THEIR FIRST ENCOUNTER was in the autumn of 1892. My mother was going over to Paris to stay with some friends and was being seen off at Victoria Station by her mother, Aunt Bunny, and Charles Santon the singer. Upon the platform also, sauntering up and down, was a tall, handsome, elegantly tailored young man, of military bearing, with a fine fair mustache and a mourning band round one arm, who regarded my mother with noticeable attention. Certainly she was attractive, pretty, petite, and vivacious, and, according to my aunt, by no means unaware of the existence of young men. The handsome gentleman was also bound for the Continent, but first class; my mother, whose family had fallen upon hard times, was travelling third—only, added my aunt drily, because there was no fourth.
This is her version of the original encounter which was later to be of such consequence to myself; my mother modestly preferred to ignore Victoria Station. She staged the first moment of mutual awareness a trifle more romantically, in mid-Channel, when she was looking about for a steward to bring her a dry biscuit and some lemon as a preventive of sea-sickness. The sea was calm, and if my mother was failing to attract the attention of a steward, she was not failing, as she “gradually noticed,” to attract that of a handsome, soldierly young man, with a fine fair mustache, who was pacing the deck before her and casting in her direction glances of unmistakable interest. At length he was emboldened to approach her, and addressed her in so chivalrous a manner that it was impossible to take offence, his actual words, according to my mother, being “I see you are in difficulties. If I can be of any assistance, pray command me.”
Such a gentlemanly speech (which, in years to come, my mother delighted to recount at dinner parties, in sentimental and dramatic tones, while my father looked selfconsciously down his nose) was reassuring, he was sent for the biscuit and lemon and permitted to escort her on to Paris, which was his own destination. How the difference in their classes was adjusted my mother could not recollect, but it remained in her memory that he possessed an exceedingly beautiful travelling-rug which he solicitously wrapped about her, for the air in the Channel had been fresh. During the journey she learnt that his name was Alfred Roger Ackerley, that he was twenty-nine, a year older than herself, that he was lately bereaved of his wife, a Swiss girl who had died only a few months previously after scarcely two years of married life, and that the object of his journey to Paris was to visit his in-laws, who lived there. He seemed much affected by his loss; my mother used to say in later years, “He came to me a broken man,” and I think it may have been for him a severe blow, for he rarely spoke to us about that period of his life or mentioned his first wife’s name, which was Louise Burckhardt. She was a friend of Sargent’s, and a portrait of her by him, “The Lady with the Rose,” is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. It seems unlikely therefore that my father fell in love with my mother so soon after his bereavement, but he clearly found her attractive—and indeed, from her photographs at that time and her appearance and character as I remember her, she must have been a charmer. He called upon her at her friend’s house several times, leaving cards and flowers, for she was always out, and, without having found her again, sent more flowers to await her at the train by which he learnt she was leaving at the conclusion of her visit.
Their second meeting took place in the early summer of the following year, again upon water, this time the fashionable reaches of the river Thames. My mother was staying at Chertsey with her mother, Aunt Bunny, and Bunny’s first ne’er-do-well husband, Randolph Payne, and they were all boating one day through Shepperton, Bunny at the oars, when a voice hailed them from a passing punt. Who should it be but Alfred Roger Ackerley, who was living, it appeared, a comfortable bachelor’s life in a house in Addlestone. To describe this second meeting thus, as my mother used to describe it, invested it with the romance of happy coincidence; actually they had been in correspondence in the interval and young Mr. Ackerley had already paid luckless calls and left cards upon her in her Chertsey lodgings. My mother had by now quite an accumulation of his cards and was “overcome by confusion,” she said, when he discovered that she had preserved them all.
Calls were exchanged and Bunny was taken one day to tea with him at the Addlestone house, a visit which, according to her, was not an unqualified success, for their host paid her (whom he had nicknamed “the Boy” because of her prowess with the sculls and the punt pole and her general independence of spirit) rather more attention than my mother liked and recriminations between the two young ladies ensued during their homeward journey. But my mother need not have upset herself. She was not to be neglected. Eighteen months later, in the spring of 1895, she was pregnant and my father was declining to marry her. The reason he gave was indeed substantial; he was receiving a princely allowance of £2000 a year from his in-laws, Mr. and Mrs. Burckhardt, who regarded him more as a son than a son-in-law, and this allowance, which was to be perpetuated in Mr. Burckhardt’s will, might well cease with his re-marriage. However, this excuse, though weighty at the time, was scarcely valid for a quarter of a century, the less so since Mr. Burckhardt died suddenly and intestate at the end of this very year, so that my father’s expectations came to nothing—nor apparently did it satisfy Aunt Bunny. She, indeed, was in a position to take of my father’s conduct and character a more objective view than was available to my mother, for she had, with regard to him, inside information, confidentially supplied by my Uncle Randolph, confidentially supplied to him by my father, with whom he had become pally, that at this same period my father was amusing himself with other women elsewhere: there was a certain Mrs. Carlisle, who lived vaguely, but appropriately, “in the North,” and he had also informed Randolph that two of the barmaids at the Chertsey Bridge Hotel were “all right.”