Yet when I look back to the Studio, to its profound engrossment in its intention, its single-hearted sacrifice of everything in life to the one Vision, its gorgeous contempt for appearances and conventions, I find myself thinking how good it would be to be five and twenty, and storming up that rickety staircase again, with a paint-box in one hand, and a Carton as big as the Gates of Gaza in the other.
DANS LA RIVE GAUCHE.
CHAPTER X
WHEN FIRST SHE CAME
“Sure ye’re always laughing! That ye may laugh in the sight of the Glory of Heaven!”
This benediction was bestowed upon Martin by a beggar-woman in Skibbereen, and I hope, and believe, it has been fulfilled. Wherever she was, if a thing amused her she had to laugh. I can see her in such a case, the unpredictable thing that was to touch the spot, said or done, with streaming tears, helpless, almost agonised, much as one has seen a child writhe in the tortured ecstasy of being tickled. The large conventional jest had but small power over her; it was the trivial, subtle absurdity, the inversion of the expected, the sublimity getting a little above itself and failing to realise that it had taken that fatal step over the border; these were the things that felled her, and laid her, wherever she might be, in ruins.
In Richmond Parish Church, on a summer Sunday, it happened to her and a friend to be obliged to stand in the aisle, awaiting the patronage of the pew-opener. The aisle was thronged, and Martin was tired. She essayed to lean against the end of a fully occupied pew, and not only fully occupied, but occupied by a row of such devout and splendid ladies as are only seen in perfection in smart suburban churches. I have said the aisle was thronged, and, as she leaned, the pressure increased. Too late she knew that she had miscalculated her mark. Like Sisera, the son of Jabin, she bowed (only she bowed backwards), she fell; where she fell, there she lay down, and where she lay down was along the laps of those devout and splendid ladies. These gazed down into her convulsed countenance with eyes that could not have expressed greater horror or surprise if she had been a boa constrictor; a smileless glare, terribly enhanced by gold-rimmed pince-nez. She thinks she must have extended over fully four of them. She never knew how she regained the aisle. She was herself quite powerless, and she thinks that with knee action, similar to that of a knife-grinder, they must have banged her on to her feet. It was enough for her to be beyond the power of those horrified and indignant and gold eye-glassed eyes, even though she knew that nothing could deliver her from the grip of the demon of laughter. She says she was given a seat, out of pity, I suppose, shortly afterwards, and there, on her knees and hidden under the brim of her hat, she wept, and uttered those faint insect squeaks that indicate the extremity of endurance, until the end of the service, when her unfortunate companion led her home.
It was, as it happens, in church that I saw her first; in our own church, in Castle Townshend. That was on Sunday, January 17, 1886. I immediately commandeered her to sing in the choir, and from that day, little as she then knew it, she was fated to become one of its fundamental props and stays. A position than which few are more arduous and none more thankless.