Many and strange were the expedients to which I had to resort in the execution of those drawings for the Graphic. For one series that set forth the romantic and cheiromantic adventures of a clergyman, and the lady (Martin) of his choice, the bedroom of a clerical guest had to be burgled, and his Sunday coat and hat abstracted, at imminent risk of discovery. In another, entitled “A Mule Ride in Trinidad,” a brother, in the exiguous costume of bathing drawers and a large straw hat, was for two mornings one of the attractions and ornaments of the Purlieu, after which he retired to bed with a heavy cold, calling down curses upon the Purlieu stove (an objet d’art of which Mrs. Martin had said that it solved the problem of producing smoke without fire). Of another series dealing with the adventures of a student of the violin in Paris, I find in my diary the moving entry, “Crucified Martin head downwards, as the fiddle girl, practising, with her music on the floor. Compelled H.” (another female relative whose name shall be withheld) “to pose as a Paris tram horse, in white stockings, with a chowrie for a tail.”
These artistic exertions were varied by schooling the carriage horses across country—in this connection I find mention of a youth imported by a brother, and briefly alluded to by Martin as “a being like a little meek bird with a brogue”; tobogganing in a bath chair down the village hill (Castle Townshend Hill, which has a fall of about fifty feet in two); “giant-striding” on the flypole in January mud; and, by the exercise of Machiavellian diplomacy, securing Sorcerer and Ballyhooly, the carriage horses aforesaid, for an occasional day with a scratch pack of trencher-fed hounds, that visited the country at intervals, and for whom the epithet “scratch” was appropriate in more senses than one.
It is perhaps noteworthy that on my second or third meeting with Martin I suggested to her that we should write a book together and that I should illustrate it. We had each of us already made our début in print; she in the grave columns of the Irish Times, with an article on the Administration of Relief to the Sufferers from the “Bad Times” of which she makes mention in her memoir of her brother Robert (page 37); I in the Argosy, with a short story, founded upon an incident of high improbability, recounted, by the way, by the “little meek bird with a brogue”; and not, I fear, made more credible by my rendering of it, which had all the worst faults of conventionality and sensationalism.
The literary atmosphere that year was full of what were known as “Shilling Shockers.” A great hit had been made with a book of this variety, named “Called Back,” and two cousins of our mothers’, Mr. W. Wills (the dramatist, already mentioned), and the Hon. Mrs. Greene (whose delightful stories for children, “Cushions and Corners,” “The Grey House on the Hill,” etc., mark an epoch in such literature), were reported to be collaborating in such a work. But I went to Paris, and Martin put forth on a prolonged round of visits, and our literary ambitions were stowed away with our winter clothes.
In June I returned from Paris; “pale and dwindled,” Martin’s diary mentions, “but fashionable,” which I find gratifying, though quite untrue. It was one of those perfect summers that come sometimes to the south of Ireland, when rain is not, and the sun is hot, but never too hot, and the gardens are a storm of flowers, flowers such as one does not see elsewhere, children of the south and the sun and the sea; tall delphiniums that have climbed to the sky and brought down its most heavenly blue; Japanese iris, with their pale and dappled lilac discs spread forth to the sun, like little plates and saucers at a high and honourable “tea ceremony” in the land of Nippon; peonies and poppies, arums and asphodel, every one of them three times as tall, and three times as brilliant, and three times as sweet as any of their English cousins, and all of them, and everything else as well, irradiated for me that happy year by a new “Spirit of Delight.” It was, as I have said, though then we knew it only dimly, the beginning, for us, of a new era. For most boys and girls the varying, yet invariable, flirtations, and emotional episodes of youth, are resolved and composed by marriage. To Martin and to me was opened another way, and the flowering of both our lives was when we met each other.
If ever Ireland should become organised and systematised, and allotmented, I would put in a plea that the parish of Castle Haven may be kept as a national reserve for idlers and artists and idealists. The memory comes back to me of those blue mornings of mid-June that Martin and I, with perhaps the saving pretence of a paint-box, used to spend, lying on the warm, short grass of the sheep fields on Drishane Side, high over the harbour, listening to the curving cry of the curlews and the mewing of the sea-gulls, as they drifted in the blue over our heads; watching the sunlight waking dancing stars to life in the deeper blue firmament below, and criticising condescendingly the manœuvres of the little white-sailed racing yachts, as they strove and squeezed round their mark-buoys, or rushed emulously to the horizon and back again. Below us, by a hundred feet or so, other idlers bathed in the Dutchman’s Cove, uttering those sea-bird screams that seem to be induced by the sea equally in girls as in gulls. But Martin and I, having taken high ground as artists and idealists, remained, roasting gloriously in the sun, at the top of the cliffs.
That summer was for all of us a time of extreme and excessive lawn tennis. Tournaments, formal and informal, were incessant, challenges and matches raged. Martin and I played an unforgettable match against two long-legged lads, whose handicap, consisting as it did in tight skirts, and highly-trimmed mushroom hats, pressed nearly as heavily on us as on them. My mother, and a female friend of like passions with herself, had backed us to win, and they kept up a wonderful and shameless barrage of abuse between the petticoated warriors and their game, and an equally staunch supporting fire of encouragement to us. When at last Martin and I triumphed, my mother and the female friend were voiceless from long screaming, but they rushed speechlessly into the middle of the court and there flung themselves into each other’s arms.
It was one of those times of high tide that come now and then, and not in the Golden World did the time fleet more carelessly than it did for all of us that summer. The mornings for sheer idling, the afternoons for lawn tennis, the evenings for dancing, to my mother’s unrivalled playing; or there was a coming concert, or a function in the church, to be practised for. A new and zealous clergyman had recently taken the place of a very easy-going cousin of my mother’s, and I find in Martin’s diary this entry:
“Unparalleled insolence of the new Parson, who wanted to know, on Saturday, if Edith had yet chosen the hymns!” and again—“E. by superhuman exertions, got the hymns away” (i.e. sent up to the reading desk) “before the 3rd Collect. Canon —— swore himself in.”
Kind and excellent man! Had the organist been the subject sworn about, no one could have blamed him. It was his hat and coat that we stole. His wondrous gentleness and long suffering with a rapscallion choir shall not be forgotten by a no less rapscallion organist.