Читать книгу Irish Memories - Ross Martin - Страница 19

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I have already commented on the social importance, and value, of the feuds of a century ago. Fights were made, like the wall-papers, the carpets, the furniture, to last. Friendships too, I daresay, but though it was possible to dissolve a friendship, the full-fledged fight, beaked and clawed, was incapable as an eagle of laying down its weapons.

Such a fight there was between two sisters, both long since dead. They were said to have been among “The Beauties of the Court of the Regent”—delightful phrase, bringing visions of ringlets and rouge, and low necks and high play—and both were famed for their wit, their charm, and their affection for each other. Still unmarried, their mother brought them home to Castle Townshend (for reasons not unconnected with the run of the cards), not quite so young as they had been—in those days a young lady’s first youth seems to have been irrevocably lost at about three and twenty—yet none the less dangerous on that account. Most feuds originate in a difference of opinion, but this one, or so it has always been said, was due to a disastrous similarity in taste. Legends hint that a young cousin, my grandfather, then a personable youth fresh from Oxford, was the difficulty. But whatever the cause (and he married the elder sister) peace was not found in sixty years; the combatants died, and the fight outlived the fighters.

In these feebler days the mental attitude of that time is hard to realise. The stories that have come down to us only complicate the effort to reconstitute the people and the period, but they may help—some of them—to explain the French Revolution. A tale is told of one of these ex-beauties, noted, be it remembered, for her charm of manner, her culture, her sense of humour. Near the end of her long life she went to the funeral of a relative, leaning decorously upon the arm of a kinsman. At the churchyard a countryman pushed forward between her and the coffin. She thereupon disengaged her arm from that of her squire, and struck the countryman in the face. It is no less characteristic of the time that the countryman’s attitude does not come into the story, but it seems to me probable that he went home and boasted then, and for the rest of his life, that old Madam —— had “bet him a blow in the face.”

There is yet another story, written in a letter to a young cousin, by my father’s cousin, the late Mrs. Pierrepont Mundy, a very delightful letter-writer and story-teller, who has taken with her to the next world a collection of anecdotes that may possibly cause her relatives there to share the regret of her friends here that she did not leave them behind her.

“One more link in the chain of events,” she writes,

“Grandmamma’s sister-in-law married her brother, ‘Devil Dick,’ who was violent to madness. His mother alone was not afraid of him. She had a spirit of her own. On one occasion she went over a ship at Cork, intending to make purchases from contraband goods. She set aside chosen ones, but was stopped by the Excisemen. She looked at the basket full, raised her tiny foot (which you and I, dearest A., inherit) and kicked the whole collection overboard into the Sea!

“That same foot she released from her high-heeled shoe on arriving, driven from Cork in a ‘Jarvey,’ and, when the Cocher said ‘Stop Madam, you haven’t paid!’ she threw the money on the ground, and with her shoe she dealt him a smart box on the ear and said,

“‘Take that before the Grand Jury!’ (meaning she could do anything and would not get fined.)

“Une maïtresse femme!”

Thus my cousin concludes her story, not without a certain approbation of our ancestress.

Indisputably the coming of the Palefaces slackened the moral fibre of Castle Townshend; the fire has gone out of the fights and the heat out of the hatreds. I do not claim for the later generations a higher standard; peace is mainly ensued by lack of concentration; it is not so much that we forgive, as that we forget. I regret that these early histories do not present my departed relatives in a more attractive light, but personal experience has taught me how infinitely boring can be the virtues of other people’s families.

A strange product of these high explosives was my father, who, as was said of another like unto him, was “The gentlest crayture ever came into a house.” He had no brothers and but one sister, a fact that did not, I think, distress my grandparents, who were in advance of their period in considering the prevalent immense families ill-bred; and even had the matter been for them a subject of regret, they had at least one consolation—a consolation offered in a similar case to a cousin of Martin’s—“Afther all,” it was said, “if ye had a hundhred of them ye couldn’t have a greater variety.”

An only son, with a solitary sister, brought up in the days when the difference between the sexes was clearly defined by the position of the definite article, “an only son” being by no means in the same case, grammatical or otherwise, with “only a daughter,” it would not have been surprising had he developed into such a flower of culture as had blossomed in “Johnny Wild.” I expect that the rare and passionate devotion of his father to his mother taught him a lesson not generally inculcated in his time. In truth, his love and consideration for his mother and sister amounted to anachronism in those days, when chivalry was mostly relegated to the Eglinton Tournament, and unselfishness was bracketed with needlework as a graceful and exclusive attribute of the Ministering Angel.

Mrs. Pierrepont Mundy, once defined the two men of her acquaintance whom most she delighted to honour as

“Preux Chevaliers! Christian gentlemen, who feed their dogs from the dinner-table!”

I find it impossible to better this as a description of my father. I recognise the profound conventionality of saying that dogs and children adored him, yet, conventional though the statement may be, it is inflicted upon me by the facts of the case. In him children knew, intuitively, the kindred soul, dogs recognised, not by mere intuition, but by force of intellect, their slave. I can see him surreptitiously passing forbidden delicacies from his plate to the silent watchers beneath the surface, his eyes disingenuously fixed upon the window to divert my mother’s suspicions, and I can still hear his leisurely histories of two imaginary South African Lion-slayers, named, with a massive simplicity, Smith and Brown, whose achievements were for us, as children, the last possibility of romance.

Children alone could extract from him the tales of various feats of his youth, feats in which, one supposes, the wild blood that was in him found its outlet and satisfaction; of the savage bull on to whose back he had dropped from the branch of a tree, and whom he had then ridden in glory round and round the field; of the bulldog who jumped at the nose of a young half-trained Arab mare when my father was riding her, and caught it, and held on. And so did my father, while the mare flung herself into knots (and how either dog or man “held their howlt” it is hard to imagine). The bulldog was finally detached with a pitchfork by one Jerry Hegarty, who must himself have shown no mean skill and courage in adventuring into the whirl of that nightmare conflict, but my father sat it out. It was a daughter of that mare, named Lalla Rukh, a lovely grey (whom I can remember as a creature by me revered and adored, above, perhaps, any earthly thing), who was being ridden by my father through a town when they met a brass band. Lalla Rukh first attempted flight, but such was her confidence in her rider that, in the end, she let him ride her up to the big drum, and, in further token of devotion, she then, heroically, put her nose on it. One imagines that the big drummer was enough of a gentleman to refrain from his duties during those tense moments, but the rest of the band blazed on. My father was a boy of seventeen when he got his commission and was presently quartered at Birr, where he acted as Whip to the regimental pack of hounds. There is an authentic story of a hound, that my grandfather sent to Birr, by rail and coach, escaping from the barracks, and making his way back to the kennels at Drishane. Birr is in King’s County, and the journey, even across country, must be over a hundred miles. (These things being thus, it is hard to understand why any dog is ever lost.)

My father was in the Kaffir wars of 1843 and 1849, and fought right through the Crimean campaign, being one of the very few infantry officers who won all the clasps with the Crimean medal. One of his brother officers in the 68th Durham Light Infantry has told (I quote from an account published by the officer in question) “of an incident that shows the coolness and ready daring that characterised him. On the morning of the battle of Inkermann, 5th Nov., 1854, the 68th saw a body of troops moving close by. Owing to the fog it was impossible to distinguish if these were Russian or English. It was of the utmost importance, and the Colonel of the 68th exclaimed, ‘What would I give to be able to decide!’

“Without a pause Henry Somerville said, ‘I’ll soon let you know!’ And, throwing open his grey military great-coat, he showed the scarlet uniform underneath.

“In a second a storm of rifle bullets answered the momentous question, thus speedily proving that enemies, and not friends, formed the advancing troops.”

There is another story of my father’s turning back, during a retirement up hill under heavy fire, at the battle of the Alma, to save a wounded private, whom he carried on his back out of danger. But not from him did we hear of these things. One of the few soldiering stories that I can recollect hearing from him was in connection with the fighting proclivities of his servant, Con Driscoll, a son of a tenant who had followed him into the regiment. Con had been in a row of no small severity; his defence, as is not unusual, took the form of reflections upon the character of his adversary, and an exposition of his own self-restraint.

“If it wasn’t that I knew me ordhers,” he said, “and the di-shiplin’ of the Sarvice, I wouldn’t lave him till I danced on his shesht!”