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.