AT ÉTAPLES
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.”