J. Comyns Carr: Stray Memories, by His Wife

								

self-confidence had inspired the confidence of my parents, and it was
not misplaced. They made the speedy marriage which, he insisted, could
alone lead him to success, just possible: economy and courage did the
rest--the courage which never forsook him. For as I look over his
letters--written to me in later years when some one of his many bold
ventures had not succeeded like another--I find the cheerful phrase
recurring: “Don’t be afraid; there’s a lot of fight left in me yet.”
Upon that--safest and most enduring of all incomes--we set sail without
a vestige of misgiving upon the sea of life; and I’m thankful to
say that I never was “afraid.”
But it was this early marriage that led Joe for a second time, as he
tells in his Reminiscences, to change his profession, and gradually,
and to the distress of his legal friends, to forsake the Bar for the
more immediately remunerative work of literature. I well recollect his
joyful announcement to me of his appointment as Art Critic to the Pall
Mall Gazette--the beginning of a long period of many-sided association
with Frederick Greenwood; and that slender certainty of income provided
the condition imposed by my father: our wedding day was fixed.

CHAPTER III
MARRIAGE

We were married in Dresden, where my father had taken a temporary
chaplaincy.
Joe had a merry journey out from England with Mr. Jameson and a gentle
but less intellectual friend who was to act as best man.
I was told later of this friend’s innocent boast of conversion to free
thought and of Joe’s quick reply: “Why, then, you’ll have plenty of
time to think.” But this sterner remark was not in his usual vein,
and much oftener I think he pleased his two friends by his immediate
sympathy with free foreign manners, most especially those of the
French, who always had the first place in his affections as contrasted
with “bulgy-necked Germans whose poverty-stricken tongue” forced
them to call a thimble a “finger hat” and a glove a “hand-shoe,” and
decreed that three men must order their baths as “drei.” I must add
in his defence that he never could speak or read the language; it was
his mother wit that pulled him through difficulties. Once when alone
in Dresden he was driven to ask his way in the words of a well-known
song and, even at that time, was probably set down as an insolent
Englishman for the intimate pronoun in his “Kennst du das Sidonien
Strasse”?
What treatment would he receive now and how would he take it?
But his two friends were German scholars and good cicerones, and led
him safely to the Hotel de Saxe on the morning of December 15th, 1873,
where my father married us in the presence of a newly arrived British
ambassador.
There was some obvious raillery, to which Joe nimbly responded, in
consequence of that pleni-potentiary remarking, with grim humour, that
he wondered if these marriages were really valid; but the gentleman