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.