I once read a fragment, by John Davidson, that appeared some years ago in the Outlook. I grieve that I have lost the copy and do not remember its date. It was called, if I am not mistaken, “The Last of the Alanadoths,” and purported to be the final page of the history of a great and marvellous tribe, whose stature was twice that of ordinary beings, whose strength was as the strength of ten, and in whose veins blue and glittering flame ran, instead of blood. These, having in various ways successfully staggered ordinary humanity, all finally embarked upon an ice-floe, and were lost in the Polar mists. “Thus perished,” ends the chronicle, “the splendid and puissant Alanadoths!”
I have now forgotten many of the details, but I remember that when I read it, it irresistibly suggested to me the thought of my mother and her sisters and brothers. Tall, and fervent, and flaming, full of what seemed like quenchless vitality, their blood, if not flame, yet of that most ardent blend of Irish and English that has produced the finest fighters in the world. And now, like the splendid and puissant Alanadoths, they also have vanished (save one, the stoutest fighter of them all) into the mists that shroud the borderland between our life and the next.
They kept their youthful outlook undimmed, and took all things in their stride, without introspection or hesitation. Their unflinching conscientiousness, their violent church-going (I speak of the sisters), were accompanied by a whole-souled love of a spree, and a wonderful gift for a row. Or for an argument. There are many who still remember those great arguments that, on the smallest provocation, would rise, and stir, and deepen, and grow, burgeoning like a rose of storm among the Alanadoths. They meant little at the moment, and nothing afterwards, but while they lasted they were awe-inspiring. It is said that a stranger, without their gates, heard from afar one such dispute, and trembling, asked what it might mean.
“Oh, that!” said a little girl, with sang-froid, “That’s only the Coghills roaring.”
(As a dweller in the Hebrides would speak of a North-Atlantic storm.)
My mother was a person entirely original in her candour, and with a point of view quite untrammelled by convention. Martin and I have ever been careful to abstain from introducing portraiture or caricature into our books, but we have not denied that the character of “Lady Dysart” (in “The Real Charlotte”) was largely inspired by my mother.
She, as we said of Lady Dysart, said the things that other people were afraid to think.
“Poetry!” she declaimed, “I hate poetry—at least good poetry!”
Her common sense often amounted to inspiration. It happened one Christmas that my sister and I found ourselves in difficulties in the matter of a suitable offering to an old servant of forty years’ standing; she was living on a pension, her fancies were few, her needs none. A very difficult subject for benefaction. My mother, however, unhesitatingly propounded a suggestion.
“Give her a nice shroud! There’s nothing in the world she’d like as well as that!”