Martin Ross

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:

(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—

The Lady replies:

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.

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).

he has warbled and departed. And then her cry (to the audience):

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.