valign="top"><a href="#CHAPTER_I">—<span class="smcap">The Martins of Ross</span></a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_3">3</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td valign="top" class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_II">II.</a></td><td valign="top"><a href="#CHAPTER_II">—<span class="smcap">The Chief</span></a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_41">41</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td valign="top" class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_III">III.</a></td><td valign="top"><a href="#CHAPTER_III">—<span class="smcap">Mainly Maria Edgeworth</span></a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_51">51</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td valign="top" class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_IV">IV.</a></td><td valign="top"><a href="#CHAPTER_IV">—<span class="smcap">Old Forgotten Things</span></a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_61">61</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td valign="top" class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_V">V.</a></td><td valign="top"><a href="#CHAPTER_V">—<span class="smcap">Early West Carbery</span></a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_71">71</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td valign="top" class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_VI">VI.</a></td><td valign="top"><a href="#CHAPTER_VI">—<span class="smcap">Her Mother</span></a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_78">78</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td valign="top" class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_VII">VII.</a></td><td valign="top"><a href="#CHAPTER_VII">—<span class="smcap">My Mother</span></a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_87">87</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td valign="top" class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_VIII">VIII.</a></td><td valign="top"><a href="#CHAPTER_VIII">—<span class="smcap">Herself</span></a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_97">97</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td valign="top" class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_IX">IX.</a></td><td valign="top"><a href="#CHAPTER_IX">—<span class="smcap">Myself When Young</span></a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_106">106</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td valign="top" class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_X">X.</a></td><td valign="top"><a href="#CHAPTER_X">—<span class="smcap">When First She Came</span></a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_119">119</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td valign="top" class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_XI">XI.</a></td><td valign="top"><a href="#CHAPTER_XI">—“<span class="smcap">An Irish Cousin</span>”</a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_128">128</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td valign="top" class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_XII">XII.</a></td><td valign="top"><a href="#CHAPTER_XII">—<span class="smcap">The Years of the Locust</span></a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_140">140</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td valign="top" class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_XIII">XIII.</a></td><td valign="top"><a href="#CHAPTER_XIII">—<span class="smcap">The Restoration</span></a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_153">153</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td valign="top" class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_XIV">XIV.</a></td><td valign="top"><a href="#CHAPTER_XIV">—<span class="smcap">Rickeen</span></a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_169">169</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td valign="top" class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_XV">XV.</a></td><td valign="top"><a href="#CHAPTER_XV">—<span class="smcap">Faiths and Fairies</span></a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_181">181</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td valign="top" class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_XVI">XVI.</a></td><td valign="top"><a href="#CHAPTER_XVI">—<span class="smcap">Beliefs and Believers</span></a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_188">188</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td valign="top" class="rt"> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_viii" id="page_viii">{viii}</a></span> -<a href="#CHAPTER_XVII">XVII.</a></td><td valign="top"><a href="#CHAPTER_XVII">—<span class="smcap">Letters from Ross</span></a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_197">197</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td valign="top" class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_XVIII">XVIII.</a></td><td valign="top"><a href="#CHAPTER_XVIII">—“<span class="smcap">Tours, Idle Tours</span>”</a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_207">207</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td valign="top" class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_XIX">XIX.</a></td><td valign="top"><a href="#CHAPTER_XIX">—<span class="smcap">Of Dogs</span></a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_217">217</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td valign="top" class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_XX">XX.</a></td><td valign="top"><a href="#CHAPTER_XX">—“<span class="smcap">The Real Charlotte</span>”</a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_229">229</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td valign="top" class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXI">XXI.</a></td><td valign="top"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXI">—<span class="smcap">Saint Andrews</span></a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_241">241</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td valign="top" class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXII">XXII.</a></td><td valign="top"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXII">—<span class="smcap">At Étaples</span></a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_252">252</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td valign="top" class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXIII">XXIII.</a></td><td valign="top"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXIII">—<span class="smcap">Paris Again</span></a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_260">260</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td valign="top" class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXIV">XXIV.</a></td><td valign="top"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXIV">—<span class="smcap">Horses and Hounds</span></a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_272">272</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td valign="top" class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXV">XXV.</a></td><td valign="top"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXV">—“<span class="smcap">The Irish R.M.</span>”</a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_286">286</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td valign="top" class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXVI">XXVI.</a></td><td valign="top"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXVI">—<span class="smcap">Of Good Times</span></a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_294">294</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td valign="top" class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXVII">XXVII.</a></td><td valign="top"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXVII">—<span class="smcap">Various Opinions</span></a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_309">309</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td valign="top" class="rt"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXVIII">XXVIII.</a></td><td valign="top"><a href="#CHAPTER_XXVIII">—<span class="smcap">The Last</span></a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_324">324</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td> </td></tr> -<tr><td colspan="3" class="c"><a href="#APPENDIX_I">APPENDICES</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td valign="top" class="rt"><a href="#APPENDIX_I">I.</a></td><td valign="top"><a href="#APPENDIX_I">—<span class="smcap">Letters from Chief Justice Charles Kendal -Bushe to Mrs. Bushe</span></a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_329">329</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td valign="top" class="rt"><a href="#APPENDIX_II">II.</a></td><td valign="top"><a href="#APPENDIX_II">—<span class="smcap">A Note by Captain Stephen Gwynn, M.P.</span></a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_335">335</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td valign="top" class="rt"><a href="#APPENDIX_III">III.</a></td><td valign="top"><a href="#APPENDIX_III">—<span class="smcap">Her Friends</span></a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_337">337</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td valign="top" class="rt"><a href="#APPENDIX_IV">IV.</a></td><td valign="top"><a href="#APPENDIX_IV">—<span class="smcap">Bibliography</span></a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_340">340</a></td></tr> -</table> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_ix" id="page_ix">{ix}</a></span> </p> - -<h2><a name="LIST_OF_ILLUSTRATIONS" id="LIST_OF_ILLUSTRATIONS"></a>LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS</h2> - -<table border="0" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="0" summary=""> - -<tr><td valign="top"><a href="#ill_1">Violet Florence Martin (<i>Photograph</i>)</a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#ill_1"><i>Frontispiece</i></a></td></tr> - -<tr><td valign="top"><a href="#ill_2">Ross House, Co. Galway (<i>inset</i>) The Martin Coat of Arms (<i>Photograph</i>)</a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_8"><i>Facing page</i> 8</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td valign="top"><a href="#ill_3">Castle Haven Harbour (<i>Photo. by Martin Ross</i>)</a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_64"><span class="ditto1">”</span>64</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td valign="top"><a href="#ill_4">Carberiae Rupes (<i>Photo. by Sir E. B. Coghill, Bart.</i>)</a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_64"><span class="ditto1">”</span>64</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td valign="top"><a href="#ill_5">From the Garden, Drishane (<i>Photo. by Martin Ross</i>)</a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_90"><span class="ditto1">”</span>90</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td valign="top"><a href="#ill_6">Drishane House (<i>Photo. by Martin Ross</i>)</a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_90"><span class="ditto1">”</span>90</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td valign="top"><a href="#ill_7">Hydrangeas, Drishane Avenue (<i>Photo. by Martin Ross</i>)</a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_90"><span class="ditto1">”</span>90</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td valign="top"><a href="#ill_8">Dans la Rive Gauche (<i>Drawing by E. Œ. Somerville</i>)</a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_118"><span class="ditto">”</span>118</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td valign="top"><a href="#ill_9">Martin Ross on Confidence (<i>Photograph</i>)</a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_122"><span class="ditto">”</span>122</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td valign="top"><a href="#ill_10">Edith Œnone Somerville (<i>Photograph</i>)</a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_138"><span class="ditto">”</span>138</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td valign="top"><a href="#ill_11">A Castle Haven Woman (<i>Drawing by E. Œ. Somerville</i>)</a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_150"><span class="ditto">”</span>150</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td valign="top"><a href="#ill_12">Martin Ross (<i>Photo. by Lady Coghill</i>)</a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_158"><span class="ditto">”</span>158</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td valign="top"><a href="#ill_13">Ross Lake (<i>Photograph</i>)</a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_158"><span class="ditto">”</span>158</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td valign="top"><a href="#ill_14">E. Œ. Somerville on Tarbrush (<i>Photograph</i>)</a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_184"><span class="ditto">”</span>184</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td valign="top"><a href="#ill_15">E. Œ. S.—Candy—Sheila—V. F. M. (<i>Photo. by Sir E. B. Coghill, Bart.</i>)</a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_210"><span class="ditto">”</span>210</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td valign="top"><a href="#ill_16">Candy (<i>Photo. by Martin Ross</i>)</a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_226"><span class="ditto">”</span>226</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td valign="top"><a href="#ill_17">E. Œ. S. and a Dilettante (<i>Photo. by Martin Ross</i>)</a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_226"><span class="ditto">”</span>226</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td valign="top"><a href="#ill_18">“Chez Cuneo” (<i>Drawing by E. Œ. Somerville</i>)</a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_264"><span class="ditto">”</span>264</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td valign="top"><a href="#ill_19">The West Carbery Hounds (<i>Photo. by Miss M. J. Robertson</i>)</a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_275"><span class="ditto">”</span>275</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td valign="top"><a href="#ill_20">At Bunalun. “Gone to Ground” (<i>Photo. by Mr. Ambrose Cramer</i>)</a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_288"><span class="ditto">”</span>288</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td valign="top"><a href="#ill_21">Waiting for the Terriers (<i>Photo. by Mr. Ambrose Cramer</i>)</a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_288"><span class="ditto">”</span>288</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td valign="top"><a href="#ill_22">West Carbery Hounds at Liss Ard (<i>Photograph</i>)</a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_308"><span class="ditto">”</span>308</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td valign="top"><a href="#ill_23">Portofino (<i>Photo. by Martin Ross</i>)</a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_308"><span class="ditto">”</span>308</a></td></tr> - -</table> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_x" id="page_x">{x}</a></span></p> - -<h2><a name="THE_TENTS_OF_THE_ARABS" id="THE_TENTS_OF_THE_ARABS"></a>THE TENTS OF THE ARABS.</h2> - -<h3>ACT II.</h3> - -<p class="c"><span class="smcap">King.</span></p> - -<p>What is this child of man that can conquer Time and that is braver than -Love?</p> - -<p class="c"><span class="smcap">Eznarza.</span></p> - -<p>Even Memory....</p> - -<p>He shall bring back our year to us that Time cannot destroy. Time cannot -slaughter it if Memory says no. It is reprieved, though banished. We -shall often see it, though a little far off, and all its hours and days -shall dance to us and go by one by one and come back and dance again.</p> - -<p class="c"><span class="smcap">King.</span></p> - -<p>Why, that is true. They shall come back to us. I had thought that they -that work miracles, whether in Heaven or Earth, were unable to do one -thing. I thought that they could not bring back days again when once -they had fallen into the hands of Time.</p> - -<p class="c"><span class="smcap">Eznarza.</span></p> - -<p>It is a trick that Memory can do. He comes up softly in the town or the -desert, wherever a few men are, like the strange dark conjurers who sing -to snakes, and he does his trick before them, and does it again and -again.</p> - -<p class="c"><span class="smcap">King.</span></p> - -<p>We will often make him bring the old days back when you are gone to your -people and I am miserably wedded to the princess coming from Tharba.</p> - -<p class="c"><span class="smcap">Eznarza.</span></p> - -<p>They will come with sand on their feet from the golden, beautiful -desert; they will come with a long-gone sunset each one over his head. -Their lips will laugh with the olden evening voices.</p> - -<p class="r"> -From “<i>Plays of Gods and Men</i>,” by <span class="smcap">Lord Dunsany</span>.<br /> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_1" id="page_1">{1}</a></span></p> - -<h1>IRISH MEMORIES</h1> - -<h2><a name="INTRODUCTORY" id="INTRODUCTORY"></a>INTRODUCTORY</h2> - -<p><span class="smcap">Perhaps</span> I ought to begin by saying that I have always called her -“Martin”; I propose to do so still. I cannot think of her by any other -name. To her own family, and to certain of her friends, she is Violet; -to many others she is best known as Martin Ross. But I shall write of -her as I think of her.</p> - -<p class="astt">* * * * *</p> - -<p>When we first met each other we were, as we then thought, well stricken -in years. That is to say, she was a little over twenty, and I was four -years older than she. Not absolutely the earliest morning of life; say, -about half-past ten o’clock, with breakfast (and all traces of bread and -butter) cleared away.</p> - -<p>We have said to each other at intervals since then that some day we -should have to write our memoirs; I even went so far as to prepare an -illustration—I have it still—of our probable appearances in the year -1920. (And the forecast was not a flattering one.) Well, 1920 has not -arrived yet, but it has moved into the circle of possibilities; 1917 has -come, and Martin has gone, and I am left alone to write the memoirs, -with such a feeling of inadequacy as does not often, I hope, beset the -historian.</p> - -<p>These vagrant memories do not pretend to regard<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_2" id="page_2">{2}</a></span> themselves as -biography, autobiography, as anything serious or valuable. Martin and I -were not accustomed to take ourselves seriously, and if what I may -remember has any value, it will be the value that there must be in a -record, however unworthy, of so rare and sunny a spirit as hers, and -also, perhaps, in the preservation of a phase of Irish life that is fast -disappearing. I will not attempt any plan of the path that I propose to -follow. I must trust to the caprice of memory, supplemented by the -diaries that we have kept with the intermittent conscientiousness proper -to such. To keep a diary, in any degree, implies a certain share of -industry, of persistence, even of imagination. Let us leave it at that. -The diaries will not be brought into court.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_3" id="page_3">{3}</a></span></p> - -<h2><a name="CHAPTER_I" id="CHAPTER_I"></a>CHAPTER I<br /><br /> -<small>THE MARTINS OF ROSS</small></h2> - -<p><span class="smcap">A few</span> years ago Martin wrote an account of her eldest brother, Robert, -known and loved by a very wide circle outside his own family as -“Ballyhooley.” He died in September, 1905, and in the following spring, -one of his many friends, Sir Henniker Heaton, wrote to my cousin and -begged her to help him in compiling a book that should be a memorial of -Robert, of his life, his writings, and of his very distinguished and -valuable political work as a speaker and writer in the Unionist cause. -Sir Henniker Heaton died, and the project unfortunately fell through, -but not before my cousin had written an account of Robert, and, -incidentally, a history of Ross and the Martins which is in itself so -interesting, and that, indirectly, accounts for so many of her own -characteristics, that, although much that she had meant to write remains -unaccomplished, I propose, unfinished though it is, to make it the -foremost chapter in these idle and straying recollections.</p> - -<h3>AN ACCOUNT OF ROBERT JASPER MARTIN, OF ROSS. BY “MARTIN ROSS”</h3> - -<h4><span class="smcap">Part I</span></h4> - -<p>My brother Robert’s life began with the epoch that has changed the face -and the heart of Ireland. It<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_4" id="page_4">{4}</a></span> ended untimely, in strange accord with the -close of that epoch; the ship has sunk, and he has gone down with it.</p> - -<p>He was born on June 17th, 1846, the first year of the Irish famine, when -Ireland brimmed with a potato-fed population, and had not as yet -discovered America. The quietness of untroubled centuries lay like a -spell on Connemara, the country of his ancestors; the old ways of life -were unquestioned at Ross, and my father went and came among his people -in an intimacy as native as the soft air they breathed. On the crowded -estate the old routine of potato planting and turf cutting was pursued -tranquilly; the people intermarried and subdivided their holdings; few -could read, and many could not speak English. All were known to the -Master, and he was known and understood by them, as the old Galway -people knew and understood; and the subdivisions of the land were -permitted, and the arrears of rent were given time, or taken in -boat-loads of turf, or worked off by day-labour, and eviction was -unheard of. It was give and take, with the personal element always warm -in it: as a system it was probably quite uneconomic, but the hand of -affection held it together, and the tradition of centuries was at its -back.</p> - -<p>The intimate relations of landlord and tenant were an old story at Ross. -It was in the days of Queen Elizabeth that they began, when the -Anglo-Norman families, known as the Tribes of Galway, still in the high -summer of their singular and romantic prosperity, began to contemplate -existence as being possible outside the walls of Galway Town, and by -purchase or by conquest acquired many lands in the county. They had -lived for three or four centuries in the town, self-sufficing, clannish -and rich; they did not forget the days of Strong-Bow, who, in the time -of Henry II,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_5" id="page_5">{5}</a></span> began the settlement of Galway, nor yet the leadership of -De Burgho, and they maintained their isolation, and married and -intermarried in inveterate exclusiveness, until, in the time of Henry -VIII, relationship was so close and intricate that marriages were not -easy. They rang the changes on Christian names, Nicholas, Dominick, -Robert, Andrew; they built great houses of the grey Galway limestone, -with the Spanish courtyards and deep archways that they learned from -their intercourse with Spain, and they carved their coats of arms upon -them in that indomitable family pride that is an asset of immense value -in the history of a country. Even now, the shop-fronts of Galway carry -the symbols of chivalry above their doors, and battered shields and -quarterings look strangely down from their places in the ancient walls -upon the customers that pass in beneath them.</p> - -<p>It was in the sixteenth century that Robert Martin, one of the long and -powerful line of High Sheriffs and Mayors of Galway, became possessed of -a large amount of land in West Galway, and in 1590 Ross was his country -place. From this point the Martins began slowly to assimilate West -Galway; Ross, Dangan, Birch Hall, and Ballinahinch, marked their -progress, until Ballinahinch, youngest and greatest of the family -strongholds, had gathered to itself nearly 200,000 acres of Connemara. -It fell, tragically, from the hand of its last owner, Mary Martin, -Princess of Connemara, in the time of the Famine, and that page of -Martin history is closed in Galway, though the descendants of her -grandfather, “Humanity Dick” (for ever to be had in honourable -remembrance as the author of “Martin’s Act for the Prevention of Cruelty -to Animals”), have kept alive the old name of Ballinahinch, and have -opened a new and notable record for themselves in Canada.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_6" id="page_6">{6}</a></span></p> - -<p>Of Dangan, the postern gate by the Galway river remains; of Birch Hall, -the ruins of a courtyard and of a manorial dove-cot; Ross, the first -outpost, nurse of many generations of Martins, still stands by its lake -and looks across it to its old neighbour, the brown mountain, Croagh -Keenan.</p> - -<p>Through a line of Jaspers, Nicholases and Roberts, the story of Ross -moved prosperously on from Robert of Elizabeth’s times, untouched even -by the hand of Cromwell, unshaken even when the gates of Galway, twelve -miles away, opened at length to Ireton. Beyond the town of Galway, the -Cromwellian did not set his foot; Connemara was a dark and barren -country, and the Martins, Roman Catholic and Royalists to the core, as -were all the other Tribes of Galway, held the key of the road.</p> - -<p>From that conflict Ross emerged, minus most of its possessions in Galway -town and suburbs; after the Restoration they were restored by the Decree -of Charles II, but remained nevertheless in the hands of those to whom -they had been apportioned as spoil. The many links that had bound Ross -to Galway Town seem thenceforward to have been severed; during the -eighteenth century the life of its owners was that of their -surroundings, peaceful for the most part, and intricately bound up with -that of their tenants. They were still Roman Catholic and Jacobite—a -kinsman of Dangan was an agent for Charles Edward—and each generation -provided several priests for its Church. With my great-grandfather, -Nicholas, came the change of creed; he became a Protestant in order to -marry a Protestant neighbour, Miss Elizabeth O’Hara, of Lenaboy; where -an affair of the heart was concerned, he was not the man to stick at -what he perhaps considered to be a trifle. It is said that at the end of -his long life his early training asserted itself, and drew him<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_7" id="page_7">{7}</a></span> again -towards the Church of his fathers; it is certainly probable that he -died, as he was born, a son of Rome.</p> - -<p>But the die had been cast. His six children were born and bred -Protestants. Strong in all ways, they were strong Protestants, and Low -Church, according to the fashion of their time, yet they lived in an -entirely Roman Catholic district without religious friction of any kind.</p> - -<p>It was during the life of Nicholas, my great-grandfather, that Ross -House was burned down; with much loss, it is believed, of plate and -pictures; it had a tower, and stood beautifully on a point in the lake. -He replaced it by the present house, built about the year 1777, whose -architecture is not æsthetically to his credit; it is a tall, unlovely -block, of great solidity, with kitchen premises half underground, and -the whole surrounded by a wide and deep area. It suggests the idea of -defence, which was probably not absent from the builder’s mind, yet the -Rebellion of twenty years later did not put it to the test. In the great -storm of 1839, still known as “The Big Wind,” my grandfather gathered -the whole household into the kitchen for safety, and, looking up at its -heavily-vaulted ceiling, said that if Ross fell, not a house in Ireland -would stand that night. Many fell, but Ross House stood the assault, -even though the lawn was white with the spray borne in from the -Atlantic, six miles away. It has at least two fine rooms, a lofty -well-staircase, with balusters of mahogany, taken out of a wreck, and it -takes all day the sun into its heart, looking west and south, with tall -windows, over lake and mountain. It is said that a man is never in love -till he is in love with a plain woman, and in spite of draughts, of -exhausting flights of stairs, of chimneys that are the despair of -sweeps, it has held the affection of five generations of Martins.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_8" id="page_8">{8}</a></span></p> - -<p>A dark limestone slab, over the dining-room chimney-piece, bears the -coat of arms—“a Calvary Cross, between the Sun in splendour on the -dexter limb, and the Moon in crescent on the sinister of the second”—to -quote the official description. The crest is a six-pointed star, and the -motto, “Sic itur ad astra,” connects with the single-minded simplicity -of the Crusader, the Cross of our faith with the Star of our hope. In -the book of pedigrees at Dublin Castle it is stated that the arms were -given by Richard Cœur de Lion to Oliver Martin, in the Holy Land; a -further family tradition says that Oliver Martin shared Richard’s -captivity in Austria. The stone on which the arms are carved came -originally from an old house in Galway; it has the name of Robuck Martin -below, and the date 1649 above. It is one of several now lying at Ross, -resembling the lintels of doorways, and engraved with the arms of -various Martins and their wives.</p> - -<p>The Protestantism of my grandfather, Robert, did not deter him from -marrying a Roman Catholic, Miss Mary Ann Blakeney, of Bally Ellen, Co. -Carlow, one of three beauties known in Carlow and Waterford as “The -Three Marys.” As in most of the acts of his prudent and long-headed -life, he did not do wrong. Her four children were brought up as -Protestants, but the rites of her Church were celebrated at Ross without -let or hindrance; my brother Robert could remember listening at the -drawing-room door to the chanting of the Mass inside, and prayers were -held daily by her for the servants, all of whom, then as now, were Roman -Catholics.</p> - -<p>“Hadn’t I the divil’s own luck,” groaned a stable-boy, stuffing his pipe -into his pocket as the prayer-bell clanged, “that I didn’t tell the -Misthress I was a Protestant!”</p> - -<div class="figcenter"><a name="ill_2" id="ill_2"></a> -<a href="images/ill_002_lg.jpg"> -<img src="images/ill_002_sml.jpg" width="560" height="316" alt="[Image unavailable.]" /></a> -<div class="caption"><p>ROSS HOUSE, CO. GALWAY.</p> - -<p>(<i>Inset</i>) <i>The Martin Coat of Arms.</i></p></div> -</div> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_9" id="page_9">{9}</a></span></p> - -<p>She lived till 1855, a hale, quiet, and singularly handsome woman, -possessed of the fortunate gift of living in amity under the same roof -with the many and various relations-in-law who regarded Ross as their -home. Family feeling was almost a religious tenet with my grandfather, -and in this, as in other things, he lived up to his theories. Shrewd and -patient, and absolutely proficient in the affairs of his property, he -could take a long look ahead, even when the Irish Famine lay like a -black fog upon all things; and when he gave up his management of the -estate there was not a debt upon it. One of his sayings is so unexpected -in a man of his time as to be worth repeating. “If a man kicks me I -suppose I must take notice of that,” he said when reminded of some -fancied affront to himself, “short of that, we needn’t trouble ourselves -about it.” He had the family liking for a horse; it is recorded that in -a dealer’s yard in Dublin he mounted a refractory animal, in his frock -coat and tall hat, got him out of the yard, and took him round St. -Stephen’s Green at a gallop, through the traffic, laying into him with -his umbrella. He was once, in Dublin, induced to go to an oratorio, and -bore it for some time in silence, till the choir reiterated the theme, -“Go forth, ye sons of Aaron! Go!” “Begad, here goes!” said my -grandfather, rising and leaving the hall.</p> - -<p>My father, James, was born in 1804, and grew up endowed, as many still -testify, with good looks and the peculiarly genial and polished manner -that seemed to be an attribute of the Galway gentlemen of his time. He -had also a gift with his pen that was afterwards to serve him well, but -the business capacity of his father was strangely absent from the -character of an otherwise able man. He took his degree at Trinity -College, Dublin, and was intended for the Bar, but<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_10" id="page_10">{10}</a></span> almost before his -dinners were eaten he was immersed in other affairs. He was but little -over twenty when he married Miss Anne Higinbotham. It was a very happy -marriage; he and his wife, and the four daughters who were born to them, -lived in his father’s house at Ross, according to the patriarchal custom -of the time, and my father abandoned the Bar, and lived then, as always, -the healthy country life that he delighted in. He shot woodcock with the -skill that was essential in the days of muzzle-loaders, and pulled a -good oar in his father’s boat at the regattas of Lough Corrib and Lough -Mask, as various silver cups still testify. I remember seeing him, a -straight and spare man, well on in his sixth decade, take a racing spin -with my brothers on Ross Lake, and though his stroke was pronounced by -the younger generation to be old-fashioned, and a trifle stiff, he held -his own with them. Robert has often told me that when they walked the -grouse mountains together, his father could, at the end of the day, face -a hill better than he, with all his equipment of youth and athleticism.</p> - -<p>Among the silver cups at Ross was a two-handled one, that often -fascinated our childhood, with the inscription:</p> - -<p class="c"> -“FROM HENRY ADAIR OF LOUGHANMORE, TO<br /> -JAMES MARTIN OF ROSS.”<br /> -</p> - -<p>It was given to my father in memory of a duel in which he had acted as -second, to Henry Adair, who was a kinsman of his first wife.</p> - -<p>My father’s first wife had no son; she died at the birth of a daughter, -and her loss was deep and grievous to her husband. Her four daughters -grew up, very good-looking and very agreeable, and were married when -still in their teens. Their husbands all came from the County Antrim, -and two of them were<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_11" id="page_11">{11}</a></span> brothers. Barklie, Callwell, McCalmont, Barton, -are well-known names in Ireland to-day, and beyond it, and the children -of his four elder sisters are bound to my brother Robert’s life by links -of long intimacy and profound affection.</p> - -<p>The aim of the foregoing <i>résumé</i> of family history has been to put -forward only such things as seem to have been determining in the -environment and heritage to which Robert was born. The chivalrous past -of Galway, the close intimacy with the people, the loyalty to family -ties, were the traditions among which he was bred; the Protestant -instinct, and a tolerance for the sister religion, born of sympathy and -personal respect, had preceded him for two generations, and a store of -shrewd humour and common sense had been laid by in the family for the -younger generation to profit by if they wished.</p> - -<p>My father was a widower of forty when he first met his second wife, Miss -Anna Selina Fox, in Dublin. She was then two and twenty, a slender girl, -of the type known in those days as elegant, and with a mind divided in -allegiance between outdoor amusements and the Latin poets. Her father, -Charles Fox, of New Park, Co. Longford, was a barrister, and was son of -Justice Fox, of the Court of Common Pleas. He married Katherine, -daughter of Chief Justice Bushe, and died while still a young man; his -children were brought up at Kilmurrey, the house of their mother’s -father.</p> - -<p>The career of the Right Honourable Charles Kendal Bushe, Chief Justice -of Ireland, is a public one, and need not here be dwelt upon; but even -at this distance of time it thrills the hearts of his descendants to -remember his lofty indifference to every voice save those of conscience -and patriotism, when, in the Irish House of Commons, he opposed the Act -of Union with all the noble gift of language that won for him<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_12" id="page_12">{12}</a></span> the name -“Silver-tongued Bushe,” and left the walls ringing with the reiterated -entreaty, “I ask you, gentlemen, will you give up your country!”</p> - -<p>His attitude then and afterwards cost him the peerage that would -otherwise have been his; but above the accident of distinction, and -beyond all gainsaying, is the fact that in the list of influential -Irishmen made before the Union, with their probable prices (as -supporters of the Act) set over against them, the one word following the -name of Charles Kendal Bushe is “Incorruptible.”</p> - -<p>His private life rang true to his public utterances; culture and charm, -and a swift and delightful wit, made his memory a fetish to those who -lived under his roof. My mother’s early life moved as if to the music of -a minuet. She learned Latin with a tutor, she studied the guitar, she -sat in the old-fashioned drawing-room at Kilmurrey while “The Chief” -read aloud Shakespeare, or the latest novel of Sir Walter Scott; she -wrote, at eight years old, verses of smooth and virtuous precocity; at -seventeen she translated into creditable verse, in the metre beloved of -Pope, a Latin poem by Lord Wellesley, the then Viceroy, and received -from him a volume in which it was included, with an inscription no less -stately than the binding. In her outdoor life she was what, in those -decorous days, was called a “Tomboy,” and the physical courage of her -youth remained her distinguishing characteristic through life. Like the -lilies of the field, she toiled not, neither did she spin, yet I have -never known a more feminine character.</p> - -<p>It was from her that her eldest son derived the highly strung -temperament, the unconscious keenness of observation that was only -stimulated by the short sight common to them both, the gift of rapid -versify<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_13" id="page_13">{13}</a></span>ing, and a deftness and brilliance in epigram and repartee that -came to both in lineal descent from “The Chief.” An instance of Robert’s -quickness in retort occurs to me, and I will give it here. It happened -that he was being examined in a land case connected with Ross. The -solicitor for the other side objected to the evidence that he gave, as -relating to affairs that occurred before he was born, and described it -as “hearsay evidence.”</p> - -<p>“Well, for the matter of that, the fact that I was born is one that I -have only on hearsay evidence!” said Robert unanswerably.</p> - -<p>My mother first met my father at the house of her uncle, Mr. Arthur -Bushe, in Dublin. She met him again at a ball given by Kildare Street -Club; they had in common the love of the classics and the love of -outdoor life; his handsome face, his attractiveness, have been so often -dwelt on by those who knew him at that time, that the mention of them -here may be forgiven. In March, 1844, they were married in Dublin, and a -month later their carriage was met a couple of miles from Ross by the -tenants, and was drawn home by them, while the bonfires blazed at the -gates and at the hall door, and the bagpipes squealed their welcome. -Bringing with her a great deal of energy, both social and literary, a -kicking pony, and a profound ignorance of household affairs, my mother -entered upon her long career at Ross. That her sister-in-law, Marian -Martin, held the reins of office was fortunate for all that composite -establishment; when, later on, my mother took them in her delicate, -impatient hands, she held the strictly logical conviction that a sheep -possessed four “legs of mutton,” and she has shown me a rustic seat, -hidden deep in laurels, where she was wont to hide when, as she said, -“they came to look for me, to ask what was to be for the servants’ -dinner.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_14" id="page_14">{14}</a></span>”</p> - -<p>For the first year of her married life tranquillity reigned in house and -estate; a daughter was born, and was accepted with fortitude by an -establishment already well equipped in that respect. But a darker -possibility than the want of an heir arose suddenly and engrossed all -minds.</p> - -<p>In July, 1845, my father drove to the Assizes in Galway, twelve and a -half English miles away, and as he drove he looked with a knowledgeable -eye at the plots of potatoes lying thick and green on either side of the -road, and thought that he had seldom seen a richer crop. He slept in -Galway that night, and next day as he drove home the smell of the -potato-blight was heavy in the air, a new and nauseous smell. It was the -first breath of the Irish famine. The succeeding months brought the -catastrophe, somewhat limited in that first winter, a blow to startle, -even to stun, but not a death-stroke. Optimistically the people flung -their thoughts forward to the next crop, and bore the pinch of the -winter with spasmodic and mismanaged help from the Government, with -help, lesser in degree, but more direct, from their landlords.</p> - -<p>In was in the following summer of stress and hope that my brother Robert -was born, in Dublin, the first son in the Martin family for forty-two -years, and the welcome accorded to him was what might have been -expected. The doctor was kissed by every woman in the house, so he -assured my brother many years afterwards, and, late at night as it was, -my father went down to Kildare Street Club to find some friend to whom -he could tell the news (and there is a touch of appropriateness in the -fact that the Club, that for so many years was a home for Robert, had -the first news of his birth).</p> - -<p>Radiant with her achievement my mother posted<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_15" id="page_15">{15}</a></span> over the long roads to -Ross, in the summer weather, with her precious first-born son, and the -welcome of Ross was poured forth upon her. The workmen in the yard -kissed the baby’s hands, the old women came from the mountains to -prophesy and to bless and to perform the dreadful rite of spitting upon -the child, for luck. My father’s mother, honourable as was her wont -towards her husband’s and son’s religion, asked my mother if a little -holy water might be sprinkled on the baby.</p> - -<p>“If you heat it you may give him a bath in it!” replied the baby’s -mother, with irrepressible lightheartedness.</p> - -<p>It may be taken for granted that he received, as we all did, secret -baptism at the hands of the priest. It was a kindly precaution taken by -our foster mothers, who were, it is needless to say, Roman Catholics; it -gave them peace of mind in the matter of the foster children whom they -worshipped, and my father and mother made no inquiries. Their Low Church -training did not interfere with their common sense, nor did it blind -them to the devotion that craved for the safeguard.</p> - -<p>A month or two later the cold fear for the safety of the potatoes fell -again upon the people; the paralysing certainty followed. The green -stalks blackened, the potatoes turned to black slime, and the avalanche -of starvation, fever and death fell upon the country. It was in the -winter of 1847, “the black ’47,” as they called it, when Robert was in -his second year, that the horror was at its worst, and before hope had -kindled again his ears must have known with their first understanding -the weak voice of hunger and the moan of illness among the despairing -creatures who flocked for aid into the yard and the long downstairs -passages of Ross. Many stories of that time remain among<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_16" id="page_16">{16}</a></span> the old -tenants; of the corpses buried where they fell by the roadside, near -Ross Gate; of the coffins made of loose boards tied round with a hay -rope. None, perhaps, is more pitiful than that of a woman who walked -fifteen miles across a desolate moor, with a child in her arms and a -child by her side, to get the relief that she heard was to be had at -Ross. Before she reached the house the child in her arms was dead; she -carried it into the kitchen and sank on the flags. When my aunt spoke to -her she found that she had gone mad; reason had stopped in that whelming -hour, like the watch of a drowned man.</p> - -<p>A soup-kitchen was established by my father and mother at one of the -gates of Ross; the cattle that the people could not feed were bought -from them, and boiled down, and the gates were locked to keep back the -crowd that pressed for the ration. Without rents, with poor rate at -22<i>s.</i> 6<i>d.</i> in the pound, the household of Ross staggered through the -intimidating years, with the starving tenants hanging, as it were, upon -its skirts, impossible to feed, impossible to see unfed. The rapid pens -of my father and mother sent the story far; some of the great tide of -help that flowed into Ireland came to them; the English Quakers loaded a -ship with provisions and sent them to Galway Bay. Hunger was in some -degree dealt with, but the Famine fever remained undefeated. My aunt, -Marian Martin (afterwards Mrs. Arthur Bushe), caught it in a school that -she had got together on the estate, where she herself taught little -girls to read and write and knit, and kept them alive with breakfasts of -oatmeal porridge. My aunt has told me how, as she lay in the blind -trance of the fever, my grandfather, who believed implicitly in his own -medical skill, opened a vein in her arm and bled her. The relief, -according to her account, was instant and exquisite, and her recovery<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_17" id="page_17">{17}</a></span> -set in from that hour. She may have owed much to the determination of -the Martins of that period that they would not be ill. My mother, -herself a daring rebel against the thraldom of illness, used to say that -at Ross no one was ill till they were dead, and no one was dead till -they were buried. It was the Christian Science of a tough-grained -generation.</p> - -<p>The little girls whom my aunt taught are old women now, courteous in -manner, cultivated in speech, thanks to the education that was given -them when National Schools were not.</p> - -<p>Our kinsman, Thomas Martin of Ballinahinch, fell a victim to the Famine -fever, caught in the Courthouse while discharging his duties as a -magistrate. He was buried in Galway, forty miles by road from -Ballinahinch, and his funeral, followed by his tenants, was two hours in -passing Ross Gate. In the words of A. M. Sullivan, “No adequate tribute -has ever been paid to those Irish landlords—and they were men of every -party and creed—who perished, martyrs to duty, in that awful time; who -did not fly the plague-reeking workhouse, or fever-tainted court.” -Amongst them he singled out for mention Mr. Martin of Ballinahinch, and -Mr. Nolan of Ballinderry (father of Colonel Nolan, M.P.), the latter of -whom died of typhus caught in Tuam Workhouse.</p> - -<p>When Robert was three years old, the new seed potatoes began to resist -the blight; he was nearly seven before the victory was complete, and by -that time the cards that he must play had already been dealt to him.</p> - -<h4><span class="smcap">Part II</span></h4> - -<p><span class="smcap">The</span> Famine yielded like the ice of the Northern Seas; it ran like melted -snows in the veins of Ireland for many years afterwards. Landlords who -had es<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_18" id="page_18">{18}</a></span>caped ruin at the time were more slowly ruined as time went on -and the money borrowed in the hour of need exacted its toll; Ross held -its ground, with what stress its owners best knew. It was in those -difficult years of Robert’s boyhood, when yet more brothers and sisters -continued to arrive rapidly, that his father began to write for the -Press. He contributed leading articles to the <i>Morning Herald</i>, a London -paper, now extinct; he went to London and lived the life that the -writing of leading articles entails, with its long waiting for the -telegrams, and its small-hour suppers, and it told on the health of a -man whose heart had been left behind him in the West. It tided over the -evil time, it brought him into notice with the Conservative Party and -the Irish Government, and probably gained for him subsequently his -appointment of Poor Law Auditor.</p> - -<p>His style in writing is quite unlike that of his eldest son; it is more -rigid, less flowing; the sentences are short and pointed, evidently -modelled on the rhythmic hammer-stroke of Macaulay; it has not the -careless and sunshiny ease with which Robert achieved his best at the -first attempt. That facility and versification that is akin to the gift -of music, and, like it, is inborn, came from my mother, and came to him -alone of his eight brothers and sisters; in her letters to her children -she dropped into doggerel verse without an effort, rhymes and metres -were in her blood, and to the last year of her life she never failed to -criticise occasional and quite insignificant roughnesses in her son’s -poems. Of her own polished and musical style one verse in illustration -may be given.</p> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">“In the fond visions of the silent night,<br /></span> -<span class="i3">I dreamt thy love, thy long sought love, was won;<br /></span> -<span class="i1">Was it a dream, that vision of delight—?<br /></span> -<span class="i3">I woke; ’twas but a dream, let me dream on!”<br /></span> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_19" id="page_19">{19}</a></span></div></div> -</div> - -<p>Robert was a nervous, warm-hearted boy, dark-eyed and romantic-looking; -the sensitive nature that expanded to affection was always his, and made -him cling to those who were kind to him. The vigorous and outdoor life -of Ross was the best tonic for such a nature, the large and healthful -intimacy with lake and woods, bog and wild weather, and shooting and -rowing, learned unconsciously from a father who delighted in them, and a -mother who knew no fear for herself and had little for her children. -Everything in those early days of his was large and vigorous; tall trees -to climb, great winds across the lake to wrestle with, strenuous and -capable talk upstairs and downstairs, in front of furnaces of turf and -logs, long drives, and the big Galway welcome at the end of them. One -day was like another, yet no day was monotonous. Prayers followed -breakfast, long prayers, beginning with the Psalms, of which each child -read a verse in due order of seniority; then First and Second Lessons, -frequently a chapter from a religious treatise, finally a prayer, from a -work named “The Tent and Altar,” all read with excellent emphasis by the -master of the house. In later years, after Robert had matriculated at -Trinity College, I remember with what youthful austerity he read prayers -at Ross, and with what awe we saw him reject “The Tent and Altar” and -heard him recite from memory the Morning Prayers from the Church -Service. He was at the same time deputed to teach Old Testament history -to his brothers and sisters; to this hour the Judges of Israel are -painfully stamped on my brain, as is the tearful morning when the Bible -was hurled at my inattentive head by the hand of the remorseless elder -brother.</p> - -<p>Robert’s early schoolroom work at Ross was got through with the ease -that may be imagined by anyone who has known his quickness in -assimilating<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_20" id="page_20">{20}</a></span> ideas and his cast-iron memory. As was the case with all -the Ross children, the real interests of the day were with the workmen -and the animals. The agreeability of the Galway peasant was enthralling; -even to a child; the dogs were held in even higher esteem. Throughout -Robert’s life dogs knew him as their friend; skilled in the lore of the -affections, they recognised his gentle heart, and the devotion to him of -his Gordon setter, Rose, is a thing to remember. Even of late years I -have seen him hurry away when his sterner sisters thought it necessary -to chastise an offending dog; the suffering of others was almost too -keenly understood by him.</p> - -<p>Reading aloud rounded off the close of those early days at Ross, -Shakespeare and Walter Scott, Napier and Miss Edgeworth; the foundation -of literary culture was well and truly laid, and laid with respect and -enthusiasm, so that what the boy’s mind did not grasp was stored up for -his later understanding, among things to be venerated, and fine diction -and choice phrase were imprinted upon an ear that was ever retentive of -music. Everyone who remembers his childhood remembers him singing songs -and playing the piano. His ear was singularly quick, and I think it was -impossible for him to sing out of tune. He learned his notes in the -schoolroom, but his musical education was dropped when he went to -school, as is frequently the case; throughout his life he accompanied -himself on the piano by ear, with ease, if with limitations; simple as -the accompaniments were, there was never a false note, and it seemed as -if his hands fell on the right places without an effort.</p> - -<p>A strange feature in his early education and in the establishment at -Ross was James Tucker, an ex-hedge schoolmaster, whose long face, blue -shaven chin, shabby black clothes, and gift for poetry have passed<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_21" id="page_21">{21}</a></span> -inextricably into the annals of the household. He entered it first at -the time of the Famine, ostensibly to give temporary help in the -management and accounts of the school which my aunt Marian had started -for the tenants’ children; he remained for many years, and filled many -important posts. He taught us the three R’s with rigour and -perseverance, he wrote odes for our birthdays, he was -controller-in-chief of the dairy; later on, when my father received the -appointment of Auditor of Poor Law, under the Local Government Board, -Tucker filled in the blue “abstracts” of the Auditor’s work in admirably -neat columns. Robert’s recital of the multiplication table was often -interrupted by wails for “Misther Tucker” and the key of the dairy, from -the kitchenmaid at the foot of the schoolroom stairs, and the -interruption was freely cursed, in a vindictive whisper, by the -schoolmaster. Tucker was slightly eccentric, a feature for which there -was always toleration and room at Ross; he entered largely into the -schoolroom theatricals that sprang up as soon as Robert was old enough -to whip up a company from the ranks of his brothers and sisters. The -first of which there is any record is the tragedy of “Bluebeard,” -adapted by him at the age of eight. As the author did not feel equal to -writing it down, it was taught to the actors by word of mouth, he -himself taking the title <i>rôle</i>. The performance took place privately in -the schoolroom, an apartment discreetly placed by the authorities in a -wing known as “The Offices,” beyond ken or call of the house proper. -Tucker was stage manager, every servant in the house was commandeered as -audience. The play met with much acceptance up to the point when -Bluebeard dragged Fatima (a shrieking sister) round the room by her -hair, belabouring her with a wooden sword, amid the ecstatic<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_22" id="page_22">{22}</a></span> yells of -the spectators, but at this juncture the mistress of the house -interrupted the revels with paralysing suddenness. She had in vain rung -the drawing-room bell for tea, she had searched and found the house -mysteriously silent and empty, till the plaudits of the rescue scene -drew her to the schoolroom. Players and audience broke into rout, and -Robert’s first dramatic enterprise ended in disorder, and, if I mistake -not, for the principals, untimely bed.</p> - -<p>It was some years afterwards, when Robert was at Trinity, that a similar -effort on his part of missionary culture ended in a like disaster. He -became filled with the idea of getting up a cricket team at Ross, and in -a summer vacation he collected his eleven, taught them to hold a bat, -and harangued them eloquently on the laws of the game. It was -unfortunate that its rules became mixed up in the minds of the players -with a game of their own, called “Burnt Ball,” which closely resembles -“Rounders,” and is played with a large, soft ball. In the first day of -cricket things progressed slowly, and the unconverted might have been -forgiven for finding the entertainment a trifle dull. A batsman at -length hit a ball and ran. It was fielded by cover-point, who, bored by -long inaction, had waited impatiently for his chance. In the enthusiasm -of at length getting something to do, the recently learned laws of -cricket were swept from the mind of cover-point, and the rules of Burnt -Ball instantly reasserted themselves. He hurled the ball at the batsman, -shouting: “Go out! You’re burnt!” and smote him heavily on the head.</p> - -<p>The batsman went out, that is to say, he picked himself up and tottered -from the fire zone, and neither then nor subsequently did cricket -prosper at Ross.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_23" id="page_23">{23}</a></span></p> - -<p>Then, and always, Robert shared his enthusiasm with others; he gave -himself to his surroundings, whether people or things, and, as -afterwards, it was preferably people. He had the gift of living in the -present and living every moment of it; it might have been of him that -Carlyle said, “Happy men live in the present, for its bounty suffices, -and wise men too, for they know its value.”</p> - -<p>Throughout Robert’s school and college days theatricals, charades, and -living pictures, written or arranged by him, continued to flourish at -Ross. There remains in my memory a play, got up by him when he was about -seventeen, in which he himself, despising the powers of his sisters, -took the part of the heroine, with the invaluable Tucker as the lover. A -tarletan dress was commandeered from the largest of the sisterhood, and -in it, at the crisis of the play, he endeavoured to elope with Tucker -over a clothes-horse, draped in a curtain. It was at this point that the -tarletan dress, tried beyond its strength, split down the back from neck -to waist; the heroine flung her lover from her, and backed off the stage -with her front turned firmly to the audience, and the elopement was -deferred <i>sine die</i>.</p> - -<p>Those were light-hearted days, yet they were indelible in Robert’s -memory, and the strength and savour of the old Galway times were in them -as inextricably as the smell of the turf smoke and the bog myrtle. -Nothing was conventional or stagnant, things were done on the spur of -the moment, and with a total disregard for pomps and vanities, and -everyone preferred good fun to a punctual dinner. Mingling with all were -the poor people, with their cleverness, their good manners, and their -unflagging spirits; I can see before me the carpenter painting a boat by -the old boat quay, and Robert sitting on a rock, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_24" id="page_24">{24}</a></span> talking to him for -long tracts of the hot afternoon. At another time one could see Robert -holding, with the utmost zeal and discrimination, a court of arbitration -in the coach-house for the settling of an intricate and vociferous -dispute between two of the tenants.</p> - -<p>Life at Ross was of the traditional Irish kind, with many retainers at -low wages, which works out as a costly establishment with nothing to -show for it. A sheep a week and a cow a month were supplied by the farm, -and assimilated by the household; it seemed as if with the farm produce, -the abundance of dairy cows, the packed turf house, the fallen timber -ready to be cut up, the fruitful garden, the game and the trout, there -should have been affluence. But after all these followed the Saturday -night labour bill, and the fact remains, as many Irish landlords can -testify, that these free fruits of the earth are heavily paid for, that -convenience is mistaken for economy, and that farming is, for the -average gentleman, more of an occupation than an income.</p> - -<p>The Famine had left its legacy of debt and a lowered rental, and further -hindrances to the financial success of farm and estate were the -preoccupation of my father’s life with his work as Auditor of Poor Law -Unions, the enormous household waste that took toll of everything, and, -last and most inveterate of all, my father’s generous and soft-hearted -disposition.</p> - -<p>One instance will give, in a few sentences, the relation between -landlord and tenant, which, as it would seem, all recent legislation has -sedulously schemed to destroy. I give it in the words of one of the -tenants, widow of an eye-witness.</p> - -<p>“The widow A., down by the lake-side” (Lough<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_25" id="page_25">{25}</a></span> Corrib—about three miles -away), “was very poor one time, and she was a good while in arrears with -her rent. The Master sent to her two or three times, and in the end he -walked down himself after his breakfast, and he took Thady” (the -steward) “with him. Well, when he went into the house, she was so proud -to see him, and ‘Your Honour is welcome!’ says she, and she put a chair -for him. He didn’t sit down at all, but he was standing up there with -his back to the dresser, and the children were sitting down one side the -fire. The tears came from the Master’s eyes; Thady seen them fall down -the cheek. ‘Say no more about the rent,’ says the Master, to her, ‘you -need say no more about it till I come to you again.’ Well, it was the -next winter the men were working in Gurthnamuckla, and Thady with them, -and the Master came to the wall of the field and a letter in his hand, -and he called Thady over to him. What had he to show him but the Widow -A.’s rent that her brother in America sent her!”</p> - -<p>It will not happen again; it belongs to an almost forgotten <i>régime</i>, -that was capable of abuse, yet capable too of summoning forth the best -impulses of Irish hearts. The end of that <i>régime</i> was not far away, and -the beginning of the end was already on the horizon of Ross.</p> - -<p>My grandfather, whose peculiar capacity might once have saved the -financial situation, had fallen into a species of second childhood. He -died at Ross, and I remember the cold thrill of terror with which I -heard him “keened” by an old tenant, a widow, who asked permission to -see him as he lay dead. She went into the twilit room, and suddenly the -tremendous and sustained wail went through the house, like the voice of -the grave itself.</p> - -<p>It seemed as if Ross had borne a charmed life<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_26" id="page_26">{26}</a></span> during the troubles of -the later ’sixties. The Fenian rising of 1867 did not touch it; the -flicker of it was like sheet lightning in the Eastern sky, but the storm -passed almost unheard. It had been so in previous risings; Ross seemed -to be geographically intended for peace. It is bounded on the east by -the long waters of Lough Corrib, on the west by barren mountains, -stretching to the Atlantic, on the north by the great silences of -Connemara. Within these boundaries the mutual dependence of landlord and -tenant remained unshaken; it was a delicate relation, almost akin to -matrimony, and like a happy marriage, it needed that both sides should -be good fellows. The Disestablishment of the Irish Church came in 1869, -a direct blow at Protestantism, and an equally direct tax upon landlords -for the support of their Church, but of this revolution the tenants -appeared to be unaware. In 1870 came Gladstone’s Land Act, which by a -system of fines shielded the tenant to a great extent from “capricious -eviction.” As evictions, capricious or otherwise, did not occur at Ross, -this section of the Act was not of epoch-making importance there; its -other provision, by which tenants became proprietors of their own -improvements, was also something of a superfluity. It was 1872 that -brought the first cold plunge into Irish politics of the new kind.</p> - -<p>In February of that year Captain Trench, son of Lord Clancarty, -contested one of the divisions of County Galway in the Conservative -interest, his opponent being Captain Nolan, a Home Ruler. It went -without saying that my father gave his support to the Conservative, who -was also a Galway man, and the son of a friend. Up to that time it was a -matter of course that the Ross tenants voted with their landlord. -Captain Trench canvassed the Ross<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_27" id="page_27">{27}</a></span> district, and there was no indication -of what was about to happen, or if there were, my father did not believe -it. The polling place for that part of the country was in Oughterard, -about five miles away; my father drove there on the election day, and on -the hill above the town was met by a man who advised him to turn back. A -troop of cavalry glittered in the main street and the crowd seethed -about them. My father drove on and saw a company of infantry keeping the -way for Mr. Arthur Guinness, afterwards Lord Ardilaun, as he convoyed to -the poll a handful of his tenants from Ashford at the other side of -Lough Corrib to vote for Captain Trench, he himself walking in front -with the oldest of them on his arm. During that morning my father ranged -through the crowd incredulously, asking for this or that tenant, unable -to believe that they had deserted him. It was a futile search; with a -few valiant exceptions the Ross tenants, following the example of the -rest of the constituency, voted according to the orders of their Church, -and Captain Nolan was elected by a majority of four to one. It was a -priest from another part of the diocese who gave forth the mandate, with -an extraordinary fury of hatred against the landlord side; one need not -blame the sheep who passed in a frightened huddle from one fold to -another. When my father came home that afternoon, even the youngest -child of the house could see how great had been the blow. It was not the -political defeat, severe as that was, it was the personal wound, and it -was incurable. A petition against the result of the election brought -about the famous trial in Galway, at which Judge Keogh, himself a Roman -Catholic, denounced the priestly intimidation that was established in -the mouths of many witnesses. The Ballot Act followed in June, but these -things could not<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_28" id="page_28">{28}</a></span> soothe the wounded spirit of the men who had trusted -in their tenants.</p> - -<p>Startlingly, the death of a Galway landlord followed on the election. He -was a Roman Catholic, and belonged to one of the oldest families in the -county; on his death-bed he desired that not one of his tenants should -touch his coffin. It was not in that spirit that my father, a few weeks -afterwards, faced the end. In March he caught cold on one of his many -journeys of inspection; he was taken ill at the Galway Club, and a slow -pleurisy followed. He lay ill for a time in Galway, and the longing for -home strengthened with every day.</p> - -<p>“If I could hear the cawing of the Ross crows I should get well,” he -said pitifully.</p> - -<p>He was brought home, but he was even then past hope.</p> - -<p>Some scenes remain for ever on the memory. In the early afternoon of the -23rd of April, I looked down through the rails of the well-stair case, -and saw Robert come upstairs to his father’s room, his tall figure -almost supported on the shoulder of one of the men. All was then over, -and the last of the old order of the Landlords of Ross had gone, -murmuring,</p> - -<p>“I am ready to meet Thee, Eternal Father!”</p> - -<h4><span class="smcap">Part III</span></h4> - -<p>With the death of my father the curtain fell for ever on the old life at -Ross, the stage darkened, and the keening of the tenants as they -followed his coffin was the last music of the piece.</p> - -<p>Two or three months afterwards the house was empty. In the blaze of the -June weather, the hall door, that had always stood open, was shut and -barred, and, in the stillness, the rabbits ventured up to the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_29" id="page_29">{29}</a></span> broad -limestone steps where once the talk of the house had centred in the -summer evenings. For the first time in its history Ross House was empty; -my mother and her children had embarked upon life in Dublin, and Robert, -like his father before him, had gone to London to write for the Press.</p> - -<p>For five or six years Robert lived in London. He belonged to the Arundel -Club, where lived and moved the Bohemians of that day, the perfect and -single-hearted Bohemians, who were, perhaps, survivals of the days of -Richard Steele, and have now vanished, unable to exist in the shadeless -glare of Borough Councils. Their literary power was unquestioned, the -current of their talk was strong, with baffling swirl and eddy, and he -who plunged in it must be a resourceful and strong swimmer. Linked -inseparably with those years of London life was my mother’s cousin, W. -G. Wills, the playwright, poet and painter, who in these early -’seventies had suddenly achieved celebrity as a dramatist, with the -tragedy of “Charles I.” If a record could be discovered of the hierarchs -of the Bohemians it would open of itself at the name of Willie Wills. -Great gifts of play-writing and portrait-painting rained upon him a -reputation that he never troubled himself about; he remained unalterably -himself, and, clad in his long grey ulster, lived in his studio a life -unfettered by the clock. Of his amazing <i>ménage</i>, of the strange and -starveling hangers-on that followed him as rooks follow the plough, to -see what they could pick up, all who knew him had stories to tell. Of -the luncheons at his studio, where the beefsteak came wrapped in -newspaper, and the plates that were hopelessly dirty were thrown out of -the window; of the appointments written boldly on the wall and -straightway forgotten; the litter of canvases, the scraps of manuscript, -and among and<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_30" id="page_30">{30}</a></span> above these incidents, the tranquillity, the charm, the -agreeability of Willie Wills.<a name="FNanchor_1_1" id="FNanchor_1_1"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_1" class="fnanchor">[1]</a></p> - -<p>Robert has found him and my mother lunching together gloriously on -mutton chops, cooked by being flung into the heart of the fire.</p> - -<p>“Just one more, Nannie,” said the dramatist, as Robert entered, spearing -a blazing fragment and presenting it to his boon companion with a -courtly gesture.</p> - -<p>In the old days at Ross, Willie Wills was a frequent guest, and held the -children in thrall—as he could always ensnare and hold children—with -his exquisite story-telling. Their natural guardians withdrew with -confidence, as Willie began, with enormous gravity, the tale of “The -Little Old Woman who lived in the Dark Wood, and had one long yellow -Tooth,” and, returning after an interval, heard that “at this momentous -crisis seven dead men, in sacks, staggered into the room—!” while, in -the fateful pause that followed, the clamour of the children, “Go on, -Willie Wills!” would rise.</p> - -<p>Robert and Willie Wills were in many aspects of character and of gifts -unlike, yet with some cousinly points in common. Both were cultivated -and literary, yet seldom read a book; both were sensitive to criticism, -and even touchingly anxious for approval; both were delightful -companions in a <i>tête-à-tête</i>. Where sympathy is joined with -imagination, and sense of humour with both, it is a combination hard to -beat. Robert regarded routine respectfully, if from afar, and sincerely -admired the efforts of those who en<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_31" id="page_31">{31}</a></span>deavoured to systematise his -belongings. Willie Wills was superbly indifferent to surroundings, yet -took a certain pride in new clothes. The real points of resemblance were -in heart; the chivalrous desire to help the weak, and the indelible -filial instinct that glows in natures of the best sort, and marks -unfailingly a good son as a good fellow through all the nations of the -world.</p> - -<p>Throughout these London days Robert wrote for the <i>Globe</i> and other -papers, chiefly paragraphs and light articles, that ran from his pen -with the real enjoyment that he found in writing them at the last -moment. He seemed to do better when working against time than when he -had large days in hand and a well-ordered writing-table inviting his -presence. He found these things thoroughly uninspiring, and facilities -for correcting his work were odious to him. Proofs he never looked at; -he said he couldn’t face them; probably because of the critical power -that underlay his facility.</p> - -<p>London with Robert in it was then, as ever, for Robert’s family, a place -with a different meaning—a place of theatre tickets, of luncheons, of -newspaper news viewed from within, of politics and actors reduced to -human personalities. It was a fixed rule that he should meet his female -relatives on their arrival at Euston; it is on record that he was once -in time, but it is also recorded that on that occasion the train was -forty minutes late. The hum of London seasons filled his brain; London -may be attractive or repellent, but it will be heard, and it made strong -music for a nature that loved the stir of men and the encounter of -minds. Four hundred miles away lay Ross in the whispering stillness of -its summer woods, and the monotony of its winter winds, producing heavy -bags of woodcock<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_32" id="page_32">{32}</a></span> after its kind, while its master “shot folly as she -flew,” and found his game in the canards of Fleet Street and -Westminster. It was inevitable as things stood, but in that alienation -both missed much that lay in the power of each to give.</p> - -<p>It was while Robert was living in London that the resignation of Mr. -Gladstone took place. Out of the ensuing general election in the spring -of 1873 came Isaac Butt and his lieutenants, with a party of sixty Home -Rulers behind them; Ireland had sent them instead of the dozen or so of -the previous Parliament, and it was said that Ireland had done it in the -new-found shelter of the Ballot Act. Robert knew, as anyone brought up -as he was must know, that for most of Ireland the Ballot Act could not -be a shelter. The Galway election of 1872 had shown to all in whose -hands the great power of the franchise lay. One indefensible position -had been replaced by another, feudal power by clerical, and only those -who knew Robert well, understood how hard it hit him. He shot at Ross -occasionally, he visited it now and then, and at every visit his -perceptive nature was aware that a new spirit was abroad; in spite of -the genuine and traditional feeling of the people for their old allies, -in spite of their good breeding, and their anxious desire to conceal the -rift. The separation had begun, and only those who have experienced it -will understand how strange, how wounding it is.</p> - -<p>It was not universal, and theoretical hostility strove always with the -soft voice of memory. My father was still to all, “The Masther, the Lord -have mercy on him”; the Martins were still “The Family,” who could do no -wrong, whose defects, if such were admitted, were revered. “The Martin -family hadn’t good sight,” said a tenant, “but sure the people say that -was a proof of their nobility.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_33" id="page_33">{33}</a></span>”</p> - -<p>There is an incident of one of Robert’s visits to Ross that is not too -small to be worth recording. He had given his Gordon setter, Rose, to a -friend who lived five miles away from Ross, and she had settled down -with resignation to her new life. Trained in the language of the -drawing-room, she may have heard it said that Robert was at Ross, or her -deep and inscrutable perceptions may have received a wave of warning of -his nearness. Whatever it was that prompted her, the old dog made her -way alone to Ross, and found her master there.</p> - -<p>In 1877 Robert turned his steps again to Dublin, and before the year was -out he was living with his grandmother, and was immersed in the life, -political, theatrical and social, of Dublin.</p> - -<p>My mother’s mother, Mrs. Fox, was, as has been said, a daughter of Chief -Justice Bushe, and was a notable member of a remarkable band of brothers -and sisters. Strongly humorous, strongly affectionate, a doughty -politician, original in every idea, and delightful in her prejudices; a -black letter authority on Shakespeare and Scott, a keen debater upon -Carlyle, upon Miss Rhoda Broughton, upon all that was worth reading. I -can see her declaiming “Henry IV” to Robert and his brethren, with -irrepressible gestures of her hand, with a big voice for Falstaff, and a -small voice for Mine Hostess, and an eye that raked the audience lest it -should waver in attentiveness. Even as clearly can I see her, as, at a -time of crisis,—it was, I think, after Gladstone’s attack on Trinity -College,—she sprang from her chair, and speechlessly wrung the hand of -someone who had rushed into her dining-room, crying,</p> - -<p>“Gladstone has resigned!”</p> - -<p>That was how she and her family took their politics.</p> - -<p>She loved Robert with a touching devotion, and I<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_34" id="page_34">{34}</a></span> think those days in -Herbert Street were deeply woven into his memory. It was a quiet street, -with a long strip of grass and hawthorns, instead of houses, forming one -side of it, part of the grounds of the convent that stood at the end. -There the birds sang, and a little convent bell spelt out the Angelus -with a friendly voice; the old red-brick house, with its old furniture -and its old china, the convent bell, with its reminder of cloistered -calm, all made a suitable setting for the strictly ordered, cultured -life of the old lady who bestowed on them their appropriateness.</p> - -<p>In the spring of ’78 Robert was in the thick of amateur theatricals. He -was never a first-rate actor, but he was a thoroughly reliable one; he -always knew his part, though none could say how or when he learned it, -he could “gag” with confidence, and dropped on to his cue unerringly, -and he had that liking for his audience that is the shortest cut to -being on good terms with them. His gift in ready verse was not allowed -to remain idle. He wrote prologues, he arranged singing quadrilles; when -the Sheridan Club had a guest whom it delighted to honour, it was Robert -who wrote and recited the ode for the occasion; an ode that never -attempted too much, and just touched the core of the matter.</p> - -<p>With the close of the ’seventies came the burst into the open of the -Irish Parliamentary Party, in full cry. Like hounds hunting confusedly -in covert, they had, in the hands of Isaac Butt, kept up a certain -amount of noise and excitement, keen, yet uncertain as to what game was -on foot. From 1877 it was Parnell who carried the horn, a grim, -disdainful Master, whose pack never dared to get closer to him than the -length of his thong; but he laid them on the line, and they ran it like -wolves.</p> - -<p>Up to 1877 crops and prices were good, even re<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_35" id="page_35">{35}</a></span>markably so, and rents -were paid. Following that year came, like successive blows on the same -spot, three bad harvests that culminated in the disastrous season of -1879-80. It was in 1847 that the Famine broke the heart and the life of -O’Connell; it was the partial failure of the crop of ’79 and ’80 that -created Parnell’s opportunity—so masterful a factor has been the potato -in the destinies of Irishmen.</p> - -<p>In 1879 the rents began to fail. The distress was not comparable to that -of ’47, but it brought about a revolution infinitely greater. At its -close it left the Irish tenant practically owner of his land, with a -rent fixed by Government, and the feudal link with the landlord was -broken for ever. On the Ross estate a new agent had inaugurated a new -policy, excellent in theory, abhorrent to those whom it concerned, the -“striping” of many of the holdings, in order to give to each tenant an -equal share of good and bad land. Anyone who knows the Irish tenant will -immediately understand what it means to interfere with his land, and, -above all things, to give to another tenant any part of it. It was done -nevertheless. The long lines of stone wall ran symmetrically parallel -over hill and pasture and bog, and the symmetry was hateful and the -equality bitter to those most concerned. It is probable that the -discontent sank in and prepared the way for the mischief that was -coming.</p> - -<p>By the winter of 1879 the pinch had become severe. The tenants, by this -time two or three years in arrear, did not meet their liabilities, and -most landlords went without the greater part of their income. Robert, -among many others, began to learn what it was to be deprived of the -moderate income left to him after the charges on his estate were paid. -He never again received any.</p> - -<p>Three Relief Funds in Dublin coped as best they<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_36" id="page_36">{36}</a></span> could with the distress -of the Irish poor. One of them was worked with great enthusiasm and -organising power by the Duchess of Marlborough, and by every means known -to a most capable leader of Society she lured from Society of all grades -a ready “rate in aid.” Entertainments sprang up—theatricals, bazaars, -concerts—that helped the Fund and at the same time put heart into the -flagging Dublin season, and Robert was in the thick of charitable -endeavour. His first Irish song, the leader of a long line that -culminated later in “Ballyhooly,” was written at about this time, “The -Vagrants of Erin,” a swinging tune, that marched to words National -enough for any party.</p> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">“Give me your hand, if owld Ireland’s the land<br /></span> -<span class="i2">From which you may chance to be farin’,”<br /></span> -</div></div> -</div> - -<p class="nind">it began, with all its author’s geniality, and the Irish audience -responded to its first chords with drowning applause. Once, as he sang -it, accompanying himself, and swinging with the tune, the music stool -began to sway in ominous accord. “First it bent, and syne it brake,” and -Robert staggered to his feet, but just in time.</p> - -<p>“This is a pantomime song, with a breakdown in it!” he said, while the -head of the stool rolled from its broken stalk and trundled down the -stage.</p> - -<p>He had the gift of making friends with his audience; as he came on to -the platform to sing, his air of enjoyment, his friendly eyes, even his -single eyeglass, had already done half the business. He took them, as it -were, to his bosom, and whatever might be their grade, he did his best -for them. In spite of the liberties he took with time, words and tune, -he was singularly easy to accompany, for anyone acquainted with his -methods and prepared to cast himself (it was generally herself) adrift -with him, and trust to ear instead of<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_37" id="page_37">{37}</a></span> to book. However far afield -Robert might range, whatever stories he told, he would surely drop back -into the key and the words, like a wild duck into the water, with a just -sufficient hint to the waiting coadjutor that his circling flight was -ending. His topical songs of those early ’eighties have died, as all of -their kind must die. He wrote down nothing, the occasion is forgotten, -and the brain in which they had their being has passed from us. One or -two points and hits remain with me. In the year that Shotover won the -Oaks, a commemorating verse ended:</p> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">“Of course she was Shot over,<br /></span> -<span class="i1">She’d a Cannon on her back!”<br /></span> -</div></div> -</div> - -<p>In one of the songs, the explanation of the failure of the ships <i>Alert</i> -and <i>Discovery</i> to reach the North Pole was that “those on the Discovery -were not on the Alert.”</p> - -<p>In spite of the thunderous political background of the early ’eighties, -in spite of the empty pockets of those dependent on Irish rents, in -spite of the crime that drew forth the Crimes Act, the fun and the -spirit were inextinguishable in Dublin.</p> - -<p>But the political background was growing blacker, and the thunder more -loud. Gladstone’s Land Act of 1881 had not pacified Ireland, even though -it made the tenant practically owner of his land, even though the rents -were fixed by Government officials, whose mission was to coax sedition -to complacence, if not to loyalty. Ireland was falling into chaos. -Arrears of rent, Relief Committees, No Rent manifestoes, Plan of -Campaign evictions, Funds for Distressed Irish Ladies, outrages, -boycotting, and Parnell stirring the “Seething Pot” with a steady hand, -while his subordinates stoked the fire. Boycotting was responded to by -the Property Defence Association, and in 1882<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_38" id="page_38">{38}</a></span> Robert went forth under -its auspices as an “Emergency man.” His business was to visit the -boycotted landlords and farmers and to supply them with men—from the -North, for the most part—to do the farm work. Those who do not know -Ireland, and for whom the word boycotting has no personal associations, -can hardly realise what that dark time meant to its victims. The owners -of boycotted lands, unable to get food or necessaries of any kind from -the local tradespeople, imported supplies from England and the North, -and opened stores in their stable yards for such of the faithful as -stood firm. Ladies, totally unaccustomed to outdoor labour, saved crops -and herded cattle, matters that in themselves might have been found -interesting, if arduous, but the terror was over all, and in face of -bitter antagonism the task was too great.</p> - -<p>It was at this work that Robert knew, for the first time, what it was to -have every man’s hand against him, to meet the stare of hatred, the -jeer, and the side-long curse; to face endless drives on outside cars, -with his revolver in his hand; to plan the uphill tussle with boycotted -crops, and cattle for which a market could scarcely be found; to know -the imminence of death, when, by accidentally choosing one of two roads, -he evaded the man with a gun who had gone out to wait for him. It taught -him much of difficult men and of tangled politics, he learned how to -make the best of a bad business, and how to fight in a corner; it made -him a proficient in Irish affairs, and it added to his opinions a -seriousness based on strong and moving points.</p> - -<p>Gladstone had faced a dangerous Ireland with concession in one hand and -coercion in the other, and however either may go in single harness, -there is no doubt that they cannot with success be driven as<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_39" id="page_39">{39}</a></span> a pair. -There followed the Maamtrasna murders, the extermination of the Huddy -family, the assassination in Phœnix Park of Lord Frederick Cavendish and -Mr. Burke, the attempted assassination of Judge Lawson opposite Kildare -Street Club. When Robert was entering into the deep places of his last -illness, he spoke with all his wonted grasp of details of those webs of -conspiracy. Tradesmen who came from Dublin to work in Kylemore Castle -(then the property of Mr. Mitchell Henry) infected the mind of Northern -Connemara with the idea that assassination was a fitting expression of -political opinion. The murders of the Maamtrasna district followed. The -stately mountains beheld the struggle and the slaughter, and the sweet -waters of Lough Mask closed upon the victims.</p> - -<p>Month by month the net of conspiracy was woven, and life was the prize -played for in wonderful silence and darkness, and murder was achieved -like a victory at chess. We know how the victories were paid for. I do -not forget the face of Timothy Kelly, as he stood in the dock and was -tried for participation in the Phœnix Park murders. There is a pallor of -fear that is remembered when once seen, and to see that sick and -desperate paleness on the face of a boy of seventeen is to feel for ever -the mystery and enormity of his crime, and the equal immensity of the -punishment. Unforgettable, too, is the moment when his mother took her -seat in the witness chair to support the <i>alibi</i> put forward on his -behalf, and looked her boy in his white and stricken face, white and -stricken as he. Yet she did not waver, and gave her evidence quietly and -collectedly.</p> - -<p>A phrase or two from the speech for the defence has fixed itself in the -memory.</p> - -<p>“Take the scales of Justice,” said the Counsel,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_40" id="page_40">{40}</a></span> with a wide gesture of -appeal towards the jury; “lift them far above the reach of passion and -prejudice, into those serener regions above where Justice herself reigns -supreme——”</p> - -<p>Death brooded palpably over the brown and grey Court, and held the tense -faces of all in his thrall, and weighted every syllable of the speeches. -Never was the irrelevancy of murder as a political weapon made more -clear, and the fearful appropriateness of capital punishment seemed -clear too, mystery requited with mystery.</p> - -<p>When we came into the Court we were told that the jury would disagree, -there being at least one “Invincible” on the list, and it was so. But -with the next trial the end was reached, and the trapped creature in the -dock, with the men who were his confederates, went down into the -oblivion into which they had thrust their prey.</p> - -<p>Many years ago a mission priest delivered a sermon in Irish in the bare -white chapel that stands high on a hill above Ross Lake. I remember one -sentence, translated for me by one of the congregation.</p> - -<p>“Oh black seas of Eternity, without height or depth, bay, brink, or -shore! How can anyone look into your depths and neglect the salvation of -his soul!”<a name="FNanchor_2_2" id="FNanchor_2_2"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_2" class="fnanchor">[2]</a></p> - -<p>It expresses all that need now be remembered of the Phœnix Park murders.</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_41" id="page_41">{41}</a></span></p> - -<p class="astt">* * * * *</p> - -<h2><a name="CHAPTER_II" id="CHAPTER_II"></a>CHAPTER II<br /><br /> -<small>“THE CHIEF”</small></h2> - -<p><span class="smcap">It</span> is a commonplace, even amounting to a bromide, to speak of the -breadth, the depth, and the length of the ties of Irish kinship. In -Ireland it is not so much Love that hath us in the net as Relationship. -Pedigree takes precedence even of politics, and in all affairs that -matter it governs unquestioned. It is sufficient to say that the -candidate for any post, in any walk of life—is “a cousin of me own, by -the Father”—“a sort of a relation o’ mine, by the Mother”—and support -of the unfittest is condoned, even justified.</p> - -<p>I am uncertain if the practice of deifying a relationship by the -employment of the definite article is peculiar to Munster, or even to -Ireland. “The fawther,” “the a’nt.” He who speaks to me of my father as -“The Fawther,” implies a sort of humorous intimacy, a respect just -tinged with facetiousness, that is quite lacking in the severe -directness of “your father.”</p> - -<p>There was once a high magnate of a self-satisfied provincial town (its -identity is negligible). An exhibition was presently to be held there, -and it chanced that a visit from Royalty occurred shortly before the -completion of the arrangements. It also chanced that a possible visit to -Ireland of a still greater<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_42" id="page_42">{42}</a></span> Personage impended—(this was several years -ago). The lesser Royalty partook of lunch with the magnate, and the -latter broached the question of a State opening of the exhibition by the -august visitor to be.</p> - -<p>“When ye go back to London, now,” he beguiled, “coax the Brother!”</p> - -<p>How winning is the method of address! It has in it something of the -insidious coquetry of the little dog who skips, in affected artlessness, -uninvited, upon your knee.</p> - -<p>I have strayed from my text, which was the potency of the net of -relationship. Being Irish, I have to acknowledge its spell, and I think -it is indisputable that a thread, however slender, of kinship adds a -force to friendship.</p> - -<p>Martin’s mother and mine were first cousins, granddaughters of Chief -Justice Charles Kendal Bushe, and of his wife, Anne Crampton. I have -heard my mother assert that she had seventy first cousins, all -grandchildren of “The Chief,” but I think there was a touch of fancy -about this. There is something sounding and sumptuous about the number -seventy, and some remembrance of Ahab and his seventy relatives may have -been in it. In her memoir of her brother Robert, Martin has given some -suggestion of the remarkable charm and influence of these -great-grandparents of ours. The adoration that both of them inspired -distils like a perfume from every record of them. They seem to have -obliterated all their rival grandfathers and grandmothers. One reflects -that each of the seventy first cousins must have possessed four -grandparents, yet, in the radiance of this couple, the alternative -grandpapas and grandmammas appear to have been, in the regard of their -grandchildren, no more than shadows.</p> - -<p>They lived in a strangely interesting time, the time<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_43" id="page_43">{43}</a></span> of the Union, when -there was room in the upper classes for each individual to be known to -each, and the proportion of those that governed, and those that were -governed, was as the players in an international cricket match to the -lookers-on; and it is not too much to boast that, out of a very -brilliant team, there was no better innings played than that of Charles -Kendal Bushe. When, as in “the ’98,” the lookers-on attempted to join in -the game, the result exemplified their incapacity and the advantages of -the existing arrangement.</p> - -<p>Martin had been given by her mother a boxful of old family letters; one -of those pathetic collections of letters that no one either wants, or -looks at, or feels justified in burning. I know not for how many years -they had been hidden away. We had talked, every now and then, of -examining them, but the examination had been postponed for a more -convenient season that never came. Now life is emptier, and time seems -of less value; I have read them all, and I think that some extracts from -them will not come amiss among these memories.</p> - -<p>It would require a sounder historian than I, and one who had specialised -in Irish affairs of the latter years of the eighteenth and the beginning -of the nineteenth centuries, to deal adequately with these old papers. -The Chief Justice and his wife lived intensely, in the very heart of the -most intense time, probably, that Ireland has ever known. They knew all -the rebel leaders, Wolfe Tone, Lord Edward Fitzgerald, and the rest of -the splendid romantics who fought and died, and lit with the white flame -of devotion one page at least of Ireland’s history. The names of -Plunket, Grattan, Saurin, later, O’Connell, and others less well known, -are found in many of these letters, and there are valentines from “Jemmy -Saurin,” apostrophising “the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_44" id="page_44">{44}</a></span> blue eyes of Kitty” (one of the Chief’s -daughters, and grandmother of “Martin Ross”); genuine, perhaps, but more -probably faked by the young lady’s heartless relatives; anagrams upon -the name of Charles Kendal Bushe, and an epigram, written by C. K. B. -himself, which has a very charming deftness, and shall be transcribed -here.</p> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i7"><span class="smcap">To Chloe</span><br /></span> -<span class="i2">(<i>To accompany the gift of a watch</i>)<br /></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">Among our fashionable Bands,<br /></span> -<span class="i2">No wonder Time should love to linger,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Allowed to place his two rude hands<br /></span> -<span class="i2">Where others dare not lay a finger.<br /></span> -</div></div> -</div> - -<p>The more I investigate the contents of the old letter box the more -fascinating they prove themselves to be.</p> - -<p>I must, at all events, endeavour to refrain from irrelevant -quotation—(even regretfully omitting “The cure for Ellen P.’s spots. -Kate writes me word her face is now as clear as chrystal”)—and will try -to deal only with such of the contents of the box as come legitimately -within my scope.</p> - -<p>The Chief’s letters cover a wide period, from about 1795 (a couple of -years after his marriage) to 1837. One does not, perhaps, find in them -the brilliance that is associated with his name in public life and in -general society. Those from which I have made extracts were written to -his wife. Deeply woven in them is the devotion to her that was the -mainspring of his life, and in works of devotion one need not expect to -find epigram.<a name="FNanchor_3_3" id="FNanchor_3_3"></a><a href="#Footnote_3_3" class="fnanchor">[3]</a></p> - -<p>In one of them, written in 1807, he writes from Dublin, to her, in the -country, telling her of “an unfortunate business” in which he, “without -any personal ill-will to anyone,” “found it his duty to<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_45" id="page_45">{45}</a></span> take a part.” -He deplores that “among the Members of the Bar coldness and jealousy -prevail, where there had been the utmost harmony and unanimity.” “It is -not in my nature to like such a state of things,” he says, and, I -believe, says truly, “and when I am alone my spirits are affected by it -in a way that I wou’d not for the World confess to anyone but you. I am -told that I am libell’d in the newspapers, which I dont know for I have -not read them, and which I wou’d not care about, from the same motives -that have so often, to your knowledge, made me indifferent about being -prais’d in them.... You remember on a former trying occasion how I acted -and I can never forget the heroism with which you supported me and -encourag’d me in a conduct which was apparently ruinous in its -consequences to yourself and our darling Babies. Ever since you left -this, my mind has been agitated in the way I have described to you. I am -seven years older and my nerves twenty years older than at the period of -the Union. Judge, then, the delight I feel at the prospect of seeing -again so soon, the bosom friend dearer than all, the only person upon -whose heart I can repose my own when weary—I judge of it by the -pleasure I feel in thus unburthening myself to you, and in the -consciousness that the very writing of this letter has given me the only -warm, comfortable and confidential glow of heart which I have felt since -you left me. Adieu beloved Nan—Pray <i>burn</i> this <i>immediately</i>” (twice -underlined) “and let no human being learn anything of those thoughts -which to you alone I wou’d communicate. Ever yours C. K. B.”</p> - -<p>It is a hundred and more years since this injunction was written. The -paper is stained and brittle, and I think that perhaps a tear, perhaps -also a kiss or two, have contributed a little to the staining. But -though<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_46" id="page_46">{46}</a></span> she disobeyed him I believe he has forgiven her. I hope he will -also forgive a great-granddaughter who has chanced upon this record of a -disobedience that few could blame and that any lover would extol.</p> - -<p>Long afterwards the same thought came in nearly the same words to -another Irishman, the poet, George Darley, and he wrote those lines that -have in them the same note of whispered tenderness that still breathes -from the discoloured page of the letter that should have been burned a -hundred years ago.</p> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">“One in whose gentle bosom I<br /></span> -<span class="i3">Can pour my inmost heart of woes,<br /></span> -<span class="i1">Like the care-burthened honey-fly<br /></span> -<span class="i3">That hides his murmurs in the rose.”<br /></span> -</div></div> -</div> - -<p class="astt">* * * * *</p> - -<p>I have said that it was an interesting time to be alive in, this -junction of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. That the Chief’s -sympathies were, as I have already mentioned, with the men on the losing -side is very well known. In one of the early letters to his wife, he -speaks of having had “a very prosperous circuit,” and says his business -was “pretty general, not confin’d to friends or United Irishmen, tho -these latter have been no bad friends to me either.” He did not defend -their methods, but he stood by his friends, and to the end of his life -he stood by his opinions.</p> - -<p>In a letter written by Mrs. Bushe to their son Charles, at Castlehaven, -after the death of the Chief (that is to say, forty-three years, at -least, after the Act of Union), she speaks of the chaotic state of the -country, and the ruin caused by the arbitrary and ill-considered -enforcement of the recent Poor Law legislation. “Useless however to -complain. England has the <i>might</i> which supersedes the right, and we are -punished now for our own folly in consenting to the <i>Union</i>!<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_47" id="page_47">{47}</a></span> Just what -your Father predicted—‘when Ireland gives up the <i>rights</i> that she has, -what right has she then to complain?’—How true this little squib of the -poor dear C——” (Chief). “Happy for him he did not live to see the ruin -he predicted!”</p> - -<p>The following account of a visit to Edgeworthstown forms part of a -letter, written at Omagh and dated Monday, August 16th, 1810. It is from -Chief Justice Bushe to his wife; the beginning portion of the letter is -printed in the Appendix I. (page 332).</p> - -<p>“I am not surpriz’d that you ask about Edgeworthstown, and I can only -tell you that every thing which Smyly has often said to us in praise of -it is true and unexaggerated. Society in that house is certainly on the -best plan I have ever met with. Edgeworth is a very clever fellow of -much talent, and tho not deeply inform’d on any subject, is highly -(which is consistent with being superficially) so in all. He talks a -great deal and very pleasantly and loves to exhibit and perhaps obtrude -what he wou’d be so justifiably vain of (his daughter and her works) if -you did not trace that pride to his predominant Egotism, and see that he -admires her because she is <i>his</i> child, and her works because they are -<i>his</i> Grand Children. Mrs. Edgeworth is uncommonly agreeable and has -been and not long ago very pretty. She is a perfect Scholar, and at the -same time a good Mother and housewife. She is an excellent painter, like -yourself, and like you has been oblig’d by producing Originals to give -up Copying: She is you know a 5th or 6th Wife and her last child was his -22d. Two Miss Sneyds, amiable old maids, live with him. They are sisters -of one of his wives, a beautiful and celebrated Honoria Sneyd, mention’d -in Miss Seward’s Monody on Major André and known by her misfortune in -having been betroth’d to that poor fellow. They are Litchfield people -of<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_48" id="page_48">{48}</a></span> the old literary set of the Garricks Dr. Johnson Miss Seward &c. &c. -There are many young Edgeworths male and female all of promise and -talent and all living round the same table with this set among whom I -have not yet mention’d Miss Edgeworth, because I consider you as already -knowing her from her works. In such a Society you may suppose -Conversation must be good, but I was not prepared to find it so easy. It -is the only set of the kind I ever met with in which you are neither led -nor driven, but actually fall, and that imperceptibly, into literary -topics, and I attribute it to this that in that house literature is not -a treat for Company upon Invitation days, but is actually the daily -bread of the family. Miss Edgeworth is for nothing more remarkable than -for the total absence of vanity. She seems to have studied her father’s -foibles for two purposes, to avoid them and never to appear to see them, -and what does not always happen, her want of affectation is unaffected. -She is as well bred and as well dress’d and as easy and as much like -other people as if she was not a celebrated author. No pretensions, not -a bit of blue stocking is to be discover’d. In the Conversation she -neither advances or keeps back, but mixes naturally and cheerfully in -it, and tho in the number of words she says less than anyone yet the -excellence of her remarks and the unpremeditated point which she gives -them makes you recollect her to have talk’d more than others. I was -struck by a little felicity of hers the night I was there. Shakespear -was talk’d of as he always is, and I mentioned what you have lately -heard me speak of as a literary discovery and curiosity, that he has -borrow’d the Character of Cardinal Wolsey from Campion, the old -Chronicler of Ireland. This was new to them and Edgeworth began one of -his rattles<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_49" id="page_49">{49}</a></span>—</p> - -<div class="blockquot"><p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>Well Sir, and has the minute, and the laborious, and the -indefatigable, and the prying, and the investigating Malone found -this out?’</p> - -<p>“Miss Edgeworth said, almost under her breath,</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>It was too large for him to see!’</p> - -<p>“Is not that good Epigram? I think it is. Edgeworth gave her the -advantage of taking her into France with his Wife and others of his -family during the short peace, and they were persons to improve -such an opportunity. Miss Edgeworth’s Madame Fleury, in the -Fashionable Tales is form’d on a true story which she learn’d -there. You will think this no description unless you know what her -figure is, and face &c. &c. I think her very good looking and can -suppose that she <i>was</i> once pretty. Imagine Miss Wilmot at about 43 -years old for such I suppose Miss E. to be, with all the -Intelligence of her Countenance perhaps encreas’d and the -Sensibility preserv’d but somewhat reduc’d, the figure very smart -and neat as it must be if like Miss W’s but some of its beautiful -redundancies retir’d upon a peace Establishment.</p> - -<p>“Such is Miss Edgeworth but take her for all in all, there is -nothing like her to be seen, or rather to be known, for it is -impossible to be an hour in her Company without recognizing her -Talent, benevolence and worth.</p> - -<p>“An interesting anecdote occurs to me that Edgeworth told us and -forc’d her to produce the proof of.</p> - -<p>“Old Johnson of St. Paul’s Churchyard London has always been her -bookseller and purchas’d her Works at first experimentally and -latterly liberally. He died a few months ago and rather suddenly -and a few hours before his death he sent for his nephew to whom he -bequeath’d his property and who succeeded him in his business and -told him that he felt he had done Miss E. injustice in only giving -her £450 for Fashionable<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_50" id="page_50">{50}</a></span> Tales and desir’d him to give her £450 -more. He died that day and the next the Nephew sent her an account -of the Transaction and the £450. This story only requires to be -told by Miss E. I read the original letter.</p> - -<p>“Adieu beloved Nan. I have scribbled very much but since I left -town I have no other opportunity of chatting to you.</p> - -<p class="r"> -“Ever your<br /> -C. K. B.”<br /> -</p></div><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_51" id="page_51">{51}</a></span></p> - -<h2><a name="CHAPTER_III" id="CHAPTER_III"></a>CHAPTER III<br /><br /> -<small>MAINLY MARIA EDGEWORTH</small></h2> - -<p><span class="smcap">There</span> is a portrait of Mrs. Bushe that is now in the possession of one -of her many great-grandchildren, Sir Egerton Coghill. It is a small -picture, in pastel, very delightful in technique, and the subject is -worthy of the technique. Nancy Crampton was her name, and the picture -was probably done at the time of her marriage, in 1793, and is a record -of the excellent judgment of the future Lord Chief Justice of Ireland.</p> - -<p>It would be hard to find a more charming face. From below a cloud of -brown curls, deep and steady blue eyes look straight into yours from -under level brows. The extreme intellectuality of the expression does -not master its sweetness. In looking at the picture the lines come -back—</p> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">“One in whose gentle bosom I<br /></span> -<span class="i2">Can pour my inmost heart of woes.”<br /></span> -</div></div> -</div> - -<p>No wonder that in the troublous days of the Union, when bribes and -threats assailed the young barrister who was already a power in the -land, no wonder indeed that he often, as he says in one of his letters, -“heav’d a sigh, and thought of Nancy,” and knew “with delight” that on -her heart he could repose his own when weary.</p> - -<p>Here, I think, may fitly be given some lines that<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_52" id="page_52">{52}</a></span> the Chief wrote, when -he was an old man, to accompany the gift to his wife of a white fur -tippet.</p> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i5"><span class="smcap">To a Tippet.</span><br /></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">Soon as thy milk-white folds are prest<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Like Wreaths of Snow about her breast,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Oh guard that precious heart from harm<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Like thee ’t is pure, like thee ’t is warm.<br /></span> -</div></div> -</div> - -<p>Love and wit are immortal, we know, but the spirit is rare that can -inspire them after nearly fifty years of married life; yet rarer, -perhaps, the young heart that can persuade them still to dwell with it -and to overlook the silver head.</p> - -<p>I grieve that I have been unable to find any of Mrs. Bushe’s earlier -letters. She was a brilliant creature in all ways, and had a rare and -enchanting gift as an artist, which, even in those days, when young -ladies of quality were immured inexorably within the padded cell of the -amateur, could scarce have failed to make its mark, had she not, as the -Chief, with marital complacency, observed, devoted herself to “making -originals instead of copies.”</p> - -<p>In her time there were few women who gave even a moment’s thought to the -possibilities of individual life as an artist, however aware they might -be—must have been—of the gifts they possessed. I daresay that my -great-grandmother was well satisfied enough with what life had brought -her—“honour, love, obedience, troops of friends.” In one of her -letters, written when she was a very old woman, she writes gaily of the -hateful limitations of old age, and says:</p> - -<p>“When people <i>will</i> live beyond their time such things must be, and I -have a right to be thankful that old Time has put on his Slippers, and -does not ride roughshod over me.”</p> - -<p>(Which shows, I think, that marriage had subdued<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_53" id="page_53">{53}</a></span> the artist in her, and -had, in compensation, evoked the philosopher.)</p> - -<p>It is clear, from the last letter in the preceding chapter, that Miss -Edgeworth and Mrs. Bushe had not met before 1810. How soon afterwards -they met, and the friendship, that lasted for the rest of their lives, -began, I cannot ascertain. In one of Miss Edgeworth’s letters (quoted in -one of the many volumes that have been written about her) she says:</p> - -<p>“Having named Mrs. Bushe, I must mention that whenever I meet her she is -my delight and admiration, from her wit, humour, and variety of -conversation.”</p> - -<p>Among the contents of the letter-box that Martin gave me are several -letters from Miss Edgeworth, and they testify to the fact that she lost -no time in falling in love with her “very dear Mrs. Bushe.”</p> - -<p>I recognise, gratefully, how highly I am privileged in being permitted -to include in my book these letters from the brilliant pioneer of Irish -novelists. To the readers and lovers of, for example, “Castle Rackrent,” -they may seem a trifle disappointing in their submission to the -conventions of their period, a period that decreed a mincing and -fettered mode for its lady letter-writers, and rigorously exacted from -its females the suitable simper.</p> - -<p>The writing is pale, prim, and pointed, undeniably suggestive of prunes, -and prisms, and papa (that inveterate papa of Maria’s); yet, in spite of -the fetters of convention, the light step is felt, and although the -manner may mince, it cannot conceal the humour, the spirit, and the -charm of disposition.</p> - -<p>Miss Edgeworth was born in the same year as Chief Justice Bushe, and -died six years later than he, in 1849. Her friendship with Mrs. Bushe -remained unbroken to the last, and their mutual admiration continued -unshaken. In such of Miss Edgewort<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_54" id="page_54">{54}</a></span>h’s letters to my great-grandmother -as I have seen, she speaks but little of literary work. One of the later -letters, however (dated 1827), accompanied a present of one of her -books; the date would make it appear that this was one of the sequels to -“Early Lessons”—(in which the unfortunate Rosamond is victimised by the -dastardly fraud of the Purple Jar, and Harry gets no breakfast until he -has made his bed, although the fact that his sole ablutions consist in -washing his hands is in no way imputed to him as sin. But this, also, is -of the period).</p> - -<div class="blockquot"><p class="c"> -<span class="smcap">Miss Maria Edgeworth to Mrs. Bushe.</span><br /> -</p> - -<p class="r"> -“<span class="smcap">Edgeworth’s Town</span><br /> -“<i>July 12. 1827</i>.<br /> -</p> - -<p>“How can I venture to send such an insignificant little child’s -book to Mrs. Bushe?—Because I know she loves me and will think the -smallest offering from me a mark of kindness—of confidence in her -indulgence and partiality.</p> - -<p>“My sister Harriet has given me great pleasure by writing me word -how kindly you <i>speak</i> of me, dear Mrs. Bushe, and as I know your -sincerity, to speak and to think kindly with you are one and the -same. Believe me I have the honour to be like you in this. In every -thing that has affected you since we parted (that has come to my -knowledge) I have keenly sympathised—Oh that we could meet again. -I am sure our minds would open and join immediately. After all -there is no greater mistake in life than counting happiness by -pounds shillings and pence—You and I have never done this I -believe—We ought to meet again. Cannot you contrive it?</p> - -<p>“I am glad at least that my sister Harriet has the pleasure which I -have not. Your penetration will soon discover all my father’s heart -and all his talents<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_55" id="page_55">{55}</a></span> in her. Remember me most respectfully and most -affectionately to the Chief Justice and believe me</p> - -<p class="r"> -“Most truly your<br /> -“Affectionate friend<br /> -“<span class="smcap">Maria Edgeworth</span>.<br /> -</p></div> - -<p>“Harriet did not know this little vol was published or that I intended -publishing it when you spoke to her.</p> - -<p>“I had amused myself with the assistance of a confederate sister at home -in getting them printed without her knowing it for the Wise pleasure of -surprising her as she had always said I could not print anything without -her knowledge—These little wee wee plays were written ages ago in my -age of happiness for birthday diversions and Harriet added the cross -Prissy 16 years ago!”</p> - -<div class="blockquot"><p class="c"> -<span class="smcap">Miss Maria Edgeworth to Mrs. Bushe</span><br /> -Kilmurrey, Thomastown, Co. Kilkenny.<br /> -</p> - -<p class="r"> -“<span class="smcap">Edgeworth’s Town</span><br /> -“<i>June 18th 1815</i>.<br /> -</p> - -<p class="nind"> -“<span class="smcap">My very dear Mrs. Bushe</span>,<br /> -</p> - -<p>“This letter is dictated by my father as you might guess by the -bold appellation with which I have begun. He projects a migration -southward this ensuing month—towards Cork where Mrs. Edgeworth’s -brother is fatly and fitly provided for in the Church. In his route -my father glances sideways to the real pleasure of having an -opportunity of seeing you free from all the shackles of high -station and high fashion, in the retirement which your wise husband -prefers to both. Tell us when he will be at home and when at home -whether it will be <i>convenient</i> (we are vain to think it would be -<i>agreeable</i> you perceive) to receive us for a day and a night. -There will be three of us, papa,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_56" id="page_56">{56}</a></span> mama and self. Though we were -<i>Foxites</i> we cannot sleep ‘<i>three in a bed</i>.’ As the circuit will -probably engage the Sol. gen<a name="FNanchor_4_4" id="FNanchor_4_4"></a><a href="#Footnote_4_4" class="fnanchor">[4]</a> for some time to come our prospect -looks to the period when he may return.</p> - -<p>“So far <i>from</i> my father—now <i>of</i> him. This day he is much better -and we are all in high spirits. And he will not let me add one word -more.</p> - -<p class="r"> -“Dear Mrs. Bushe,<br /> -“Affectionately yours<br /> -“<span class="smcap">Maria Edgeworth</span>.”<br /> -</p></div> - -<div class="blockquot"><p class="c"> -“<span class="smcap">From Miss Maria Edgeworth</span><br /> -<span class="smcap">to Mrs. Bushe</span>, Kilmurrey, Thomastown,<br /> -Co. Kilkenny<br /> -</p> - -<p class="r"> -“<span class="smcap">Edgeworth’s Town</span><br /> -<i>Augt. 26th 1832</i>.<br /> -</p> - -<p> -<span class="smcap">My dear Mrs. Bushe</span><br /> -</p> - -<p>“Did you ever form any idea of the extent of my assurance—</p> - -<p>“If you did I have a notion I shall now exceed whatever might have -been your estimate.</p> - -<p>“I am about to ask you—to ask you, plunging without preface or -apology—to go to work for me, and to give <i>me</i>, only because I -have the assurance to ask for it, what every body would wish to -have from you and nobody who had any pretence to modesty (out of -your own family and privileged circle of dears) would venture to -think of asking for.</p> - -<p>“A bag if you please of your own braidwork my dear Mrs. -Bushe—Louisa Beaufort who has just come to visit us tells me that -your braid work is so beautiful that I do covet this souvenir from -you. The least <i>Forget me not</i>—or <i>Heartsease</i> will fulfil all my -wishes—if indeed you are so very kind as to listen to me. I<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_57" id="page_57">{57}</a></span> have -your Madonna over the chimney piece in our library and often do I -look at her with affection and gratitude. I wish dear Mrs. Bushe we -could ever meet again, but this world goes so badly that I fear our -throats will be cut by order of O’Connell & Co very soon, or we -shall be beggars walking the world, and walking the world -<i>different</i> ways. It is good to laugh as long as we can, however -and whenever we can—between crying times—of which there are so -many too many now a days.</p> - -<p>“I hear sad tidings of my much loved, more loved even than admired, -friend Sir Walter Scott. His body lives and is likely to live some -time—his mind oh such a mind! is gone forever. His temper too -which was most charming and most amiable is changed by disease. -Mrs. Lockhart that daughter who so admires him is more to be pitied -than words can express. His mind was a little revived by the first -return to Abbotsford—but sunk again—Of all afflictions surely -this is the worst that friends can have to endure—death a -comparative blessing.</p> - -<p>“I find the love of garden grow upon me as I grow older more and -more. Shrubs and flowers and such small gay things, that bloom and -please and fade and wither and are gone and we care not for them, -are refreshing interests, in life, and if we cannot say never -fading pleasures, we may say unreproved pleasures and never -grieving losses.</p> - -<p>“I remember your history of the bed of tulips or anemones which the -Chief Justice fancied he should fancy and which you reared for him -and he walked over without knowing.</p> - -<p>“Does your taste for flowers continue. We have some fine -carnations—if you could fancy them. Some way or other they should -get to you. If not by a flying carpet by as good a mode of -conveyance or<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_58" id="page_58">{58}</a></span> better—the frank of Sir W. Gapes or Right Hon. C. -G. S. Stanley.</p> - -<p>“To either of which direct for me anything of whatever size or -weight (barring the size of the house or so) and it will be -conveyed to me swift and sure as if the African Magician himself -carried the same.</p> - -<p>“I more much more wish to hear from you my dear Mrs. Bushe, and to -know from your own self how you are going on than to have all the -braided bags however pretty that could be given to me. That is the -truth of the matter. So pray write to me and tell me all that -concerns you—for</p> - -<p class="r"> -“I am very sincerely and affectionately<br /> -“Your little old friend<br /> -“<span class="smcap">Maria Edgeworth</span>.<br /> -</p> - -<p>“Will you present my affectionate respects to the Chief Justice. I -wish his country were more worthy of him—or rather I wish his -country were allowed to be and to show itself more worthy of such a -Chief Justice and such a private character as his.</p> - -<p>“I am convinced that if the Scotch maxim of Let well alone were -pursued in Ireland we should do well enough. But to the rage of -obtaining popularity in a single individual must the peace of a -country be sacrificed.<a name="FNanchor_5_5" id="FNanchor_5_5"></a><a href="#Footnote_5_5" class="fnanchor">[5]</a></p> - -<p>“What can the heart of such a man be made of? And however great his -talents how infinitely little and nauseously mean must his Mind be!</p> - -<p>“He is too clever and clear sighted not to know too well what he is -about and what his own motions are. It is my belief however that he -could not now be quiet if he would he has such a Mob-omania upon -him.</p> - -<p>“We are quiet enough here—as yet.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_59" id="page_59">{59}</a></span>”</p> - -<p class="r"> -“<span class="smcap">The Lord Chief Justice of Ireland</span><br /> -“17 Upper Mount Street, Dublin.<br /> -</p> - -<p> -<span class="smcap">From Miss Maria Edgeworth.</span><br /> -</p> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">A proverb goes—(I love it well)<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Of “Give an inch and take an ell”<br /></span> -<span class="i0">’Tis lady’s law—and, to be brief<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Now must be mine, my dear Lord Chief<br /></span> -</div></div> -</div> - -<p>“The case is this—</p> - -<p>“May I beg your Lordship not to shake your head irrevocably before -you have heard me out—</p> - -<p>“<span class="smcap">Suppose</span>.... I only modestly say <i>suppose</i> ... which leaves the -matter just as it was, in case your Lordship is determined to -<i>oppose</i>—<small>SUPPOSE</small> now, in short, you could contrive to come down to -us a day—a day or <small>TWO</small>—(pray dont start off!) or if you <i>could</i> -possibly bear <i>3</i>—days before the assizes? You could get—say -here—without hurry to dinner at 7—or—name your hour—and you -should have coffee comfortably without being obliged to enter an -appearance in the drawing room, and should retire to rest at -whatever hour you like—and I do humbly concieve that your bed and -all concerns, might be as comfortably arranged here as at Mullingar -Hotel—(though I wd not disparage sd Hotel)—But double bedded or -single room and room for friend and servant adjoining—and a whole -apartment with backstairs of its own shut out from the rest of the -house is at your Lordship’s disposal—And as to invalid habits -unless you have the habit of walking in your sleep all over the -house I don’t see how they could incommode or be incommoded.</p> - -<p>“If you mean that you like to lie in bed in the morning late— Lie -as late as ever you please.</p> - -<p>“No questions asked. No breakfast waiting for you below, or thought -of your appearance till you please to shine upon us. Breakfast -waiting your<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_60" id="page_60">{60}</a></span> bell’s touch, in your bed, or out of it at any hour -you please—And no worry of Company at dinner (unless you bespeak -the world and his wife—But if you did we should not know where to -find them for you).</p> - -<p>“We have only our own every-day family party and should only wish -and hope to add to it, to meet you, a sister, who in happy days -knew and admired you, even from her childhood (Mrs. Butler née -Harriet Edgeworth) and her husband, whom you knew in happy days -too, at the late Bishop of Meath’s. Thank you my dear Lord for -promising to look for the Bishop’s verses.</p> - -<p>Now pray let me thank you in my heart for your answer to this -letter.</p> - -<p>“Mrs Bushe if she likes me as well as I most humbly believe she -does, will put in a good word for us—and her good words can never -be said in vain—and must be followed by good deeds.</p> - -<p class="c"> -“I am my dear Lord<br /> -with more respect than appears here<br /> -And all the sincerely affectionate<br /> -regard that has been felt for you (we need not say how many years)—<br /> -</p> - -<p class="r"> -“Your—to be obliged—humble servant<br /> -“<span class="smcap">Maria Edgeworth</span><br /> -</p> - -<p class="hang"> -“<span class="smcap">Edgeworth Town</span><br /> -“<i>Feb. 1st 1837</i>”<br /> -</p></div><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_61" id="page_61">{61}</a></span></p> - -<h2><a name="CHAPTER_IV" id="CHAPTER_IV"></a>CHAPTER IV<br /><br /> -<small>OLD FORGOTTEN THINGS</small></h2> - -<p><span class="smcap">Chief Justice Bushe</span> died in 1843, and Maria Edgeworth in 1849, but Mrs. -Bushe lived on till 1857, a delight and an inspiration to her children -and grandchildren. To her, even more than to the Chief, may be ascribed -the inevitable, almost invariable turn for the Arts, in some form, -frequently in all forms, that distinguishes their descendants, and to -her also is attributed a quality in story-telling known as “Crampton -dash,” which may be explained as an intensifying process, analogous to -the swell in an organ.</p> - -<p>But few of their grandchildren, that potent and far-reaching first -cousinhood of seventy, now remain. Bushes, Plunkets, Coghills, Foxes, -Franks, Harrises, they were a notable company, and I imagine that in the -middle and later years of the last century they made a clan of no small -power and influence. “Dublin is my washpot, over Merrion Square will I -cast out my shoe,” they might have said, possibly did say, in their -arrogant youth, when “The Family,” good-looking, amusing, and strenuous, -“took the flure” in the Dublin society of the ’fifties. From among them -came no luminary in Art, specially outstanding, yet there was scarcely -one of them without some touch of that spark which is lit by a coal -taken from the altar, and is, for want of a better term,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_62" id="page_62">{62}</a></span> called -originality; and although the reputations of neither Shakespeare nor -Michael Angelo were threatened, they could have provided a club -dedicated to “Les Quatz’ Arts” with a very useful selection of members.</p> - -<p>(Yet the mention of Shakespeare, and the wish to be sincere, force me to -recall a tale of two of these first cousins of Martin’s mother and mine, -the one an artist of delightful achievement, the other, amongst her many -gifts, an astronomer and writer. The latter reproached the former for -her neglect of Shakespeare, and announced her intention of reading aloud -to her one of his plays. The artist replied with a high and -characteristic tranquillity, “Shakespeare was a coarse man, my dear, but -you may read him to me if you like. I can go into a reverie.”)</p> - -<p>It is not out of place to mention here that the first writing in which -Martin and I collaborated was a solemnly preposterous work, a dictionary -of the words and phrases peculiar to our family, past and present, with -derivations and definitions—the definitions being our opportunity. It -might possibly—in fact I think some selections would—entertain the -public, but I can confidently say it will never be offered to it; -Bowdler himself would quail at the difficulties it would present.</p> - -<p class="astt">* * * * *</p> - -<p>Martin has, in her memoir of her brother Robert, given a sketch of life -at Ross as it was in the old days, in its patriarchal simplicity, its -pastoral abundance, its limitless hospitality, its feudal relations with -the peasants. Its simplicity was, I imagine, of a more primitive type -than can be claimed for any conditions that I can personally remember in -my own country. The time of which she has written was already passing -when she arrived on the scene, and she had to rely<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_63" id="page_63">{63}</a></span> mainly on the -records of her elders. The general atmosphere there and in my country -was much the same, but a certain degree of sophistication may have set -in a little earlier here, and when I say “here,” I speak of that fair -and far-away district, the Barony of West Carbery, County Cork, the -ultimate corner of the ultimate speck of Europe—Ireland. You will not -find West Carbery’s name in the atlas, but Cape Clear will not be -denied, and there is nothing of West Carbery west of Cape Clear, unless -one counts its many sons and daughters who have gone even farther west, -to the Land of the Setting Sun.</p> - -<p>The Ireland that Martin and I knew when we were children is fast leaving -us; every day some landmark is wiped out; I will try, as she has done, -to recapture some of the flying memories.</p> - -<p>To begin with</p> - -<h3><span class="smcap">Castle Townshend.</span></h3> - -<p>Castle Townshend is a small village in the south-west of the County of -Cork, unique in many ways among Irish villages, incomparable in the -beauty of its surroundings, remarkable in its high level of -civilisation, and in the number of its “quality houses.” “High ginthry -does be jumpin’ mad for rooms in this village,” was how the matter was -defined by a skilled authority, while another, equally versed in social -matters, listened coldly to commendation of a rival village, and -remarked, “It’s a nice place enough, but the ginthry is very light in -it. It’s very light with them there entirely.”</p> - -<p>I hasten to add that this criticism did not refer to the morals of the -gentry, merely to their scarcity—as one says “a light crop.”</p> - -<p>Castlehaven Harbour, to whose steep shores it adheres, defiant of the -law of gravity, by whose rules<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_64" id="page_64">{64}</a></span> it should long since have slipped into -the sea, has its place in history. The Spanish Armada touched <i>en -passant</i> (touched rather hard in some places), one of Queen Elizabeth’s -admirals, Admiral Leveson, touched too, fairly hard, and left -cannon-ball bruises on the walls of Castlehaven Castle. The next -distinguished visitors were a force of Cromwell’s troopers. Brian’s -Fort, built by Brian Townshend, the son of one of Cromwell’s officers, -still stands firm, and Swift’s tower, near it, is distinguished as the -place where “the gloomy Dean; (of <i>autre fois</i>) wrote a Latin poem, -called “Carberiae Rupes.” A translation of this compliment to the Rocks -of Carbery was printed one hundred and seventy years ago in Smith’s -“History of the Co. Cork.” It was much admired by the historian. A -quotation from it may be found in “A Record of Holiday,” in one of our -books, “Some Irish Yesterdays,” but candour compels me to admit that -four of its lines, descriptive of the coast of Carbery—</p> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">“Oft too, with hideous yawn, the cavern wide<br /></span> -<span class="i1">Presents an orifice on either side;<br /></span> -<span class="i1">A dismal orifice, from sea to sea<br /></span> -<span class="i1">Extended, pervious to the god of day.”<br /></span> -</div></div> -</div> - -<p>—might be taken as equally descriptive of its readers.</p> - -<p>The <i>Titanic</i> passed within a few miles of Castlehaven on her first and -last voyage; I saw her racing to the West, into the glow of a fierce -winter sunset. It was from Castle Townshend that the first warnings of -the sharks that were waiting for the <i>Lusitania</i> were sent; and into -Castlehaven Harbour came, by many succeeding tides, victims of that -tragedy. Let it be remembered to the honour of the fishermen who -harvested those sheaves of German reaping, that the money and the -jewels, which most of the drowned</p> - -<div class="figcenter"><a name="ill_3" id="ill_3"></a> -<a href="images/ill_001-a_lg.jpg"> -<img src="images/ill_001-a_sml.jpg" alt="[Image unavailable.]" /></a> -<div class="caption"><p>CASTLEHAVEN HARBOUR.</p> - -<div class="sigg"> -V. F. M. -</div> -</div></div> - -<div class="figcenter"><a name="ill_4" id="ill_4"></a> -<a href="images/ill_001-b_lg.jpg"> -<img src="images/ill_001-b_sml.jpg" alt="[Image unavailable.]" /></a> -<div class="caption"><p>CARBERIAE RUPES.</p> - -<div class="sigg"> -E. B. C.<br /> -</div> -</div> -</div> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_65" id="page_65">{65}</a></span></p> - -<p class="nind">people had brought with them, were left with them, untouched.</p> - -<p>It must have been eighty or ninety years ago that the first member of -“The Chief’s” family reached Castlehaven. This was his second son, the -Rev. Charles Bushe, who was, as Miss Edgeworth says of her stepmamma’s -brother, “fatly and fitly provided for” with the living of Castlehaven. -Somervilles and Townshends had been living and intermarrying in -Castlehaven Parish, with none to molest their ancient solitary reign, -since Brian Townshend built himself the fort from which he could look -forth upon one of the loveliest harbours in Ireland, and the Reverend -Thomas Somerville, the first of his family to settle in Munster, took to -himself (by purchase from the representatives of the Earl of -Castlehaven) the old O’Driscoll Castle, and lies buried beside it, in -St. Barrahane’s churchyard, under a slab that proclaims him to have been -“A Worthy Magistrate, and a Safe and Affable Companion.” The two clans -enjoyed in those days, I imagine, a splendid isolation, akin to that of -the Samurai in Old Japan, and the Rev. Charles Bushe, an apostle of an -alien cultivation, probably realised the feelings of Will Adams when he -was cast ashore at Osaka, may, indeed, have felt his position to be as -precarious as that of the first missionary at the Court of the King of -the Cannibal Islands.</p> - -<p>My great-uncle Charles was for forty years the Rector of Castlehaven -Parish, and the result of his ministry that most directly affects me was -the marriage of my father, Colonel Thomas Henry Somerville, of Drishane, -to the Rev. Charles’s niece, Adelaide Coghill. (That she was also his -step-sister-in-law is a fact too bewildering to anyone save a -professional genealogist for me to dwell on it here. I will merely say -that my mother’s father was Admiral Sir Josiah<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_66" id="page_66">{66}</a></span> Coghill, and her mother -was Anna Maria Bushe, daughter of the Chief Justice.)<a name="FNanchor_6_6" id="FNanchor_6_6"></a><a href="#Footnote_6_6" class="fnanchor">[6]</a></p> - -<p>There is a picture extant, the work of that artist to whom I have -already referred, in which is depicted the supposed indignation of the -Aboriginal Red men, <i>i.e.</i>, my grandfather Somerville and his household, -at the apostasy of my father, a Prince of the (Red) Blood Royal, in -departing from the family habit of marrying a Townshend, and in allying -himself with a Paleface. In that picture the Red men and women are armed -with clubs, the Palefaces with croquet mallets. It was with these that -they entered in and possessed the land. My grandmother (<i>née</i> Townshend, -of Castle Townshend), a small and eminently dignified lady, one of my -great-aunts, and other female relatives, are profanely represented, -capering with fury, clad in brief garments of rabbit skin. The Paleface -females surge in vast crinolines; the young Red man is encircled by -them, as was the swineherd in Andersen’s fairy tale, by the Court -ladies. My grandfather swings a tomahawk, and is faced by my uncle, Sir -Joscelyn Coghill, leader of the second wave of invasion, with a -photographic camera (the first ever seen in West Carbery) and a tripod.</p> - -<p class="astt">* * * * *</p> - -<p>I think I must diverge somewhat farther from my<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_67" id="page_67">{67}</a></span> main thesis in order to -talk a little about the Ancient Order of Hibernians (if I may borrow the -appellation) who were thus dispossessed. For, as is the way all the -world over, the missionaries ate up the cannibals, and the Red men have -left only their names and an unworthy granddaughter to commemorate their -customs.</p> - -<p>Few South Pacific Islands are now as isolated as was, in those days,—I -speak of ninety or one hundred years ago—Castle Townshend. The roads -were little better than bridle-paths; they straggled and struggled, as -far as was possible, along the crests of the hills, and this was as a -protection to the traveller, who could less easily be ambushed and -waylaid by members of the large assortment of secret societies, -Whiteboys, Ribbonmen, Molly Maguires, Outlaws in variety, whose spare -moments between rebellions were lightened by highway robbery. I have -heard that my great-grandmother’s “coach” was the only wheeled vehicle -that came into Castle Townshend. My great-grandfather used to ride to -Cork, fifty-two miles, and the tradition is that he had a fabulous black -mare, named Bess, who trotted the journey in three hours (which I take -leave to doubt). All the heavy traffic came and went by sea. The pews of -the church came from Cork by ship. They have passed now, but I can -remember them, and I should have thought that their large simplicity -would not have been beyond the scope of the local carpenter. There was a -triple erection for the pulpit; the clerk sat in the basement, the -service was read <i>au premier</i>, and to the top story my great-uncle -Charles was wont to mount, in a black gown and “bands,” and thence -deliver classic discourses, worthy, as I have heard, of the son of -“silver-tongued Bushe,” but memorable to me (at the age of, say, six) -for the conviction,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_68" id="page_68">{68}</a></span> imparted by them anew each Sunday, that they were -samples of eternity, and would never end. My eldest brother, who shared -the large square pew with our grandfather and me, was much sustained by -a feud with a coastguard child, with whom he competed in the emulous -construction of grimaces, mainly based, like the sermons, on an -excessive length of tongue, but I had no such solace. Feuds are, -undoubtedly, a great solace to <i>ennui</i>, and in the elder times of a -hundred years or so ago they seem to have been the mainstay of society -in West Cork. Splendid feuds, thoroughly made, solid, and without a -crack into which any importunate dove could insert so much as an -olive-leaf.</p> - -<p>Ireland was, in those days, a forcing bed for individuality. Men and -women, of the upper classes, were what is usually described as “a law -unto themselves,” which is another way of saying that they broke those -of all other authorities. That the larger landowners were, as a class, -honourable, reasonably fair-minded, and generous, as is not, on the -whole, disputed, is a credit to their native kindliness and good -breeding. They had neither public opinion nor legal restraint to -interfere with them. Each estate was a kingdom, and, in the -impossibility of locomotion, each neighbouring potentate acquired a -relative importance quite out of proportion to his merits, for to love -your neighbour—or, at all events, to marry her—was almost inevitable -when matches were a matter of mileage, and marriages might be said to -have been made by the map. Enormous families were the rule in all -classes, such being reputed to be the will of God, and the olive -branches about the paternal table often became of so dense a growth as -to exclude from it all other fruits of the earth, save, possibly, the -potato.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_69" id="page_69">{69}</a></span></p> - -<p>Equally vigorous, as I have said, was the growth of character. There was -room in those spacious days for expansion, and the advantage was not -wasted. There was an old lady who lived in West Carbery, and died some -fifty years ago, about whom legend has accumulated. She lived in a gaunt -grey house, that still exists, and is as suggestive of a cave as -anything as high and narrow, and implacably symmetrical, can be. Tall -elms enshroud it, and rooks at evening make a black cloud about it. It -has now been civilised, but I can remember the awe it inspired in me as -a child. She was of distinguished and ancient family (though she was -born in such remote ages that one would say there could have been -scarcely more than two generations between her and Adam and Eve). She -was very rich, and she was a miser of the school of comic opera, showy -and dramatic. Her only son, known, not without reason, as “Johnny Wild,” -is said, after many failures, to have finally extracted money from her -by the ingenious expedient of inveigling her into a shed in which was a -wicked bull, and basing a claim for an advance on the probability that -the bull would do the same. She lost ten shillings on a rent day, and -raised it among her tenants by means of a round-robin. Her costume was -that of a scarecrow that has lost all self-respect, yet—a solitary -extravagance—when she went in a train she travelled first-class. It is -said that on a journey to Dublin she was denounced to the guard as a -beggar-woman who had mistaken the carriage. It happened that the -denouncer was a lady with a courtesy-title derived from a peerage of -recent and dubious origin. The beggar-woman threatened to recite their -respective pedigrees on the platform, and the protest was withdrawn. -Naturally she fought with most of her neighbours, specially her -kinsfolk, and, as a result of a<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_70" id="page_70">{70}</a></span> specially sanguinary engagement, -announced that she would never again “set foot” in the village sacred to -her clan (and it may be noted that the term “to set foot” invariably -implies something sacrificial, a rite, but one always more honoured in -the breach than in the observance) “until the day when she went into it -with four horses and her two feet foremost,” which referred to her final -transit to the family burying-ground. On her death-bed, a cousin, not -unnaturally anxious as to her future welfare, offered to read to her -suitable portions of the Bible, but the offer was declined.</p> - -<p>“Faith, my dear, I’ll not trouble ye. I know it all by heart; but I’m -obliged to ye, and I wish I had a pound that I might give it ye, but I -haven’t so much as a ha’penny.”</p> - -<p>She shortly afterwards died, and there was found in her bedroom, in a -desk, £500, and a further £20 was discovered rolled up in an old bonnet, -a black straw bonnet with bright green ribbons.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_71" id="page_71">{71}</a></span></p> - -<h2><a name="CHAPTER_V" id="CHAPTER_V"></a>CHAPTER V<br /><br /> -<small>EARLY WEST CARBERY</small></h2> - -<p><span class="smcap">I have</span> already commented on the social importance, and value, of the -feuds of a century ago. Fights were made, like the wall-papers, the -carpets, the furniture, to last. Friendships too, I daresay, but though -it was possible to dissolve a friendship, the full-fledged fight, beaked -and clawed, was incapable as an eagle of laying down its weapons.</p> - -<p>Such a fight there was between two sisters, both long since dead. They -were said to have been among “The Beauties of the Court of the -Regent”—delightful phrase, bringing visions of ringlets and rouge, and -low necks and high play—and both were famed for their wit, their charm, -and their affection for each other. Still unmarried, their mother -brought them home to Castle Townshend (for reasons not unconnected with -the run of the cards), not quite so young as they had been—in those -days a young lady’s first youth seems to have been irrevocably lost at -about three and twenty—yet none the less dangerous on that account. -Most feuds originate in a difference of opinion, but this one, or so it -has always been said, was due to a disastrous similarity in taste. -Legends hint that a young cousin, my grandfather, then a personable -youth fresh from Oxford, was the difficulty. But whatever the cause (and -he married the elder sister) peace was<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_72" id="page_72">{72}</a></span> not found in sixty years; the -combatants died, and the fight outlived the fighters.</p> - -<p>In these feebler days the mental attitude of that time is hard to -realise. The stories that have come down to us only complicate the -effort to reconstitute the people and the period, but they may -help—some of them—to explain the French Revolution. A tale is told of -one of these ex-beauties, noted, be it remembered, for her charm of -manner, her culture, her sense of humour. Near the end of her long life -she went to the funeral of a relative, leaning decorously upon the arm -of a kinsman. At the churchyard a countryman pushed forward between her -and the coffin. She thereupon disengaged her arm from that of her -squire, and struck the countryman in the face. It is no less -characteristic of the time that the countryman’s attitude does not come -into the story, but it seems to me probable that he went home and -boasted then, and for the rest of his life, that old Madam —— had “bet -him a blow in the face.”</p> - -<p>There is yet another story, written in a letter to a young cousin, by my -father’s cousin, the late Mrs. Pierrepont Mundy, a very delightful -letter-writer and story-teller, who has taken with her to the next world -a collection of anecdotes that may possibly cause her relatives there to -share the regret of her friends here that she did not leave them behind -her.</p> - -<p>“One more link in the chain of events,” she writes,</p> - -<p>“Grandmamma’s sister-in-law married her brother, ‘Devil Dick,’ who was -violent to madness. His mother alone was not afraid of him. She had a -spirit of her own. On one occasion she went over a ship at Cork, -intending to make purchases from contraband goods. She set aside chosen -ones, but was stopped by the <i>Excisemen</i>. She looked at the basket -full,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_73" id="page_73">{73}</a></span> raised her tiny foot (which you and I, dearest A., inherit) and -kicked the whole collection overboard into the Sea!</p> - -<p>“That same foot she released from her high-heeled shoe on arriving, -driven from Cork in a ‘Jarvey,’ and, when the <i>Cocher</i> said ‘Stop Madam, -you haven’t paid!’ she threw the money on the ground, and with her shoe -she dealt him a smart box on the ear and said,</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>Take <i>that</i> before the Grand Jury!’ (meaning <i>she</i> could do anything -and would not get fined.)</p> - -<p>“<i>Une maïtresse femme!</i>”</p> - -<p>Thus my cousin concludes her story, not without a certain approbation of -our ancestress.</p> - -<p>Indisputably the coming of the Palefaces slackened the moral fibre of -Castle Townshend; the fire has gone out of the fights and the heat out -of the hatreds. I do not claim for the later generations a higher -standard; peace is mainly ensued by lack of concentration; it is not so -much that we forgive, as that we forget. I regret that these early -histories do not present my departed relatives in a more attractive -light, but personal experience has taught me how infinitely boring can -be the virtues of other people’s families.</p> - -<p>A strange product of these high explosives was my father, who, as was -said of another like unto him, was “The gentlest crayture ever came into -a house.” He had no brothers and but one sister, a fact that did not, I -think, distress my grandparents, who were in advance of their period in -considering the prevalent immense families ill-bred; and even had the -matter been for them a subject of regret, they had at least one -consolation—a consolation offered in a similar case to a cousin of -Martin’s—“Afther all,” it was<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_74" id="page_74">{74}</a></span> said, “if ye had a hundhred of them ye -couldn’t have a greater variety.”</p> - -<p>An only son, with a solitary sister, brought up in the days when the -difference between the sexes was clearly defined by the position of the -definite article, “an only son” being by no means in the same case, -grammatical or otherwise, with “only a daughter,” it would not have been -surprising had he developed into such a flower of culture as had -blossomed in “Johnny Wild.” I expect that the rare and passionate -devotion of his father to his mother taught him a lesson not generally -inculcated in his time. In truth, his love and consideration for his -mother and sister amounted to anachronism in those days, when chivalry -was mostly relegated to the Eglinton Tournament, and unselfishness was -bracketed with needlework as a graceful and exclusive attribute of the -Ministering Angel.</p> - -<p>Mrs. Pierrepont Mundy, once defined the two men of her acquaintance whom -most she delighted to honour as</p> - -<p>“<i>Preux Chevaliers!</i> Christian gentlemen, who feed their dogs from the -dinner-table!”</p> - -<p>I find it impossible to better this as a description of my father. I -recognise the profound conventionality of saying that dogs and children -adored him, yet, conventional though the statement may be, it is -inflicted upon me by the facts of the case. In him children knew, -intuitively, the kindred soul, dogs recognised, not by mere intuition, -but by force of intellect, their slave. I can see him surreptitiously -passing forbidden delicacies from his plate to the silent watchers -beneath the surface, his eyes disingenuously fixed upon the window to -divert my mother’s suspicions, and I can still hear his leisurely<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_75" id="page_75">{75}</a></span> -histories of two imaginary South African Lion-slayers, named, with a -massive simplicity, Smith and Brown, whose achievements were for us, as -children, the last possibility of romance.</p> - -<p>Children alone could extract from him the tales of various feats of his -youth, feats in which, one supposes, the wild blood that was in him -found its outlet and satisfaction; of the savage bull on to whose back -he had dropped from the branch of a tree, and whom he had then ridden in -glory round and round the field; of the bulldog who jumped at the nose -of a young half-trained Arab mare when my father was riding her, and -caught it, and held on. And so did my father, while the mare flung -herself into knots (and how either dog or man “held their howlt” it is -hard to imagine). The bulldog was finally detached with a pitchfork by -one Jerry Hegarty, who must himself have shown no mean skill and courage -in adventuring into the whirl of that nightmare conflict, but my father -sat it out. It was a daughter of that mare, named Lalla Rukh, a lovely -grey (whom I can remember as a creature by me revered and adored, above, -perhaps, any earthly thing), who was being ridden by my father through a -town when they met a brass band. Lalla Rukh first attempted flight, but -such was her confidence in her rider that, in the end, she let him ride -her up to the big drum, and, in further token of devotion, she then, -heroically, put her nose on it. One imagines that the big drummer was -enough of a gentleman to refrain from his duties during those tense -moments, but the rest of the band blazed on. My father was a boy of -seventeen when he got his commission and was presently quartered at -Birr, where he acted as Whip to the regimental pack of hounds. There is -an authentic story of a hound,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_76" id="page_76">{76}</a></span> that my grandfather sent to Birr, by -rail and coach, escaping from the barracks, and making his way back to -the kennels at Drishane. Birr is in King’s County, and the journey, even -across country, must be over a hundred miles. (These things being thus, -it is hard to understand why any dog is ever lost.)</p> - -<p>My father was in the Kaffir wars of 1843 and 1849, and fought right -through the Crimean campaign, being one of the very few infantry -officers who won all the clasps with the Crimean medal. One of his -brother officers in the 68th Durham Light Infantry has told (I quote -from an account published by the officer in question) “of an incident -that shows the coolness and ready daring that characterised him. On the -morning of the battle of Inkermann, 5th Nov., 1854, the 68th saw a body -of troops moving close by. Owing to the fog it was impossible to -distinguish if these were Russian or English. It was of the utmost -importance, and the Colonel of the 68th exclaimed, ‘What would I give to -be able to decide!’</p> - -<p>“Without a pause Henry Somerville said, ‘I’ll soon let you know!’ And, -throwing open his grey military great-coat, he showed the scarlet -uniform underneath.</p> - -<p>“In a second a storm of rifle bullets answered the momentous question, -thus speedily proving that enemies, and not friends, formed the -advancing troops.”</p> - -<p>There is another story of my father’s turning back, during a retirement -up hill under heavy fire, at the battle of the Alma, to save a wounded -private, whom he carried on his back out of danger. But not from him did -we hear of these things. One of the few soldiering stories that I can -recollect hearing from him was in connection with the fighting -proclivities of his servant, Con Driscoll, a son of a<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_77" id="page_77">{77}</a></span> tenant who had -followed him into the regiment. Con had been in a row of no small -severity; his defence, as is not unusual, took the form of reflections -upon the character of his adversary, and an exposition of his own -self-restraint.</p> - -<p>“If it wasn’t that I knew me ordhers,” he said, “and the di-<i>ship</i>lin’ -of the Sarvice, I wouldn’t lave him till I danced on his shesht!<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_78" id="page_78">{78}</a></span>”</p> - -<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VI" id="CHAPTER_VI"></a>CHAPTER VI<br /><br /> -<small>HER MOTHER</small></h2> - -<p><span class="smcap">I have</span> spoken of that first cousinhood of seventy, the grandchildren of -the Chief Justice, of whom my mother and Martin’s were not the least -notable members. I want to say something more of these two, and if such -tales as Martin and I have remembered may seem sometimes to impinge upon -the Fifth Commandment, I would, in apology, recall the old story of the -masquerade at which Love cloaked himself in laughter, and was only -discovered when he laughed till he cried, and they saw that the laughter -was assumed, but the tears were real.</p> - -<p>I have come upon a letter of my cousin Nannie’s, undated, unfortunately, -but its internal evidence, indicating for her an age not far exceeding -seven years, would place it in or about the year 1830.</p> - -<div class="blockquot"><p class="c"> -“<i>To Mrs. Charles Fox</i>:<br /> -</p> - -<p class="nind"> -“<span class="smcap">My dear Mama</span>,<br /> -</p> - -<p>“I am very sorry for touching that stinking little cat. I’ll try -to-morrow and Teusday if I can do as happy and as well without -touching Dawny. I had once before my birthday a little holiness in -my heart and for two days I was trying to keep it in and I exceeded -a little in it but alas one day Satan tempted me and one day I kept -it out of my heart and then I<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_79" id="page_79">{79}</a></span> did not care what I did and I ware -very bold. One day the week after that I tried without touching -Dawny and I thought myself every bit as much happy but I was -tempted tempted tempted another day: but I hope to-morrow morning I -may be good Mama and that there will be one day that I may please -Mama</p> - -<p class="r"> -“Your affectionate daughter<br /> -“<span class="smcap">Nannie Fox.</span>”<br /> -</p></div> - -<p>The crime of which this is an expression of repentance is obscure. That -the repentance was not untinged by indignation with the temptation is -obvious; but why should she <i>not</i> have “touched Dawny”? I am reminded of -a companion incident. A small boy, of whom I have the honour to be -godmother, was privileged to come upon a <i>cache</i> of carpenter’s tools, -unhampered by the carpenter. He cut his fingers and was sent to bed. In -the devotions which he subsequently offered up, the following clause was -overheard,</p> - -<p>“And please God, be more careful another time, and don’t let me touch -Willy Driscoll’s tools.”</p> - -<p>A very just apportioning of the blame. My cousin Nannie put it all upon -Satan, who was the more fashionable deity of her period.</p> - -<p>I remember that my aunt Florence Coghill sat up for the whole of one -night, verifying from her Bible the existence of the devil; a fact that -had been called in question by a reprobate nephew. She came down to -breakfast wan, but triumphant, and flung texts upon the nephew, even as -the shields were cast upon Tarpeia.</p> - -<p>Martin had many stories of her mother, which, alas! she has not written -down. Many of them related to the time when they were living in Dublin,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_80" id="page_80">{80}</a></span> -and with all humility, and with apologies for possible error, I will try -to remember some of them. Mrs. Martin was then a large and handsome lady -of imposing presence, slow-moving, stately, and, in spite of a very -genial manner, distinctly of a presence to inspire respect. It was -alleged by her graceless family that only by aligning her with some -fixed and distant object, and by close observation of the one in -relation to the other, was it possible to see her move. (One of the -stories turned on the mistake of one of her children, short-sighted like -herself. “Oh, there’s Mamma coming at last!” A pause. Then, in tones of -disappointment, “No, it’s only the tramcar!”)</p> - -<p>Martin once wrote that “the essence of good housekeeping is to make -people eat things that they naturally dislike. Ingredients that must, -for the sacred sake of economy, be utilised, are rarely attractive, but -the good housekeeper can send the most nauseous of them to heaven, in a -curry, as in a chariot of fire.”</p> - -<p>It must be admitted that neither artistic housekeeping, nor even the -lower branches of the art, were my cousin Nannie’s strong suit. It is -related of her that one day, returning from a tea-party, she remembered -that her household lacked some minor need. Undeterred by her tea-party -splendour of attire, she sailed serenely into a small and unknown -grocer’s shop in quest of what she needed. The grocer, stout and -middle-aged, lolled on his fat bare arms on the counter, reading a -newspaper. He negligently produced the requirement, received the payment -for it, and then, remarking affably, “Ta ta, me child!” returned to his -paper.</p> - -<p>My cousin Nannie, whose sense of the ridiculous could afflict her like -an illness, tottered home in tearful ecstasies, and was only less -shattered by the condescension of the grocer than by another tribute,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_81" id="page_81">{81}</a></span> -somewhat similar in kind. She had a singularly small and well-shaped -foot; a fact to which her son Robert was wont to attribute the -peculiarity that her shoe-strings were rarely securely fastened, -involving her in an appeal to the nearest man to tie them. She returned -to her family one day and related with joy how, as she passed a -cabstand, her shoe lace had become unfastened, and how she had then -asked a cabman to tie it for her. She thanked him with her usual and -special skill in such matters, and, as she slowly moved away, she was -pleased to hear her cabman remark to a fellow:</p> - -<p>“That’s a dam pleshant owld heifer!”</p> - -<p>And the response of the fellow:</p> - -<p>“Ah, Shakespeare says ye’ll always know a rale lady when ye see her.”</p> - -<p>Her love for society was only matched by her intolerance of being bored. -There was a recess in her bedroom, possessed of a small window and a -heavy curtain. To this one day, on hearing a ring at the door, she -hurriedly repaired, and took with her a chair and a book. She heard the -travelling foot of the maid, searching for her. Then the curtain was -pushed aside and the maid’s face appeared.</p> - -<p>“Oh, is it <i>there</i> you are!” said the maid, with the satisfaction of the -finder in a game of hide and seek. That her mistress did not dash her -book in her face speaks well for her self-control.</p> - -<p>It may be urged that Mrs. Martin might have spared herself this -discomfiture by the simpler expedient of leaving directions that she was -“Not at Home.” But this shows how little the present generation can -appreciate the consciences of the last. I have known my mother to rush -into the garden on a wet day, in order that the servant might truthfully -say she was “out.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_82" id="page_82">{82}</a></span>”</p> - -<p>“Ah, Ma’am, ’twas too much trouble you put on yourself,” said the -devoted retainer for whom the sacrifice was made. “God knows I’d tell a -bigger lie than that for you! And be glad to do it!” (which was probably -true, if only from the artist’s point of view).</p> - -<p>Mrs. Martin’s contempt for danger was one of the many points wherein she -differed from the average woman of her time. Indeed, it cannot be said -that she despised it, as, quite obviously, she enjoyed it. Martin has -told of how she and her mother were caught in a storm, in a small boat, -on Lough Corrib. Things became serious; one boatman dropped his oar and -prayed, the other wept but continued to row; Martin, who had not been -bred to boats on Ross Lake for nothing, tugged at the abandoned oar of -the supplicant. Meanwhile her mother sat erect in the stern, looking on -the tempest in as unshaken a mood as Shakespeare could have desired, and -enjoying every moment of it. Neither where horses were concerned did she -know fear. I have been with her in a landau, with one horse trying to -bolt, while the other had kicked till it got a leg over the trace. Help -was at hand, and during the readjustment Mrs. Martin firmly retained her -seat. Her only anxiety was lest the drive might have to be given up, her -only regret that both horses had not bolted. She said she liked driving -at a good round pace. An outside-car might do anything short of lying -down and rolling, without being able to shake her off; her son Robert -used to say of her that on an outside-car his mother’s grasp of the -situation was analogous to that of a poached egg on toast—both being -practically undetachable.</p> - -<p>How different was she from her first cousin, my mother, who, frankly -mid-Victorian, proclaimed her<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_83" id="page_83">{83}</a></span>self a coward, without a blush, even with -ostentation. When the much-used label, “Mid-Victorian,” is applied, it -calls up, in my mind at least, a type of which the three primary causes -are, John Leech’s pictures, “The Newcomes,” and Anthony Trollope’s -massive output. Pondering over these signs of that time, I withdraw the -label from my mother and her compeers. Either must that be done, or the -letter “i” substituted for the “a” in label. Let us think for a moment -of Mrs. Proudie, of “The Campaigner”; of Eleanor, “The Warden’s” -daughter, who bursts into floods of tears as a solution to all -situations; of the insufferable Amelia Osborne. Consider John Leech’s -females, the young ones, turbaned and crinolined, wholly idiotic, flying -with an equal terror from bulls and mice, ogling Lord Dundreary and his -whiskers, being scored off by rude little boys. And the elderly women, -whose age, if nothing else, marked them, in mid-Victorian times, as fit -subjects for ridicule, invariably hideous, jealous, spiteful, nagging, -and even more grossly imbecile than their juniors. Thackeray and -Trollope between them poisoned the wells in the ’fifties, and the water -has hardly cleared yet. Nevertheless, with however mutinous a mind their -books are approached, their supreme skill, their great authority, cannot -be withstood; their odious women must needs be authentic. I am therefore -forced to the conclusion that Martin’s mother, and mine, and their -sisters, and their cousins and their aunts were exceptions to the rule -that all mid-Victorian women were cats, and I can only deposit the -matter upon that crowded ash-heap, that vast parcel-office, adored of -the bromidic, “the knees of the Gods,” there to be left till called for.</p> - -<p class="astt">* * * * *</p> - -<p>There is a song that my mother used to sing to us<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_84" id="page_84">{84}</a></span> when we were -children, of which I can now remember only fragments, but what I can -recall of it is so beautifully typical of the early Victorian young -lady, and of what may be called the Bonnet and Shawl attitude towards -the Lover, that a verse or two shall be transcribed. I believe it used -to be sung at the house of my grandmother (Anna Maria Coghill, <i>née</i> -Bushe), in Cheltenham, by one of the many literary and artistic dandies -who hung about her and her handsome daughters. Lord Lytton, then Sir -Edward Bulwer Lytton, was one of these, and he and my grandmother were -among the first amateur experimenters in mesmerism, thought-reading, and -clairvoyance, as might have been expected from the future author of -“Zanoni,” and from the mother of my mother (who was wont, with her usual -entire frankness, to declare herself “the most curious person in the -world,” <i>i.e.</i> the most inquisitive).</p> - -<p>I do not know the name of the song or of its composer. It has a most -suitable, whining, peevish little tune; my mother used to sing it to us -with intense dramatic expression, and it was considered to be a failure -if the last verse did not leave my brother and me dissolved in tears. -The song is in the form of a dialogue between the Lady and the Lover, -and the Lady begins:</p> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">“So so so, Sir, you’ve come at last!<br /></span> -<span class="i3">I thought you’d come no more,<br /></span> -<span class="i1">I’ve waited with my bonnet on<br /></span> -<span class="i3">From one till half-past four!<br /></span> -<span class="i1">You know I hate to sit at home<br /></span> -<span class="i3">Uncertain where to go,<br /></span> -<span class="i1">You’ll break my heart, I know you will,<br /></span> -<span class="i3">If you continue so!”<br /></span> -</div></div> -</div> - -<p class="nind">(The tune demands the repetition of the last two lines, but it, I regret -to say, cannot be given here.)<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_85" id="page_85">{85}</a></span></p> - -<p>One sees her drooping on a high chair by the window (which of course is -closed), her ringlets losing their curl, her cheeks their colour. The -Lover takes a high hand.</p> - -<p>“Pooh! pooh! my dear! Dry up your tears,” he begins, arrogantly, and -goes on to ask for trouble by explaining that the delay was caused by -his having come “down Grosvenor Gate Miss Fanny’s eye to catch,” and he -ends with defiance—</p> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">“I won’t, I swear, I <i>won’t</i> be made<br /></span> -<span class="i2">To keep time like a watch!”<br /></span> -</div></div> -</div> - -<p class="nind">The Lady replies:</p> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">“What! Fanny Grey! Ah, now indeed<br /></span> -<span class="i3">I understand it all!<br /></span> -<span class="i1">I saw you making love to her<br /></span> -<span class="i3">At Lady Gossip’s ball!”<br /></span> -<span class="i1">“My life, my soul! My dearest Jane!<br /></span> -<span class="i3">I love but you alone!<br /></span> -<span class="i1">I never <i>thought</i> of Fanny Grey!<br /></span> -<span class="i3">(How tiresome she’s grown!)<br /></span> -<span class="i1">I <i>never</i> thought of Fanny Grey!<br /></span> -<span class="i3">(How <i>tiresome</i> she’s grown!)”<br /></span> -</div></div> -</div> - -<p>The last phrase an aside to the moved audience. “She” was his so-called -“dearest Jane”! We thrilled at the perfidy, which lost nothing from my -mother’s delivery.</p> - -<p>And then poor Jane’s reproaches, and his impudent defence.</p> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">“Oh Charles, I wonder that the earth<br /></span> -<span class="i3">Don’t open where you stand!<br /></span> -<span class="i1">By the Heaven that’s above us both,<br /></span> -<span class="i3">I saw you kiss her hand!”<br /></span> -<span class="i1">“You didn’t dear, and if you did,<br /></span> -<span class="i3">Supposing it is true,<br /></span> -<span class="i1">When a pretty woman shows her rings<br /></span> -<span class="i3">What <i>can</i> a poor man do!”<br /></span> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_86" id="page_86">{86}</a></span></div></div> -</div> - -<p>But it was always the last lines of the last verse that touched the -fount of tears. Charles, with specious excuses, has made his farewells; -she watches him from the window (still closed, no doubt).</p> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">“Goodbye, goodbye, we’ll meet again<br /></span> -<span class="i2">On one of these fine days!”<br /></span> -</div></div> -</div> - -<p class="nind">he has warbled and departed. And then her cry (to the audience):</p> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">“He’s <i>turned</i> the street, I knew he would!<br /></span> -<span class="i3">He’s gone to Fanny Grey’s!<br /></span> -<span class="i1">He’s turned the street, I <i>knew</i> he would,<br /></span> -<span class="i3">He’s gone—to Fanny Grey’s!”<br /></span> -</div></div> -</div> - -<p>I shall never forget that absurd tune, and its final feeble wail of -despair; and inextricably blended with it is the memory of how -lusciously my brother and I used to weep, even while we clamoured for an -encore.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_87" id="page_87">{87}</a></span></p> - -<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VII" id="CHAPTER_VII"></a>CHAPTER VII<br /><br /> -<small>MY MOTHER</small></h2> - -<p><span class="smcap">The</span> men and women, but more specially the women, of my mother’s family -and generation are a lost pattern, a vanished type.</p> - -<p>I once read a fragment, by John Davidson, that appeared some years ago -in the <i>Outlook</i>. I grieve that I have lost the copy and do not remember -its date. It was called, if I am not mistaken, “The Last of the -Alanadoths,” and purported to be the final page of the history of a -great and marvellous tribe, whose stature was twice that of ordinary -beings, whose strength was as the strength of ten, and in whose veins -blue and glittering flame ran, instead of blood. These, having in -various ways successfully staggered ordinary humanity, all finally -embarked upon an ice-floe, and were lost in the Polar mists. “Thus -perished,” ends the chronicle, “the splendid and puissant Alanadoths!”</p> - -<p>I have now forgotten many of the details, but I remember that when I -read it, it irresistibly suggested to me the thought of my mother and -her sisters and brothers. Tall, and fervent, and flaming, full of what -seemed like quenchless vitality, their blood, if not flame, yet of that -most ardent blend of Irish and English that has produced the finest -fighters in the world. And now, like the splendid and puissant<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_88" id="page_88">{88}</a></span> -Alanadoths, they also have vanished (save one, the stoutest fighter of -them all) into the mists that shroud the borderland between our life and -the next.</p> - -<p>They kept their youthful outlook undimmed, and took all things in their -stride, without introspection or hesitation. Their unflinching -conscientiousness, their violent church-going (I speak of the sisters), -were accompanied by a whole-souled love of a spree, and a wonderful gift -for a row. Or for an argument. There are many who still remember those -great arguments that, on the smallest provocation, would rise, and stir, -and deepen, and grow, burgeoning like a rose of storm among the -Alanadoths. They meant little at the moment, and nothing afterwards, but -while they lasted they were awe-inspiring. It is said that a stranger, -without their gates, heard from afar one such dispute, and trembling, -asked what it might mean.</p> - -<p>“Oh, <i>that</i>!” said a little girl, with <i>sang-froid</i>, “That’s only the -Coghills roaring.”</p> - -<p>(As a dweller in the Hebrides would speak of a North-Atlantic storm.)</p> - -<p>My mother was a person entirely original in her candour, and with a -point of view quite untrammelled by convention. Martin and I have ever -been careful to abstain from introducing portraiture or caricature into -our books, but we have not denied that the character of “Lady Dysart” -(in “The Real Charlotte”) was largely inspired by my mother.</p> - -<p>She, as we said of Lady Dysart, said the things that other people were -afraid to think.</p> - -<p>“Poetry!” she declaimed, “I <i>hate</i> poetry—at least <i>good</i> poetry!”</p> - -<p>Her common sense often amounted to inspiration. It happened one -Christmas that my sister and I found ourselves in difficulties in the -matter of a<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_89" id="page_89">{89}</a></span> suitable offering to an old servant of forty years’ -standing; she was living on a pension, her fancies were few, her needs -none. A very difficult subject for benefaction. My mother, however, -unhesitatingly propounded a suggestion.</p> - -<p>“Give her a nice shroud! There’s nothing in the world she’d like as well -as that!”</p> - -<p>Which was probably true, but was a counsel of perfection that we were -too feeble to accept.</p> - -<p>It is indeed indisputable that my mother breathed easily a larger air -than the lungs of her children could compete with. Handsome, impetuous, -generous, high-spirited, yet with the softest and most easily-entreated -heart, she was like a summer day, with white clouds sailing high in a -clear sky, and a big wind blowing. Hers was the gift of becoming, -without conscious effort, the rallying point of any entertainment. It -was she who never failed to supply the saving salt of a dull -dinner-party; her inveterate <i>joie-de-vivre</i> made a radiance that struck -responsive sparkles from her surroundings, whatever they might be.</p> - -<p>She was a brilliant pianiste, and played with the same spirit with which -she tackled the other affairs of life. She was renowned as an -accompanist, having been trained to that most onerous and perilous -office by an accomplished and exacting elder brother—and nothing can be -as relentlessly exacting as a brother who sings—and she had a gift of -reading music, with entire facility, that is as rare among amateurs as -it is precious.</p> - -<p>Music, books, pictures, politics, were in her blood. Music, with plenty -of tune; painting, with plenty of colour and a rigid adherence to fact; -novels, compact of love-making; and politics, of the most implacable -party brand. Alas! she did not live to see many of our books, but I fear -that such as she did see, with<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_90" id="page_90">{90}</a></span> their culpable economy of either -love-makings or happy endings, were a disappointment to her. In her -opinion the characters should leave a story, as the occupants left -Noah’s Ark, in couples. I remember the indignation in her voice when, -having finished reading “An Irish Cousin,” she said:</p> - -<p>“But you never said who Mimi Burke married.”</p> - -<p>Those who have done us the honour of reading that early work will, I -think, admit that our description of Miss Mimi Burke might have -exonerated us from the necessity of providing her with a husband.</p> - -<p>My mother was one of the most thorough and satisfying letter-writers of -a family skilled in that art, having in a high degree the true instinct -in the matter of material, and knowing how to separate the wheat from -the chaff (and—<i>bien entendu</i>—to give the preference to the chaff). -She was a Woman Suffragist, unfaltering, firm, and logical; a -philanthropist, practical and energetic.</p> - -<p>“Where’d we be at all if it wasn’t for the Colonel’s Big Lady!” said the -hungry country women, in the Bad Times, scurrying, barefooted, to her in -any emergency, to be fed and doctored and scolded. She was a -Spiritualist, wide-minded, eager, rejoicing in the occult, mysterious -side of things, with the same enthusiasm with which she faced her -sunshiny everyday life. Not that it was all sunshine. My grandfather, -Thomas Somerville, of Drishane, died in 1882. With him, as Martin has -said of his contemporary, her father, passed the last of the old order, -the unquestioned lords of the land. Mr. Gladstone’s successive Land Acts -were steadily making themselves felt, and my father and mother, like -many another Irish father and mother, began to learn what it was to -have, as a tenant said of himself, “a long serious family, and God knows -how I’ll make the two ends of the candle meet!”</p> - -<div class="figcenter"><a name="ill_5" id="ill_5"></a> -<a href="images/ill_002-a_lg.jpg"> -<img src="images/ill_002-a_sml.jpg" width="342" height="225" alt="[Image unavailable.]" /></a> -<div class="caption"><p>FROM THE GARDEN, DRISHANE.</p> - -<div class="sigg"> -V. F. M. -</div> -</div></div> - -<div class="figcenter"><a name="ill_6" id="ill_6"></a> -<a href="images/ill_002-b_lg.jpg"> -<img src="images/ill_002-b_sml.jpg" width="342" height="211" alt="[Image unavailable.]" /></a> -<div class="caption"><p>DRISHANE HOUSE.</p> - -<div class="sigg"> -V. F. M. -</div> -</div></div> - -<div class="figcenter"><a name="ill_7" id="ill_7"></a> -<a href="images/ill_002-c_lg.jpg"> -<img src="images/ill_002-c_sml.jpg" width="341" height="181" alt="[Image unavailable.]" /></a> -<div class="caption"><p>HYDRANGEAS, DRISHANE AVENUE.</p> - -<div class="sigg"> -V. F. M. -</div> -</div></div> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_91" id="page_91">{91}</a></span></p> - -<p>I marvel now, when I think of their courage and their gallant -self-denial. The long, but far from serious, family, numbering no less -than five sons and two daughters, thought little of Land Acts at the -time, and took life as lightly as ever. The stable was cut down, but -there were no hounds then, and I was in the delirium of a first break -into oil colours, after a spring spent in Paris in drawing and painting, -and even horses were negligible quantities. There was no change made in -the destined professions for the sons; it was on themselves that my -father and mother economised; and with effort, and forethought, and -sheer self-denial, somehow they “made good,” and pulled through those -bad years of the early ‘eighties, when rents were unpaid, and crops -failed, and Parnell and his wolf-pack were out for blood, and the -English Government flung them, bit by bit, the property of the only men -in Ireland who, faithful to the pitch of folly, had supported it since -the days of the Union. When the Russian woman threw the babies to the -wolves, at least they were her own.</p> - -<p>I have claimed for my mother moral courage and self-denial, and, in -making good that claim, said that the stable establishment at -Drishane—never a large one—had been cut down. I feel I ought to admit -that this particular economy cannot be said to have afflicted her. She -had an unassailable conviction that every horse was “at heart a rake.” -Though she was not specially active, no rabbit could bolt before a -ferret more instantaneously than she from a carriage at the first wink -of one of the “bright eyes of danger.” No horse was quiet enough for -her, few were too old.</p> - -<p>“Slugs?” she has said, in defence of her carriage-horses, “I <i>love</i> -slugs! I adore them! And slugs or no, I will <i>not</i> be driven by B——” -(a massive sailor<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_92" id="page_92">{92}</a></span> son). “He’s no more use on the box than a blue -bottle!”</p> - -<p>There was an occasion when she was discovered halfway up a ladder, -faintly endeavouring to hang a picture, and unable to do so by reason of -physical terror. She was restored to safety, and with recovered vigour -she countered reproaches with the singular yet pertinent inquiry: “<i>May</i> -I ask, <i>am</i> I a paralysed babe?”</p> - -<p>Her similes were generally unexpected, but were invariably to the point. -It often pleases me to try to recall some of the flowers of fancy that -she has lavished upon my personal appearance. I think I should begin by -saying that her ideal daughter had been denied to her. This being should -have had hair of dazzling gold, blue eyes as big as mill-wheels, and -should have been incessantly enmeshed in the most lurid flirtation. My -eyes did indeed begin by being blue, but, as was said by an old nurse -who held by the Somerville tradition of brown ones,</p> - -<p>“By the help of the Lord they’ll change!”</p> - -<p>They did change, but as the assistance was withdrawn when they had -merely attained to a non-committal grey, neither in eyes, nor in the -other conditions, did I gratify my mother’s aspirations.</p> - -<p>I have been at a dinner-party with her, and have found, to my great -discomfort, her eyes dwelling heavily upon my head. Her face wore openly -the expression of a soul in torment. I knew that in some way, dark to -me, I was the cause. After dinner she took an early opportunity of -assuring me that my appearance had made her long to go under the -dinner-table.</p> - -<p>“Never,” she said, “have I seen your hair so abominable. It was like a -collection of filthy little furze-bushes.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_93" id="page_93">{93}</a></span>”</p> - -<p>Which was distressing enough, but not more so than being told on a -similar occasion, and, I think, for similar reasons, that I was “not -like any human young lady,” and again, she has seriously, even with -agony, informed me that I was “the Disgrace of Castle Townshend!”</p> - -<p>It was a sounding title, with something historic and splendid about it.</p> - -<p>“The Butcher of Anjou!” “The Curse of Cromwell!” occur to me as parallel -instances.</p> - -<p>It was my privilege—sometimes, I think, my misfortune—to have -succeeded my mother as the unofficial player of the organ in Castlehaven -Church, and her criticisms of the music, and specially of the choir, -were as unfailing as unsparing.</p> - -<p>“They sang like infuriated pea-hens! Never have I heard such a -collection of screech-cats! You should have drowned them with the great -diapason!”</p> - -<p>Not long ago, among some of her papers, I found a home-made copybook, of -blue foolscap paper, with lines very irregularly ruled on it, and, on -the lines, still more irregular phalanxes of “pothooks and hangers.” -Further investigation discovered my own name, and a date that placed me -at something under six years old; and at the foot of each page was my -mother’s careful and considered judgment upon my efforts. “Middling,” -“Careless,” “Bobbish,” “Naughty,” “Abominable,” and then a black day, -when it was written, plain for all men to see, that I was not only -abominable, but also naughty.</p> - -<p>“Naughty and Abominable,” there it stands, and shows not only my early -criminality, but my mother’s enchanting sincerity. What young mamma, of -five or six and twenty, is there to-day who would thus faithfully allot -praise or blame to her young. I feel safe in saying that the naughtier -and more abominable<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_94" id="page_94">{94}</a></span> the copy, the more inevitably would it be described -as either killing or sweet.</p> - -<p>In reference to this special page, I may add that, although I regard -myself as a reliable opinion in calligraphy, I am unable to detect any -perceptible difference between the pothooks and hangers of the occasion -when I was bobbish, or those of that day of wrath when I was both -naughty and abominable.</p> - -<p>Amongst other episodes I cherish an unforgettable picture of my mother -having her fortune told by her hand. (A criminal act, as we have -recently learned, and one that under our enlightened laws might have -involved heavy penalties.)</p> - -<p>The Sibyl was a little lady endowed with an unusual share of that -special variety of psychic faculty that makes the cheiromant, and also -with a gift, almost rarer, of genuine enthusiasm for the good qualities -of others, an innocent and whole-souled creator and worshipper of -heroes, if ever there were one. To her did my mother confide her hand, -her pretty hand, with the shell pink palm, and the blush on the Mount of -Venus, that she had inherited from her mother, the Chief’s daughter.</p> - -<p>“<i>Intensely</i> nervous!” pronounced the Sibyl (who habitually talked in -italics and a lovable Cork brogue), looking at the maze of delicate -lines that indicate the high-strung temperament. “<i>Adores</i> her -children!”</p> - -<p>“Not a bit of it!” says my mother, flinging up her head, in a way she -had, like a stag, and regarding with a dauntless eye her two grinning -daughters.</p> - -<p>The Sibyl swept on, dealing with line and mount and star, going from -strength to strength in the exposition till, at the line of the heart, -she came to a dead set.</p> - -<p>“Oh, Mrs. Somerville! <i>What</i> do I see? <i>Count</i>less flirtations!! And -Oh—” (a long squeal of sympathy<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_95" id="page_95">{95}</a></span> and excitement) “<i>Four!</i> Yes! -One—Two—<i>Three</i>—<span class="smcap">Four</span> Great Passions!”</p> - -<p>At this the ecstasy of my mother knew no bounds. “Four, Miss X.! Are you -<i>sure</i>?”</p> - -<p>Miss X. was certain. She expounded and amplified, and having put the -Four Great Passions on a basis of rock, proceeded with her elucidation -of lesser matters; but it was evident that my mother’s attention was no -longer hers.</p> - -<p>“I’m trying to remember who the Four Passions were,” she said that -evening to one of her first cousins (who might be supposed to know -something of her guilty past), and to my sister, “There was Charlie -B——. He’ll do for one—and L. W.——!—that’s two—and then—Oh, -yes!—then there was S. B——! Minnie! <i>Was</i> I in love with S. B——?” -She paused for an answer that her cousin was incapable, for more reasons -than the obvious one, of giving.</p> - -<p>My mother resumed the delicious inquiry.</p> - -<p>“Well—” she said, musingly, “Anyhow, that’s only three. Now, <i>who</i> was -the fourth?”</p> - -<p>My sister Hildegarde, who was young and inclined to be romantic, said -languishingly,</p> - -<p>“Why, of course it was <i>Papa</i>, Mother!”</p> - -<p>My father and mother’s mutual love and devotion were as delightful an -example of what twenty-five years of happy married life bestows as can -well be conceived, and I think Hildegarde was justified. My mother, -however, regarded her with wide open blue eyes, almost sightless from -the dazzle of dreams—dreams of the four reckless and dangerous beings -who had galloped, hopeless and frenzied, into darkness (not to say -oblivion) for love of her—dreams of her own passionate, heartbroken -despair when they had thus galloped.</p> -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_96" id="page_96">{96}</a></span></p> -<p>“What?... What?...” she demanded, bewilderedly, sitting erect, with -eyes like stars, looking as Juno might have looked had her peacock -turned upon her, “<i>What</i> do you say?”</p> - -<p>“There was Papa, Mother,” repeated Hildegarde firmly, but not (she says) -reprovingly, “<i>He</i> was the fourth, of course!”</p> - -<p>“<i>Papa???</i> ...”</p> - -<p>The preposterous dowdiness of this suggestion almost deprived my mother -of the power of speech.</p> - -<p>“<i>Papa!</i> ... Paugh!”</p> - -<p class="astt">* * * * *</p> - -<p>Thus did the splendid and puissant Alanadoths dispose of the cobweb -conventions of mere mortals.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_97" id="page_97">{97}</a></span></p> - -<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VIII" id="CHAPTER_VIII"></a>CHAPTER VIII<br /><br /> -<small>HERSELF</small></h2> - -<p><span class="smcap">“It</span> was on a Sunday, the eleventh day of a lovely June,” her sister, -Mrs. Edward Hewson, has written, “that Violet entered the family. A time -of roses, when Ross was at its best, with its delightful old-fashioned -gardens fragrant with midsummer flowers, and its shady walks at their -darkest and greenest as they wandered through deep laurel groves to the -lake. She was the eleventh daughter that had been born to the house, and -she received a cold welcome.</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>I am glad the Misthress is well,’ said old Thady Connor, the steward; -‘but I am sorry for other news.’</p> - -<p>“I think my father’s feelings were the same, but he said she was ‘a -pretty little child.’ My mother comforted herself with the reflection -that girls were cheaper than boys.</p> - -<p>“At a year old she was the prettiest child I ever saw, with her glorious -dark eyes, and golden hair, and lovely colour; a dear little child, but -quite unnoticed in the nursery. Charlie was the child brought forward. I -think the unnoticed childhood had its effect. She lived her own life -apart. Then came the reign of the Governesses, and their delight in her. -I never remember the time she could not read, and she played the piano -at four years old very well. (At twelve<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_98" id="page_98">{98}</a></span> years old she took first prize -for piano-playing at an open competition, held in Dublin, for girls up -to eighteen.)</p> - -<p>“Her great delight at four or five years old was to slip into the -drawing-room and read the illustrated editions of the poets. Her -favourite was an edition of Milton, with terrifying pictures; this she -read with delight. One day there was an afternoon party, and, as usual, -Violet stole into the drawing-room and was quickly engrossed in her -loved Milton, entirely oblivious of the company. Later on, she was found -fast asleep, with her head resting on the large volume. The scene is -present with me; the rosy little face, and the golden hair resting on -the book.</p> - -<p>“I remember that Henry H—— said ‘Some day I shall boast that I knew -Violet as a child!’<span class="lftspc">”</span></p> - -<p>She was christened Violet Florence, by her mother’s cousin, Lord -Plunket, afterwards Archbishop of Dublin, in the drawing-room at Ross, -the vessel employed for the rite being, she has assured me, the silver -slop-basin, and at Ross she spent the first ten happy years of her life.</p> - -<p>I, also, had a happy childhood, full of horses and dogs and boats and -dangers (which latter are the glory of life to any respectable child -with suitable opportunity), but after I had seen Ross I could almost -have envied Martin and her brother, Charlie, nearest to her in age, -their suzerainty over Ross demesne.</p> - -<p>“I thravelled Ireland,” said someone, “and afther all, there’s great -heart in the County of Cork!”, and I am faithful to my own county; but -there is a special magic in Galway, in its people and in its scenery, -and for me, Ross, and its lake and its woods, is Galway. The beauty of -Ross is past praising. I think of it as I saw it first, on a pensive -evening of early spring, still and grey, with a yellow spear-head of -light low<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_99" id="page_99">{99}</a></span> in the west. Still and grey was the lake, too, with the brown -mountain, Croagh-Keenan, and the grey sky, with that spear-thrust of -yellow light in it, lying deep in the wide, quiet water, that was -furrowed now and then by the flapping rush of a coot, or streaked with -the meditative drift of a wild duck; farther back came the tall -battalions of reeds, thronging in pale multitudes back to the shadowy -woods; and for foreground, the beautiful, broken line of the shore, with -huge boulders of limestone scattered on it, making black blots in the -pearl-grey of the shallows.</p> - -<p>On higher ground above the lake stands the old house, tall and severe, a -sentinel that keeps several eyes, all of them intimidating, on all -around it. The woods of Annagh, of Bullivawnen, of Cluinamurnyeen, trail -down to the lake side, with spaces of grass, and spaces of hazel, and -spaces of bog among them. I have called the limestone boulders blots, -but that was on an evening in February; if you were to see them on a -bright spring morning, as they lie among primroses at the lip of the -lake, you would think them a decoration, a collar of gems, that respond -to the suggestions of the sky, and are blue, or purple, or grey, bright -or sullen, as it requires of them. Things, also, to make a child -delirious with their possibilities. One might jump from one huge stone -to another, till, especially in a dry summer when the lake was low, one -might find oneself far out, beyond even the Turf Quay, or Swans’ Island, -whence nothing but one’s own prowess could ever restore one to home and -family. If other stimulant were needed, it was supplied by the thought -of the giant pike, who were known to inhabit the outer depths. One of -them, stuffed and varnished, honoured the hall at Ross with its -presence. It looked big and wicked enough to pull down a small girl as -easily as a minnow.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_100" id="page_100">{100}</a></span></p> - -<p>When I first went to Ross, a grown-up young woman, I found that -seduction of the boulders, and of the chain of leaps that they -suggested, very potent. The attraction of the pike also was not to be -denied. (We used to try to shoot them with a shot-gun, and sometimes -succeeded.) What then must the lake not have meant to its own children?</p> - -<p>I don’t suppose that any little girl ever had more accidents than -Martin. Entirely fearless and reckless, and desperately short-sighted, -full of emulation and the irrepressible love of a lark, scrapes, in the -physical as well as the moral sense, were her daily portion, and how she -came through, as she did, with nothing worse than a few unnoticeable -scars to commemorate her many disasters, is a fact known only to her -painstaking guardian angel. Tenants, who came to Ross on their various -affairs, found their horses snatched to be galloped by “the children,” -their donkeys purloined for like purposes (or the donkeys’ nearest -equivalent to a gallop)—and it may be noted that the harder the -victimised horses were galloped, the more profound was the admiration, -even the exultation, of their owners.</p> - -<p>“Sure,” said a southern woman of some children renowned for their -naughtiness, “them’s very arch childhren. But, afther all, I dunno -what’s the use of havin’ childhren if they’re not arch!”</p> - -<p>In certain of the essays in one of our books, “Some Irish Yesterdays,” -we have pooled memories of our respective childhoods, which, -fortunately, perhaps, for the peace of nations, were separated by some -hundred miles of moor and mountain, as well as by an interval of years. -Their conditions were similar in many respects, and specially so in the -government of the nursery. Our mothers, if their nurses satisfied their -requirements, had a large indifference to the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_101" id="page_101">{101}</a></span> antecedents of the -nurses’ underlings, who were usually beings of the type that is caught -at large on a turf-bog and imported raw into the ministry. One such was -once described to me—“An innocent, good-natured slob of a gerr’l that -was rared in a bog beside me. The sort of gerr’l now that if you were -sick would sit up all night to look afther ye, and if you weren’t, she’d -lie in bed all day!”</p> - -<p>I believe the nurses enjoyed the assimilation of the raw product, much -as a groom likes the interest afforded by an unbroken colt, and they -found the patronage among the mothers of the disciples a useful asset. -In later years, Martin was discoursing of her nursery life, with her -foster-mother, who had also been her nurse, Nurse B., a most agreeable -person, gifted with a saturnine humour that is not infrequent in our -countrywomen.</p> - -<p>“Sure didn’t I ketch Kit Sal one time”—(the reigning nursemaid)—“an’ -she bating and kicking yerself on the avenue!” Nurse B. began. She then -went on to describe how she had fallen on Kit Sal, torn her hair, and -“shtuck her teeth in her.”</p> - -<p>“The Misthress seen me aftherwards, and she axed me what was on me, for -sure I was cryin’ with the rage. ‘Nothin’ Ma’am!’ says I. But I told her -two days afther, an’ she goes to Kit Sal, an’ says she, ‘What call had -you to bate Miss Wilet?’ says she, ‘Ye big shtump!’ ‘She wouldn’t folly -me,’ says Kit. ‘Well indeed,’ says the Misthress, ‘I believe ye got a -bigger batin’ yerself from Nurse, and as far as that goes,’ says she, ‘I -declare to God,’ says she, ‘I wish she dhrank yer blood!’ says she.”</p> - -<p>The tale is above comment, but for those who knew Mrs. Martin’s very -special distinction of manner and language, Nurse B.’s paraphrase of her -reproof has a very peculiar appeal.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_102" id="page_102">{102}</a></span></p> - -<p>Nurse B. was small, spare, and erect, with a manner that did not conceal -her contempt for the world at large—(with one cherished exception, -“Miss Wilet”)—and a trenchancy of speech that was not infrequently -permitted to express it. At Ross, at lunch one day, during the later -time when Mrs. Martin had returned there, the then cat—(the pampered -and resented drawing-room lady, not the mere kitchen cat)—exhibited a -more than usually inordinate greediness, and Mrs. Martin appealed, with -some reproach, to Nurse B., who was at that time acting—and the word -may be taken in its stage connection—the part of parlour-maid.</p> - -<p>“Nurse! <i>Does</i> this poor cat <i>ever</i> get <i>anything</i> to eat?”</p> - -<p>“It’d be the quare cat if it didn’t!” replied Nurse, with a single -glance at “Miss Wilet” to claim the victor’s laurel.</p> - -<p class="astt">* * * * *</p> - -<p>It was not until Martin and I began to write “The Real Charlotte” that I -understood how wide and varied a course of instruction was to be -obtained in a Dublin Sunday school. Judging by a large collection of -heavily-gilded books, quite unreadable (and quite unread), each of which -celebrates proficiency in some branch of scriptural learning, Martin -took all the available prizes. In addition to these trophies and the -knowledge they implied, she learnt much of that middle sphere of human -existence that has practically no normal points of contact with any -other class, either above or below it.</p> - -<p>It was a rather risky experiment, as will, I think, be admitted by -anyone who considers the manners and customs of the detestable little -boys and girls who squabble and giggle in the first chapter of “The Real -Charlotte.” There are not many children who could have come unscathed -out of such a furnace.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_103" id="page_103">{103}</a></span> There is a story of a priest who was such a good -man that he “went through Purgatory like a flash of lightning. There -wasn’t a singe on him!”</p> - -<p>Martin was adored, revered, was received as an oracle by her fellow -scholars, and was, as was invariable with her, the wonder and admiration -of her teacher. She has told me how she took part in dreadful revels, -school feasts and the like, which, in their profound aloofness from her -home-life, had something almost illicit about them. With her intensely -receptive, perceptive brain, she was absorbing impressions, points of -view, turns and twists of character wrought on by circumstance; yet, -when that phase of her childhood had passed, “there wasn’t a singe on -her!”</p> - -<p>She had a spiritual reserve and seriousness that shielded her, like an -armour of polished steel that reflects all, and is impenetrable. -Refinement was surpassingly hers; intellectual refinement, a mental -fastidiousness that rejected inevitably the phrase or sentiment that had -a tinge of commonness; personal refinement, in her dress, in the -exquisite precision of all her equipment; physical refinement, in the -silken softness of her hair, the slender fineness of her hands and feet, -the flower-bloom of her skin; and over and above all, she had the -refinement of sentiment, which, when it is joined with a profound -sensitiveness and power of emotion, has a beauty and a perfectness -scarcely to be expressed in words.</p> - -<p>She has told me stories of those times, and of the curious contrasts of -her environment. Long, confidential walks with “Francie Fitzpatrick” and -her fellows, followed by an abrupt descent from the position of “Sir -Oracle,” to the status of the youngest of a number of sisters and -brothers whose cleverness, smartness, and good looks filled her with awe -and<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_104" id="page_104">{104}</a></span> glory. She was intensely critical and intensely appreciative. The -little slender brown-eyed girl, who was part pet, part fag of that -brilliant, free-going, family crowd, secretly appraised them all in her -balancing, deliberative mind, and, fortunately for all concerned, passed -them sound. They taught her to brush their hair, and read her the poets -while she was thus employed; they chaffed her, and called her The Little -Philosopher, and unlike many elder sisters—(and I speak as an elder -sister)—dragged her into things instead of keeping her out of them. It -must have been a delightful house, full of good looks and good company. -I was far away in South Cork, and knew of the Martins but distantly and -dimly; after my eldest brother had met them and returned to chant their -charms, I think that a certain faint hostility tinged my very occasional -thoughts of them, which, after all, is not unusual.</p> - -<p>The Martins’ house in Dublin was one of the gathering places for the -clans of the family. Dublin society still existed in those days; things -went with a swing, and there was a tingle in life. Probably there was no -place in the kingdom where a greater number of pleasant people were to -be met with. Jovial, unconventional, radiant with good looks, unfailing -in agreeability, they hunted, they danced, they got up theatricals and -concerts, they—the elder ones, at least—went to church with an equal -enthusiasm, and fought to the death over the relative merits of their -pet parsons.</p> - -<p>Martin has told me of a Homeric and typical battle of which she was a -spectator, between her mother and one of my many aunts, Florence -Coghill. It began at tea, at the house of another aunt, with a suave and -academic discussion of the Irish Episcopate, and narrowed a little to -the fact that the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_105" id="page_105">{105}</a></span> diocese of Cork needed a bishop. My aunt Florence -said easily,</p> - -<p>“Oh—Gregg, of course!”</p> - -<p>My cousin Nannie (Mrs. Martin) replied with a sweet reasonableness, yet -firmly, “I think you will find that Pakenham Walsh is the man.”</p> - -<p>The battle then was joined. From argument it passed on into shouting, -and thence neared fisticuffs. They advanced towards each other in large -armchairs, even as, in these later days, the “Tanks” move into action. -They beat each other’s knees, each lady crying the name of her champion, -and then my aunt remembered that she had a train to catch, and rushed -from the room. The air was still trembling with her departure, when the -door was part opened, the monosyllable “Gregg!” was projected through -the aperture, and before reply was possible, the slam of the hall door -was heard.</p> - -<p>Mrs. Martin flung herself upon the window, and was in time to scream -“Paknamwalsh!” in one tense syllable, to my aunt’s departing long, thin -back.</p> - -<p>My aunt Florence was too gallant a foe to affect, as at the distance she -might well have done, unconsciousness. Anyone who knows the deaf and -dumb alphabet will realise what conquering gestures were hers, as -turning to face the enemy she responded,</p> - -<p class="clspc"> -“G!R!E!G!G!”<br /> -</p> - -<p class="nind">and with the last triumphant thump of her clenched fists, fled round the -corner.</p> - -<p>And she was right. “Gregg & son, Bishops to the Church of Ireland,” have -passed into ecclesiastical history.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_106" id="page_106">{106}</a></span></p> - -<h2><a name="CHAPTER_IX" id="CHAPTER_IX"></a>CHAPTER IX<br /><br /> -<small>MYSELF, WHEN YOUNG</small></h2> - -<p><span class="smcap">I have</span> deeply considered the question as to how far and how deep I -should go in the matter of my experiences as an Art student. Those brief -but intense visits to Paris come back to me as almost the best times -that life has given me. To be young, and very ardent, and to achieve -what you have most desired, and to find that it brings full measure and -running over—all those privileges were mine. I may have taken my hand -from the plough, and tried to “<i>cultiver mon jardin</i>” in other of the -fields of Paradise, but if I did indeed loose my hand from its first -grasp, it was to place it in another, in the hand of the best comrade, -and the gayest playboy, and the faithfullest friend, that ever came to -turn labour to pastime, and life into a song.</p> - -<p>I believe that those who have been Art students themselves will -sympathise with my recollections, and I trust that those who were not -will tolerate them. If neither of these expectations is fulfilled, this -chapter can be lightly skipped. The damage done on either side will be -inconsiderable.</p> - -<p>Drawing and riding seem to me to go farther back into my consciousness -than any other of the facts of life. I cannot remember a time when I had -not a pony and a pencil. I adored both about equally, and if I cannot, -even now, draw a horse as I should<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_107" id="page_107">{107}</a></span> wish to do it—a fact of which I am -but too well aware—it is not for want of beginning early and trying -often.</p> - -<p>My education in Art has been somewhat spasmodic. I think I was about -seventeen when a dazzling invitation came for me from a very much loved -aunt who was also my godmother, to stay with her in London and to work -for a term at the South Kensington School of Art. There followed three -months of a most useful breaking-in for a rather headstrong and unbroken -colt. I do not know what the present curriculum of South Kensington may -be; I know what it was then. From a lawless life of caricaturing my -brethren, my governesses, my clergy, my elders and betters generally, -copying in pen and ink all the hunting pictures, from John Leech to -Georgina Bowers, that old and new “Punches” had to offer, and painting -such landscapes in water colours as would have induced the outraged -earth to open its mouth and swallow up me and all my house, had it but -seen them, I passed to a rule of iron discipline.</p> - -<p>1. Decoration, scrolls and ornament in all moods and tenses.</p> - -<p>2. The meticulous study in outline of casts of detached portions of the -human frame, noses, ears, hands, feet; and</p> - -<p>3. The most heart-breaking and time-wasting stippling of the same.</p> - -<p>I well remember how, on a day that I was toiling at a large and knubbly -foot, a full-rigged Mamma came sailing round the class, with a daughter -in tow. The other students were occupied with scrolls and apples and the -like. The Mamma shed gracious sanction as she passed. Then came my turn. -I was aware of a pause, a shock of disapproval, and then the words,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_108" id="page_108">{108}</a></span></p> - -<p>“A <i>naked</i> foot, my dear!”</p> - -<p>There was a tug on the tow-rope and the daughter was removed.</p> - -<p>I imagine it must have been near the end of my three months that my -detested efforts were made into a bundle and sent up to high places with -a scribble on the margin of one of them, “May Miss Somerville pass for -the Antique? E. Miller.”</p> - -<p>In due course the bundle was returned. Mr. Sparkes, a majestic and -terrible being, wrapped in remoteness and in a great and waving red -beard, as in a mantle of flame, had placed his sign of acquiescence -after the inquiry. Miss Somerville was given to understand that she was -permitted to Pass for the Antique.</p> - -<p>This, however, Miss Somerville did not do. She was (not without deep -regret for all of her London sojourn that did <i>not</i> include the School -of Art) permitted instead to pass the portals of Paddington Station, and -to return to Ireland by “The Bristol Boat,” in other words, an -instrument of the devil, much in vogue at that time among the Irish of -the South, that took some thirty hours to paddle across the Channel, and -was known to the wits of Cork as “The Steam Roller.” It was, I fancy, on -board the Steam Roller that a cousin of mine, when still deep in -hard-earned slumber, and still far outside “The Heads” (<i>i.e.</i> the -entrance of Cork Harbour), was assaulted by the steward.</p> - -<p>“Come, get up, get up!” said the steward, shaking him by the shoulder, -with the licence of old acquaintance and authority.</p> - -<p>My cousin replied with a recommendation to the steward to betake himself -to a rival place of torment, where (he added) there was little the -steward could learn, and much that he could teach.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_109" id="page_109">{109}</a></span></p> - -<p>“Well,” replied the steward, dispassionately, “ye’re partly right. Ye -have an hour yet.”</p> - -<p>Thus I found myself back in Carbery again, left once more to follow my -own buccaneering fancy in the domain of Art, a little straightened and -corrected, perhaps, in eye, and with ideas on matters æsthetic -beneficially widened. But this was due mainly to one who has ever been -my patron saint in Art, that cousin who preferred reverie to -Shakespeare; partly, also, to peripatetic lunches among the pictures and -marvels of the South Kensington Museum; not, I say firmly, to that -heavy-earned Pass for the Antique.</p> - -<p>My next term of serious apprenticeship did not occur for four or five -years, and was spent in Düsseldorf. One of my cousins (now my -brother-in-law), Egerton Coghill, was studying painting there, and -advised my doing the same. It was there, therefore, that I made my first -dash into drawing from life, under the guidance of M. Gabriel Nicolet, -then himself a student, now a well-known and successful -portrait-painter. In the following spring I was there again, for singing -lessons as well as for painting. This time I had Herr Carl Sohn for my -professor, a delightful painter, who helped me much, but on the whole I -think that I learnt more of music than of anything else while I was in -Düsseldorf, and had I learnt nothing of either, I can at least look back -to the concerts at the Ton Halle, and praise Heaven for the remembrance -of their super-excellence. Twice a week came the concerts; it was very -much the thing to go to them, and I have not often enjoyed music more -than I have at those Ton Halle nights, sitting with the good friends -whom Providence had considerately sent to Düsseldorf to be kind to me, -in an atmosphere of rank German tobacco, listening to the best of -orchestras, and enjoying every note<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_110" id="page_110">{110}</a></span> they played, while I covered my -programme with caricatures (as, also, was very much the thing to do).</p> - -<p>My friends and I joined one of the big Gesang Vereins, and a very good -two months ended in three ecstatic days of singing alto in the -Rheinische Musik Fest, which, by great good luck, took place that May in -Düsseldorf.</p> - -<p>The Abbé Liszt was one of the glories of the occasion. I saw him roving -through the gardens of the Ton Halle, with an ignored train of admirers -at his heels; an old lion, with a silver mane, and a dark, untamed eye.</p> - -<p>I do not regret those two springs in Düsseldorf, but still less do I -regret the change of counsels that resulted in my going to Paris in the -following year. “When the true gods come, the half-gods go,” and, apart -from other considerations, the Düsseldorf School of Art only admitted -male students, and ignored, with true German chivalry, the other half of -creation.</p> - -<p>Of old, we are told, Freedom sat on the heights, well above the snow -line, no doubt, and, even in 1884, she was disposed to turn a freezing -eye and a cold shoulder on any young woman who had the temerity to climb -in her direction. My cousin, who had been painting in Düsseldorf, had -moved on to Paris, and his reports of the studios there, as compared -with the possibilities of work in Düsseldorf, settled the question for -me. But the point was not carried without friction.</p> - -<p>“Paris!”</p> - -<p>They all said this at the tops of their voices. It does not specially -matter now who they were; there are always people to say this kind of -thing.</p> - -<p>They said that Paris was the Scarlet Woman embodied; they also said,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_111" id="page_111">{111}</a></span></p> - -<p>“The <small>IDEA</small> of letting a <small>GIRL</small> go to <span class="smcap">Paris</span>!”</p> - -<p>This they said incessantly in capital letters, and in “capital letters” -(they were renowned for writing “capital letters”), and my mother was -frightened.</p> - -<p>So a compromise was effected, and I went to Paris with a bodyguard, -consisting of my mother, my eldest brother, a female cousin, and with us -another girl, the friend with whom I had worked in Düsseldorf. We went -to a <i>pension</i> in the Avenue de Villiers, which, I should imagine and -hope, exists no more.</p> - -<p>As I think of its gloomy and hideous <i>salons</i>, its atmosphere of garlic -and bad cigars, its system of ventilation, which consisted of heated -draughts that travelled from one stifling room to another, seeking an -open window and finding none; when I remember the thread-like passages, -dark as in a coal mine, the clusters of tiny bedrooms, as thick as cells -in a wasp’s nest; the endless yet inadequate meals, I recognise, with -long overdue gratitude, the devotion of the bodyguard. For me and my -fellow-student nothing of this signified. For us was the larger air, the -engrossing toil of the studio. It absorbed us from 8 a.m. till 5 p.m. -But the wheels of the bodyguard drave heavily, and they had a poor time -of it.</p> - -<p>So poor indeed was it, that, after three weeks of conscientious -sight-seeing and no afternoon tea (“Le Fife o’clock” not having then -reached the shores of France), my mother decided it were better to leave -me alone, sitting upon the very knee of the Scarlet Woman, than to -endure the Avenue de Villiers any longer, and to fly back to what she -was wont to describe to her offspring, if restive, as -“your-own-good-home-and-what-more-do-you-want.” (In this connection, I -remember an argument I once had with her, in which, being young and -merely theoretically affaired with the matter, I furiously asserted<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_112" id="page_112">{112}</a></span> my -preference, even—as the fight warmed—my adoration, for the practice of -cremation, and my unalterable resolve to be thus disposed of. My mother, -who would rise to any argument, no less furiously combated the -suggestion, and finally clinched the matter by saying, “Cremation! -Nonsense! I can tell you, my fine friend, you shall just be popped into -your own good family vault!”)</p> - -<p>With the departure of my people, May Goodhall and I also shook off as -much of the dust of the Avenue de Villiers as was possible, and moved to -another <i>pension</i>, nearly <i>vis-à-vis</i> the Studio. This latter was an -offshoot of the well-known Atelier Colarossi. It had been started in the -Rue Washington (Avenue des Champs Elysées) in order to secure English -and American clients, as well as those French <i>jeunes filles bien -élevées</i> to whose parents the studios of the Quartier Latin did not -commend themselves. Its tone was distinctly amateur; we were all “<i>très -bien élevées</i>’ and “<i>très gentilles</i>,” and in recognition of this, a -sort of professional chaperon had been provided, a small, cross female, -who made up the fire, posed the models, and fought with <i>les élèves</i> -over the poses, and hatred for whom created a bond of union among all -who came within her orbit. One of the French girls, Mlle. La C——, -fair, smart, good-looking, bestowed upon me some degree of favour. The -class was wont to do a weekly composition for correction by M. -Dagnan-Bouveret, who was one of the professors; the subjects he selected -were usually Scriptural, and Mlle. La C—— was accustomed to appeal to -me for information. She was, I remember, quite at sea about <i>La fille de -Jephté</i>, and explained that the Bible was a book not <i>convenable pour -les jeunes filles</i>, whereas the Lives of the Saints were most -interesting, and full of a thousand delicious little horrors. Without -approaching Martin’s Sunday<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_113" id="page_113">{113}</a></span> School erudition, I presently found myself -established as the exponent of the composition. I recollect one week, -when the subject was “The Maries at the Sepulchre,” an obsequious German -came to inquire “if eet was in ze morning zat ze holy Laties did co to -ze tomb? Or did zose Laties, perhaps, co in ze efening?”</p> - -<p>Mlle. la C——’s home chanced to be the house next but one to the -Studio, and the Rue Washington was a street of a decorum appropriate to -its name. None the less, a <i>bonne</i> came daily at 12 o’clock to escort -her home for <i>déjeuner</i>. There came a day when the <i>bonne</i> failed of her -mission, and on my return at one o’clock, I found my young friend (who -was as old as she would ever, probably, admit to being) faint with -hunger, and very angry, but too much afraid of the wrath of her family -to return alone.</p> - -<p>One wonders whether, even in provincial France, Freedom still denies -herself to this extent.</p> - -<p>In the following spring I went again to Paris, and this time, my friend -May Goodhall being unfortunately unable to come with me, a very -delightful American, and her friend, German by up-bringing, but of old -French noble descent, allowed me to join their <i>ménage</i>. Its duties were -divided according to our capacities. Marion A—— was housekeeper, -“Ponce,” by virtue of her German training, was cook, and to me was -allotted the humble <i>rôle</i> of scullion. We had rooms in a tall and -filthy old house in the Rue Madame, one of those sinister and dark and -narrow streets that one finds in the Rive Gauche, that seem as if they -must harbour all variety of horrors, known and unknown, and are composed -of houses whose incredible discomforts would break the spirit of any -creature less inveterate in optimism than an Art student. For Marion and -Ponce and I had decided<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_114" id="page_114">{114}</a></span> to abandon the Rue Washington, and to go to -what was known there as “<i>le Colarossi là-bas</i>,” the real, serious, -professional studio (as opposed to its refined astral body, “<i>près -l’Étoile</i>”), and we now felt ourselves Art students indeed.</p> - -<p>I don’t know how young women manage now, but in those days I and my -fellows were usually given—like the Prodigal Son—a portion, a sum of -money, which was to last for as long or as short a time as we pleased, -but we knew that when it ended there would be no husks to fall back -upon; nothing but one long note on the horn, “Home!”, and home we should -have to go. (I once ran it to so fine a point that I could buy no food -between Paris and London, and when I arrived at my uncle’s house in -London, it was my long-suffering uncle who paid the cabman.)</p> - -<p>Therefore, for the keen ones, the most stringent and profound economies -were the rule. Never did I reveal to my father and mother more than the -most carefully selected details of that house in the Rue Madame. I paid -seven francs per week for my bedroom and <i>service</i>, and though this may -not seem excessive, I am inclined now to think that the accommodation -was dear at the money. My room, <i>au cinquième</i>, had a tiled floor, but -this was of less consequence, as its size permitted of most of the -affairs of life being conducted from a central and stationary position -on the bed. Thence, I could shut the door, poke the fire, cook my -breakfast, and open the window, a conventional rite, quite disconnected -with the question of fresh air. The outlook was into a central shaft, -full of darkness and windows, remarkable for the variety and pungency of -its atmosphere, and for the fact that at no hour of the day or night did -it cease to reverberate with the thunderous gabble of pianos, the acrid -screeches of the violin—(to which<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_115" id="page_115">{115}</a></span> latter I contributed a not unworthy -share)—and, worst of all, the solfeggi of the embryo vocalist.</p> - -<p>The <i>service</i> (comprised, it may be remembered, in the daily franc) -consisted in the occasional offices of a male housemaid, whose -professional visits could only be traced by the diminution of our -hoarded supplies of English cigarettes. Yet he was not all evil. He -reminded me of my own people at home in his readiness to perform any -task that was not part of his duties, and a small coin would generally -evoke hot water. Marion A——, who had retained, even in the Rue Madame, -a domestic standard to which I never aspired, would, at intervals, offer -Léon her opinion of him and his methods. The housemaid, with one of -Ponce’s cigarettes in the corner of his mouth, and one of mine behind -his ear, would accept it in the best spirit possible, and once went so -far as to assure her, with a charming smile, that he had now been so -much and so very often scolded that he really did not mind it in the -least.</p> - -<p>Colarossi, the proprietor of the studios, was a wily and good-natured -old Italian, who had been a model, and having saved money, had somehow -acquired a nest of tumble-down studios in the Rue de la Grande -Chaumière. He then bribed, with the promise of brilliant pupils, some -rising artists to act as his “Professeurs,” and secured, with the -promise of brilliant professors, a satisfactory crowd of rising pupils, -and by various arts he had succeeded in keeping both promises -sufficiently to make his venture a success. The studio in which I worked -was at the top of the building, and was reached by a very precarious, -external wooden staircase; the men-students were on the ground-floor -beneath us. “<i>Le Colarossi là-bas</i>” was indisputably serious. The models -were well managed, as might be expected, when no trick<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_116" id="page_116">{116}</a></span> of the trade -could hope to pass undetected by “<i>Le Patron</i>”; the students were there -to work, and to do good work at that, and the women’s and men’s studios -were all crowded with “<i>les sérieux</i>.” Raphael Collin, gloomy, pale, -pock-marked, and clever, and Gustave Courtois—“<i>Le beau Gustave</i>”—tall -and swaggering, with a forked red beard, and a furious moustache like -two emphatic accents (both grave and acute), were our professors. They -were both first-rate men, and were respected as much as they were -feared. They went their rounds with—as it were—scythe blades on their -chariot wheels, and flaming swords in their hands. It was nerve-shaking -to hear the cheerful and incessant noises of “<i>les hommes en bas</i>” cease -in an instant, as though they had all been turned to stone, and to know -that the Terror that walked in the noonday was upon them. Extraordinary -how that silence, and that awful time of waiting for the step on our -stair, opened the eyes; everything was wrong, and it was now too late to -make it right. And then, the professor’s tour of slaughter over, and the -study, that was “<i>pas assez bien construit</i>,” looking with its savage -corrections, as if someone had been striking matches on it, how feebly -one tottered to the old concierge for the three sous’ worth of black -coffee that was to pull one together, and enable the same office to be -performed for the humiliated drawing. It may, however, be remembered to -“<i>le beau Gustave</i>” that one <i>élève</i> was spared from the fire and sword -to which he was wont to put the Studio. This was a small and ancient -widow who arrived one Monday morning, announcing that she was -eighty-two, but none the less had decided to become an artist. It was -soon pathetically obvious that she would require a further eighty-two -years, at least, to carry out her intention. Courtois came,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_117" id="page_117">{117}</a></span> regarded -with stupefaction the sheet of brown paper on which she had described, -in pink chalk, hieroglyphs whose purport were known only to herself, -faltered “<i>Continuez, Madame</i>,” and hurried on. Despite this -encouragement, the old lady apparently abandoned her high resolve, for -on Saturday she departed, and the Studio knew her no more.</p> - -<p>When I think of Colarossi’s, I can now recall only foreigners; many -Germans, a Czech, who sang, beautifully, enchanting Volksliede of the -Balkans, and whose accompaniments I used to play on a piano that -properly required two performers, one to sit on the music stool and put -the notes down, the other to sit on the floor and push them up again; -they all stuck. There were Swiss, and Russians, and <i>Finlandaises</i>; -there was a Hungarian Jewess, a disgusting being, almost brutish in her -manners and customs, yet brilliant in her work; an oily little -Marseillaise, Parthians and Medes and Elamites, dwellers in Mesopotamia -(with a stress upon the first syllable), unclean, uncivilised, -determined, with but one object in life, to extract the last sou of -value from their <i>abonnements</i> (and, incidentally, also to extract from -any unguarded receptacle such colours, charcoal, <i>punaises</i>, etc., as -they were in need of, uninfluenced by any consideration save that of -detection.)</p> - -<p>The standard of accomplishment was very high. The Marseillaise, who -looked like a rag-picker, did extraordinarily good work; so, as I have -said, did the Jewess, whose appearance suggested an itinerant barrow and -fried potatoes. (Delicious French fried potatoes! I used to buy five -sous’ worth off a brazier at the corner of the Place S. Sulpice, and -carry them back to the <i>ménage</i> wrapped in a piece of <i>La Patrie</i>, until -Ponce, who adored animals, was told very officiously that they were -fried in the fat of<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_118" id="page_118">{118}</a></span> lost dogs, and forbade further dealings with the -murderer.)</p> - -<p>Colarossi’s never took “a day off.” Weekdays, Sundays, and holy days, -the studios were open, and there were <i>élèves</i> at work. Impossible to -imagine what has become of them, all those strange, half-sophisticated -savages, diligently polishing their single weapon, to which all else had -been sacrificed.</p> - -<p>Yet when I look back to the Studio, to its profound engrossment in its -intention, its single-hearted sacrifice of everything in life to the one -Vision, its gorgeous contempt for appearances and conventions, I find -myself thinking how good it would be to be five and twenty, and storming -up that rickety staircase again, with a paint-box in one hand, and a -<i>Carton</i> as big as the Gates of Gaza in the other.</p> - -<div class="figcenter"><a name="ill_8" id="ill_8"></a> -<a href="images/ill_003_lg.jpg"> -<img src="images/ill_003_sml.jpg" width="379" height="436" alt="[Image unavailable.]" /></a> -<div class="caption"><p>DANS LA RIVE GAUCHE.</p></div> -</div> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_119" id="page_119">{119}</a></span></p> - -<h2><a name="CHAPTER_X" id="CHAPTER_X"></a>CHAPTER X<br /><br /> -<small>WHEN FIRST SHE CAME</small></h2> - -<p>“<span class="smcap">Sure</span> ye’re always laughing! That ye may laugh in the sight of the Glory -of Heaven!”</p> - -<p>This benediction was bestowed upon Martin by a beggar-woman in -Skibbereen, and I hope, and believe, it has been fulfilled. Wherever she -was, if a thing amused her she had to laugh. I can see her in such a -case, the unpredictable thing that was to touch the spot, said or done, -with streaming tears, helpless, almost agonised, much as one has seen a -child writhe in the tortured ecstasy of being tickled. The large -conventional jest had but small power over her; it was the trivial, -subtle absurdity, the inversion of the expected, the sublimity getting a -little above itself and failing to realise that it had taken that fatal -step over the border; these were the things that felled her, and laid -her, wherever she might be, in ruins.</p> - -<p>In Richmond Parish Church, on a summer Sunday, it happened to her and a -friend to be obliged to stand in the aisle, awaiting the patronage of -the pew-opener. The aisle was thronged, and Martin was tired. She -essayed to lean against the end of a fully occupied pew, and not only -fully occupied, but occupied by a row of such devout and splendid ladies -as are only seen in perfection in smart suburban churches. I<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_120" id="page_120">{120}</a></span> have said -the aisle was thronged, and, as she leaned, the pressure increased. Too -late she knew that she had miscalculated her mark. Like Sisera, the son -of Jabin, she bowed (only she bowed backwards), she fell; where she -fell, there she lay down, and where she lay down was along the laps of -those devout and splendid ladies. These gazed down into her convulsed -countenance with eyes that could not have expressed greater horror or -surprise if she had been a boa constrictor; a smileless glare, terribly -enhanced by gold-rimmed <i>pince-nez</i>. She thinks she must have extended -over fully four of them. She never knew how she regained the aisle. She -was herself quite powerless, and she thinks that with knee action, -similar to that of a knife-grinder, they must have banged her on to her -feet. It was enough for her to be beyond the power of those horrified -and indignant and gold eye-glassed eyes, even though she knew that -nothing could deliver her from the grip of the demon of laughter. She -says she was given a seat, out of pity, I suppose, shortly afterwards, -and there, on her knees and hidden under the brim of her hat, she wept, -and uttered those faint insect squeaks that indicate the extremity of -endurance, until the end of the service, when her unfortunate companion -led her home.</p> - -<p>It was, as it happens, in church that I saw her first; in our own -church, in Castle Townshend. That was on Sunday, January 17, 1886. I -immediately commandeered her to sing in the choir, and from that day, -little as she then knew it, she was fated to become one of its -fundamental props and stays. A position than which few are more arduous -and none more thankless.</p> - -<p>I suppose some suggestion of what she looked like should here be given. -The photograph that forms<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_121" id="page_121">{121}</a></span> the frontispiece of this book was of this -period, and it gives as good a suggestion of her as can be hoped for -from a photograph. She was of what was then considered “medium height,” -5 ft. 5-1/2 in. Since then the standard has gone up, but in 1886 Martin -was accustomed to assert that small men considered her “a monstrous fine -woman,” and big men said she was “a dear little thing.” I find myself -incapable of appraising her. Many drawings I have made of her, and, that -spring of 1886, before I went to Paris, I attempted also a small sketch -in oils, with a hope, that was futile, that colour might succeed where -black and white had failed. I can only offer an inadequate catalogue.</p> - -<p>Eyes: large, soft, and brown, with the charm of expression that is often -one of the compensations of short sight. Hair: bright brown and waving, -liable to come down out riding, and on one such occasion described by an -impressionable old General as “a chestnut wealth,” a stigma that she was -never able to live down. A colour like a wild rose—a simile that should -be revered on account of its long service to mankind, and must be -forgiven since none other meets the case—and a figure of the lightest -and slightest, on which had been bestowed the great and capricious boon -of smartness, which is a thing apart, and does not rely upon merely -anatomical considerations.</p> - -<p>“By Jove, Miss Martin,” said an ancient dressmaker, of the order -generically known as “little women,” “By Jove, Miss, you have a very -genteel back!” And the compliment could not have been better put, though -I think, from a literary standpoint, it was excelled by a commendation -pronounced by a “little tailor” on a coat of his own construction. “Now, -Mr. Sullivan,” said his client anxiously, twining her neck,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_122" id="page_122">{122}</a></span> -giraffe-like, in a vain endeavour to view the small of her own back, -“<i>is</i> the back right?”</p> - -<p>“Mrs. Cair’rns,” replied Mr. Sullivan with solemnity, “humanity could do -no more.”</p> - -<p>Martin’s figure, good anywhere, looked its best in the saddle; she had -the effect of having poised there without effort, as a bird poises on a -spray; she looked even more of a feather-weight than she was, yet no -horse that I have ever known, could, with his most malign capers, -discompose the airy security of her seat, still less shake her nerve. -Before I knew how extravagantly short-sighted she was, I did not -appreciate the pluck that permitted her to accept any sort of a mount, -and to face any sort of a fence, blindfold, and that inspired her out -hunting to charge what came in her way, with no more knowledge of what -was to happen than Marcus Curtius had when he leaped into the gulf.</p> - -<p>It is trite, not to say stupid, to expatiate upon that January Sunday -when I first met her; yet it has proved the hinge of my life, the place -where my fate, and hers, turned over, and new and unforeseen things -began to happen to us. They did not happen at once. An idler, more -good-for-nothing pack of “blagyards” than we all were could not easily -be found. I, alone, kept up a pretence of occupation; I was making -drawings for the <i>Graphic</i> in those days, and was in the habit of -impounding my young friends as models. My then studio—better known as -“the Purlieu,” because my mother, inveighing against its extreme -disorder, had compared it to “the revolting purlieus of some disgusting -town”—(I have said she did not spare emphasis)—was a meeting place for -the unemployed, I may say the unemployable, even though I could -occasionally wring a pose from one of them.</p> - -<div class="figcenter"><a name="ill_9" id="ill_9"></a> -<a href="images/ill_004_lg.jpg"> -<img src="images/ill_004_sml.jpg" width="491" height="374" alt="[Image unavailable.]" /></a> -<div class="caption"><p>MARTIN ROSS ON CONFIDENCE.</p></div> -</div> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_123" id="page_123">{123}</a></span></p> - -<p>Many and strange were the expedients to which I had to resort in the -execution of those drawings for the <i>Graphic</i>. For one series that set -forth the romantic and cheiromantic adventures of a clergyman, and the -lady (Martin) of his choice, the bedroom of a clerical guest had to be -burgled, and his Sunday coat and hat abstracted, at imminent risk of -discovery. In another, entitled “A Mule Ride in Trinidad,” a brother, in -the exiguous costume of bathing drawers and a large straw hat, was for -two mornings one of the attractions and ornaments of the Purlieu, after -which he retired to bed with a heavy cold, calling down curses upon the -Purlieu stove (an <i>objet d’art</i> of which Mrs. Martin had said that it -solved the problem of producing smoke without fire). Of another series -dealing with the adventures of a student of the violin in Paris, I find -in my diary the moving entry, “Crucified Martin head downwards, as the -fiddle girl, practising, with her music on the floor. Compelled H.” -(another female relative whose name shall be withheld) “to pose as a -Paris tram horse, in white stockings, with a chowrie for a tail.”</p> - -<p>These artistic exertions were varied by schooling the carriage horses -across country—in this connection I find mention of a youth imported by -a brother, and briefly alluded to by Martin as “a being like a little -meek bird with a brogue”; tobogganing in a bath chair down the village -hill (Castle Townshend Hill, which has a fall of about fifty feet in -two); “giant-striding” on the flypole in January mud; and, by the -exercise of Machiavellian diplomacy, securing Sorcerer and Ballyhooly, -the carriage horses aforesaid, for an occasional day with a scratch pack -of trencher-fed hounds, that visited the country at intervals, and for -whom the epithet “scratch” was appropriate in more senses than one.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_124" id="page_124">{124}</a></span></p> - -<p>It is perhaps noteworthy that on my second or third meeting with Martin -I suggested to her that we should write a book together and that I -should illustrate it. We had each of us already made our <i>début</i> in -print; she in the grave columns of the <i>Irish Times</i>, with an article on -the Administration of Relief to the Sufferers from the “Bad Times” of -which she makes mention in her memoir of her brother Robert (page 37); I -in the <i>Argosy</i>, with a short story, founded upon an incident of high -improbability, recounted, by the way, by the “little meek bird with a -brogue”; and not, I fear, made more credible by my rendering of it, -which had all the worst faults of conventionality and sensationalism.</p> - -<p>The literary atmosphere that year was full of what were known as -“Shilling Shockers.” A great hit had been made with a book of this -variety, named “Called Back,” and two cousins of our mothers’, Mr. W. -Wills (the dramatist, already mentioned), and the Hon. Mrs. Greene -(whose delightful stories for children, “Cushions and Corners,” “The -Grey House on the Hill,” etc., mark an epoch in such literature), were -reported to be collaborating in such a work. But I went to Paris, and -Martin put forth on a prolonged round of visits, and our literary -ambitions were stowed away with our winter clothes.</p> - -<p>In June I returned from Paris; “pale and dwindled,” Martin’s diary -mentions, “but fashionable,” which I find gratifying, though quite -untrue. It was one of those perfect summers that come sometimes to the -south of Ireland, when rain is not, and the sun is hot, but never too -hot, and the gardens are a storm of flowers, flowers such as one does -not see elsewhere, children of the south and the sun and the sea; tall -delphiniums that have climbed to the sky and brought down its most -heavenly blue;<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_125" id="page_125">{125}</a></span> Japanese iris, with their pale and dappled lilac discs -spread forth to the sun, like little plates and saucers at a high and -honourable “tea ceremony” in the land of Nippon; peonies and poppies, -arums and asphodel, every one of them three times as tall, and three -times as brilliant, and three times as sweet as any of their English -cousins, and all of them, and everything else as well, irradiated for me -that happy year by a new “Spirit of Delight.” It was, as I have said, -though then we knew it only dimly, the beginning, for us, of a new era. -For most boys and girls the varying, yet invariable, flirtations, and -emotional episodes of youth, are resolved and composed by marriage. To -Martin and to me was opened another way, and the flowering of both our -lives was when we met each other.</p> - -<p>If ever Ireland should become organised and systematised, and -allotmented, I would put in a plea that the parish of Castle Haven may -be kept as a national reserve for idlers and artists and idealists. The -memory comes back to me of those blue mornings of mid-June that Martin -and I, with perhaps the saving pretence of a paint-box, used to spend, -lying on the warm, short grass of the sheep fields on Drishane Side, -high over the harbour, listening to the curving cry of the curlews and -the mewing of the sea-gulls, as they drifted in the blue over our heads; -watching the sunlight waking dancing stars to life in the deeper blue -firmament below, and criticising condescendingly the manœuvres of the -little white-sailed racing yachts, as they strove and squeezed round -their mark-buoys, or rushed emulously to the horizon and back again. -Below us, by a hundred feet or so, other idlers bathed in the Dutchman’s -Cove, uttering those sea-bird screams that seem to be induced by the sea -equally in girls as in gulls.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_126" id="page_126">{126}</a></span> But Martin and I, having taken high -ground as artists and idealists, remained, roasting gloriously in the -sun, at the top of the cliffs.</p> - -<p>That summer was for all of us a time of extreme and excessive lawn -tennis. Tournaments, formal and informal, were incessant, challenges and -matches raged. Martin and I played an unforgettable match against two -long-legged lads, whose handicap, consisting as it did in tight skirts, -and highly-trimmed mushroom hats, pressed nearly as heavily on us as on -them. My mother, and a female friend of like passions with herself, had -backed us to win, and they kept up a wonderful and shameless <i>barrage</i> -of abuse between the petticoated warriors and their game, and an equally -staunch supporting fire of encouragement to us. When at last Martin and -I triumphed, my mother and the female friend were voiceless from long -screaming, but they rushed speechlessly into the middle of the court and -there flung themselves into each other’s arms.</p> - -<p>It was one of those times of high tide that come now and then, and not -in the Golden World did the time fleet more carelessly than it did for -all of us that summer. The mornings for sheer idling, the afternoons for -lawn tennis, the evenings for dancing, to my mother’s unrivalled -playing; or there was a coming concert, or a function in the church, to -be practised for. A new and zealous clergyman had recently taken the -place of a very easy-going cousin of my mother’s, and I find in Martin’s -diary this entry:</p> - -<p>“Unparalleled insolence of the new Parson, who wanted to know, <i>on -Saturday</i>, if Edith had yet chosen the hymns!” and again—“E. by -superhuman exertions, got the hymns away” (<i>i.e.</i> sent up to the reading -desk) “before the 3rd Collect. Canon —— swore himself in.”</p> - -<p>Kind and excellent man! Had the organist been<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_127" id="page_127">{127}</a></span> the subject sworn about, -no one could have blamed him. It was his hat and coat that we stole. His -wondrous gentleness and long suffering with a rapscallion choir shall -not be forgotten by a no less rapscallion organist.</p> - -<p>When I try to recall that lovely summer and its successor, the year of -the old Queen’s First Jubilee, 1887, I seem best to remember those -magical evenings when two or three boat-loads of us would row “up the -river,” which is no river, but a narrow and winding sea-creek, of, as we -hold, unparalleled beauty, between high hills, with trees on both its -sides, drooping low over the water, and seaweed, instead of ivy, hanging -from their branches. Nothing more enchanting than resting on one’s oars -in the heart of that dark mirror, with no sound but the sleepy chuckle -of the herons in the tall trees on the hill-side, or the gurgle of the -tide against the bows, until someone, perhaps, would start one of the -glees that were being practised for the then concert—there was always -one in the offing—and the Echo, that dwells opposite Roger’s Island, -would wake from its sleep and join in, not more than half a minute -behind the beat.</p> - -<p>Or out at the mouth of the harbour, the boats rocking a little in the -wide golden fields of moonlight, golden as sunlight, almost, in those -August nights, and the lazy oars, paddling in what seemed a sea of opal -oil, would drip with the pale flames of the phosphorus that seethed and -whispered at their touch, when, as Martin has said,</p> - -<p>“Land and sea lay in rapt accord, and the breast of the brimming tide -was laid to the breast of the cliff, with a low and broken voice of -joy.”</p> - -<p>These are some of those Irish yesterdays, that came and went lightly, -and were more memorable than Martin and I knew, that summer, when first -she came.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_128" id="page_128">{128}</a></span></p> - -<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XI" id="CHAPTER_XI"></a>CHAPTER XI<br /><br /> -<small>“AN IRISH COUSIN”</small></h2> - -<p><span class="smcap">I think</span> that the final impulse towards the career of letters was given -to us by that sorceress of whom mention has already been made. By her we -were assured of much that we did, and even more that we did not aspire -to (which included two husbands for me, and at least one for Martin); -but in the former category was included “literary success,” and, with -that we took heart and went forward.</p> - -<p>It was in October, 1887, that we began what was soon to be known to us -as “The Shocker,” and “The Shaughraun,” to our family generally, as -“that nonsense of the girls,” and subsequently, to the general public, -as “An Irish Cousin.” Seldom have the young and ardent “commenced -author” under less conducive circumstances. We were resented on so many -grounds. Waste of time; the arrogance of having conceived such a -project; and, chiefly, the abstention of two playmates. They called us -“The Shockers,” “The Geniuses” (this in bitter irony), “The -Hugger-muggerers” (this flight of fancy was my mother’s); when not -actually reviled, we were treated with much the same disapproving -sufferance that is shown to an outside dog who sneaks into the house on -a wet day. We compared ourselves, not without reason, to the Waldenses -and the Albigenses,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_129" id="page_129">{129}</a></span> and hid and fled about the house, with the -knowledge that every man’s hand was against us.</p> - -<p>Begun in idleness and without conviction, persecution had its usual -effect, and deepened somewhat tepid effort into enthusiasm, but the -first genuine literary impulse was given by a visit to an old and lonely -house, that stands on the edge of the sea, some twelve or thirteen miles -from Drishane. It was at that time inhabited by a distant kinswoman of -mine, a pathetic little old spinster lady, with the most charming, -refined, and delicate looks, and a pretty voice, made interesting by the -old-fashioned Irish touch in it; provincial, in that it told of life in -a province, yet entirely compatible with gentle breeding. She called me -“Eddith,” I remember (a pronunciation entirely her own), and she -addressed the remarkable being who ushered us in, half butler, half -coachman, as “Dinnis,” and she asked us to “take a glass of wine” with -her, and, apologising for the all too brief glimpse of the fire -vouchsafed to the leg of mutton, said she trusted we did not mind the -meat being “rare.”</p> - -<p>The little lady who entertained us is dead now; the old house, stripped -of its ancient portraits and furniture, is, like many another, in the -hands of farmer-people; its gardens have reverted to jungle. I wonder if -the tombstone of the little pet dog has been respected. In the shade of -a row of immense junipers, that made a sheltering hedge between the -flower garden and the wide Atlantic, stood the stone, inscribed, with -the romantic preciosity of our hostess’s youth,</p> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">“Lily, a violet-shrouded tomb of woe.”<br /></span> -</div></div> -</div> - -<p>But it was the old house, dying even then, that touched our -imaginations; full of memories of brave days past, when the little -lady’s great-grandfather,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_130" id="page_130">{130}</a></span> “Splendid Ned,” had been a leading blade in -“The County of Corke Militia Dragoons,” and his son, her grandfather, -had raised a troop of yeomanry to fight the Whiteboys, and, when the -English Government disbanded the yeomen, had, in just fury, pitched -their arms over the cliff into the sea, rather than yield them to the -rebels, and had then drunk the King’s health, with showy loyalty, in -claret that had never paid the same King a farthing.</p> - -<p>We had ridden the long thirteen miles in gorgeous October sunshine; -before we had seen the gardens, and the old castle on the cliff, and the -views generally, the sun was low in the sky, but we were not allowed to -leave until a tea, as colossal as our lunch had been, was consumed. Our -protests were unheeded, and we were assured that we should be “no time -at all springing through the country home.” (A suggestion that moved -Martin so disastrously, that only by means of hasty and forced -facetiousness was I enabled to justify her reception of it.) The sunset -was red in the west when our horses were brought round to the door, and -it was at that precise moment that into the Irish Cousin some thrill of -genuineness was breathed. In the darkened façade of the long grey house, -a window, just over the hall-door, caught our attention. In it, for an -instant, was a white face. Trails of ivy hung over the panes, but we saw -the face glimmer there for a minute and vanish.</p> - -<p>As we rode home along the side of the hills, and watched the fires of -the sunset sink into the sea, and met the crescent moon coming with -faint light to lead us home, we could talk and think only of that -presence at the window. We had been warned of certain subjects not to be -approached, and knew enough of the history of that old house to realise -what we had seen. An old stock, isolated from the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_131" id="page_131">{131}</a></span> world at large, -wearing itself out in those excesses that are a protest of human nature -against unnatural conditions, dies at last with its victims round its -death-bed. Half-acknowledged, half-witted, wholly horrifying; living -ghosts, haunting the house that gave them but half their share of life, -yet withheld from them, with half-hearted guardianship, the boon of -death.</p> - -<p>The shock of it was what we had needed, and with it “the Shocker” -started into life, or, if that is too much to say for it, its authors, -at least, felt that conviction had come to them; the insincere ambition -of the “Penny Dreadful” faded, realities asserted themselves, and the -faked “thrills” that were to make our fortunes were repudiated for ever. -Little as we may have achieved it, an ideal of Art rose then for us, far -and faint as the half-moon, and often, like her, hidden in clouds, yet -never quite lost or forgotten.</p> - -<p class="astt">* * * * *</p> - -<p>Probably all those who have driven the pen, in either single or double -harness, are familiar with the questions wont to be propounded by those -interested, or anxious to appear interested, in the craft of letters. It -is strange how beaten a track curiosity uses. The inquiries vary but -little. One type of investigator regards the <i>métier</i> of book-maker as a -kind of cross between the trades of cook and conjurer. If the recipe of -the mixture, or the trick of its production, can be extracted from those -possessed of the secret, the desired result can be achieved as simply as -a rice pudding, and forced like a card upon the publishers. The -alternative inquirer approaches the problem from the opposite pole, and -poses respectfully that conundrum with which the Youth felled Father -William:</p> - -<p>“What makes you so awfully clever?” “How<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_132" id="page_132">{132}</a></span> do you think of the things?” -And again, “How can you make the words come one after the other?” And -yet another, more wounding, though put in all good feeling, “But how do -you manage about the spelling? I suppose the printers do that for you?”</p> - -<p>With Martin and me, however, the fact of our collaboration admitted of -variants. I have found a fragment of a letter of mine to her that sets -forth some of these. As it also in some degree expounds the type of the -examiner, I transcribe it all.</p> - -<div class="blockquot"><p class="c"> -E. Œ. S. to V. F. M. (<i>circa</i> 1904).<br /> -</p> - -<p>“She was wearing white kid gloves, and was eating heavily buttered -teacake and drinking tea, with her gloves buttoned, and her veil -down, and her loins, generally, girded, as if she were keeping the -Passover. She began by discussing Archdeacon Z——’s wife.</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>Ah, she was a sweet woman, but she always had a very delicate, -puny sort of a colour. Ah no, <i>not</i> strong.’ A sigh, made -difficult, but very moving, by teacake, followed by hurried -absorption of tea. ‘And the poor Archdeacon too. Ah, he was a very -clever man.’ (My countenance probably expressed dissent.) ‘Well, he -was very clever at <i>religion</i>. Oh, he was a wonderfully holy man! -Now, <i>that’s</i> what I’d call him, holy. And he used to talk like -that. Nothing but religion; he certainly was most clever at it.’</p> - -<p>“Later on in the conversation, which lasted, most enjoyably, for -half an hour, ‘Are <i>you</i> the Miss Somerville who writes the books -with Miss Martin? Now! To think I should have been talking to you -all this time! And is it you that do the story and Miss Martin the -words?’ (etc., etc., for some time). ‘And which of you holds the -pen?’ (To this branch of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_133" id="page_133">{133}</a></span> examination much weight was attached, -and it continued for some time.) ‘And do you put in everyone you -meet? No? Only sometimes? And sometimes people who you <i>never</i> met? -Well! I declare, that’s like direct inspiration!’</p> - -<p>“She was a delightful woman. She went on to ask me,</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>Do you travel much? I love it! I think Abroad’s very pritty. Do -you like Abroad?’</p> - -<p>“She also told me that she and ‘me daughter’ had just been to -Dublin—‘to see the great tree y’know.’ By the aid of ‘direct -inspiration’ I guessed that she meant Beerbohm of that ilk, but as -she hadn’t mentioned the theatre, I think it was rather a fine -effort.”</p></div> - -<p>The question put by this lady, as to which of us held the pen, has ever -been considered of the greatest moment, and, as a matter of fact, during -our many years of collaboration, it was a point that never entered our -minds to consider. To those who may be interested in an unimportant -detail, I may say that our work was done conversationally. One or the -other—not infrequently both, simultaneously—would state a proposition. -This would be argued, combated perhaps, approved, or modified; it would -then be written down by the (wholly fortuitous) holder of the pen, would -be scratched out, scribbled in again; before it found itself finally -transferred into decorous MS. would probably have suffered many things, -but it would, at all events, have had the advantage of having been well -aired.</p> - -<p>I have an interesting letter, written by a very clever woman, herself a -writer, to a cousin of ours. She found it impossible to believe in the -jointness of the authorship, though she admitted her inability<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_134" id="page_134">{134}</a></span> to -discern the joints in the writing, and having given “An Irish Cousin” a -handling far more generous than it deserves, says:</p> - -<p>“But though I think the book a success, and cannot pick out the -fastenings of the two hands, I yet think the next novel ought to be by -<i>one</i> of them. I wonder by which! I say this because I thought the -conception and carrying out of ‘Willy’ much the best part of the -character drawing of the whole book. It had the real thing in it. If -Willy, and the poor people’s talk, were by one hand, that hand is the -better of the two, say I!”</p> - -<p>I sent this letter to Martin, and had “the two hands” collaborated in -her reply, it could not more sufficingly have expressed my feelings.</p> - -<div class="blockquot"><p class="c"> -V. F. M. to E. Œ. S. (Sept., 1889.)<br /> -</p> - -<p>“You do not say if you want Miss ——’s most interesting letter -back. Never mind what she says about people writing together. We -have proved that we can do it, and we shall go on. The reason few -people can, is because they have separate minds upon most subjects, -and fight their own hands all the time. I think the two Shockers -have a very strange belief in each other, joined to a critical -faculty; added to which, writing together is, to me at least, one -of the greatest pleasures I have. To write with you doubles the -triumph and the enjoyment, having first halved the trouble and -anxiety.”</p></div> - -<p>On January 3rd, 1888, we had finished the first half of “An Irish -Cousin.”</p> - -<p>I find in my diary: “A few last revisionary scratches at the poor -Shocker, and so farewell for the present. Gave it to mother to read. She -loathes it.”</p> - -<p>All through the spring months we wrote and rewrote,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_135" id="page_135">{135}</a></span> and clean-copied, -and cast away the clean copies illegible from corrections. -Intermittently, and as we could, we wrote on, and in Martin’s diary I -find a quotation from an old part-song that expressed the general -attitude towards us:</p> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">“Thus flies the dolphin from the shark,<br /></span> -<span class="i2">And the stag before the hounds.”<br /></span> -</div></div> -</div> - -<p class="nind">Martin and I were the dolphin and the stag. As a propitiatory measure -the Shocker was read aloud at intervals, but with no great success. Our -families declined to take us seriously, but none the less offered -criticisms, incessant, and mutually destructive. In connection with this -point, and as a warning to other beginners, I will offer a few -quotations from letters of this period.</p> - -<div class="blockquot"><p class="c"> -E. Œ. S. to V. F. M. (Spring, 1888.)<br /> -</p> - -<p>“Minnie says you are too refined, and too anxious not to have -anything in our book that was ever in anyone else’s book. Mother, -on the other hand, complained bitterly of the want of love -interest. Minnie defended us, and told her that there was now -plenty of love in it. To which Mother, who had not then read the -proposal, replied with infinite scorn, ‘only squeezing her hand, my -dear!’ She went on to say that she ‘<i>liked</i> improprieties.’ I -assured her I had urged you in vain to permit such, and she -declared that you were quite wrong, and when I suggested the -comments of The Family, she loudly deplored the fact of our writing -being known, ignoring the fact that she has herself blazoned it to -the ends of the earth <i>and</i> to Aunt X.”</p></div> - -<p>Following on this, a protest is recorded from another relative, on the -use of the expression “he ran as if<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_136" id="page_136">{136}</a></span> the devil were after him,” but the -letter ends with a reassuring postscript.</p> - -<p>“Mother has just said that she thought Chapter IX <i>excellent</i>, ‘most -fiery love’; though she said it had rather taken her by surprise, as she -‘had not noticed a stream of love leading up to it—only jealousy.’<span class="lftspc">”</span></p> - -<p>At length, in London, on May 24th, the end, which had seemed further off -than the end of the world, came. The MS., fairly and beautifully -copied,—typewriters being then unborn,—was sent off to Messrs. Sampson -Low. In a month it returned, without comment. We then, with, as Dr. -Johnson says, “a frigid tranquillity, having little to fear or hope from -censure, or from praise,” placed it in the hands of a friend to do with -it as he saw fit, and proceeded to forget all about it.</p> - -<p>It was not until the following December that the dormant Shocker -suddenly woke to life. It was on Sunday morning, December 2nd, 1888, -that the fateful letter came. Messrs. R. Bentley & Son offered us £25 on -publication, and £25 on sale of 500 copies of the book, which was to be -published in two volumes at half a guinea each.</p> - -<p>“All comment is inadequate,” says Martin’s diary; “wrote a dizzy letter -of acceptance to Bentley, and went to church, twice, in a glorified -trance.”</p> - -<p>(Thus did a huntsman of mine, having slain two foxes in a morning, which -is a rarer feat in Carbery than—say—in Cheshire, present himself in -gratitude at the priest’s night-school.)</p> - -<p>Passing over intermediate matters, I will follow the career of the -Shocker, which was not published for six months after its assignment to -Messrs. Bentley, six months during which Martin had written several -admirable articles for <i>The World</i> (then edited by Mr. Edmund Yates), -and I had illustrated a picture-<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_137" id="page_137">{137}</a></span>book, “The Kerry Recruit,” and written -an indifferent short story, and we had begun to think about “The Real -Charlotte.” For some reason that I have now forgotten, my mother was -opposed to my own name appearing in “An Irish Cousin.” Martin’s <i>nom de -plume</i> was ready to hand, her articles in <i>The World</i> having been signed -“Martin Ross,” but it was only after much debate and searching of -pedigrees that a Somerville ancestress, by name Geilles Herring, was -selected to face the music for me. Her literary career was brief, and -was given a death-blow by Edmund Yates, who asked “Martin Ross” the -reason of her collaboration with a grilled herring; and as well as I -remember, my own name was permitted to appear in the second edition.</p> - -<p>This followed the first with a pleasing celerity, and was sold out by -the close of the year. Any who have themselves been through the mill, -and know what it is to bring forth a book, will remember the joys, and -fears, and indignations, and triumphings, that accompany the appearance -of a first-born effort. Many and various were the letters and -criticisms. Our vast relationship made an advertising agency of the most -far-reaching and pervasive nature, and our friends were faithful in -their insistence in the matter at the libraries.</p> - -<p>“<i>Have</i> you ‘An Irish Cousin?’<span class="lftspc">”</span> was demanded at a Portsmouth bookshop.</p> - -<p>“No, Madam,” the bookseller replied, with <i>hauteur</i>, “I have <i>no</i> -H’Irish relations.”</p> - -<p>Looking back on it now, I recognise that what was in itself but a very -moderate and poorly constructed book owed its success, not only with the -public, but with the reviewers, to the fact that it chanced to be the -first in its particular field. Miss Edgeworth had been the last to write -of Irish country life with<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_138" id="page_138">{138}</a></span> sincerity and originality, dealing with both -the upper and lower classes, and dealing with both unconventionally. -Lever’s brilliant and extravagant books, with their ever enchanting -Micky Frees and Corney Delaneys, merely created and throned the stage -Irishman, the apotheosis of the English ideal. It was of Lever’s period -to be extravagant. The Handley Cross series is a case in point. Let me -humbly and hurriedly disclaim any impious thought of depreciating -Surtees. No one who has ever ridden a hunt, or loved a hound, but must -admit that he has his unsurpassable moments. “The Cat and Custard-pot -day,” with that run that goes with the rush of a storm; the -<i>tête-à-tête</i> of Mr. Jorrocks and James Pigg, during which they drank -each other’s healths, and the healths of the hounds, and the <i>séance</i> -culminated with the immortal definition of the state of the weather, as -it obtained in the cupboard; Soapey Sponge and Lucy Glitters “sailing -away with the again breast-high-scent pack”—these things are indeed -<i>hors concours</i>. But I think it is undeniable that the hunting people of -Handley Cross, like Lever’s dragoons, were always at full gallop. With -Surtees as with Lever, everyone is “all out,” there is nothing in -hand—save perhaps a pair of duelling pistols or a tandem whip—and the -height of the spirits is only equalled by the tallness of the hero’s -talk. That intolerable adjective “rollicking” is consecrated to Lever; -if certain of the rank and file of the reviewers of our later books -could have realised with what abhorrence we found it applied to -ourselves, and could have known how rigorously we had endeavoured to -purge our work of anything that might justify it, they might, out of the -kindness that they have always shown us, have been more sparing of it.</p> - -<p>Lever was a Dublin man, who lived most of his</p> - -<div class="figcenter"><a name="ill_10" id="ill_10"></a> -<a href="images/ill_005_lg.jpg"> -<img src="images/ill_005_sml.jpg" width="392" height="557" alt="[Image unavailable.]" /></a> -<div class="caption"><p>EDITH ŒNONE SOMERVILLE.</p></div> -</div> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_139" id="page_139">{139}</a></span></p> - -<p class="nind">life on the Continent, and worked, like a scene-painter, by artificial -light, from memoranda. Miss Edgeworth had the privilege, which was also -ours, of living in Ireland, in the country, and among the people of whom -she wrote. Of the Irish novels of Miss Lawless the same may be said, -though the angle at which she chose to regard that many-sided and deeply -agreeable person, the Irish peasant, excluded the humour that permeates -Miss Edgeworth’s books. (One recalls with gratitude the “quality toss” -of Miss Judy McQuirk.) That Miss Edgeworth’s father was a landlord, and -a resident one, deepened her insight and widened her opportunities. -Panoramic views may, no doubt, be obtained from London; and what a -County Meath lady spoke of as a “<i>ventre à terre</i> in Dublin” has its -advantages; but I am glad that my lot and Martin’s were cast “in a fair -ground, in a good ground, In Carbery:”—(with apologies to Mr. -Kipling)—“by the sea.”</p> - -<p class="astt">* * * * *</p> - -<p>I will not inflict the undeservedly kind comments of the reviewers of -“An Irish Cousin” upon these pages, though I may admit that nothing that -I have ever read, before or since, has seemed to me as entirely -delightful as the column and a half that <i>The Spectator</i> generously -devoted to a very humble book, by two unknowns, who had themselves -nearly lost belief in it.</p> - -<p>August, 1889, was a lucky month for Martin and me. We had a “good -Press”—we have often marvelled at its goodness—we were justified of -our year of despised effort; the hunted Shockers emerged from their -caves to take a place in the sun; we had indeed “Commenced Author.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_140" id="page_140">{140}</a></span>”</p> - -<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XII" id="CHAPTER_XII"></a>CHAPTER XII<br /><br /> -<small>THE YEARS OF THE LOCUST</small></h2> - -<p><span class="smcap">Before</span> I abandon these “Irish Cousin” years at Drishane, I should like -to say something more of the old conditions there. I do not think I -claim too much for my father and mother when I say that they represented -for the poor people of the parish their Earthly Providence, their Court -of Universal Appeal, and, in my mother’s case, their Medical Attendant, -who, moreover, provided the remedies, as well as the nourishment, that -she prescribed.</p> - -<p>The years of the ’eighties were years of leanness, “years that the -locust hath eaten.” Congested District Boards and Departments of -Agriculture had not then arisen. Successive alterations of the existing -land tenure had bewildered rather than encouraged the primitive farmers -of this southern seaboard; the benefits promised were slow in -materialising, and in the meantime the crops failed. The lowering or -remission of rents did not mean any immediate benefit to people who were -often many years in arrears. Even in normal years the yield of the land, -in the district of which I speak, barely sufficed to feed the dwellers -on it; the rent, when paid, was, in most cases, sent from America, by -emigrated sons and daughters. There was but little margin at any time. -In bad years there was hunger.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_141" id="page_141">{141}</a></span></p> - -<p>Two or three fairly prosperous farms there were, and for the rest, a -crowd of entirely “uneconomic” holdings, a rabble of fragmentary -patches, scarcely larger than the “allotments” of this present war time, -each producing a plentiful crop of children, but leaving much to be -desired in such matters as the increase of the soil.</p> - -<p>The district is not a large one. It contains about eight miles of fierce -and implacable seaboard, with only a couple of coves in which the -fishermen can find some shelter for their boats, and its whole extent is -but three or four miles in length, by a little more than half as many in -depth. A great headland, like a lion couchant, sentinels it on one side; -on the other, a long and malign spike of rock, thinly clad with heather, -and furze, drives out into the Atlantic, like an alligator with jaws -turned seawards. Not few are the ships that have found their fate in -those jaws; during these past three years of war, this stretch of sea -has seen sudden and fearful happenings, but even these tragedies are -scarcely more fearful than those that, in the blackness of mid-winter -storms, have befallen many a ship on the desperate rocks of Yokawn and -Reendhacusán.</p> - -<p>It is hard to blame people for being ignorant, equally hard to condemn -them for thriftlessness and dirt in such conditions as obtained thirty -years ago in what are now called “Congested Districts.” Thriftlessness -and dirt were indeed the ruling powers in that desolate country. In -fortunate years, desolate and “congested” though it was, its little -fields, inset among the rocks and bogs, could produce crops in -reasonable quantity, and—as I do not wish to overstate the case—not -less luxuriant in growth than their attendant weeds. The yellow ragwort, -the purple loosestrife, the gorgeous red and orange heads of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_142" id="page_142">{142}</a></span> docks, -only in Kerry can these <i>fleurs de mal</i> be equalled, even in Kerry they -cannot be surpassed. The huge shoulder of the headland is beautiful with -heather and ling of all sorts and shades; the pink sea-thrift—would -that other forms of thrift throve with equal success!—meets the heather -at the verge of the cliffs, and looks like a decoration of posies of -monthly roses. <i>Osmunda Regalis</i> fern fringes the streams, and the -fuchsia bushes have fed on the Food of the Gods and are become trees. On -a central plateau, high over the sea, stands one of the signal towers -that were built at the time of the French landing in Bantry. In its -little courtyard you stand “ringed by the azure world.” From west to -east the ocean is wide before you. On many days I have seen it, in -summer and winter alike lovely; a vast outlook that snatches away your -breath, and takes you to its bosom, making you feel yourself the very -apex and central point of the wondrous crescent line of fretted shore, -that swings from the far blue Fastnet Rock, looking like an anchored -battleship, on the west, to the long and slender arm of the Galley Head, -with its white lighthouse, floating like a seagull on the rim of the -horizon. Between those points, among those heavenly blues and greens and -purples, that change and glow and melt into each other in ecstasies of -passionate colour, history has been made, and unforgettable things have -happened. But standing up there in the wind and the sun, on that small -green circle of grass, hearing the sea-birds’ wild and restless cries, -watching the waves lift and break into snow on the flanks of the Stag -Rocks far below, it is impossible to remember human insanity, impossible -to think of anything save of the overwhelming beauty that encircles you.</p> - -<p>In that climate and that soil anything could flourish, given only a -little shelter, and a little care, and the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_143" id="page_143">{143}</a></span> elimination from the -cultivators of traditional imbecilities; eliminating also, if possible, -fatalism, and the custom of attributing to “the Will o’ God” each and -every disaster, from a houseful of hungry children to an outbreak of -typhus consequent on hopelessly insanitary conditions.</p> - -<p>“How was it the spuds failed with ye?” asked someone, looking at the -blackened “lazy-beds” of potatoes.</p> - -<p>“I couldn’t hardly say,” replied the cultivator, who had omitted the -attention of spraying them; “Whatever it was, God spurned them in a -boggy place.”</p> - -<p>Things are better now. The Congested Districts Board has done much, the -general spread of education and civilisation has done more. Inspectors, -instructors, remission of rents, land purchase, State loans, English -money in various forms, have improved the conditions in a way that would -hardly have been credible thirty years ago, when, in these congested -districts, semi-famine was chronic, and few, besides the “little -scholars” of the National Schools, could read or write, and the breeding -of animals and cultivation of crops was the affair of an absentee -Providence, and no more to be influenced by human agency than the -vagaries of the weather.</p> - -<p>The first of the “Famines” in which I can remember my mother’s -collecting and distributing relief was in 1880. The potatoes had failed, -and I find it recorded that “troops of poor women came to Drishane from -the west for help.” My mother lectured them on the necessity of not -eating the potatoes that had been given them for seed, and assured them, -not as superfluously as might be supposed, that if they ate them they -could not sow them. To this they replied in chorus.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_144" id="page_144">{144}</a></span></p> - -<p>“May the Lord spare your Honour long!” and went home and boiled the -seed-potatoes for supper.</p> - -<p>Poor creatures, what else could they do, with their children asking them -for food?</p> - -<p>In that same spring came a woman, crying, and saying she was “the most -disthressful poor person, that hadn’t the good luck to be in the -Misthress’s division.” Asked where she lived, she replied,</p> - -<p>“I do be like a wild goose over on the side of Drominidy Wood.”</p> - -<p>Spring after spring, during those dark years for Ireland of the -’eighties, the misery and the hunger-time recurred. Seed-potatoes, -supplied by charity, were eaten; funds were raised, and help, public and -private, was given, but Famine, like its brother, Typhus, was only -conciliated, never annihilated. In 1891 Mr. Balfour’s Relief Fund and -Relief Works brought almost the first touch of permanence into the -alleviating conditions. My mother was among the chief of the -distributors for this parish. Desperate though the state of many of the -people was, Ireland has not yet, thank Heaven, ceased to be Ireland, and -the distribution of relief had some irrepressibly entertaining aspects -that need not wholly be ignored.</p> - -<p>My mother had herself collected a considerable sum of money, for buying -food and clothes (the Government fund being, as well as I recollect, -mainly devoted to the purchase of seed-potatoes). Many were her clients, -and grievous though their need was, it was impossible not to enjoy the -high absurdities of her convocations of distribution. These took place -in the kitchen at Drishane. The women came twice a week to get the food -tickets, and the preliminary gathering in the stable-yard looked and -sounded like a parliament of rooks. Incredibly ragged and wretched, but -unquenchable in spirit and conversation, they sat,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_145" id="page_145">{145}</a></span> huddled in dark -cloaks or shawls, on the ground in rows, waiting to be admitted to the -kitchen when “The Misthress” was ready for them. Most of them had known -nothing of the existence of the fund until told of it by my mother’s -envoys. It was my mission, and that of my brethren, to ride through the -distressed town-lands, and summon those who seemed in worst need, and in -my letters and diaries of these years I have found many entries on the -subject.</p> - -<p>“<i>Jan. 27, 1891.</i>—Rode round the Lickowen country. Sickened and stunned -by the misery. Hordes of women and children in the filthiest rags. Gave -as many bread and tea tickets as we could, but felt helpless and -despairing in the face of such hopeless poverty.”</p> - -<p>“<i>January 30.</i>—Jack and I again rode to the West to collect Widows for -the Relief Fund. Bagged nine and had some lepping” (an ameliorating -circumstance of these expeditions was the necessity of making -cross-country short cuts). “Numbers of women came over, some being rank -frauds ably detected by the kitchenmaid; one or two knee-deep in lies.” -“The boys walked to Bawneshal with tea, etc., for two of the worst -widows.” (The adjective refers to their social, not their moral -standing.)</p> - -<p>On another occasion I have recorded that my sister was sent to inquire -into the circumstances of a poor woman with a large family. The latter, -in absorbed interest in the proceedings, surrounded the mother, who held -in her arms the most recent of the number, an infant three weeks old.</p> - -<p>“I have seven children,” said the pale mother, “and this little one-een -that,” she turned a humorous grey eye on her listening family, “I’m -afther taking out of the fox’s mouth!” (The fox playing the part -attributed in Germany to the stork.)<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_146" id="page_146">{146}</a></span></p> - -<p>My sister, absorbed in estimating the needs of the seven little brothers -and sisters, replied absently,</p> - -<p>“<i>Poor</i> little thing! It must have been very frightened!”</p> - -<p>Mrs. Conolly stared, and, in all her misery, began to laugh; “May the -Lord love ye, Miss!” she said compassionately yet admiringly, “May ye -never grow grey!”</p> - -<p>The difficulties of distribution were many, not the least being that of -steeling my mother’s heart, and keeping her doles in some reasonable -relation to her resources. I should like to try to give some idea of one -of these gatherings. Lists of those in most immediate need of help had -been prepared, I do not now remember by whom, and, in the majority of -cases, the names given were those of the males of the respective -households. Therefore would my mother, standing tall and majestic in the -middle of the big, dark, old kitchen at Drishane, her list in her hand, -certain underlings (usually her daughters and the kitchenmaid) in -attendance, summon to her presence—let us say—“John Collins, Jeremiah -Leary, Patrick Driscoll.” (These are names typical of this end of West -Carbery, and the subsequent proceedings, like the names, may be accepted -in a representative sense.)</p> - -<p>The underling, as Gold Stick-in-Waiting, would then advance to the back -door, and from the closely attendant throng without would draw, as one -draws hounds in kennel, but with far more difficulty, the female -equivalents of the gentlemen in question.</p> - -<p>“Now, John Collins,” says my mother (who declared it confused her if she -didn’t stick to what was written in the list), addressing a little -woman, the rags of whose shrouding black shawl made her look like the -Jackdaw of Rheims subsequent to the curse, “Now, John Collins, here’s -your ticket. Is your daughter better?<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_147" id="page_147">{147}</a></span>”</p> - -<p>“Why then she is not, your Honour, Ma’am,” replies John Collins in a -voluble whine, “only worse she is. She didn’t ate a bit since.” John -Collins pauses, removes a hairpin from her back hair, and with nicety -indicates on it a quarter of an inch. “God knows she didn’t ate <i>that</i> -much since your Honour seen her; but sure she might fancy some little -rarity that yourself’d send her.”</p> - -<p>There follow medical details on which I do not propose to dwell. My -mother, ever a mighty doctor before the Lord, prescribes, promises “a -rarity,” in the shape of a rice pudding, and John Collins, well -satisfied, swings her shawl, yashmak-wise, across her mouth, and pads -away on her bare feet.</p> - -<p>“Patrick Driscoll!”</p> - -<p>Patrick Driscoll, bony and haggard, the hood of her dark cloak over her -red head, demands an extra quantity, on the plea of extra poverty.</p> - -<p>She is asked why her husband does not get work.</p> - -<p>“Husband is it!” echoes Patrick Driscoll, witheringly, “What have I but -a soort of an old man of a husband, that’s no use only to stay in his -bed!”</p> - -<p>Other women press in through the doorway, despite the efforts of the -underlings, each eloquent of her superior sufferings. Another husband is -inquired for.</p> - -<p>“He’s dead, Ma’am, the Lord ha’ mercy upon him, he’s in his coffin this -minute; and Fegs, he was in the want of it!”</p> - -<p>Yet another has a blind husband.</p> - -<p>“Dark as a stone, asthore,” she says to Gold Stick, “only for he being -healthy and qu’ite, I’d be dead altogether! Well, welcome the Will o’ -God! I might be worse, as bad as I am!”</p> - -<p>Philosophy, resignation, piety, humour, one finds them all in these -bewildering, infuriating, enchanting<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_148" id="page_148">{148}</a></span> people. And then, perhaps, a cry -from the heart of the crowd,</p> - -<p>“Sure ye’ll <i>not</i> forget yer own darlin’ Mary Leary!”</p> - -<p>A heartrending appeal that elicits from the Mistress a peremptory -command not to attempt to come out of her turn.</p> - -<p>Nothing could be more admirable than my mother’s manner with the people. -Entirely simple, dictatorial, sympathetic, sensible. She believed -herself to be an infallible judge of character, but “for all and for -all,” as we say in Carbery, her soft heart was often her undoing, and -her sterner progeny found her benevolence difficult to control. She was, -in fact, as a man said of a spendthrift and drunken brother, “too -lion-hearted for her manes” (means).</p> - -<p>“No wonder,” said one of her supplicants, “Faith, no wonder at all for -the Colonel to be proud of her! She’d delight a Black!”</p> - -<p>Whether this imputed to the Black a specially severe standard of taste, -or if it meant that even the most insensate savage would be roused to -enthusiasm by my mother’s beauty, I am unable to determine.</p> - -<p>I have a letter from my companion Gold Stick, from which I think a few -quotations, in exemplification, may be permitted.</p> - -<div class="blockquot"><p class="c"> -<span class="smcap">Hildegarde Somerville</span> to E. Œ. S. (Feb., 1891.)<br /> -</p> - -<p>“The women have swarmed since you left. I really think I know every -one of them now, by voice, sight, and smell, notably Widow -Catherine Cullinane, who has besieged us daily. Her voice is not -dulcet, especially when raised in abusive entreaty, but she has not -got anything out of me yet. It is as well that C. (a brother) and I -are here to manage the show, as Mother is, to say the least, -lavish. I was out one day<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_149" id="page_149">{149}</a></span> when a woman called, a Mrs. Michael -Kelleher; she has the most magnificent figure, walk, and throat -that I have ever seen. She is tall, and her throat is exactly like -the Rossetti women’s throats, long and round, and like cream. She -would make a splendid model for you. I had seen her before, and -proved her not deserving,” (O wise young judge of quite nineteen!) -“her husband being a caretaker with a house and 4s. a week, and the -use of two cows, besides a daughter out as a nursemaid. She really -did not exactly beg, but came to see if she had ‘a shance of the -sharity.’ Her eldest boy, aged eleven, had fallen off the cowhouse -roof on to a cow’s back (neither hurt!), and we gave her Elliman, -which cured him. But the day I was out, Mother saw her, and -although I had given <i>full particulars</i> in the book as to her -means”—(her princely affluence in fact, as compared with her -fellows)—“she gave her bread, tea, sugar, and meal, simply because -she had a baby the other day and had a child with a bad cold.”</p> - -<p>Regarding the matter dispassionately, and from a distance, I should -say that either affliction amply justified my mother’s action, but -H. did not then think so.</p> - -<p>“I don’t think this will happen again,” she resumes, severely, “as -Mother now regrets having done it. All the same, I had the greatest -difficulty in stopping her from clothing an entire family with the -Dorcas things, (which are lovely) as I told her, there are not 100 -things, and there are over 200 people, and it seems wicked to -clothe one family from top to toe, so I prevailed. E. says the -Balfour Fund will help very few of our women.” (E. was my cousin -Egerton Coghill, who, like Robert Martin, had given his services to -the Government as a distributor of the Fund, and, in the south and -west of the County Cork,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_150" id="page_150">{150}</a></span> had some of the worst districts in -Ireland under his jurisdiction.)</p> - -<p>“No one with less than a quarter of an acre of land is entitled to -get help,” my sister’s letter continues, “as they can get Out-door -Relief from the Rates, and no one with one ‘healthy male’ able to -work on the Balfour road can have it, in fact, only those with sick -husbands, or widows with farms, are eligible. As the fund is over -£44,000, and I have estimated that £150 would keep our Western -women going for 6 months, it seems to me very unfair to send the -quarter-acre people on to the Rates.”</p></div> - -<p>It may be gathered from this that the difficulties of administration -were not light; it may also, perhaps, be inferred that the ancient -confidence in the landlord class (none of these people were tenants of -my father’s), which modern teaching has done its best to obliterate, was -not entirely misplaced. I do not claim any exceptional virtues for my -father and mother. Their efforts on behalf of their distressed -neighbours were no more than typical of what their class was, and is, -accustomed to consider the point of honour. It remains to be seen if the -substitutes for the old order will adopt and continue the tradition of -“<i>Noblesse oblige</i>.”</p> - -<p>I have heard a beggar-woman haranguing on this topic.</p> - -<p>“I towld them,” she cried, with, I admit, an eye on my hand as it sought -my pocket, “you were the owld stock, and had the glance of the -Somervilles in your eye! God be with the owld times! The Somervilles and -the Townshends! Them was the rale genthry! Not this shipwrecked crew -that’s in it now!”</p> - -<p>I may as well acknowledge at once that Martin</p> - -<div class="figcenter"><a name="ill_11" id="ill_11"></a> -<a href="images/ill_006_lg.jpg"> -<img src="images/ill_006_sml.jpg" width="372" height="448" alt="[Image unavailable.]" /></a> -<div class="caption"><p>A CASTLEHAVEN WOMAN.</p></div> -</div> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_151" id="page_151">{151}</a></span></p> - -<p class="nind">and I have ever adored and encouraged beggars, however venal, and have -seldom lost an opportunity of enjoying their conversation; ancient -female beggars especially, although I have met many very attractive old -men. At my mother’s Famine Conversaziones many beggar-women, whose names -were on no list, would join themselves to the company of the accredited.</p> - -<p>“I have no certain place Achudth!” (a term of endearment), said one such -to me, “I’m between God and the people.”</p> - -<p>It may be said that the people, however deep their own want, are -unfailing in charity to such as she. I had, for a long time, a creature -on my visiting list, or, to be accurate, I was on hers, who was known as -“the Womaneen.” As far as I know, she subsisted entirely on “the -Neighbours,” wandering round the country from house to house, never -refused a night’s lodging and the “wetting of her mouth o’ tay” -generally given “a share o’ praties” to “put in her bag for herself.” -She was the very best of company, and the bestowal of that super-coveted -boon, an old pair of boots, had power to evoke a gratitude that shamed -its recipient.</p> - -<p>“Yes, Hanora,” I have said, “I believe I have a pair to give you.”</p> - -<p>On this the “Womaneen” opened the service of thanksgiving by clasping -her hands, mutely raising her eyes to Heaven, and opening and shutting -her mouth; this to show that emotion had rendered her speechless. She -next seized my reluctant hand, and smacked upon it kisses of a breadth -and quality that suggested the enveloping smack of a pancake when it has -been tossed high and returns to its pan. Her speech was then recovered.</p> - -<p>“That Good Luck may attind you every day you<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_152" id="page_152">{152}</a></span> see the sun! That I -mightn’t leave this world until I see you well marrid!” A pause, and a -luscious look that spoke unutterable things. “Ah ha! I’ll tell the Miss -Connors that ye thrated me dacint!” A laugh, triumphing in my -superiority to the Misses Connor, followed, and I made haste to produce -the boots.</p> - -<p>“Oh! Oh! Oh! Me heart ’d open! Ye-me-lay, but they’ll go on me in -style!”</p> - -<p>Then, in a darkling whisper, and with a conspirator’s eye on the open -hall-door: “Where did you get them, asthore? Was it Mamma gave ‘em -t’ye?” (The implication being that I, for love of the “Womaneen,” must -have stolen them, as no one could have parted with them voluntarily.) -Then returning to the larger style. “That God Almighty may retch out the -two hands to ye, my Pearl of a noble lady! How will I return thanks to -ye? That the great God may lave me alive until I’d be crawlin’ -this-a-way”—(an inch by inch progress is pantomimed with two gnarled -and ebony fingers)—“and on my knees, till I’d see the gran’ weddin’ of -my fine lady that gave me the paireen o’ shluppers!”</p> - -<p>I think it will be admitted that this was an adequate return for value -received.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_153" id="page_153">{153}</a></span></p> - -<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XIII" id="CHAPTER_XIII"></a>CHAPTER XIII<br /><br /> -<small>THE RESTORATION</small></h2> - -<p><span class="smcap">It</span> was in June, 1888, that Mrs. Martin became the tenant of Ross House -and that she and her daughters returned to Galway, sixteen years, to the -very month, since they had left it.</p> - -<p>It would demand one more skilled than I in the unfathomable depths of -Irish Land Legislation to attempt to set forth the precise status of -Ross, its house, demesne, and estate, at this time. It is not, after -all, a matter of any moment, save to those concerned. Mrs. Martin had -been staying in Galway, and had paid a visit to Ross, with the result -that she decided to rent the house and gardens from the authorities in -whose jurisdiction they then were, and set herself to “build the walls -of Jerusalem.” The point which may be dwelt on is the courage that was -required to return to a place so fraught with memories of a happiness -never to be recaptured, and to take up life again among people in whom, -as was only too probable, the ancient friendship was undermined by years -of absence, misrepresentation, and misunderstanding. The handling of the -estate had been unfortunate; the house and demesne had been either -empty, or in the hands of strangers, careless and neglectful of all -things, save only of the woodcock shooting, and the rabbit-trapping. -When Mrs. Martin<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_154" id="page_154">{154}</a></span> proposed to become a tenant in her old home, it had -been empty for some time, and had suffered the usual indignities at the -hands of what are erroneously known as caretakers. It is possible that -caretakers exist who take care, and take nothing else, but the converse -is more usual, and I do not imagine that Ross was any exception to the -average of such cases.</p> - -<p>The motives that impelled my cousin Nannie to face the enormous -difficulties involved can, however, be understood, and that Martin -should have sacrificed herself to the Lares and Penates of Ross—Ross, -the love of which was rooted in her from her cradle—was no more, I -suppose, than was to be expected from her.</p> - -<p>From her mother had come the initiative, but it was Martin who saved -Ross. She hurled herself into the work of restoration with her own -peculiar blend of enthusiasm and industry, qualities that, in my -experience, are rarely united. Her letters became instantly full of -house-paintings, house-cleanings, mendings, repairs of every kind; what -was in any degree possible she did with her own hands, what was not, she -supervised, inventing, instructing, insisting on the work being done -right, in the teeth of the invincible determination of the workmen to -adhere to the tradition of the elders, and do it wrong.</p> - -<p>Looking back on it, it seems something of a waste to have set a razor to -cut down trees, and the work that was accomplished by “Martin Ross” that -year was small indeed as compared with the manifold activities of “Miss -Wilet.”</p> - -<p>There was everything to be done, inside and outside that old house, and -no one to do it but one fragile, indomitable girl. Ireland, now, is full -of such places as Ross was then. “Gentry-houses,” places that were once -disseminators of light, of the humanities;<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_155" id="page_155">{155}</a></span> centres of civilisation; -places to which the poor people rushed, in any trouble, as to Cities of -Refuge. They are now destroyed, become desolate, derelict. To-day</p> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i8">“The Lion and the Lizard keep<br /></span> -<span class="i0">The Courts where Jamshyd gloried and drank deep;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And Bahram, that great Hunter—the Wild Ass<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Stamps o’er his Head, but cannot break his Sleep.”<br /></span> -</div></div> -</div> - -<p>But even more than the laying waste of Ross House and gardens I believe -it was the torture of the thought that the Ross people might feel that -the Martins had failed them, and that the “Big House” was no longer the -City of Refuge for its dependants in the day of trouble, that chiefly -spurred Martin on, in her long and gallant fight with every sort of -difficulty, that summer, when she and her mother began to face the music -again at Ross.</p> - -<p>In that music, however, there was an undertone of discord that -threatened for a while to wreck all the harmony. There are a few words -that Martin had written, in continuation of the account of her brother -Robert, that explain the matter a little, and I will quote them here.</p> - -<p>“The white chapel that overlooked the lake and the woods of Ross, heard -much, at about this time (<i>i.e.</i> the later years of the ’eighties), that -was not of a spiritual tendency. The Land League had been established in -the parish; the branch had for its head, in the then Parish Priest, an -Apostle of land agitation, a man whose power of bitter animosity, legal -insight, and fighting quality, would have made his name in another -profession. He made his mark in his own, a grievous one for himself. He -rose up against his Bishop, supported by the great majority of his -parish, and received the reprimand of his Church. He went with his case -to Rome, and after long intrigue<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_156" id="page_156">{156}</a></span> there, came home, a beaten man, -dispossessed of his parish, and was received in Galway with a brass band -and a procession, the latter of which accompanied him, brokenly, but -with persistence, to his home, a distance of about fifteen miles. For -many months afterwards the strange and not unimpressive spectacle -presented itself, of a Roman Catholic Priest defying his Church, and -holding, by some potent spell, the support of the majority of his -parish. Sunday after Sunday two currents of parishioners set in -different directions, the one heading to the lawful Chapel on the hill -and the accredited priest, the other to the green and white ‘Land League -Hut,’ that had been built with money that Father Z. had himself -collected.”</p> - -<p>Martin’s MS. ceases here. I may add to it a little.</p> - -<p>I went to Ross not long after Father Z.’s return from Rome. I chanced -but once to see him, but the remembrance of that fierce and pallid face, -and of the hatred in it, is with me still. He is dead, and I believe -that his teaching died with him. The evil that men do does not always -live after them. The choice of his successor was a fortunate one for the -parish of Rosscahill. Few people out of Ireland realise how much depends -on the personality of the parish priest. Father Z. had had it in his -power to shake a friendship of centuries, but it was deeply rooted, he -could do no more than shake it. His successor had other views of his -duty; in him the people of Rosscahill and the House of Ross, alike, -found a friend, unfailing in kindness and sympathy, a priest who made it -his mission to bring peace to his parish, and not a sword.</p> - -<p>No one was more sensible of this friendship, or more grateful for it -than Martin. What sustained her and made the sacrifice of time, -strength, and money in<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_157" id="page_157">{157}</a></span> some degree worth while, during that hard, -pioneer year at Ross, was the renewal of the old goodfellowship and -intimacy with the tenants. Sixteen years is a big gap, but not so big -that it cannot be bridged. Even had the gap been wider, I believe -Martin’s slender hand would have reached across it. As she has said of -the relation between the Martins and their tenants—“The personal -element was always warm in it ... the hand of affection held it -together....”<a name="FNanchor_7_7" id="FNanchor_7_7"></a><a href="#Footnote_7_7" class="fnanchor">[7]</a></p> - -<p>And so she and her mother proved it. It was the intense interest and -affection which Martin had in and for the “Ross people” that made -enjoyment march with what she believed to be her duty. She had a gift -for doing, happily and beautifully, always the right thing, at no matter -what cost to herself. A very unusual gift, and one of more value to -others than to its possessor. One remembers the Arab steed, who dies at -a gallop. It was not only that she was faithful and unselfish, but she -so applied her intellect to obliterating all traces of her fidelity and -her unselfishness, that their object strode, unconscious, into the soft -place that she had prepared, and realised nothing of the self-sacrifice -that had gone to its making. With her, it was impossible to say which -was the more beautiful, the gentleness of heart, or the brilliance of -intellect. I have heard that among the poor people<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_158" id="page_158">{158}</a></span> they called her The -Gentle Lady; in such a matter, poor people are the best judges.</p> - -<p>In her first letters to me from Ross, the place it held in her heart is -shown, and there is shown also some of the difficulties, the -heartrendings, the inconveniences, the absurdities, of those first -months of reclamation. No one but Martin herself will ever know what -courage and capacity were required to cope with them. She overcame them -all. Many times have I been a guest at Ross, and more wholly enjoyable -visits seldom fall to anyone’s lot. But the comfort and restored -civilisation of the old house had cost a high price.</p> - -<div class="blockquot"><p class="c"> -V. F. M. to E. Œ. S. (Ross, July, 1888.)<br /> -</p> - -<p>“It is a curious thing to be at Ross. But it does not seem as if we -were—not yet. It takes a long time to patch the present Ross, and -the one I remember, on to each other. It is, of course, smaller, -and was, I think, disappointing, but it is <i>deeply</i> interesting, as -you can imagine. It is also heartrending.... Everything looks -ragged and unkempt, but it is a fine free feeling to sit up in this -window and look abroad. There are plenty of trees left, and there -is a wonderful Sleeping-Beauty-Palace air about everything, -wildness, and luxuriance, and solitude. As to being lonely, or -anything like it, it does not enter my mind. The amount of work to -be done would put an end to that pretty fast.... The garden is, as -the people told me, ‘the height o’ yerself in weeds,’ not a walk -visible. The hot-house, a sloping jungle of vines run wild; the -melon pit rears with great care a grove of nettles, the stable-yard -is a meadow. We inhabit five rooms in the house, the drawing-room -having been made (by the caretakers) a kitchen. I could laugh and I -could cry when I think of it. There is a small elderly mare here</p></div> - -<div class="figcenter"><a name="ill_12" id="ill_12"></a> -<a href="images/ill_007-a_lg.jpg"> -<img src="images/ill_007-a_sml.jpg" width="186" height="239" alt="[Image unavailable.]" /></a> -<div class="caption"><p>MARTIN ROSS.</p> - -<div class="sigg"> -H. A. C.<br /> -</div> -</div></div> - -<div class="figcenter"><a name="ill_13" id="ill_13"></a> -<a href="images/ill_007-b_lg.jpg"> -<img src="images/ill_007-b_sml.jpg" width="370" height="273" alt="[Image unavailable.]" /></a> -<div class="caption"><p>ROSS LAKE.</p></div> -</div> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_159" id="page_159">{159}</a></span></p> - -<div class="blockquot"><p>(belonging to the estate) whom we shall use. A charming creature, -with a high character and a hollow back. I spent this morning in -having her heels and mane and ears clipped, and it took two men, -and myself, to hold her while her ears were being done. Car or -conveyance we have none, at present, but we have many offers of -cars. I drive Mama on these extraordinary farmers’ cars, and oh! -could you but see the harness! Mouldy leather, interludes of twine -in the reins—terrific!”</p> - -<p>There follow particulars of the innumerable repairs required in the -house.</p> - -<p>“My hand is shaking from working on the avenue, I mean cutting the -edges of it, which will be my daily occupation for ever, as by the -time I get to the end, I shall have to begin again, and both sides -mean a mile and a quarter to keep right.... The tenants have been -very good about coming and working here for nothing, except their -dinners, and a great deal has been done by them. It is, of course, -gratifying, but, in a way, very painful. The son of the old -carpenter has been making a cupboard for me, also all for love. He -is a very smart person and has been to America, but he is still the -same ‘Patcheen Lee’—(I have altered most of the names -throughout—E.Œ.S.)—“whom Charlie and I used to beat with sticks -till he was ‘near dead,’ as he himself says proudly.</p> - -<p>“We have many visits from the poor people about, and the same -compliments, and lamentations, and finding of likenesses goes on. -This takes up a lot of time, and exhausts one’s powers of -rejoinder. Added to this, I don’t know yet what to make of the -people.... Of course some are really devoted, but there is a -change, and I can feel it. I wish you had seen Paddy Griffy, a very -active little old man, and a beloved of mine, when he came down on -Sunday<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_160" id="page_160">{160}</a></span> night to welcome me. After the usual hand-kissings on the -steps, he put his hands over his head and stood in the doorway, I -suppose invoking his saint. He then rushed into the hall.</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>Dance Paddy!’ screamed Nurse Barrett (my foster-mother, now our -maid-of-all-work).</p> - -<p>“And he did dance, and awfully well too, to his own singing. Mama, -who was attired in a flowing pink dressing-gown, and a black hat -trimmed with lilac, became suddenly emulous, and, with her spade -under her arm, joined in the jig. This lasted for about a minute, -and was a never-to-be-forgotten sight. They skipped round the hall, -they changed sides, they swept up to each other and back again, and -finished with the deepest curtseys.... I went down to the -Gate-house after dinner, and there discoursed Nurse Griffy for a -long time.” (At Ross, and probably elsewhere in the County Galway, -the foster-mothers of “the Family” received the courtesy-title of -“Nurse,” and retained it for the rest of their lives. I have been -at Ross when the three principal domestics were all ceremoniously -addressed as “Nurse,” and were alluded to, collectively, as “the -Nursies.” After all, at one time or another, there were probably -twelve or fourteen ladies who had earned the title.) “I was amused -by a little discourse about the badness of the shooting of the -tenants here last winter” (<i>i.e.</i> the Englishmen who took the -shooting). “Birds were fairly plenty, but the men couldn’t hit -them.</p> - -<p>“<span class="dblftspc">‘</span>’Tis no more than one in the score they got!’ says Paddy Griffy, -who was one of the beaters, with full-toned contempt.</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>Well, maybe they done their besht,’ says Kitty Hynes, the -Gate-house woman, who is always apologetic.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_161" id="page_161">{161}</a></span></p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>You spoke a thrue word,’ says Paddy Griffy, ‘Faith, they done -their besht, Mrs. Hynes! I seen a great wisp o’ shnipes going up -before them, and the divil a one in it that didn’t go from them! -But you may believe they done their besht!’</p> - -<p>“This wants the indescribable satisfaction of the speaker, and the -ecstasy of Kitty Hynes at finding that she had said something -wonderful.”</p></div> - -<p>This is a part of her first letter. To those unversed in Ireland and her -ways, the latter may appear incredible, “nay, sometimes even terrible,” -as Ruskin says of the pine-trees; but as I think that enlightenment is -good for the soul, I shall continue to give the history of the renewal -of Ross, as set forth in Martin’s letters, and these may present to the -English reader (to whom I would specially commend the incident of the -children’s tea-party, in all its bearings) a new and not uninteresting -facet in the social life of the most paradoxical country in the world.</p> - -<div class="blockquot"><p class="c"> -V. F. M. to E. Œ. S. (July ’88. Ross.)<br /> -</p> - -<p>“I had not heard of F.’s death. It was a shock. He seemed a -thoroughly alive and practical person. I don’t know why it should -be touching that he should rave of his hounds to the end, but it -is. I suppose any shred of the ordinary interests is precious in a -strange unnatural thing, like dying. I think often of a thing that -a countrywoman here said to me the other day, apropos of her sons -going away from her to America.</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>But what use is it to cry, even if ye dhragged the hair out o’ -yer head! Ye might as well be singin’ an’ dancin’.’</p> - -<p>“She was crying when she said it, and was a wild-looking creature -whom you would like to paint, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_162" id="page_162">{162}</a></span> the thing altogether stays in my -mind. (And now abides in the mouth of Norry the Boat, in “The Real -Charlotte.”)</p> - -<p>“Your letter spent 2 hours after its arrival in Nurse Barrett’s -pocket, while I entertained some thirty of the children about here. -Tea, and bread and jam, and barm bracks”—(a sort of sweet loaf, -made with barm, and “<i>brack</i>” <i>i.e.</i> “spotted,” with currants)—“in -the lawn, and races afterwards. I had a very wearying day. Cutting -up food in the morning, and then at luncheon I received a great -shock. I had asked a girl who teaches a National School to bring 12 -of her best scholars, and besides these, we had only invited about -half a dozen. At luncheon in comes the teacher’s sister to say that -the teacher had gone to Galway ‘on business,’ and that no children -were coming. Boycotted, I thought at once. However I thought I -would make an effort, even though I was told that the priest must -have vetoed the whole thing, and I sent a whip round to the near -villages, which are loyal, and away I went myself to two more. I -never had such a facer as thinking the children were to be kept -away, and with that I nearly cried while I was pelting over the -fields. I could only find six children, of whom three were too -young to come, and one was a Land Leaguer’s. However two were to be -had, and I pelted home again, very anxious. There I found the half -dozen I knew would come, and divil another. I waited, and after I -had begun to feel very low, I saw a little throng on the back -avenue, poor little things, with their best frocks, such as they -were. I could have kissed them, but gave them tea instead, and -before it was over another bunch of children, including babies in -arms, arrived, and there was great hilarity. I never shall -understand what was the matter about the teacher.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_163" id="page_163">{163}</a></span> She is a nice -girl, but they are all cowards, and she may have thought she was -running a risk. She was here to-day, with a present of eggs and -white cabbage, which was a peace offering, of course.”</p> - -<p>In those bad times this form of stabbing friendship in the back was -very popular. I remember how, a few years earlier, a Christmas -feast to over a hundred National School children was effectively -boycotted, the sole reason being a resolve on the part of the -ruling powers to discourage anything so unseasonable as Peace on -Earth and good will towards ladies. These dark ages are now, for -the most part, past. Possibly, some day, a people naturally -friendly and kind-hearted will be permitted to realise that -patriotism means loving their country, instead of hating their -neighbours.</p> - -<p>At Ross, happily, the hostile influence had but small strength for -evil. Had it been even stronger, I think it would not long have -withstood the appeal that was made to the chivalry of the people by -the gallant fight to restore the old ways, the old friendship.</p> - -<p>Martin’s letter continues:</p> - -<p>“The presents are very touching, but rather embarrassing, and last -week there was a great flow of them; they included butter, eggs, a -chicken, and a bottle of port; all from different tenants, some -very poor. An experience of last week was going to see a party of -sisters who are tenants, and work their farm themselves. In the -twinkling of an eye I was sitting ‘back in the room,’ with the -sisterhood exhausting themselves in praise of my unparalleled -beauty, and with a large glass of potheen before me, which I knew -had got to be taken somehow. It was much better than I expected, -and I got through a respectable amount of it before handing it on -with a flourish to one of my hostesses, which was looked on as the -height<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_164" id="page_164">{164}</a></span> of politeness. I wish I could remember some of the -criticisms that went on all the time.</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>I <i>assure</i> you, Miss Wilet, you are very handsome, I may say -beautiful. ‘I often read of beauty in books, but indeed we never -seen it till to-day. Indeed you are a perfect creature.’ ‘All the -young ladies in Connemara may go to bed now. Sure they’re nothing -but upstarts.’ ‘And it’s not only that you’re lovely, but so -commanding. Indeed you have an imprettive look!’ This, I believe, -means imperative. Then another sister took up the wondrous tale. -‘Sure we’re all enamoured by you!’</p> - -<p>“This and much more, and I just sat and laughed weakly and -drunkenly. Many other precious things I lost, as all the sisters -talked together, yea, they answered one to another. Custom has -taken the edge off the admiration now, I am grieved to say, but it -still exists, and the friend of my youth, Patcheen Lee, is -especially dogmatic in pronouncing upon my loveliness. I am afraid -all these flowers of speech will have faded before you get here; -they will then begin upon you.”</p></div> - -<p>Another extract from the letters of these early days I will give. The -sister whose return to Ross is told of was Geraldine, wife of Canon -Edward Hewson;<a name="FNanchor_8_8" id="FNanchor_8_8"></a><a href="#Footnote_8_8" class="fnanchor">[8]</a> it is her account of Martin, as a little child, that -is given in Chapter VIII.</p> - -<div class="blockquot"><p>“Geraldine felt this place more of a nightmare than I did. The old -days were more present with her, naturally, than with me. I pitied -her when she came up the steps. She couldn’t say a word for a long -time. There was a bonfire at the gate in her honour in the evening, -built just as we described it<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_165" id="page_165">{165}</a></span> in the Shocker, a heap of turf, -glowing all through, and sticks at the top. Poor Geraldine was so -tired I had to drive her down to it, but she went very gallant and -remembered the people very well. There was little cheering or -demonstrativeness, but there was a great deal of conversation and -some slight and inevitable subsequent refreshment in the form of -porter.</p> - -<p>“I can hardly tell you what it felt like to see the bonfire blazing -there, just as it used to in my father’s time, when he and the boys -and all of us used to come down when someone was being welcomed -home, and it was all the most natural thing in the world. It was -very different to see Geraldine walk in front of us through the -wide open gates, between the tall pillars, with her white face and -her black clothes. Thady Connor, the old steward, met her at the -gate, and not in any ‘Royal enclosure’ could be surpassed the way -he took off his hat, and came silently forward to her, while -everyone else kept back, in dead silence too. Of course they had -all known her well. What with that glare of the bonfire, and the -lit circle of faces, and the welcome killed with memories for her, -I wonder how she stood it. It was the attempt at the old times that -was painful and wretched, at least I thought it so. Edward was -wonderful, in a trying position. In about two minutes he was -holding a group of men in deep converse without any apparent -effort, and he was much approved of.</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>A fine respectable gentleman’—‘The tallest man on the -property’—such were the comments.”</p></div> - -<p>There are two poems that were written many years ago, by one of the -tenants, one Jimmy X., a noted poet, in praise of the Martins and of -Ross, and mysteriously blended with these themes is a eulogy of a<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_166" id="page_166">{166}</a></span> -certain musician, who was also a tenant. The first few verses were -dictated to Martin, I know not by whom; the last three were written for -her by the poet himself; his spelling lends a subtle charm. To read it, -giving the lines their due poise and balance, demands skill, the poem -being of the modern mode, metrical, but rhymeless. There is a tune -appertaining to it which offers some assistance in the matter of stress, -but it must here be divorced from its words; since, however, it is a -tune of maddening and haunting incompleteness, a tune that has “no -earthly close,” one of those tunes, in fact, that are of the nature of a -possession (in an evil and spiritual sense), this need not be regretted.</p> - -<p class="c">ROSS.</p> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">It is well known through Ireland<br /></span> -<span class="i0">That Ross it is a fine place<br /></span> -<span class="i0">The healthiest in climate<br /></span> -<span class="i0">That ever yet was known.<br /></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">When you get up in the morning<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Ye’ll hear the thrishes warbling<br /></span> -<span class="i0">The cuckoo playing most charming<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Which echoes the place.<br /></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">The birds they join in chorus<br /></span> -<span class="i0">To hum their notes melodious<br /></span> -<span class="i0">The bees are humming music<br /></span> -<span class="i0">All over the demesne.<br /></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">The place it being so holy<br /></span> -<span class="i0">It is there they live in glory,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Honey is flowing<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And rolling there in sthrames.<br /></span> -</div></div> -</div> - -<p class="nind">There follows a panegyric of “Robert Martin Esqur,” the Bard lamenting -his inability to “tell the lovely fatures of the noble gentleman.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_167" id="page_167">{167}</a></span>”</p> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">“Indeed,” he continues, “it sprung through nature<br /></span> -<span class="i1">For this gentleman being famous,<br /></span> -<span class="i1">The Martins were the bravest<br /></span> -<span class="i1">That ever were before.<br /></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">“With Colonels and good Majors<br /></span> -<span class="i1">Who fought with many nations,<br /></span> -<span class="i1">I’m sure twas them that gained it<br /></span> -<span class="i1">On the plains of Waterloo.”<br /></span> -</div></div> -</div> - -<p>Thus far the dictation; the following four verses are as they came from -the hand of their maker.</p> - -<div class="blockquot"> - -<p>A song composed for Robirt Martin Esqur and one of his tinants</p> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> - -<span class="i0">A song composed for Robirt Martin Esqur and one of his tinants<br /></span> -</div><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i4">1st varce<br /></span> - -<span class="i0">Its now we have a tradesman<br /></span> -<span class="i0">The best in any nation,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">He never met his eaquils, he went to tullamore.<br /></span> -<span class="i0">He played in Munstereven<br /></span> -<span class="i0">The tune of Nora Chrena<br /></span> -<span class="i0">But Garryown delighted the natives of the town.<br /></span> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> - -<span class="i5">2nd<br /></span> - -<span class="i0">He can write music<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Play it and peruse it<br /></span> -<span class="i0">A man in deep concumption from death he revive<br /></span> -<span class="i0">But from the first creation<br /></span> -<span class="i0">There was never yet his eaquels<br /></span> -<span class="i0">So clever and ingenious with honour and renown.<br /></span> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> - -<span class="i4">3rd virce<br /></span> - -<span class="i0">Patrick he resayved them<br /></span> -<span class="i0">So deacent and so plesant<br /></span> -<span class="i0">He is as nice a man in features as I ever saw before<br /></span> -<span class="i0">When they sat to his table with turkeys and bacon<br /></span> -<span class="i0">With Brandy and good ale he would suplie as many more.<br /></span> -<span class="i0">He got aninvetation to Dublin with they ladies<br /></span> -<span class="i0">They brought him in their pheatons he was playing as they were going<br /></span> -<span class="i0">He is the best fluit player from Cliften to Glasnevan<br /></span> -<span class="i0">They thought he was inchanted his music was so neat.<br /></span> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_168" id="page_168">{168}</a></span> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<span class="i4">4th virce<br /></span> - -<span class="i0">His fluit is above mention<br /></span> -<span class="i0">It is the best youtencal (<i>utensil</i>)<br /></span> -<span class="i0">That ever yet was mentioned sunce the race of Man<br /></span> -<span class="i0">He got it by great intrest as a presant from the gentry<br /></span> -<span class="i0">It was sent to him by finvarra the rular of Nockma.<br /></span> -</div></div> -</div></div> - -<p>There are many more varces (or virces) in which the glories of Ross, of -“Robirt” Martin, and of his “tinant,” are hymned with equal ardour, but -I think these samples suffice.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_169" id="page_169">{169}</a></span></p> - -<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XIV" id="CHAPTER_XIV"></a>CHAPTER XIV<br /><br /> -<small>RICKEEN</small></h2> - -<p><span class="smcap">The</span> journey from Drishane to Ross was first made by me in February, -1889. As the conventional crow flies, or as, on the map, the direct line -is drawn, the distance is no more than a hundred miles, but by the time -you have steered east to Cork, and north-west to Limerick, and north to -Ennis, and to Athenry, and to Galway, with prolonged changes (and always -for the worse), at each of these places, you begin to realise the -greatness of Ireland, and to regard with awe the independent attitude of -mind of her railway companies. It would indeed seem that the Sinn Fein -movement, “Ourselves Alone,” might have been conceived and brought forth -by any one of the lines involved in the <i>trajet</i> from Cork to Galway. I -cannot say what are the conditions now, but there was a time when each -connecting link was separated by an interval of just as many minutes as -enabled the last shriek of the train as it left the station to madden -the ear of the traveller. Once I have been spared this trial; it was at -Limerick; a member of the staff was starting with his bride on their -honeymoon. The station palpitated; there were white satin ribbons on the -engine, a hoar-frost of rice on the platform; there was also a prolonged -and sympathetic delay, while the bride kissed the remainder of the -staff.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_170" id="page_170">{170}</a></span> And thus, with the aid of a fleet porter, and by travelling in -“fateful Love’s high fellowship,” I succeeded in shortening my journey -by some two hours, and in taking unawares the train at “The Junction” -(which, as everyone in Munster knows, is the Limerick Junction).</p> - -<p>February is a bad month for the West of Ireland, but there are places, -like people, that rely on features and are independent of complexion. -Ross was grey and cold, windy, rainy, and snowy, but its beauty did not -fail. Martin and I heeded the occasional ill-temper of the weather as -little as two of the wild duck whom we so assiduously strove to shoot. -We had been lent a boat and a gun, and there are not many pleasanter -things to do in a still February twilight than to paddle quietly along -the winding waterways among the tall pale reeds of Ross Lake; in the -thrilling solitude and secrecy of those dark and polished paths anything -may be expected, from a troop of wild swans, or the kraken, down to the -alternative thrill of the splashing, swishing burst upwards of the duck, -as the boat invades their hidden haven. We walked enormously; visiting -the people in the little villages on the estate, making exciting and -precarious short cuts across bogs; getting “bushed” in those strange -wildernesses, where hazel and blackthorn scrub has squeezed up between -the thick-sown limestone boulders of West Galway, and a combination has -resulted that makes as impenetrable a barrier as can well be imagined. -We wandered in the lovely Wood of Annagh, lovely always, but loveliest -as I saw it later on, in April, when primroses, like faint sunlight, -illumined every glade and filled the wood with airs of Paradise. We -explored the inmost recesses of Tully Wood, which is a place of mystery, -with a prehistoric baptismal “bullán” stone, and chapel, in its depths.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_171" id="page_171">{171}</a></span> -There are quagmires in Tully, “shwally-holes” hidden in sedge among the -dark fir-trees, and somewhere, deep in it, you may come on a tiny lake -among the big, wildly-scattered pine-stems, and a view between them over -red and brown bog to the pale, windy mountains of Connemara.</p> - -<p>I was having a holiday from writing, and was painting any model, old or -young, that I could suborn to my use. We searched the National Schools -for red-haired children, for whom I had a special craving, and, after -considerable search, were directed to ask in Doone for the house of one -Kennealy, which harboured “a Twin,” “a foxy Twin”; and there found “The -Twin,” <i>i.e.</i> two little girls of surpassing ugliness, but with hair of -such burnished copper as is inevitably described by the phrase “such as -Titian would have loved to paint.”</p> - -<p>There are few evasions of a difficulty more bromidic and more -unwarrantable. “A sunset such as Turner would have loved to paint.” “A -complexion such as Sir Joshua would have loved to paint.” The formula is -invariable. It is difficult to decide whether the stricken incapacity of -description, or the presumption of a layman in selecting for a painter -his subject, is the more offensive.</p> - -<p>“Oh, what a handsome sunset you have!”</p> - -<p>I have heard at a garden party a lady thus compliment the proprietor of -the decoration.</p> - -<p>“I know,” she turned to me, “that you’re delighting in it! What a pity -you haven’t your easel with you!” (Nothing else, presumably, was -required.) The attitude of mind is the same, but there is much in the -way a thing is said.</p> - -<p>A special joy was imparted to Martin’s and my wanderings about Ross by -the presence of the Puppet. I had brought him to Paris (and Martin and I -had<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_172" id="page_172">{172}</a></span> together smuggled him home under the very nose of the <i>Douane</i>); he -had accompanied me on a yachting excursion (in the course of which I -walked on deck in my sleep, and very nearly walked overboard, the Puppet -following me faithfully; in which case we should neither of us have ever -been heard of again, as the tide-race in Youghal Harbour is no place for -a bad swimmer). He had paid many and various visits with me, and had -passed from a luxury into a necessity. Naturally he came with me to -Ross. He was a very small fox terrier, rather fast in manner, but -engaging; with a heart framed equally for love or war, and a snub nose. -His official name was Patsey; a stupid name, I admit, and conventional -to exhaustion, but of a simplicity that popularised him. There are a few -such names, for humans as for dogs. I need give but one instance, Bill. -(I do not refer to the Bills of humbler life, though I am not sure that -the rule does not apply there also.) The man who hails his friend as -“Bill” feels himself, in so doing, a humourist, which naturally endears -Bill to him.</p> - -<p>It was Fanny Currey, by the way, who called Patsey “The Puppet” (as a -variant of “The Puppy”). There are not many people with any pretensions -to light and leading who did not know Miss Fanny Currey of Lismore. She -is dead now, and Ireland is a poorer place for her loss. I will not now -try to speak of her brilliance and versatility. She was, among her many -gifts, a profound and learned dog-owner, and though her taste had been -somewhat perverted by dachshunds (which can degenerate into a very -lowering habit), it was an honour to any little dog to be noticed by -her.</p> - -<p>The Puppet had various accomplishments. He wept when rebuked, and, -sitting up penitentially, real tears would course one another down his -brief<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_173" id="page_173">{173}</a></span> and innocent nose. He could walk on his fore-legs only; he could -jump bog-drains that would daunt a foxhound; even the tall single-stone -walls of Galway, that crumble at a touch, could not stop him. The -carpenter at Ross was so moved by his phenomenal activity that he -challenged me to “lep my dog agin his.” His dog, a collie, was defeated, -and the carpenter said, generously, that he “gave it in to the Puppet -that he was dam’ wise.”</p> - -<p>Many were the vicissitudes through which that little dog came safely. A -mad dog in Castle Haven missed him by a hair’s breadth. (The hair, one -supposes, of the dog that did <i>not</i> bite him.) Distemper fits in Paris -were only just mastered. (It is worthy of note that the cure was -effected by strong coffee, prescribed by a noted vet. of the Quartier -Latin.) In battles often, in perils of the sea; nor shall I soon forget -a critical time in infancy, when, as my diary sourly relates, “Jack and -Hugh” (two small and savage brothers) “rushed to me in state of frantic -morbid delight, to tell me that the puppy had thrown up a huge worm, and -was dying.”</p> - -<p>And all these troubles he survived only to die of poison at Ross. But -this came later, during my second visit, and during that first and happy -time the Puppet and Martin and I enjoyed ourselves without let or -hindrance.</p> - -<p>It is long now since I have been in Galway, and I know that many of the -poor people with whom Martin and I used to talk, endlessly, and always, -for us, interestingly, have gone over to that other world where she now -is. Of them all, I think the one most beloved by her was the little man -of whom she discoursed in one of the chapters of “Some Irish Yesterdays” -as “Rickeen.” This was not his name, but it will serve. Rickeen was of -the inmost and straitest<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_174" id="page_174">{174}</a></span> sect of the Ross tenants. His farm, which was -a very small one, was, I imagine, run by his wife and children; he, -being rightly convinced that Ross House and all appertaining to it would -fall in ruin without his constant attention, spent his life “about the -place,” in the stables, the garden, the house; and wherever he was, he -was talking, and that, usually and preferably, to “Miss Wilet.”</p> - -<p>The adoration that was given to her by all the people found its highest -expression in Rickeen. She was his religion, the visible saint whom he -worshipped, he gave her his supreme confidence. I believe he spoke the -truth to her. More can hardly be said.</p> - -<p>Rickeen was a small, dark fellow, with black whiskers, and a pale, -sharp-featured face. We used to think that he was like a London -clergyman, rather old-fashioned, yet broad in his views. He had a -passion for horses and dogs, and was unlike most of his fellows in a -certain poetic regard for such frivolous by-products of nature as -flowers and birds. I can see Rickeen on a fair May morning pulling off -his black slouch hat to Martin and me, with the shine of the sun on his -high forehead, on which rings of sparse black hair straggled, his dark -eyes beaming, and I can hear his soft-tuned Galway voice saying:</p> - -<p>“Well, glory be to God, Miss Wilet, this is a grand day! And great -growth entirely in the weather! Faith, I didn’t think to see it so good -at all to-day, there was two o’ thim planets close afther the moon last -night!”</p> - -<p>And he would probably go on to tell us of the garden o’ praties he had, -and the “bumbles and the blozzums they had on them. Faith, I’d rather be -lookin’ at them than ateing me dinner!” (The term “bumbles” referred, we -gathered, to buds.)</p> - -<p>Martin would contentedly spend a morning in<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_175" id="page_175">{175}</a></span> scraping paths and raking -gravel with Rickeen, and, having a marvellous gift of memory, would -justify herself of her idleness by repeating to me, at length, one of -his recitals. Some of these, as will presently be discovered, she has -written down, but the written word is a poor thing. “When the lamp is -shattered, the light in the dust lies dead.” For anyone who knew the -perfection of Martin’s rendering of the tones of West Galway, of the -gestures, the pauses, that give the life of a story, the words lying -dead on the page are only a pain. Perhaps, some day, portable and -bindable phonography will be as much part of a book as its pictures are.</p> - -<p>Phonetic spelling in matters of dialect is a delusive thing, to be used -with the utmost restraint. It is superfluous for those who know, boring -for those who do not. Of what avail is spelling when confronted with the -problem of indicating the pronunciation of, for example, “Papa”; the -slurring and softening of the consonant, the flattening of the vowel -sound—how can these be even indicated? And, spelling or no, can any -tongue, save an Irish one, pronounce the words “being” and “ideal,” as -though they owned but one syllable? Long ago Martin and I debated the -point, and the conclusion that we then arrived at was that the root of -the matter in questions of dialect was in the idiomatic phrase and the -mental attitude. The doctrine of “Alice’s” friend, the Duchess, still -seems to me the only safe guide. “Take care of the sense, and the sounds -will take care of themselves.”</p> - -<p>There was a sunny spring afternoon at Ross, and Martin and Rickeen and I -and the Puppet went forth together to erect a wall of “scraws,” <i>i.e.</i> -sods, round the tennis ground. As soon as there was a sufficient -elevation for the purpose, we seated ourselves on the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_176" id="page_176">{176}</a></span> scraws, and the -business of conversation with Rickeen, that had, in some degree, been -interfered with by his labours in scraw-cutting and lifting, was given -full scope. The Puppet was a little below us, hunting young rabbits in -the dead bracken. At intervals we could see him, proceeding in -grasshopper springs through the bracken (which is the correct way to -draw heavy covert, as all truly sporting little dogs know), throughout -we could hear him. Rooks in the tall elms behind the stables, feeding -their young ones, made a pleasing undercurrent of accompaniment to the -Puppet’s soprano solo. There was a bloom of green over the larches; -scraps of silver glinting between the tree stems represented the lake. -The languor of spring was in the air, and it seemed exercise enough to -watch Rickeen’s wondrous deftness in marking, cutting, and lifting the -scraws on the blade of his narrow spade, and tossing them accurately on -to their appointed spot on the rising wall.</p> - -<p>Martin had a Maltese charm against the “<i>Mal Occhio</i>”; a curious silver -thing, whose design included a branch of the Tree of Life, and clenched -fists, and a crescent moon, and other symbolisms. This, and its uses, -she expounded to Rickeen, and he, in his turn, offered us his experience -of the Evil Eye, and of suitable precautions against it.</p> - -<p>“Look now, Miss Wilet, if a pairson ’d say ‘that’s a fine gerr’l,’ or ‘a -fine cow,’ or the like o’ that, and wouldn’t say ‘God bless him!’ that’s -what we’d call ‘Dhroch Hool.’<a name="FNanchor_9_9" id="FNanchor_9_9"></a><a href="#Footnote_9_9" class="fnanchor">[9]</a> That’s the Bad Eye. Maybe, then, the -one he didn’t say ‘God bless them’ to would fall back, or dhrop down, or -the like o’ that; and then, supposin’ a pairson ’d folly the one that -gave the Bad Eye, and to bring him back, and then if that one ’d bate -three spits down on the one that was lyin<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_177" id="page_177">{177}</a></span>’ sthritched, and to say ‘God -bless him,’ he’d be all right.”</p> - -<p>Strange how wide is the belief in the protective power of this simple -provision of Nature. From the llama to the cat, it is relied on, and by -the cat, no doubt, it was suggested to the human being as a means of -defiance and frustration. There was a beggar-woman who, as my mother has -told me, did not fail on the occasion of any of our christenings to -bestow upon the infant an amulet of this nature. She had a magnificent -oath, reserved, I imagine, for great occasions.</p> - -<p>“By the Life of Pharaoh!” she would say, advancing upon the baby, “I -pray that all bad luck may be beyant ye, and that my luck may be in your -road before ye!”</p> - -<p>The amulet would then be administered.</p> - -<p>Martin and Rickeen and I discoursed, I remember, for some time upon -these subjects. The mysterious pack of white hounds who hunt the woods -of Ross, whose music has been heard more than once, and the sight of -which has been vouchsafed to some few favoured ones, was touched on, and -Martin told of an Appearance that had come to her and some of her -brothers and sisters, one dusky evening, in the Ross avenue. Something -that was first like a woman walking quickly towards them, and then rose, -vast and toppling, like a high load of hay, and then sank down into -nothingness.</p> - -<p>“Ah sure, the Avenue!” said Rickeen, as one that sets aside the thing -that is obvious. “No one wouldn’t know what ’d be in it. There was one -that seen fairies as thick as grass in it, and they havin’ red caps on -them!”</p> - -<p>He turned from us, and fell to outlining the scraws that he was going to -cut. We watched him for a<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_178" id="page_178">{178}</a></span> space, while the afternoon shadow of the -house crept nearer to us down the slope, and Martin began to talk of the -coach that drives to Ross when the head of the house dies. At the death -of her grandfather she had been too little to comprehend such things.</p> - -<p>“I can only remember ‘The Old Governor’ in snatches,” she said.</p> - -<p>From across the lake the rattle of the mail car on the Galway road came, -faintly, and mysterious enough to have posed as the sound of the ghostly -coach. The staccato hunting yelps of the Puppet had died down, and from -among the boughs of a small beech tree, a little hapless dwarf of a -tree, twisted by a hundred thwarted intentions, a thrush flung a spray -of notes into the air, bright and sudden as an April shower. Rickeen -paused.</p> - -<p>“Ye’d like to be leshnin’ to the birds screechin’,” he remarked -appreciatively; “But now, Miss Wilet, as for the coach, I dunno. There’s -quare things goin’; ye couldn’t hardly say what harm ’d be in them, only -ye’d friken when ye’d meet them.” He gave his white flannel bauneen, -which is a loose coat, an extra twist, stuffing the corners that he had -twisted together inside the band of his trousers, and entered upon his -narration.</p> - -<p>“I remember well the time the Owld Governor, that’s yer grandfather, -died. Your father was back in Swineford, in the County Mayo, the same -time, and the Misthress sent for me and she give me a letther for him. -‘Take the steamer to Cong,’ says she, ‘and dhrive then, and don’t rest -till ye’ll find him.’</p> - -<p>“But sure Louisa Laffey, that was at the Gate-house that time, she says -to me, ‘Do not,’ says she, ‘take the steamer at all,’ says she. ‘Go -across the ferry,’ says she, ‘an’ dhrive to Headford and ye’ll get -another car there.’</p> - -<p>“I was a big lump of a boy that time, twenty years<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_179" id="page_179">{179}</a></span> an’ more maybe, and -faith, I didn’t let on, but God knows I was afraid goin’ in it. ’Twas -night on me when I got to Headford, and when I wint to th’ hotel that -was in it, faith sorra car was before me; but the gerr’l that was -mindin’ th’ hotel says, ‘D’ye see the house over with the light in it?’ -‘I do,’ says I. ‘Maybe ye’d get a car in it,’ says she. Faith, the man -that was there ruz out of his bed to come with me!”</p> - -<p>A pause, to permit us to recognise the devotion of the man.</p> - -<p>“We went dhrivin’ then,” resumed Rickeen, with a spacious gesture, -“dhrivin’ always, and it deep in the night, and we gettin’ on till it -was near Claremorris, back in the County Mayo. Well, there was a hill -there, and a big wood, and when we come there was a river, and it up -with the road, and what ’d rise out of it only two wild duck! Faith, the -horse gave a lep and threwn herself down, an’ meself was thrown a-past -her, and the man the other side, and he broke his little finger, and the -harness was broke.”</p> - -<p>He dwelt for a moment on the memory, and we made comment.</p> - -<p>“What did we do, is it?” Rickeen went on. “To walk into the town o’ -Swineford we done. ‘It’s hardly we’ll find a house open in it,’ says the -fella that was dhrivin’ me. But what ’d it be but the night before the -Fair o’ Swineford, and there was lads goin’ to the fair that had boots -for mendin’, and faith we seen the light in the shoemaker’s house when -we come into the town.”</p> - -<p>“That was luck for you,” said Martin.</p> - -<p>Rickeen turned his dark eyes on her, and then on me, with an expression -that had in it something of pity, and something of triumph, the triumph -of the story-teller who has a stone in his sling.</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">’</span>Twas a half door was in it,” he went on, “and<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_180" id="page_180">{180}</a></span> when I looked over the -door, faith I started when I seen the two that was inside, an’ they -sewin’ boots. Two brothers they were, an’ they as small—!” He spread -forth his two lean brown hands at about three feet above the ground, -“an’ not as much mate on them as ’d bait a mouse thrap, an’ they as -quare—!” He turned aside, and secretly spat behind his hand. “Faith, I -wasn’t willin’ to go in where they were. ’Twasn’t that they were that -small entirely, nor they had no frump on thim——”</p> - -<p>“No <i>what</i>, Rick?” we ventured.</p> - -<p>“No frump like, on their shoulder,” Rick said, with an explanatory hand -indicating a hump; “but faith, above all ever I seen I wouldn’t wish to -go next or nigh them!</p> - -<p>“The man that was with me put a bag on the horse’s head. ‘Come inside,’ -says he, ‘till they have the harness mended.’ ‘I’ll stay mindin’ the -horse,’ says I, ‘for fear would she spill the oats.’ ‘I know well,’ says -he, ‘ye wouldn’t like to go in where thim is!’ ‘Well then, God knows I -would not!’ says I, ‘above all ever I seen!’<span class="lftspc">”</span></p> - -<p>“And had they the Bad Eye?” said Martin.</p> - -<p>Rickeen again turned aside, and the propitiatory or protective act was -repeated.</p> - -<p>“I dunno what way was in thim,” he replied, cautiously, “but b’lieve me -’twas thim that could sew!”</p> - -<p>At this point a long and seemingly tortured squeal from the Puppet told -that the rabbit had at long last broken covert. I cannot now remember if -he or the rabbit had the pre-eminence—I think the rabbit—but the -immediate result was that for us the story of those Leprechaun brethren -remained unfinished, which is, perhaps, more stimulating, and leaves the -imagination something to play with.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_181" id="page_181">{181}</a></span></p> - -<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XV" id="CHAPTER_XV"></a>CHAPTER XV<br /><br /> -<small>FAITH AND FAIRIES</small></h2> - -<p><span class="smcap">In</span> our parts of Ireland we do not for a moment pretend to be too -civilised for superstition. When Cromwell offered the alternative of -“Hell or Connaught,” with, no doubt, the comfortable feeling that it was -a case of six of one and half a dozen of the other, more creatures than -he knew of accepted the latter refuge. And when, in the County Cork, the -ancient saying was proved that “Beyond the Leap”—which is a village -about twelve miles inland from the Western Ocean—was indeed “beyond the -Law,” and that the King’s writ, if it ran at all, ran for its life in -the wrong direction, sanctuary was found there, also, for more than the -hard-pressed people of the land.</p> - -<p>The “Fairies and Bridhogues and Witches” of the old song fled west and -south; in Galway, in Kerry and in Cork, they are still with us. Have I -not seen and handled a little shoe that was found in a desolate pass of -the Bantry mountains? It was picked up seventy or eighty years ago by a -countryman, who was crossing a pass at dawn to fetch the doctor to his -child. It is about two and a half inches long, and is of leather, in all -respects like a countryman’s brogue, a little worn, as if the wearer had -had it in use for some time. The countryman gave it to the doctor, and -the docto<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_182" id="page_182">{182}</a></span>r’s niece showed it to me, and if anyone can offer a more -reasonable suggestion than that a Leprechaun made it for a fairy -customer, who, like Cinderella, dropped it at a dance in the mountains, -I should be glad to hear it.</p> - -<p>At Delphi, in Connemara, to two brothers, a Bishop and a Dean of the -Irish Church, many years before its disestablishment, when Bishops were -Lords Spiritual and Temporal, and by no means people to be trifled with, -to these, and to their sister, there came visibly down the beautiful -Erriff river a boatload of fairies. They disembarked at a little -strand—one of those smooth and golden river strands that were obviously -created in order to be danced on by fairies—and there the fairies -danced, under the eyes of “Tom of Tuam” (thus I have heard that Bishop -irreverently spoken of by my cousin Nannie Martin), and of his brother, -the Dean, and of their sister; but to what music I know not. They were -possibly related to the Ross fairies, as it was noted (by the Bishop’s -sister, I believe) that they “wore red caps, and were very small and -graceful.”</p> - -<p>Not half a mile from Drishane Gate there is a little wood that has not -the best of reputations. At its western end there is an opening, out of -the road that traverses it, that has been immemorially called the -Fairies’ Gap. I have in vain striven to obtain the facts as to the -Fairies’ Gap. Such information as was obtainable had no special -connection with Those People, yet was vague and disquieting. That there -was Something within in the wood, and it might come out at you when -you’d be going through it late of an evening, but if “you could have a -Friendly Ghost to be with you, there could no harm happen you.” The -thought of the friendly ghost is strangely soothing and reassuring; -perhaps oftener than one knows<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_183" id="page_183">{183}</a></span> one has a kind and viewless companion to -avert danger.</p> - -<p>Only eighteen months ago I was told of an old man who was coming from -the West into Castle Townshend village to get his separation allowance. -“A decent old man he was too, and he a tailor, with a son in the army in -France. He was passing through the wood, and it duskish, and what would -he see but the road full of ladies, ten thousand of them, he thought. -They passed him out, going very quietly, like nuns they were, and there -was one o’ them, and when she passed him out, he said she looked at him -so pitiful, ‘Faith,’ says the old tailor, ‘if I had a fi’ pun note to my -name I’d give it in Masses for her soul!’<span class="lftspc">”</span></p> - -<p>I was told by a woman, a neighbour of mine, of a young wife who lived -among these hills, and was caught away by the fairies and hidden under -Liss Ard Lake. “A little girl there was, of the Driscolls, that was sent -to Skibbereen on a message, and when she was coming home, at the bridge, -east of the lake, one met her, and took her in under the lake entirely. -And she seen a deal there, and great riches; and who would she meet only -the young woman that was whipped away. ‘Let you not eat e’er a thing,’ -says she to the little girl, ‘the way Theirselves ’ll not be able to -keep you.’ She told the little girl then that she should tell her -husband that on a night in the week she would go riding with the -fairies, and to let him wait at the cross-roads above on Bluidth. -Herself would be on the last horse of them, and he a white horse, and -when the husband ’d see her, he should catch a hold of her, and pull her -from the horse, and keep her. The little girl went home, and she told -the husband. The husband said surely he would go and meet her the way -she told him; but the father of the woman told him he would be better -leave her with<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_184" id="page_184">{184}</a></span> them now they had her, as he would have no more luck -with her, and in the latter end the husband was said by him, and he left -the woman with them.”</p> - -<p>I know the cross-roads above on Bluidth; often, coming back from -hunting, “and it duskish,” with the friendly hounds round my horse, and -my home waiting for me, I have thought of the lost woman that was riding -the white horse at the end of the fairy troop, and of the tragic eyes -that watched in vain for the coward husband.</p> - -<p class="astt">* * * * *</p> - -<p>We have, or had, a saint in Castle Haven parish, Saint Barrahane was his -name, and his Well of Baptism is still honoured and has the usual -unattractive tributes of rag on its over-shadowing thorn-bush. The well -is in a deep, wooded glen, just above a graveyard that is probably of an -equal age with it. The graveyard lies on the shore, under the lee of -that castle that stood the bombardment from Queen Elizabeth’s sea -captains; the sea has made more than one sally to invade the precincts, -but the protecting sea wall, though it has been undermined and sometimes -thrown down, has not, so far, failed of its office. It is considered a -good and fortunate place to be buried in. All my people lie there, and I -think there should be luck for those who lie in a place of such ancient -sanctity. It is held that the last person who is buried in it has to -keep the graveyard in order, and—in what way is not specified—to -attend to the wants of his neighbours. I can well remember seeing a race -between two funerals, as to which should get their candidate to the -graveyard first. A very steep and winding lane leads down to the sea, -and down it thundered the carts with the coffins, and their following -<i>cortéges</i>.</p> - -<p>In the next parish to Castle Haven there is a graveyard</p> - -<div class="figcenter"><a name="ill_14" id="ill_14"></a> -<a href="images/ill_008_lg.jpg"> -<img src="images/ill_008_sml.jpg" width="524" height="387" alt="[Image unavailable.]" /></a> -<div class="caption"><p>E. Œ. SOMERVILLE ON TARBRUSH.</p></div> -</div> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_185" id="page_185">{185}</a></span></p> - -<p class="nind">lonelier even than that of Saint Barrahane. Like most of the ancient -burial places it is situated close to the sea, probably to permit of the -funerals taking place by boat, in times when roads hardly existed. -There, at the top of the cliffs, among the ruins of a church, and among -the dreadful wreck of tombs too old even for tradition to whisper whose -once they were, there took place, not long ago, the funeral of a certain -woman, who was well known and well loved. I was told of an old -beggar-woman who walked many miles to see the last of a friend.</p> - -<p>“She rose early, and she hasted, and she was at the gate of the -graveyard when the funeral was coming,” another woman told me; “an’ when -she seen them, and they carrying in the corpse, she let the owld cloak -back from her. And when she seen the corpse pass her, she threw up the -hands, and says she, ‘That your journey may thrive wid ye!’<span class="lftspc">”</span></p> - -<p>That journey that we think to be so long and dark and difficult. Perhaps -we may find, as in so many of our other journeys, that it is the -preparation and the setting forth that are the hardest part of it.</p> - -<p>In Ireland, at all events, it is certain that a warning to the -traveller, or to the friends of the traveller, is sometimes vouchsafed. -Things happen that are explainable in no commonsense, commonplace way; -things of which one can only say that they are withdrawals for an -instant of the curtain that veils the spiritual from the material. I -speak only of what I have personal knowledge, and I will not attempt to -justify my beliefs to anyone who may consider either that I have -deceived myself, or that the truth is not in me. In the spring of 1886 -one of my great-aunts died. She had been a Herbert, from the County -Kerry, and had married my grandfather’s brother, Major John Somerville. -Her age “went with the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_186" id="page_186">{186}</a></span> century,” and when heavy illness came upon her -there was obviously but little hope of her recovery. I went late one -afternoon to inquire for her. She lived in a small house just over the -sea, and my way to it from Drishane lay through a dark little grove of -tall trees; a high cliff shut out the light on one hand, below the path -were the trees, straining up to the height of the cliff, and below the -trees, the sea, which, on that February evening, strove, and tossed, and -growled. The last news had been that she was better, but as I went -through the twilight of the trees a woman’s voice quite near me was -lifted up in a long howl, ending in sobs. I said to myself that Aunt -Fanny was dead, and this was “Nancyco,” her ancient dairy-woman, keening -her. In a moment I heard the cry and the sobs again, such large, -immoderate sobs as countrywomen dedicate to a great occasion, and as I -hurried along that gloomy path the crying came a third time. Decidedly -Aunt Fanny was dead. Arrived at the house, it was quite a shock to hear -that, on the contrary, she was better. I asked, with some indignation, -why, this being so, Nancyco was making such a noise. I was told that -Nancyco hadn’t been “in it” all day; that she was at home, and that -there was no one “in it.” I said naught of my Banshee, but when, three -days afterwards, the old lady slipped out through that opening in the -curtain, I remembered her warning.</p> - -<p>Such a thing has happened thrice in my knowledge; the second time on a -lovely June night, the night of the eve of St. John, when every hill was -alight with bonfires, and one might hope the powers of evil were -propitiated and at rest. Yet, on that still and holy night, six boys and -girls, the children of some of my father’s tenants, were drowned on -their way home from a church festival that they had attended at Ross<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_187" id="page_187">{187}</a></span> -Carbery. The party of eight young people had rowed along the coast to -Ross harbour, and of the eight but two returned. At “the mid-hour of -night” my sister, who was then only a child, came running to my room for -shelter and reassurance. She had been wakened by the crying of a woman, -in the garden under her window; the crying came in successive bursts, -and she was frightened. At breakfast the news of the drowning was -brought to my father. It had happened near an island, and it was at just -about the time that the voice had broken the scented peace of the June -night that the boatload of boys and girls were fighting for their lives -in the black water, and some of them losing the fight.</p> - -<p>One other time also I know of, though the warning was not, as I might -have expected, given to me personally. The end was near, and the voice -cried beneath the windows of the room in which Martin lay. The hearing -of it was, perhaps in mercy, withheld from me. The anguish of those -December days of 1915 needed no intensifying.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_188" id="page_188">{188}</a></span></p> - -<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XVI" id="CHAPTER_XVI"></a>CHAPTER XVI<br /><br /> -<small>BELIEFS AND BELIEVERS</small></h2> - -<p><span class="smcap">There</span> is, I imagine, some obscure connection between the Fairies and the -Evil Eye. There was “an old Cronachaun of a fellow,” who lived in the -parish of Myross, who was said to be “away with the Fairies” a great -deal, and, whether as a resulting privilege or not I cannot say, he also -had the Bad Eye. It was asserted that he could go to the top of Mount -Gabriel, which is a good twenty miles away, in five minutes. It seems a -harmless feat, but it must be said that Mount Gabriel, in spite of its -name, is not altogether to be trusted. It is the sort of place where the -“Fodheen Mara” might come on at any moment. The Fodheen Mara is a sudden -loss of your bearings, and a bewilderment as to where you are, that -prevails, like a miasma, in certain spots; but, Rickeen has told me, “if -a person ’d have as much sense as to turn anything he’d have on him -inside out, he’d know the way again in the minute.” Or the “Fare Gurtha” -might assail you, and it is even more awful than the Fodheen Mara, being -a sudden starvation that doubles you up and kills you, unless you can -instantly get food. Also, on Mount Gabriel’s summit there is a lake, and -it is well known that a heifer that ran into the lake came back to her -owner out of the sea, “below in Schull harbour,” which implies something -wrong, somewhere.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_189" id="page_189">{189}</a></span></p> - -<p>A neighbour of the old Cronachaun (which means a dwarfish cripple), and -presumably a rival in the Black Arts, was accused by the Cronachaun’s -wife of being “an owld wicked divil of a witch-woman, who is up to -ninety years, but she can’t die because she’s that bad the Lord won’t -take her! Sure didn’t she look out of her door and see meself going by, -and says she ‘Miggera Murth’! (and that means ‘misfortune to ye’) and -the owld daughther she has, she looked out too, and she says, three -times over, ‘Amin-a-heerna!’ and after that what did I do but to fall -off the laddher and break me leg!”</p> - -<p>“Amin-a-heerna” is a reiterated amen. No wonder the curse operated.</p> - -<p>I have myself, when pursuing the harmless trade of painter, been -credited with the possession of the Evil Eye. In the Isle of Aran, -Martin has told how “at the first sight of the sketch book the village -street becomes a desert; the mothers, spitting to avert the Bad Eye, -snatch their children into their houses, and bang their doors. The old -women vanish from the door-steps, the boys take to the rocks.” We are -too civilised now in West Carbery to hold these opinions, but I can -recollect the speed with which an old man, a dweller in an unfashionable -part of Castle Townshend, known as Dirty Lane, fled before me down that -thoroughfare, declaring that the Lord should take him, and no one else -(a <i>jeu d’esprit</i> which I cannot but think was unintentional).</p> - -<p>Probably</p> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i7">“In the dacent old days<br /></span> -<span class="i7"> Before stockings and stays<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Were invented, or breeches, top-boots and top-hats,”<br /></span> -</div></div> -</div> - -<p class="nind">all illness was attributed to ill-wishers. It is certain that charms and -remedies, all more or less disgusting, are still relied on, and are -exhibited with a faith that<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_190" id="page_190">{190}</a></span> is denied to the doctor’s remedies, and -that wins half the battle in advance.</p> - -<p>“Ha, thim docthors!” said a dissatisfied patient on hearing of the death -of his medical adviser. “They can let themselves die too!”</p> - -<p>I think it advisable, for many reasons, to withhold such recipes as I -can now recall, but I may offer a couple of samples that will possibly -check any desire for more.</p> - -<p>In typhoid fever: “close out” all the windows, and anoint the patient -from head to foot with sheep’s butter.</p> - -<p>In whooping-cough: the patient should be put “under an ass, and over an -ass”; but a better method is to induce a gander to spit down the -sufferer’s throat.</p> - -<p>“A lucky hand” in doctor or nurse is of more value than many diplomas. -There is an old woman whose practice has been untrammelled by the -fetters or follies of science.</p> - -<p>“The cratures!” she says of her clients. “They sends for me, and I goes -to them, and I gives them the best help I can. And sure the Lord -Almighty’s very thankful to me; He’d be glad of a help too.”</p> - -<p>She is now “pushing ninety,” but she is still helping.</p> - -<p>If a quack is not procurable, a doctor with a hot temper is generally -well thought of. Martin made some notes of a conversation that she had -with a countryman in West Carbery, which exemplified this fact. The “Old -Doctor” referred to was noted for his potency in language as in physic, -and it was valued.</p> - -<p>“Lave him curse, Ma’am!” whispered a patient to the doctor’s -expostulating wife, “For God’s sake, lave him curse!”</p> - -<p>“I had to wait in a hayfield at the top of the Glen,” Martin’s notes -record, “while E. was haranguing at a<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_191" id="page_191">{191}</a></span> cottage about a litter of cubs, -whose Mamma considered that chicken, now and then, was good for them. -There was a man making the hay into small cocks, with much the same -delicate languor with which an invalid arranges an offering of flowers. -Glandore Harbour was spread forth below me, a lovely space of glittering -water, and the music of invisible larks drifted down in silver shreds -through air that trembled with heat. This, I thought, is a good place in -which to be, and I selected a haycock capable of supporting me, and the -haymaker and I presently fell into converse. The talk, I now forget why, -turned to the medical profession.</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>Thim Cork docthors was very nice,’ said the man, pausing from his -labours, and seating himself upon a neighbouring haycock, ‘but sure -docthors won’t do much for the likes of us, only for ladies and -gentlemen. Ye should be the Pink of Fashion for them!’</p> - -<p>“He surveyed me narrowly; apparently the thickness of the soles of my -boots inspired him with confidence.</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>Ye’re a counthry lady, and ye have understanding of poor people. Some -o’ thim docthors would be sevare on poor people if their houses wouldn’t -be—’ he considered, and decided that the expression was good enough to -bear repetition, ‘—wouldn’t be the Pink of Fashion. Well, the Owld -Docthor was good, but he was very cross. But the people that isn’t cross -is the worst. There’s no good in anny woman that isn’t cross. Sure, you -know yourself, my lady, the gerr’l that’s cross, she’s the good -servant!’</p> - -<p>“He looked to me, with his head on one side for assent. I assented.</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>Well, as for the Owld Docthor,’ he resumed, ‘he was very cross, but -afther he put that blast out of him he’d be very good. My own brother -was<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_192" id="page_192">{192}</a></span> goin’ into th’ Excise, and he went to the Owld Docthor for a -certifi-cat. Sure, didn’t the Docthor give him back the sovereign! -“You’ll want it,” says he, “for yer journey.” There was an old lady -here, and she was as cross as a diggle.’ (‘A diggle,’ it may be noted, -is a euphuism by which, to ears polite, the Prince of Darkness is -indicated.) ‘She’d go out to where the men ’d be working, and if she’d -be displeased, she’d go round them with a stick. Faith she would. She’d -put them in with a stick! But afther five minutes she’d be all right; -afther she had that blast put out of her.’</p> - -<p>“It gives a comfortable feeling that ‘crossness’ is of the nature of a -gas-shell, and can be eliminated from the system in a single explosion.”</p> - -<p> </p> - -<p>Unfortunately the interview was interrupted here.</p> - -<p>Dean Swift says somewhere that “Good manners is the art of making those -people easy with whom we converse.” Martin had a very special gift of -encouraging people to talk to her. There was something magnetic about -her, some power of sympathy and extraction combined. Together with this -she had a singular gift of toleration for stupid people, even of -enjoyment of stupidity, if sincerity, and a certain virtuous anxiety, -accompanied it. She was wont to declare that the personal offices of a -good and dull person were pleasing to her. The fumbling efforts, the -laboured breathing of one endeavouring—let us say—to untie her veil; a -man, for choice, frightened, but thoroughly well-intentioned and humble. -This she enjoyed, repudiating the reproach of effeteness, which, in this -connection, I have many times laid to her charge.</p> - -<p>In dealing with Rickeen, however, allowances for stupidity (she called -it simplicity) had not to be taken<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_193" id="page_193">{193}</a></span> into consideration. I have a letter -from her, recounting another of her conversations with Rick, in which he -discussed a “village tragedy” that occurred at Christmas time, a few -years after she had returned to Ross. (The reference at the beginning of -the letter is to the sudden death of an acquaintance.)</p> - -<div class="blockquot"><p class="c"> -V. F. M. to E. Œ. S. (Ross, January, 1894.)<br /> -</p> - -<p>“These sudden deaths are happy for the people who die them, but -desperate for those who are left behind. Certainly it makes one -feel that the thing to desire, beyond most heavenly things, is -strength to face the dreadful thing that may be coming. For -oneself, one could wish for the passion for death that was in a -young fellow here. He disappeared on St. Stephen’s Day<a name="FNanchor_10_10" id="FNanchor_10_10"></a><a href="#Footnote_10_10" class="fnanchor">[10]</a> and they -found him at last in the Wood of Annagh, in an awful pond that is -on your left, just after you get into the wood—Poulleen-a-férla. -They hooked him up from among the sunken branches of trees, and -found him by getting a boat on to the pool and staring down in all -lights. Finally they wrapped a big stone in a white flannel -‘bauneen’ and dropped it in. They were just able to see where it -lay, and it placed things for them, so that they at last recognised -some dim companion shadow as what they were searching for, and got -it out. He was a very religious and steady young man, but his mind -was weak, and it turns out that what chiefly preyed on it was that -one day some people called him from his work and deluded him -somehow into shortening up the chain of the chapel bell, in order -that when the new priest came to hold Mass next Sunday, the bell -could not be rung. (I have told you that Father Z. has been -forbidden to officiate, and a new priest is coming.)<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_194" id="page_194">{194}</a></span></p> - -<p>“When this poor boy found out what he had done, he was miserable. -He brooded over it and his people were alarmed, and watched him, -more or less, but not enough. Never was a more bitter comment on a -parish feud, and never was there a more innocent and godly life -turned to active insanity by dastardly treatment. (The curs, who -were afraid to meddle with the Chapel themselves!)”</p></div> - -<p>Rickeen’s discussion of the matter with Martin and one of the “Nursies” -is interesting in showing the point of view of an intelligent peasant, a -man who had been to America, and who was, though illiterate, of -exceptionally sound and subtle judgment. I copy it from the notes that -Martin sent to me.</p> - -<p>“Rickeen and Nurse Davin and I were talking about the poor boy who is -believed to have drowned himself. Rick took up his parable.</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>Sure you remember of him? Red Mike’s son, back in Brahalish? Him that -used to be minding the hins for the Misthress?</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>Always and ever he was the same; not a word o’ talk out of him the -longest year that ever came, only talkin’ about God, and goin’ to Mass, -and very fond of the work. Sure they say the mother wouldn’t let him to -Mass this while back to Father X.’ (N.B. This is the lawful priest. -Father Z., his predecessor, was suspended by the Church, but many of the -parish still side with him.) ‘And Mortheen, the brother that’s in -Galway, got an account he was frettin’ like, and he hired a car and took -him to Galway to go to Mass there, and tellin’ him no one ’d be denyin’ -him there. Faith, sorra Mass he’d go to in it! They say before he left -home, a whileen back, himself was back in the room, and the people was -outside, talkin’, and sayin’ he should be sent to Ballinasloe’ (the -Lunatic<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_195" id="page_195">{195}</a></span> Asylum) ‘and sorra bit but when they looked round, himself was -there, leshnin’ to them! “What did I ever do to ye?” says he, “And -aren’t ye damned fools,” says he, walkin’ over to them this way, “to -think ye’ll put me in it!” says he. And sorra word more he spoke.</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>The Lord save us! They’re lookin’ for him now since Stephenses Day, -and I’m sure ’tis in Poulleen-a-férla he is. He was down lookin’ at it a -while ago, and Stephenses Day they seen him runnin’ down through -Bullywawneen, and they’re afther findin’ his Scafflin and his Agnus -Di<a name="FNanchor_11_11" id="FNanchor_11_11"></a><a href="#Footnote_11_11" class="fnanchor">[11]</a> on a flagstone that’s on the brink. Sure he took thim off him the -ways he’d be dhrowned. No one could be dhrowned that had thim on him. -Faith, he could not.</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>Didn’t ye hear talk of the man back in Malrour, that wint down to the -lake last Sunday, and jumped into it to dhrown himself? The people that -seen him they ran, and they dhragged him out, an’ he lyin’ on his back, -and the scafflin he got from the priest round his neck; and it dhry! God -help the crature!’</p> - -<p>“(Nurse Davin, weeping, ‘Amin! Amin!’)</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>But sure what way can they find him in Poulleen-a-férla? I know well -there’s thirty feet o’ wather in it. Maybe they’d see him down through -the wather to-day, it’s that clear. God knows ’tis quare weather. The -air’s like it ’d be comin’ up out o’ the ground, and no breeze in it at -all! I’m thinkin’ it’s the weather as well as another that’s puttin’ the -people asthray in their heads.’</p> - -<p>“Rick paused here to take breath, and turned to Nurse Davin, who was -peeling potatoes, and groaning at suitable intervals.</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>Nurse, did ye ever hear tell o’ puttin’ a shave (sheaf) o’ oats on the -wather where ye’d think a<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_196" id="page_196">{196}</a></span> pairson ’d be dhrowned, an’ it ’ll stand up -whin it ’d be over the place where he’s lyin’? They have a shave beyant, -but it’s lyin’ on the wather always. I wouldn’t believe that at all.’</p> - -<p>“Nurse Davin uttered a non-committal invocation of her favourite saint, -but offered no opinion.</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>Sure it was that that they coaxed him to do at the chapel that preyed -on him entirely.’</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>Lord ha’ mercy on him!’ said Nurse, wiping her eyes.</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>When he knew then what he done,’ Rick resumed, turning to me again, -‘sorra Mass he’d ever go to again, and they knew by him he was watchin’ -his shance to make off. They follied him a few days back, when they seen -him sneakin’ off down through the wood, but sorra bit but he felt them -afther him and he turned back.</p> - -<p>“<span class="dblftspc">‘</span>’Twas on Stephenses Day he wint cuttin’ a rope o’ ferns with his -brother, and faith when the brother was talkin’ to a man that was in it, -he shlipped away. The brother thought it was home he wint, till he got -the rope o’ ferns threwn afther him on the ground.</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>An’ that, now, was the time he got the shance.’</p> - -<p>“Nurse Davin, who is the very salt of the earth, has felt it all very -deeply. I cheered her by giving her your Christmas messages. She was -overwhelmed with gratitude. ‘And would ye be pleased to wish her every -sort of good luck and happiness, and the blessing o’ God on her! The -crature! Indeed she was good, and clane, and quiet, and sensible! And -her little dog—so nice and so clever!’<span class="lftspc">”</span> (This was the Puppet.) “<span class="lftspc">‘</span>She -cried afther him, the crature! She could do no more.’<span class="lftspc">”</span></p> - -<p>I trust I may be pardoned for quoting this encomium. The virtues -enumerated by Nurse Davin have not often been ascribed to me.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_197" id="page_197">{197}</a></span></p> - -<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XVII" id="CHAPTER_XVII"></a>CHAPTER XVII<br /><br /> -<small>LETTERS FROM ROSS</small></h2> - -<p><span class="smcap">Taking</span> the publication of “An Irish Cousin” as the beginning of our -literary work, its next development was a series of short articles on -Irish subjects that Martin wrote, single-handed, for the <i>World</i>.</p> - -<p>The sap was beginning to run up; more and more things began with her to -throw themselves, almost unconsciously, into phrases and forms. Her -thoughts blossomed in the fit words, as the life in the tree breaks in -leaves. Everything appealed to her in this new life at Ross, which was -the old, and while she weeded the flower-beds in the garden, or painted -doors in the house, or drove her mother for long miles on the outside -car, she was meditating, and phrase-making, and formulating her -impressions. These, presently, passing through her letters to me, as -through a filter, developed into an article, which was primarily -inspired by the death of one of the older retainers of Ross.</p> - -<p>Mr. Edmund Yates then had the <i>World</i> at his feet, having created it not -very many years before, and that he possessed the <i>flair</i> for good work -was evident in the enthusiasm for her writing that, from the first, he -did not attempt to conceal from Martin.</p> - -<p>If, in things literary, the buyer would forget his traditional pose of -saying “it is naught,” and would<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_198" id="page_198">{198}</a></span> woo the thirsty, tremulous soul of the -artist with appreciation, the bargain would not often work out to his -disadvantage. Edmund Yates had the courage of his opinions, and the -admiration that he was too generous to withhold more than -counterbalanced the minuteness of the cheque that came from his cashier.</p> - -<p>The first of these articles, “A Delegate of the National League,” -appeared in July, 1889, and was received by our friends with mingled -emotions. It is my mature conviction that they were horrified by its -want of levity. That “a Shocker” should preach, that “one of the girls” -should discourse on what was respectfully summarised by a young lady of -my acquaintance as “Deep subjects of Life and Death,” was not quite what -anyone enjoyed. Mrs. H. Ward’s book, “Robert Elsmere,” had just -appeared; it was considered to be necessary to read it, and to talk -intellectually about it, and it was found wearing that Martin should -also be among the Prophets, and should write what one of her cousins -called “Potted Carlyle.” None the less, she followed up “The Delegate,” -in a month or two, with another article in the same vein, entitled -“Cheops in Connemara.” In some of her letters of this period she speaks -of these articles.</p> - -<p>“I weed the garden a good deal,” she says, “and give meat to my -household, and I got a sort of grip of the Education article to-day, and -hope it may continue. But I am a fraud in the way of writing. I heap -together descriptions, with a few carefully constructed moralities -interspersed, and hide behind them, so that no one shall discern my -ignorance and hesitation.</p> - -<p>“I am ploughing along at an article, and have a most ponderous notion in -my head for another about<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_199" id="page_199">{199}</a></span> the poor women of the West of Ireland, their -lives, their training, their characters, all with a view as to whether -they would be the better for having votes, or would give a better or -worse vote than the men. I feel overwhelmed and inadequate. I think I -write worse every time I try” (which was obviously absurd).</p> - -<p>“Mama has had a most kind letter from Sir William Gregory. He has many -literary friends and so has Augusta” (Lady Gregory), “and he says they -will both do their best for The Shocker, and that he hopes his -conscience will allow him to praise it with trumpets and shawms. Poor -Mama required a little bucking up after the profound gloom in which she -was plunged by a letter from her oldest ally, Mrs. X., saying she -thought the ‘Delegate’ was ‘high-flown and verbose’—‘merely, of course, -the faults of young writing,’ says Mrs. X. Mama was absolutely -staggered, and has gone about saying at intervals, ‘Knee-buckles to a -Highlander!’ by which she means to express her glorious contempt for -Mrs. X.’s opinion of the classics.”</p> - -<p>The “ponderous notion” of which she spoke eventually developed into an -article which she called “In Sickness and in Health.” It first appeared -in <i>Blackwood’s Magazine</i>, and we reprinted it in “Some Irish -Yesterdays.” It is, I think, a very delightful example of a class of -writing in which she seems to me to be unequalled.</p> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">“Erin, the tear and the smile in thine eye,”<br /></span> -</div></div> -</div> - -<p class="nind">is a line that is entirely applicable to her, and to her outlook on the -ways of Ross and its people. She loved them and she laughed at them, and -even though she could hold Ross at arm’s length, to analyse, and to -philosophise, and to make literature of it and of its<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_200" id="page_200">{200}</a></span> happenings, she -took it back to her heart again, and forgave what she could not approve, -for no better reason than that she loved it.</p> - -<p>I am aware that the prosperity of a letter, as of a jest, often lies in -the ear of him that hears, or reads. Nevertheless I propose here and now -to give a few extracts from her Ross letters. None of them have any -connection with each other, or with anything else in particular, and -anyone who fears to find them irrelevant or frivolous may, like Francie -Fitzpatrick (when she eluded Master Whitty) “give a defiant skip and -pass on.”</p> - -<div class="blockquot"><p class="c"> -V. F. M. to E. Œ. S. (Ross, 1895.)<br /> -</p> - -<p>“Nurse B. gave, yesterday, a fine example of using the feminine for -animals to imply cunning.</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>Didn’t a big rat walk in the lardher windy, and me lookin’ at her -this ways, through the door, an’ she took a bit o’ bacon to dhrag -it with her. She was that long’ (indicating as far as her elbow), -‘an’ not that high!’ (measuring half her little finger). ‘Faith, -Bridgie dhrove her the way she came!’</p> - -<p>“Bridgie is of undaunted courage, runs after rats to slay them, and -fears ‘neither God nor devil, like the Black Prosbitarians.’ She is -a Topsy, lies and steals and idles, and is as clever as she can be. -Could you but see her with a pink bow in her cap, and creaking -Sunday boots, and her flaming orange hair and red eyes you would -not be the better of it. She is fifteen, and for some mysterious -reason, unknown to myself, I like her.... I am working at an -article, badly. I am very stupid, and not the least clever, except -at mending blinds, and the pump. I am tired of turning away my eyes -from iniquity that I cannot rectify, of trying to get the servants -up in the morning, of many things, but let me be thankful,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_201" id="page_201">{201}</a></span> I have -had the kitchen whitewashed. I laugh foolishly when I think of the -Herculaneum and Pompeii episode from which the cat and three -kittens barely escaped with their lives. The cat, being in labour, -selected as her refuge the old oven in the corner of the kitchen, a -bricked cavern, warm, lofty, and secluded. There, among bottles, -rags, and other concealments of Bridgie’s, she nourished and -brought up her young in great calm, till the day that Andy set to -work at the kitchen chimney. No one knew that the old oven had a -special flue of its own, and it was down this flue that the soot -elected to come. I was fortunately pervading space that day, and -came in time to see a dense black cloud issuing from the oven’s -mouth into the kitchen. I yelled to a vague assembly of Bridgets in -the servants’ hall, all of whom were sufficiently dirty to bear a -little more without injury, and having rushed into the gloom they -promptly slammed the door on the unfortunate family inside, on whom -then rained without intermission, soot, bricks, and jackdaws’ -nests. Having with difficulty got the door open again, the party -was disinterred, quite unhurt, but <i>black</i>, and more entirely -mortified than anything you can imagine. For the rest of the day -‘Jubilee’ cleaned herself and her children in the coldest parts of -the house, with ostentatious fury. She was offered the top turf-box -on the back stairs, but instantly refused, and finally settled -herself in a stone compartment of the wine-cellar; a top berth this -time, you bet!”</p></div> - -<div class="blockquot"><p class="c"> -V. F. M. to E. Œ. S. (Ross, 1901.)<br /> -</p> - -<p>“We did not achieve church this morning without some difficulty. I -went round to the yard after breakfast, to see that things were <i>en -train</i>, and was informed by Rickeen that he had not fed the grey<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_202" id="page_202">{202}</a></span> -pony, as he had found a weazel in the oats, ‘and sure there’s some -kind of a pizen in thim.’ Being unable to combat this statement, I -desired that the pony should be given hay. This was done, but at -the last moment, just before she was being put into the shafts, she -‘sthripped a shoe.’ Mama’s old pony, Killola, was again a little -lame—nothing for it but the monster Daisy, browsing in the lawn -with her foal. It was then 10.45. I had on a voile skirt of -stupendous length, with a floating train, my best gloves and other -Sunday trappings, none the less must I help Rick to harness Daisy. -Then the trouble was to shut her foal into the barn. In the barn -was already immured the donkey, filled with one fierce -determination to flee over to the White Field, where was Darcy’s -donkey. I had to hold Daisy, and combat her maternal instincts, and -endure her ceaseless shriekings; I also had to head off the donkey, -which burst from the barn, with gallopings and capers, while -Rickeen stuffed in the foal, who, like its mother, was shrieking at -the top of its voice. I also was weak with laughing, as Rick’s -language, both English and Irish, was terrific, and the donkey very -ridiculous. Rick finally flailed it into what he called ‘the -pig-shtyle,’ with many fervent ‘Hona-mig-a-dhiouls’ (Rick always -throws in ‘mig,’ for pure intensity and rhythm). Then—(‘musha, the -Lord save thim that’s in a hurry’)—the harness had to be torn off -the grey, in the loose box, ‘for fear would she rub the collar agin -the Major’ (which is what he calls the manger). Then we pitched -Mama on to the car and got off. Daisy, almost invisible under her -buffalo mane, as usual went the pace, and we got in at the First -Lesson, and all was well.”</p></div> - -<div class="blockquot"><p class="c"> -V. F. M. to E. Œ. S. (Ross.)<br /> -</p> - -<p>“I had a long walk on Thursday in search of turf,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_203" id="page_203">{203}</a></span> to burn with -logs. A sunset, that was boiling up orange steam on to grey clouds, -kept turning me round all the way to Esker. At the turn to Pribaun -I heard a frightful ruction going on. Two men in a cart using awful -language at the tops of their voices, and Pat Lydon, on the fence, -giving it back to them, asserting with unnecessary invocations, -that there was nothing he hated like ‘thim liars.’ The men drove on -as I came up, still chewing the last mouthful of curses as they -passed, and Pat came forward with his hat off and the sweetest -smile.</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>What was all that about?’ said I.</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>Oh, thim was just tellin’ me the price o’ pigs in Ochtherard -yesterday.’ (This in a tone of the barest interest.) ‘And how’s -Mama? Divil a one in the counthry’s gettin’ fat, only Mama!’ This -was, of course, the highest compliment, and I recognised that I was -expected to enquire no more into the matter of the price of pigs. -He then advised me to go to Jimmy X. (the song-maker) for turf, and -I found him at Esker, dreamily contemplating an immense and -haggard-looking sow, on whom, no doubt, he was composing a sonnet. -He assured me that he would sell Mama a rick of turf. I asked how -much was in the rick.</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>Well, indeed Miss, of that matter I am quite ignorant, but Jimmy -Darcy can value it—(stand in off the road for fear anyone would -hear us!)’ (Then in a decorous whisper) ‘But him and me is not very -great since he summonsed me little girl for pullin’ grass in the -Wood of Annagh——’</p> - -<p>“There followed much more, in a small and deprecating voice, which, -when told to Jim Darcy, he laughed to scorn.</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>There’s not a basket, no, nor a sod he doesn’t know that’s in -that rick!’</p> - -<p>“The end of it was that the two Jimmys wrangled <span class="pagenum"><a name="page_204" id="page_204">{204}</a></span>down in the Bog of -Pullagh the greater part of the next day, and nothing more than -that has been accomplished.</p> - -<p>“Poor old Kitty has been in trouble. I have not time now to give -you the particulars, but will only note her account of the singular -effects of remorse upon her, as unfolded to me by her, subsequent -to the interview between her and her accuser and Katie.</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>Faith the hair is dhroppin’ out o’ me head, and the skin rollin’ -off the soles o’ me feet, with the frettin’. Whin I heard what Mrs. -Currey said, I went back to that woman above, an’ she in her bed. I -dhragged her from the bed,’ (sob) ‘an’ she shweatin,’ (sob) ‘an’ I -brought her down to Mrs. Currey at the Big House——’</p> - -<p>“I have been doctoring Honor Joyce up in Doone for some days. She -has had agonising pain, which the poor creature bore like a Trojan. -I asked her to describe it, and she said feebly,</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>I couldn’t give ye any patthern of it indeed, but it’s like in me -side as a pairson ’d be polishin’ a boot, and he with a brush in -his hand.’ Which was indeed enlightening. Such a house! One little -room, with some boards nailed together for a bed, in which was hay -with blankets over it; a goat was tethered a few feet away, and -while I was putting the mustard-leaf on, there came suddenly, and -apparently from the bed itself, ‘a cry so jubilant, so strange,’ -that indicated that somewhere under the bed a hen had laid an egg.</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>God bless her!’ says Honor, faintly.</p> - -<p>“Next I heard a choking cough in the heart of the blankets. It was -a sick boy, huddled in there with his mother—quite -invisible—buried in the bedclothes, like a dog.... A beautiful day -yesterday, fine and clear throughout. To-day the storm stormeth<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_205" id="page_205">{205}</a></span> as -usual, and the white mist people are rushing after each other -across the lawn, sure sign of hopeless wet. Poor Michael (an old -tenant) died on Thursday night—a very gallant, quiet end, -conscious and calm. His daughter did not mean to say anything -remarkable when she told me that he died ‘as quiet, now as quiet as -a little fish’; but those were her words. I went up there to see -his old wife, and coming into a house black with people, was -suddenly confronted with Michael’s body, laid out in the kitchen. -His son, three parts drunk, advanced and delivered a loud, horrible -harangue on Michael and the Martin family. The people sat like -owls, listening, and we retired into a room where were whisky -bottles galore, and the cream of the company; men from Galway, -respectably drunk, and magnificent in speech.... The funeral -yesterday to which I went (Michael was one of our oldest and most -faithful friends) was only a shade less horrifying. At all events -the pale, tranced face was hidden, and the living people looked -less brutal without that terrific, purified presence——”</p></div> - -<p>One other picture, of about the same period, may be given, and in -connection with these experiences two things may be remembered. That -they happened more than twenty years ago; also, that among these people, -primitive, and proud, tenacious of conventions, and faithful to their -dead, a want of hospitality at a funeral implied a want of respect for -the one who had left them.</p> - -<p>Unfortunately, it has not even yet been learnt that hospitality is not -necessarily synonymous with whisky.</p> - -<div class="blockquot"><p class="c"> -V. F. M. to E. Œ. S. (Ross, 1895.)<br /> -</p> - -<p>“William L.’s wife died suddenly, having had a<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_206" id="page_206">{206}</a></span> dead baby, two days -ago, and was buried yesterday, up at the Chapel on the Hill. I went -to the back gate and walked with the funeral from there. It was an -extraordinary scene. The people who had relations buried there, -roared and howled on the graves, and round the grave where Mrs. L. -was being buried, there was a perpetual whining and moaning, -awfully like the tuning of fiddles in an orchestra. Drunken men -staggered about; one or two smart relations from Galway flaunted to -and fro in their best clothes, occasionally crossing themselves, -and three keeners knelt together inside the inmost ring by the -grave, with their hands locked, rocking, and crying into each -other’s hoods, three awful witches, telling each other the full -horrors that the other people were not competent to understand. -There was no priest, but Mrs. L.’s brother read a kind of Litany, -very like ours, at top speed, and all the people answered. Every -Saint in the calendar was called on to save her and to protect her, -and there poor William stood, with his head down, and his hat over -his eyes. It was impressive, very, and the view was so fresh and -clean and delightful from that height. The thump of the clods and -stones on the coffin was a sound that made one shudder, and all the -people keened and cried at it.... There have been many enquiries -for you since I came home. Rickeen thinks he never seen the like of -a lady like you that would have ‘that undherstandin’ of a man’s -work; and didn’t I see her put her hand to thim palings and lep -over them! Faith I thought there was no ladies could be as soople -as our own till I seen her. But indeed, the both o’ yee proved very -bad that yee didn’t get marri’d, and all the places yee were in!’<span class="lftspc">”</span></p></div><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_207" id="page_207">{207}</a></span></p> - -<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XVIII" id="CHAPTER_XVIII"></a>CHAPTER XVIII<br /><br /> -<small>“TOURS, IDLE TOURS”</small></h2> - -<p><span class="smcap">The</span> adverse opinion of her old and once-trusted comrade, Mrs. X., in the -matter of “The Delegate” was not the only trial of the kind that Mrs. -Martin had to face. I imagine that few things in her life had given her -as much pleasure as Violet’s success as a writer. She had a very highly -cultured taste, and her literary judgment, builded as it was upon the -rock of the classics, was as sound as it was fastidious. Had a conflict -been pressed between it and maternal pride, I believe the latter would -have been worsted. Fortunately, her critical faculty permitted her to -extend to Martin’s writing the same entire approval that she bestowed -upon her in all other regards. It is usual to make merry over a mother’s -glorying in her young, but there are few things more touching than to -see a brilliant creature, whose own glories are past, renew her youth, -and yet forget it, in the rising sun of a child’s success.</p> - -<p>No one expects to be a prophet in his own country, but when Martin and I -first began to write, we have sometimes felt as if a mean might have -been discovered between receiving our books with the trumpets and -shawms, suggested by Sir William Gregory, and treating them as -regrettable slips, over which a cloak of kindly silence was to be flung. -My cousin Nannie<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_208" id="page_208">{208}</a></span> and—though in less degree—my mother, were both out -for trumpets, and the silence of their acquaintances (a silence that -Martin and I did not fail to assure them was compassionate) filled them -with wrath that only each other’s sympathy could assuage. (It is, I am -sure, unnecessary to say that each was comfortingly aware that her own -daughter had done all the work. But this did not invalidate the -sympathy.)</p> - -<p>The formula touching the superfluity of kneebuckles to the Highlander -was, however, sustaining; and this was fortunate, as each of Martin’s -articles, as they appeared in the <i>World</i>, called it into requisition. -If “The Delegate” had staggered the Highlanders, they literally reeled -when “Cheops in Connemara” was offered for their learning by Mrs. -Martin, who had a pathetic hope, never realised, that some day they -might find grace and understanding.</p> - -<p>It was of “Cheops” that a lady, who may be called Mrs. Brown, said to my -cousin Nannie,</p> - -<p>“Oh, Mrs. Martin, I <i>loved</i> it! It was so <i>nice</i>! I couldn’t quite -understand it, though I read it twice over, but I showed it to Mr. -Brown, and <i>he</i> solved the problem!”</p> - -<p>Wonderful man, as Martin commented when she wrote the story to me.</p> - -<p>It was this same Mr. Brown whose criticism of the “Irish Cousin,” wrung -from him by Mrs. Martin, was so encouraging.</p> - -<p>“I found it,” he wrote, “highly imaginative, but not nonsensical, -unusual in a work of legendary character. In fact, it is not bosh!”</p> - -<p>The singular spring from the clouds to every day’s most common slang was -typical of good Mr. Brown. He is now beyond the clouds, or, in any case, -is, I am sure, where he will not be offended if I recall one or two of -his pulpit utterances. In my diary at this<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_209" id="page_209">{209}</a></span> time I find: “Interesting -sermon. Mr. Brown told us that ‘a sin, though very great, is not as -great as one that exceeds it; but remember that sin can only find -entrance in a heart prepared for it, even as matches strike only on the -box. And oh friends, it is useless to trust in those whose names are -fragrant in Christian society to pull you through.’<span class="lftspc">”</span></p> - -<p>Martin was much attached to Mr. Brown, who was as kind a man, and as -worthy a parson, as ever was great-grandson to Mrs. Malaprop. In a -letter to me she says:</p> - -<p>“Last Sunday’s sermon was full of ‘jewels five words long.’ I noticed -first an allusion to Jacob’s perfidy to Esau. ‘Which of us, Beloved, -would not have blushed if we had been in—in—in the shoes in which -Jacob was then living? Or if we had been his mother?’</p> - -<p>“There was something in this so suggestive of the tale of the Old Woman, -who with her family, lived in a shoe, that I found my seat in the front -row of the choir inconvenient, more especially when one recollected that -in Jacob’s time sandals were the usual wear. Mr. B. then proceeded to -tell us of ‘The Greek Chap’ who held the gunwale of the boat and ‘when -his right hand was chopped off, held it with his left, and that being -cut off, caught it in his teeth. Then his head was cut off! Think of -him, Beloved, who, when his head was cut off, still with his teeth held -the boat impossible!’</p> - -<p>“The last word was doubtless the nearest he could get to ‘immoveable.’ -At this two prominent members of the choir laughed, long and -agonisingly, as did many others. I never smiled. Had you been there I -might have been unequal to the strain, but I felt sorry for poor Mr. -Brown, as it was only a slip to say ‘head’ for ‘hand.’ He got through -the rest pretty well,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_210" id="page_210">{210}</a></span> only saying, a little later, that we should not -‘ask the Almighty for mercies to be doled out to us, like a pauper’s -gruel, in half-pints.’ He gave us another striking metaphor, a few -Sundays ago. ‘Dear friends, to what shall I liken the Day of -Resurrection, and the rising of us, miserable sinners, from the grave? -Will it not be like poor, wretched, black chimney-sweeps, sticking their -heads up out of chimneys!’<span class="lftspc">”</span></p> - -<p>Martin’s pitifulness to incapacity, whether mental or physical, could be -almost exasperating sometimes in its wide charity. Failure of any kind -appealed to her generosity. Her consideration and tenderness for the -limitations and disabilities of old age were very wonderful and -beautiful things, and no one ever knew her to triumph over a fallen foe. -For myself, I am of opinion that, with some foes, this is a mistake, -akin to being heroic at a dentist’s. However, the question need not now -be discussed.</p> - -<p>That “An Irish Cousin” had satisfied Messrs. Bentley’s expectations was -evidenced by a letter from Mr. R. Bentley in October, 1889, in which he -suggested that we should write a three-volume novel for them, and -offered us £100 down and £125 on the second 500 copies. We were then at -work on a short novel that we had been commissioned to write. This was -“Naboth’s Vineyard,” which, after various adventures, was first -published by Spencer Blackett, in October, 1891. The story had had a -preliminary canter in the <i>Lady’s Pictorial</i> Christmas number as a short -story, which we called “Slide Number 42.” It was sufficiently approved -of to encourage us to fill it up and make a novel of it. As a book it -has had a curious career. We had sold the copyright without reservation, -and presently it was passed on to Mr. Blackett. We next heard of it in -the hands of Griffith and Farran. Then it appeared as a “yellow-back”</p> - -<div class="figcenter"><a name="ill_15" id="ill_15"></a> -<a href="images/ill_009_lg.jpg"> -<img src="images/ill_009_sml.jpg" width="524" height="375" alt="[Image unavailable.]" /></a> -<div class="caption"> - -<p class="spc"> -E. Œ. S. CANDY. SHEILA. V. F. M. -</p> - -<div class="sigg"> E. B. C.<br /> -</div> -</div></div> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_211" id="page_211">{211}</a></span></p> - -<p class="nind">at 2<i>s.</i> 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 4<i>d.</i>; 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 <i>Spectator</i>, the <i>Saturday Review</i>, the <i>Times</i>, 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.</p> - -<p>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 <i>World</i> articles and in Ross affairs -generally, and though we discussed the “serious novel” intermittently it -did not advance.</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>During one of my many visits there, the honourable<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_212" id="page_212">{212}</a></span> 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.”</p> - -<p>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 <i>contretemps</i> -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<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_213" id="page_213">{213}</a></span> 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.</p> - -<div class="blockquot"><p class="c"> -V. F. M. to E. Œ. S. (Ross, 1890.)<br /> -</p> - -<p>“None of us were able to go to church to-day, the weather being -detestable and Mama’s eyes much inflamed by gout. So we had prayers -at home. Quite early in the morning Mama had strong convulsions at -the very thought, and I compelled her to delegate Katie for the -office of chaplain. Muriel and her English nurse, Hoskins, were -summoned, and before they came Mama stipulated that the Psalms -should be read. Katie consented, on condition that Mama should not -try to read her verse, and after some resistance, Mama gave in. In -came Hoskins, looking the picture of propriety, with a crimson -nose, and Muriel, armed with a Child’s Bible, and Katie made a -start. Will you believe that Mama could not refrain, but nipped in -with the second verse, in a voice of the most majestic gravity. The -fourth verse was her next, and in that I detected effort, and -prepared for the worst. At the sixth came collapse, and a stifled -anguish of laughter. I said in tones of ice,</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>I’m afraid your eye is hurting you?’</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>Yes,’ gasped Mama.</p> - -<p>“Katie swept on without a stagger, and thus the situation was -saved. I think Hoskins would consider laughter of the kind so -incredible that she would more easily believe that Mama always did -this when her eye hurt her. Katie slew Mama, hip and thigh, -afterwards, as indeed, her magnificent handling of the affair -entitled her to do.”</p></div><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_214" id="page_214">{214}</a></span></p> - -<p>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 -<i>Lady’s Pictorial</i>. 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 ‘<i>put together by Cromwell’s soldier</i>’!”</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>In the autumn of ’91 we went, by arrangement with the <i>Lady’s -Pictorial</i>, to Bordeaux, to investigate, and to give our valuable views -upon the vintage in<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_215" id="page_215">{215}</a></span> that district. This developed into a very -interesting expedition; we had introductions that opened to us the -gloomy and historic portals of the principal “<i>Caves</i>”; we saw claret in -all its stages (some of them horrible); we assisted at a “<i>Danse de -Vendange</i>,” 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.</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>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 -<i>Black and White</i>. 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.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_216" id="page_216">{216}</a></span></p> - -<p>Only once more, and in this same year, 1893, did we adventure on a tour. -This time again on behalf of the <i>Lady’s Pictorial</i>, 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.</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>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.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_217" id="page_217">{217}</a></span></p> - -<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XIX" id="CHAPTER_XIX"></a>CHAPTER XIX<br /><br /> -<small>OF DOGS</small></h2> - -<p><span class="smcap">Throughout</span> these very discursive annals I have tried to keep in -remembrance a lesson that I learnt a few years ago from a very -interesting book of Mr. Seton Thompson’s called, I think, “In the Arctic -Prairies.” In it he began by saying that travellers’ accounts of their -sufferings from mosquitoes were liable to degenerate into a weariness to -the reader; therefore he determined to mass all he had suffered into one -chapter. Thenceforward, when the remembrance of the mosquitoes became -too poignant for endurance, a pause came in the narrative, and a -footnote said (with an audible groan), “See Chapter So and So.” Thus it -has been with me and dogs. This is Chapter So and So, and I honourably -invite the Skip of Defiance already several times advocated.</p> - -<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_218" id="page_218">{218}</a></span> 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.</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>I have ever been faithful to two breeds, foxhounds, and fox terriers, -and, as I look back over a long series<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_219" id="page_219">{219}</a></span> of <i>Grandes Passions</i>, 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.”</p> - -<p>“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<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_220" id="page_220">{220}</a></span> 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.</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>After Dot, in the succession of fox terriers, came Musk, who was unto -Dot as a daughter, so much so,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_221" id="page_221">{221}</a></span> indeed, that I find it said in my diary -that Dot, like the Abbess in the Ballad of the Nun,</p> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">“—— loved her more and more,<br /></span> -<span class="i1">And as a mark of perfect trust<br /></span> -<span class="i1">Made her the Keeper of the Ashpit.”<br /></span> -</div></div> -</div> - -<p class="nind">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.</p> - -<p>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,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_222" id="page_222">{222}</a></span> 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.</p> - -<p>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.”</p> - -<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_223" id="page_223">{223}</a></span> 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.</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">’</span>Tis a daag!”</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">’</span>Tis not!”</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">’</span>Tis!”</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">’</span>Tis not! ’Tis a Sarpint!”</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>“Oh, Master, you wouldn’t ask them pore ’ounds to do such a thing?” said -G.</p> - -<p>I said I would; that they were old, and steady; in short, I apologised, -but was firm.</p> - -<p>G. asked coldly if a couple would be enough.</p> - -<p>I said quite enough, adding that all the ladies’ and gentlemen’s dogs -were coming.</p> - -<p>G. said, “Oh, them cur-dogs——”</p> - -<p>He then asked, with resignation, the hour of “the meet,” and retired.</p> - -<p>At the appointed time he was there, with Rachel<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_224" id="page_224">{224}</a></span> 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<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_225" id="page_225">{225}</a></span> game had palled on the rest of the pursuers, and they -were going home for tea.</p> - -<p>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 <i>fear</i>fully 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.</p> - -<p>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).</p> - -<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_226" id="page_226">{226}</a></span> 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.</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>“Jeanie,” said the Laird to his sister, “you’ve let the fire out.”</p> - -<p>Jeanie, in whose lap Candy was embedded, replied, “I couldn’t help it, -Duncan. Candy dislikes so intensely the noise of putting on coal.”</p> - -<p>The Laird admitted the explanation.</p> - -<p>Much remains to be desired in travelling facilities on steamers, but in -nothing more than in provision</p> - -<div class="figcenter"><a name="ill_16" id="ill_16"></a> -<a href="images/ill_010-a_lg.jpg"> -<img src="images/ill_010-a_sml.jpg" width="211" height="308" alt="[Image unavailable.]" /></a> -<div class="caption"><p>“CANDY.”</p> - -<div class="sigg"> -V. F. M. -</div> -</div></div> - -<div class="figcenter"><a name="ill_17" id="ill_17"></a> -<a href="images/ill_010-b_lg.jpg"> -<img src="images/ill_010-b_sml.jpg" width="372" height="251" alt="[Image unavailable.]" /></a> -<div class="caption"><p>E. Œ. S. AND A DILETTANTE.</p> - -<div class="sigg"> -V. F. M. -</div> -</div></div> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_227" id="page_227">{227}</a></span></p> - -<p class="nind">for dogs and children; a <i>crèche</i> 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.)</p> - -<p>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.”</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_228" id="page_228">{228}</a></span> of this chapter, but, as may have been observed, I -have absolved myself from limitations such as this.</p> - -<div class="blockquot"><p class="c"> -E. Œ. S. to V. F. M. (May, 1890.)<br /> -</p> - -<p>“The Stewardess, in the course of much friendly converse, said, -‘Well, and I suppose ye’re coming back from school, now?’</p> - -<p>“I concealed my deep gratification at the supposition, and said -‘No—that I was done with school for some time.’ ‘Well then, I -suppose you are too’—(clearly thinking I was offended at the -inference)—‘I suppose you’re too big now to be going to school!’</p> - -<p>“Then I said I had never gone to school; whereat she put her helm -hard down, and began to abuse school-girls with much heartiness, -and said they gave more trouble than any other passengers.</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>Indeed, they’re great imps,’ she said.</p> - -<p>“I, clearly, am that woman whom you have so often and so -consistently abused, to whom Stewardesses talk—(all night, by the -light of a sickeningly swinging colza-oil lamp).”</p> - -<p>A friend of mine once said to this admirable woman that she -proposed to bring her dog to England, and quoted the precedent of -my dogs as to cabin privileges.</p> - -<p>“Is it Miss Somerville?” said the Stewardess, in a voice weary with -the satiety of a foregone conclusion. “Sure, she has nests of -them!”</p></div><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_229" id="page_229">{229}</a></span></p> - -<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XX" id="CHAPTER_XX"></a>CHAPTER XX<br /><br /> -<small>“THE REAL CHARLOTTE.”</small></h2> - -<p>“<span class="smcap">The</span> 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<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_230" id="page_230">{230}</a></span> stories and the like (that are now -<i>réchauffé</i> 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.</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>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)—</p> - -<p>“And tell me, how in the worr’ld did you know about Charlotte’s” (I may -call her Charlotte) “love-affair?”</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>“Well, ’tis <i>pairfectly</i> true!” replied the old lady, intensely.</p> - -<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_231" id="page_231">{231}</a></span> 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.”</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>“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.”</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>We have often been reviled for that, as for many other incidents in “The -Real Charlotte,” but I still think we were right.</p> - -<p>Although the book was practically finished in June, the delays and -interruptions that had followed it from<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_232" id="page_232">{232}</a></span> 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.”</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_233" id="page_233">{233}</a></span> 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 (<i>vide</i> 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.</p> - -<p>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.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_234" id="page_234">{234}</a></span></p> - -<p>“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.</p> - -<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_235" id="page_235">{235}</a></span> into the bright places of memory. When I think now of those -May days</p> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">“There comes no answer but a sigh,<br /></span> -<span class="i1">A wavering thought of the grey roofs,<br /></span> -<span class="i1">The fluttering gown, the gleaming oars,<br /></span> -<span class="i5">And the sound of many bells.”<a name="FNanchor_12_12" id="FNanchor_12_12"></a><a href="#Footnote_12_12" class="fnanchor">[12]</a><br /></span> -</div></div> -</div> - -<p class="nind">and I “can make reply,” falteringly,</p> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>I too have seen Oxford.’<span class="lftspc">”</span><br /></span> -</div></div> -</div> - -<p> </p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>Are things that are equal to the same thing equal to each other? It is a -question for the Don of Magdalen to decide.</p> - -<p class="astt">* * * * *</p> - -<p>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.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_236" id="page_236">{236}</a></span></p> - -<p>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”; <i>The Weekly Sun</i>, 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’!”</p> - -<p>A very regrettable incident, but, I fear (to quote kind Mr. Brown), -though legendary, it is not nonsensical.</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>“As you told me to give you faithfully all I heard, pro and con, about -Charlotte, I will do so.</p> - -<p>“Mrs. A. ‘Very clever, very clever, but I have no<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_237" id="page_237">{237}</a></span> 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!’</p> - -<p>“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.</p> - -<p>“Then Miss C. didn’t like it, first because of the oaths and secondly -because it would give English people the idea that in <i>all</i> ranks of -Irish life the people were vulgar, rowdy, and gave horrible parties.</p> - -<p>“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.’<span class="lftspc">”</span></p> - -<p>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 <i>had</i> to kill her to get the whole set of them -out of the awful muddle they had got into!’</p> - -<p>The authors, on receipt of these criticisms, laughed rather wanly. -“<i>Sophie pleurait, mais la poupée restait cassée.</i>” Although we could -laugh, a certain depression was inescapable.</p> - -<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_238" id="page_238">{238}</a></span> 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.</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>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 <i>Black and White</i>. 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. -<i>Black and White</i> 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’,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_239" id="page_239">{239}</a></span>” now orphaned of its artists, ever -gathers a new generation under its wings, these divagations of -<i>autre-fois</i> will have an interest of their own for those that survive -of the old order.</p> - -<p>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 <i>esprit à bruler</i> lit its many windows -at the sacred hour of <i>le fife o’clock</i>, or such of its windows as -appertained to <i>les Anglaises</i>. The third member of our <i>ménage</i> went -daily to what she spoke of as “The Louvre”—meaning the <i>Magasin</i>, not -the <i>Musée</i>—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 <i>au premier</i>)—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 <i>café</i>, dedicated to a mysterious and ever-thirsty company, -“<i>Les bons Gymnasiarques</i>.” 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 <i>Bons Gymnasiarques</i><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_240" id="page_240">{240}</a></span> 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.</p> - -<p>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 <i>Magasin du -Louvre</i> 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 <i>Rayon</i> devoted to slippers that she desired -for herself a pair of <i>pantalons rouges</i>? And if another, who presided -at a lace counter, has forgotten the singular request made to him for a -“<i>Front avec des rides</i>”? “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?”</p> - -<p>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 <i>agrémens</i> of her hotel; one imagines that the -equivalents for mattress and for pillow must have, in one red ruin, -blended themselves in her mind. “<i>Oreiller</i>,” “<i>sommier</i>,” something -akin to these formulated itself in her brain and sprang to her lips, and -she said,</p> - -<p>“Donnez moi un sommelier, s’il vous plait.”</p> - -<p>“M’dame?” replied the shopman, in a single, curt, slightly bewildered -syllable.</p> - -<p>“Un sommelier,” repeated the embodiment of the Irish Church, distinctly, -“Je dors toujours avec deux sommeliers——”</p> - -<p>Here my cousin intervened.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_241" id="page_241">{241}</a></span></p> - -<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXI" id="CHAPTER_XXI"></a>CHAPTER XXI<br /><br /> -<small>SAINT ANDREWS</small></h2> - -<p><span class="smcap">For</span> the remainder of the year ’94 the exigencies of family life kept -Martin and me apart, she at Ross, or paying visits, I at home, doing the -illustrations for our Danish tour, with complete insincerity, from local -models. My diary says, “Impounded Mother to pose as the -Hofjägermesterinde, and Mary Anne Whoolly as a Copenhagen -market-woman—as Tennyson prophetically said, ‘All, all are Danes.’<span class="lftspc">”</span></p> - -<p>In the meantime “The Real Charlotte” continued to run the race set -before her, with a growing tide of approval from those whose approval we -most valued, and with steadily improving sales. In November I went to -Leicestershire (a visit that shall be told of hereafter), and thence I -moved on to Paris.</p> - -<p>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,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_242" id="page_242">{242}</a></span> whom she met at St. -Andrews, was one of the firmest friends of the much-abused “Miss -Mullen.”</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<div class="blockquot"><p class="c"> -V. F. M. to E. Œ. S. (St. Andrews, Jan. 16, 1895.)<br /> -</p> - -<p>“It <i>is</i> a long journey here from Ross, by reason of the many -changes, and by reason of my back,” (she had fallen downstairs at -Ross, and had hurt her back, straining and bruising it very badly,) -“which gave me rather a poor time. I hurt it horribly getting in -and out of carriages, and was rather depressed about it -altogether.... However it is ever so much better to-day, and none -the worse for the dinner last night. I don’t think I looked <i>too</i> -bad, in spite of all. I was ladylike and somewhat hectic and -hollow-eyed. The Langs have large rooms, and their dinner-party was -fourteen ... an ugly nice youth was my portion, and I was put at -Andrew Lang’s left. I was not shy, but anxious. A. L. is very -curious to look at; tall, very thin, white hair, growing far down -his forehead, and shading dark eyebrows and piercing-looking, -charming brown eyes. He has a somewhat foxey profile, a lemon-pale -face and a black moustache.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_243" id="page_243">{243}</a></span> Altogether very quaint looks, and -appropriate. I think he is shy; he keeps his head down and often -does not look at you when speaking, his voice is rather high and -indistinct, and he pitches his sentences out with a jerk. Anyhow I -paid court to my own young man for soup and fish time, and found -him most agreeable and clever, and I <i>did</i> talk of hunting, and he -was mad about it, so now! no more of your cautionary hints!</p> - -<p>“To me then Andrew L. with a sort of off-hand fling,</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>I suppose you’re the one that did the writing?’</p> - -<p>“I explained with some care that it was not so. He said he didn’t -know how any two people could equally evolve characters, etc., that -<i>he</i> had tried, and it was always he or the other who did it all. I -said I didn’t know how we managed, but anyhow that I knew little of -book-making as a science. He said I must know a good deal, on which -I had nothing to say. He talked of Miss Broughton, Stevenson, and -others, as personal friends, and exhibited at intervals a curious -silent laugh up under his nose.... He was so interesting that I -hardly noticed how ripping was the dinner, just as good as it could -be. I then retired upon my own man for a while, and Andrew upon his -woman; then my youth and he and I had a long talk about Oscar Wilde -and others. Altogether I have seldom been more entertained and at -ease. After dinner the matrons were introduced and were very civil, -and praised Charlotte for its ‘delightful humour, and freshness and -newness of feeling,’ and so on. One said that her son told her he -would get anything else of ours that he could lay his hands on. -Then the men again. I shared an unknown man with a matron, and then -the good and kind Andrew drew a chair up and discoursed me, and -told me how he is<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_244" id="page_244">{244}</a></span> writing a life of Joan of Arc—‘the greatest -human being since Jesus Christ.’ He seems <i>wonderfully</i> informed on -all subjects. To hear him reel off the historical surroundings of -the Book of Esther would surprise you and would scandalise the -Canon. He offered to give me a lesson in golf, but, like Cuthbert’s -soldier servant I ‘pleaded the ’eadache.’ I hear that I was highly -honoured, as he very often won’t talk to people and is rude; I must -say I thought he was, in his jerky, unconventional way, polite to -everyone.... This is a cultured house, and all the new books are -here.... I wish I had been walking in the moonlight by the Seine. -It is like a dream to think of it. Talking to Andrew Lang has made -me feel that nothing I could write <i>could</i> be any good; he seems to -have seen the end of perfection. I will take my stand on Charlotte, -I think, and learn to make my own clothes, and so subside -noiselessly into middle age.”</p></div> - -<div class="blockquot"><p class="c"> -V. F. M. to E. Œ. S. (St. Andrews, Jan. 23, 1895.)<br /> -</p> - -<p>“Do you know that even now the sun doesn’t rise here till 8.30 at -the best; at the worst it is not seen till about a quarter to nine! -This, and the amazing cold of the wind make one know that this is -pretty far north.... Since I last wrote various have been the -dissipations. Afternoon teas, two dinners, an organ recital, a -concert. It is very amusing. They are all, as people, more -interesting than the average, being Scotch, and they have a high -opinion of Charlotte. I am beginning to be accustomed to having -people introduced to me, and feeling that they expect me to say -something clever. I never do. I am merely very conversational, and -feel in the highest spirits, which is the effect of the air. It is -passing pleasant to hear my nice hostess tell me how<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_245" id="page_245">{245}</a></span> she went into -an assembly of women (and this being St. Andrews, mostly clever -ones) and heard them raving of Charlotte. She then said, ‘I know -one of the authors, and she is coming to stay with me!’ Sensation! -By the bye, several people have told me that Charlotte is like ‘La -Cousine Bette,’ which is one of Balzac’s novels. I had to admit -that we have neither of us read Balzac. At one dinner-party the -host, who is an excellent photographer, showed some very good -lantern-slides, mostly ruins, old churches and the like, being -things Mr. Lang is interested in. Finally came some statuary -groups; from outside South Kensington, I think; horrible blacks on -the backs of camels, etc. On the first glimpse of these Andrew, who -had, I think, been getting bored, shuddered, and fled away into the -next room, refusing to return till all was over.</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>If you had any Greek statuary——’ he said, feebly, but there -was none.</p> - -<p>“Then I was turned on to shriek like a dog, and he was bewildered -and perturbed, but not amused. He asked me, in an unhappy way, how -I did it. I said by main strength, the way the Irishman played the -fiddle. This was counted a good jest. On that the Langs left, he -saying in a vague, dejected way, apropos of nothing, ‘If you’d like -me to take you round the town sights I’ll go—perhaps if Monday -were fine——’ he then faded out of the house.</p> - -<p>“On Monday no sign of him, nor on Tuesday either. I withered in -neglect, though assured that he never kept appointments, or did -anything. Yesterday he sent word that he would come at 2.30, and he -really did. The weather was furiously Arctic.</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>Doctor Nansen, I presume?’ said I, coming in dressed and ready. -He looked foolish, and admitted it <i>was</i> a bad day for exploration. -(Monday had<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_246" id="page_246">{246}</a></span> been lovely.) However we went. You will observe that I -was keeping my tail very erect.</p> - -<p>“In the <i>iron</i> blast we went down South Street, where most things -are. It is a little like the High at Oxford, on a small trim scale. -Andrew was immediately very nice, and I think he likes showing -people round. Have I mentioned that he is a gentleman? Rather -particularly so. It is worth mentioning. He was a most -perished-looking one, this piercing day, with his white face, and -his grey hair under a deerstalker, but still he looks all that. I -won’t at this time tell you of all the churches and places he took -me through. It was pleasant to hear him, in the middle of the -leading Presbyterian Church, and before the pew opener, call John -Knox a scoundrel, with intensest venom. In one small particular you -may applaud me. He showed me a place where Lord Bute is scrabbling -up the ruins of an old Priory and building ugly red sandstone -imitations on the foundations. I said,</p> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>The sacred Keep of Ilion is rent<br /></span> -<span class="i2">With shaft and pit;’<br /></span> -</div></div> -</div> - -<p>“This is the beginning of a sonnet by Andrew Lang, in the ‘Sonnets -of this Century,’ mourning the modern prying into the story of -Troy.</p> - -<p>“We talked of dogs, and I quoted from Stevenson’s Essay. <i>He</i> also -has written an attack on them, having been unaware of Stevenson’s. -He keeps and adores a cat, which he says hates him.... While in the -College Library Dr. Boyd (the ‘Country Parson’) came in and spoke -to Mr. Lang. I examined the nearest bookcase, but was ware of the -C.P.’s china blue eye upon me, and he presently spoke to me. He is -like a clean, rubicund priest, with a high nose; more than all he -is like a creditable ancestor on a wall, and should have a choker -and a high coat collar.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_247" id="page_247">{247}</a></span> He told me that his wife is now ‘gloating -over Charlotte,’ which was nice of him, and I am to go to tea with -them to-morrow. <i>Why</i> aren’t you here to take your share?</p> - -<p>“I said to Andrew that I thought of going to Edinburgh on Monday, -to see a few things, and he said he would be there and would show -me Holyrood. He said in his resigned voice, ‘I’ll meet you anywhere -you like.’ ... I am going to write to Mr. Blackwood, who has asked -me to go to see him. I will ask him if he would like the ‘Beggars.’ -Andrew L. wants to go there too, so we may go together. Now you -must be sick of A. L. and I will mention only two or three more -things about him.</p> - -<p>“He put a notice of Charlotte into some American magazine for which -he writes, before he knew me. I believe it is a good one, but am -rather shy of asking about it. You will be glad that she is getting -a lift in America. I hope some of your artist friends will see it. -He told me that Charlotte treated of quite a new phase, and seemed -to think that was its chiefest merit. He would prefer our writing -in future more of the sort of people one is likely to meet in -everyday life. He put his name in the Mark Twain Birthday Book, and -I told him you had compiled it. Lastly, I may remark that when he -leaves St. Andrews to-morrow, all other men go with him, as far as -I am concerned, or rather they stay, and they seem <i>bourgeois</i> and -commonplace (which is ungrateful, and not strictly true, and of -course there are exceptions, and, chief among them, my nice host, -and Father A., who are always what one likes).... Post has come, -bringing a most unexpected tribute to the Real C. from T. P. -O’Connor in the <i>Weekly Sun</i>. It is really one of the best, and -best-written notices we have ever had. I read it with high -gratification, in spite<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_248" id="page_248">{248}</a></span> of his calling us ‘Shoneens’—(whatever -they may be).... The Editor of <i>Black and White</i> has written asking -for something about St. Andrews, from an Irish point of view. ‘But -what about the artist?’ says he. What indeed? And I don’t know what -to write about. Everyone has written about St. Andrews.... I saw -them play the game of ‘Curling,’ which was funny, like bowls played -on ice, with big round stones that slide. The friends of a stone -tear in front of it as it slides, sweeping the ice with twigs so as -to further its progress. When a good bowl is made they say ‘Fine -stone!’ It is in many ways absurd....”</p></div> - -<div class="blockquot"><p class="c"> -St. Andrews, Jan. 29. ’95.<br /> -</p> - -<p>“...The dissipations have raged, and I have been much courted by -the ladies of St. Andrews. I shall not come back here again. Having -created an impression I shall retire on it before they begin to -find me out. It will be your turn next.... Mrs. Lang wrote to say -that the B——s, with whom the Langs were staying in Edinburgh, -wanted me to lunch there, being ‘proud to be my compatriots.’ -Professor B. is Irish, and is professor of Greek at Edinburgh -University, and Mrs. B. is also Irish.... Accordingly, yesterday I -hied me forth alone. It was a lovely hard frost here, but by the -time I was half way—(it is about two hours by train)—the snow -began. I drove to the B——s, along Princes Street, all horrible -with snow, but my breath was taken away by the beauty of it. There -is a deep fall of ground along one side, where once there was a -lake, then with one incredible <i>lep</i>, up towers the crag, three -hundred feet, and the Castle, and the ramparts all along the top. -It was foggy, with sun struggling through, and to see that thing -hump its great shoulder into the haze was fine. You know what I -think of Scott. You would<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_249" id="page_249">{249}</a></span> think the same if you once saw -Edinburgh. It was almost overwhelming to think of all that has -happened there—However, to resume, before you are bored.</p> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">“Andhrew he resaved me,<br /></span> -<span class="i1">So dacent and so pleasant,<br /></span> -<span class="i1">He’s as nice a man in fayture<br /></span> -<span class="i1">As I ever seen before.”<br /></span> -</div></div> -</div> - -<p class="nind">(<i>vide</i> Jimmy and the Song of Ross). He is indeed, and he has a -most correct and rather effeminate profile. No one else was in. He -was as miserable about the snow as a cat, and huddled into a huge -coat lined with sable. In state we drove up to the Castle by a long -round, and how the horse got up that slippery hill I don’t know. -The Castle was very grand; snowy courtyards with grey old walls, -and chapels, and dining-halls, most infinitely preferable to -Frederiksborg. The view should have been noble; as the weather was, -one could only see Scott’s monument—a very fine thing—and a very -hazy town. It is an awful thing to look over those parapets! A -company of the Black Watch was drilling in the outer courtyard, -very grand, and a piper went strutting like a turkeycock, and -skirling. It was wild, and I stood up by ‘Mons Meg’ and was -thrilled. Is it an insult to mention that Mons Meg is the huge, -historic old gun, and crouches like a she-mastiff on the topmost -crag, glaring forth over Edinburgh with the most concentrated -defiance? You couldn’t believe the expression of that gun. I asked -Andrew L. whether it was the same as ‘Muckle-mouthed Meg,’ having -vague memories of the name. He said in a dying gasp that -Muckle-mouthed Meg was his great-great-grandmother! That was a bad -miss, but I preserved my head just enough to enquire what had -become of the ‘Muckle mouth.’ (I may add that his own is -admirable.) He could only say with some</p></div><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_250" id="page_250">{250}</a></span></p> - -<p class="nind">slight embarrassment that it must have gone in the other line.</p> - -<p>“We solemnly viewed the Regalia, of which he knew the history of every -stone, and the room where James VI was born, a place about as big as a -dinner-table, and so on, and his information on all was petrifying. Then -it was all but lunch time, but we flew into St. Giles’ on the way home -to see Montrose’s tomb. A more beautiful and charming face than -Montrose’s you couldn’t see, and the church is a very fine one. An old -verger caught sight of us, and instantly flung to the winds a party he -was taking round, and endeavoured to show us everything, in spite of A. -L.’s protests. At length I firmly said, ‘Please show us the door.’ He -smiled darkly, and led us to a door, which, when opened, led into an -oaken and carven little room. He then snatched a book from a shelf—and -a pen and ink from somewhere else.</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>I know distinguished visitors when I see them!’ says he, showing us -the signatures of all the Royalties and distinguished people, about two -on each page. ‘Please write your names.’</p> - -<p>“Andrew wrote his, and I mine, on a blank sheet, and there they remain -for posterity. Andrew swears the verger didn’t know him, and that it was -all the fur coat, and that our names were a bitter disappointment—<i>why</i> -didn’t I put ‘Princess of Connemara’?</p> - -<p>“Then to lunch. The B——s were <i>very</i> nice. He is tall and thin, she -short, both as pleasant and unconventional and easy as nice Irish people -alone are. After lunch she and Mrs. Lang tackled me in the drawing-room -about the original of the Real C. I gaily admitted that she was drawn -from life, and that you had known her a thousand times better than I. -Then I told them various tales of her, and, without thinking, revealed -her name.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_251" id="page_251">{251}</a></span></p> - -<div class="blockquot"><p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>Oh yes!’ says Mrs. B. in ecstasy, ‘she was my husband’s cousin!’</p> - -<p>“I covered my face with my hands, and I swear that the blush -trickled through my fingers. I then rose, in strong convulsions, -and attempted to fly the house. Professor B—— was called in to -triumph over me, and said that she was only a very distant cousin, -and that he had never seen her, and didn’t care what had been said -of her. They were <i>enchanted</i> about it and my confusion, and they -have asked me to go to their place in Ireland, with delightful -cordiality.... Andrew L. and I then walked forth to Blackwood’s, a -very fine old-fashioned place, with interesting pictures. We were -instantly shown upstairs, to a large, pleasant room, where was Mr. -Blackwood.... I broached the subject of the ‘Beggars,’ while Andrew -stuck his nose into a book. Mr. Blackwood said he would like to see -it.... Mr. Lang then spoke to him about an article on Junius that -he is writing, and <i>I</i> put <i>my</i> nose into a book. We then left. -There was no time to see Holyrood.... Thus to the train. My most -comfortable thought during the two hours’ journey home was that in -talking to Mrs. B. I had placed Charlotte on <i>your</i> shoulders! -Andrew L. was very kind, and told me that if ever I wanted anything -done that he could help me in, that he would do it.... My last -impression of him is of his whipping out of the carriage as it -began to move on, in the midst of an account of how Buddha died of -eating roast pork to surfeit.”</p></div><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_252" id="page_252">{252}</a></span></p> - -<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXII" id="CHAPTER_XXII"></a>CHAPTER XXII<br /><br /> -<small>AT ÉTAPLES</small></h2> - -<p><span class="smcap">In</span> February, 1895, I met Martin in London, and found her in considerable -feather, consequent on her reviving visit to St. Andrews, and on that -gorgeous review in which we had been called hard and pitiless censors, -as well as sardonic, squalid, and merciless observers of Irish life. We -felt this to be so uplifting that we lost no time in laying the -foundations of a further “ferocious narrative.” This became, in process -of time, “The Silver Fox.” It had the disadvantage, from our point of -view, of appearing first in a weekly paper (since defunct). This -involved a steady rate of production, and recurring “curtains,” which -are alike objectionable; the former to the peace of mind of the author, -while the latter are noxious trucklings to and stimulation of the casual -reader. That, at least, is how the stipulated sensation at the end of -each weekly instalment appeared to us at the time, and I have seen no -reason for relinquishing these views. “The Silver Fox,” like most of our -books, was the victim of many interruptions; it was finished in 1896, -and as soon as its weekly career was careered, it was sold to Messrs. -Lawrence and Bullen, who published it in October, 1897. It was a curious -coincidence that almost in the same week we hunted a silver-grey fox -with the West Carbery hounds.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_253" id="page_253">{253}</a></span> The hunt took place on Friday, the 13th -of the month, we lost the fox in a quarry-hole, in which a farmer had, -at the bidding of a dream, dug, fruitlessly, and at much expense, for -fairy gold, and two of our horses were very badly cut. I saw the Silver -Fox break covert, it was the Round Covert at Bunalun, and by all the -laws of romance I ought to have broken my neck; but the Powers of -Darkness discredited him, and neither he nor I were any the worse for -the hunt. I do not remember ever seeing him again, and I presume he -returned immediately to the red covers (without a t) of our book, from -which he had been given a temporary outing.</p> - -<p>It was in May and June, 1895, that we spent a happy and primitive -fortnight in one of the Isles of Aran; we have described it in “Some -Irish Yesterdays,” and it need not be further dealt with, though I may -quote from my diary the fact that on “May 22. M. & I rescued a drowning -child by the quay, and got very wet thereby. Several Natives surveyed -performance, pleased, but calm, and did not offer assistance.”</p> - -<p>In July, an entirely new entertainment was kindly provided for us by a -General Election; our services were requisitioned by the Irish Unionist -Alliance, and with a deep, inward sense of ignorance (not to say of -play-acting), we sailed forth to instruct the East Anglian elector in -the facts of Irish politics. It was a more arduous mission than we had -expected, and it opened for us a window into English middle-class life -through which we saw and learned many unsuspected things. Notably the -persistence of English type, and the truth that was in George Eliot. We -met John Bunyan, unconverted, it is true, but unmistakably he; cobbling -in a roadside stall, full of theories, and endowed by heredity with a -splendid Biblical speech in which to set them forth. Seth Bede<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_254" id="page_254">{254}</a></span> was -there, a house-painter and a mystic, with transparent, other-worldly -blue eyes and a New Testament standard of ethics. Dinah Morris was there -too, a female preacher and a saintly creature, who shamed for us the -play-acting aspect of the affair into abeyance, and whose high and -serious spirit recognised and met Martin’s spirit on a plane far remote -from the sordid or ludicrous controversies of electioneering.</p> - -<p>These few and elect souls we met by chance and privilege, not by -intention. We had been given “professional” people, mainly, as our -victims. Doctors, lawyers, and non-conforming parsons of various -denominations. It taught us an unforgettable lesson of English honesty, -level-headedness, and open-mindedness. Also of English courtesy. With -but a solitary exception, we were received and listened to, seriously, -and with a respect that we secretly found rather discomposing. They took -themselves seriously, and their respect almost persuaded us that we were -neither actors nor critics, but real people with a real message. The -whole trend of Irish politics has changed since then. Every camp has -been shifted, many infallibles have failed. I am not likely to go on the -stump again, but I shall ever remember with pride that on this, our -single entry into practical politics, our man got in, and that a Radical -poster referred directly, and in enormous capital letters, to Martin and -me as “IRISH LOCUSTS.”</p> - -<p>I went to Aix-les-Bains a year or two after this. It was the first of -several experiences of that least oppressive of penalties for the sins -of your forefathers, if not of your own. There was one year when among -the usual number of kings and potentates was one of the Austrian -Rothschilds. With him was an inseparable private secretary, who had -been, one would say, cut with a fret-saw straight from an Assyrian<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_255" id="page_255">{255}</a></span> -bas-relief. His profile and his crimped beard were as memorable as the -example set by M. le Baron to the gamblers at the Cercle. Followed by a -smart crowd in search of a sensation, the Baron and the Secretary moved -to the table of “<i>Les Petits Chevaux</i>,” and people waited to see the -Bank broken in a single coup. The Baron murmured a command to the -Profile. The Profile put a franc on “<i>Egalité</i>.” “<i>Egalité</i>” won. The -process was repeated until the Baron was the winner of ten francs, when -the couple retired, and were seen there no more, and one began to -understand why rich men are rich. There was one dazzling night with “the -little horses” when I found myself steering them in the Chariot of the -Sun. I could not make a mistake; where I led, the table, with gamblers’ -instant adoption of a mascot, followed. I found myself famous, and won -forty-five francs. Alas! I was not Baron de Rothschild, or even the -Assyrian Profile, and the rest is silence.</p> - -<p>From Aix I went to Boulogne, and meeting Martin there, we moved on to -Étaples, which was, that summer (1898), the only place that any -self-respecting painter could choose for a painting ground. Cazin, and a -few others of the great, had made it fashionable, and there were two -“Classes” there (which, for the benefit of the uninitiated, are -companies of personally-conducted art-students, who move in groups round -a law-giver, and paint series of successive landscapes, that, in their -one-ness and yet progressiveness, might be utilised with effect as -cinematograph backgrounds). We found, by appointment, at Étaples a -number of our particular friends, “Kinkie,” “Madame Là-Là,” “The Dean,” -Helen Simpson, Anna Richards, a pleasingly Irish-American gang, with -whom we had worked and played in Paris. The two or three small hotels -and boarding-houses were full of painters, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_256" id="page_256">{256}</a></span> the Quartier Latin held -the town in thrall. As far, at least, as bedrooms, studios, and feeding -places were concerned. Sheds and barns and gardens, all were absorbed; -everyone gave up everything to <i>MM. Les Étrangers</i>; everyone, I should -say, who had been confirmed. Confirmation at Étaples was apparently of -the nature of the Conversion of St. Paul in its effect upon the -character. After confirmation, instant politeness and kindness to the -stranger within their gates characterised the natives; prior to that -ceremony, it is impossible to give any adequate impression of the -atrocity of the children of the town. If an artist pitched his easel and -hoisted his umbrella on any spot unsurrounded by a ten-foot wall, he was -immediately mobbed by the unconfirmed. The procedure was invariable. One -chose, with the usual effort, the point of view. One set one’s palette -and began to work. A child strayed round a corner and came to a dead -set. It retired; one heard its sabots clattering as it flew. Presently, -from afar, the clatter would be renewed, an hundred-fold; shrill cries -blended with it. Then the children arrived. They leaned heavily on the -shoulders of the painter, and were shaken off. They attempted, often -successfully, to steal his colours. They postured between him and his -subject, dancing, and putting forth their tongues. They also spat.</p> - -<p>The maddened painters made deputations to the Mayor, to the Curé, to the -Police, and from all received the same reply, that <i>méchant</i> as the -children undeniably were now, they would become entirely <i>sage</i> after -confirmation. We did not attempt to dispute the forecast, but our -contention that, though consolatory to parents, it was of no -satisfaction to us, was ignored by the authorities. Therefore, in so far -as was possible, we took measures into our own hands. I<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_257" id="page_257">{257}</a></span> wrote home for -a hunting-crop, and Martin took upon herself the varying yet allied -offices of Chucker-out and Whipper-in. She was not only fleet of foot, -but subtle in expedient and daring in execution. I recall with ecstasy a -day when a wholly loathsome boy, to whose back a baby appeared to be -glued, was put to flight by her with the stick of my sketching-umbrella. -Right across the long Bridge of Étaples he fled, howling; the baby, -crouched on his shoulders, sitting as tight as Tod Sloan, while Martin, -filled with a splendid wrath, belaboured him heavily below the baby, -ceasing not until he had plunged, still howling, into a fisherman’s -cottage. Another boy, tending cattle on the marshes, drove a calf in -front of us, and, with a weapon that might have been the leg of a table, -beat it sickeningly about the eyes. In an instant Martin had snatched -the table-leg from him and hurled it into a wide dyke, the next moment -she had sent his cap, skimming like a clay pigeon, across it, and -“Madame Là-Là” (who is six feet high), rising, cobra-like, from the lair -in which she had concealed herself from the enemy, chased the calf from -our neighbourhood. Later, we heard him indicate Martin to his fellows.</p> - -<p>“<i>Elle est méchante, celle la!</i>”—and, to our deep gratification, the -warning was accepted.</p> - -<p>In those far-off times Paris Plage and Le Touquet were little more than -names, and were represented by a few villas and chalets of fantastic -architecture peppered sparsely among the sand-dunes and in the little -fairy-tale forests of toy pine-trees that divided Étaples from Le -Touquet. There was a villa, whose touching name of “Home, <i>Swet</i> Home,” -appealed to the heated wayfarer, where now a Red Cross hospital is a -stepping-stone to “Home,” for many a British wayfarer who has fallen by -the way, and pale<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_258" id="page_258">{258}</a></span> English boys, in blue hospital kit, lie about on the -beach where we have sat and sketched the plump French ladies in their -beautiful bathing dresses.</p> - -<p>It was among Cazin’s sand-dunes, possibly on the very spot where Hagar -is tearing her hair over Ishmael (in his great picture, which used to -hang in the Luxembourg), that the “Irish R.M.” came into existence. -During the previous year or two we had, singly and jointly, been writing -short stories and articles, most of which were republished in a volume, -“All on the Irish Shore.” Many of these had appeared in the <i>Badminton -Magazine</i>, and its editor now requested us to write for it a series of -such stories. Therefore we sat out on the sand hills, roasting in the -great sunshine of Northern France, and talked, until we had talked Major -Sinclair Yeates, R.M., and Flurry Knox into existence. “Great Uncle -MacCarthy’s” Ghost and the adventure of the stolen foxes followed, as it -were, of necessity. It has always seemed to us that character -presupposes incident. The first thing needful is to know your man. -Before we had left Étaples, we had learned to know most of the people of -the R.M.’s country very well indeed, and all the better for the fact -that, of them all, “Slipper” and “Maria” alone had prototypes in the -world as we knew it. All the others were members of a select circle of -which Martin and I alone had the <i>entrée</i>. Or so at least we then -believed, but since, of half a dozen counties of Ireland, at least, we -have been categorically and dogmatically assured that “<i>all</i> the -characters in the R.M.” lived, moved, and had their being in them, we -have almost been forced to the conclusion that there were indeed six -Richmonds in every field, and that, in the spirit, we have known them -all.</p> - -<p>The illustrations to the first and second of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_259" id="page_259">{259}</a></span> stories were -accomplished at Etaples, and, in the dearth of suitable models, Martin, -and other equally improbable victims, had to be sacrificed. One piece of -luck fell to me in the matter. I wished to make an end-drawing, for the -first story, of a fox, and I felt unequal to evolving a plausible -imitation from my inner consciousness. It may not be believed, but it is -a fact that, as, one afternoon, I crossed the Bridge of Étaples, I met -upon it a man leading a young fox on a chain, a creature as mysteriously -heaven-sent as was the lion to the old “Man of God.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_260" id="page_260">{260}</a></span>”</p> - -<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXIII" id="CHAPTER_XXIII"></a>CHAPTER XXIII<br /><br /> -<small>PARIS AGAIN</small></h2> - -<p><span class="smcap">We</span> returned to Drishane in October, having by that time written and -illustrated the third story of the series. Which was fortunate, as on -the first of November, “November Day” as we call it in Carbery, we went -a-hunting, and under my eyes Martin “took a toss” such as I trust I may -never have to see again. It happened in the middle of a run; there was a -bar across an opening into a field. It was a wooden bar, with bushes -under it, and it was not very high, but firmly fixed. I jumped it, and -called to her to come on. The horse she was riding, Dervish, was a good -hunter, but was cunning and often lazy. He took the bar with his knees, -and I saw him slowly fall on to his head, and then turn over, rolling on -Martin, who had kept too tightly her grip of the saddle. Then he -struggled to his feet, but she lay still.</p> - -<p>It was two months before she was able again to “lift her hand serenely -in the sunshine, as before,” or so much as take a pen in it, and several -years before she could be said to have regained such strength as had -been hers. Nothing had been broken, and she had entirely escaped -disfigurement, even though the eye-glasses, in which she always rode, -had cut her brow; but one of the pummels of the saddle had<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_261" id="page_261">{261}</a></span> bruised her -spine, and the shock to a system so highly-strung as hers was what might -be expected. The marvel was that so fragile a creature could ever have -recovered, but her spirit was undefeated, and long before she could even -move herself in bed, she had begun to work with me again, battling -against all the varied and subtle sufferings that are known only to -those who have damaged a nerve centre, with the light-hearted courage -that was so conspicuously hers.</p> - -<p>During the second half of that black November we were writing “The -Waters of Strife,” which is the fourth story of the “R.M.” series. Its -chief incident was the vision which came to the central figure of the -story, of the face of the man he had murdered. This incident, as it -happened, was a true one, and was the pivot of the story. We had -promised a monthly story, and in order to keep faith, we had written it -with an effort that had required almost more than we had to give. The -story now appears in our book as we originally wrote it, but on its -first appearance in the <i>Badminton Magazine</i> a passage had been -introduced by an alien and unsolicited collaborator, and “various jests” -had been “eliminated as unfit” for, one supposes, the sensitive readers -of the magazine. Sometimes one wonders who are these ethereal beings -whose sensibilities are only shielded from shock by the sympathetic -delicacy of editors. I remember once before being crushed by another -editor. I had drawn, from life, for the Connemara Tour, a portrait of -“Little Judy from Menlo,” a Galway beggar-woman of wide renown. It was -returned with the comment that “such a thing would shock delicate -ladies.” So, as the song says, “Judy being bashful said ‘No, no, no’!” -and returned to private life. Another and less distinguished -beggar-woman once said to me of the disappointments of life,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_262" id="page_262">{262}</a></span> “Such -things must be, Miss Somerville, my darlin’ gerr’l!” and authors must, -one supposes, submit sometimes to be sacrificed to the susceptibilities -of the ideal reader.</p> - -<p>The twelve “R.M.” stories kept us desperately at work until the -beginning of August, 1899. Looking back on the writing of them, each -one, as we finished it, seemed to be the last possible effort of -exhausted nature. Martin hardly knew, through those strenuous months, -what it was to be out of suffering. Even though it cannot be denied that -we both of us found enjoyment in the writing of them, I look back upon -the finish of each story as a nightmare effort. Copying our unspeakably -tortuous MS. till the small hours of the morning of the last possible -day; whirling through the work of the illustrations (I may confess that -one small drawing, that of “Maria” with the cockatoo between her paws, -was done, as it were “between the stirrup and the ground,” while the -horse, whose mission it was to gallop in pursuit of the postman, stamped -and raged under my studio windows). By the time the last bundle had been -dispatched Martin and I had arrived at a stage when we regarded an -ink-bottle as a mad dog does a bucket of water. Rest, and change of air, -for both of us, was indicated. I was sent to Aix, she went to North -Wales, and we decided to meet in Paris and spend the winter there.</p> - -<p>In the beginning of October, 1899, we established ourselves in an -<i>appartement</i> in the Boulevard Edgar Quinet, and there we spent the next -four months.</p> - -<p>Looking back through our old diaries I recognise for how little of that -time Martin was free from suffering of some kind. The effects of the -hunting accident, and the strain of writing, too soon undertaken, were -only now beginning to come to their own. Neuralgia, exhaustion, -backaches, and all the in<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_263" id="page_263">{263}</a></span>describable miseries of neurasthenia held her -in thrall. It is probable that the bracing tonic of the Paris climate -saved her from a still worse time, but she had come through her -reserves, and was now going on pluck. We wrote, desultorily, when she -felt equal to it, and I worked at M. Délécluse’s studio in the mornings, -and, with some others, assisted Mr. Cyrus Cuneo, a young, and then -unknown, American, in getting up an “illustration class” in the -afternoons. Most people have seen the brilliant black and white -illustrations that Mr. Cuneo drew for the <i>Illustrated London News</i> and -other papers and magazines, and his early death has left a blank that -will not easily be filled. He could have been no more than four or five -and twenty when I met him, and he was already an extraordinarily clever -draughtsman. He was small, dark, and exceedingly good-looking, with a -peculiarly beautiful litheness, balance, and swiftness of movement, that -was to some extent explained by the fact that before he took up Art he -had occupied the exalted position of “Champion Bantam of the South -Pacific Slope”!</p> - -<p>At that juncture we were all mad about a peculiar style of crayon -drawing, which, as far as we were concerned, had been originated by -Cuneo, and about a dozen of us took a studio in the Passage Stanilas, -and worked there, from the most sensational models procurable. Cuneo was -“<i>Massier</i>”; he found the models, and posed them (mercilessly), and we -all worked like tigers, and brutally enjoyed the strung-up sensation -that comes from the pressure of a difficult pose. Each stroke is Now or -Never, every instant is priceless. Pharaoh of the Oppression was not -firmer in the matter of letting the Children of Israel go, than we were -with those unhappy models. I console myself by remembering that a good -model has a<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_264" id="page_264">{264}</a></span> pride in his endurance in a difficult pose that is as -sustaining as honest and just pride always is. Nevertheless, when I look -over these studies, and see the tall magician, peering, on tip-toe, over -a screen, and the High-priest denouncing the violation of the sanctuary, -and the unfortunate Arab, half rising from his couch to scan the -horizon, I recognise that for these models, though Art was indisputably -long, Time could hardly have been said to be fleeting.</p> - -<p>Mr. Whistler was at that time in Paris, and had a morning class for -ladies only, and it was in their studio that we had our class. It was -large, well-lighted, with plenty of stools and easels and a sink for -washing hands and brushes. It also was thoroughly insanitary, and had a -well-established reputation for cases of typhoid. As a precautionary -measure we always kept a certain yellow satin cushion on the mouth of -the sink; this, not because of any superstition as to the colour, or the -cushion, but because there was no other available “stopper for the -stink.” (Thus Cuneo, whose language, if free, was always well chosen.) -One of our members was a very clever American girl, who had broken loose -from the bondage of the Whistler class. There, it appeared from her, if -you had a soul, you could not think of calling it your own. It was -intensively bossed by Mr. Whistler’s <i>Massière</i>, on the lines laid down -by Mr. Whistler, until, as my friend said, you had “no more use for it, -and were just yelling with nerves.” The model, whether fair, dark, red, -white, or brown, had to be seen through Mr. Whistler’s spectacles, and -these, judging by the studies that were occasionally left on view, were -of very heavily smoked glass. When it came to the <i>Massière</i> setting my -American friend’s palette, and dictating to her the flesh tones, the -daughter of the Great Republic</p> - -<div class="figcenter"><a name="ill_18" id="ill_18"></a> -<a href="images/ill_011_lg.jpg"> -<img src="images/ill_011_sml.jpg" width="347" height="654" alt="[Image unavailable.]" /></a> -<div class="caption"><p>“CHEZ CUNEO.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_265" id="page_265">{265}</a></span>”</p></div> -</div> - -<p class="nind">observed that she was used to a free country, and shook the dust off her -feet, and scraped the mud off her palette, and retired. An interesting -feature of the studio was that many sheets of paper on which Mr. -Whistler had scribbled maxim and epigram were nailed on its walls, for -general edification, and it might have served better had his lieutenant -allowed these to influence the pupils, unsupported by her -interpretations. Since then I have met some of these pronouncements in -print, but I will quote one of those that I copied at the time, as it -bears on the case in point.</p> - -<p>“That flesh should ever be low in tone would seem to many a source of -sorrow, and of vast vexation, and its rendering, in such circumstance, -an unfailing occasion of suspicion, objection, and reproach; each -objection—which is the more fascinating in that it would seem to imply -superiority and much virtue on the part of the one who makes it—is -vaguely based upon the popular superstition as to what flesh really -is—when seen on canvas, for the people never look at Nature with any -sense of its pictorial appearance, for which reason, by the way, they -also never look at a picture with any sense of Nature, but -unconsciously, from habit, with reference to what they have seen in -other pictures. Lights have been heightened until the white of the tube -alone remains. Shadows have been deepened until black only is left! -Scarcely a feature stays in its place, so fierce is its intention of -firmly coming forth. And in the midst of this unseemly struggle for -prominence, the gentle truth has but a sorry chance, falling flat and -flavourless and without force.”</p> - -<p>No one who has not lived, as we did, the life of “The Quarter” can at -all appreciate its charm. In description—as I have already had occasion -to say<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_266" id="page_266">{266}</a></span>—it is usual, and more entertaining, to dwell upon the disasters -of daily life, but though these, thanks to a <i>bonne à tout faire</i>, and a -perfidious stove, were not lacking, Martin and I, and our friends, -enjoyed ourselves. Small and select tea-parties were frequent; -occasionally we aspired to giving what has been called by a gratified -guest in the County Cork “a nice, ladylike little dinner,” and in a -letter of my own I find an account of a more unusual form of -entertainment which came our way.</p> - -<p>“A friendly and agreeable American, who works in the Studio, asked us to -come and see her in her rooms, away back of Saint Sulpice. When we got -there we found, as well as my American friend, a little incidental, -casual mother, whom she had not thought worth mentioning before. She -just said, briefly,</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>Oh, this is Mother,’ which, after all, sufficed.</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>Mother’ was a perfect specimen of one of the secret, serf-like -American mothers, who are concealed in Paris, put away like a pair of -warm stockings, or an old waterproof, for an emergency. She was a nice, -shrivelled, little old thing, very kind and polite. Their room, which -was about six inches square, had little in it save a huge and catafaltic -bed with deep crimson curtains; the window curtains were deep crimson, -the walls, which were brown, had panels of deep crimson. Hot air welled -into the room through gratings. We sat and talked, and looked at picture -postcards for a long time, and our tongues were beginning to hang out, -from want of tea, and suffocation, when the daughter said something to -the mother.</p> - -<p>“There was then produced, from a sort of hole in the wall, sweet -biscuits, and a bottle of wine, the latter also deep crimson (to match -the room, no doubt). It was a fierce and heady vintage. I know not its<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_267" id="page_267">{267}</a></span> -origin, I can only assure you that in less than two minutes from its -consumption our faces were tremendously <i>en suite</i> with the curtains. We -tottered home, clinging to each other, and lost our way twice.”</p> - -<p>We had ourselves an opportunity of offering a somewhat unusual form of -hospitality to two of our friends, the occasion being nothing less than -the expected End of the World. This was timed by the newspapers to occur -on the night of November 15, and I will allow Martin to describe what -took place. The beginning part of the letter gives the history of one of -those curious and unlucky coincidences of which writing-people are more -often the victims than is generally known, and for this reason I will -transcribe it also.</p> - -<div class="blockquot"><p class="c"> -V. F. M. to Mrs. Martin. (Nov. 23, 1899.)<br /> -</p> - -<p>“...The story for the Christmas number of the <i>Homestead</i> came to -a most untimely end; not that it was untimely, as we were at the -very limit of time allowed for sending it in. It was finished, and -we were just sitting down to copy it, when I chanced to look -through last year’s Xmas No. (which, fortunately, we happened to -have here,) in order to see about the number of words. I then made -the discovery that one of the stories last Christmas, by Miss Jane -Barlow, no less! was built round the same idea as ours; one or two -incidents quite startlingly alike, so much so that one couldn’t -possibly send in ours. It read like a sort of burlesque of Miss -Barlow’s, and would never have done. There was no time to re-write -it, so all we could do was to write and tell the Editor what had -happened, and make our bows. E. sent him a sketch, as an <i>amende</i>, -which he has accepted in the handsome and gentlemanlike spirit in -which it was offered, and I sent him a little dull<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_268" id="page_268">{268}</a></span> article<a name="FNanchor_13_13" id="FNanchor_13_13"></a><a href="#Footnote_13_13" class="fnanchor">[13]</a> -that I happened to have here, on the chance that it might do to -fill a corner, and it is to appear with E.’s sketch. But I am -afraid, though he was very kind about it, that these things have -not at all consoled the Editor, who wanted a story like the -‘R.M.’s.’</p> - -<p>“Nothing very interesting has happened here since the night of ‘The -Leonids,’ the Shower of Stars that was to have happened last week. -There was much excitement in Paris, at least the newspapers were -excited. On my way to the dentist a woman at the corner of the -boulevard was selling enormous sheets of paper, with ‘<i>La Fin du -Monde, à trois heures!</i>’ on them, and a gorgeous picture of Falbe’s -comet striking the earth. It was then 1.30, but I thought I had -better go to the dentist just the same. I believe that lots of the -poor people were very much on the jump about it. The Rain of -Meteors was prophesied by the Observatory here for that night, and -Kinkie, and the lady whom we call ‘Madame Là Là,’ arranged to spend -the night in our sitting room (which has a good view of the sky in -two aspects). We laid in provender and filled the stove to -bursting, and our visitors arrived at about 9.30 p.m. It really was -very like a wake, at the outset. The stipulation was that they were -to call us if anything happened; I went to bed at 10.30, E. at -midnight, and those unhappy creatures sat there all night, and -<i>nothing</i> happened. They saw three falling stars, and they made tea -three times (once in honour of each star), and they also had -‘Maggi,’ which is the French equivalent for Bovril, and twice as -nice. During the night I could hear their stealthy steps going to -and fro to the kitchen to boil up things on the gas stove. In the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_269" id="page_269">{269}</a></span> -awful dawn they crept home, and, I hear, turned up at the Studio -looking just the sort of wrecks one might have expected.</p> - -<p>“I believe that they did see a light go sailing up from the Dome of -the Observatoire, (which we can see from here) and that was a -balloon, containing a lady astronomer, Mademoiselle Klumpke, (who -is, I believe an American) and others. She sailed away in the -piercing cold to somewhere in the South of Switzerland, and I -believe she saw a few dozen meteors. Anyhow, two days afterwards, -she walked into Kinkie’s studio, bringing a piece of mistletoe, and -some flowers that she had gathered when she got out of the balloon -down there.”</p></div> - -<p>The South African War made life in Paris, that winter, a school of -adversity for all English, or nominally English, people. Each reverse of -our Army—and if one could believe the French papers it would seem that -such took place every second day—was snatched at by the people of Paris -and their newspapers with howls of delight. Men in the omnibuses would -thrust in our faces <i>La Patrie</i>, or some such paper, to exhibit the -words “<i>Encore un Écrasement Anglais!</i>”, in large, exultant letters, -filling a page. Respectable old gentlemen, in “faultless morning dress,” -would cry “Oh yais!” as we passed; large tongues would be exhibited to -us, till we felt we could have diagnosed the digestions of the Quarter. -At last our turn came, and when the <i>Matin</i> had a line, “<i>Capitulation -de Cronjé</i>,” writ large enough for display, Martin made an expedition in -an omnibus down “The Big Boulevards” for no purpose other than to flaunt -it in the faces of her fellow passengers.</p> - -<p>To Martin, who was an intensely keen politician, the aloofness of many -of the art-students whom she met, from the War, the overthrow of the -French<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_270" id="page_270">{270}</a></span> Government, from, in fact, any question on any subject outside -the life of the studio, was a constant amazement.</p> - -<p>In a letter from her to one of her sisters she releases her feelings on -the subject.</p> - -<div class="blockquot"><p class="c"> -V. F. M. to Mrs. Cuthbert Dawson.<br /> -(Paris, Nov. 29, 1899.)<br /> -</p> - -<p>“The French papers are realising that a mistake has been made in -the attacks on the Queen, and the better ones are saying so. But -the <i>Patrie</i>, the <i>Libre Parole</i>, and all that fleet of halfpenny -papers that the poor read, have nailed their colours to the mast, -and it seems as if their idea is to overthrow their present -Government by fair means or foul. As long as this Government is in -there will be no quarrel with England, but it might, of course, go -out like a candle, any day. I daresay you have heard the <i>Rire</i> -spoken of as one of the papers that ought to be suppressed. We -bought the number that was to be all about the English, and all -about them it was, a sort of comic history of England since the -Creation, with Hyde Park as the Garden of Eden. The cover was a -hauntingly horrible picture of Joan of Arc being burned. The rest -of the pictures were dull, disgusting, and too furiously angry to -be clever. We had pleasure in consigning the whole thing to the -stove.... The students here, with exceptions, of course,—appear -deaf and blind to all that goes on, and Revolutions in Paris, and -the War in the Transvaal, are as nothing to them as compared with -the pose of the model. In every street are crowds of them, scraping -away at their charcoal ‘academies’ by the roomful, all perfectly -engrossed and self-centred, and, I think, quite happy. Last Sunday -we went to a mild little tea-party in a studio, where were several<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_271" id="page_271">{271}</a></span> -of these artist-women, in their best clothes, and somewhere in the -heart of the throng was a tiny hideosity, an American, (who has a -studio in which R. B. once worked,) fat, bearded, and unspeakably -common, but interesting.<a name="FNanchor_14_14" id="FNanchor_14_14"></a><a href="#Footnote_14_14" class="fnanchor">[14]</a> Holding another court of the women was -a microbe English artist, an absurd little thing to look at, but, I -believe, clever; I hear that on weekdays he dresses like a French -workman and looks like a toy that you would buy at a bazaar. No one -talked anything but Art, except when occasionally one of the -hostesses (there were four) hurriedly asked me what I thought of -the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyám, or <i>how</i> two people managed to write -together, just to show what good hostesses they were, while all the -while they tried to listen to the harangues of the microbe or the -hideosity. Poor things, it was very nice of them, and I was -touched. There are about half a dozen, that I know here, who take -an English paper; it is a remarkable thing that they are nearly all -Irish and Scotch, and have baths.”</p></div><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_272" id="page_272">{272}</a></span></p> - -<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXIV" id="CHAPTER_XXIV"></a>CHAPTER XXIV<br /><br /> -<small>HORSES AND HOUNDS</small></h2> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">With Flurry’s Hounds, and you our guide,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">We learned to laugh until we cried;<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Dear Martin Ross, the coming years<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Find all our laughter lost in tears.<br /></span> -<span class="i10">—<i>Punch</i>, Jan. 19, 1916.<br /></span> -</div></div> -</div> - -<p>I <span class="smcap">have</span> thought of leaving it to our books to express and explain the -part that hunting has played in Martin’s life and mine; but when I -remember (to quote once again those much-quoted lines) how much of the -fun that we have had in our lives has been “owed to horse and hound,” I -feel an acknowledgment more direct and deliberate is due.</p> - -<p>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 <i>near</i> 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<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_273" id="page_273">{273}</a></span> 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.</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>In 1891 my brother Aylmer restarted the old West<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_274" id="page_274">{274}</a></span> 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.</p> - -<p>No longer are such items to be found as:</p> - -<p>“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.”</p> - -<p>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.”</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>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</p> - -<div class="figcenter"><a name="ill_19" id="ill_19"></a> -<a href="images/ill_012_lg.jpg"> -<img src="images/ill_012_sml.jpg" width="377" height="536" alt="[Image unavailable.]" /></a> -<div class="caption"><p>THE WEST CARBERY HOUNDS.</p> - -<div class="sigg"> -M. J. R.<br /> -</div> -</div></div> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_275" id="page_275">{275}</a></span></p> - -<p class="nind">of office had ended, a farmer summed up for me the opinion that the -country people had of him:</p> - -<p>“He was the King of the world for them! If he rode his horses into their -beds they’d ask no better!”</p> - -<p>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 “<span class="lftspc">’</span>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.</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_276" id="page_276">{276}</a></span> 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.</p> - -<p>“Oh!” exclaimed my Aunt S. rapturously, “what a darling little hound! I -like it the best of them all!”</p> - -<p>The disaster of a sigh too much, or a kiss too long, was never more -tragically exemplified.</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>“Edith is wonderful!” she said fervently, “she knows them <i>all</i>! If she -wants one of them she just says, ‘Here, Spot! Spot! Spot!’<span class="lftspc">”</span></p> - -<p>One gathered that the response to this classic hound name was instant.</p> - -<p>Huntsmen have, in their way, almost as much to put up with as writers in -the matter of cross-examination.</p> - -<p>“And do you <i>really</i> know them? <i>Each</i> one?”</p> - -<p>“And have they <i>all</i> got names?”</p> - -<p>Then, upon explanation that there are enough names to go round, “And do -you absolutely <i>know</i> them all?”</p> - -<p>L., like Tom Corey, was unsustained by a sense of humour, and nothing -but his lovableness enabled<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_277" id="page_277">{277}</a></span> him to fulfil that most difficult of -Christian duties, to suffer fools gladly.</p> - -<p>“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,</p> - -<p>“What a number of cubs you have killed!”</p> - -<p>The Master said, icily, that those were foxes, and the subject dropped.</p> - -<p>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 <small>A.M.</small>, 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<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_278" id="page_278">{278}</a></span> 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 <i>little pet</i>!’ ’e says!”</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_279" id="page_279">{279}</a></span> -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.</p> - -<p>I had had my own little <i>fracas</i> 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.</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>“Gawd bless you, Governor boy! Gawd bless you, Rachel my darling! Come -along, Master! Come along! He’s away, thank Gawd! He’s away!”</p> - -<p>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.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_280" id="page_280">{280}</a></span></p> - -<p>“Where is ’e, ’Arry?” he roared.</p> - -<p>“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?”</p> - -<p>“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!”</p> - -<p>With which G. laid on his hounds, and left Harry to comfort himself with -this reflection and to catch his horse when he could.</p> - -<p>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.”</p> - -<p>“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.”</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>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,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_281" id="page_281">{281}</a></span> 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.”</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>“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!”</p> - -<p>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.”</p> - -<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_282" id="page_282">{282}</a></span> 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.</p> - -<p>“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 <i>af</i>ter that,” she went on, “we jumped it five times.”</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<div class="blockquot"><p class="c"> -V. F. M. to the Hon. Mrs. Campbell. (December.)<br /> -</p> - -<p>“We had an unusual sort of hunt the other day, when the hounds, -unattended, put a fox out of a very thick wood and up a terrible -hill; when we caught them up there ensued much scrambling and -climbing; there were even moments when, having<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_283" id="page_283">{283}</a></span> a bad head, I was -extremely frightened, and, in the middle of all this, a fallow doe -joined up from behind, <i>through the riders</i>, and got away over the -hill-top. To the doe the hounds cheerfully attached themselves, and -we had much fun out of it, and it was given to us to see, as they -went away, that one hound had a rabbit in his mouth. It is not -every day that one hunts a fox, a deer and a rabbit at the same -moment. It was like old hunting scenes in tapestry. C., the old -huntsman, and his old white horse went like smoke in the boggy, -hilly country. It was pleasant to see, and the doe beat the hounds -handsomely and got back safely to the wood, to which, in the -meantime, the fox had strolled back by the avenue.</p> - -<p>“Last week we drew another of the minor mountains of this district, -and the new draft got away like lightning after a dog! who fled -over a spur of the hill for his paternal home. All went out of -sight, but the row continued. C. sat and blew his horn, and the -poor Whip nearly burst himself trying to get round them. Then they -reappeared, half the pack by this time, going like mad, and <i>no</i> -dog in front of them! We then had a vision of an old humpbacked man -with a scythe, like the conventional figure of ‘Time,’ set up -against a furzy cliff, mowing at the hounds in the full belief that -they were going to pull him down. They swept on up the hill and -disappeared, having, in the excursion with the dog, put up a fox! -E. had divined it and got away with them. By cleaving to C. I -caught them all right, otherwise I should have been left with -everyone else at the bottom of the hill, saying funny things about -the dog. It was touching to hear C. saying to E. in triumph, ‘Where -are your English hounds now, Miss?’ She had praised the United, and -this sank into the soul of C., and indeed it was his<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_284" id="page_284">{284}</a></span> beloved -black-and-tan Kerry beagles and Scalliwags who were in front, and -the rest not in sight. The new English draft were probably occupied -in crossing themselves instead of the country—for which I don’t -blame them. Personally, however, I feel as if an open grass -country, and a smart pack, and a sound horse, would be very -alarming.”</p></div> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>“I have once more pottered forth with the hounds, and have had some real -leps, and tasted the wine of life again.”</p> - -<p class="astt">* * * * *</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_285" id="page_285">{285}</a></span> best can teach, but -there will never be better than those three: Ralph and Gerald -Thornycroft, and Harry Becher.</p> - -<p>“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.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_286" id="page_286">{286}</a></span>”</p> - -<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXV" id="CHAPTER_XXV"></a>CHAPTER XXV<br /><br /> -<small>“THE IRISH R.M.”</small></h2> - -<p><span class="smcap">As</span> had been the case with “The Real Charlotte,” so were we also in Paris -when “Some Experiences of an Irish R.M.”—to give the book its full and -cumbrous title—was published by Messrs. Longman in November, 1899.</p> - -<p>It was probably better for us both that we should be where, beyond the -voices, there was peace, but it meant that most of the fun of publishing -a book was lost to us. The thrill, for example, of buying a chance -paper, and lighting upon a review in it. One might buy all the papers in -Paris without a moment of anxiety.</p> - -<p>After a time, however, congested envelopes of “press cuttings,” mostly -of a reassuring character, began to arrive. Press-cuttings, received <i>en -gros</i>, 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<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_287" id="page_287">{287}</a></span> 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 “<i>knew</i> 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.</p> - -<p>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 -“<i>Sommeliers</i>”), 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<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_288" id="page_288">{288}</a></span> 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 <i>very</i> slowly, chewing every word; and -then I read it a third time, dwelling on the bits I like best; and then, -and <i>not</i> till then, thank Heaven! I was told it was written by two -women!”</p> - -<p>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—</p> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">‘Then felt I like some watcher of the skies<br /></span> -<span class="i1">When a new planet swims into his ken,’<br /></span> -</div></div> -</div> - -<p class="nind">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.”</p> - -<p>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</p> - -<div class="figcenter"><a name="ill_20" id="ill_20"></a> -<a href="images/ill_012-a_lg.jpg"> -<img src="images/ill_012-a_sml.jpg" width="375" height="212" alt="[Image unavailable.]" /></a> -<div class="caption"><p>AT BUNALUN. “GONE TO GROUND.”</p> - -<div class="sigg"> -A. C.<br /> -</div> -</div></div> - -<div class="figcenter"><a name="ill_21" id="ill_21"></a> -<a href="images/ill_012-b_lg.jpg"> -<img src="images/ill_012-b_sml.jpg" width="225" height="355" alt="[Image unavailable.]" /></a> -<div class="caption"><p>WAITING FOR THE TERRIERS.</p> - -<div class="sigg"> -A. C.<br /> -</div> -</div></div> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_289" id="page_289">{289}</a></span></p> - -<p class="nind">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 <i>Spectator</i>, included in a letter from the inquirer, -“G.,” and is as follows:</p> - -<p>“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 -disapproba<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_290" id="page_290">{290}</a></span>tion 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.”</p> - -<p>I trust “G.” will permit me to quote also the following from his letter.</p> - -<p>“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.’</p> - -<p>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.”</p> - -<p>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——!’<span class="lftspc">”</span> she had tried her utmost to restrain.</p> - -<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_291" id="page_291">{291}</a></span> 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.</p> - -<p>“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.</p> - -<p>“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.”</p> - -<p>It is seventeen years since we first perused this<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_292" id="page_292">{292}</a></span> 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.</p> - -<p>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!”</p> - -<p>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!”</p> - -<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_293" id="page_293">{293}</a></span> 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.</p> - -<p>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 <i>Times</i> 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.</p> - -<p>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.”</p> - -<p>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,</p> - -<p>“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.”</p> - -<p>I believe that she knows these things, and I am quite sure that she is -glad.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_294" id="page_294">{294}</a></span></p> - -<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXVI" id="CHAPTER_XXVI"></a>CHAPTER XXVI<br /><br /> -<small>OF GOOD TIMES</small></h2> - -<p class="c"><span class="smcap">In a Swiss Valley.</span></p> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">Silver and blue the hills, and blue the infinite sky,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And silver sweet the straying sound of bells<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Among the pines; their tangled music tells<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Where the brown cattle wander. From on high<br /></span> -<span class="i0">A glacier stream leaps earthward, passionately,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">A white soul flying from a wizard’s spells.<br /></span> -<span class="i0">And still above the pines one snow-drift dwells,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Winter’s last sentinel, left there to die.<br /></span> -<span class="i0">From the deep valley, while the waterfall<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Charms memory to sleep, I see the snow<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Sink, conquered, on the pine trees’ steady spears.<br /></span> -<span class="i0">A waft of flowers comes to me. Dearest, all<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Our happy days throng back, and with the flow<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Of that wild stream, there mingle alien tears.<br /></span> -</div></div> -</div> - -<p class="astt">* * * * *</p> - -<p><span class="smcap">The</span> 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,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_295" id="page_295">{295}</a></span> 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.</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_296" id="page_296">{296}</a></span> moment, shrink. But, she added, undoubtedly the -butler did.</p> - -<p>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 <i>malaise</i>, and those attractions of idleness and comfort which -may be symbolised in “The Sofa.”</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_297" id="page_297">{297}</a></span> broached, we discovered -that there was an unprocurable sixpence between us.</p> - -<p>He eyed me and said,</p> - -<p>“I’ll toss ye for the sixpence!”</p> - -<p>“Done!” called Martin, feebly, from within.</p> - -<p>The doctor and I tossed, double or quits, sudden death. I won. And there -came a faint cock-crow from the inner chamber.</p> - -<p>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 -<i>tour de force</i>, 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.”</p> - -<p>(In this connection I will quote a fragment of a letter which bears -indirectly on the same point.)</p> - -<div class="blockquot"><p class="c"> -E. Œ. S. to V. F. M. (Spring, 1903.)<br /> -</p> - -<p>“—— I have also heard of a very smart lady, going to Ireland for -the first time, who invested in an R.M., saying, ‘I have bought -this book. I want to see how one should talk to the Irish.’</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>Blasht your Sowl!’ replied my friend Slipper.</p> - -<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>May the Divil crack the two legs undher ye!’ (See any page, -anywhere, in the Irish R.M.)”</p></div> - -<p>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.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_298" id="page_298">{298}</a></span> We called it “An Irish Problem”; it appeared in -the <i>National Review</i>, 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.</p> - -<p>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 <i>simpatica</i> to his company!”</p> - -<p>I may here state, with my hand, so to speak, on my heart, that there -<i>is</i> a charm, an actual form of words which may be divulged only by “<i>a -her to a him; or a him to a her</i>.” 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<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_299" id="page_299">{299}</a></span> Curing of Warts, and such small deer, are -recommended to prosecute their inquiries in the Royal County.</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_300" id="page_300">{300}</a></span> 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.</p> - -<div class="blockquot"><p class="c"> -V. F. M. to E. Œ. S. (Dublin, October (year uncertain).)<br /> -</p> - -<p>“Miss K. ceaselessly flits from Committee to Lecture and from -Lecture to Convention, and would hound me to all. She is much -wrapped up in the <i>Feis Ceoil</i>, of which a meeting, about Village -Choral Societies, was held in the Mansion House on Friday. She -begged me to go, and see the Lord Mayor preside, and hear much -useful information, so, in the interests of the C.T. Choral Class I -went. It was five o’clock before I approached, for the first time -in my life, the portals of the Mansion House, and in the hall I -could see nothing but a dirty bicycle and a little boy of about -ten, who murmured that I was to write my name in a book, which I -did with a greasy pencil from his own pocket. He told me that I was -to go to the stairs and take the first to the left. I did so, and -found myself in a pitch dark drawing-room. I returned to<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_301" id="page_301">{301}</a></span> the boy, -who then told me to go <i>up</i> the stairs and turn to my left.</p> - -<p>“I climbed two flights, of homely appearance, and found a quite -dark landing at the top. As I stood uncertain, something stirred in -the dark. It was very low and dwarfish, and my flesh crept; it said -nothing, but moved past, no higher than my waist. It seemed, in the -glimmer that came from the foot of the stairs, to be some awful -little thing carrying a big bundle on its back or head. I shall -never know more than this.</p> - -<p>“There was light down a passage, and making for it I came to a room -with little and big beds jammed up side by side, obviously a -nursery. There was also a nurse. I murmured apologies and fled. The -nurse, if it were indeed a nurse and not an illusion, took not the -faintest notice. After various excursions round the dark landing, -during which the conviction grew upon me that I was in a dream, I -went back to the nursery passage and there met a good little -slut-tweenie, without cap or apron, who took me downstairs and put -me right for the meeting, which I entered in a state bordering on -hysterics. That died away very soon under the influence of a very -long speech about the hire of pianos. Very practical, but deadly. -The room was interesting, panelled with portraits around, and the -audience was scanty.... On the whole I think the information I -obtained is entirely useless to you, but the mysterious life into -which I stumbled was interesting, and had a pleasing Behind the -Looking Glass bewilderment in it.... This morning I had a tooth out -under gas. I am quite sure that all gassings and chloroformings are -deeply uncanny. One dies, one goes off into dreadful vastness with -one’s astral body. That was the feeling. A poor little clinging <small>ME</small>, -that first clung to the human<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_302" id="page_302">{302}</a></span> body that had decoyed it into B——’s -chair, was cast loose from that, and then hung desperately on to -an astral creature that was wandering in nightmare -fastnesses,—(even as I wandered in the Mansion House)—quite -separate—then that was lost, and that despairing <small>ME</small> said to itself -quite plainly, ‘I am forsaken—I have lost grip—I don’t know how I -am behaving—I must just endure.’ Long afterwards came an effect as -of the gold shower of a firework breaking silently over my head. -Then appeared a radiant head in a fog—B——’s. Delightful -relaxation of awful effort at self-control, and sudden realisation -that the brute was out. Then the usual restoration to the world, -tipped B——, put on my hat, and so home. I am sure these visions -happen when one dies, and I am convinced of the existence of an -innermost self, who just sits and holds on to the other two.”</p></div> - -<p>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.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_303" id="page_303">{303}</a></span>” The -description was restrained but seductive, and I brooded over it all the -way to Dublin.</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>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.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_304" id="page_304">{304}</a></span> 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.</p> - -<p>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 <i>protégé</i> 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 “<i>du -pays</i>.” “<i>C’est du pays, Mademoiselle!</i>” 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 “<i>Mees Violette</i>.” 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;<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_305" id="page_305">{305}</a></span> “<i>Ah, ils -sont meilleurs que nous!</i>” he said, with conviction, but he excepted -Georges Sand and Mees Violette.</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_306" id="page_306">{306}</a></span> 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.</p> - -<p>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 <i>Strand</i> and other magazines, and -had gradually accumulated until a volume became possible. We had had an -offer from an Irish journal,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_307" id="page_307">{307}</a></span> 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.</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>That was in September, 1911, and when we got back<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_308" id="page_308">{308}</a></span> 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,</p> - -<p>“<i>Now</i> I’m going to read books, and never do another stitch of work till -I die!”</p> - -<p>So did Martin and I assure each other, though without the gesture that -gave such effective emphasis to Katharine’s determination.</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>Passing pleasant it all was; alas! that the pleasure is now no longer -passing, but past.</p> - -<div class="figcenter"><a name="ill_22" id="ill_22"></a> -<a href="images/ill_014-a_lg.jpg"> -<img src="images/ill_014-a_sml.jpg" width="368" height="244" alt="[Image unavailable.]" /></a> -<div class="caption"><p>WEST CARBERY HOUNDS AT LISS ARD.</p></div> -</div> - -<div class="figcenter"><a name="ill_23" id="ill_23"></a> -<a href="images/ill_014-b_lg.jpg"> -<img src="images/ill_014-b_sml.jpg" width="364" height="249" alt="[Image unavailable.]" /></a> -<div class="caption"><p>PORTOFINO.</p> - -<div class="sigg"> -V. F. M. -</div> -</div> -</div> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_309" id="page_309">{309}</a></span></p> - -<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXVII" id="CHAPTER_XXVII"></a>CHAPTER XXVII<br /><br /> -<small>VARIOUS OPINIONS</small></h2> - -<p><span class="smcap">While</span> I have been writing this book the difficulty of deciding between -the things that interested Martin and me, and those that might -presumably interest other people, has been ever before me. In the path -of this chapter there is another and still more formidable lion, -accompanied—as a schoolchild said—by “his even fiercer wife, the -Tiger.” By which I wish to indicate Irish politics, and Woman’s -Suffrage. I will take the Tiger first, and will dispose of it as briefly -as may be.</p> - -<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_310" id="page_310">{310}</a></span> -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.</p> - -<p>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!”</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_311" id="page_311">{311}</a></span> 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.</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>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.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_312" id="page_312">{312}</a></span></p> - -<p>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>i.e.</i> 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 9<i>d.</i> 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,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_313" id="page_313">{313}</a></span> 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,</p> - -<p>“Now men,” she said, “In the name of God, let this be the bounds.”</p> - -<p>And it was so.</p> - -<p>What is more, a few Sundays later, one of the twain, narrating the -incident after Mass, said with satisfaction,</p> - -<p>“It failed the agent, and it failed the landlord, and it failed the -priest; but Lady Mary settled it!”</p> - -<p>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!”</p> - -<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_314" id="page_314">{314}</a></span> 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.</p> - -<p>“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!”</p> - -<p>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.</p> - -<p>“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!”</p> - -<p>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.”</p> - -<p>“Say-Miss-ye-brat!” replied the lady in charge, in a single sabre-cut of -Saxon speech.</p> - -<p class="astt">* * * * *</p> - -<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_315" id="page_315">{315}</a></span> -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.</p> - -<div class="blockquot"><p class="c"> -V. F. M. to <span class="smcap">Captain Stephen Gwynn</span>, M.P.<br /> -</p> - -<p class="r"> -“<span class="smcap">Drishane House</span>,<br /> -“<span class="smcap">Skibbereen</span>.<br /> -“<i>Feb. 1, 1912.</i><br /> -</p> - -<p>“...The day after —— was here I rode on a large horse, of mild -and reflective habit, away over a high hill, where farms reached up -to the heather. We progressed by a meandering lane from homestead -to homestead, and the hill grass was beautifully green and clean, -and the sun shone upon it in an easterly haze. There was ploughing -going on, and all the good, quiet work that one longs to do, -instead of brain-wringing inside four walls. I wondered deeply and -sincerely whether Home Rule could increase the peacefulness, or -whether it will not be like upsetting a basket of snakes over the -country. These people have bought their land. They manage their own -local affairs. Must there be yet another upheaval for them—and a -damming up of Old Age Pensions, which now flow smoothly and balmily -among them, to the enormous comfort and credit of the old people? -(And since I saw my mother’s old age and death I have understood -the innermost of that tragedy of failing life.)</p> - -<p>“My Cousin and I, in our small way, live in the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_316" id="page_316">{316}</a></span> manner that seems -advisable for Ireland. We make money in England and we spend it -over here. We are sorry for those who have to live in London, but -Ireland cannot support us all without help.</p> - -<p>“You will understand now how badly I bored your friend, and how -long-suffering he was.”</p></div> - -<div class="blockquot"><p class="c"> -From <span class="smcap">Captain Stephen Gwynn</span>, M.P., to V. F. M.<br /> -</p> - -<p class="r"> -“<span class="smcap">House of Commons.</span><br /> -“<i>Feb. 8th, 1912.</i><br /> -</p> - -<p>“Your letter filled me with a desire to talk to you for about 24 -hours, concerning Ireland. Why snakes?... what demoralisation is -going to come to your nice country-side because they send —— or -another, to sit in Dublin and vote on Irish affairs, which he -understands less or more, instead of hanging round at St. Stephens?</p> - -<p>“We have too much <i>abstract</i> politics in Ireland, we want them real -and concrete. Take Old Age Pensions, for instance. I don’t for an -instant believe that the pension will ever be cut down, but I do -think that an Irish Assembly ought to decide whether farmers should -qualify for it by giving their farms to their sons. I do think that -we ought to be able to pass a law enabling us to put a ferry across -Corrib with local money; it is now impossible because of one -Englishman’s opposition. I think we ought to be able to tackle the -whole transit question, including the liberation of canals from -railway control, and including also the Train Ferry and All Red -Route possibilities. In 1871 Lord Hartington said it was a strong -argument for Home Rule that a Royal Commission had reported in 1867 -for the State control of Irish railways, forty years ago, and -nothing has been done but to appoint another Commission. Poor<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_317" id="page_317">{317}</a></span> Law, -the whole Education system—all these things want an assembly of -competent men, with leisure and local knowledge. You think we can’t -get them? That is the trouble with people like you. You know the -peasantry very well; you don’t know the middle class.... There are -plenty of men in Ireland—men of the Nationalist party—brilliant -young men, like Kettle,<a name="FNanchor_15_15" id="FNanchor_15_15"></a><a href="#Footnote_15_15" class="fnanchor">[15]</a> who has also courage and enterprise. He -once gave us all a lead in a very ugly corner with a crowd.</p> - -<p>“Devlin is to my thinking as good a man as Lloyd George, and that -is a big word. Redmond and Dillon seem to me more like statesmen -than anyone on either front bench. Of course, in many cases here -you feel the want of an educated tradition behind. No one can count -the harm that was done by keeping Catholics out of Trinity Coll., -Dublin. But beside the Nationalists there will be no disinclination -to employ other educated men, witness Kavanagh. Some of our fiercer -people wanted to stop his election, right or wrong, but we reasoned -them over, and once he got into the party no man was better -listened to, even when, as sometimes happened, he differed with the -majority.... He would be in an Irish Parliament, in one house or -the other, and a better public man could not be found.... To my -mind the present System <i>breeds</i> what you have called ‘snakes.’ In -Clare, among the finest people I ever met in Ireland, you have the -beastly and abominable shooting, and no man will bring another to -justice. They are out of their bearings to the law, and will be, -till they are made to feel it is their own law. And the scandal of -bribery in ‘Local Elections’ will never be put down till you have a -central assembly where things<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_318" id="page_318">{318}</a></span> will be thrashed out without any -fear of seeming to back ‘Dublin Castle’ against a ‘good -Nationalist.’</p> - -<p>“For Gentlefolk (to use the old word) who want to live in the -country, Ireland is going to be a better place to live in than it -has been these thirty years—yes, or than before, for it is bad for -people to be a caste. They will get their place in public business, -easily and welcome, those who care to take it, but on terms of -equality, with the rest. Don’t tell me that Ireland isn’t a -pleasanter place for men like Kavanagh or Walter Nugent, than for -the ordinary landlord person who talks about ‘we’ and ‘they.’</p> - -<p>“Caste is at the bottom of nine-tenths of our trouble. A Catholic -bishop said to me, drink did a lot of harm in Ireland, but not half -as much as gentility. Everybody wanting to be a clerk. Catholic -clerks anxious to be in Protestant tennis clubs, Protestant tennis -clubs anxious to keep out Catholic clerks, and so on, and so on. My -friend, a guest for anybody’s house in London, in half of Dublin -socially impossible.</p> - -<p>“I am prophesying, no doubt, but I know, and you, with all your -knowledge and your insight <i>don’t</i> know—what is best worth knowing -in Ireland, better even than the lovely ways of the peasant folk. -I’ve seen and rubbed shoulders with men in the making.</p> - -<p>“You don’t, for instance, know D. E., who used to drive a van -in —— and was a Fenian in arms, and the starved orphan of a —— -labourer first of all,—and is now the very close personal friend -of a high official personage. Now, if ever I met Don Quixote I met -him in the shoes of D. E.; if you like a little want of training to -digest the education that he acquired, largely in gaol, but with a -real love of fine thoughts. If Sterne could have heard D. E. and -another old warrior, E. P. O’Kelly—and a very charming, shrewd old -person—quoting ‘Tristram<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_319" id="page_319">{319}</a></span> Shandy’ which they got by heart in -Kilmainham, Sterne would have got more than perhaps he deserved in -the way of satisfaction.</p> - -<p>“This inordinate epistle is my very embarrassing tribute. You know -so much. You and yours stand for so much that is the very choice -essence of Ireland, that it fills me with distress to see you all -standing off there in your own paddock, distrustful and not even -curious about the life you don’t necessarily touch.</p> - -<p>“You and I will both live, probably, to see a new order growing up. -I daresay it may not attract you, and may disappoint me, only, for -heaven’s sake, don’t think it is going to be all ‘snakes.’</p> - -<p>“And do forgive me for having inflicted all this on you. After all, -you needn’t read it—and very likely you can’t!...”</p></div> - -<div class="blockquot"><p class="c"> -V. F. M. to <span class="smcap">Captain Gwynn</span>, M.P.<br /> -</p> - -<p class="r"> -“<span class="smcap">Drishane House</span>,<br /> -“<span class="smcap">Skibbereen</span>,<br /> -“<i>Feb. 10, 1912.</i><br /> -</p> - -<p>“I do indeed value your letter, and like to think you snatched so -much from your busy day in order to write it.... By ‘snakes’ in -Ireland, I mean a set of new circumstances, motives, influences, -and possibilities acting on people’s lives and characters, and -causing disturbance. My chief reason for this fear that I have is -that Irish Nationalism is not one good solid piece of homespun. It -is a patch work. There are some extremely dangerous factors in it, -one of the worst being the Irish-American revolutionary. The older -Fenianism lives there, <i>plus</i> all that is least favourable in -American republicanism.... (These) will look on Ireland as the -depot and jumping-off place for their animosity to England. Apart -from<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_320" id="page_320">{320}</a></span> America there is much hostility to England, dormant and -theoretical, innate and inherited—and it is fostered by certain -Gaelic League teachings. Here again I speak only of what I know -personally. I have seen the prize book of Irish poetry given at a -‘Feis’ to a little boy as a prize for dancing. A series of war -songs against England.... You see what I am aiming at. There are -dangerous elements in Ireland, and strong ones, Irish-American, -Gaelic League, Sinn Fein, and what I feel very uncertain about is -whether straight and genuine and tolerant people, like you, will -have the power to control them. With the Home Rule banner gone, -what is to keep them in hand?... I am sure that you will despise -this feeling on my part. You feel that the Church of Rome is with -you, and that with its help all will fall into line. And you feel -that men of high and practical talent are with you and must -prevail.... A Roman Catholic ascendancy and government will bring -Socialism, because now-a-days Socialism is the complementary colour -of R.C. government or ascendancy. America will play its part -there—the general trend of the world will continue; the priesthood -knows it, and I am sorry for them. I do not want to see them -dishonoured and humiliated. I know their influence for good as well -as I know the danger of the policy of their Church. That is my -second point. A Vatican policy for Ireland it will have to be, -under Home Rule, or else the Priesthood is shouldered aside, and -that is an ugly and demoralising thing. The religious question is -deep below all others, and we all are aware of that. There is -perfect toleration between the Protestants and Catholics -individually (except for the North). All, as far as I have ever -known, is give and take and good-breeding on the subject. We accept -the Holydays of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_321" id="page_321">{321}</a></span> R.C. Church (which are still in full force in -the West) and they go to early Mass in order that they may drive us -to church later in the day. There is no trouble whatever, and we go -to each other’s funerals, etc.! But the larger policy of the Church -of Rome is a different thing, and a dangerous—and Socialism is its -Nemesis....</p> - -<p>“I wish that I did know the men you speak of. I am sure they are -tip-top men, and no one realises more than I do the talent and the -genius that lie among the Irish lower and middle classes. I am not -quite clear as to what either you or I mean by ‘middle classes,’ I -think of well-to-do farmers, and small professional people in the -towns. We know both these classes pretty well down here.... Last -year we had a middle-class man at luncheon here, an able business -man, working like a nigger, and an R.C. and Home Ruler. We -discussed the matter. He said, as all you genuine people say and -believe, that once Home Rule was granted, the good men among -Protestant Unionists would be selected, and the wasters flung -aside. I said, and still say, that the brave and fair thing would -be to select them <i>beforehand</i>, show trust in them, give them -confidence, and then indeed there would be a strong case for Home -Rule. His argument was that they must keep up this artificial, -feverish, acrid agitation, or their case falls to the ground. Two -exactly opposite points of view.</p> - -<p>“The people that I am most afraid of are the town politicians. I am -not fond of anything about towns; they are full of second-hand -thinking; they know nothing of raw material and the natural -philosophy of the country people. As to caste, it is in the towns -that the <i>vulgar</i> idea of caste is created. The country people -believe in it strongly; they cling to a belief in<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_322" id="page_322">{322}</a></span> what it should -stand for of truth and honour—and there the best classes touch the -peasant closely, and understand each other. ‘A lady’s word.’<a name="FNanchor_16_16" id="FNanchor_16_16"></a><a href="#Footnote_16_16" class="fnanchor">[16]</a> -How often has that been brought up before me as a thing -incorruptible and unquestionable, and it incites one, and humbles -one, and gives a consciousness of deep responsibility.</p> - -<p>“I think the social tight places you speak of exist just as tightly -in England, Scotland, and Wales. Social ambition is vulgarity, of -course, and even a republican spirit does not cure it—witness -America. It is not Ireland alone that is ‘sicklied o’er with the -pale thought of caste!’ ... I venture to think that your friend -looks on me with a friendly eye, especially since I told him that -my foster-mother took me secretly, as a baby to the priest and had -me baptised. It was done for us all, and my father and mother knew -it quite well, and never took any notice. I was also baptised by -Lord Plunket in the drawing-room at Ross, so the two Churches can -fight it out for me!...”</p></div> - -<div class="blockquot"><p class="c"> -V. F. M. to <span class="smcap">Captain Gwynn</span>.<br /> -</p> - -<p class="r"> -“<span class="smcap">Drishane</span>,<br /> -“<i>Nov. 8, 1912</i>.<br /> -</p> - -<p>“It is nice of you to let the authors of ‘Dan Russel’ know that -what they said has helped<a name="FNanchor_17_17" id="FNanchor_17_17"></a><a href="#Footnote_17_17" class="fnanchor">[17]</a> ... and I can assure you that it -gives us real pleasure to think of it.</p> - -<p>“I am very glad that you yourself like it, and feel with us about -John Michael and Mrs. Delanty.</p> - -<p>“One does not meet these people out of Ireland; they are a blend -not to be arrived at elsewhere. But<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_323" id="page_323">{323}</a></span> I wish there were more John -Michaels; shyness is so nice a quality when it goes deep. In fact -all really nice people have shy hearts, I think—but their friends -enjoy the quality more than they do, ... I was up in the North -myself at the Signing of the Covenant, not in Belfast, but in the -country. I went up on a visit there, not as a journalist, but when -I saw what I saw I wrote an article about it for the <i>Spectator</i>. I -did not know the North at all.... I send you what I wrote, because -it is an honest impression. What surprised me about the place was -the feeling of cleverness, and go, and also the people struck me as -being hearty. If only the South would go up North and see what they -are doing there, and how they are doing it, and ask them to show -them how, it would make a good deal of difference. And then the -North should come South and see what nice people we are, and how we -do <i>that</i>! Your lovely Donegal I did not see, but hope to do that -next time. You need not send back the <i>Spectator</i>, because that is -a heavy supertax on the reader.”</p></div><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_324" id="page_324">{324}</a></span></p> - -<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXVIII" id="CHAPTER_XXVIII"></a>CHAPTER XXVIII<br /><br /> -<small>THE LAST</small></h2> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> -<span class="i0">She hid it always, close against her breast,<br /></span> -<span class="i2">A golden vase, close sealed and strangely wrought,<br /></span> -<span class="i2">And set with gems, whose dim eyes, mystery fraught,<br /></span> -<span class="i0">Shot broken gleams, like secrets half confessed.<br /></span> -<span class="i0">“One day,” she said, “Love’s perfumed kisses pressed<br /></span> -<span class="i2">Against its lip their perfectness, unsought,<br /></span> -<span class="i2">And suddenly the dizzy fragrance caught<br /></span> -<span class="i0">My senses in its mesh, and gave them rest.<br /></span> -<span class="i2">And life’s disquietude no more I feel,<br /></span> -<span class="i2">For now,” she said, “my heart sleeps still and light.<br /></span> -<span class="i2">Love’s Anodyne outlasts the lingering years!”<br /></span> -<span class="i2">But in the darkness of an autumn night<br /></span> -<span class="i2">Her heart woke, weeping, and she brake the seal.<br /></span> -<span class="i2">The scent was dead; the vase was full of tears.<br /></span> -</div></div> -</div> - -<p>I have come to what must be the final chapter, and the thought most -present with me is that in writing it I am closing the door on these -memories of two lives that made the world a pleasant place for each -other, and I find now that although I began them with reluctance, it is -with reluctance still that I must end them.</p> - -<p>It has been hard, often, to leave untold so many of those trivial things -that counted for more, in the long run, than the occasional outstanding -facts of two quite uneventful lives. I fear I have yielded too much to -the temptation of telling and talking<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_325" id="page_325">{325}</a></span> nonsense, and now there remains -only the Appendix in which to retrieve Martin’s character and mine for -intelligence and for a serious concern for the things that are serious.</p> - -<p>To return to our work, which for us, at all events, if for no one else, -was serious. As soon as we had recovered from “Dan Russel,” Martin set -forth on what I find entered in my diary as “a series of tribal -war-dances round the County Galway,” which meant that she paid visits, -indefatigably, and with entire satisfaction, in her own county and among -her own allies and kinsfolk. I should like to quote her account of a -visit to one of her oldest friends, Lady Gregory, at Coole Park, where -she met (and much enjoyed meeting) Mr. W. B. Yeats, and where she, -assisted by the poet, carved her initials on a tree dedicated to the -Muses, whereon A. E., and Dr. Douglas Hyde, and others of high -achievement had inscribed themselves. But I must hold to the ordinance -of silence as to living people that she herself ordained and would wish -me to observe.</p> - -<p>No one ever enjoyed good company more than Martin, and, as the beggars -say, she “thravelled the County Galway,” and there was good company and -a welcome before her wherever she went.</p> - -<p>At about this time she and I were invited to a public dinner in Dublin, -given to Irish literary women by the Corinthian Club; and, having -secured exemption from speech-making, we found it a highly interesting -entertainment, at which were materialised for us many who till then had -been among the things believed in but not seen. At this time also, or a -little later, I re-established the West Carbery Hounds, after a brief -interregnum. I only now allude to them in order to record the fact that -when the first draft of the reconstituted pack arrived, the lamented<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_326" id="page_326">{326}</a></span> -“Slipper” (now no more) met them at the station with an enormous bouquet -of white flowers in a cavity in his coat that might have begun life as a -button-hole, and a tall hat. He cheered the six couples as they left the -station yard (accompanied, it may not be out of place to mention, -ridiculously, by two and a half gambolling couples of black and white -British-Holstein young cattle, on a herd of which magpie breed my sister -and I were embarking), and then, as the procession moved like a circus -through the streets of Skibbereen, “Slipper” renewed the task of -drinking all their healths, this time at my expense.</p> - -<p>The doctrine that sincere friendship is only possible between men dies -hard. It is, at last, in the fulness of time, expiring by force of fact, -and is now, like many another decayed convention, dragging out a -deplorable old age in facetious paragraphs in “Comic Corners,” where the -Mother-in-law, Mrs. Gamp and her ministrations, and the Unfortunate -Husband (special stress being laid on the sufferings endured by the -latter while his wife is enjoying herself upstairs) gibber together, and -presumably amuse someone.</p> - -<p>The outstanding fact, as it seems to me, among women who live by their -brains, is friendship. A profound friendship that extends through every -phase and aspect of life, intellectual, social, pecuniary. Anyone who -has experience of the life of independent and artistic women knows this; -and it is noteworthy that these friendships of women will stand even the -strain of matrimony for one or both friends. I gravely doubt that had -Jonathan outlived Uriah he would have seen much of David.</p> - -<p>However, controversy, and especially controversy of this complexion, is -a bore. As Martin said, in a letter to me,</p> - -<p>“Rows are a mistake; which is the only reason I<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_327" id="page_327">{327}</a></span> don’t fight with you -for invariably spelling ‘practice,’ the noun, with an ‘s.’<span class="lftspc">”</span></p> - -<p>Martin had a very special gift for friendship, both with women and with -men. Her sympathies were wide, and her insight into character and motive -enabled her to meet each of her many friends on their own ground, and to -enter deeply and truly into their lives, and give them a share in hers.</p> - -<p>In spite of the ordinance of silence, I feel as if she would wish me to -record in this book the names, at least, of some of those whom she -delighted to honour, and, with all diffidence, I beg them to understand -that in the very brief mention of them that will be found in the -Appendix, I have only ventured to do this because I believe that she -desires it.</p> - -<p>I suppose it was the result of old habit, and of the return of the -hounds, but, for whatever reason, during the years that followed the -appearance of “Dan Russel the Fox,” Martin and I put aside the notions -we had been dwelling upon in connection with “a serious novel,” and took -to writing “R.M.” stories again. These, six couple of them (like the -first draft of the re-established pack), wandered through various -periodicals, chiefly <i>Blackwood’s Magazine</i>, and in July, 1915, they -were published in a volume with the title of “In Mr. Knox’s Country.”</p> - -<p>We were in Kerry when the book appeared, or rather we were on our way -there. I remember with what anxiety I bought a <i>Spectator</i> at the Mallow -platform bookstall, and even more vividly do I recall our departure from -Mallow, when Martin, and Ethel Penrose, and I, all violently tried to -read the <i>Spectator</i> review of Mr. Knox at the same moment.</p> - -<p class="astt">* * * * *</p> - -<p>I will say nothing now of the time that we spent<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_328" id="page_328">{328}</a></span> in Kerry; a happy -time, in lovely weather, in a lovely place. It was the last of many such -times, and it is too near, now, to be written of.</p> - -<p>I will try no more. Withered leaves, blowing in through the open window -before a September gale, are falling on the page. Our summers are ended. -“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>Vanity of vanities,’ saith the Preacher.”</p> - -<p>I have tried to write of the people, and the things, and the events that -she loved and was interested in. It has been a happiness to me to do so, -and at times, while I have been writing, the present has been forgotten -and I have felt as though I were recapturing some of the “careless -rapture” of older days.</p> - -<p>The world is still not without its merits; I am not ungrateful, and I -have many reasons that are not all in the past, and one in especial of -which I will not now speak, for gratitude. But there is a thing that an -old widow woman said, long ago, that remains in my mind. Her -husband—she spoke of him as “her kind companion”—had died, and she -said to me, patiently, and without tears,</p> - -<p>“Death makes people lonesome, my dear.”</p> - -<p class="fint"><span class="smcap">Finis.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_329" id="page_329">{329}</a></span></span></p> - -<h2><a name="APPENDIX_I" id="APPENDIX_I"></a>APPENDIX I<br /><br /> -<small>LETTERS FROM CHIEF JUSTICE CHARLES KENDAL BUSHE TO MRS. BUSHE</small></h2> - -<div class="blockquot"><p class="c"> -<span class="smcap">Charles Kendal Bushe</span> to <span class="smcap">Mrs. Bushe</span>.<br /> -</p> - -<p class="r"> -<span class="smcap">Waterford.</span> (Undated.)<br /> -Probably July or August, 1798.<br /> -</p> - -<p>“Within this day or two the United Irishmen rose in the Co Kilkenny -and disarm’d every gentleman and man in the County except Pierce -Butler. O’Flaherty, Davis, Nixon, Lee, and Tom Murphy was not -spar’d and they even beat up the Quarters of Bob’s Seraglio, but he -had the day before taken the precaution to remove his arms, and -among them my double barrell’d Gun, to Pierce Butler’s as a place -of safety, so that no arms remain’d but the arms of his Dulcinea, -but what they did in that respect Bob says not.... The United men -have done one serious mischief which is that they have discredited -Bank notes to such a degree that in Wexford no one wd give a Crown -for a national note or take one in payment and here tho they take -them they wont give Change for them so that at the Bar Room we are -oblig’d to pass little promissory notes for our Dinner and pay them -when they come to a Guinea. I assure you if you ow’d 17 shillgs -here no one wou’d give you four and take a Guinea. As to Gold it is -vanish’d. I have recei<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_330" id="page_330">{330}</a></span>v’d but 2 Gold Guineas in £133.0.0 since I -came on Circuit. There is a good deal of Alarm about these United -Men every where.”</p></div> - -<p>Another letter, written at about the same time as the above, is dated -“Wexford, July twenty sixth, 1798.” It seems to have been written while -on circuit, a short time after the suppression of the Rebellion.</p> - -<div class="blockquot"><p class="c"> -<span class="smcap">Charles Kendal Bushe</span> to <span class="smcap">Mrs. Bushe</span>.<br /> -</p> - -<p class="nind"> -“My dearest Nancy,<br /> -</p> - -<p>“We return by Ross” (Co. Wexford) “both for greater safety and that -we may see the scene of the famous battle.” (This probably was -Vinegar Hill). “From every observation I can make it appears to me -that this Country is completely quieted; if you were to hear all -the different anecdotes told here you wou’d suppose you were -reading another Helen Maria Williams. I shall give you but -one—Col. Lehunte who is very civil to us was a prisoner to the -Rebels and tolerably well treated as such till one day in the -tattering (<i>sic</i>) of his house a Room—furnish’d with antique -ornaments in black and <i>orange</i> was discover’d a small Skreen in -the same colours with heathen divinities on it. This Skreen was -carried instantly by the enrag’d mob thro the town as a proof of an -intended Massacre by the Orange Men. This Skreen, says the famous -fury Mrs. Dixon, was to be the standard of their Cavalry. This, -(Hope) is the anchor on which the Catholic sailors were to be -roasted alive—This, (Jupiter’s Eagle) is the Vulture that was to -pick out the Catholic Children’s Eyes—She went thro the Mythology -of the Skreen in this rational Exposition and entirely convinc’d -the Mob. In a moment Col. Lehunte was dragg’d out to Execution,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_331" id="page_331">{331}</a></span> -and his life was sav’d in the same manner his house was, by the -number of disputants who shou’d take it. He received three pike -wounds and was beat almost to death with sticks and the end of -firelocks and at last taken back for a more deliberate Execution in -the morning, being thrown for the night into a Dungeon where he lay -wounded on fetters, bolts, and broken Bottles. This is a venerable -old Gentleman, near 70 years old.</p> - -<p>“We hear many such stories. The Bridge is deep stain’d with blood.</p> - -<p class="c"> -“Ever yours, my darling Nancy,<br /> -</p> - -<p class="r"> -“<span class="smcap">C. K. Bushe</span>.”<br /> -</p></div> - -<p>The temptation to quote extensively from these early letters of “the -Chief” cannot be too freely indulged in, but I may include an account, -written from Clonmel, in about 1797, to his wife, giving an account of -what he calls “a most novel and extraordinary and disgusting species of -crime”; which is a moderate way of defining the comprehensive atrocity -of the act in question.</p> - -<div class="blockquot"><p class="c"> -<span class="smcap">Charles Kendal Bushe</span> to <span class="smcap">Mrs. Bushe</span>.<br /> -</p> - -<p class="r"> -<span class="smcap">Clonmel.</span> (<i>circa 1797.</i>)<br /> -</p> - -<p>“...The woman was clearly convicted and will be exemplarily -punish’d for it. She robb’d a churchyard of the hand of a dead man -which she put into all the milk she churn’d. Butter making is a -great part of the trade of the Country and the unfortunate Wretch -was persuaded that this hand drawn thro the Milk in the devil’s -name would give a miraculous quantity of butter, and it seems <i>she -has long</i> made it a practice.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_332" id="page_332">{332}</a></span>”</p> - -<p class="c"> -From <span class="smcap">Chief Justice Bushe</span> to <span class="smcap">Mrs. Bushe</span>.<br /> -</p> - -<p class="r"> -“<span class="smcap">Omagh.</span> <i>Monday August 16. 1810.</i><br /> -</p> - -<p class="nind"> -“My dearest Nan,<br /> -</p> - -<p>“By making a forc’d march with Smyly here I have arrived some hours -before the other Judge, Cavalcade &c. and I have for the first time -since I left town sat down in a room by myself with something like -tranquillity, at least that negative Repose that consists in the -absence of stress or clamour fuss and hurry. The day has -fortunately been good and without stopping we rode here, 21 miles -across the mountains. This I found pleasant and indeed necessary -after the Confinement and bad weather which we have had -uninterruptedly since we left Dublin. You have no notion of such a -den as Cavan is. It is no wonder that poor Smyly us’d to get fever -in it, I am only astonish’d that I ever got out of it for I was not -for a moment well. It lies at the bottom of a Bason form’d by many -hills closing in on each other, and is surrounded by bogs and -lakes. The Sun can scarcely reach it, you look up at the heavens as -you do out of a jail yard that has high walls and I was glad to -have a large Turf fire in my Room. The Water is quite yellow and -deranges the stomach &c. so that my poor head was a mass of -confusion and my Spirits were slack enough.... After breakfast, bad -as the day was, I got a boat and went on the lake (Lough Erne) and -sail’d to the Island of Devenish where there is a curious Ruin of -an antient place of worship and a Round Tower in as perfect -preservation as the day it was built.... Short as the time was if -the weather had been favourable I was determined upon seeing Lough -Derg and St. Patrick’s purgatory which is in a small island in the -middle of it and which is in its<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_333" id="page_333">{333}</a></span> history certainly one of the -greatest Curiosities in Europe.<a name="FNanchor_18_18" id="FNanchor_18_18"></a><a href="#Footnote_18_18" class="fnanchor">[18]</a> It has maintained its Character -as the principal place of penance in the World since the first -Establishment of Christianity in Ireland and is as much frequented -now by Pilgrims from all Countries as it was in what we are in the -habit of calling the darker ages, as freely as if our own was -enlighten’d. Miller’s house is about ten miles from it and he has -by enquiries from the Priests and otherwise ascertained that the -average number of pilgrims during the season which begins with the -Summer and ends with the first of August exceeds ten thousand. This -last Season in this present year the number was much greater. They -all perform their journey barefooted<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_334" id="page_334">{334}</a></span> and in mean Dress but those -of the upper Class are discover’d by the delicacy of their hands -and feet. There is a large ferry Boat which from morning to night -is employ’d in transporting and retransporting them. Each Pilgrim -remains 24 hours in the Island performing Devotions round certain -stone altars call’d Stations, at which five Priests perpetually -officiate. All this time and for some time before they strictly -fast, and on leaving the Island the Priest gives them what is -called Bread and Wine, that is Bread and Lake water which they -positively assert has the Taste of wine and the power of refreshing -and recovering them....”</p></div> - -<p>The end of this letter, giving a description of a visit to -Edgeworthstown, appears in the book, Chapter II, page 47.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_335" id="page_335">{335}</a></span></p> - -<h2><a name="APPENDIX_II" id="APPENDIX_II"></a>APPENDIX II</h2> - -<div class="blockquot"><p>The following is written by <span class="smcap">Captain Stephen Gwynn</span>, M.P., Member for -Galway City, who has very kindly permitted me to include it among -these memories.</p></div> - -<p>Probably no one can have really known “Martin Ross” who did not spend -some time in her company either in Connemara or West Cork. I, to my -sorrow, only met her once, at a Dublin dinner table. That hour’s talk -has left on my mind a curiously limited and even negative impression. -She looked surprisingly unlike a person who spent much of her life in -the open air; and it was hard to associate her with the riotous humour -of many “R.M.” stories. What remains positive in the impression is a -sense of extreme fineness and delicacy, qualities which reflect -themselves in the physical counterparts of that restraint and sure taste -which are in the essence of all that she signed.</p> - -<p>That one meeting served me well, however, because out of it arose -casually an intermittent correspondence which passed into terms of -something like friendship. Once at all events I traded, as it were, on a -friend’s kindness; for when a boy of mine lay sick abroad, and I was -seeking for acceptable things to bring to his bedside, I wrote -repeatedly to Martin Ross, provoking replies from a most generous -letter-writer—letters very touching in their kindness.</p> - -<p>But most of our communications had their source<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_336" id="page_336">{336}</a></span> in the prompting which -urged her to speak her mind to a Nationalist Member of Parliament, -concerning happenings in Ireland. These letters show how gravely and -anxiously she thought about her country, and events have written a grim -endorsement on certain of her apprehensions. She was never of those who -can be content to regard Ireland as a pleasant place for sport, full of -easy, laughable people; or she would never have understood Ireland with -that intensity which can be felt even in her humour. If her letters show -that she was often angry with her countrymen, they show too that it was -because she could not be indifferent to the honour of Ireland.</p> - -<p><i>September, 1917.</i><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_337" id="page_337">{337}</a></span></p> - -<h2><a name="APPENDIX_III" id="APPENDIX_III"></a>APPENDIX III<br /><br /> -<small>HER FRIENDS</small></h2> - -<p><span class="smcap">In</span> trying to include in these divagations the names of some of the chief -among the friends of Martin Ross, I am met at once by the thought of her -brothers and sisters. These were first in her life, and they held their -place in it, and in her heart, in a manner that is not always given to -brothers and sisters. Two griefs, the death of her eldest brother, -Robert, and of the sister next to her in age, Edith Dawson, struck her -with a force that can best be measured by what the loss of two people so -entirely lovable meant to others less near to them than she. Handsome -and amusing, charming and generous, one may go on heaping up adjectives, -yet come no nearer to explaining to those who did not know Edith what -was lost when she died. Many of the times to which Martin looked back -with most enjoyment were spent with Edith and her husband, Cuthbert -Dawson. Colonel Dawson was then in the Queen’s Bays, and Martin’s -stories of those soldiering days were full of riding, and -steam-launching, and motoring (the last at an early period in history, -when, in Connemara at all events, a motor was described by the poor -people as “a hell-cart,” and received as such). All these things, and -the more dangerous the better, were what she and Edith found their -pleasure in,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_338" id="page_338">{338}</a></span> with the spirit that took all the fun that was going in -its stride, and did not flinch when trouble, suffering, and sorrow had -to be faced.</p> - -<p>Of Robert, she has herself written, and now but one brother and one -sister of all that brilliant family remain; Mr. James Martin, the Head -of the House, and Mrs. Hamilton Currey, whose husband, the late -Commander Hamilton Currey, R.N., was a distinguished writer on naval -matters, and was one whose literary opinion was very deeply valued by -Martin.</p> - -<p>She was, as Captain Gwynn has said, “a generous letter-writer,” and I -have been allowed by him and by one of her very special friends, Mrs. -Campbell, to make extracts from some of her letters to them. Her -letters, as Mrs. Campbell says, “have so much of her delightful self in -them,” that I very much regret that, for various reasons, I have not -been able to print more of them.</p> - -<p>Another of her great friends was Miss Nora Tracey, with whom she was -staying in Ulster at the tremendous moment of the signing of the Ulster -Covenant. Few things ever made a deeper political impression upon Martin -than did that visit, and the insight that she then gained into Ulster -and its fierce intensity of purpose did not cease to influence her -views. Whatever political opinions may be held, and however much the -attitude of No Compromise may be regretted, the impressiveness of Ulster -has to be acknowledged. No one was more sensitive to this than Martin, -and an article that, at this time, she wrote and sent to the <i>Spectator</i> -was inspired by what she saw and heard in the North during that time of -crisis.</p> - -<p>Name after name of her friends comes to me, and I can only feel the -futility of writing them down,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_339" id="page_339">{339}</a></span> and thinking that in so doing it is -possible to explain her talent for friendship, her fine and faithful -enthusiasm for the people whom she liked; still less to indicate how -much their affection, and interest, and sympathy helped to fill her -life, and to make it what it was, a happy one.</p> - -<p>A few names at least I may record.</p> - -<p>Mr. and Mrs. Edmund Helps, Rose Helps, Mr. C. L. Graves, Lady Gregory, -Mrs. Wynne (who is one of Lord Morris’s daughters, and is one of a -family of old Galway friends and neighbours), Miss Gertrude Sweetnam, -Miss A. S. Kinkead, Sir Horace Plunkett, Fan Morris, “Jem” Barlow, and -Martin Ross’s kinsman, Mr. Justice Archer Martin, Justice of Appeal, -Victoria, B.C.</p> - -<p>It is of no avail to prolong the list, though I could do so (and I ask -to be forgiven for unintentional omissions), and I will do no more than -touch on her many friends among our many relations. Rose Barton, Ethel -Penrose (my own oldest friend, loved by Martin more than most), Violet -Coghill, Loo-Loo Plunket, Jim Penrose (that “Professor of Embroidery and -Collector of Irish Point” to whom she dedicated the “Patrick’s Day -Hunt”), and, nearest of all after her own family, my sister and my five -brothers, to all of whom she was as another sister, only, as the Army -List says, “with precedence of that rank.”</p> - -<p>An end must come. I am afraid I have forgotten much, and I know I have -failed in much that I had hoped to do, but I know, too, however far I -may have come short, that the memory of Martin Ross is safe with her -friends.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_340" id="page_340">{340}</a></span></p> - -<h2><a name="APPENDIX_IV" id="APPENDIX_IV"></a>APPENDIX IV<br /><br /> -<small>BIBLIOGRAPHY</small></h2> - -<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" summary=""> - -<tr><td>“An Irish Cousin.”</td><td>1889: R. Bentley & Son;</td></tr> -<tr><td> </td><td>1903: Longmans, Green & Co.</td></tr> - -<tr><td>“Naboth’s Vineyard.”</td><td>1891: Spencer Blackett.</td></tr> - -<tr><td>“Through Connemara in a Governess Cart.”</td></tr> -<tr><td> </td><td>1892: W. H. Allen & Co.</td></tr> - -<tr><td>“In the Vine Country.”</td><td>1893: W. H. Allen & Co.</td></tr> - -<tr><td>“The Real Charlotte.”</td><td>1895: Ward & Downey;</td></tr> -<tr><td> </td><td>1900: Longmans, Green & Co.</td></tr> - -<tr><td>“Beggars on Horseback.”</td></tr> -<tr><td> </td><td>1895: Blackwood & Sons.</td></tr> - -<tr><td>“The Silver Fox.”</td><td>1897: Lawrence and Bullen;</td></tr> -<tr><td> </td><td>1910: Longmans, Green & Co.</td></tr> - -<tr><td>“Some Experiences of an Irish R.M.”</td></tr> -<tr><td> </td><td>1899: Longmans, Green & Co.</td></tr> - -<tr><td>“A Patrick’s Day Hunt.”</td></tr> -<tr><td> </td><td>1902: Constable & Co.</td></tr> - -<tr><td>“Slipper’s A B C of Foxhunting.”</td></tr> -<tr><td> </td><td>1903: Longmans, Green & Co.</td></tr> - -<tr><td>“All on the Irish Shore.”</td></tr> -<tr><td> </td><td>1903: Longmans, Green & Co.</td></tr> - -<tr><td>“Some Irish Yesterdays.”</td></tr> -<tr><td> </td><td>1906: Longmans, Green & Co.</td></tr> - -<tr><td>“Further Experiences of an Irish R.M.”</td></tr> -<tr><td> </td><td>1908: Longmans, Green & Co.</td></tr> - -<tr><td>“Dan Russel the Fox.”</td><td>1911: Methuen & Co., Ltd.</td></tr> - -<tr><td>“The Story of the Discontented Little Elephant.”</td></tr> -<tr><td> </td><td>1912: Longmans, Green & Co.</td></tr> - -<tr><td>“In Mr. Knox’s Country.”</td></tr> -<tr><td> </td><td>1915: Longmans, Green & Co.</td></tr> -</table> - -<p class="fint"><small> -PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY R. CLAY AND SONS, LTD.,<br /> -BRUNSWICK STREET, STAMFORD STREET, S.E. 1, AND BUNGAY, SUFFOLK.<br /></small> -</p> - -<div class="footnotes"><p class="cb">FOOTNOTES:</p> - -<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_1" id="Footnote_1_1"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_1"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> Robert has told me how, hearing from Willie Wills that “the -money-market was tight,” he went to proffer assistance. In Willie’s -studio he was about to light a cigarette with a half-burned “spill” of -paper, when he became aware that the “spill” was a five-pound note, an -unsuspected relic of more prosperous times, that had already been used -for a like purpose. E. Œ. S.</p></div> - -<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_2_2" id="Footnote_2_2"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_2"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> This sentence was subsequently introduced in the article -“At the River’s Edge,” by Martin Ross, <i>The Englishwoman’s Review</i>.</p></div> - -<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_3_3" id="Footnote_3_3"></a><a href="#FNanchor_3_3"><span class="label">[3]</span></a> In these, and all the following letters, I have left the -spelling, punctuation, etc., unchanged.</p></div> - -<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_4_4" id="Footnote_4_4"></a><a href="#FNanchor_4_4"><span class="label">[4]</span></a> Solicitor-General.</p></div> - -<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_5_5" id="Footnote_5_5"></a><a href="#FNanchor_5_5"><span class="label">[5]</span></a> Daniel O’Connell.</p></div> - -<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_6_6" id="Footnote_6_6"></a><a href="#FNanchor_6_6"><span class="label">[6]</span></a> Among the letters in the old letter-box of which I have -spoken was a paper, the contents of which may be offered to the -professional genealogist. They are as follows: -</p><p> -“By the marriage of Charles Bushe to Emmeline Coghill, (daughter of Sir -J. Coghill Bt. by his first wife,) the lady becomes neice (<i>sic</i>) to her -husband, sister to her mother, and daughter to her grandmother, aunt to -her sisters and cousins, and grandaunt to her own children, stepmother -to her cousins, and sister-in-law to her father, while her mother will -be at the same time aunt and grandmother to her nephews and neices.” I -recommend no one to try to understand these statements.—E. Œ. S.</p></div> - -<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_7_7" id="Footnote_7_7"></a><a href="#FNanchor_7_7"><span class="label">[7]</span></a> Throughout these recollections I have, as far as has been -possible, refrained from mentioning those who are still trying to make -the best of a moderate kind of world. (Far be it from me to add to their -trials!) I wish to say, however, in connection with the subject of this -chapter, that in the struggle for life which so many of the Irish gentry -had at this period to face, Martin’s brothers and sisters were no less -ardently engaged than were their mother and their youngest sister. In -London, in India, in Ceylon, the Martins were doing “their country’s -work,” as Mr. Kipling has sung, and although the fates at first -prevented their taking a hand in person in the restoration of Ross, it -is well known that “The Irish over the seas” are not in the habit of -forgetting “their own people and their Father’s House.”</p></div> - -<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_8_8" id="Footnote_8_8"></a><a href="#FNanchor_8_8"><span class="label">[8]</span></a> Mrs. Hewson died July, 1917.</p></div> - -<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_9_9" id="Footnote_9_9"></a><a href="#FNanchor_9_9"><span class="label">[9]</span></a> I think it best to spell all the Irish phrases -phonetically.</p></div> - -<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_10_10" id="Footnote_10_10"></a><a href="#FNanchor_10_10"><span class="label">[10]</span></a> December 26th.</p></div> - -<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_11_11" id="Footnote_11_11"></a><a href="#FNanchor_11_11"><span class="label">[11]</span></a> Scapular and Agnus Dei.</p></div> - -<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_12_12" id="Footnote_12_12"></a><a href="#FNanchor_12_12"><span class="label">[12]</span></a> “<i>Et in Arcadia Ego</i>,” E. L. in the <i>Spectator</i>. August -25, 1917.</p></div> - -<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_13_13" id="Footnote_13_13"></a><a href="#FNanchor_13_13"><span class="label">[13]</span></a> This article was subsequently incorporated in Martin -Ross’s sketch “Children of the Captivity” and is reprinted in “Some -Irish Yesterdays.”</p></div> - -<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_14_14" id="Footnote_14_14"></a><a href="#FNanchor_14_14"><span class="label">[14]</span></a> Of this same American a tale is told which might, I think, -had she known it, have mitigated Martin’s disapproval. One of the more -futile of his pupils showed him a landscape that she had painted. He -regarded it for some time in silence, then he said: -</p><p> -“Did you see it like that?” -</p><p> -“Oh yes, Mr. L——!” twittered the pupil. -</p><p> -“And did you feel it like that?” -</p><p> -“Oh yes, Mr. L——, indeed I did!” -</p><p> -“Wal,” said Mr. L——, smoothly, “the next time you see and feel like -that, <i>don’t paint</i>!”</p></div> - -<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_15_15" id="Footnote_15_15"></a><a href="#FNanchor_15_15"><span class="label">[15]</span></a> Professor Kettle was killed, fighting in France, in the -Royal Dublin Fusiliers at Ginchy, in September, 1916.</p></div> - -<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_16_16" id="Footnote_16_16"></a><a href="#FNanchor_16_16"><span class="label">[16]</span></a> To this may be added a companion phrase. “A Gentleman’s -bargain; no huxthering!”</p></div> - -<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_17_17" id="Footnote_17_17"></a><a href="#FNanchor_17_17"><span class="label">[17]</span></a> See <a href="#APPENDIX_II">Appendix II.</a></p></div> - -<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_18_18" id="Footnote_18_18"></a><a href="#FNanchor_18_18"><span class="label">[18]</span></a> “Evidence of the widespread fame of St. Patrick’s -Purgatory, Lough Derg, Co. Donegal, in mediaeval days is furnished by a -document recently copied from the Chancery treaty roll of Richard II. -This is a safe conduct issued on the 6th September, 1397, to Raymond -Viscount of Perilleux, Knight of Rhodes, a subject of the King of -France, who desired to make the pilgrimage. It was addressed to all -constables, marshals, admirals, senechals, governors, bailiffs, -prefects, captains, castellans, majors, magistrates, counsellors of -cities and towns, guardians of camps, ports, bridges and passways, and -their subordinates—in a word, to all those who under one title or -another exercised some authority in those days—and recited that Raymond -‘intends and purposes to come into our Kingdom of England and to cross -over and travel through the said Kingdom to our land of Ireland, there -to see and visit the Purgatory of St. Patrick, with twenty men and -thirty horses in his company.’ The conduct went on to enjoin that any of -the little army of officials mentioned above should not molest the said -Raymond during his journey to Lough Derg, nor during his return -therefrom, nor as far as in them lay should they permit injury to him, -his men, horses or property; provided always that the Viscount and his -men on entering any camp, castle or fortified town, should present the -letter of safe conduct to the guardians of the place, and in purchasing -make fair and ready payment for food or other necessaries. The safe -conduct was valid until the Easter of the following year. Besides -showing that over five hundred years ago foreigners were anxious to make -the pilgrimage which so many make in the present age, the document is -interesting inasmuch as it gives an indication of the difficulties under -which a pilgrim or tourist travelled in the fourteenth century.” (<i>Cork -Examiner</i>, August 8, 1917.)</p></div> - -</div> -<hr class="full" /> - -<div class="figcenter"> -<img src="images/back.jpg" width="319" height="500" alt="" title="" /> -</div> - - - - - - - - -<pre> - - - - - -End of Project Gutenberg's Irish Memories, by Edith Somerville and Martin Ross - -*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK IRISH MEMORIES *** - -***** This file should be named 61336-h.htm or 61336-h.zip ***** -This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: - http://www.gutenberg.org/6/1/3/3/61336/ - -Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed -Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was -produced from images available at The Internet Archive) - - -Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions -will be renamed. - -Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no -one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation -(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without -permission and without paying copyright royalties. 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