During the second half of that black November we were writing “The Waters of Strife,” which is the fourth story of the “R.M.” series. Its chief incident was the vision which came to the central figure of the story, of the face of the man he had murdered. This incident, as it happened, was a true one, and was the pivot of the story. We had promised a monthly story, and in order to keep faith, we had written it with an effort that had required almost more than we had to give. The story now appears in our book as we originally wrote it, but on its first appearance in the Badminton Magazine a passage had been introduced by an alien and unsolicited collaborator, and “various jests” had been “eliminated as unfit” for, one supposes, the sensitive readers of the magazine. Sometimes one wonders who are these ethereal beings whose sensibilities are only shielded from shock by the sympathetic delicacy of editors. I remember once before being crushed by another editor. I had drawn, from life, for the Connemara Tour, a portrait of “Little Judy from Menlo,” a Galway beggar-woman of wide renown. It was returned with the comment that “such a thing would shock delicate ladies.” So, as the song says, “Judy being bashful said ‘No, no, no’!” and returned to private life. Another and less distinguished beggar-woman once said to me of the disappointments of life, “Such things must be, Miss Somerville, my darlin’ gerr’l!” and authors must, one supposes, submit sometimes to be sacrificed to the susceptibilities of the ideal reader.
The twelve “R.M.” stories kept us desperately at work until the beginning of August, 1899. Looking back on the writing of them, each one, as we finished it, seemed to be the last possible effort of exhausted nature. Martin hardly knew, through those strenuous months, what it was to be out of suffering. Even though it cannot be denied that we both of us found enjoyment in the writing of them, I look back upon the finish of each story as a nightmare effort. Copying our unspeakably tortuous MS. till the small hours of the morning of the last possible day; whirling through the work of the illustrations (I may confess that one small drawing, that of “Maria” with the cockatoo between her paws, was done, as it were “between the stirrup and the ground,” while the horse, whose mission it was to gallop in pursuit of the postman, stamped and raged under my studio windows). By the time the last bundle had been dispatched Martin and I had arrived at a stage when we regarded an ink-bottle as a mad dog does a bucket of water. Rest, and change of air, for both of us, was indicated. I was sent to Aix, she went to North Wales, and we decided to meet in Paris and spend the winter there.
In the beginning of October, 1899, we established ourselves in an appartement in the Boulevard Edgar Quinet, and there we spent the next four months.
Looking back through our old diaries I recognise for how little of that time Martin was free from suffering of some kind. The effects of the hunting accident, and the strain of writing, too soon undertaken, were only now beginning to come to their own. Neuralgia, exhaustion, backaches, and all the indescribable miseries of neurasthenia held her in thrall. It is probable that the bracing tonic of the Paris climate saved her from a still worse time, but she had come through her reserves, and was now going on pluck. We wrote, desultorily, when she felt equal to it, and I worked at M. Délécluse’s studio in the mornings, and, with some others, assisted Mr. Cyrus Cuneo, a young, and then unknown, American, in getting up an “illustration class” in the afternoons. Most people have seen the brilliant black and white illustrations that Mr. Cuneo drew for the Illustrated London News and other papers and magazines, and his early death has left a blank that will not easily be filled. He could have been no more than four or five and twenty when I met him, and he was already an extraordinarily clever draughtsman. He was small, dark, and exceedingly good-looking, with a peculiarly beautiful litheness, balance, and swiftness of movement, that was to some extent explained by the fact that before he took up Art he had occupied the exalted position of “Champion Bantam of the South Pacific Slope”!
At that juncture we were all mad about a peculiar style of crayon drawing, which, as far as we were concerned, had been originated by Cuneo, and about a dozen of us took a studio in the Passage Stanilas, and worked there, from the most sensational models procurable. Cuneo was “Massier”; he found the models, and posed them (mercilessly), and we all worked like tigers, and brutally enjoyed the strung-up sensation that comes from the pressure of a difficult pose. Each stroke is Now or Never, every instant is priceless. Pharaoh of the Oppression was not firmer in the matter of letting the Children of Israel go, than we were with those unhappy models. I console myself by remembering that a good model has a pride in his endurance in a difficult pose that is as sustaining as honest and just pride always is. Nevertheless, when I look over these studies, and see the tall magician, peering, on tip-toe, over a screen, and the High-priest denouncing the violation of the sanctuary, and the unfortunate Arab, half rising from his couch to scan the horizon, I recognise that for these models, though Art was indisputably long, Time could hardly have been said to be fleeting.
Mr. Whistler was at that time in Paris, and had a morning class for ladies only, and it was in their studio that we had our class. It was large, well-lighted, with plenty of stools and easels and a sink for washing hands and brushes. It also was thoroughly insanitary, and had a well-established reputation for cases of typhoid. As a precautionary measure we always kept a certain yellow satin cushion on the mouth of the sink; this, not because of any superstition as to the colour, or the cushion, but because there was no other available “stopper for the stink.” (Thus Cuneo, whose language, if free, was always well chosen.) One of our members was a very clever American girl, who had broken loose from the bondage of the Whistler class. There, it appeared from her, if you had a soul, you could not think of calling it your own. It was intensively bossed by Mr. Whistler’s Massière, on the lines laid down by Mr. Whistler, until, as my friend said, you had “no more use for it, and were just yelling with nerves.” The model, whether fair, dark, red, white, or brown, had to be seen through Mr. Whistler’s spectacles, and these, judging by the studies that were occasionally left on view, were of very heavily smoked glass. When it came to the Massière setting my American friend’s palette, and dictating to her the flesh tones, the daughter of the Great Republic
observed that she was used to a free country, and shook the dust off her feet, and scraped the mud off her palette, and retired. An interesting feature of the studio was that many sheets of paper on which Mr. Whistler had scribbled maxim and epigram were nailed on its walls, for general edification, and it might have served better had his lieutenant allowed these to influence the pupils, unsupported by her interpretations. Since then I have met some of these pronouncements in print, but I will quote one of those that I copied at the time, as it bears on the case in point.