J. Comyns Carr: Stray Memories, by His Wife

								

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.

CHAPTER II
THE HOME OF BOYHOOD

So from that day there was no more dingy boarding-house for me: my
betrothed took me to his parents’ house at Clapham, where I well
remember the courtly words: “I hear I have to congratulate my son
Joe” with which I was received by his father.
Small blame would it have been to parents, ambitious for the
advancement of their children, had they only seen in me a foreign
adventuress without credentials coming to snatch one of the flowers of
their flock; yet instead of that, most generously was I welcomed to a