Читать книгу The Country of Our Dreams - Mary O'Connell - Страница 19

Now are you men, or are you kine, ye tillers of the soil?

Would you be free, or evermore the rich man’s cattle toil?

The serpent’s curse upon you lies – ye writhe within the dust,

Ye fill your mouths with beggars’ swill, ye grovel for a crust.

But God is on the peasant’s side, the God that loves the poor;

His angels stand with flaming swords on every mount and moor.

Oh!, by the God who made us all – the seigneur and the serf –

Rise up! And swear, this day to hold your own green Irish turf;

Rise up! And plant your feet as men, where now you crawl as slaves,

And make your harvest-fields your camps, or make of them your graves.

Hold the Harvest! Fanny Parnell – 1879

New York, 29 July 1880

When Davitt came, with his light hurried step, into the foyer of the New York Hotel in Park St, Fanny stood back from the rush to greet him. She let the rest of the Famine Relief Committee surround him, watched them bow and bob, gather and swirl. Even without his marked affliction, he looked every inch the part – the land agitator, the feared and fearless scourge of landlordism. Tall and thin, his hair beginning to recede, but his beard was dark and full, his brown eyes of striking intensity under a prominent brow. The phrase rose in her mind. ‘yon Cassius has a lean and hungry look; he thinks too much; such men are dangerous.’ Caesar would have been right to be afraid of this Cassius.

Her sister Anna had spent a lot of time with Michael Davitt since he had come to New York in May, helping him organise the new American Land League offices at Washington Square. Anna had reported back to Fanny, who was busy with their mother and her family’s estate in New Jersey, that it was a great pleasure to work with a man so intent on accurate records, and most praiseworthy of all, on acknowledging receipt of funds. In this respect he was not like their brother Charlie at all.

Davitt was in fact an unexpected delight to work with. Unlike all the other men sent over so far, he listened to other people’s ideas, he recalled facts and figures as readily as he did faces, and he grasped rapidly what had to be done on a local level. Anna had marvelled at him. Davitt was not just systematic and orderly in his accounts-keeping, he even remembered where he put things.

He was busy planning more tours and lectures, travelling across the country – criss-crossing it, raising awareness and funds and the morale of the Irish in America. ‘You want to be honoured among the elements that constitute this great nation,’ he had said to the crowds in halls and city parks who gathered to hear him, ‘you want to be regarded with the respect due you, so aid us in Ireland to remove the stain of degradation from your birth.’

Now Anna was bringing Davitt over to her, both of them smiling, and Fanny came out from behind her hiding place of the great armchair, suddenly shy. It was always easier to observe than to connect.

The others watched with interest: the celebrated Irish agitator meeting the celebrated Irish poetess. Michael Davitt. Fanny Parnell. A moment for the history books.

‘Your Hold the Harvest,’ Davitt said immediately, grasping Fanny’s outstretched hand in his strong left hand, ‘rings throughout Ireland. It is the Marseillaise of our people ’ he said, ‘and I am so honoured finally to meet its author.’

Fanny blushed. From Anna’s description she had begun to think of Michael Davitt as a tidy clerk, an earnest, obedient revolutionary, but he was almost overpowering in person. She stammered something in response, about being glad to do some good with her little ‘varses’.

‘Ireland has always been remarkably blessed in her poets,’ he continued warmly. ‘And you, Miss Parnell, are one of our greatest blessings.’

Fanny flushed deeper, cast her eyes down a little. Really, she didn’t quite know what to do with him. It just showed how brave – or blind – dear Anna was.

‘My dear sister Anna has been singing your praises.’ she said, trying to recover some dignity. ‘She has met her match in organization, we think.’

‘Your sister far outpaces me in organization and systems. I have learned much from her.’ Davitt said, smiling back and down at Anna, as if to soften any unintended sisterly blow.

Fanny was immediately sorry for her teasing. Sorry for her poor conversational skills. Really she was no good in the public realm, she should stay at home in Bordentown with their mother. Then she recalled that Davitt’s own mother had only very recently died, somewhere in upstate New York. He had vanished for a week, then come back to the work. Anna had been concerned for him.

‘You have had a terrible time, Mr Davitt’, she said, ‘but you still do the work of Ireland.’

He smiled, but said nothing. As if waiting for some real poetry, real pearls of wisdom to drop from her lips. Really her ‘varses’ were becoming a nuisance, a barrier. ‘We hear that the harvest in Ireland will be a good one this year,’ she said, to get his attention off her poetry.

‘Yes, thank God’ he nodded. ‘The best in at least a decade.’

‘So, the Famine is averted.’

‘The landless labourers of Ireland are always starving,’ Davitt reminded her gently, ‘even when the bigger tenant farmers move into safer waters.’ Fanny saw how he was a man who darted and shimmered, both moth and flame. ‘One good harvest does not make a just world. Famine in Ireland can be created and recreated at any time. It has always been a man made catastrophe. ’

‘So you will hold the harvest anyway?’

‘Yes, it is our intention’ he said, looking at her intently, ‘that this year’s harvest will remain with the people.’

She nodded. ‘That seems reasonable. The people will need time to recover.’

‘It is quite reasonable, and reasonable people everywhere will hold it so, for Irish farmers to feed themselves and their children first, and keep seed potatoes for next year. They can sell what they need for renewal of tools and shelter and buy warm clothes for the winter, and keep some aside for the education of their children.’ He smiled again, almost mischievously. ‘I doubt very much there’ll be any funds left over for the landlord.’

‘But the landlords will seize the harvest, won’t they?’ As if Davitt of all people needed to be told. ‘Even the half-decent ones, who didn’t want to see the people die. Even they will claim a good harvest as their rightful rent arrears.’

He nodded. Fanny understood all that he was not saying. It was no longer famine relief. It was now a war for the land.

‘In which case you will still require funds to resist the evictions.’

‘And to support the prisoners and their families,’ he said, softly.

‘So you need even more help from us over here,’ she said, ‘and not less.’

‘Yes,’ he said, smiling, including her and Anna and the entire group of young famine activists standing around them. ‘We will need your American help more than ever.’

They all laughed and clapped, as if he had given them something rather than asked them for more.

‘Then I would like to start a women’s organisation,’ Fanny said suddenly, seizing the opportunity, most unexpectedly arrived right here and now. She had always been the shyest girl and the boldest girl – her family had never quite worked it out. ‘I want us to form a Ladies Land League.’

Davitt wasn’t horrified, or shocked, or ready to laugh. Anna had said he could listen. Fanny saw he was listening now, and with great attention.

‘We would still fund-raise,’ she said to reassure him, if he needed it, ‘but not for charity anymore. It would be for real change. And we would also raise awareness, to work against all the lies in the British press. We would start here in New York, where Anna and I have many contacts,’ Fanny looked over at Anna, who was nodding vigorously. ‘But eventually women could be organised in various cities across this country, across all the Irish dominions.’

‘You might even goad the men on to greater deeds.’ Davitt laughed, his brown eyes warm and alight. ‘Although some of the others may not like it,’ he said, coming down a little, ‘the idea of women so active in the world.’

‘But you would support us.’

‘Yes, of course,’ he nodded, ‘but you see I am not from the gentleman class.’ He said this quietly, but with no shame. ‘With my people, the farming people of Mayo, and the working people of Lancashire, we don’t like to waste women’s strengths and energies. We need them too much to survive.’

‘Whereas if the Irish landlords deserve to be extinguished for any one thing,’ Anna spoke up with some energy, ‘it is for their treatment of their own women.’

Davitt heard the rage. He understood it. He knew from Anna that each of the three Parnell sons had got a fine house and lands in their father’s will – the five daughters nothing. They were living on the charity of their brothers and their mother’s American family. In a way Anna and Fanny Parnell were as poor as he was.

‘And now, with this idea of yours, Miss Parnell,’ he said, bowing in a theatrical manner to Fanny, ‘when we have united the manhood and the beauty of Ireland, surely we will be both invincible and irresistible.’ Around him people laughed and applauded some more.

It was only then that Fanny saw, underneath all the gallantry and the force of his being, that Davitt was struggling against something deep. The flickering and shimmering may not have been a character trait after all, but the presence of grief. It was perhaps that force which had threatened to overpower her at the beginning.

Fearing she was being clumsy again, she asked quietly, ‘Are you unwell Mr Davitt?’

He looked a little startled.

‘I am often unwell myself,’ she said, apologetically, to soften her observation. ‘It makes me quite sensitive to others. Your mother -’

‘Yes I am thinking of my mother,’ he admitted. ‘She would have loved your idea. A women’s political organisation. And not just national, but international! And now she cannot join you.’ His voice broke just a little.

‘Come and sit down and tell me about her,’ Fanny said, drawing him away, nodding silent instructions to the others to leave them alone. Anna took the others back to sit in the hotel foyer while Davitt, strangely unresisting, came with Fanny to her quiet corner.

He sat down beside her on a plush blue couch, pushing the cushions aside, as if oblivious to their woven finery. He stroked distractedly at his beard. She saw how it was flecked with gray.

‘Two years ago, when I was released from prison, I promised my mother I would take her back to Ireland, to see her old places again,’ he said, moving straight into his need, ‘and I did not. I put the cause of Ireland first. What sort of a son was I, when she had suffered so much already for me.’ He stopped speaking. There were tears in his darkened eyes.

Fanny felt truly honoured to be in the presence of a man’s grief, honoured and thrilled, but yet a little surprised. She had expected Michael Davitt to be tougher, somehow. But then people expected her to be more serious, or wiser. Like a ‘real’ poetess. What Anna had not said, was that the famous land agitator was human.

‘You know my mother got us out of the workhouse,’ he said.

Fanny drew in her breath but he shook his head against her sympathy. ‘We were one family amongst thousands, Miss Parnell. I tell this story not for your pity but to honour my mother with you today.’

He told how after being evicted from their destroyed home, his parents, being utterly without hope, had brought their children to the local workhouse – some miles away. It took them over four hours to walk that terrible grieving road.

Davitt told her that his father felt such shame about this destination that he never once afterwards referred to it. His father was a shanachie, a storyteller, in both the languages, and he could read and write in both of them too. Yet he never once spoke or wrote of that day, in public or in private, neither in Irish nor in English.

‘But my mother felt,’ Davitt said, ‘and I believe rightly, that there was no shame in our family having reached the zero of adversity. She loved truth, my mother, and she taught me to love it too.’ He paused for a while. Fanny sat, breathing with him. She frowned at anyone coming close. But Davitt saw nothing. He had gone back to Swinford Workhouse.

‘And so we came to that dreadful place, with its dark walls, its tiny slits of windows. You could feel its cold cruelty just from standing outside on the road. When we finally got inside, the authorities said I was too old to stay with my mother and sisters and must go to the men’s quarters. I was ready to do what was necessary. I was practically a man. I was four years old.’ He smiled, and squared his shoulders, in mimicry of his boyish self. Fanny smiled with him.

‘And they were about to take me away, when my mother grabbed hold of me. She said she would die by the roadside rather than submit to such an unnatural condition, a mother being separated from her children, and she marched us all then and there out of that workhouse.’ He grinned, and Fanny laughed, and brought her hands together in a clap.

‘And as you can see, Miss Parnell, we did not die by the roadside. My mother entreated another family to squeeze us in on their cart, and we all took the road to Dublin – with their poor old donkey trying to make a break for it every now and then.’ He was smiling now. ‘I suppose there were too many of us in that old cart. The poor beast was affronted. But we children made a joke out of it, we said that the old mule was running for Ireland.’ He laughed softly at the memory.

‘And from Dublin we sailed to England. Got off at Liverpool. Both those cities were astounding to us. My father had been to England for work, but we children had never seen so many people in one place. And then we all walked, that other family and ours, we walked for about two days to Lancashire, because that was where the work was. My parents paid that kind family back as soon as they could. Though my mother had no English, she hawked fruit in the streets of Haslingden in order to do so.’ He looked up and smiled at her. ‘Now you know, Miss Parnell, why I have no difficulties in accepting a woman’s helping hand.’

Fanny thought of her own errant mother. ‘Your mother sounds like she was a wonderful woman.’

Davitt nodded. ‘She never lost hope in God or confidence in her ability to meet misfortune. She never allowed herself to be conquered.’ He spoke with a great pride in his voice. ‘She met every reverse and beat down despair, even in the darkest hours. After my father died, while I was in prison in England, I made her go to America, to be out of the way, safe. I told her that one day I would take her back to Ireland. I promised her that. And now she lies here forever – here in this foreign soil. Far away from her own people. Far from Mayo.’

Fanny saw he had slumped back into his terrible guilt. ‘But you saw her, Michael,’ she said, reaching over and laying her hand on his arm, quite unable to use his surname now, ‘you saw her before she died, and what’s more, she saw you!’

‘It was not enough’ he said, shaking his head.

‘For any mother, it would be enough.’ Fanny spoke with authority. ‘To see her son so fine, so powerful, so useful. Michael Davitt, you are the hope of millions.’

‘It was not enough’ he said, but more quietly.

And Fanny thought she might have given him something of comfort.