Part 6

There was never a _festa_ in the _Piazza_ that we were not there, watching or walking with the bewildering procession of elegant young Venetians, and peasants from the mainland, and officers, and soldiers, and gondoliers with big caps set jauntily on their curls, and beautiful girls in the gay fringed shawls that have disappeared from Venice and the wooden shoes that once made an endless clatter along the _Riva_ but are heard no more, and Greeks, and Armenians, and priests, and beggars, passing up and down between the arcades and the _café_ tables that overflowed far into the square, St. Mark's more unreal in its splendour than ever with its domes and galleries and traceries against the blue of the Venetian night.

There was never a side-show on the _Riva_ that we did not interrupt our work to go and see it; whether it was the circus in the little tent, with the live pony, the most marvellous of all sights in Venice; or the acrobats tumbling on their square of carpet; or the blindfolded, toothless old fortune-teller, whose shrill voice I can still hear mumbling "_Una volta soltanta per Napoli!_" when she was asked if Naples, this coming summer, as the last, would be ravaged by cholera. She was right, for in the town, cleaned out of picturesqueness, cholera could not again do its work in the old wholesale fashion.

There was never an excursion to the Islands that we did not join it. To visit some of the further Islands was not so easy in those days, except for tourists with a fortune to spend on _gondolas_, and we were grateful to the occasional little steamboat that undertook to get us there, though with a crowd and noise and a brass band, for all the world like an excursion to Coney Island, and though most people, except the grateful natives, were obediently believing with Ruskin that it was the symbol of the degeneracy of Venice and would have thought themselves disgraced forever if they were seen on it. But the Lagoon was as beautiful from the noisy, fussy little steamboat as from a _gondola_, the sails of the fishing boats touching it with as brilliant colour, the Islands lying as peacefully upon its shining waters, the bells of the many _campanili_ coming as sweetly to our ears, the sky above as pure and radiant; and it mattered not how we reached the Islands, they were as enchanting when we landed.

One wonderful day was at Torcello, where nothing could mar the loveliness of its solitude and desolation, its old cathedral full of strange mosaics and stranger memories, the green space in front that was once a _Piazza_ tangled with blossoms and sweet-scented in the May sunshine, the purple hills on the mainland melting into the pale sky. And a second day as wonderful was at Burano, with its rose-flushed houses and gardens and traditions of noise and quarrels, and the girls who followed the boat along the bank and pelted us with roses until Jobbins vowed he would go and live there--and he did, but a market boat brought him back in a week. And other excursions took us to Chioggia, the canals there alive with fishing boats and the banks with fishermen mending their nets; and to Murano, busy and beautiful both, with the throb of its glass furnaces and the peace of the fields where the dead sleep; and again and again to the _Lido_ where green meadows were sprinkled with daisies and birds were singing.

More wonderful were the nights, coming home, when the gold had faded from sea and sky, the palaces and towers of Venice rising low on the horizon as in a City of Dreams, the Lagoon turned by the moon into a sheet of silver, lights like great fireflies stealing over the water, ghostly _gondolas_ gliding past,--then we were the real Lotus Eaters drifting to the only Lotus Land where all things have rest.

The fussy little steamboat, I found, could rock ambition to sleep as well as a _gondola_, and life seemed to offer nothing better than an endless succession of days and nights spent on its deck bound for wherever it might bear us. I understood and sympathized with the men who lay asleep all day in the sunshine on the _Riva_ and who sang all night on the bridge below our windows. What is more, I envied them and wished they would take me into partnership. Were they not putting into practice the philosophy our ancient friend Davies had preached to me in Rome? But only the Venetian can master the secret of doing nothing with nothing to do it on, and if J. and I were to hope for figs with our bread, or even for bread by itself, we had to move on to the next place where work awaited us. And so the last of our nights in Venice came before spring had ripened into summer, and the last of our mornings when porters again scrambled for our bags, and we again stumbled after them up the long platform; and then there were again yells, but this time of "_Partenza_" and "_Pronti_," and the train hurried us away from the _Panada_, and the _Orientale_, and the Lagoon, to a world where no lotus grows and life is all labour.

IV

NIGHTS IN LONDON

IN LONDON

I

I cannot remember how or why we began our Thursday nights. I rather think they began themselves and we kept them up to protect our days against our friends.

It was an unusually busy time with us--or perhaps I ought to say with me, for, to my knowledge, J. has never known the time that was anything else. After our years of wandering, years of hotels and rooms and lodgings, we had just settled in London in the first place we had ever called our own--the old chambers in the old Buckingham Street house overlooking the river; I was doing more regular newspaper work than I had ever done before or ever hope to do again; we were in the Eighteen-Nineties, and I need neither the magnifying glasses through which age has the reputation of looking backward, nor the clever young men of to-day who write about that delectable decade and no doubt deplore my indiscretion in being alive to write about it myself, to show me how very much more amusing and interesting life was then than now.

There is no question that people, especially people doing our sort of work, were much more awake in the Nineties, much more alive, much more keen about everything, even a fight, or above all a fight, if they thought a fight would clear the air. Those clever young men, self-appointed historians of a period they know only by hearsay, may deplore or envy its decadence. But because a small clique wrote anæmic verse and bragged of the vices for which they had not the strength, because a few youthful artists invented new methods of expression the outsider did not understand, that does not mean decadence. A period of revolt against decadence, of insurrection, of vigorous warfare it seemed to me who lived and worked through it. The Yellow Nineties, the Glorious Nineties, the Naughty Nineties, the Rococo Nineties, are descriptions I have seen, but the Fighting Nineties would be mine. As I recall those stimulating days, the prevailing attitude of the artist in his studio, the author at his desk, the critic at his task, was that of Henley's Man in the Street:

Hands in your pockets, eyes on the pavement, Where in the world is the fun of it all? But a row--but a rush--but a face for your fist. Then a crash through the dark--and a fall.

Scarcely an important picture was painted, an important illustration published, an important book written, an important criticism made, that it did not lead to battle. Few of the Young Men of the Nineties accomplished all the triumphant things they thought they could, but the one thing they never failed to do and to let the world know they were doing was to fight, and they loved nothing better--coats off, sleeves rolled up, arms squared. Whatever happened was to them a challenge. Whistler began the Nineties with his Exhibition at the Groupil Gallery and it was a rout for the enemy. The harmless portrait of Desboutin by Degas was hung at the New English Art Club and straightaway artists and critics were bludgeoning each other in the press. Men were elected to the Royal Academy, pictures were bought by the Chantrey Bequest; new papers and magazines were started by young enthusiasts with something to say and no place to say it in; new poets, yearning for degeneracy, read their poems to each other in a public house they preferred to re-christen a tavern; new printing presses were founded to prove the superiority of the esoteric few; new criticism--new because honest and intelligent--was launched; everything suddenly became _fin-de-siècle_ in the passing catchword of the day borrowed from Paris; every fad of the Continent was adopted; but no matter what it might be, the incident, or work, or publication that roused any interest at all was the signal for the clash of arms, for the row and the rush. Everybody had to be in revolt, though it might not always have been easy to say against just what. I remember once, at the show of a group of young painters who fancied themselves fiery Independents, running across Felix Buhot, the most inflammable man in the world, and his telling me, with his wild eyes more aflame than usual, that he could smell the powder. He was not far wrong, if his metaphor was a trifle out of proportion to those very self-conscious young rebels. A good deal of powder was flying about in the Nineties, and when powder flies, whatever else may come of it, one thing sure is that nobody can sleep and most people want to talk.

I had not been in London a year before I knew that there the _café_ was not the place to talk in. I have dreary memories of the first efforts J. and I, fresh from Italy, made to go on leading the easy, free-from-care life in restaurants and _cafés_ we had led in Rome and Venice. But it was not to be done. The distances were too great, the weather too atrocious, the little restaurants too impossible, the big restaurants too beyond our purse, and the only real _café_ was the _Café Royal_. At an earlier date Whistler had drawn his followers to it. In the Nineties Frederick Sandys was one of its most familiar figures. Even now, especially on Saturday nights, young men, in long hair and strange hats and laboriously unconventional clothes, are to be met there, looking a trifle solemnized by their share in so un-English an entertainment. For this is the trouble: The _café_ is not an English institution and something in the atmosphere tells you right away that it isn't. It might, it may still, serve us for an occasion, its mirrors and gilding and red velvet pleasantly reminiscent, but for night after night it would not answer at all as the _Nazionale_ had answered in Rome, the _Orientale_ in Venice.

However, Buckingham Street made a good substitute as an extremely convenient centre for talk, and its convenience was so well taken advantage of that, at this distance of time, I am puzzled to see how we ever got any work done. J. and I have never been given to inhospitality, and we both liked the talk. But the day of reckoning came when, sitting down to lunch one morning, we realized that it was the first time we had eaten that simple meal alone for we could not remember how long. The lunch for which no preparation is made and at which the company is uninvited but amusing may be one of the most agreeable of feasts, but we knew too well that if we went on cutting short our days of work to enjoy it, we ran the risk of no lunch ever again for ourselves, let alone for anybody else.

To be interrupted in the evening did not matter so much, though our evenings were not altogether free of work--nor are J.'s even yet, the years proving less kind in moulding him to the indolence to which, with age, I often find myself pleasantly yielding. Our friends, when we stopped them dropping in by day, began dropping in by night instead, and one group of friends to whom Thursday night was particularly well adapted for the purpose gradually turned their dropping in from a chance into a habit until, before we knew it, we were regularly at home every Thursday after dinner.

The entertainment, if it can be called by so fine a name, always retained something of the character of chance with which it began. We sent out no invitations, we attempted no formality. Nobody was asked to play at anything or to listen to anything. Nobody was expected to dress, though anybody who wanted to could--everybody was welcome in the clothes they wore, whether they came straight from the studio or a dinner. If eventually I provided sandwiches--in addition to the tobacco always at hand in the home of the man who smokes and the whiskey-and-soda without which an Englishman cannot exist through an evening--it was because I got too hungry not to need something to eat before the last of the company had said good-night. We did not offer even the comfort of space. Once the small dining-room that had been Etty's studio, and the not over-large room that was J.'s, and the nondescript room that was drawing-room and my workroom combined, were packed solid, there was no place to overflow into except the short, narrow entrance hall, and I still grow hot at the thought of what became of hats and coats if it also was filled. I can never forget the distressing evening when in the bathroom--which, with the ingenuity of the designer of flats, had been fitted in at the end of the narrow hall and was the reason of its shortness--I caught William Penn devouring the gloves of an artist's wife who I do not believe has forgiven him to this day; nor the still more distressing occasion when I discovered Bobbie, William's poor timid successor, curled up on a brand-new bonnet of feathers and lace.

But it was the very informality, so long as it led to no crimes on the part of our badly brought-up cats, that attracted the friends who were as busy and hard-working as ourselves,--this, and the freedom to talk without being silenced for the music that no talker wants to hear when he can listen to his own voice, or for the dances that nobody wants to watch if he can follow his own argument, or for the introductions that invariably interrupt at the wrong moment, or for the games and innumerable devices without which intelligent human beings are not supposed to be able to survive an evening in each other's company. The idle who play golf all day and bridge all night, who cannot eat in the short intervals between without music, believe that talk has gone out of fashion. My experience had been in Rome and Venice, was then in London, and is now, that men and women who have something to talk about are always anxious to talk about it, if only the opportunity is given to them, and the one attraction we offered was just this opportunity for people who had been doing more or less the same sort of work all day to meet and talk about it all night--the reason why, despite heat and discomfort, despite meagre fare and the risk to hats and coats, Thursday after Thursday crowded our rooms to suffocation as soon as evening came.

II

As, in memory, I listen to the endless talk of our Thursday nights, the leading voice, when not J.'s, is Henley's, which is natural since it was Henley, followed by his Young Men,--our name for his devoted staff always in attendance at his office and out of it,--who got so into the habit of dropping in to see us on Thursday night that we got into the habit of staying at home to see him. For Thursday was the night when the _National Observer_, which he was editing at the time, went to press and Ballantynes, the printers, were not more than five minutes away in Covent Garden. At about ten his work was over and he and his Young Men were free to do nothing save talk for the rest of the week if they chose--and they usually did choose--and Buckingham Street was a handy place to begin it in. Our rooms were already fairly well packed, pleasantly smoky, and echoing with the agreeable roar of battle when they arrived.

I like to remember Henley as I saw him then, especially if my quite superfluous feeling of responsibility as hostess had brought me on some equally superfluous mission into the little hall at the moment of his arrival. As the door opened he would stand there at the threshold, his tall soft black hat still crowning his massive head, leaning on his crutch and stick as he waited to take breath after his climb up our three flights of stone stairs--"Did I really ever climb those stairs at Buckingham Street?"--he asked me the last time I saw him, some years later, at Worthing when he was ill and broken, and I have often marvelled myself how he managed it. But breathless as he might be, he always laughed his greeting. I cannot think of Henley as he was in his prime, to borrow a word that was a favourite with him, without hearing his laugh and seeing his face illuminated by it. Rarely has a man so hampered by his body kept his spirit so gay. He was meant to be a splendid creature physically and fate made of him a helpless cripple--who was it once described him as "the wounded Titan"? Everybody knows the story: he made sure that everybody should by telling it in his _Hospital Verses_. But everybody cannot know who did not know him how bravely he accepted his disaster. It seemed to me characteristic once when a young cousin of mine, a girl at the most susceptible age of hero-worship, meeting him for the first time in our chambers and volunteering, in the absence of anybody else available, to fetch the cab he needed, thought his allowing her to go on such an errand for him the eccentricity of genius and never suspected his lameness until he stood up and took his crutch from the corner. There was nothing about him to suggest the cripple.

He was a remarkably handsome man, despite his disability, tall and large and fair, a noble head and profile, a shock of red hair, short red beard, keen pale blue eyes, his indomitable gaiety filling his face with life and animation, smoothing out the lines of pain and care. He was so striking in every way, his individuality so strangely marked that the wonder is the good portrait of him should be the exception. Nicholson, when painting him, was a good deal preoccupied with the big soft hat and blue shirt and flowing tie, feeling their picturesque value, and turned him into a brigand, a land pirate, to the joy of Henley, whom I always suspected of feeling this value himself and dressing as he did for the sake of picturesqueness. Simon Bussy seemed to see, not Henley, but Stevenson's caricature--the John Silver of _Treasure Island_, the cripple with the face as big as a ham. Even Whistler failed and never printed more than one or two proofs of the lithograph for which Henley sat. Rodin came nearest success, his bust giving the dignity and ruggedness and character of head and profile both. He and Nicholson together go far to explain the man.

Unfortunately there is no biography at all. Charles Whibley was to have written the authorized life, but the world still waits. Cope Cornford attempted a sketch, but scarcely the shadow of Henley emerges from its pages. Because he thundered and denounced and condemned and slashed to pieces in the _National Observer_, his contemporaries imagined that Henley did nothing anywhere at any time save thunder and denounce and condemn and slash to pieces and that he was altogether a fierce, choleric, intolerant, impossible sort of a person. The chances are few now realize that Henley was enough of an influence in his generation for it to have mattered to anybody what manner of man he was. A glimpse of him remains here and there. Stevenson has left the description of his personality, so strong that he was felt in a room before he was seen. His vigour and his manliness, survive in his work, but cannot quite explain the commanding power he was in his generation, while neither he nor his friends have shewn, as it should be shewn, the other side to his character, the gay, the kindly side, so that I feel almost as if I owed it to his memory to put on record my impressions of my first meeting with him, since it was only this side he then gave me the chance to see.

I wonder sometimes why I had never met Henley before. When J. and I came to London he was editing the _Magazine of Art_, a little later he managed the _Art Journal_, and in both he published a number of J.'s drawings, and we had letters from him. We went to houses where he often visited. I remember hearing him announced once at the Robinsons' in Earl's Terrace, but Miss Mary Robinson, as she was then--Madame Duclaux as she is now--left everybody in the drawing-room while she went to see him downstairs, because of his lameness she said, but partly, I fancied, because she wanted to keep him to herself to discuss a new series of articles. She had just "come out" in literature and was as fluttered by her every new appearance in print as most girls are by theirs in a ball-room. In other houses, more than once I just missed him, I had never got nearer than business correspondence when he left London to edit the _Scots Observer_ in Edinburgh, and he stayed there until the _Scots_ became the _National Observer_ with its offices in London.

I had heard more than enough about him in the meanwhile. The man who says what he believes to be the truth--the man who sits in, and talks from, the chair of the scorners--is bound to get himself hated, and Henley came in for his fair share of abuse. As somebody says, truth never goes without a scratched face.

But, like all men hated by the many, Henley inspired devotion in the few who, in his case, were not only devoted themselves but eager to make their friends devoted too. When he got back to London one of his Young Men, whom I do not see why I should not call Charles Whibley, insisted that J. and I must meet Henley first in the right way, that all our future relations with him depended upon it, and that this right way would be for him to ask Henley and ourselves, and nobody else, to dinner in his rooms.