J. Comyns Carr: Stray Memories
9781465652034
100 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
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 libretto. 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.
