Читать книгу All That Swagger - Miles Franklin - Страница 3

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Memory recaptures a song or two echoing wistfully through the generations of Delacy in the voice of old Fearless Danny. He was wont to rune to himself as he sat alone, thrust aside by his sons as childish, his eyes glazed with absence—that retreat of the aged when time has wrung the colours from the present and left the rose and green only on the distant fields of youth.

"Oh, moi! Oh, moi!" he would ejaculate, conversing to himself. Rarely was there an understanding listener. When there was, he would gaze backward into what long ago had been the future, and belatedly indulge in nostalgia. He would linger on the picture of his mother taking her farewell of him, and his father lacking the courage to see young Danny being picked up by the coach that was to bear him away for ever.

The wild Murrumbidgee sinking into the bunyip hole, and tumbling therefrom into Delacy's Crossing, would vanish, the Shannon take its place, graciously traversing its ancient plain by Limerick, the beauteous city. The road ran by Sarsfield Bridge to old Ennis in County Clare, to the ruined Abbey where the boys played, and to Clare Castle. The day would be in May with the whinchats merry in the furze, the larks high in the air, such a day as the Isle of Destiny knows, a cajoling day, a day to caress the heart of a youth to water in the presence of a maid, and to turn a maid's heart to a man; and the era was a hundred years from now, for young Daniel Brian Robert M. Delacy, born in the year of Waterloo, was stretching towards eighteen.

His home was on the rise by Ennis that looks north-east to the Slieve Aughty Mountains, and north-west to the Aran Isles and the Atlantic, which had expatriated or swallowed entirely so many Clare and Galway lads. He stood in the road, not that he was at that date given to meditation, but the ancient legendary of the scene, the acknowledged presence of the fairies in the glens and raths, was as saturating to his inner consciousness as the sun to his outer. The sunshine spread a benediction full away to Kilrush and Liscannor Bay, to Kilkee and Killaloe, to lilting Kildare and hilarious Kilkenny and Tipperary, to Ennistymon and Crusheen, and Rathdrum and Carrickmore, to Enniskillen, and Trillick and Letterkenny and Ballysodare, and Tara, and Tralee, and Mallow, and Bantry, and Bandon. The darling loves and doves of names that swell in the heart of Erin's inheritor, until he is thrappled! A presence grown palpable through centuries of articulate myth and poesy had nurtured young Delacy's spirit. He loved the open view of the thatched white cabins on the treeless hillsides with the sociable roads across them. Roads excited him, packed as they were with history, glamorous with fable, with chivalry and romance and liberation in the way they ran through the winds and rains of all the seasons of all the generations, a foe to stagnation, a hostage to adventure.

He had a sense of deprivation that none of the green land was his. The only soil he could dig his spade into was the paltry acreage of his father's college, where there were prior rights of a playground for the scholars, and a plot for the goat.

There was a legend that the Delacys had crossed the English Channel with the Conqueror, and the Irish Sea with Strongbow. Whatever, the Delacys had followed clerical pursuits and had never been rooted in the soil as were the families of the reverberating cognomens and Firbolgian descent, whose bones and brains had fertilized the soil and culture of Eire long before culture or agriculture began in Albion. So Gaelic lore and archaeological research would have it; but perhaps only pride, put on its mettle by presumptuous usurpers, could reconstruct so gratifying a prospect from the records of the savage and bloody procedure of all factions in past days. At any rate, among the whole boiling of Delacys was never a Kevin, a Patrick, nor an Aloysius, which showed they had lost their chances in epochs later than the Tuatha de Danaan and Milesian.

Danny's father was principal of a preparatory college for boys. His curriculum was limited, but he transmitted with his canings something invaluable to his third son in his after life in the Antipodes—character unflinching and resourceful. In the dislocation which accompanied Continental military glory and the local agitation against oppression, Schoolmaster Delacy, who was classified with the petty gentry loyal to the Union, could not provide careers for three sons. One in due time would step into his father's shoes, but it is debilitating to camp for an old man's shoes, and no one knows what became of Robert Delacy. No doubt he and the school petered out together. The second son, William, was engulfed by India. It is known that he rose—or sank—to be a major in the army there, but nothing more.

Danny's hunger for land was a crying for the moon in so far as his father could help him. There was, however, an opening to appeal to the lad. Poverty following the Napoleonic wars had driven thousands across the Atlantic. Now the Colony of New South Wales was greedy for settlers. Tales of rosy prospects for free men penetrated to Ennis, though Mrs Delacy suppressed any talk of this.

Danny went often to the Cooleys, of Cooley Hall, over the hill, a name pretentious for the farm, but the Cooleys remembered that they were of one of the ancient and powerful clans. Mrs Cooley was a Francallew. The patronymic, as found in an antique missal, had been written Franc-Alleu, and signified freefield. The first Franc-Alleu had also been a follower of the Bastard of Normandy. Thus the Cooleys and Francallews, as the Delacys, had claims to a gentility characterized by loss of the Gaelic tongue and the acceptance of the decree that Irish nationality was synonymous with treason.

Danny enjoyed walking around with old Cooley, looking at the turnips, discussing the bull in the meadow or the pigs in the sty, and was always ready to help for love of work on the land. Old Cooley thought him an obliging gossoon and sometimes lent him a nag to appear in the hunts. The acuter Honoria had lately opened her husband's eves.

"Helping you, is it! Have ye seen his eyes light on our Johanna?" Pretty Johanna was mistress of the dairy, and could turn the heel of a sock with the best.

"The devil mend him! I'll break the young spalpeen's back."*

[* The aim is merely to indicate the rhythm and poetic and philosophic idiom of' the speech of the Irish characters, not to make a pedantic exhibition of Irish pronunciation word by word. Those acquainted with the deeply-placed voices, and rich unorthodox vowel sounds which distinguish much of Irish-English, despite disclaimers by thaw who adopt the haw-haw, flat-vowelled Public School English, are independent of phonetic reproduction, and to read dialect is a wearying and frequently an impossible exercise to all but those who specialize in linguistics.]

"Father O'Fogarty shall say a special word to her on her duty."

"A Prodestan', and him with nothing to his back—will have to go for a soldier belike."

"He talks more of going to the Antipodes."

"The sooner the better! Kevin O'Gorman with a phroperty near as good as me own, waiting for her to say the word."

"An old widow-man with big children, not to touch the heart of a young girl."

"I'll touch her back with a stout ashplant if she shows anny nonsense."

Thereafter Danny was frigidly met, and found it difficult to see Johanna alone. She confessed to undergoing penances. "Sure, 'twas worth it," she said, tossing her head.

This made Danny feel like a king. He, too, had been taken to task. The unpleasantness suffered by love's young dreamers on opposite sides of a sectarian fence was theirs, though the elders had kindly dispositions and were among the enlightened and less bigoted. There was, too, an endearing story about the Delacys. In bad past days when the land had been parcelled among the usurpers, a Delacy had accepted in name only and permitted the rightful inheritor to occupy. In the recent agitation for Catholic Emancipation, Schoolmaster Delacy had allowed the use of his class-room. These things were not forgotten. Also, Danny's emigration was becoming practical, and both sets of parents looked upon this as a way out of the danger. The Cooleys welcomed it with relief, the Delacys with sorrow, but also as the lesser of two evils.

Danny was taking his head with a precocity and enterprise natural to one who was as Danny was, who did what Danny did when he became known by half a dozen nicknames, all tributes to character and courage. On the intoxicating day of his recollection he was scanning the landscape for a handkerchief on a gorse bush at the back of Cooley's barn. On that day old Cooley went to market, and Danny had something to read to his Johanna.

Scarcely waiting to take precautions against discovery, he pulled a paper from his shirt and cried: "Johanna, Mavourneen! Listen to this. I've got it all laid out in me moind."

Johanna had rather he noted her dainty shoes and trim kirtle. What satisfaction was there in virtue without opportunity to win its spurs? Kevin O'Gorman—nasty widow-man of the advanced age of thirty-five—was over-ready to test her, but she resisted his attempts with loathing, while she doubted that Danny could be provoked out of his respect for women by any tactics possible to an inviolable maiden.

Danny liked to read. He had more facility than Johanna, the victim of an inferior governess. "Out there, sure there are new developments at every turning of the moon. Listen, will you?—"

"The short space of little more than four decades has converted the horrid and trackless wilderness—the transient hunting field of some migratory tribe of naked and unidead savages—into the busy mart of civilized and enlightened intercourse where there is yearly exported to the mother-country produce of many kinds, and where the tastes, the pursuits, the comforts, and even elegancies of English Society, are valued and enjoyed to a far more substantial extent than in many of the large towns of Great Britain itself."

"It reads like a grand story," commented Johanna.

"'Tis actual fact. There are towns like Limerick, and fine establishments like your aunt's already there."

"Can that be true?" exclaimed Johanna, her eyes dancing with excitement. "I'm wanting to hear of the elegancies."

"True, why true! You can depend on the printed word as if 'twas from the book of Ballymote. Listen to their aims:"

"To induce respectable and virtuous families among the industrious ranks of society at home, to transfer their capital and labour from an arena where the whirl of competition stands formidably in the way of successful exertion, to a field where not competency alone, but certain fortune can hardly fail to reward the efforts of careful, persevering and honourable toil."

"Certain fortune! A man would be driving his carriage, with high-steppers like the Thomonds', before you could turn round."

"Ah, %mould take too long!" said Johanna, dubiously. "Me Aunt Della had a letter that came from Shamus O'Tooley, who wint out after the rebellion, and it was full of terrible hardships, and convicts, and nothing to eat. I saw it meself. 'Tis kept in the old book."

"Och! Johanna, I have trouble getting things into your head, and then they come out again. The rebellion was a generation ago, and sure, they were rebels and convicts."

"They were noble heroes foighting for freedom."

"Maybe they were, too, but they were treated as felons and transported. 'Tis all dealt with here. It says that Sydney Cove was a repository of national crime, a vast territorial jail inhabited only by felons and their overseers. 'Even the Governors themselves scarcely exceeded, either in dignity or importance, anything but superintendents of houses of correction.' Sure, what could that generate but a superfluity of naughtiness? That was at the beginning, but since 1820, 'a tide of respectable immigration has been diluting that deplorable state of affairs at the furthest extremity of the globe'."

"It sounds desperate to be so far away."

"Lo, and behold ye! 'Twould be the centre of the universe if you were there with me, Johanna," said Danny, boldly. "And what put such a notion in ye'r skull?" demanded Johanna with mounting interest.

"'Tis natural, Johanna, and there is no escape from Nature."

"And what do ye mean by me being at the centre of the universe out there? Me father and mother would never emigrate to the furthest ends of the globe, and them with this fine place."

"Then are you going to remain unmarried? That would be difficult for the prettiest girl in County Clare."

"It would that same, with O'Gorman never giving me a moment's peace. Sure, his eye would be on me now, but for his going to market a pig."

"Arrah! O'Gorman, an old grandfather like a gorilla, with grown-up children."

"He could give his wife everything, Danny Delacy."

"He could never give her the advinture of going over the seas to a splendid new country. I could soon give you a carriage and pair like the Marchioness of Sligo. They give a free man 130 or 150 acres, and a few acres to each child, and you can get Government men assigned to labour for you."

"It doesn't sound rational."

"At anny rate, I'm off the day I'm eighteen. Will you wait for me?"

"How long, Danny-boy?"

"Maybe two years. Time is consumed with the voyage."

"I could never hold out two years against O'Gorman's importunities, and me feyther all for getting me set up with such a property. I'm a full year and a trifle more than ye, Danny-boy. 'Tis only a dream."

"Everything is a dream till it is made come true. Come make this true with me, Johanna."

He stood before her, not yet eighteen, and the meagre stature of five-feet-seven-and-a-half-inches wherewith to attack the wilds of the Antipodes in bravura days of convicts and aborigines, before the explorers had finished their surveys. Neither had he the features of the classic heroes; a small pointed nose, a stubborn mouth, now full of ugly teeth, and later to be ambushed in an unmolested beard. But Johanna doted on his eyes, as blue as the heavens on the days when the salmon wait to go up; his hair with the raven sheen and as soft as floss silk; his forehead broad and full; his voice as deep and brave as a stag hound's.

As the Isle of Destiny animated the early Milesians with the expectation of refuge and plenty, so did the Continent of Australia inspire young Danny. His hunger for land and need for action banished indecision. He dreamed of wide acres like those of County Clare, running away for square miles, all his own.

"Moi, oh, moi! What a prospect," he would exclaim.

The district was combed for families with members in New South Wales, and, no matter what the nature of the information, it fanned the enthusiasm of Danny Delacy. The schoolmaster aided the lad, as far as small means allowed, to escape from restricting circumstances to spacious opportunities baited with adventure. The eyes of Mrs Delacy reflected her bereavement. Industrious and cheerful, his ready wit with never a barb in it, arid cowardice and lies unknown to him, Danny was his mother's bright spot in life, her baby. Now he was to go. She would be old and deserted. Her eyes reflected her bereavement.

Otherwise, the situation was eased for neighbours who feared a mixed marriage. Danny confessed that he had asked Johanna to come out to him. Danny not quite eighteen! His parents hid the smiles. The difficulties of communication guaranteed the defeat of young love. The widow Cassidy once had had a paper with a mark beside the title which meant that her daughter was living, but not another line in all the years. It would take more than a year to receive a reply to a letter. A little tact until Danny departed was all that was necessary.

Mrs Cooley was likewise sensible, and also sympathetic. Cooley had been foisted on her as a safe match when her imagination hungered for something more knightly. She was a steady woman and true to her faith; she was firmly for establishing Johanna but, "Be aisy," she would advise. "Danny Delacy is a nice boy, for all he's a heretic. He's as fearless as a game cock."

"It's a bantam he is."

"And with the lively word for young and old, and all his foine book-learning and conversation from his feyther; it is not to be wondered that Johanna is a bit touched; but sure, he's but halffledged—not a pluck of beard on him yet. Whin he's gone, and no sign for a full year, then O'Gorman can be tender, and it's snugly settled she'll be before the second year."

"O'Gorman may be a little coorse in the horn beside young Danny, but he has a tidy phropery, and with twinty years more on her, 'tis glad she'll be that she was saved from a come-day-go-day Prodestan'."

"Maybe, and maybe not," said Honoria, with recollections of herself at Johanna's age. "At anny rate, let her have a rich good-bye to him. Sure, she was crying all night."

"Women can turn the taps on for annything."

"All the same, O'Gorman should not be too pressing for a while. She has been teasing to go stay by me sister Kate Thomond. She need not come back till Danny has gone for good and all."

Cooley left the matter to her. She was his second wife. He had never been able finally to get the better of either; women were unfathomable. New dresses were necessary for the visit to Mrs Thomond, whose husband throve in the law in Limerick, but Honoria pointed out that they would do for the wedding later. Honoria was plotting for Johanna's escape from the widow-man. There would be promising sprigs of the law about the Thomonds. Johanna could seize her chance to mate in accordance with youthful taste as well as in het own religion.

She and Danny had their final meeting in the coomb, reached by the stile out of the barley paddock behind the Cooley Hall barn.

"I could never hold out for two years, Danny-boy," sobbed Johanna. "As soon as ye'r back is turned, they'll put on the clampers. Besides, it's out of sight, out of mind with min. The minute ye don't see me, ye'll forget me."

"Be all the pipers in Paradise!" shouted Danny, his eyes flashing blue flame. "We can put the come-hither on it in a twinkling. Come with me, Johanna, and see to it that I do not change me moind, nor yours neither."

Johanna baulked momentarily. She accused Danny of his youth, which he said would quickly improve. There was the dread obstruction of creed, like black magic, but Danny was inclined to pooh-pooh all religions as superstition. In this issue his lissom young form and fair skin outweighed the swarthy hairy O'Gorman, with a breath which made kisses a persecution; and not for nothing was Johanna given a nose like an Emperor's, and black eyes to go with it, and a mouth as beautiful as those that the Greeks sculptured in marble, and as firmly set.

She lacked Danny's love of the soil and open spaces. Her cravings were for town graces as found with her aunt, Kate Thomond; and the O'Gorman farm had fewer amenities and uglier furniture than Cooley Hall. She could see what was ahead of her in County Clare. She did not share Danny's visions, but was it not in print that the people of Sydney Cove "enjoyed to a far more substantial extent than in many of the large towns of Great Britain itself, the tastes, the pursuits, the comforts and even the elegancies of English Society"? Johanna adored elegancies. Better the hope of elegancies at the "furthest extremity of the globe" than the certainty of inelegancies on O'Gorman's farm. She swallowed the camel of faith in the delusion of brides that husbands can be reformed. The susceptible Danny, who could not meet her eyes without flushing and collapsing into self-consciousness, would be easily managed when she had him all alone. His conversion would reflect glory on her.

That pretty day they sat side by side upon the stile overlooking the ripening barley, their troth plighted, and considering, with the high-heartedness of youth and inexperience, the stratagems necessary.

She packed her box that night and put in her best bits, collected against marriage. Her mother wondered at the weight of it at the time. She was to travel with a Sister from the convent.

"Just supposing that ye'r Danny never comes back?"

"Then I'll be a nun, but I'll never marry O'Gorman. Don't say I have not warned ye."

It was certainly better that she should have her chance at Kate Thomond's fine parties and not be plagued by the hairy O'Gorman for the present.

The wrench of departure remained unrecorded by Danny except in the final perspective of memory. When years had taken the strength—though never the courage—from Daniel's spirit, the old eyes would rest upon that poignant drama. He could be seen with all his worldly goods in a box on his shoulder, walking away from his home to take the coach where the lane met the highway to Limerick. He had few goods: a tool or two, a new suit, a second pair of boots, several pairs of socks, some shirts, a Bible, and a book of poems. All the currency that his parents could collect was in his belt, but there was a fortune in his sound stomach and high heart.

"Sure, me father kissed me—the only time he ever did, that I remember. He handed me his own frieze over-coat, and went into his schoolroom and shut the door...Me mother sat on a milestone and flung her apron over her head and buried her head in her arms. That's how she remained as I looked back—all the way to the turn of the road. That's how I remember her always...All those years, and I never saw her again...dead a lifetime ago...but in me moind I can see her sitting there still...The moind! The moind!"

On that summer day, when the heavens matched his eyes in sparkle and colour, he glanced blithely toward the coomb, with the stile at its feet, where he and Johanna had sealed their plan of action with sacred promises. He took the parting from his family lightly—going to Johanna as he was, and full of impatience to be accumulating that fortune which would bring him back to them or them to him—but it deepened in his memory as the road lengthened. Later he found a song to voice his emotions, and this he would rune over and over, forgetting his listener—if any—his fading eyes on the sweet distance of old County Clare:

I'm sitting on the stile, Mary, where we sat side by side, On a bright May morning long ago, when first you were my bride. The corn was springing fresh and green and the lark sang loud and high, And the red was on your lip, Mary, and the lovelight in your eye.

The young man's consciousness was instinct with the comprehended soul of Ireland, a tangible entity wrought by countless generations to a nourishing cloak for the ego. Stored for sustenance later was the spiritual grace of concrete places, that supra mundane presence which gave reality to the musical names, the long-trodden ways of Eire. His heart and eyes were ahead on adventure. Away, away, from his native environment so rich in mystic lore, to a land purged of history since before Etruscan Ides or Babylonian orgies were calendared, his spirit of an independence to further the artificing of a new culture and of legends distinctive of places whose names at that date were scarcely taken down from the aborigines.

There was wild dismay at Cooley Hall when it was discovered that Johanna would never more return to superintend her dairy or help the younger children with their lessons. One Cooley blamed the other. O'Gorman blamed them both, having held his horses for two years for this reluctant girl. With the aid of a cousin—herself bent on eloping with an English officer—Johanna had made her escape forty-eight hours before it was suspected. A letter came some days later stating that she was off to Belfast to be married to Danny Delacy and emigrate to the Antipodes.

"Marry a Prodestant—to travel without marriage and be roonedand in that scoundrelly northern town!" Mrs Cooley keened affrightingly and set out to attack Mrs Delacy. Both women said things that they could neither forgive nor forget.

There came in time a letter from young Delacy to old Cooley reporting that the absconders were married and on board the good ship Jane bound for Sydney Cove. Honoria Cooley preserved the document as the certificate of her daughter's rectitude, but old Cooley never felt that it was a real marriage. His bitter denunciation followed his Johanna—once his delight. He disowned her as part of his flesh, and prayed that she would rue the vile sorrow and shame she had put on him and her mother.

Johanna accepted excommunication cheerfully. Maledictions could not travel so far as she and Danny were going, and all would be repealed when Danny was brought into the true fold. She was full of excitement in sailing with the personal effects she had collected, ostensibly as the bride of the odious O'Gorman; and had she not her own rights of being? The Cooleys claimed descent from the princes of Ith or Heremon. Were there not legends of Queen Maeve and the great cattle spoil of Cooley?

Moyna Thomond, Johanna's accomplice, a generous and romantic girl, was distressed by Johanna's going so far away, and insisted upon giving as many of her own things as the two girls could smuggle out of the house. Among these was a cedar work-box with drawers, set on a tripod pedestal, which had to be lashed on to the deck arid tended all the way to Sydney Cove. There was also a little chair with carved back and curved legs with claw-and-ball fret, a pair of china ornaments and a set of three Waterford lustres. The cousins parted with promises of eternal fealty and the hope of reunion in Sydney. Every possibility dangles before the nose of adventurous youth.

They never met again. Nor did old Cooley ever rescind his curses. That, perhaps, is why the Delacys know so little of their ancestry in Ireland. Mrs Daniel Brian Robert M. Delacy rarely mentioned her family, except abstractly, even to her sons and daughters. Danny lost account of his because his mother died shortly after his departure, and he disregarded letter-writing. Also, His Majesty's mails were not so cheap, swift and dependable a hundred years ago as to-day.

A later Mrs Delacy wrote home to the parish priest, who could find only an aunt on the Cooley side, and her memory was gone. A hundred years from the date of Danny's embarkation, a great-grandson of his name alighted out of the sky near Ennis. He was hospitably received by the Bishop of Killaloe, and entertained at St Flannahan's College, but not a trace of a Cooley or a Delacy could he find. Nevertheless, in the indestructible archives of imagination, Mrs Delacy still sits upon the milestone with her head bowed upon her arms. By the further aid of an old song, Danny and his Johanna remain for ever in the sunlight on the stile, he young and brave, and listening to the words she now for ever speaks, the lovelight in her eyes; the red upon her cheeks.