Racksole

“ That afternoon Racksole went with Felix Babylon first to a firm of solicitors in the City, and then to a stockbroker, in order to carry out the practical details of the purchase of the hotel.
‘I mean to settle in England,’ said Racksole, as they were coming back. ‘It is the only country—’ and he stopped.
‘The only country?’
‘The only country where you can invest money and spend money with a feeling of security. In the United States there is nothing worth spending money on, nothing to buy. ”

“ He said to himself that here, precisely where no one would have expected to find one, was an honest man.
‘Good day,’ said Racksole briefly. ‘To what do I owe the pleasure—’
‘I expect your time is limited,’ answered Sampson Levi. ‘Anyhow, mine is, and so I’ll come straight to the point, Mr Racksole. I’m a plain man. I don’t pretend to be a gentleman or any nonsense of that kind. I’m a stockbroker, that’s what I am, and I don’t care who knows it. The other night I had a ball in this hotel. ”

“ Ten pounds apiece if we overtake him!’
‘Lay down to it now, boys!’ said Hazell, and the heavy Customs boat shot out in pursuit.
‘This is going to be a lark,’ Racksole remarked.
‘Depends on what you call a lark,’ said Hazell; ‘it’s not much of a lark tearing down midstream like this in a fog. You never know when you mayn’t be in kingdom come with all these barges knocking around. ”

“ Over everything brooded an air of mystery—a spirit and feeling of strangeness, remoteness, and the inexplicable. As the broad flat little boat bobbed its way under the shadow of enormous hulks, beneath stretched hawsers, and past buoys covered with green slime, Racksole could scarcely believe that he was in the very heart of London—the most prosaic city in the world. He had a queer idea that almost anything might happen in this seeming waste of waters at this weird hour of ten o’clock. ”

“ The family of the Rackrents is, I am proud to say, one of the most ancient in the kingdom. Everybody knows this is not the old family name, which was O'Shaughlin, related to the kings of Ireland—but that was before my time. My grandfather was driver to the great Sir Patrick O'Shaughlin, and I heard him, when I was a boy, telling how the Castle Rackrent estate came to Sir Patrick; Sir Tallyhoo Rackrent was cousin-german to him, and had a fine estate of his own, only never a gate upon it, it being his maxim that a car was the best gate. Poor gentleman! ”

“ I had always had the impression, from the intimate inside knowledge of Fairy-land which his work betrayed, that Arthur Rackham was a kind of wizard: that he only pretended to call himself Arthur Rackham, and hobgoblins really hailed him by some more mystic name on stormy nights on Hanmpstead Heath, which is an easy broomstick ride from a certain little house in Chalcot Gardens. Acquaintance has not entirely allayed the suspicion. Arthur Rackham looks rather like a wizard—a wizard of the unmalicious order, who dabbles in sly, freakish, and delightful arts. ”

“ Edyth Starkie, with a smooth pink-and-white complexion, unlined to the end of her life, with wide-open Irish blue eyes ever full of mischief, her hair snow-white from an early age, was the antithesis of Arthur Rackham in character. She had a charm which made everybody like her and many people love her. If she was not conventionally beautiful, she gave the impression of beauty. ”

“ The question of summer plans arose: the Villalongas wanted all the Breckenridges in their Canadian camp for as much as possible of July and August. Clarence regarded the project with the embittered eye of utter boredom, Billy was far from enthusiastic, Rachael made no comment. She stood, like a diver, ready for the chilling plunge from which she might never rise, yet, after which, there was one glorious chance: she might find herself swimming strongly to freedom. ”

“ Diving into a pile of surviving ‘fan’ letters we find one from Rochester, New York, written in the late nineteen-twenties, which commences ‘My dear Sir Arthur’, and another containing the apology: ‘Everybody here in New York calls you “Sir Arthur”, and that explains why I began my letter that way.’ (A Melbourne correspondent had already asked: “How shall I begin? Not Mr Rackham surely! It doesn’t sound a bit like the artist spirit who creates those wonderful fairy people. ...’) A letter from Texas came from ‘a co-ed with red hair and artistic appreciations’. ”

“ Rackby drew back. "Why should I dance?" he muttered.
He was town clerk as well as harbor master—a scholarly man with visionary, pale eyes, and a great solitary, as Peter knew.
"Why? I'll tell you why," said Peter. "To bring joy to Caddie Sill's heart, if nothing more. The girl would throw all the rest of us in a heap tomorrow for a firm hold of you, Rackby."
He winked at Zinie Shadd, who swayed on his heels soberly.
Rackby turned his eyes toward the black mound of Meteor, which lay like a shaggy stone Cerberus at the harbor's mouth. ”

“ One by one, like startled shadows, its denizens flitted thence, and left Rackham alone with Susan.
They hung over the stairs, buzzing like bees in the semi-darkness, thrilled by an interest that was vaguely heightened by alarm. At intervals they hushed each other into silence, listening with bated breath lest anything might transpire, and watching with a kind of fascination the crack of light that issued from the door of the sitting room. Only Miss Robinson herself went whispering, whispering on.
"Poor little girl!" said Rackham. ”

“ There was a measure of artistic talent in the Harris family. James’s brother Henry was a lithographer, and Henry’s son Augustus became a drawing master at Maidstone.
Alfred Thomas Rackham, the father of Arthur Rackham, was born on 11th July 1829, in the house in Baalzephon Street, Bermondsey, and was christened at old Bermondsey Church. It was then a relatively prosperous neighbourhood, for a number of wealthy men lived in Bermondsey at their business premises. ”

“ Now very soon after she left the Rakshas’ house, the young Rakshas came home, and he was very fierce and terrible to look at. At once his mother began to scold at him.
“Why are you so late?” she cried. “A young maiden has been here, a fine and dainty morsel, all pink and white, and as tender as a bird, and you might have had her for your supper if only you had returned earlier, in time to catch her.”
When the Rakshas heard this, his eyes grew red as fire, and he gnashed his teeth together with rage. ”

“ A casual visitor’s impressions of a stranger will usually bring qualifications or contradictions from those who have known him more intimately – we have seen, for example, that Rackham’s isolation, a synonym perhaps for his artistic integrity, was consistent with a strong loyalty and devotion to his family and friends. Yet Mr Ward is not the only chance observer of Arthur Rackham who has retained a similar impression of him. The artist had indeed lived for many years in a world of fantasy that was consistently and recognizably his own. ”

“ To have visited the United States and made the acquaintance of so many hitherto unknown admirers remained a lasting source of pleasure to Rackham. Henceforth he often had the American market in mind, as with The Lonesomest Doll by Abbie Farwell Brown (1928) , which was published only in America, and Washington Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (1928) . Many of the drawings for these two books found their way into the collection of Columbia University, New York. In the England of jazz and Noel Coward the whimsical and fantastic had grown increasingly out of fashion. ”

“ This tallied with Mr Ward’s general impression of Rackham on that visit to Limpsfield:
‘I have the recollection of a smallish, ageing, almost wizened person, with a bald domed forehead and a very wide and elfish grin: a gnome, perhaps, though an entirely benevolent one. But there was more to the impression than that: there was something earthy and even elemental about him. ... Nor would it be wholly absurd to say that he resembled one of his own grotesquely poetical trees with (as like as not) faces, for which his own face might have served as the
model. ”

“ Rackham enjoyed poking fun at himself – a sure sign of a healthy state of mind. When the American George Macy called on Rackham in the summer of 1936 at his ivy-covered, red-roofed cottage studio off Fitzroy Road, he, too, found him ‘looking like a character out of one of his own drawings’. ‘In the last years of his life, when I knew him,’ wrote Macy in The Horn Book (May–June 1940) , ‘his head seemed always cocked to one side, bright and eager and smiling and cheerful ”

“ His first crude published drawings had appeared in Scraps of 4th October 1884, illustrating the thesis: ‘Mothers in Ceylon have a curious way of preventing their children from eating too much. A fine thread is tied round the child before it commences its meal, and when the thread breaks, the child is considered to have had enough.’ Rackham demonstrated this with the minimum of subtlety. ”

“ Yet still the smell of human flesh bewildered the Rakkhashis. They passed it over, however, and the time went by in friendly entertainment. One day when their hosts had gone out in search of food, Lalkamal with his brother went to a well at the back of the house, dived under it, and brought up with him a casket containing two hornets, in one of which the lives of all the Rakkhashis were lodged. The other had in it the life of the Rakkhashi who was Lalkamal's mother. When each of the brothers took out a hornet, the giants, who had gone out, felt themselves uneasy and hastened home ”

“ Billy had never doubted her stepmother's judgment; like all of the new Mrs. Breckenridge's friends, she was deeply, dumbly impressed with that lady's amazing efficiency. She had been a spoiled and discontented little rowdy. She became an entirely self-satisfied little gentlewoman. Clarence, jealously watching her progress, knew that Rachael was doing for his daughter far more than he could ever do himself.
But Rachael, if she had expected reward, reaped none. Her husband was a supremely selfish man, and his daughter inherited his sublime ability to protect his own pleasure at any cost. ”

“ Nelly Raquet was such a piquant little beauty, though not quite thirteen, she was small for her age, but beautifully formed, her feet, legs and bottom, were as exquisitely shaped as any Epicurean could wish to feast his eyes upon, whilst her face, which he could see perfectly, although it was turned away from Frank, had its beauty heightened by the crimson blushes of shame by which it was suffused, at being so humiliated before a gentleman ”

“ To live here must vulgarise an artist ... I could easily run off & dump my bags & self on the first ship to Europe. ... Bang bang bang bash. That man will bust that drum if no one stops him.’
Later letters were more cheerful. Rackham at sixty was obviously unable to come to terms with New York, but he found much to enjoy there. ‘Everyone is excessively kind,’ he wrote; ‘Everyone was brought up on my work – if young enough – or brought up their families on it if old enough.’ He soon had the run of six New York clubs, and was inundated with invitations. ”

“ When they met downtown for dinner there was always the little ceremony of finding the florist, and all the operas this winter were mingled for Rachael with the most exquisite fragrance in the world.
These days were perfect. It was only when the outside world entered their paradise that anything less than perfect happiness entered, too. Rachael's old friends--Judy Moran, Elinor, and the Villalongas--said, and said with truth, that she had changed. She had not tried to change, but it was hard for her to get the old point of view now, to laugh at the old jokes, to listen to the old gossip. ”

“ Rackby, who had fallen into a deep sleep, lying northeast and southwest, was awakened by a hand smiting his door in, and a wailing outside of the Old Roke busy with his agonies. In a second his room was full of crowding seamen, at their head Peter Loud, bearing in his arms the dripping form of Caddie Sills. He laid her gently on the couch.
"Where did you break up?" whispered Rackby. He trembled like a leaf.
"Pull-an'-be-Damned," said Deep-water Peter. "The Cap'n's gone. He didn't come away. Men can say what they like of Sam Dreed; he wouldn't come into the boat. I'll tell all the world that." ”

“ Rackham provided admirable new frontispieces for both books and worked on many of the old colour plates. The 1907 Ingoldsby, in its vellum-bound limited edition, is valued by collectors, but the book as a whole lacks consistency of vision. Authentic Rackham is to be found in the frontispiece and occasionally elsewhere, but might seem to have been imposed on a medley borrowed from Beardsley, Hugh Thomson and the monkish slapstick of John Hassall. By 1907 Rackham had not only outdistanced his own earlier self but had also outgrown the coarse humours of Barham. ”

“ So it must be warm there."
"I wish I could go in the little house," sighed Racky.
"Why don't you?" asked the tree. "I am glad to have you here, under me, but I cannot help sifting snow on you when the wind blows. And it is too breezy for one who is catching cold. The little old woman is kind. I am sure she will let you come in her house."
"Then I am going there, thank you," said Racky, who was now shivering so that he almost shook Grandma's glasses out from between the cushions. "How can I find the little house?" ”

“ Alyn Williams, President of the Royal Society of Miniature Painters, and his American wife were Rackham’s companions on the voyage in the liner Republic in early November. ‘Mrs Williams, thank heaven, had never heard of me before,’ Rackham told his wife. In the ship’s gymnasium Rackham and Williams went through a series of exercises designed to make Rackham fatter and Williams thinner. ”