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.”