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COURTSHIP

It was in June of the year 1873 that I first saw my husband.

Aimée Desclée was beginning a memorable season of French Plays at the Royalty Theatre, and it was in the capacity of dramatic critic to The Echo—a post to which he had recently been appointed—that “Joe Carr,” as his friends called him, sat awaiting the curtain to rise on that remarkable performance of Frou-Frou which set the cosmopolitan world of London aflame in its day.

He was twenty-four years of age; but he looked more, for though he had the complexion almost of a girl and that unruly twist in his fair, curling hair which belongs to early youth, he was broad-shouldered and had the strong build of the Cumberland statesmen from whom he was as proud to claim ancestry on his father’s side as he was of the Irish blood that came to him from his mother.

Not that I could have described him that evening: the stalls were too ill lit and my excitement over the play was too great.

I had but lately arrived from Italy—having cajoled my father, then English chaplain at Genoa, into letting me “see London” under the care of my brother, resident there; so that I had just been shot from the socially restricted life of a parson’s daughter in the small English colony of a small foreign town into the comparative Bohemianism of the artistic set in the London of that day best described by my husband himself in the introduction to his book Coasting Bohemia.

There was much that must have been, unconsciously to myself, of rare educational advantage in the lovely scenery and picturesque surroundings of my childhood’s life on the Riviera and in the Apennines; and my parents so loved both Nature and Art that they gave us constant change of opportunity in these directions. Yet I must confess that as I grew up, the chestnut groves of the Apennines and the shores of the blue Mediterranean became empty joys to me, and even the comparative excitement of wearing my own and criticizing my friends’ frocks in the Public Gardens of Genoa or the keener delight of an occasional dance in a stately palace, was insufficient to fill my cravings; and I longed for freedom and the attractions of the world—more especially in London, which I only knew through visits to relatives during the holidays of a short period of my life at a Brighton school. And it was from the house of specially strict relatives that I definitely escaped that evening, to come to the wicked French play with my brother and his friend and housemate, Mr. Frederick Jameson, an architect by profession, but incidentally a distinguished musician—in later years the translator of the Wagner libretti.

Mr. Comyns Carr, to whom they introduced me, sat behind us; and, though he often told me that he marked me down as I came in, and somehow associated me with the personality of Aimée Desclée herself, I took small heed of him then, and when, as we sought a cab at the close of the performance, he volunteered to go back and search for a valueless brooch which I had lost, I did not have the grace to insist on waiting for his return before we hurried off.

But I was not to be punished; that very incident furnished occasion for a next meeting.

Through my brother he tracked me to a Bloomsbury boarding-house, whereto insubordination to the deserved reproof of the conventional relatives had made me condemn myself.

Oh, that boarding-house—with the city clerk’s bon mot, “Why are you like the spoon resting in your tea?” And the spinster convinced that the Italian Stornelli I sang in the evening must be “improper!” Could I have endured it if Mr. Jameson and my brother had not started the glorious idea of theatricals in their rooms hard by in Great Russell Street? And if, on the second day of my sojourn, the lodging-house slavey had not burst into the wee bedroom looking out to the backyard where I was putting on my hat, with the news that a gentleman was asking for me at the front door?

I never guessed who it was, but, through the sunshine that struck into the dingy hall, I saw a strong figure on the door-step and, as I advanced out of the dimness, a mouth hidden in a fair beard—thick and long according to the fashion of the hour—parted in a smile; then I recognised the young man whom I had seen two nights ago at the play.

He had brought my lost brooch, but I don’t think the excuse was needed. I knew why he had come, though at the moment an unwonted shyness had fallen on me, and I think I did not know whether to be pleased or frightened.

He said, “Mayn’t I come in?”

And I recollect my vexation as I answered, “There’s nowhere to come to! The drawing-room is full of old ladies—the sort who tell one that a waterproof and an umbrella are the safe dress for a girl in London.”

How he laughed! the laugh that many knew and loved him for: and any who recollect the speckled-hen variety of the waterproof of the seventies will not wonder.

Then he said: “But you are going out. Which way are you going?”

My reply so well betrayed utter ignorance of London thoroughfares that his next remark was natural.

“Well, as I know you’re a stranger, I won’t say you’ve a small bump of locality!” he said. And how often did he say it again in after years! “But you had better let me take you along. I’m going that way.”

He told the lie unblushingly—and unblushing I did as he bade me and followed him into the street.

I had been brought up with the strictness not only of my father’s cloth but of Italian customs, and I felt I was doing a bold thing: in those days my whole English adventure was considered bold by Mrs. Grundy, and my poor father had already come over on a hasty visit from Italy to place me with those relatives from whom I had escaped; but on that occasion I was simply overborne. Long afterwards, at a crush where Royalty was present, my husband won a bet that he would sup in the Royal room merely by the way in which he bade the footman drop the dividing red rope, and by the same way of bidding a porter put his valise on a cab, he won another with J. L. Toole as to his luggage passing unexamined on a return from abroad. So it was by some kindred “way” that he led me forth that day—whither I knew not. And honestly, I forget where we went. I only knew that he took me a long way—in more senses than one—and showed me many things that were new and told me many that were more Greek to me than I chose to admit at the time.

I was an ignorant girl—the smattering of a brief boarding-school education counting probably far less than the companionship of refined parents in a land of beauty, and of the sort of cultivation in which Joe lived and revelled I knew absolutely nothing.

I don’t know that, at that stage in my career, I ever had so much desire to learn as I pretended—and I am not sure that Joe cared.

Yet he was in those days of his youth at the height of his enthusiasm on matters of Art; he had just written those articles on living painters—specially noting the so-called Pre-Raphaelites—which had drawn considerable notice to his pseudonym of “Ignotus,” and he was, at the moment, one of Rossetti’s favoured young admirers.

But I knew nothing of all this; nor of his having already begun his career of a “wit” as Junior of the Bar on the Northern Circuit. In fact, what I recall of him then is not his wit but his tenderness. He was the ardent pursuer, the first man I had met with whom I was afraid to flirt, because—in spite of some tremulousness in his eager insistence—there was something that said: “I mean to succeed.”

So I stood dreaming before the masterpieces of the National Gallery, and he, I am bound to say, was content with much silence as we sat in the large, cool rooms on that hot May day.

Later on, when he was showing me what to admire, I would teaze him by pointing to some atrocity in Art, and say: “That is what I really like.” But not that day.

And when the hour came for me to return to the boarding-house, I think his sole thought was upon the contriving of our next meeting. As we passed the British Museum—he looked up at the windows of my brother’s rooms facing it, and said: “Sheridan Knowles’ ‘Hunchback,’ you said.”

“Yes,” I replied. “And I do Julia and Mr. Jameson Master Walter. But it may all fall through because he can’t find a man for the lover. It is desolating.”

I can recall the slow look he gave me; but then he smiled and said: “Is that what you would say in your foreign tongues?”

I got cured of such expressions later on, but that day I think I was ashamed of my careless speech, for I knew better; and I shook hands with him with a sense of disappointment as the slavey opened the door into the dingy brown hall. Had I been too flippant and free to please such a clever man?

That evening, however, when I went to the rehearsal in Great Russell Street, Mr. Comyns Carr was there; of course he had offered himself to play that lover’s part. He was busy enough—though not so busy as he had been before I knew him, when reading for his Law Scholarship at the London University. He had, in fact, if I remember rightly, just returned from his first experience on the Northern Circuit and was beginning to supplement his earnings at the Bar by literary efforts. But he was not too busy for this adventure, and there followed three weeks of rehearsals under Mr. Jameson’s management, during which my assets for the stage were calmly discussed, Mr. Jameson declaring that they were good, and finally winning my brother’s consent to the bidding of his theatrical friends—John Hare among them—to decide the question.

But Joe always pooh-poohed the notion.

And when I said: “Well, I’m going to earn enough to keep me in London somehow. I’m not going back to that dead-alive life at home!” he only said cryptically, “There are other ways.”

I think I was a bit huffed at the time and crowed when a lightly spoken word of praise came to me presently from a very authoritative quarter.

For one day, as we sat resting from our labours in one of the window seats of the beautiful Adams room where Burne-Jones had once painted and that Whistler had not long left, a light rap fell on the door and a voice long loved by us all called out: “Anybody at home?” as the radiant face of Ellen Terry peeped merrily in upon us.

There was little work done that day; but our stage manager, whose old friend she was, bade me speak one of my speeches, and she said: “A good carrying voice, and she finishes her words.” No merit to me, who had been bred in a land where folk open their throats and where I had heard cultivated English only; but I was naturally flattered and, when “the night” came and I was awkward and terrified and John Hare smiled pleasant nothings and my kindly, ambitious stage-manager’s ardour was damped, I might have been sore cast down but that a new excitement and glamour had flashed into my life.

Joe Carr’s “way” was carving its straight course.

Many a time I had been caught wandering aimlessly up Gower Street pretending a shopping excursion and swearing that I had not seen him on the opposite pavement, and many a half-hour had we both pretended to enjoy the Elgin Marbles in the British Museum, but in truth it was only three weeks after that theatrical performance when I put my key one day into the door of the Dispensary over which were those historic rooms and felt rather than saw a figure behind me, and knew that the great moment had come for me and that I was to be carried off my feet.

As once before he said: “May I come in?” And I answered nothing and left the key in the door (of which I never heard the end), and he followed me up to the big studio where we were to spend the first year of our wedded life.

I had come there that day for a singing lesson from Mr. Jameson and, when he returned presently, I am sure he guessed no more than we did that in four months he would be in America and would have rented his rooms to us for our first home.