OF GOOD TIMES
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 <small>ME</small>,
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 <small>ME</small> 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.
[Illustration: WEST CARBERY HOUNDS AT LISS ARD.]
[Illustration: PORTOFINO.
V. F. M.
]