If Noli wants a jest, tell her Edith has heard from a Richmond priest—;our reputation is completely gone in Richmond.... A lady had said to him she did not understand how anyone with self-respect could put up at the Tumble-Down-Dick Inn! The priest, who is Irish and sent us here under counsel of a Benedictine friar, is in great bliss!!
And in March 1910, having both been ill, they conclude thus an invitation:
Try to come on Wednesday. We are gradually gathering together the teeth, glasses, wigs, and complexions that may enable us again to greet our friends. Henry is among the flowers. Henry sees the flowers: I see Henry, I have little to say. Speech, I suppose, will go next!! “Yet once,” as Villon says....
From the time of the Dial contributions Mr Ricketts became their adviser in matters of book-production. It was on his suggestion, too, that they removed from Reigate to the small Georgian house at 1 The Paragon, Richmond, which overlooks the Thames from its balconies and sloping garden, and remained their home until their death. That was in 1899, after the death of Henry’s father had left them free to choose another home. It was in this year that they published their masque, Noontide Branches, from the Daniel Press at Oxford. They had been in Oxford two years earlier, in October 1897, while they were still under the shadow of Mr Cooper’s uncertain fate. He had been lost on the Riffelalp in June, and his body had not yet been recovered. But the beauty of Oxford brought them peace, and the kindliness which met them there, in particular from Mr and Mrs Daniel, lightened the cloud that lay on their spirits. Michael wrote afterward from Richmond to Miss Trusted to record gratefully how Mr Daniel, though she had been quite unknown to him, had consented to print the masque and warmly befriended them.
They would joke about the minute size of the house at Richmond, which nowadays has dwindled to a mere annexe. “Do not squirm at the lowly entrance,” they wrote in an invitation to a friend; “within the snail-shell are two poets most gay and happy”; and added, referring to their dog, “Do come! Chow says you will, or he will know the reason why.” Probably there never was so modest a shell with so exquisite an interior; but of this it is Mr Gordon Bottomley who can best speak:
Their rooms were not less flawless than their poems. Their interiors showed a rarer, wider, more certain choice than those of the Dutch painters. The silvery, clear lithographs of their friend Mr C. H. Shannon were hung all together in a cool northern room, which they seemed to permeate with a faint light; and in another room the gold grain of the walls, alike with the Persian plates that glowed on the table as if they were rich, large petals, seemed to find their reason for being there in the two deeply and subtly coloured pictures by Mr Charles Ricketts on the walls.
But always there was the same feeling of inevitable choice and unity everywhere: in a jewelled pendant that lay on a satin-wood table, in the opal bowl of pot-pourri near by on which an opal shell lay lightly—;a shell chosen for its supreme beauty of form, and taken from its rose-leaf bed by Miss Cooper to be shown to a visitor in the same way as she took a flower from a vase, saying, “This is Iris Susiana,” as if she were saying “This is one of the greatest treasures in the world,” and held it in her hand as if it were a part of her hand.
It is true that at Paragon they were gaily and happily busy: the years there were fruitful of mellow achievement. Nevertheless, it was there that the spiritual crisis of their life came, when in 1907 both poets entered the Roman Catholic Church. Henry was received into the Church at St Elizabeth’s, Richmond, on April 19th of that year; and Michael went to Edinburgh on May 8th to be received by their old friend the poet Father John Gray.
The crisis had been prepared for partly by Henry’s ill-health, which encouraged her contemplative habit of mind—;that in turn operating upon the religious sense which had always underlain their rationality. It was Henry who first made the great decision when, after reading the Missal in Latin, she suddenly exclaimed: “This is sacrifice: from this moment I am a Catholic.” But their curious small volume called Whym Chow suggests (and the suggestion is confirmed by the facts) that the course of that event was strongly influenced by the death of their Chow dog. It was a mental process of great interest for the student of the psychology of religious conversion, but too intimate and subtle to be discussed here; and Whym Chow, printed privately in an exquisite small edition in the Eragny Press, was intended only for the eyes of friends. The chief value of the book is therefore bibliographical. Yet, in order to comprehend how the rationalists of the year 1887 and the declared pagans of 1897 became the Catholics of the year 1907, one thing may at least be said—;that in the manner of the death of the little creature they loved both the poets came to realize sacrifice as the supreme good. It was not by any means a new idea to them; on the contrary, it will be seen that it was their earliest ideal. And the reason for its triumphant force at this stage lay precisely in the fact that what had been an instinct then, an intuitive, hardly conscious, but integral element of character, became now a passionate conviction.
In February 1911 Henry was attacked by cancer; and in one of the few letters that she wrote she says (to the Rothensteins):