CHAPTER XXVI
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.