CHAPTER XXVIII

THE LAST

She hid it always, close against her breast, A golden vase, close sealed and strangely wrought, And set with gems, whose dim eyes, mystery fraught, Shot broken gleams, like secrets half confessed. “One day,” she said, “Love’s perfumed kisses pressed Against its lip their perfectness, unsought, And suddenly the dizzy fragrance caught My senses in its mesh, and gave them rest. And life’s disquietude no more I feel, For now,” she said, “my heart sleeps still and light. Love’s Anodyne outlasts the lingering years!” But in the darkness of an autumn night Her heart woke, weeping, and she brake the seal. The scent was dead; the vase was full of tears.

I have come to what must be the final chapter, and the thought most present with me is that in writing it I am closing the door on these memories of two lives that made the world a pleasant place for each other, and I find now that although I began them with reluctance, it is with reluctance still that I must end them.

It has been hard, often, to leave untold so many of those trivial things that counted for more, in the long run, than the occasional outstanding facts of two quite uneventful lives. I fear I have yielded too much to the temptation of telling and talking nonsense, and now there remains only the Appendix in which to retrieve Martin’s character and mine for intelligence and for a serious concern for the things that are serious.

To return to our work, which for us, at all events, if for no one else, was serious. As soon as we had recovered from “Dan Russel,” Martin set forth on what I find entered in my diary as “a series of tribal war-dances round the County Galway,” which meant that she paid visits, indefatigably, and with entire satisfaction, in her own county and among her own allies and kinsfolk. I should like to quote her account of a visit to one of her oldest friends, Lady Gregory, at Coole Park, where she met (and much enjoyed meeting) Mr. W. B. Yeats, and where she, assisted by the poet, carved her initials on a tree dedicated to the Muses, whereon A. E., and Dr. Douglas Hyde, and others of high achievement had inscribed themselves. But I must hold to the ordinance of silence as to living people that she herself ordained and would wish me to observe.

No one ever enjoyed good company more than Martin, and, as the beggars say, she “thravelled the County Galway,” and there was good company and a welcome before her wherever she went.

At about this time she and I were invited to a public dinner in Dublin, given to Irish literary women by the Corinthian Club; and, having secured exemption from speech-making, we found it a highly interesting entertainment, at which were materialised for us many who till then had been among the things believed in but not seen. At this time also, or a little later, I re-established the West Carbery Hounds, after a brief interregnum. I only now allude to them in order to record the fact that when the first draft of the reconstituted pack arrived, the lamented “Slipper” (now no more) met them at the station with an enormous bouquet of white flowers in a cavity in his coat that might have begun life as a button-hole, and a tall hat. He cheered the six couples as they left the station yard (accompanied, it may not be out of place to mention, ridiculously, by two and a half gambolling couples of black and white British-Holstein young cattle, on a herd of which magpie breed my sister and I were embarking), and then, as the procession moved like a circus through the streets of Skibbereen, “Slipper” renewed the task of drinking all their healths, this time at my expense.

The doctrine that sincere friendship is only possible between men dies hard. It is, at last, in the fulness of time, expiring by force of fact, and is now, like many another decayed convention, dragging out a deplorable old age in facetious paragraphs in “Comic Corners,” where the Mother-in-law, Mrs. Gamp and her ministrations, and the Unfortunate Husband (special stress being laid on the sufferings endured by the latter while his wife is enjoying herself upstairs) gibber together, and presumably amuse someone.

The outstanding fact, as it seems to me, among women who live by their brains, is friendship. A profound friendship that extends through every phase and aspect of life, intellectual, social, pecuniary. Anyone who has experience of the life of independent and artistic women knows this; and it is noteworthy that these friendships of women will stand even the strain of matrimony for one or both friends. I gravely doubt that had Jonathan outlived Uriah he would have seen much of David.

However, controversy, and especially controversy of this complexion, is a bore. As Martin said, in a letter to me,

“Rows are a mistake; which is the only reason I don’t fight with you for invariably spelling ‘practice,’ the noun, with an ‘s.’”

Martin had a very special gift for friendship, both with women and with men. Her sympathies were wide, and her insight into character and motive enabled her to meet each of her many friends on their own ground, and to enter deeply and truly into their lives, and give them a share in hers.

In spite of the ordinance of silence, I feel as if she would wish me to record in this book the names, at least, of some of those whom she delighted to honour, and, with all diffidence, I beg them to understand that in the very brief mention of them that will be found in the Appendix, I have only ventured to do this because I believe that she desires it.

I suppose it was the result of old habit, and of the return of the hounds, but, for whatever reason, during the years that followed the appearance of “Dan Russel the Fox,” Martin and I put aside the notions we had been dwelling upon in connection with “a serious novel,” and took to writing “R.M.” stories again. These, six couple of them (like the first draft of the re-established pack), wandered through various periodicals, chiefly _Blackwood’s Magazine_, and in July, 1915, they were published in a volume with the title of “In Mr. Knox’s Country.”

We were in Kerry when the book appeared, or rather we were on our way there. I remember with what anxiety I bought a _Spectator_ at the Mallow platform bookstall, and even more vividly do I recall our departure from Mallow, when Martin, and Ethel Penrose, and I, all violently tried to read the _Spectator_ review of Mr. Knox at the same moment.

* * * * *

I will say nothing now of the time that we spent in Kerry; a happy time, in lovely weather, in a lovely place. It was the last of many such times, and it is too near, now, to be written of.

I will try no more. Withered leaves, blowing in through the open window before a September gale, are falling on the page. Our summers are ended. “‘Vanity of vanities,’ saith the Preacher.”

I have tried to write of the people, and the things, and the events that she loved and was interested in. It has been a happiness to me to do so, and at times, while I have been writing, the present has been forgotten and I have felt as though I were recapturing some of the “careless rapture” of older days.

The world is still not without its merits; I am not ungrateful, and I have many reasons that are not all in the past, and one in especial of which I will not now speak, for gratitude. But there is a thing that an old widow woman said, long ago, that remains in my mind. Her husband--she spoke of him as “her kind companion”--had died, and she said to me, patiently, and without tears,

“Death makes people lonesome, my dear.”

FINIS.

APPENDIX I

LETTERS FROM CHIEF JUSTICE CHARLES KENDAL BUSHE TO MRS. BUSHE

CHARLES KENDAL BUSHE to MRS. BUSHE.

WATERFORD. (Undated.) Probably July or August, 1798.

“Within this day or two the United Irishmen rose in the Co Kilkenny and disarm’d every gentleman and man in the County except Pierce Butler. O’Flaherty, Davis, Nixon, Lee, and Tom Murphy was not spar’d and they even beat up the Quarters of Bob’s Seraglio, but he had the day before taken the precaution to remove his arms, and among them my double barrell’d Gun, to Pierce Butler’s as a place of safety, so that no arms remain’d but the arms of his Dulcinea, but what they did in that respect Bob says not.... The United men have done one serious mischief which is that they have discredited Bank notes to such a degree that in Wexford no one wd give a Crown for a national note or take one in payment and here tho they take them they wont give Change for them so that at the Bar Room we are oblig’d to pass little promissory notes for our Dinner and pay them when they come to a Guinea. I assure you if you ow’d 17 shillgs here no one wou’d give you four and take a Guinea. As to Gold it is vanish’d. I have receiv’d but 2 Gold Guineas in £133.0.0 since I came on Circuit. There is a good deal of Alarm about these United Men every where.”

Another letter, written at about the same time as the above, is dated “Wexford, July twenty sixth, 1798.” It seems to have been written while on circuit, a short time after the suppression of the Rebellion.

CHARLES KENDAL BUSHE to MRS. BUSHE.

“My dearest Nancy,

“We return by Ross” (Co. Wexford) “both for greater safety and that we may see the scene of the famous battle.” (This probably was Vinegar Hill). “From every observation I can make it appears to me that this Country is completely quieted; if you were to hear all the different anecdotes told here you wou’d suppose you were reading another Helen Maria Williams. I shall give you but one--Col. Lehunte who is very civil to us was a prisoner to the Rebels and tolerably well treated as such till one day in the tattering (_sic_) of his house a Room--furnish’d with antique ornaments in black and _orange_ was discover’d a small Skreen in the same colours with heathen divinities on it. This Skreen was carried instantly by the enrag’d mob thro the town as a proof of an intended Massacre by the Orange Men. This Skreen, says the famous fury Mrs. Dixon, was to be the standard of their Cavalry. This, (Hope) is the anchor on which the Catholic sailors were to be roasted alive--This, (Jupiter’s Eagle) is the Vulture that was to pick out the Catholic Children’s Eyes--She went thro the Mythology of the Skreen in this rational Exposition and entirely convinc’d the Mob. In a moment Col. Lehunte was dragg’d out to Execution, and his life was sav’d in the same manner his house was, by the number of disputants who shou’d take it. He received three pike wounds and was beat almost to death with sticks and the end of firelocks and at last taken back for a more deliberate Execution in the morning, being thrown for the night into a Dungeon where he lay wounded on fetters, bolts, and broken Bottles. This is a venerable old Gentleman, near 70 years old.

“We hear many such stories. The Bridge is deep stain’d with blood.

“Ever yours, my darling Nancy,

“C. K. BUSHE.”

The temptation to quote extensively from these early letters of “the Chief” cannot be too freely indulged in, but I may include an account, written from Clonmel, in about 1797, to his wife, giving an account of what he calls “a most novel and extraordinary and disgusting species of crime”; which is a moderate way of defining the comprehensive atrocity of the act in question.

CHARLES KENDAL BUSHE to MRS. BUSHE.

CLONMEL. (_circa 1797._)

“...The woman was clearly convicted and will be exemplarily punish’d for it. She robb’d a churchyard of the hand of a dead man which she put into all the milk she churn’d. Butter making is a great part of the trade of the Country and the unfortunate Wretch was persuaded that this hand drawn thro the Milk in the devil’s name would give a miraculous quantity of butter, and it seems _she has long_ made it a practice.”

From CHIEF JUSTICE BUSHE to MRS. BUSHE.

“OMAGH. _Monday August 16. 1810._

“My dearest Nan,

“By making a forc’d march with Smyly here I have arrived some hours before the other Judge, Cavalcade &c. and I have for the first time since I left town sat down in a room by myself with something like tranquillity, at least that negative Repose that consists in the absence of stress or clamour fuss and hurry. The day has fortunately been good and without stopping we rode here, 21 miles across the mountains. This I found pleasant and indeed necessary after the Confinement and bad weather which we have had uninterruptedly since we left Dublin. You have no notion of such a den as Cavan is. It is no wonder that poor Smyly us’d to get fever in it, I am only astonish’d that I ever got out of it for I was not for a moment well. It lies at the bottom of a Bason form’d by many hills closing in on each other, and is surrounded by bogs and lakes. The Sun can scarcely reach it, you look up at the heavens as you do out of a jail yard that has high walls and I was glad to have a large Turf fire in my Room. The Water is quite yellow and deranges the stomach &c. so that my poor head was a mass of confusion and my Spirits were slack enough.... After breakfast, bad as the day was, I got a boat and went on the lake (Lough Erne) and sail’d to the Island of Devenish where there is a curious Ruin of an antient place of worship and a Round Tower in as perfect preservation as the day it was built.... Short as the time was if the weather had been favourable I was determined upon seeing Lough Derg and St. Patrick’s purgatory which is in a small island in the middle of it and which is in its history certainly one of the greatest Curiosities in Europe.[18] It has maintained its Character as the principal place of penance in the World since the first Establishment of Christianity in Ireland and is as much frequented now by Pilgrims from all Countries as it was in what we are in the habit of calling the darker ages, as freely as if our own was enlighten’d. Miller’s house is about ten miles from it and he has by enquiries from the Priests and otherwise ascertained that the average number of pilgrims during the season which begins with the Summer and ends with the first of August exceeds ten thousand. This last Season in this present year the number was much greater. They all perform their journey barefooted and in mean Dress but those of the upper Class are discover’d by the delicacy of their hands and feet. There is a large ferry Boat which from morning to night is employ’d in transporting and retransporting them. Each Pilgrim remains 24 hours in the Island performing Devotions round certain stone altars call’d Stations, at which five Priests perpetually officiate. All this time and for some time before they strictly fast, and on leaving the Island the Priest gives them what is called Bread and Wine, that is Bread and Lake water which they positively assert has the Taste of wine and the power of refreshing and recovering them....”

The end of this letter, giving a description of a visit to Edgeworthstown, appears in the book, Chapter II, page 47.

APPENDIX II

The following is written by CAPTAIN STEPHEN GWYNN, M.P., Member for Galway City, who has very kindly permitted me to include it among these memories.

Probably no one can have really known “Martin Ross” who did not spend some time in her company either in Connemara or West Cork. I, to my sorrow, only met her once, at a Dublin dinner table. That hour’s talk has left on my mind a curiously limited and even negative impression. She looked surprisingly unlike a person who spent much of her life in the open air; and it was hard to associate her with the riotous humour of many “R.M.” stories. What remains positive in the impression is a sense of extreme fineness and delicacy, qualities which reflect themselves in the physical counterparts of that restraint and sure taste which are in the essence of all that she signed.

That one meeting served me well, however, because out of it arose casually an intermittent correspondence which passed into terms of something like friendship. Once at all events I traded, as it were, on a friend’s kindness; for when a boy of mine lay sick abroad, and I was seeking for acceptable things to bring to his bedside, I wrote repeatedly to Martin Ross, provoking replies from a most generous letter-writer--letters very touching in their kindness.

But most of our communications had their source in the prompting which urged her to speak her mind to a Nationalist Member of Parliament, concerning happenings in Ireland. These letters show how gravely and anxiously she thought about her country, and events have written a grim endorsement on certain of her apprehensions. She was never of those who can be content to regard Ireland as a pleasant place for sport, full of easy, laughable people; or she would never have understood Ireland with that intensity which can be felt even in her humour. If her letters show that she was often angry with her countrymen, they show too that it was because she could not be indifferent to the honour of Ireland.

_September, 1917._

APPENDIX III

HER FRIENDS

In trying to include in these divagations the names of some of the chief among the friends of Martin Ross, I am met at once by the thought of her brothers and sisters. These were first in her life, and they held their place in it, and in her heart, in a manner that is not always given to brothers and sisters. Two griefs, the death of her eldest brother, Robert, and of the sister next to her in age, Edith Dawson, struck her with a force that can best be measured by what the loss of two people so entirely lovable meant to others less near to them than she. Handsome and amusing, charming and generous, one may go on heaping up adjectives, yet come no nearer to explaining to those who did not know Edith what was lost when she died. Many of the times to which Martin looked back with most enjoyment were spent with Edith and her husband, Cuthbert Dawson. Colonel Dawson was then in the Queen’s Bays, and Martin’s stories of those soldiering days were full of riding, and steam-launching, and motoring (the last at an early period in history, when, in Connemara at all events, a motor was described by the poor people as “a hell-cart,” and received as such). All these things, and the more dangerous the better, were what she and Edith found their pleasure in, with the spirit that took all the fun that was going in its stride, and did not flinch when trouble, suffering, and sorrow had to be faced.

Of Robert, she has herself written, and now but one brother and one sister of all that brilliant family remain; Mr. James Martin, the Head of the House, and Mrs. Hamilton Currey, whose husband, the late Commander Hamilton Currey, R.N., was a distinguished writer on naval matters, and was one whose literary opinion was very deeply valued by Martin.

She was, as Captain Gwynn has said, “a generous letter-writer,” and I have been allowed by him and by one of her very special friends, Mrs. Campbell, to make extracts from some of her letters to them. Her letters, as Mrs. Campbell says, “have so much of her delightful self in them,” that I very much regret that, for various reasons, I have not been able to print more of them.

Another of her great friends was Miss Nora Tracey, with whom she was staying in Ulster at the tremendous moment of the signing of the Ulster Covenant. Few things ever made a deeper political impression upon Martin than did that visit, and the insight that she then gained into Ulster and its fierce intensity of purpose did not cease to influence her views. Whatever political opinions may be held, and however much the attitude of No Compromise may be regretted, the impressiveness of Ulster has to be acknowledged. No one was more sensitive to this than Martin, and an article that, at this time, she wrote and sent to the _Spectator_ was inspired by what she saw and heard in the North during that time of crisis.

Name after name of her friends comes to me, and I can only feel the futility of writing them down, and thinking that in so doing it is possible to explain her talent for friendship, her fine and faithful enthusiasm for the people whom she liked; still less to indicate how much their affection, and interest, and sympathy helped to fill her life, and to make it what it was, a happy one.

A few names at least I may record.

Mr. and Mrs. Edmund Helps, Rose Helps, Mr. C. L. Graves, Lady Gregory, Mrs. Wynne (who is one of Lord Morris’s daughters, and is one of a family of old Galway friends and neighbours), Miss Gertrude Sweetnam, Miss A. S. Kinkead, Sir Horace Plunkett, Fan Morris, “Jem” Barlow, and Martin Ross’s kinsman, Mr. Justice Archer Martin, Justice of Appeal, Victoria, B.C.

It is of no avail to prolong the list, though I could do so (and I ask to be forgiven for unintentional omissions), and I will do no more than touch on her many friends among our many relations. Rose Barton, Ethel Penrose (my own oldest friend, loved by Martin more than most), Violet Coghill, Loo-Loo Plunket, Jim Penrose (that “Professor of Embroidery and Collector of Irish Point” to whom she dedicated the “Patrick’s Day Hunt”), and, nearest of all after her own family, my sister and my five brothers, to all of whom she was as another sister, only, as the Army List says, “with precedence of that rank.”

An end must come. I am afraid I have forgotten much, and I know I have failed in much that I had hoped to do, but I know, too, however far I may have come short, that the memory of Martin Ross is safe with her friends.

APPENDIX IV

BIBLIOGRAPHY

“An Irish Cousin.” 1889: R. Bentley & Son; 1903: Longmans, Green & Co.

“Naboth’s Vineyard.” 1891: Spencer Blackett.

“Through Connemara in a Governess Cart.” 1892: W. H. Allen & Co.

“In the Vine Country.” 1893: W. H. Allen & Co.

“The Real Charlotte.” 1895: Ward & Downey; 1900: Longmans, Green & Co.

“Beggars on Horseback.” 1895: Blackwood & Sons.

“The Silver Fox.” 1897: Lawrence and Bullen; 1910: Longmans, Green & Co.

“Some Experiences of an Irish R.M.” 1899: Longmans, Green & Co.

“A Patrick’s Day Hunt.” 1902: Constable & Co.

“Slipper’s A B C of Foxhunting.” 1903: Longmans, Green & Co.

“All on the Irish Shore.” 1903: Longmans, Green & Co.

“Some Irish Yesterdays.” 1906: Longmans, Green & Co.

“Further Experiences of an Irish R.M.” 1908: Longmans, Green & Co.

“Dan Russel the Fox.” 1911: Methuen & Co., Ltd.

“The Story of the Discontented Little Elephant.” 1912: Longmans, Green & Co.

“In Mr. Knox’s Country.” 1915: Longmans, Green & Co.

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY R. CLAY AND SONS, LTD., BRUNSWICK STREET, STAMFORD STREET, S.E. 1, AND BUNGAY, SUFFOLK.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Robert has told me how, hearing from Willie Wills that “the money-market was tight,” he went to proffer assistance. In Willie’s studio he was about to light a cigarette with a half-burned “spill” of paper, when he became aware that the “spill” was a five-pound note, an unsuspected relic of more prosperous times, that had already been used for a like purpose. E. Œ. S.

[2] This sentence was subsequently introduced in the article “At the River’s Edge,” by Martin Ross, _The Englishwoman’s Review_.

[3] In these, and all the following letters, I have left the spelling, punctuation, etc., unchanged.

[4] Solicitor-General.

[5] Daniel O’Connell.

[6] Among the letters in the old letter-box of which I have spoken was a paper, the contents of which may be offered to the professional genealogist. They are as follows:

“By the marriage of Charles Bushe to Emmeline Coghill, (daughter of Sir J. Coghill Bt. by his first wife,) the lady becomes neice (_sic_) to her husband, sister to her mother, and daughter to her grandmother, aunt to her sisters and cousins, and grandaunt to her own children, stepmother to her cousins, and sister-in-law to her father, while her mother will be at the same time aunt and grandmother to her nephews and neices.” I recommend no one to try to understand these statements.--E. Œ. S.

[7] Throughout these recollections I have, as far as has been possible, refrained from mentioning those who are still trying to make the best of a moderate kind of world. (Far be it from me to add to their trials!) I wish to say, however, in connection with the subject of this chapter, that in the struggle for life which so many of the Irish gentry had at this period to face, Martin’s brothers and sisters were no less ardently engaged than were their mother and their youngest sister. In London, in India, in Ceylon, the Martins were doing “their country’s work,” as Mr. Kipling has sung, and although the fates at first prevented their taking a hand in person in the restoration of Ross, it is well known that “The Irish over the seas” are not in the habit of forgetting “their own people and their Father’s House.”

[8] Mrs. Hewson died July, 1917.

[9] I think it best to spell all the Irish phrases phonetically.

[10] December 26th.

[11] Scapular and Agnus Dei.

[12] “_Et in Arcadia Ego_,” E. L. in the _Spectator_. August 25, 1917.

[13] This article was subsequently incorporated in Martin Ross’s sketch “Children of the Captivity” and is reprinted in “Some Irish Yesterdays.”

[14] Of this same American a tale is told which might, I think, had she known it, have mitigated Martin’s disapproval. One of the more futile of his pupils showed him a landscape that she had painted. He regarded it for some time in silence, then he said:

“Did you see it like that?”

“Oh yes, Mr. L----!” twittered the pupil.

“And did you feel it like that?”

“Oh yes, Mr. L----, indeed I did!”

“Wal,” said Mr. L----, smoothly, “the next time you see and feel like that, _don’t paint_!”

[15] Professor Kettle was killed, fighting in France, in the Royal Dublin Fusiliers at Ginchy, in September, 1916.

[16] To this may be added a companion phrase. “A Gentleman’s bargain; no huxthering!”

[17] See Appendix II.

[18] “Evidence of the widespread fame of St. Patrick’s Purgatory, Lough Derg, Co. Donegal, in mediaeval days is furnished by a document recently copied from the Chancery treaty roll of Richard II. This is a safe conduct issued on the 6th September, 1397, to Raymond Viscount of Perilleux, Knight of Rhodes, a subject of the King of France, who desired to make the pilgrimage. It was addressed to all constables, marshals, admirals, senechals, governors, bailiffs, prefects, captains, castellans, majors, magistrates, counsellors of cities and towns, guardians of camps, ports, bridges and passways, and their subordinates--in a word, to all those who under one title or another exercised some authority in those days--and recited that Raymond ‘intends and purposes to come into our Kingdom of England and to cross over and travel through the said Kingdom to our land of Ireland, there to see and visit the Purgatory of St. Patrick, with twenty men and thirty horses in his company.’ The conduct went on to enjoin that any of the little army of officials mentioned above should not molest the said Raymond during his journey to Lough Derg, nor during his return therefrom, nor as far as in them lay should they permit injury to him, his men, horses or property; provided always that the Viscount and his men on entering any camp, castle or fortified town, should present the letter of safe conduct to the guardians of the place, and in purchasing make fair and ready payment for food or other necessaries. The safe conduct was valid until the Easter of the following year. Besides showing that over five hundred years ago foreigners were anxious to make the pilgrimage which so many make in the present age, the document is interesting inasmuch as it gives an indication of the difficulties under which a pilgrim or tourist travelled in the fourteenth century.” (_Cork Examiner_, August 8, 1917.)

End of Project Gutenberg's Irish Memories, by Edith Somerville and Martin Ross