Читать книгу Irish Memories - Ross Martin - Страница 13

With the death of my father the curtain fell for ever on the old life at Ross, the stage darkened, and the keening of the tenants as they followed his coffin was the last music of the piece.

Two or three months afterwards the house was empty. In the blaze of the June weather, the hall door, that had always stood open, was shut and barred, and, in the stillness, the rabbits ventured up to the broad limestone steps where once the talk of the house had centred in the summer evenings. For the first time in its history Ross House was empty; my mother and her children had embarked upon life in Dublin, and Robert, like his father before him, had gone to London to write for the Press.

For five or six years Robert lived in London. He belonged to the Arundel Club, where lived and moved the Bohemians of that day, the perfect and single-hearted Bohemians, who were, perhaps, survivals of the days of Richard Steele, and have now vanished, unable to exist in the shadeless glare of Borough Councils. Their literary power was unquestioned, the current of their talk was strong, with baffling swirl and eddy, and he who plunged in it must be a resourceful and strong swimmer. Linked inseparably with those years of London life was my mother’s cousin, W. G. Wills, the playwright, poet and painter, who in these early ’seventies had suddenly achieved celebrity as a dramatist, with the tragedy of “Charles I.” If a record could be discovered of the hierarchs of the Bohemians it would open of itself at the name of Willie Wills. Great gifts of play-writing and portrait-painting rained upon him a reputation that he never troubled himself about; he remained unalterably himself, and, clad in his long grey ulster, lived in his studio a life unfettered by the clock. Of his amazing ménage, of the strange and starveling hangers-on that followed him as rooks follow the plough, to see what they could pick up, all who knew him had stories to tell. Of the luncheons at his studio, where the beefsteak came wrapped in newspaper, and the plates that were hopelessly dirty were thrown out of the window; of the appointments written boldly on the wall and straightway forgotten; the litter of canvases, the scraps of manuscript, and among and above these incidents, the tranquillity, the charm, the agreeability of Willie Wills.[1]

Robert has found him and my mother lunching together gloriously on mutton chops, cooked by being flung into the heart of the fire.

“Just one more, Nannie,” said the dramatist, as Robert entered, spearing a blazing fragment and presenting it to his boon companion with a courtly gesture.

In the old days at Ross, Willie Wills was a frequent guest, and held the children in thrall—as he could always ensnare and hold children—with his exquisite story-telling. Their natural guardians withdrew with confidence, as Willie began, with enormous gravity, the tale of “The Little Old Woman who lived in the Dark Wood, and had one long yellow Tooth,” and, returning after an interval, heard that “at this momentous crisis seven dead men, in sacks, staggered into the room—!” while, in the fateful pause that followed, the clamour of the children, “Go on, Willie Wills!” would rise.

Robert and Willie Wills were in many aspects of character and of gifts unlike, yet with some cousinly points in common. Both were cultivated and literary, yet seldom read a book; both were sensitive to criticism, and even touchingly anxious for approval; both were delightful companions in a tête-à-tête. Where sympathy is joined with imagination, and sense of humour with both, it is a combination hard to beat. Robert regarded routine respectfully, if from afar, and sincerely admired the efforts of those who endeavoured to systematise his belongings. Willie Wills was superbly indifferent to surroundings, yet took a certain pride in new clothes. The real points of resemblance were in heart; the chivalrous desire to help the weak, and the indelible filial instinct that glows in natures of the best sort, and marks unfailingly a good son as a good fellow through all the nations of the world.

Throughout these London days Robert wrote for the Globe and other papers, chiefly paragraphs and light articles, that ran from his pen with the real enjoyment that he found in writing them at the last moment. He seemed to do better when working against time than when he had large days in hand and a well-ordered writing-table inviting his presence. He found these things thoroughly uninspiring, and facilities for correcting his work were odious to him. Proofs he never looked at; he said he couldn’t face them; probably because of the critical power that underlay his facility.

London with Robert in it was then, as ever, for Robert’s family, a place with a different meaning—a place of theatre tickets, of luncheons, of newspaper news viewed from within, of politics and actors reduced to human personalities. It was a fixed rule that he should meet his female relatives on their arrival at Euston; it is on record that he was once in time, but it is also recorded that on that occasion the train was forty minutes late. The hum of London seasons filled his brain; London may be attractive or repellent, but it will be heard, and it made strong music for a nature that loved the stir of men and the encounter of minds. Four hundred miles away lay Ross in the whispering stillness of its summer woods, and the monotony of its winter winds, producing heavy bags of woodcock after its kind, while its master “shot folly as she flew,” and found his game in the canards of Fleet Street and Westminster. It was inevitable as things stood, but in that alienation both missed much that lay in the power of each to give.

It was while Robert was living in London that the resignation of Mr. Gladstone took place. Out of the ensuing general election in the spring of 1873 came Isaac Butt and his lieutenants, with a party of sixty Home Rulers behind them; Ireland had sent them instead of the dozen or so of the previous Parliament, and it was said that Ireland had done it in the new-found shelter of the Ballot Act. Robert knew, as anyone brought up as he was must know, that for most of Ireland the Ballot Act could not be a shelter. The Galway election of 1872 had shown to all in whose hands the great power of the franchise lay. One indefensible position had been replaced by another, feudal power by clerical, and only those who knew Robert well, understood how hard it hit him. He shot at Ross occasionally, he visited it now and then, and at every visit his perceptive nature was aware that a new spirit was abroad; in spite of the genuine and traditional feeling of the people for their old allies, in spite of their good breeding, and their anxious desire to conceal the rift. The separation had begun, and only those who have experienced it will understand how strange, how wounding it is.

It was not universal, and theoretical hostility strove always with the soft voice of memory. My father was still to all, “The Masther, the Lord have mercy on him”; the Martins were still “The Family,” who could do no wrong, whose defects, if such were admitted, were revered. “The Martin family hadn’t good sight,” said a tenant, “but sure the people say that was a proof of their nobility.”

There is an incident of one of Robert’s visits to Ross that is not too small to be worth recording. He had given his Gordon setter, Rose, to a friend who lived five miles away from Ross, and she had settled down with resignation to her new life. Trained in the language of the drawing-room, she may have heard it said that Robert was at Ross, or her deep and inscrutable perceptions may have received a wave of warning of his nearness. Whatever it was that prompted her, the old dog made her way alone to Ross, and found her master there.

In 1877 Robert turned his steps again to Dublin, and before the year was out he was living with his grandmother, and was immersed in the life, political, theatrical and social, of Dublin.

My mother’s mother, Mrs. Fox, was, as has been said, a daughter of Chief Justice Bushe, and was a notable member of a remarkable band of brothers and sisters. Strongly humorous, strongly affectionate, a doughty politician, original in every idea, and delightful in her prejudices; a black letter authority on Shakespeare and Scott, a keen debater upon Carlyle, upon Miss Rhoda Broughton, upon all that was worth reading. I can see her declaiming “Henry IV” to Robert and his brethren, with irrepressible gestures of her hand, with a big voice for Falstaff, and a small voice for Mine Hostess, and an eye that raked the audience lest it should waver in attentiveness. Even as clearly can I see her, as, at a time of crisis,—it was, I think, after Gladstone’s attack on Trinity College,—she sprang from her chair, and speechlessly wrung the hand of someone who had rushed into her dining-room, crying,

“Gladstone has resigned!”

That was how she and her family took their politics.

She loved Robert with a touching devotion, and I think those days in Herbert Street were deeply woven into his memory. It was a quiet street, with a long strip of grass and hawthorns, instead of houses, forming one side of it, part of the grounds of the convent that stood at the end. There the birds sang, and a little convent bell spelt out the Angelus with a friendly voice; the old red-brick house, with its old furniture and its old china, the convent bell, with its reminder of cloistered calm, all made a suitable setting for the strictly ordered, cultured life of the old lady who bestowed on them their appropriateness.

In the spring of ’78 Robert was in the thick of amateur theatricals. He was never a first-rate actor, but he was a thoroughly reliable one; he always knew his part, though none could say how or when he learned it, he could “gag” with confidence, and dropped on to his cue unerringly, and he had that liking for his audience that is the shortest cut to being on good terms with them. His gift in ready verse was not allowed to remain idle. He wrote prologues, he arranged singing quadrilles; when the Sheridan Club had a guest whom it delighted to honour, it was Robert who wrote and recited the ode for the occasion; an ode that never attempted too much, and just touched the core of the matter.

With the close of the ’seventies came the burst into the open of the Irish Parliamentary Party, in full cry. Like hounds hunting confusedly in covert, they had, in the hands of Isaac Butt, kept up a certain amount of noise and excitement, keen, yet uncertain as to what game was on foot. From 1877 it was Parnell who carried the horn, a grim, disdainful Master, whose pack never dared to get closer to him than the length of his thong; but he laid them on the line, and they ran it like wolves.

Up to 1877 crops and prices were good, even remarkably so, and rents were paid. Following that year came, like successive blows on the same spot, three bad harvests that culminated in the disastrous season of 1879-80. It was in 1847 that the Famine broke the heart and the life of O’Connell; it was the partial failure of the crop of ’79 and ’80 that created Parnell’s opportunity—so masterful a factor has been the potato in the destinies of Irishmen.

In 1879 the rents began to fail. The distress was not comparable to that of ’47, but it brought about a revolution infinitely greater. At its close it left the Irish tenant practically owner of his land, with a rent fixed by Government, and the feudal link with the landlord was broken for ever. On the Ross estate a new agent had inaugurated a new policy, excellent in theory, abhorrent to those whom it concerned, the “striping” of many of the holdings, in order to give to each tenant an equal share of good and bad land. Anyone who knows the Irish tenant will immediately understand what it means to interfere with his land, and, above all things, to give to another tenant any part of it. It was done nevertheless. The long lines of stone wall ran symmetrically parallel over hill and pasture and bog, and the symmetry was hateful and the equality bitter to those most concerned. It is probable that the discontent sank in and prepared the way for the mischief that was coming.

By the winter of 1879 the pinch had become severe. The tenants, by this time two or three years in arrear, did not meet their liabilities, and most landlords went without the greater part of their income. Robert, among many others, began to learn what it was to be deprived of the moderate income left to him after the charges on his estate were paid. He never again received any.

Three Relief Funds in Dublin coped as best they could with the distress of the Irish poor. One of them was worked with great enthusiasm and organising power by the Duchess of Marlborough, and by every means known to a most capable leader of Society she lured from Society of all grades a ready “rate in aid.” Entertainments sprang up—theatricals, bazaars, concerts—that helped the Fund and at the same time put heart into the flagging Dublin season, and Robert was in the thick of charitable endeavour. His first Irish song, the leader of a long line that culminated later in “Ballyhooly,” was written at about this time, “The Vagrants of Erin,” a swinging tune, that marched to words National enough for any party.

“Give me your hand, if owld Ireland’s the land

From which you may chance to be farin’,”

it began, with all its author’s geniality, and the Irish audience responded to its first chords with drowning applause. Once, as he sang it, accompanying himself, and swinging with the tune, the music stool began to sway in ominous accord. “First it bent, and syne it brake,” and Robert staggered to his feet, but just in time.

“This is a pantomime song, with a breakdown in it!” he said, while the head of the stool rolled from its broken stalk and trundled down the stage.

He had the gift of making friends with his audience; as he came on to the platform to sing, his air of enjoyment, his friendly eyes, even his single eyeglass, had already done half the business. He took them, as it were, to his bosom, and whatever might be their grade, he did his best for them. In spite of the liberties he took with time, words and tune, he was singularly easy to accompany, for anyone acquainted with his methods and prepared to cast himself (it was generally herself) adrift with him, and trust to ear instead of to book. However far afield Robert might range, whatever stories he told, he would surely drop back into the key and the words, like a wild duck into the water, with a just sufficient hint to the waiting coadjutor that his circling flight was ending. His topical songs of those early ’eighties have died, as all of their kind must die. He wrote down nothing, the occasion is forgotten, and the brain in which they had their being has passed from us. One or two points and hits remain with me. In the year that Shotover won the Oaks, a commemorating verse ended:

“Of course she was Shot over,

She’d a Cannon on her back!”

In one of the songs, the explanation of the failure of the ships Alert and Discovery to reach the North Pole was that “those on the Discovery were not on the Alert.”

In spite of the thunderous political background of the early ’eighties, in spite of the empty pockets of those dependent on Irish rents, in spite of the crime that drew forth the Crimes Act, the fun and the spirit were inextinguishable in Dublin.

But the political background was growing blacker, and the thunder more loud. Gladstone’s Land Act of 1881 had not pacified Ireland, even though it made the tenant practically owner of his land, even though the rents were fixed by Government officials, whose mission was to coax sedition to complacence, if not to loyalty. Ireland was falling into chaos. Arrears of rent, Relief Committees, No Rent manifestoes, Plan of Campaign evictions, Funds for Distressed Irish Ladies, outrages, boycotting, and Parnell stirring the “Seething Pot” with a steady hand, while his subordinates stoked the fire. Boycotting was responded to by the Property Defence Association, and in 1882 Robert went forth under its auspices as an “Emergency man.” His business was to visit the boycotted landlords and farmers and to supply them with men—from the North, for the most part—to do the farm work. Those who do not know Ireland, and for whom the word boycotting has no personal associations, can hardly realise what that dark time meant to its victims. The owners of boycotted lands, unable to get food or necessaries of any kind from the local tradespeople, imported supplies from England and the North, and opened stores in their stable yards for such of the faithful as stood firm. Ladies, totally unaccustomed to outdoor labour, saved crops and herded cattle, matters that in themselves might have been found interesting, if arduous, but the terror was over all, and in face of bitter antagonism the task was too great.

It was at this work that Robert knew, for the first time, what it was to have every man’s hand against him, to meet the stare of hatred, the jeer, and the side-long curse; to face endless drives on outside cars, with his revolver in his hand; to plan the uphill tussle with boycotted crops, and cattle for which a market could scarcely be found; to know the imminence of death, when, by accidentally choosing one of two roads, he evaded the man with a gun who had gone out to wait for him. It taught him much of difficult men and of tangled politics, he learned how to make the best of a bad business, and how to fight in a corner; it made him a proficient in Irish affairs, and it added to his opinions a seriousness based on strong and moving points.

Gladstone had faced a dangerous Ireland with concession in one hand and coercion in the other, and however either may go in single harness, there is no doubt that they cannot with success be driven as a pair. There followed the Maamtrasna murders, the extermination of the Huddy family, the assassination in Phœnix Park of Lord Frederick Cavendish and Mr. Burke, the attempted assassination of Judge Lawson opposite Kildare Street Club. When Robert was entering into the deep places of his last illness, he spoke with all his wonted grasp of details of those webs of conspiracy. Tradesmen who came from Dublin to work in Kylemore Castle (then the property of Mr. Mitchell Henry) infected the mind of Northern Connemara with the idea that assassination was a fitting expression of political opinion. The murders of the Maamtrasna district followed. The stately mountains beheld the struggle and the slaughter, and the sweet waters of Lough Mask closed upon the victims.

Month by month the net of conspiracy was woven, and life was the prize played for in wonderful silence and darkness, and murder was achieved like a victory at chess. We know how the victories were paid for. I do not forget the face of Timothy Kelly, as he stood in the dock and was tried for participation in the Phœnix Park murders. There is a pallor of fear that is remembered when once seen, and to see that sick and desperate paleness on the face of a boy of seventeen is to feel for ever the mystery and enormity of his crime, and the equal immensity of the punishment. Unforgettable, too, is the moment when his mother took her seat in the witness chair to support the alibi put forward on his behalf, and looked her boy in his white and stricken face, white and stricken as he. Yet she did not waver, and gave her evidence quietly and collectedly.

A phrase or two from the speech for the defence has fixed itself in the memory.

“Take the scales of Justice,” said the Counsel, with a wide gesture of appeal towards the jury; “lift them far above the reach of passion and prejudice, into those serener regions above where Justice herself reigns supreme——”

Death brooded palpably over the brown and grey Court, and held the tense faces of all in his thrall, and weighted every syllable of the speeches. Never was the irrelevancy of murder as a political weapon made more clear, and the fearful appropriateness of capital punishment seemed clear too, mystery requited with mystery.

When we came into the Court we were told that the jury would disagree, there being at least one “Invincible” on the list, and it was so. But with the next trial the end was reached, and the trapped creature in the dock, with the men who were his confederates, went down into the oblivion into which they had thrust their prey.

Many years ago a mission priest delivered a sermon in Irish in the bare white chapel that stands high on a hill above Ross Lake. I remember one sentence, translated for me by one of the congregation.

“Oh black seas of Eternity, without height or depth, bay, brink, or shore! How can anyone look into your depths and neglect the salvation of his soul!”[2]

It expresses all that need now be remembered of the Phœnix Park murders.

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