J. Comyns Carr: Stray Memories, by His Wife

								

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