Читать книгу Irish Memories - Ross Martin - Страница 12

“In the fond visions of the silent night,

I dreamt thy love, thy long sought love, was won;

Was it a dream, that vision of delight—?

I woke; ’twas but a dream, let me dream on!”

Robert was a nervous, warm-hearted boy, dark-eyed and romantic-looking; the sensitive nature that expanded to affection was always his, and made him cling to those who were kind to him. The vigorous and outdoor life of Ross was the best tonic for such a nature, the large and healthful intimacy with lake and woods, bog and wild weather, and shooting and rowing, learned unconsciously from a father who delighted in them, and a mother who knew no fear for herself and had little for her children. Everything in those early days of his was large and vigorous; tall trees to climb, great winds across the lake to wrestle with, strenuous and capable talk upstairs and downstairs, in front of furnaces of turf and logs, long drives, and the big Galway welcome at the end of them. One day was like another, yet no day was monotonous. Prayers followed breakfast, long prayers, beginning with the Psalms, of which each child read a verse in due order of seniority; then First and Second Lessons, frequently a chapter from a religious treatise, finally a prayer, from a work named “The Tent and Altar,” all read with excellent emphasis by the master of the house. In later years, after Robert had matriculated at Trinity College, I remember with what youthful austerity he read prayers at Ross, and with what awe we saw him reject “The Tent and Altar” and heard him recite from memory the Morning Prayers from the Church Service. He was at the same time deputed to teach Old Testament history to his brothers and sisters; to this hour the Judges of Israel are painfully stamped on my brain, as is the tearful morning when the Bible was hurled at my inattentive head by the hand of the remorseless elder brother.

Robert’s early schoolroom work at Ross was got through with the ease that may be imagined by anyone who has known his quickness in assimilating ideas and his cast-iron memory. As was the case with all the Ross children, the real interests of the day were with the workmen and the animals. The agreeability of the Galway peasant was enthralling; even to a child; the dogs were held in even higher esteem. Throughout Robert’s life dogs knew him as their friend; skilled in the lore of the affections, they recognised his gentle heart, and the devotion to him of his Gordon setter, Rose, is a thing to remember. Even of late years I have seen him hurry away when his sterner sisters thought it necessary to chastise an offending dog; the suffering of others was almost too keenly understood by him.

Reading aloud rounded off the close of those early days at Ross, Shakespeare and Walter Scott, Napier and Miss Edgeworth; the foundation of literary culture was well and truly laid, and laid with respect and enthusiasm, so that what the boy’s mind did not grasp was stored up for his later understanding, among things to be venerated, and fine diction and choice phrase were imprinted upon an ear that was ever retentive of music. Everyone who remembers his childhood remembers him singing songs and playing the piano. His ear was singularly quick, and I think it was impossible for him to sing out of tune. He learned his notes in the schoolroom, but his musical education was dropped when he went to school, as is frequently the case; throughout his life he accompanied himself on the piano by ear, with ease, if with limitations; simple as the accompaniments were, there was never a false note, and it seemed as if his hands fell on the right places without an effort.

A strange feature in his early education and in the establishment at Ross was James Tucker, an ex-hedge schoolmaster, whose long face, blue shaven chin, shabby black clothes, and gift for poetry have passed inextricably into the annals of the household. He entered it first at the time of the Famine, ostensibly to give temporary help in the management and accounts of the school which my aunt Marian had started for the tenants’ children; he remained for many years, and filled many important posts. He taught us the three R’s with rigour and perseverance, he wrote odes for our birthdays, he was controller-in-chief of the dairy; later on, when my father received the appointment of Auditor of Poor Law, under the Local Government Board, Tucker filled in the blue “abstracts” of the Auditor’s work in admirably neat columns. Robert’s recital of the multiplication table was often interrupted by wails for “Misther Tucker” and the key of the dairy, from the kitchenmaid at the foot of the schoolroom stairs, and the interruption was freely cursed, in a vindictive whisper, by the schoolmaster. Tucker was slightly eccentric, a feature for which there was always toleration and room at Ross; he entered largely into the schoolroom theatricals that sprang up as soon as Robert was old enough to whip up a company from the ranks of his brothers and sisters. The first of which there is any record is the tragedy of “Bluebeard,” adapted by him at the age of eight. As the author did not feel equal to writing it down, it was taught to the actors by word of mouth, he himself taking the title rôle. The performance took place privately in the schoolroom, an apartment discreetly placed by the authorities in a wing known as “The Offices,” beyond ken or call of the house proper. Tucker was stage manager, every servant in the house was commandeered as audience. The play met with much acceptance up to the point when Bluebeard dragged Fatima (a shrieking sister) round the room by her hair, belabouring her with a wooden sword, amid the ecstatic yells of the spectators, but at this juncture the mistress of the house interrupted the revels with paralysing suddenness. She had in vain rung the drawing-room bell for tea, she had searched and found the house mysteriously silent and empty, till the plaudits of the rescue scene drew her to the schoolroom. Players and audience broke into rout, and Robert’s first dramatic enterprise ended in disorder, and, if I mistake not, for the principals, untimely bed.

It was some years afterwards, when Robert was at Trinity, that a similar effort on his part of missionary culture ended in a like disaster. He became filled with the idea of getting up a cricket team at Ross, and in a summer vacation he collected his eleven, taught them to hold a bat, and harangued them eloquently on the laws of the game. It was unfortunate that its rules became mixed up in the minds of the players with a game of their own, called “Burnt Ball,” which closely resembles “Rounders,” and is played with a large, soft ball. In the first day of cricket things progressed slowly, and the unconverted might have been forgiven for finding the entertainment a trifle dull. A batsman at length hit a ball and ran. It was fielded by cover-point, who, bored by long inaction, had waited impatiently for his chance. In the enthusiasm of at length getting something to do, the recently learned laws of cricket were swept from the mind of cover-point, and the rules of Burnt Ball instantly reasserted themselves. He hurled the ball at the batsman, shouting: “Go out! You’re burnt!” and smote him heavily on the head.

The batsman went out, that is to say, he picked himself up and tottered from the fire zone, and neither then nor subsequently did cricket prosper at Ross.

Then, and always, Robert shared his enthusiasm with others; he gave himself to his surroundings, whether people or things, and, as afterwards, it was preferably people. He had the gift of living in the present and living every moment of it; it might have been of him that Carlyle said, “Happy men live in the present, for its bounty suffices, and wise men too, for they know its value.”

Throughout Robert’s school and college days theatricals, charades, and living pictures, written or arranged by him, continued to flourish at Ross. There remains in my memory a play, got up by him when he was about seventeen, in which he himself, despising the powers of his sisters, took the part of the heroine, with the invaluable Tucker as the lover. A tarletan dress was commandeered from the largest of the sisterhood, and in it, at the crisis of the play, he endeavoured to elope with Tucker over a clothes-horse, draped in a curtain. It was at this point that the tarletan dress, tried beyond its strength, split down the back from neck to waist; the heroine flung her lover from her, and backed off the stage with her front turned firmly to the audience, and the elopement was deferred sine die.

Those were light-hearted days, yet they were indelible in Robert’s memory, and the strength and savour of the old Galway times were in them as inextricably as the smell of the turf smoke and the bog myrtle. Nothing was conventional or stagnant, things were done on the spur of the moment, and with a total disregard for pomps and vanities, and everyone preferred good fun to a punctual dinner. Mingling with all were the poor people, with their cleverness, their good manners, and their unflagging spirits; I can see before me the carpenter painting a boat by the old boat quay, and Robert sitting on a rock, and talking to him for long tracts of the hot afternoon. At another time one could see Robert holding, with the utmost zeal and discrimination, a court of arbitration in the coach-house for the settling of an intricate and vociferous dispute between two of the tenants.

Life at Ross was of the traditional Irish kind, with many retainers at low wages, which works out as a costly establishment with nothing to show for it. A sheep a week and a cow a month were supplied by the farm, and assimilated by the household; it seemed as if with the farm produce, the abundance of dairy cows, the packed turf house, the fallen timber ready to be cut up, the fruitful garden, the game and the trout, there should have been affluence. But after all these followed the Saturday night labour bill, and the fact remains, as many Irish landlords can testify, that these free fruits of the earth are heavily paid for, that convenience is mistaken for economy, and that farming is, for the average gentleman, more of an occupation than an income.

The Famine had left its legacy of debt and a lowered rental, and further hindrances to the financial success of farm and estate were the preoccupation of my father’s life with his work as Auditor of Poor Law Unions, the enormous household waste that took toll of everything, and, last and most inveterate of all, my father’s generous and soft-hearted disposition.

One instance will give, in a few sentences, the relation between landlord and tenant, which, as it would seem, all recent legislation has sedulously schemed to destroy. I give it in the words of one of the tenants, widow of an eye-witness.

“The widow A., down by the lake-side” (Lough Corrib—about three miles away), “was very poor one time, and she was a good while in arrears with her rent. The Master sent to her two or three times, and in the end he walked down himself after his breakfast, and he took Thady” (the steward) “with him. Well, when he went into the house, she was so proud to see him, and ‘Your Honour is welcome!’ says she, and she put a chair for him. He didn’t sit down at all, but he was standing up there with his back to the dresser, and the children were sitting down one side the fire. The tears came from the Master’s eyes; Thady seen them fall down the cheek. ‘Say no more about the rent,’ says the Master, to her, ‘you need say no more about it till I come to you again.’ Well, it was the next winter the men were working in Gurthnamuckla, and Thady with them, and the Master came to the wall of the field and a letter in his hand, and he called Thady over to him. What had he to show him but the Widow A.’s rent that her brother in America sent her!”

It will not happen again; it belongs to an almost forgotten régime, that was capable of abuse, yet capable too of summoning forth the best impulses of Irish hearts. The end of that régime was not far away, and the beginning of the end was already on the horizon of Ross.

My grandfather, whose peculiar capacity might once have saved the financial situation, had fallen into a species of second childhood. He died at Ross, and I remember the cold thrill of terror with which I heard him “keened” by an old tenant, a widow, who asked permission to see him as he lay dead. She went into the twilit room, and suddenly the tremendous and sustained wail went through the house, like the voice of the grave itself.

It seemed as if Ross had borne a charmed life during the troubles of the later ’sixties. The Fenian rising of 1867 did not touch it; the flicker of it was like sheet lightning in the Eastern sky, but the storm passed almost unheard. It had been so in previous risings; Ross seemed to be geographically intended for peace. It is bounded on the east by the long waters of Lough Corrib, on the west by barren mountains, stretching to the Atlantic, on the north by the great silences of Connemara. Within these boundaries the mutual dependence of landlord and tenant remained unshaken; it was a delicate relation, almost akin to matrimony, and like a happy marriage, it needed that both sides should be good fellows. The Disestablishment of the Irish Church came in 1869, a direct blow at Protestantism, and an equally direct tax upon landlords for the support of their Church, but of this revolution the tenants appeared to be unaware. In 1870 came Gladstone’s Land Act, which by a system of fines shielded the tenant to a great extent from “capricious eviction.” As evictions, capricious or otherwise, did not occur at Ross, this section of the Act was not of epoch-making importance there; its other provision, by which tenants became proprietors of their own improvements, was also something of a superfluity. It was 1872 that brought the first cold plunge into Irish politics of the new kind.

In February of that year Captain Trench, son of Lord Clancarty, contested one of the divisions of County Galway in the Conservative interest, his opponent being Captain Nolan, a Home Ruler. It went without saying that my father gave his support to the Conservative, who was also a Galway man, and the son of a friend. Up to that time it was a matter of course that the Ross tenants voted with their landlord. Captain Trench canvassed the Ross district, and there was no indication of what was about to happen, or if there were, my father did not believe it. The polling place for that part of the country was in Oughterard, about five miles away; my father drove there on the election day, and on the hill above the town was met by a man who advised him to turn back. A troop of cavalry glittered in the main street and the crowd seethed about them. My father drove on and saw a company of infantry keeping the way for Mr. Arthur Guinness, afterwards Lord Ardilaun, as he convoyed to the poll a handful of his tenants from Ashford at the other side of Lough Corrib to vote for Captain Trench, he himself walking in front with the oldest of them on his arm. During that morning my father ranged through the crowd incredulously, asking for this or that tenant, unable to believe that they had deserted him. It was a futile search; with a few valiant exceptions the Ross tenants, following the example of the rest of the constituency, voted according to the orders of their Church, and Captain Nolan was elected by a majority of four to one. It was a priest from another part of the diocese who gave forth the mandate, with an extraordinary fury of hatred against the landlord side; one need not blame the sheep who passed in a frightened huddle from one fold to another. When my father came home that afternoon, even the youngest child of the house could see how great had been the blow. It was not the political defeat, severe as that was, it was the personal wound, and it was incurable. A petition against the result of the election brought about the famous trial in Galway, at which Judge Keogh, himself a Roman Catholic, denounced the priestly intimidation that was established in the mouths of many witnesses. The Ballot Act followed in June, but these things could not soothe the wounded spirit of the men who had trusted in their tenants.

Startlingly, the death of a Galway landlord followed on the election. He was a Roman Catholic, and belonged to one of the oldest families in the county; on his death-bed he desired that not one of his tenants should touch his coffin. It was not in that spirit that my father, a few weeks afterwards, faced the end. In March he caught cold on one of his many journeys of inspection; he was taken ill at the Galway Club, and a slow pleurisy followed. He lay ill for a time in Galway, and the longing for home strengthened with every day.

“If I could hear the cawing of the Ross crows I should get well,” he said pitifully.

He was brought home, but he was even then past hope.

Some scenes remain for ever on the memory. In the early afternoon of the 23rd of April, I looked down through the rails of the well-stair case, and saw Robert come upstairs to his father’s room, his tall figure almost supported on the shoulder of one of the men. All was then over, and the last of the old order of the Landlords of Ross had gone, murmuring,

“I am ready to meet Thee, Eternal Father!”