In due course the bundle was returned. Mr. Sparkes, a majestic and terrible being, wrapped in remoteness and in a great and waving red beard, as in a mantle of flame, had placed his sign of acquiescence after the inquiry. Miss Somerville was given to understand that she was permitted to Pass for the Antique.
This, however, Miss Somerville did not do. She was (not without deep regret for all of her London sojourn that did not include the School of Art) permitted instead to pass the portals of Paddington Station, and to return to Ireland by “The Bristol Boat,” in other words, an instrument of the devil, much in vogue at that time among the Irish of the South, that took some thirty hours to paddle across the Channel, and was known to the wits of Cork as “The Steam Roller.” It was, I fancy, on board the Steam Roller that a cousin of mine, when still deep in hard-earned slumber, and still far outside “The Heads” (i.e. the entrance of Cork Harbour), was assaulted by the steward.
“Come, get up, get up!” said the steward, shaking him by the shoulder, with the licence of old acquaintance and authority.
My cousin replied with a recommendation to the steward to betake himself to a rival place of torment, where (he added) there was little the steward could learn, and much that he could teach.
“Well,” replied the steward, dispassionately, “ye’re partly right. Ye have an hour yet.”
Thus I found myself back in Carbery again, left once more to follow my own buccaneering fancy in the domain of Art, a little straightened and corrected, perhaps, in eye, and with ideas on matters æsthetic beneficially widened. But this was due mainly to one who has ever been my patron saint in Art, that cousin who preferred reverie to Shakespeare; partly, also, to peripatetic lunches among the pictures and marvels of the South Kensington Museum; not, I say firmly, to that heavy-earned Pass for the Antique.
My next term of serious apprenticeship did not occur for four or five years, and was spent in Düsseldorf. One of my cousins (now my brother-in-law), Egerton Coghill, was studying painting there, and advised my doing the same. It was there, therefore, that I made my first dash into drawing from life, under the guidance of M. Gabriel Nicolet, then himself a student, now a well-known and successful portrait-painter. In the following spring I was there again, for singing lessons as well as for painting. This time I had Herr Carl Sohn for my professor, a delightful painter, who helped me much, but on the whole I think that I learnt more of music than of anything else while I was in Düsseldorf, and had I learnt nothing of either, I can at least look back to the concerts at the Ton Halle, and praise Heaven for the remembrance of their super-excellence. Twice a week came the concerts; it was very much the thing to go to them, and I have not often enjoyed music more than I have at those Ton Halle nights, sitting with the good friends whom Providence had considerately sent to Düsseldorf to be kind to me, in an atmosphere of rank German tobacco, listening to the best of orchestras, and enjoying every note they played, while I covered my programme with caricatures (as, also, was very much the thing to do).
My friends and I joined one of the big Gesang Vereins, and a very good two months ended in three ecstatic days of singing alto in the Rheinische Musik Fest, which, by great good luck, took place that May in Düsseldorf.
The Abbé Liszt was one of the glories of the occasion. I saw him roving through the gardens of the Ton Halle, with an ignored train of admirers at his heels; an old lion, with a silver mane, and a dark, untamed eye.
I do not regret those two springs in Düsseldorf, but still less do I regret the change of counsels that resulted in my going to Paris in the following year. “When the true gods come, the half-gods go,” and, apart from other considerations, the Düsseldorf School of Art only admitted male students, and ignored, with true German chivalry, the other half of creation.