“I had to wait in a hayfield at the top of the Glen,” Martin’s notes record, “while E. was haranguing at a cottage about a litter of cubs, whose Mamma considered that chicken, now and then, was good for them. There was a man making the hay into small cocks, with much the same delicate languor with which an invalid arranges an offering of flowers. Glandore Harbour was spread forth below me, a lovely space of glittering water, and the music of invisible larks drifted down in silver shreds through air that trembled with heat. This, I thought, is a good place in which to be, and I selected a haycock capable of supporting me, and the haymaker and I presently fell into converse. The talk, I now forget why, turned to the medical profession.
“‘Thim Cork docthors was very nice,’ said the man, pausing from his labours, and seating himself upon a neighbouring haycock, ‘but sure docthors won’t do much for the likes of us, only for ladies and gentlemen. Ye should be the Pink of Fashion for them!’
“He surveyed me narrowly; apparently the thickness of the soles of my boots inspired him with confidence.
“‘Ye’re a counthry lady, and ye have understanding of poor people. Some o’ thim docthors would be sevare on poor people if their houses wouldn’t be—’ he considered, and decided that the expression was good enough to bear repetition, ‘—wouldn’t be the Pink of Fashion. Well, the Owld Docthor was good, but he was very cross. But the people that isn’t cross is the worst. There’s no good in anny woman that isn’t cross. Sure, you know yourself, my lady, the gerr’l that’s cross, she’s the good servant!’
“He looked to me, with his head on one side for assent. I assented.
“‘Well, as for the Owld Docthor,’ he resumed, ‘he was very cross, but afther he put that blast out of him he’d be very good. My own brother was goin’ into th’ Excise, and he went to the Owld Docthor for a certifi-cat. Sure, didn’t the Docthor give him back the sovereign! “You’ll want it,” says he, “for yer journey.” There was an old lady here, and she was as cross as a diggle.’ (‘A diggle,’ it may be noted, is a euphuism by which, to ears polite, the Prince of Darkness is indicated.) ‘She’d go out to where the men ’d be working, and if she’d be displeased, she’d go round them with a stick. Faith she would. She’d put them in with a stick! But afther five minutes she’d be all right; afther she had that blast put out of her.’
“It gives a comfortable feeling that ‘crossness’ is of the nature of a gas-shell, and can be eliminated from the system in a single explosion.”
Unfortunately the interview was interrupted here.
Dean Swift says somewhere that “Good manners is the art of making those people easy with whom we converse.” Martin had a very special gift of encouraging people to talk to her. There was something magnetic about her, some power of sympathy and extraction combined. Together with this she had a singular gift of toleration for stupid people, even of enjoyment of stupidity, if sincerity, and a certain virtuous anxiety, accompanied it. She was wont to declare that the personal offices of a good and dull person were pleasing to her. The fumbling efforts, the laboured breathing of one endeavouring—let us say—to untie her veil; a man, for choice, frightened, but thoroughly well-intentioned and humble. This she enjoyed, repudiating the reproach of effeteness, which, in this connection, I have many times laid to her charge.
In dealing with Rickeen, however, allowances for stupidity (she called it simplicity) had not to be taken into consideration. I have a letter from her, recounting another of her conversations with Rick, in which he discussed a “village tragedy” that occurred at Christmas time, a few years after she had returned to Ross. (The reference at the beginning of the letter is to the sudden death of an acquaintance.)