CHAPTER XXVI OF GOOD TIMES

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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 ME, 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 ME 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.

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WEST CARBERY HOUNDS AT LISS ARD.

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PORTOFINO.

V. F. M.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

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