Three Houses Read Online Free PDF Page B

years. One might find Mr Yeats upstairs andM. Henri Bernstein downstairs while, neglecting them both, Auntie Stella might insist on taking me for a drive in a hansom and reciting Mélisande in French – she was going to act with Sarah Bernhardt – begging her most incompetent companion to criticise her French accent.
    There was constant intercourse between Young Street and North End Road. If we were not taken to The Grange my grandfather was sure to come round after tea when it was too dark to paint. When he came I always asked him to draw pictures, for which purpose a book of blank drawing paper of the very best kind was kept at Young Street. In it he drew pictures for me, each with an enchanting title. Many of the names were invented and written down before he could make the drawings, so that we shall never know now what the Fen Ganger was like, or Heath Horrors, or the Mist Walker.
    My first demand, when I was nineteen months old, had been for a picture of my tiger, a preposterous stuffed beast to which I was devotedly attached. It had no merit from an artist’s point of view, but my grandfather loved me so much that he did anything Iasked. Accordingly he sat down with grave intent face and drew the animal with all the skill he could, putting it into a romantic landscape with a rising sun. But I was not allowed to choose a subject again, only to say which of the entrancing titles I would like him to use. The tiger was followed by a farm with a duck pond, and a great barge full of babies sailing over a neatly rippled sea. Then came a series of schools for children and animals, culminating in a Seminary for More Advanced Dragon Babies with doors leading to the Hisstry and Jogruffy schools. A page called The North Sea shows the track of some great unknown beast going down to a cold stormy sea where a darkened sun rests on the horizon under lowering clouds. The Burning Mountain is a rugged hill crowned with a fierce upward rush of flame. Smaller fires are licking out of clefts in the hillside, a little city lies at the foot, and far away on the heaving sea a ship is being tossed to and fro. Volcanoes, especially Vesuvius, were a favourite subject, and he gave me two little early nineteenth-century volumes on Pompeii and Herculaneum, ‘the cities of the burning plain’. Flames he always loved to draw. With a few lines of his pencil he gave the rapid rhythmic onrush of a fire, looking asif it had been arrested in its course and turned to beaten metal.
    A lovely drawing of The Tree that Weeps has a little tree with crooked branches shedding tears from every leaf. The tears run into streams shaped like the branches of the tree, and these meet in a swift flowing river shaped like the trunk, so that the tree is imaged in its own tears. These pictures were mostly drawn after tea on winter evenings. My grandfather sat at the dining-room table with the book in front of him while the little girl made her choice among the ravishing titles that he had written on the blank pages. Best of all I remember the Mirk Strider, whom he drew at my wish one evening. I sat close up to him, watching the horror grow. With the very soft pencil that he used for this drawing he adumbrated a shadowy figure of unearthly size, clawing hands outstretched in front, hair flying backwards in the wind of its onward course, taking hills and valleys in its seven-leagued stride, a starless night overshadowing whatever evil it was bent upon.
    Even if I could not remember my grandfather at all, I should have proof enough of his adoring love forme in the photographs that were taken by Mr Stiles, our Kensington photographer, when I was two and a half years old. Mr Stiles lived on the north side of the High Street, in a little backwater long since destroyed. To reach it you went under an archway next to Coles the carriage builder in whose shop a life-size model of a dapple grey horse dazzled the young beholder’s eye. His studio, a top-floor room with a skylight,