“I am ready to meet Thee, Eternal Father!”
Part III
With the death of my father the curtain fell for ever on the old life at Ross, the stage darkened, and the keening of the tenants as they followed his coffin was the last music of the piece.
Two or three months afterwards the house was empty. In the blaze of the June weather, the hall door, that had always stood open, was shut and barred, and, in the stillness, the rabbits ventured up to the broad limestone steps where once the talk of the house had centred in the summer evenings. For the first time in its history Ross House was empty; my mother and her children had embarked upon life in Dublin, and Robert, like his father before him, had gone to London to write for the Press.
For five or six years Robert lived in London. He belonged to the Arundel Club, where lived and moved the Bohemians of that day, the perfect and single-hearted Bohemians, who were, perhaps, survivals of the days of Richard Steele, and have now vanished, unable to exist in the shadeless glare of Borough Councils. Their literary power was unquestioned, the current of their talk was strong, with baffling swirl and eddy, and he who plunged in it must be a resourceful and strong swimmer. Linked inseparably with those years of London life was my mother’s cousin, W. G. Wills, the playwright, poet and painter, who in these early ’seventies had suddenly achieved celebrity as a dramatist, with the tragedy of “Charles I.” If a record could be discovered of the hierarchs of the Bohemians it would open of itself at the name of Willie Wills. Great gifts of play-writing and portrait-painting rained upon him a reputation that he never troubled himself about; he remained unalterably himself, and, clad in his long grey ulster, lived in his studio a life unfettered by the clock. Of his amazing ménage, of the strange and starveling hangers-on that followed him as rooks follow the plough, to see what they could pick up, all who knew him had stories to tell. Of the luncheons at his studio, where the beefsteak came wrapped in newspaper, and the plates that were hopelessly dirty were thrown out of the window; of the appointments written boldly on the wall and straightway forgotten; the litter of canvases, the scraps of manuscript, and among and above these incidents, the tranquillity, the charm, the agreeability of Willie Wills.[1]
Robert has found him and my mother lunching together gloriously on mutton chops, cooked by being flung into the heart of the fire.
“Just one more, Nannie,” said the dramatist, as Robert entered, spearing a blazing fragment and presenting it to his boon companion with a courtly gesture.
In the old days at Ross, Willie Wills was a frequent guest, and held the children in thrall—as he could always ensnare and hold children—with his exquisite story-telling. Their natural guardians withdrew with confidence, as Willie began, with enormous gravity, the tale of “The Little Old Woman who lived in the Dark Wood, and had one long yellow Tooth,” and, returning after an interval, heard that “at this momentous crisis seven dead men, in sacks, staggered into the room—!” while, in the fateful pause that followed, the clamour of the children, “Go on, Willie Wills!” would rise.
Robert and Willie Wills were in many aspects of character and of gifts unlike, yet with some cousinly points in common. Both were cultivated and literary, yet seldom read a book; both were sensitive to criticism, and even touchingly anxious for approval; both were delightful companions in a tête-à-tête. Where sympathy is joined with imagination, and sense of humour with both, it is a combination hard to beat. Robert regarded routine respectfully, if from afar, and sincerely admired the efforts of those who endeavoured to systematise his belongings. Willie Wills was superbly indifferent to surroundings, yet took a certain pride in new clothes. The real points of resemblance were in heart; the chivalrous desire to help the weak, and the indelible filial instinct that glows in natures of the best sort, and marks unfailingly a good son as a good fellow through all the nations of the world.
Throughout these London days Robert wrote for the Globe and other papers, chiefly paragraphs and light articles, that ran from his pen with the real enjoyment that he found in writing them at the last moment. He seemed to do better when working against time than when he had large days in hand and a well-ordered writing-table inviting his presence. He found these things thoroughly uninspiring, and facilities for correcting his work were odious to him. Proofs he never looked at; he said he couldn’t face them; probably because of the critical power that underlay his facility.