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.”
CHAPTER XXIII
PARIS AGAIN
We returned to Drishane in October, having by that time written and illustrated the third story of the series. Which was fortunate, as on the first of November, “November Day” as we call it in Carbery, we went a-hunting, and under my eyes Martin “took a toss” such as I trust I may never have to see again. It happened in the middle of a run; there was a bar across an opening into a field. It was a wooden bar, with bushes under it, and it was not very high, but firmly fixed. I jumped it, and called to her to come on. The horse she was riding, Dervish, was a good hunter, but was cunning and often lazy. He took the bar with his knees, and I saw him slowly fall on to his head, and then turn over, rolling on Martin, who had kept too tightly her grip of the saddle. Then he struggled to his feet, but she lay still.
It was two months before she was able again to “lift her hand serenely in the sunshine, as before,” or so much as take a pen in it, and several years before she could be said to have regained such strength as had been hers. Nothing had been broken, and she had entirely escaped disfigurement, even though the eye-glasses, in which she always rode, had cut her brow; but one of the pummels of the saddle had bruised her spine, and the shock to a system so highly-strung as hers was what might be expected. The marvel was that so fragile a creature could ever have recovered, but her spirit was undefeated, and long before she could even move herself in bed, she had begun to work with me again, battling against all the varied and subtle sufferings that are known only to those who have damaged a nerve centre, with the light-hearted courage that was so conspicuously hers.