Finishing Touches

I

IN 1904 I had such a success with ‘Spring’ that I decided to paint the seasons. I was looking for a spot to paint ‘Summer’ when I had a letter from J. Milner Kite, an Anglo-American painter, inviting me to go to Brittany. So, thinking it might solve the problem of the picture, I went to Beg-mai, taking with me ‘Spring’ and Shiel, an Irishman with nothing to do. After working all day from a model in the country it has always been a relief to me to have a third person, male or female, to take the sit ter off my hands, so to speak, and reduce the strain for both model and painter. Shiel served my purpose in that he shared the scandal, if there should be one, of my taking a beautiful girl to the country for months at a time.

In the same hotel I used to sec two girls on their verandah at morning coffee as I passed on my way to work with my six-foot canvas strapped on my shoulders. Kite informed me that they were American girls with their mother, and that he was trying to paint the elder one, who I could see was very beautiful, and he added that he would be forever indebted to me if I could give him a hand. I was only too glad to show off, especially before such loveliness; and, as it is invariably much easier to work on another man’s canvas when he has got into difficulties than it is on one’s own under similar circumstances, in a very short time I was looked upon by the sitter as a master and treated with great respect, not to say admiration. I cannot say that. I was appreciated by the mother, Mrs. Edward Jenner Martyn, whom Kite called ‘the old Chicago dame’ — which I thought disrespectful, since she had commissioned him to paint her daughter.

I cannot understand to this day what Hazel saw in me — she said I reminded her of Harry Lauder. I was more than twice her age; I was traveling with a model (it is true that Kite and Shiel were with us); I was a widower with a daughter almost as old as herself; I was Irish, to her a nationality associated with Tammany Hall; and she was already engaged to a young surgeon, son of the famous Doctor Trudeau at whose sanatorium Robert Louis Stevenson was an impatient, inmate, breaking up his furniture to make a fire in the intense cold that eventually drove him to Honolulu. Mrs. Martyn, observing the interest her daughter was showing in me, sent Trudeau a message to come at once or he would lose Hazel. He came, he observed, and he married her.

I then realized that painting pictures was not everything.

Three or four months afterwards, Trudeau died suddenly. In the course of time Alice was born and Hazel returned to Paris with her child, who at the age of five acted as bridesmaid when, with Cunninghame Graham as best man, I married her mother at Brompton Oratory.

Just about the time when Hazel and Alice came into my life I bought a little property on the Hill outside Tangier. I made it my winter quarters for the next fifteen or more years. Hazel at the start being twenty-three and Alice five. I remember the latter’s age well. I was painting a portrait of Kenneth Clark, the present Director of the National Gallery, who was then aged six or seven, and Alice came up to entertain the sitter. The dialogue was pretty good.

He: ‘Hello, who are you?'

She: ‘I am Alice.’

He: ‘How old are you?’

She: ‘I’ve just struck five.’

He: ‘Did you ting or did you cuckoo?’

When she went to school she was asked by her companions why her name was Trudeau and her mother’s Lavery. She was much embarrassed and, swallowing hard, said, ‘Well, you see, my mother married a friend of mine, and that’s how it came about.’ This was literally true, because I had promised to marry her when she grew up. When I married her mother she said resignedly, ‘Well, we’ll just have to be friends.’

Although I had spent some winters in Morocco, she picked up the language much quicker than I did. What is more, living in the stables in Tangier, she acquired stable Arabic with equal facility. One day, riding Moses her donkey, she was heard addressing him in Arabic with ‘Go on, thou son of an adulteress,’ and similar epithets.

The domestic question in Morocco was a difficult one, since a Moor lost caste if he or she served a Christian, but I had the luck to get two remarkable characters — Aïsha, a girl about sixteen, and Ben Ali Rabbati, a cook and an artist in water colors. When Aisha came she could only speak Spanish and Arabic; within a month her English was wonderful. She preferred to call herself Aida because it sounded Spanish. I painted a picture of her which I sent to the Venice Triennale Esposizione de Belle Arti. The King of Italy paid a visit, and among other pictures purchased that of Aïda. It was reproduced as a frontispiece in L’Illustrazione Italiana, of which Aïda was very proud and made good use in London.

She used to take Alice out in the Park, where a young German poet became interested in her. We later found out that he was mad, but she had already told him that she was related to the Italian Royal House, in proof of which she showed her portrait in the Italian journal, under which was printed ‘Aïda, from the collection of His Majesty the King.’ She explained to the poet that she was a Moorish princess and that I had smuggled her out of Morocco and was treating her like a slave. He was much impressed, and when he had got all her facts he wrote to Truth to expose what he called ‘Brown Slave Traffic in Our Midst.’

I had had difficulty in getting her out of Morocco, it being against the law for a Moorish woman to leave the country, but the British Minister came to my aid by assuring the Pasha she would be brought back safely. She was dressed up in my daughter’s European clothes, heavily veiled, and the high-heeled shoes made her walk strangely. She was very sick in the small boat going out to the steamer, and not daring to remove the tightly tied veil made it even more embarrassing. The boatmen developed suspicions which a few dollars allayed, and we got safely on board the P. & O. When the time came to go back, however, she refused to go, saying, ‘Me free under British flag.’ I was told at the Foreign Office that I could not force her to return unless she became an undesirable alien, so we had to go back without her, in great fear of the trouble her family would make. When we told them they merely said, ‘Poison awaits her, which, Allah be praised, will be sure.’

Soon after our return war broke out, and Aïda disappeared, to be found in a munitions factory. In a few months she had charge of a number of workers, and at the end of the war she married the manager of her department.

II

My life has been largely a question of painting in my various studios — for the last forty years at Cromwell Place. Yet Cromwell Place for many years achieved another status: it was the meeting ground of a large number of famous people holding all sorts of views and engaged in many different activities.

These people did not come to see me. They came to see Hazel. She loved making friends; she had the gift, and the power to use it delighted her always. She enjoyed all sorts and conditions of people, and she was almost childishly anxious to win each and every one’s esteem and affection. She was genuinely interested in all she mot, old or young, celebrities or no bodies — to her they were somebodies because they were human beings, and all humanity enthralled her. She was in love with the spectacle of life.

When illness took her hand from the pulse of the lives of others, she died. My life was my work — painting; her life was life itself. She had much Irish blood, but she was primarily an American.

Hazel loved to meet people who excelled in anything, and she was equally interested whether they were rulers, writers, soldiers, or painters. She herself was a very good artist, and her views on books were found so worth while even by Bernard Shaw that he used to send her batches of his Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism while he was writing it. But it was as a hostess that she excelled and found her true art. She had exquisite tact and discrimination, and mixed her friends with the ease and grace of the most successful diplomat. When they came, whoever they were, they all felt that they had something in common — this pleasure of the moment. All were made to feel at home, not just that they were being made to feel at home. And when they left the house they did not feel that they were being discussed unfavorably and pulled to pieces. They knew that Hazel did not do that sort of thing, and that no one else did it in her presence.

Therefore she came to have a host of friends and admirers, and they numbered as many women as men. Not so many women at first; but as the years passed, and no scandal could be fastened on her in any way at any time, her women admirers — especially the married ones — increased and became more and more friendly disposed towards her.

I do not know how many sitters, and wealthy ones, came to me on her account. For, apart from these social gifts, she made sitters talk to her, which set them at their ease while I was painting them. Lord Northcliffe and Lord Lonsdale both loved to have her to talk to during the sittings. When they were over, Lord Northcliffo, in the most charming manner conceivable, handed her a large check, saying, ‘My dear lady, you have revolutionized sittings.’ She was a little embarrassed, but he was so obviously sincere that she could only say, ‘Thank you.’

Any attempt to single out names and recall on this page the friendly faces that honored our house must be seen as impossible. Hazel left behind a trunkful of letters and mementoes of those days. It is not for me to disturb them.

I have painted her portrait many times, but neither in paint nor in words do I feel I could ever do justice to Hazel. Her rare beauty of face and character must have been known personally to be believed, and so upon the things nearest to me I will write least. We had twentyfive years together. She died in 1935, after a long illness.

III

‘Breathes there a man with soul so dead,’ and so forth. Well, shame to say, I am that man, still breathing; and, what is worse, I have known other lands I have liked better than Ireland — at any rate for the time being. No country holds the monopoly of all virtues.

Hazel, who was very keen on the Irish Question, said to me one day, ‘John, why don’t you do something for your country?’ Now, an undeveloped sense of patriotism was my trouble. For years I did not seem to grasp what Ireland had suffered, and if I did the feeling was that possibly it served us right. But when the Great War came and the ‘Black and Tans’ were given carte blanche to do their damnedest, — which they did, — the desire to fight stirred in my blood for the first time. Yet I very much doubt if it was patriotism and a love of country so much as a sense of justice. There was nothing much I could do. So when Hazel asked me why I did not do something for my country I replied, ‘I cannot see that I can do anything without mixing myself up with religion or politics, and I have no time to differ with people.’ ‘Don’t differ,’ she replied. ‘Just agree with them all, as you do anyway.’ So it struck me that I might be of some use by making my studio neutral ground where both sides might meet.

Michael Collins came to London, as everyone knows, on a safe-conduct with Griffith, Gavan Duffy, Barton, Duggan, and Erskine Childers. De Valera had been over a week or two before, but had failed to come to terms, and now sent these representatives in the hope that a treaty might result.

Hazel was anxious that the delegates should meet Englishmen of importance concerned with the Irish Question, and this resulted in many dinner parties and other functions. But there was one delegate who held out — Erskine Childers. I had him on the telephone once or twice, but he would not be induced to come, not even to a meal.

By many it was believed that had it not been for Hazel there would have been no treaty — certainly not at the time it was signed. She had given up Erskine Childers as impossible to move, but she had overcome Arthur Griffith’s objections. Michael Collins stood firm to the last minute. He seemed to have lost his temper. Even I, whose head was never really out of the paintpot, could see that he who loses his temper in argument is lost, and told him so, but failed to convince him. Eventually, after hours of persuasion, Hazel prevailed. She took him to Downing Street in her car that last evening and he gave in. Yet he knew, knowing our queer race, that in signing he might well be signing his death warrant. Neither friend nor foe ever accused this man of lacking courage.

Collins was a patient sitter, but I noticed that he liked to sit facing the door. He was always on the alert. During the war in Ireland he was almost a wizard in the way he was never caught. He did not go into hiding, yet when the military came to some house they saw him enter they never could find him, though there seemed no means of escape — in this, and in the capacity to disguise himself, he bore a strong resemblance to Lenin, I am told. He told me that his mother died during the troubles and that he insisted on going to her funeral. His friends implored him not to, for it would be putting himself into the hands of the military. But he went. And the military went. He stood in their midst. But they did not see him — so skillful was his make-up as a monk.

When the delegates returned to Dublin, Hazel and I also went over. We now learned that Collins had ‘sold his country.’ Phrases are terrible things. One day we lunched with Collins at the Gresham Hotel. On his way there he was ordered to put up his hands by a youth with a gun. In putting them up he knocked the youth over and took the gun from him, telling him that he had stopped the wrong man, together with a few other points the youth had overlooked. They shook hands and parted friends, Michael keeping the gun.

One evening he came to dinner with us at the Kingstown Hotel. I did not know till afterwards that Hazel had saved his life by sitting between him and the window, where a gunman had been placed for half an hour. She was anxious that he should know Horace Plunkett and took him to meet him that same evening. I was a little worried, but for some reason did not go. Coming back, they were waylaid, and half-a-dozen shots poured into the car. I examined the car with an electric torch, and it seemed a miracle that no one was hurt, for there were six people sitting close together. The bullets must have gone over their heads. Collins made light of it, but complained of a pain in his side that he thought might possibly be his appendix. After much persuasion he accepted my hot-water bottle and, placing it under his tunic, smilingly said that the pain had gone. With a ‘God bless you both’ he jumped into his car with Emmet Dalton and Joe Riley, dashing off into the night. That was the last I saw of him alive.

Hazel was pale with excitement and woke up screaming once or twice that night. Next day she was strange and silent. I could not get her to talk. She had fearful premonitions. Once after a dinner party she had told me that Sargent, who was present, was about to die — and he died. Now she said at last, looking away from me, ‘All day I have been seeing them carrying Michael, covered with blood. Wherever I go I cannot get rid of the sight.’ I got her to bed and sat with her until well on into the night, and at last she went to sleep. At seven in the morning her very English maid came in with the tea. After she had put it down she said in a voice showing not the slightest trace of interest, ‘They have shot Mr. Collins, my lady.’

I felt then, and feel still, that on that night the Irish slew the Irish — that the Irish killed Ireland as a force for good and greatness in the world today, when every horror is committed in the name of nationalism.

His body was brought back to Dublin and placed in the mortuary chapel, where only relatives and closest friends were admitted. I was allowed to paint him in death. Any grossness in his features, even the peculiar little dent near the point of his nose, had disappeared. He might have been Napoleon in marble as he lay in his uniform, covered by the Free State flag, with a crucifix on his breast. Four soldiers stood round the bier. The stillness was broken at long intervals by someone’s entering the chapel on tiptoe, kissing the brow, and then slipping to the door, where I could hear a burst of suppressed grief. One woman kissed the dead lips, making it hard for me to continue my work.

All that day I strove to record the mystery that seemed to play about that mouth, the lips appearing to move at times. When I got back lo Kingstown at midnight the hotel was all dark; the night porter let me in, the one who had told me of the gunman at the window two nights previously. I thought it would interest him to see what I had done, so, opening up the picture, I placed it on a chair under a light in the hall. He looked long, and in a strange, harsh voice said, ‘Well, now, that is the last of Mike; the next one will get the same.’

‘Are you an Irishman?’ I asked.

‘I am, God help me.’

‘I hope he will,’ I said.

I have been told of the treachery of my countrymen by those who did not like them, but this was the first experience of it at the source. I now believe I misunderstood what he said, and that he really meant there were so many misguided people that, no one trying to save his country would be allowed to five. How, then, can Ireland live? Must she not herself be slain if she slew, in Gogarty’s great phrase, ‘the most rapid and bright soul that alien envy ever quenched’?