MARRIAGE
We were married in Dresden, where my father had taken a temporary
chaplaincy.
Joe had a merry journey out from England with Mr. Jameson and a gentle
but less intellectual friend who was to act as best man.
I was told later of this friend’s innocent boast of conversion to free
thought and of Joe’s quick reply: “Why, then, you’ll have plenty of
time to think.” But this sterner remark was not in his usual vein,
and much oftener I think he pleased his two friends by his immediate
sympathy with free foreign manners, most especially those of the
French, who always had the first place in his affections as contrasted
with “bulgy-necked Germans whose poverty-stricken tongue” forced
them to call a thimble a “finger hat” and a glove a “hand-shoe,” and
decreed that three men must order their baths as “drei.” I must add
in his defence that he never could speak or read the language; it was
his mother wit that pulled him through difficulties. Once when alone
in Dresden he was driven to ask his way in the words of a well-known
song and, even at that time, was probably set down as an insolent
Englishman for the intimate pronoun in his “Kennst du das Sidonien
Strasse”?
What treatment would he receive now and how would he take it?
But his two friends were German scholars and good cicerones, and led
him safely to the Hotel de Saxe on the morning of December 15th, 1873,
where my father married us in the presence of a newly arrived British
ambassador.
There was some obvious raillery, to which Joe nimbly responded, in
consequence of that pleni-potentiary remarking, with grim humour, that
he wondered if these marriages were really valid; but the gentleman
took the best precautions available in requiring the legal part of
the ceremony to take place on the “British ground” of his
small, temporary hotel room, and there, both of us kneeling on two
little sofa cushions, the ring was put upon my finger.
My father, however, naturally wanted to “finish us off” in
the English Church, and I remember my shyness when I saw the uninvited
crowd which had assembled there--I was told afterwards to see what a
high-art wedding dress would be like!
Joe declared that they expected it to be scanty; if so they must have
been disappointed that the folds of my soft brocade, fashioned after my
artist sister-in-law’s design and approved by my husband, were
much more ample than was the mode of the day.
How much have we changed since the Morris vogue!
I don’t think I minded then being the centre of observation, even
though I may have guessed it was fraught with adverse criticism--not
wholly, as I now think, undeserved.
But in the friendly little party that assembled in our modest home to
wish us God-speed there was no adverse criticism, and we went off to
Leipzig for our honeymoon _en route_ for England and work, without any
of the fatiguing excitement of a society assembly.
Joe’s graceful little speech in reply to congratulations was
quite the merriest note of the simple festivities.
I daresay the wine at that table was not wholly worthy of the palate
for which Joe had already acquired a reputation among his London
friends; but when we reached Leipzig I remember his ordering a bottle
of the celebrated Johannesberg for our wedding dinner. Possibly he may
have told a sympathetic _bon viveur_ of this afterwards; anyhow our
first dinner invitation on our return to London was to the house of a
wealthy bachelor who produced a bottle of the (ostensibly) same wine
with the dessert. Unluckily, Joe, on being pressed to praise it, said
with his usual candour: “Well, my dear fellow, you gave us such
excellent claret during dinner that you have spoiled my palate for
this!”
The laugh that followed compensated for an ominous frown on the brow of
our rather peppery host, who was however placated by one of the guests
recalling an occasion on which Joe had mortified the famous proprietor
of a famous eating-house by forcing him to admit a mistake in serving,
later in the dinner, an inferior brand of the wine supplied at first.
Two days of lazy sight-seeing in the fine old German town, and then on
we travelled; and a cold journey we had of it! But Joe’s spirits
were equal to every _contretemps_: even when we were turned out at a
dreary frontier junction in the middle of the night to await a slow
train, although we had paid first class fare and had been told there
was no change.
There was but one other passenger in the train--a quiet, elderly
German, and when I translated to Joe the bullying official’s
assurance that this gentleman had agreed to waive his rights if we did
the same, he made me ask our fellow-traveller if this was the case.
Unwarily the gentleman admitted that he had been told the same thing
of us, and although I was unable to put all the epithets which Joe
applied to the lying official into colloquial German, I was buoyed up
to persuade the traveller to use some of them, with the result that a
special engine and first class carriage took us all three on to Paris
by the morning. Perhaps our unknown companion was a person in power.
But in Paris fresh delays awaited us. When after two arduous but
cheerful days of some sight-seeing and a good deal of aimless and
delightful wandering and strange but equally pleasant meals in tiny
restaurants--we came to the Gare du Nord on our last day, Joe found
that he had not money enough to pay for tickets and luggage, and we
were obliged to return ignominiously to the hotel and borrow from our
best man--happily for us just arrived there on his own homeward route.
Somehow we minded little, but we reached Clapham one day late for the
family Christmasing--arriving, indeed, when the turkey was already
on the table, and I think it took all Joe’s tact to win his
mother’s forgiveness.
So that was the end of our one week’s wedding trip; it was back
to work and a busy time we had of it till our son Philip was about nine
months old. Then, by dint of Joe’s unceasing work and my economy
we found that we could allow ourselves a journey to Italy to stay with
the various friends of my girlhood.
We called it our honeymoon--a belated one, like the gift of
a portrait-bust of our boy at three years old, which Joe
chaffed Miss Henrietta Montalba for presenting to us as a
“wedding-present.” But none the less a honeymoon for that,
though not of the conventional and luxurious type.
Many a funny experience attended Joe’s efforts to pursue in travel the
economy which I had sternly sought to instil at home, and I am afraid
that he never again fully resumed the good habit from which he then
first broke away. Economy was not one of his virtues--was he not the
son of an Irish-woman? But, then, generosity was. Burne-Jones once
asked him why he took a cab to drive down the Strand, and he said it
came cheaper, because if he walked he was sure to give half a crown to
some former “stage-hand.” Yet when another day Burne-Jones himself was
deceived by a plausible story and Joe cried in reproof: “Can’t you see
that it’s only acting?” Burne-Jones replied: “Well, my dear, I’ve paid
ten-and-six to see worse.”
But in the days of our first foreign trip my extravagant husband was
still “trying to be good.”
I remember his taking the English prescription for a sedative to a
small chemist on Lago Maggiore, whom he described as the alchymist in
_Romeo and Juliet_; but when the dose, which at home represented about
two tablespoonfuls, arrived in a straw covered quart “fiasco,” he
preferred a night’s toothache to venturing on it.
As representing his sympathetic understanding of one side of the
Italian character, I might cite our going into the quaintest of
curiosity shops in an old town where we had to wait at a junction, and
his tendering a cheque in payment of a trifling purchase. I am bound
to say he confessed afterwards that he had only bought me the trinket
in the faint hope of getting the change he needed and that he was
as surprised as I was to see the ox-eyed little hunchback unearth a
beautiful ancient casket and hand him from it the gold required.
Possibly the timid request having come from me in the man’s own dialect
may have helped to confirm the impression of “good faith” given by
Joe’s candid countenance; but he did naturally count on me; and on a
different occasion when he was obstinately trying to drive a bargain
with an unwisely grasping _vetturino_, his delight was great at the
sudden drop of five francs in the demand of the astounded plunderer
upon hearing his own vernacular from my indignant English lips.
There were many times when Joe would have none of my help. When we
were staying on the Riviera he would go every day into the town in the
rattling little omnibus that plied along the dusty road, succeeding
by sheer kindred _bonhomie_ in making friends with the drivers and
rejoicing at the abusive epithet of “ugly microbe” suggested by some
late epidemic, with which they used at the time merrily to bombard one
another.
His best crony amongst the friends of my childhood was the old priest
of our Apennine village who had taught me the piano when I was a little
girl, in exchange--as he always averred--for my instruction in my own
tongue.
I’m afraid his conversational English was little credit to me
and not much better than Joe’s Italian, although the old man was
a scholar and had taught himself enough, with occasional help from my
father, to read Shakespeare in the original.
He pronounced the name with every vowel broad and separate, as in his
Latin; this was easy in that case, but when he wanted to tell which
were his “four favourite poets”--in which list he included
musicians--he was sore put to it for the pronunciation of Byron,
Beethoven and Bach.
But Joe taught him more than I had done at ten years old, for which the
old man upbraided me again as he would have done in my baby days.
I can see him standing in his shabby cassock beneath his pergola with
the sun filtering through the vines on to the hanging bunches of purple
fruit, and shaking his finger at me with mock solemnity as of yore.
“When she was four years old she told me I spoke English like a
Spanish cow,” said he, quoting a Genoese proverb. “But she
taught me badly.”
And then he related--what I refused at first to translate--how he had
had to whip me for stealing his currants.
“Grapes she might have had--but English currants, they require
_watering_.”
And grapes _we_ had too, as many as we could devour. In their natural
form Joe could pluck and eat them gladly too; but when it came to
the sour wine which the _Prevosto_ had made from them and with which
he served him at table, I am bound to confess that my husband risked
disgracing me by spilling it on the brick floor when his host’s
back was turned; and on one occasion he even went so far as to pour
a whole half _fiasco_ through the little window which separated the
refectory from the church, where he bespattered the marble pavement
behind the high altar.
But these delinquencies remained a secret, and “Giò” became
the old man’s loved and patient instructor and friend.
“Tor bay or not tor bay,” I seem to hear him painfully enunciating:
and then Joe finishing Hamlet’s familiar soliloquy in slow, even tones
as they passed up the vineyards. Pleasant climbs they were through
sweeping chestnut-woods and beside trickling trout-streams that grew
to rushing torrents after a thunderstorm; climbs that ended perhaps at
some mountain sanctuary whence the white cities of the plain could be
seen beyond a sea of gently lowering ridges and crests; or sometimes
only at some hamlet beside the stony bed of the wandering river,
where the old man would bid him wait while he mumbled his “Office” or
went in “to see an ill” in one of the thatched cottages adorned with
hanging fringe of golden maize-cones that cluster around the village
fountain. It was here that one evening, when I had been my husband’s
companion, the village sempstress came forth to greet us--she who had
made my own and my sister’s new cotton frocks on that great occasion
when the _Prevosto_ had begged for us, as the “cleanest children in the
village,” to strew flowers before the Archbishop when he came for the
Confirmation.
I reminded the old priest of it and he said: “Yes, yes!
And the Archbishop asked if you were Protestants and I answered
‘Certainly! but their parents did not refuse because we are
Catholics: we all pray to the same God.’”
The sempstress was old when Joe saw her and so stout that the great
scissors that hung from her vast apron bobbed as she moved; but she was
handsome still and gracious with the graciousness of a duchess; I well
recollect Joe’s comment on it.
The laughing girls who clustered round us in wonder pinched his calves,
perhaps to see if they were padded, though their excuse to old Teresa’s
sharp and quick reprimand was that they only wanted to feel “the
beautiful real English wool” of his shooting stockings.
Joe had not objected, but she was not placated, and bade the hussies be
off while she invited us into her dwelling.
A girl sat at the hand-loom, rapidly moving her bare brown feet and
flinging the shuttle to and fro for the weaving of the sheeting, a
completed length of which lay beside her ready to be bleached on the
stones by the river.
Joe wanted to hear about it from her, for her eyes were “like the
fish pools of Heshbon”; but she jumped up at the mistress’s
bidding and he lost interest in weaving; I think he would even have
tasted the sour wine which she presently brought on a copper tray if I
had not quickly invented a polite fiction to the effect that Englishmen
never drink anything but tea in the afternoon.
A slice of chestnut cake we were forced to accept from the elder
woman’s hospitable hand as she asked my husband’s name. I remember the
charming bow with which she turned to him after she had heard it and
said: “_O che bel San Guiseppe!_” and his equally charming recognition
of her pretty compliment.
Irish and Italian--there was some subtle affinity always between
them--the grave and the gay, the superstitious and the Pagan, as _he_
said--and he was positively confused when she observed that his golden
beard and fair, curling hair were just like the St. Joseph’s in
the Church. It was a merry run we had down through the chestnut woods
and a sweet walk by the river in the sunset, back to the Presbytery.
Graver but none the less satisfactory was the appreciation given to
him by my old nurse, when we arrived presently in Genoa. She was of a
different type--refined, sensitive, serious even to sadness--with the
blight always on her of a foundling’s ignorance of parentage; but
devoted beyond all words and of a rare intelligence: Joe was impressed
with her and likened her to a female Dante.
Yet the brighter types were more in accordance with his holiday mood:
when we were on a visit later at a mediaeval castle whose battlements
stand sheer above the sea and whose olive groves slope to a transparent
bay, he spent all the time not occupied by eating figs off the tree on
the Castle keep to playing with half-naked brown urchins on the quay of
the tiny fishing-port below.
His first acquaintance with one of them was at dead of night when we
were alone in the weird old place and a hollow bell clanged suddenly
through the hot air.
Joe got out of bed--his chief fear being lest the mosquitoes should
take the chance to get in under the sheltering net--and made his way
down a dark, vaulted passage to the outer gateway and what was once
the portcullis. A ragged boy stood there with a telegram: it was an
invitation which should have been delivered six hours before, but the
boy had walked five miles along a cliff in the dark and Joe rewarded
him so well that his fame was spread in the village and he never more
walked peacefully abroad.
The little girls, however, were his chief pilferers: he could never
refuse their appealing black eyes. And some of them were fine
coquettes. I can see him now dancing a hornpipe on the quay with a
half-clad little maiden who presently signed to him to take off his
hat; the elaborate bow with which he did so, bidding me apologise to
her for the omission, was worthy of the producer of many subsequent
plays.
The little incident recalls another of later date.
Then it was in the Engadine that we were holiday-making. Mr. and Mrs.
Bancroft--as they then were--had invited us to lunch at the Campfer
Hotel and we had walked over from S. Moritz where we were lodged.
As we came up the path through the pine-wood beside the rushing stream
we saw the famous little lady standing on the dusty road above to
welcome us; and Joe--his hat in his hand this time--began advancing
towards her executing his hornpipe step.
To the entranced amazement of a few loungers, she picked up her
skirts in the prettiest way imaginable and immediately responded with
a pas-seul of her own--her little feet nimble as ever, till the two
met, laughing immoderately, in the middle of the highway just as the
diligence hove in sight.