“One does not meet these people out of Ireland; they are a blend not to be arrived at elsewhere. But I wish there were more John Michaels; shyness is so nice a quality when it goes deep. In fact all really nice people have shy hearts, I think—but their friends enjoy the quality more than they do, ... I was up in the North myself at the Signing of the Covenant, not in Belfast, but in the country. I went up on a visit there, not as a journalist, but when I saw what I saw I wrote an article about it for the Spectator. I did not know the North at all.... I send you what I wrote, because it is an honest impression. What surprised me about the place was the feeling of cleverness, and go, and also the people struck me as being hearty. If only the South would go up North and see what they are doing there, and how they are doing it, and ask them to show them how, it would make a good deal of difference. And then the North should come South and see what nice people we are, and how we do that! Your lovely Donegal I did not see, but hope to do that next time. You need not send back the Spectator, because that is a heavy supertax on the reader.”

CHAPTER XXVIII
THE LAST

She hid it always, close against her breast,
A golden vase, close sealed and strangely wrought,
And set with gems, whose dim eyes, mystery fraught,
Shot broken gleams, like secrets half confessed.
“One day,” she said, “Love’s perfumed kisses pressed
Against its lip their perfectness, unsought,
And suddenly the dizzy fragrance caught
My senses in its mesh, and gave them rest.
And life’s disquietude no more I feel,
For now,” she said, “my heart sleeps still and light.
Love’s Anodyne outlasts the lingering years!”
But in the darkness of an autumn night
Her heart woke, weeping, and she brake the seal.
The scent was dead; the vase was full of tears.

I have come to what must be the final chapter, and the thought most present with me is that in writing it I am closing the door on these memories of two lives that made the world a pleasant place for each other, and I find now that although I began them with reluctance, it is with reluctance still that I must end them.

It has been hard, often, to leave untold so many of those trivial things that counted for more, in the long run, than the occasional outstanding facts of two quite uneventful lives. I fear I have yielded too much to the temptation of telling and talking nonsense, and now there remains only the Appendix in which to retrieve Martin’s character and mine for intelligence and for a serious concern for the things that are serious.

To return to our work, which for us, at all events, if for no one else, was serious. As soon as we had recovered from “Dan Russel,” Martin set forth on what I find entered in my diary as “a series of tribal war-dances round the County Galway,” which meant that she paid visits, indefatigably, and with entire satisfaction, in her own county and among her own allies and kinsfolk. I should like to quote her account of a visit to one of her oldest friends, Lady Gregory, at Coole Park, where she met (and much enjoyed meeting) Mr. W. B. Yeats, and where she, assisted by the poet, carved her initials on a tree dedicated to the Muses, whereon A. E., and Dr. Douglas Hyde, and others of high achievement had inscribed themselves. But I must hold to the ordinance of silence as to living people that she herself ordained and would wish me to observe.

No one ever enjoyed good company more than Martin, and, as the beggars say, she “thravelled the County Galway,” and there was good company and a welcome before her wherever she went.

At about this time she and I were invited to a public dinner in Dublin, given to Irish literary women by the Corinthian Club; and, having secured exemption from speech-making, we found it a highly interesting entertainment, at which were materialised for us many who till then had been among the things believed in but not seen. At this time also, or a little later, I re-established the West Carbery Hounds, after a brief interregnum. I only now allude to them in order to record the fact that when the first draft of the reconstituted pack arrived, the lamented “Slipper” (now no more) met them at the station with an enormous bouquet of white flowers in a cavity in his coat that might have begun life as a button-hole, and a tall hat. He cheered the six couples as they left the station yard (accompanied, it may not be out of place to mention, ridiculously, by two and a half gambolling couples of black and white British-Holstein young cattle, on a herd of which magpie breed my sister and I were embarking), and then, as the procession moved like a circus through the streets of Skibbereen, “Slipper” renewed the task of drinking all their healths, this time at my expense.

The doctrine that sincere friendship is only possible between men dies hard. It is, at last, in the fulness of time, expiring by force of fact, and is now, like many another decayed convention, dragging out a deplorable old age in facetious paragraphs in “Comic Corners,” where the Mother-in-law, Mrs. Gamp and her ministrations, and the Unfortunate Husband (special stress being laid on the sufferings endured by the latter while his wife is enjoying herself upstairs) gibber together, and presumably amuse someone.