During the winter Whistler met Sir Seymour Haden for the last time at a dinner given by the Society of Illustrators (of which both were Vice-Presidents) to Mr. Alfred Parsons, on his election to the Royal Academy. It was Whistler's first appearance in public since his wife's death, and as we had persuaded him to go, never anticipating any such meeting, we were annoyed to think that we had exposed him to the unpleasantness of it, or Haden either, for we had had no part in their quarrels. However, as soon as Whistler saw Haden he woke up and began to enjoy himself. His laugh carried far. Haden heard it, and may have seen the three monocles on the dinner-table. He looked toward the laugh, dropped his spoon in his soup-plate, and left. Later Whistler was called upon to make a speech and could not get out of it. But it was an anti-climax. The event of the dinner was over.
At Christmas he went with Mr. and Mrs. T. Fisher Unwin and ourselves to Bournemouth, where our hotel was an old-fashioned inn, selected from the guide-book because it was the nearest to the sea. We breakfasted in our rooms, we met at lunch to order dinner, and the rest of the day Whistler insisted must be spent getting an appetite for it—wandering on the cliffs, he with his little paint-box. But the sea was on the wrong side, the wind blew the wrong way, he could do nothing. Some days we took long drives. One damp, cold, cheerless afternoon we stopped at a small inn in Poole. The landlady, watching Whistler sip his hot whisky and water, was convinced he was somebody, but was unable to place him. "And who do you suppose I am?" Whistler asked at last. "I can't exactly say, sir, but I should fancy you was from the 'Alls!" Aubrey Beardsley was then at Boscombe, a further stage in his brave fight with death, and we went to see him. But the sight of the suffering of others was too cruel a reminder to Whistler, and he shrank from going to Beardsley.
Dinner was the event of the day, and it would have proved a disaster had Whistler not seen humour in being expected to eat it, so little was it what he thought a dinner should be. On Christmas Day he was melancholy and stared at the turkey and bread sauce, the sodden potatoes and soaked greens: "To think of my beautiful room in the Rue du Bac, and the rest of them there, eating their Christmas dinner, having up my wonderful old Pouilly from my cellar."
But we had something else to talk about. In the Saturday Review of that week, December 26, there was an article, signed Walter Sickert, that was of interest to us all.
Footnotes
[ [11]Whistler never lost his fancy for inventing names for his friends, and O'K. was the one he found for Mr. Kennedy, rarely calling him by any other either in conversation or correspondence