So from that day there was no more dingy boarding-house for me: my betrothed took me to his parents’ house at Clapham, where I well remember the courtly words: “I hear I have to congratulate my son Joe” with which I was received by his father.
Small blame would it have been to parents, ambitious for the advancement of their children, had they only seen in me a foreign adventuress without credentials coming to snatch one of the flowers of their flock; yet instead of that, most generously was I welcomed to a home of which I have never seen the like; and if sometimes bewildered and always non-plussed by the free-and-easy give and take and the wonderful argumentative capacity of that large and variously gifted family—I felt out of it—my lover was always unobtrusively protecting, and the artist-sister who had always shared his tastes and sympathized with his ambitions, often held out a kindly hand to help me up the steep places.
But they were few: the sunny places, full of real romance, of utter confidence in our future—rash as it might appear to prudent elders—bright with his radiant enthusiasms and his fine ambitions, are the things that cannot fade from my memory.
In those days much verse was written not then intended for publication, but some of which has seen the light since.
The typical gathering, of the large family, presided over by the wise father whose “Landmarks, boys”! from the head of the table generally calmed any storm, was most often one of obstinate argument and fierce word-fights, and stands out now as the proper school where the keen critical faculty and the gift of ready repartee for which many friends now remember Joe Carr, were first forged and perfected.
And, be it noted, that however sanguinary the fight, there was never any malice, never any after ill-will among the combatants: generous natures and a Celtic sense of humour prevented that—not a little helped by the complete freedom of arena left by the parents.
The mother ruled her household as Victorian mothers did, and spared neither pains nor expense for her son’s ambitions and her daughters’ proper advancement in the world; she welcomed their friends with courteous Irish welcome, however little many of their tastes might be in harmony with her own; but she let them talk unmolested and was content to keep her own counsel, while she ministered lavishly to their creature comforts; and the father—a man of few words but of strong character and clear insight—kept his own views undisturbed. He had nevertheless more deeply, though probably unconsciously, impressed them on his children, than his children then guessed. He was a broad Liberal, and it is interesting to note that, in days when we were even more insular than we are now, no fighter in the cause of freedom was forbidden his house because he was a foreigner. Under the auspices of Mr. Adam Gielgud—the son of a great Polish refugee—patriots from many lands who had sought our shelter, found their way to that hospitable roof. Pulski and Riciotti Garibaldi are the only other names that recur to me, but there were more and they were all welcome. Men of after note in the art world and in journalism came also as friends of Joe’s or of his sister’s—shaken together with charming Irish and hard-headed North country cousins.
Many were the times when dinner had been ordered for six, and sixteen would sit down at the long mahogany table, the polishing of which Mrs. Carr supervised daily, laden with homely but abundant fare.
But Joe made many other friends in town who never found time to visit Clapham. In spite of his recent appointment as dramatic critic to The Echo his new friends were less among actors than among painters—Burne-Jones and perhaps chiefest just then, Rossetti, whose friendship he describes himself in Some Eminent Victorians. Nevertheless he had met Henry Irving through the son of the Lyceum manager, Mr. Bateman, and had often passionately praised him.
To the girl fresh from the small English colony abroad it was all vastly entertaining, though I did not realize then how much of a figure my betrothed already was among the men of his time. Even the gayer part of my girlhood—the summers spent at S. Moritz, which my father had discovered, as a homely village in his yearly Alpine tramp—bore little resemblance to London excitements. I had but rarely seen the inside of a theatre and never a fine English actor, and my first vision of Henry Irving in “The Bells,” is a haunting memory still.