Part 2

He sailed for England the second time in October, 1881, and I joined him in London early in the next July. On the “glorious Fourth” we visited Mr. Whistler’s studio, where Homer had occasionally painted. I think it must have been there that he painted, late in the previous autumn, a delightful Newport landscape which was bought at the Artist Fund sale of that season by Mr. Lanthier for Mr. Charles de Kay. Whistler’s beautiful portrait of his mother—which I afterward saw in Paris at the Salon—was on the easel, and it is the only one of his pictures which I distinctly recollect. There were some “nocturnes” on the walls, and they were doubtless worth remembering. But I never went there again, and on this occasion my attention was riveted by the artist and his surroundings, alike spectacular and bizarre, the man grotesque as a caricature in attitude and aspect, the rooms all pale blue and lemon-yellow, even to the many vases and the flowers therein contained. He said a good many things, not one of which was I able to recall, so lost was I in contemplation of the general oddity of him and his chosen environment. “What did you think of him?” asked Homer after we came away. “Why didn’t you talk? You never said a thing.” “I was afraid to open my lips,” said I, “lest I should involuntarily tell him to shake that feather out of his hair. He must have had his head buried in a pillow before we went in.” “I wish you had!” said he with a laugh. “That is Jimmy’s feather. He delights in having it noticed.” I had observed that he bowed profoundly on our introduction and so brought it into staring evidence; but I could scarcely believe, even on testimony, that the premeditated effect was produced by a quite unpremeditated lock of gray hair.

The especial occasion for this second visit to England was the making of some drawings illustrative of places mentioned in the novels of Thackeray and George Eliot. He had been there for some months and they were hardly more than begun, but after I came he worked at them pretty steadily. It was an undertaking which he did not at all enjoy, but which circumstances had made imperative. When he first told me of it in the previous summer, he made it evident that he thought such a commission derogatory to his dignity as a painter. Whether it was that his pictures were selling less readily, or because the painting mood came with less imperative frequency, I do not know, but he was unusually despondent. The idea of the voyage was pleasant in itself. One of his never fulfilled longings was to cross the ocean in a sailing vessel. His Artist Fund picture was nearly due and could be painted on the other side; he thought the price of the drawings would pay all his other expenses. And when an unexpected stroke of good fortune made it possible for me to join him, his sky cleared up. I do not remember whether the English drawings were successful; I do know that they were tardy in reaching the New York office of The Century Company, for whose magazine they had been destined, and that when, in the ensuing year, he sent the same publishers a set of Villerville drawings, accompanied by a sketch he had suggested my writing about that delightful haunt of painters, Mr. Gilder wrote me, after some delay, that they had been much interested in my article, but that their art department was not satisfied with the drawings. It was subsequently published in the “Catholic World,” unaccompanied by the illustrations, that magazine not then having begun to produce any.

In October of that year, the completion of the last drawing coincided with the arrival in London of an old New York friend, the late Mr. Bryant Godwin, and an invitation to spend some weeks in Normandy with the family of another, W. J. Hennessy, the well-known artist and illustrator. There was no further reason for delay in England, and the three of us crossed the Channel one night by the Southampton boat. I have never forgotten my first sight of the French shore next morning. “I don’t wonder now at Rousseau’s color,” I said to Homer; “how could he help it?”

It had been our intention to return to New York after a brief visit with the Hennessys, who had been living for years in a picturesque and pleasant way at Pennedepie, an agricultural hamlet on the road between Honfleur and Trouville, where they occupied a roomy and quaintly furnished old manor just opposite the village church. But we found the place, the people, and the neighboring views alike delightful, and when news arrived, early in our stay, of a considerable sum to his credit which had been lying for some months uncalled for at the American Exchange, London, where it had been sent to his first address by Mr. James Stillman, Homer decided on remaining in Normandy. To have returned to New York just then would have been a distinct loss to both of us in many ways. I look back on the time we spent in Villerville as the most tranquil and satisfactory period of our life together.

That little fishing village, dominated by the tower of a church erected when the eleventh century was young, in thanksgiving because the foreboded end of the world had not come in the year 1000, lies about midway between Honfleur and Trouville, at an easy walk from Pennedepie. Equidistant from either place stands the ivy-grown church of Criquebœuf, beloved of artists, and made by Homer the theme of one of his best pictures. In the same grassy enclosure on the right of the pond into which this old church dips its foot, he found two more delightful subjects. One of them is embodied on one of his last canvases, the “Normandy Farm,” now owned, I believe, by Mr. Bloomingdale of New York. It was bought in the first place by Mr. W. T. Evans, a week or so before my husband’s death. The other, a view of a deserted manor, showing dimly through a veil of ghostly trees, which Mrs. Hennessy declared ought to be called “The Haunted House,” was finished in New York after his return for an early friend, Dr. D. M. Stimson, to whom for many years he had been greatly attached. I think it was exhibited at the Chicago World’s Fair.

Villerville had for years been thronged in summer and fall by painters, French, English, and American; perhaps it is so still. Guillemet had been there for twenty consecutive seasons; Duez had built himself a house and studio with a Norman tower. Stanley Reinhart came both summers while we were there, with that most sweet wife of his and their pretty little children. The Forbes-Robertsons had a little villa for a while,—the parents, that is, and Miss Frances, then a girl of sixteen; and the actor son must have spent some considerable part of his vacation with them, for I recall a rather animated discussion we had one night, pacing up and down the _estacade_ in the moonlight, when he declaimed in so ardent a fashion about the intrinsic and extrinsic glories of England, that a mere sense of equilibrium made the interjection of a “What about Ireland? What about India?” seem to me inevitable. “Oh! unjust, if you insist,” said he. “But I am an Englishman—Scotch as a matter of fact, I suppose. And you must admit that a man is bound to stand up for his country, right or wrong.” It is a sentiment I have never been able to understand. Some of us, I suppose, are born cosmopolitans, or else look forward to “an abiding city wherein dwelleth justice,” since not even patriotism can insist that it has a local abiding place here.

And that reminds me of another incident belonging to the winter time, when, as there was not an English-speaking soul in the entire neighborhood except ourselves, our landlord one day brought me in despair a lady whose vernacular it was, accompanied by a French _bonne_ and two little children as apple-faced and ruddy as Polly Toodles’ babies. She explained that she was the wife of a major in the English army, and had but just returned with him from India; also, that while there she had read such a glowing description of the beauties of Villerville in a copy of “The Queen,” that she had determined to examine them for herself. I did what I could for her in the way of finding a furnished apartment, and before they had removed to it, went one morning to return her call at one of the hotels. I found her and the major at a late breakfast, with the English newspapers lying about. The period antedated Mr. Joseph Chamberlain’s change of his political coat, the Irish question was well to the front, and my new acquaintances spoke English with one of the most sonorous brogues that had ever greeted my ear. Here was a case in which my own sympathies and the presumable ones of my audience seemed naturally to invite a moderate expression of views on a current topic. Dead silence fell for a moment after I had stopped speaking. Then the major said with an accent that positively projected: “Excuse me, but I am English: that is to say, I am Irish, _but of the landlord class_!” It was simply a matter of the point of view.

It was this question of the seasons, I think, which chiefly necessitated my learning the language which was afterward of so much use to both of us up to the very end. It also necessitated a more incessant companionship than at any period was ever possible in the city of the Century Club. It was easy to pick up French enough to carry on such intercourse as was absolutely necessary with the people about us, but my serious study of it was undertaken in the first place in order that I might continue to read aloud to Homer in the evenings after the available supply of English novels and periodicals had been exhausted. I began with About’s “Roi des Montagnes,” my method being to read a sentence to accustom his ear and my tongue to the unfamiliar sounds, and forthwith to translate it literally. Of course, I had teachers, one of whom had taught this, her native language, in a London private school, while a second was at the time professor of English in the College of Honfleur. Curious English it must have been! But he was praiseworthily anxious to increase his own knowledge as well as mine. But the best one of the three was a delightful woman, Mademoiselle Lemonnier, the village postmistress, who did not know a word of English although her mother had been an Englishwoman. She was very well read and intelligent as well as companionable and kindly. I had applied to her, when my first instructress found it impossible to come any longer, to find me another. We already knew each other pretty well, and when she said, “If you will let me teach you _for love_, I will do it myself, but if you insist on paying, I will inquire for some one else,” it was simply a new version of Hobson’s choice. I could not have done better in any case. When Homer went abroad for the last time, he made a point of crossing the Channel to visit Mademoiselle Lemonnier. Slender as were their means of communication, they had managed to understand and sympathize with each other very completely, a strong sense of humor on either side helping greatly to that consummation.

We lived in Villerville for nineteen months. An excellent studio with two adjacent rooms had been arranged for us before our arrival, and we lunched and dined at Madame Cornu’s hotel, providing our breakfast in our own quarters. A quaint old English priest whom I knew in London, and who had to the full the hereditary prejudice against “Johnny Crapaud,” had warned me not merely of what he believed to be the prevalent Jansenism which would prevent so frequent an approach to the sacraments as I had been accustomed to, but against the cheating, the conscienceless thievery to which he assured me we would be subjected on all sides. “I would not spend a farthing in France!” said he. Well, in Paris, perhaps, though I had no personal experience of it even there. But in Villerville, and afterward in Honfleur, there was absolutely no exception to the perfect cordiality, absolute trust, and gentle politeness which greeted us on all sides. I have never met anything like it elsewhere save in the parish of the Paulist Fathers in New York. I speak from what may be called exhaustive knowledge, since there was a period, before we left the former place, when we were out of money for so long that when at last we were able to settle Madame Cornu’s bill it amounted to the considerable sum of two thousand francs. I had asked her some time previously if she were not in need of it, but only to receive the smiling answer: “When Madame pleases. We are neither of us robbers.” So in Honfleur, where, after we had been domiciled for a month or so, and had found our fresh bread and rolls on the kitchen-window ledge every morning, I went to the baker to inquire for and settle his account. “But, Madame,” objected the fresh-cheeked young woman in charge, “we have kept no account. Does not Madame know how much it is herself?” “Why, yes,” said I; “you have brought so much for so many days at such a price.” “_C’est ça_” she smiled. “Whatever Madame says.” And this, again, reminds me of Madame Cornu and her remarkable bill. There had been a price set in the first place of so much a day for our two meals, which were always abundant and well-cooked. I knew the dates and was ready with the exact sum. But when my tally was placed beside her bill there was a discrepancy arising from the fact that Homer would sometimes be absent from the midday meal by reason of a sketching excursion or something of the sort, and she was never notified beforehand. Yet on every such occasion a deduction had been scrupulously made. Such an experience never befell us elsewhere.

To Homer also Villerville was as delightful as any place could be while lacking that social intercourse with men of brains and cultivation which was always his chief pleasure and relaxation. Years afterward, Mr. Brownell said one evening when we were all dining together in those pleasant apartments of theirs on Fifty-sixth Street, that the three weeks which he and his wife had spent there with us seemed to him more like his idea of heaven than anything he remembered. And he asked me whether I would not like to live it all over again. In retrospect, yes; as I have just been proving. But, were it possible in reality? O no! Never have I seen a day that has tempted me to say to it: “Stay, thou art fair!”

Our sojourn in Villerville was a particularly important one for both of us, but in different ways. For him it was a period of absorption rather than of production, while, on that very account, exactly the reverse process went on in me. I have already said it was at his suggestion that I accompanied his Villerville drawings with an article which, Mr. Brownell afterward wrote me, was like “a Martin landscape put into words.” Homer perhaps thought so himself, for he had already said: “I see that you can paint with words. I wonder if you can set people in action. Why not try?” Whereupon I made a character sketch which Mr. Alden, of “Harper’s Magazine,” declined because “it was too painful,” but which the then editor of “Lippincott’s”—I think his name was Kirk—found too short, and wrote me that if I would lengthen it out so that it should bear less resemblance to a truncated cone, he would be glad to avail himself of it. Whereupon I recalled it, fished up my heroine out of an earthquake on the island of Capri which I had allowed to swallow her, but whom I now unearthed, none the worse except in the matter of a broken wrist,—I think it was a wrist,—and in a month or so received a very fair-sized check for the tale of her experiences.

The same sort of exterior pressure, not any interior need of expression, was what led to the production of a tale which ran for eighteen months as a serial in the “Catholic World” under the title of “Katharine,” and during that period provided for our necessary expenditures. Henry Holt republished it with a new name which he himself suggested. I liked the first one better, but it made too little difference to me to make it worth while to adhere to my own views. Mr. Kirk, by the way, had also renamed my sketch: that seems to be a privilege with literary sponsors, the literary parent not being present. Almost an entire chapter was also eliminated from the book, because the reader, whose name I never knew, objected to it on the ground that it showed too plainly that “Mrs. Martin really believed” that a certain tenet of her faith was absolutely true.

I began a second story on the heels of this one, but when it had run to some thirty thousand words, Homer objected to it as certain to split upon the same dogmatic rock as its predecessor, and I laid it aside for a third one which attained the same proportions and pleased every one who then or thereafter read it better than either of its predecessors. But it had the misfortune of not specially interesting me; and yet there was a baby in it with the second sight, who bade fair to develop into something “mystic, wonderful,” in course of time, if not interfered with. Meantime, the imperative need for production on my part having ended, I put the unfinished manuscript in the fire some three years ago. The second one I completed after our return to New York, and it was published under the title of “John Van Alstyne’s Factory,” in the “Catholic World.”

To Homer our life in France was chiefly seed-time. There germinated his “Low Tide at Villerville,” the “Honfleur Lights,” the “Criquebœuf Church,” the “Normandy Trees,” the “Normandy Farm,” the “Sun Worshipers,” and the landscape known in the Metropolitan Gallery of New York, where it now hangs, as a “View on the Seine,”—which, in strictness, it is not,—but for which his own title was “The Harp of the Winds.” I had asked him what he meant to call it, and, with his characteristic aversion to putting his deeper sentiments into words, he answered that he supposed it would seem too sentimental to call it by the name I have just given, but that was what it meant to him, for he had been thinking of music all the while he was painting it. And this reminds me of a commission given him by a music-lover among his friends during our early days in New York to “paint a Beethoven symphony” for him. He did it, too, and to the utmost satisfaction of its possessor.

He used to carry about with him in those days a pocket sketch-book in which he noted his impressions in water-color. Mr. Brownell must remember it, and so, I think, must Mr. Russell Sturgis, for, being at our rooms during my husband’s last sojourn on the other side of the Atlantic, when he was known to be afflicted with an incurable malady, he said to me that if Homer’s things were ever put up for sale, he would like to become the purchaser of this book. My husband never got over his chagrin when it became evident that it must have fallen a prey to some unscrupulous packer of our household goods at the time when he concluded to follow me to St. Paul, in June, 1893. He had a suspicion that it might have found its way to a pawnbroker, and never gave up hoping for its ultimate recovery. It had in it some delightful miniature bits of character and color.

It was in Villerville also that he began the “Sand Dunes on Lake Ontario,” now hanging in the Metropolitan Museum, New York, with the intention of sending it to the Salon. But before it was completed he got into one of those hobbles which were not uncommon in his experience, when the more he tried to hurry the less he was in reality accomplishing. It was in no condition to be seen when the last day for sending came, as we both agreed, yet he sent it. Naturally enough, it was rejected. I think that result surprised him less than it momentarily annoyed him. He put the canvas aside and for months never touched it. But one day during the next season, while he was painting on it, a French landscapist and his wife came to call upon us. I forget his name. He studied it in silence for a long time. Then turning to me, he said: “Your husband’s work reminds me strongly of that of Pointelin. He must send this canvas to the next Salon.” “It has been there once,” said I, “and the jury rejected it,” adding, because of his evident surprise, “It was not then in its present condition.” “Nevertheless,” he replied, “I cannot understand a French jury rejecting such a picture in any state in which Mr. Martin would have sent it in at all.”

I do not remember just why we removed from Villerville. Perhaps because Homer was able to obtain in Honfleur a roomy and well-lighted studio apart from our dwelling-place, an arrangement which he always preferred. The little city from which William the Norman set out on his conquering expedition in 1066 had not the picturesque charm of the village we left, but possessed compensating features in the way of English and American neighbors. Our whole sojourn in France was, in fact, delightful, and perhaps even more so to me than to my husband. Through my mother there was a good deal of French blood in my veins, and in its ancestral environment it throbbed with a rhythmic atavism unknown elsewhere to my pulses.

I think that notwithstanding the excellent lighting arrangements of his studio, my husband did not complete much work in Honfleur. “The Mussel Gatherers,” to me one of the most impressive of his later canvases, was finished there, and though I do not recall another for the Artist Fund Sale, I suppose there must have been one. A never-completed studio interior with a portrait of me, and reproductions in miniature of the studies hanging on the walls; still another small portrait, a number of panels, one of which, “Wild Cherry Trees,” was in the Clarke Sale in 1897, and various water-colors belong likewise to this period. Meanwhile his note-books were filling up with material for future use.