Irish Memories

CHAPTER X

WHEN FIRST SHE CAME

In Richmond Parish Church, on a summer Sunday, it happened to her and a friend to be obliged to stand in the aisle, awaiting the patronage of the pew-opener. The aisle was thronged, and Martin was tired. She essayed to lean against the end of a fully occupied pew, and not only fully occupied, but occupied by a row of such devout and splendid ladies as are only seen in perfection in smart suburban churches. I have said the aisle was thronged, and, as she leaned, the pressure increased. Too late she knew that she had miscalculated her mark. Like Sisera, the son of Jabin, she bowed (only she bowed backwards), she fell; where she fell, there she lay down, and where she lay down was along the laps of those devout and splendid ladies. These gazed down into her convulsed countenance with eyes that could not have expressed greater horror or surprise if she had been a boa constrictor; a smileless glare, terribly enhanced by gold-rimmed pince-nez. She thinks she must have extended over fully four of them. She never knew how she regained the aisle. She was herself quite powerless, and she thinks that with knee action, similar to that of a knife-grinder, they must have banged her on to her feet. It was enough for her to be beyond the power of those horrified and indignant and gold eye-glassed eyes, even though she knew that nothing could deliver her from the grip of the demon of laughter. She says she was given a seat, out of pity, I suppose, shortly afterwards, and there, on her knees and hidden under the brim of her hat, she wept, and uttered those faint insect squeaks that indicate the extremity of endurance, until the end of the service, when her unfortunate companion led her home.

It was, as it happens, in church that I saw her first; in our own church, in Castle Townshend. That was on Sunday, January 17, 1886. I immediately commandeered her to sing in the choir, and from that day, little as she then knew it, she was fated to become one of its fundamental props and stays. A position than which few are more arduous and none more thankless.

I suppose some suggestion of what she looked like should here be given. The photograph that forms the frontispiece of this book was of this period, and it gives as good a suggestion of her as can be hoped for from a photograph. She was of what was then considered “medium height,” 5 ft. 5-1/2 in. Since then the standard has gone up, but in 1886 Martin was accustomed to assert that small men considered her “a monstrous fine woman,” and big men said she was “a dear little thing.” I find myself incapable of appraising her. Many drawings I have made of her, and, that spring of 1886, before I went to Paris, I attempted also a small sketch in oils, with a hope, that was futile, that colour might succeed where black and white had failed. I can only offer an inadequate catalogue.

Eyes: large, soft, and brown, with the charm of expression that is often one of the compensations of short sight. Hair: bright brown and waving, liable to come down out riding, and on one such occasion described by an impressionable old General as “a chestnut wealth,” a stigma that she was never able to live down. A colour like a wild rose—a simile that should be revered on account of its long service to mankind, and must be forgiven since none other meets the case—and a figure of the lightest and slightest, on which had been bestowed the great and capricious boon of smartness, which is a thing apart, and does not rely upon merely anatomical considerations.

“By Jove, Miss Martin,” said an ancient dressmaker, of the order generically known as “little women,” “By Jove, Miss, you have a very genteel back!” And the compliment could not have been better put, though I think, from a literary standpoint, it was excelled by a commendation pronounced by a “little tailor” on a coat of his own construction. “Now, Mr. Sullivan,” said his client anxiously, twining her neck, giraffe-like, in a vain endeavour to view the small of her own back, “is the back right?”

“Mrs. Cair’rns,” replied Mr. Sullivan with solemnity, “humanity could do no more.”

Martin’s figure, good anywhere, looked its best in the saddle; she had the effect of having poised there without effort, as a bird poises on a spray; she looked even more of a feather-weight than she was, yet no horse that I have ever known, could, with his most malign capers, discompose the airy security of her seat, still less shake her nerve. Before I knew how extravagantly short-sighted she was, I did not appreciate the pluck that permitted her to accept any sort of a mount, and to face any sort of a fence, blindfold, and that inspired her out hunting to charge what came in her way, with no more knowledge of what was to happen than Marcus Curtius had when he leaped into the gulf.

It is trite, not to say stupid, to expatiate upon that January Sunday when I first met her; yet it has proved the hinge of my life, the place where my fate, and hers, turned over, and new and unforeseen things began to happen to us. They did not happen at once. An idler, more good-for-nothing pack of “blagyards” than we all were could not easily be found. I, alone, kept up a pretence of occupation; I was making drawings for the Graphic in those days, and was in the habit of impounding my young friends as models. My then studio—better known as “the Purlieu,” because my mother, inveighing against its extreme disorder, had compared it to “the revolting purlieus of some disgusting town”—(I have said she did not spare emphasis)—was a meeting place for the unemployed, I may say the unemployable, even though I could occasionally wring a pose from one of them.

Many and strange were the expedients to which I had to resort in the execution of those drawings for the Graphic. For one series that set forth the romantic and cheiromantic adventures of a clergyman, and the lady (Martin) of his choice, the bedroom of a clerical guest had to be burgled, and his Sunday coat and hat abstracted, at imminent risk of discovery. In another, entitled “A Mule Ride in Trinidad,” a brother, in the exiguous costume of bathing drawers and a large straw hat, was for two mornings one of the attractions and ornaments of the Purlieu, after which he retired to bed with a heavy cold, calling down curses upon the Purlieu stove (an objet d’art of which Mrs. Martin had said that it solved the problem of producing smoke without fire). Of another series dealing with the adventures of a student of the violin in Paris, I find in my diary the moving entry, “Crucified Martin head downwards, as the fiddle girl, practising, with her music on the floor. Compelled H.” (another female relative whose name shall be withheld) “to pose as a Paris tram horse, in white stockings, with a chowrie for a tail.”

These artistic exertions were varied by schooling the carriage horses across country—in this connection I find mention of a youth imported by a brother, and briefly alluded to by Martin as “a being like a little meek bird with a brogue”; tobogganing in a bath chair down the village hill (Castle Townshend Hill, which has a fall of about fifty feet in two); “giant-striding” on the flypole in January mud; and, by the exercise of Machiavellian diplomacy, securing Sorcerer and Ballyhooly, the carriage horses aforesaid, for an occasional day with a scratch pack of trencher-fed hounds, that visited the country at intervals, and for whom the epithet “scratch” was appropriate in more senses than one.

It is perhaps noteworthy that on my second or third meeting with Martin I suggested to her that we should write a book together and that I should illustrate it. We had each of us already made our début in print; she in the grave columns of the Irish Times, with an article on the Administration of Relief to the Sufferers from the “Bad Times” of which she makes mention in her memoir of her brother Robert (page 37); I in the Argosy, with a short story, founded upon an incident of high improbability, recounted, by the way, by the “little meek bird with a brogue”; and not, I fear, made more credible by my rendering of it, which had all the worst faults of conventionality and sensationalism.

The literary atmosphere that year was full of what were known as “Shilling Shockers.” A great hit had been made with a book of this variety, named “Called Back,” and two cousins of our mothers’, Mr. W. Wills (the dramatist, already mentioned), and the Hon. Mrs. Greene (whose delightful stories for children, “Cushions and Corners,” “The Grey House on the Hill,” etc., mark an epoch in such literature), were reported to be collaborating in such a work. But I went to Paris, and Martin put forth on a prolonged round of visits, and our literary ambitions were stowed away with our winter clothes.

In June I returned from Paris; “pale and dwindled,” Martin’s diary mentions, “but fashionable,” which I find gratifying, though quite untrue. It was one of those perfect summers that come sometimes to the south of Ireland, when rain is not, and the sun is hot, but never too hot, and the gardens are a storm of flowers, flowers such as one does not see elsewhere, children of the south and the sun and the sea; tall delphiniums that have climbed to the sky and brought down its most heavenly blue; Japanese iris, with their pale and dappled lilac discs spread forth to the sun, like little plates and saucers at a high and honourable “tea ceremony” in the land of Nippon; peonies and poppies, arums and asphodel, every one of them three times as tall, and three times as brilliant, and three times as sweet as any of their English cousins, and all of them, and everything else as well, irradiated for me that happy year by a new “Spirit of Delight.” It was, as I have said, though then we knew it only dimly, the beginning, for us, of a new era. For most boys and girls the varying, yet invariable, flirtations, and emotional episodes of youth, are resolved and composed by marriage. To Martin and to me was opened another way, and the flowering of both our lives was when we met each other.

If ever Ireland should become organised and systematised, and allotmented, I would put in a plea that the parish of Castle Haven may be kept as a national reserve for idlers and artists and idealists. The memory comes back to me of those blue mornings of mid-June that Martin and I, with perhaps the saving pretence of a paint-box, used to spend, lying on the warm, short grass of the sheep fields on Drishane Side, high over the harbour, listening to the curving cry of the curlews and the mewing of the sea-gulls, as they drifted in the blue over our heads; watching the sunlight waking dancing stars to life in the deeper blue firmament below, and criticising condescendingly the manœuvres of the little white-sailed racing yachts, as they strove and squeezed round their mark-buoys, or rushed emulously to the horizon and back again. Below us, by a hundred feet or so, other idlers bathed in the Dutchman’s Cove, uttering those sea-bird screams that seem to be induced by the sea equally in girls as in gulls. But Martin and I, having taken high ground as artists and idealists, remained, roasting gloriously in the sun, at the top of the cliffs.

That summer was for all of us a time of extreme and excessive lawn tennis. Tournaments, formal and informal, were incessant, challenges and matches raged. Martin and I played an unforgettable match against two long-legged lads, whose handicap, consisting as it did in tight skirts, and highly-trimmed mushroom hats, pressed nearly as heavily on us as on them. My mother, and a female friend of like passions with herself, had backed us to win, and they kept up a wonderful and shameless barrage of abuse between the petticoated warriors and their game, and an equally staunch supporting fire of encouragement to us. When at last Martin and I triumphed, my mother and the female friend were voiceless from long screaming, but they rushed speechlessly into the middle of the court and there flung themselves into each other’s arms.

It was one of those times of high tide that come now and then, and not in the Golden World did the time fleet more carelessly than it did for all of us that summer. The mornings for sheer idling, the afternoons for lawn tennis, the evenings for dancing, to my mother’s unrivalled playing; or there was a coming concert, or a function in the church, to be practised for. A new and zealous clergyman had recently taken the place of a very easy-going cousin of my mother’s, and I find in Martin’s diary this entry:

“Unparalleled insolence of the new Parson, who wanted to know, on Saturday, if Edith had yet chosen the hymns!” and again—“E. by superhuman exertions, got the hymns away” (i.e. sent up to the reading desk) “before the 3rd Collect. Canon —— swore himself in.”

Kind and excellent man! Had the organist been the subject sworn about, no one could have blamed him. It was his hat and coat that we stole. His wondrous gentleness and long suffering with a rapscallion choir shall not be forgotten by a no less rapscallion organist.

When I try to recall that lovely summer and its successor, the year of the old Queen’s First Jubilee, 1887, I seem best to remember those magical evenings when two or three boat-loads of us would row “up the river,” which is no river, but a narrow and winding sea-creek, of, as we hold, unparalleled beauty, between high hills, with trees on both its sides, drooping low over the water, and seaweed, instead of ivy, hanging from their branches. Nothing more enchanting than resting on one’s oars in the heart of that dark mirror, with no sound but the sleepy chuckle of the herons in the tall trees on the hill-side, or the gurgle of the tide against the bows, until someone, perhaps, would start one of the glees that were being practised for the then concert—there was always one in the offing—and the Echo, that dwells opposite Roger’s Island, would wake from its sleep and join in, not more than half a minute behind the beat.

Or out at the mouth of the harbour, the boats rocking a little in the wide golden fields of moonlight, golden as sunlight, almost, in those August nights, and the lazy oars, paddling in what seemed a sea of opal oil, would drip with the pale flames of the phosphorus that seethed and whispered at their touch, when, as Martin has said,

“Land and sea lay in rapt accord, and the breast of the brimming tide was laid to the breast of the cliff, with a low and broken voice of joy.”

These are some of those Irish yesterdays, that came and went lightly, and were more memorable than Martin and I knew, that summer, when first she came.

CHAPTER XI

“AN IRISH COUSIN”

It was in October, 1887, that we began what was soon to be known to us as “The Shocker,” and “The Shaughraun,” to our family generally, as “that nonsense of the girls,” and subsequently, to the general public, as “An Irish Cousin.” Seldom have the young and ardent “commenced author” under less conducive circumstances. We were resented on so many grounds. Waste of time; the arrogance of having conceived such a project; and, chiefly, the abstention of two playmates. They called us “The Shockers,” “The Geniuses” (this in bitter irony), “The Hugger-muggerers” (this flight of fancy was my mother’s); when not actually reviled, we were treated with much the same disapproving sufferance that is shown to an outside dog who sneaks into the house on a wet day. We compared ourselves, not without reason, to the Waldenses and the Albigenses, and hid and fled about the house, with the knowledge that every man’s hand was against us.

Begun in idleness and without conviction, persecution had its usual effect, and deepened somewhat tepid effort into enthusiasm, but the first genuine literary impulse was given by a visit to an old and lonely house, that stands on the edge of the sea, some twelve or thirteen miles from Drishane. It was at that time inhabited by a distant kinswoman of mine, a pathetic little old spinster lady, with the most charming, refined, and delicate looks, and a pretty voice, made interesting by the old-fashioned Irish touch in it; provincial, in that it told of life in a province, yet entirely compatible with gentle breeding. She called me “Eddith,” I remember (a pronunciation entirely her own), and she addressed the remarkable being who ushered us in, half butler, half coachman, as “Dinnis,” and she asked us to “take a glass of wine” with her, and, apologising for the all too brief glimpse of the fire vouchsafed to the leg of mutton, said she trusted we did not mind the meat being “rare.”

The little lady who entertained us is dead now; the old house, stripped of its ancient portraits and furniture, is, like many another, in the hands of farmer-people; its gardens have reverted to jungle. I wonder if the tombstone of the little pet dog has been respected. In the shade of a row of immense junipers, that made a sheltering hedge between the flower garden and the wide Atlantic, stood the stone, inscribed, with the romantic preciosity of our hostess’s youth,

But it was the old house, dying even then, that touched our imaginations; full of memories of brave days past, when the little lady’s great-grandfather, “Splendid Ned,” had been a leading blade in “The County of Corke Militia Dragoons,” and his son, her grandfather, had raised a troop of yeomanry to fight the Whiteboys, and, when the English Government disbanded the yeomen, had, in just fury, pitched their arms over the cliff into the sea, rather than yield them to the rebels, and had then drunk the King’s health, with showy loyalty, in claret that had never paid the same King a farthing.

We had ridden the long thirteen miles in gorgeous October sunshine; before we had seen the gardens, and the old castle on the cliff, and the views generally, the sun was low in the sky, but we were not allowed to leave until a tea, as colossal as our lunch had been, was consumed. Our protests were unheeded, and we were assured that we should be “no time at all springing through the country home.” (A suggestion that moved Martin so disastrously, that only by means of hasty and forced facetiousness was I enabled to justify her reception of it.) The sunset was red in the west when our horses were brought round to the door, and it was at that precise moment that into the Irish Cousin some thrill of genuineness was breathed. In the darkened façade of the long grey house, a window, just over the hall-door, caught our attention. In it, for an instant, was a white face. Trails of ivy hung over the panes, but we saw the face glimmer there for a minute and vanish.

As we rode home along the side of the hills, and watched the fires of the sunset sink into the sea, and met the crescent moon coming with faint light to lead us home, we could talk and think only of that presence at the window. We had been warned of certain subjects not to be approached, and knew enough of the history of that old house to realise what we had seen. An old stock, isolated from the world at large, wearing itself out in those excesses that are a protest of human nature against unnatural conditions, dies at last with its victims round its death-bed. Half-acknowledged, half-witted, wholly horrifying; living ghosts, haunting the house that gave them but half their share of life, yet withheld from them, with half-hearted guardianship, the boon of death.

The shock of it was what we had needed, and with it “the Shocker” started into life, or, if that is too much to say for it, its authors, at least, felt that conviction had come to them; the insincere ambition of the “Penny Dreadful” faded, realities asserted themselves, and the faked “thrills” that were to make our fortunes were repudiated for ever. Little as we may have achieved it, an ideal of Art rose then for us, far and faint as the half-moon, and often, like her, hidden in clouds, yet never quite lost or forgotten.

* * * * *

Probably all those who have driven the pen, in either single or double harness, are familiar with the questions wont to be propounded by those interested, or anxious to appear interested, in the craft of letters. It is strange how beaten a track curiosity uses. The inquiries vary but little. One type of investigator regards the métier of book-maker as a kind of cross between the trades of cook and conjurer. If the recipe of the mixture, or the trick of its production, can be extracted from those possessed of the secret, the desired result can be achieved as simply as a rice pudding, and forced like a card upon the publishers. The alternative inquirer approaches the problem from the opposite pole, and poses respectfully that conundrum with which the Youth felled Father William:

“What makes you so awfully clever?” “How do you think of the things?” And again, “How can you make the words come one after the other?” And yet another, more wounding, though put in all good feeling, “But how do you manage about the spelling? I suppose the printers do that for you?”

With Martin and me, however, the fact of our collaboration admitted of variants. I have found a fragment of a letter of mine to her that sets forth some of these. As it also in some degree expounds the type of the examiner, I transcribe it all.

The question put by this lady, as to which of us held the pen, has ever been considered of the greatest moment, and, as a matter of fact, during our many years of collaboration, it was a point that never entered our minds to consider. To those who may be interested in an unimportant detail, I may say that our work was done conversationally. One or the other—not infrequently both, simultaneously—would state a proposition. This would be argued, combated perhaps, approved, or modified; it would then be written down by the (wholly fortuitous) holder of the pen, would be scratched out, scribbled in again; before it found itself finally transferred into decorous MS. would probably have suffered many things, but it would, at all events, have had the advantage of having been well aired.

I have an interesting letter, written by a very clever woman, herself a writer, to a cousin of ours. She found it impossible to believe in the jointness of the authorship, though she admitted her inability to discern the joints in the writing, and having given “An Irish Cousin” a handling far more generous than it deserves, says:

“But though I think the book a success, and cannot pick out the fastenings of the two hands, I yet think the next novel ought to be by one of them. I wonder by which! I say this because I thought the conception and carrying out of ‘Willy’ much the best part of the character drawing of the whole book. It had the real thing in it. If Willy, and the poor people’s talk, were by one hand, that hand is the better of the two, say I!”

I sent this letter to Martin, and had “the two hands” collaborated in her reply, it could not more sufficingly have expressed my feelings.

On January 3rd, 1888, we had finished the first half of “An Irish Cousin.”

I find in my diary: “A few last revisionary scratches at the poor Shocker, and so farewell for the present. Gave it to mother to read. She loathes it.”

All through the spring months we wrote and rewrote, and clean-copied, and cast away the clean copies illegible from corrections. Intermittently, and as we could, we wrote on, and in Martin’s diary I find a quotation from an old part-song that expressed the general attitude towards us:

Martin and I were the dolphin and the stag. As a propitiatory measure the Shocker was read aloud at intervals, but with no great success. Our families declined to take us seriously, but none the less offered criticisms, incessant, and mutually destructive. In connection with this point, and as a warning to other beginners, I will offer a few quotations from letters of this period.

Following on this, a protest is recorded from another relative, on the use of the expression “he ran as if the devil were after him,” but the letter ends with a reassuring postscript.

“Mother has just said that she thought Chapter IX excellent, ‘most fiery love’; though she said it had rather taken her by surprise, as she ‘had not noticed a stream of love leading up to it—only jealousy.’”

At length, in London, on May 24th, the end, which had seemed further off than the end of the world, came. The MS., fairly and beautifully copied,—typewriters being then unborn,—was sent off to Messrs. Sampson Low. In a month it returned, without comment. We then, with, as Dr. Johnson says, “a frigid tranquillity, having little to fear or hope from censure, or from praise,” placed it in the hands of a friend to do with it as he saw fit, and proceeded to forget all about it.

It was not until the following December that the dormant Shocker suddenly woke to life. It was on Sunday morning, December 2nd, 1888, that the fateful letter came. Messrs. R. Bentley & Son offered us £25 on publication, and £25 on sale of 500 copies of the book, which was to be published in two volumes at half a guinea each.

“All comment is inadequate,” says Martin’s diary; “wrote a dizzy letter of acceptance to Bentley, and went to church, twice, in a glorified trance.”

(Thus did a huntsman of mine, having slain two foxes in a morning, which is a rarer feat in Carbery than—say—in Cheshire, present himself in gratitude at the priest’s night-school.)

Passing over intermediate matters, I will follow the career of the Shocker, which was not published for six months after its assignment to Messrs. Bentley, six months during which Martin had written several admirable articles for The World (then edited by Mr. Edmund Yates), and I had illustrated a picture-book, “The Kerry Recruit,” and written an indifferent short story, and we had begun to think about “The Real Charlotte.” For some reason that I have now forgotten, my mother was opposed to my own name appearing in “An Irish Cousin.” Martin’s nom de plume was ready to hand, her articles in The World having been signed “Martin Ross,” but it was only after much debate and searching of pedigrees that a Somerville ancestress, by name Geilles Herring, was selected to face the music for me. Her literary career was brief, and was given a death-blow by Edmund Yates, who asked “Martin Ross” the reason of her collaboration with a grilled herring; and as well as I remember, my own name was permitted to appear in the second edition.

This followed the first with a pleasing celerity, and was sold out by the close of the year. Any who have themselves been through the mill, and know what it is to bring forth a book, will remember the joys, and fears, and indignations, and triumphings, that accompany the appearance of a first-born effort. Many and various were the letters and criticisms. Our vast relationship made an advertising agency of the most far-reaching and pervasive nature, and our friends were faithful in their insistence in the matter at the libraries.

“Have you ‘An Irish Cousin?’” was demanded at a Portsmouth bookshop.

“No, Madam,” the bookseller replied, with hauteur, “I have no H’Irish relations.”

Looking back on it now, I recognise that what was in itself but a very moderate and poorly constructed book owed its success, not only with the public, but with the reviewers, to the fact that it chanced to be the first in its particular field. Miss Edgeworth had been the last to write of Irish country life with sincerity and originality, dealing with both the upper and lower classes, and dealing with both unconventionally. Lever’s brilliant and extravagant books, with their ever enchanting Micky Frees and Corney Delaneys, merely created and throned the stage Irishman, the apotheosis of the English ideal. It was of Lever’s period to be extravagant. The Handley Cross series is a case in point. Let me humbly and hurriedly disclaim any impious thought of depreciating Surtees. No one who has ever ridden a hunt, or loved a hound, but must admit that he has his unsurpassable moments. “The Cat and Custard-pot day,” with that run that goes with the rush of a storm; the tête-à-tête of Mr. Jorrocks and James Pigg, during which they drank each other’s healths, and the healths of the hounds, and the séance culminated with the immortal definition of the state of the weather, as it obtained in the cupboard; Soapey Sponge and Lucy Glitters “sailing away with the again breast-high-scent pack”—these things are indeed hors concours. But I think it is undeniable that the hunting people of Handley Cross, like Lever’s dragoons, were always at full gallop. With Surtees as with Lever, everyone is “all out,” there is nothing in hand—save perhaps a pair of duelling pistols or a tandem whip—and the height of the spirits is only equalled by the tallness of the hero’s talk. That intolerable adjective “rollicking” is consecrated to Lever; if certain of the rank and file of the reviewers of our later books could have realised with what abhorrence we found it applied to ourselves, and could have known how rigorously we had endeavoured to purge our work of anything that might justify it, they might, out of the kindness that they have always shown us, have been more sparing of it.

Lever was a Dublin man, who lived most of his

life on the Continent, and worked, like a scene-painter, by artificial light, from memoranda. Miss Edgeworth had the privilege, which was also ours, of living in Ireland, in the country, and among the people of whom she wrote. Of the Irish novels of Miss Lawless the same may be said, though the angle at which she chose to regard that many-sided and deeply agreeable person, the Irish peasant, excluded the humour that permeates Miss Edgeworth’s books. (One recalls with gratitude the “quality toss” of Miss Judy McQuirk.) That Miss Edgeworth’s father was a landlord, and a resident one, deepened her insight and widened her opportunities. Panoramic views may, no doubt, be obtained from London; and what a County Meath lady spoke of as a “ventre à terre in Dublin” has its advantages; but I am glad that my lot and Martin’s were cast “in a fair ground, in a good ground, In Carbery:”—(with apologies to Mr. Kipling)—“by the sea.”

* * * * *

I will not inflict the undeservedly kind comments of the reviewers of “An Irish Cousin” upon these pages, though I may admit that nothing that I have ever read, before or since, has seemed to me as entirely delightful as the column and a half that The Spectator generously devoted to a very humble book, by two unknowns, who had themselves nearly lost belief in it.

August, 1889, was a lucky month for Martin and me. We had a “good Press”—we have often marvelled at its goodness—we were justified of our year of despised effort; the hunted Shockers emerged from their caves to take a place in the sun; we had indeed “Commenced Author.”

CHAPTER XII

THE YEARS OF THE LOCUST

The years of the ’eighties were years of leanness, “years that the locust hath eaten.” Congested District Boards and Departments of Agriculture had not then arisen. Successive alterations of the existing land tenure had bewildered rather than encouraged the primitive farmers of this southern seaboard; the benefits promised were slow in materialising, and in the meantime the crops failed. The lowering or remission of rents did not mean any immediate benefit to people who were often many years in arrears. Even in normal years the yield of the land, in the district of which I speak, barely sufficed to feed the dwellers on it; the rent, when paid, was, in most cases, sent from America, by emigrated sons and daughters. There was but little margin at any time. In bad years there was hunger.

Two or three fairly prosperous farms there were, and for the rest, a crowd of entirely “uneconomic” holdings, a rabble of fragmentary patches, scarcely larger than the “allotments” of this present war time, each producing a plentiful crop of children, but leaving much to be desired in such matters as the increase of the soil.

The district is not a large one. It contains about eight miles of fierce and implacable seaboard, with only a couple of coves in which the fishermen can find some shelter for their boats, and its whole extent is but three or four miles in length, by a little more than half as many in depth. A great headland, like a lion couchant, sentinels it on one side; on the other, a long and malign spike of rock, thinly clad with heather, and furze, drives out into the Atlantic, like an alligator with jaws turned seawards. Not few are the ships that have found their fate in those jaws; during these past three years of war, this stretch of sea has seen sudden and fearful happenings, but even these tragedies are scarcely more fearful than those that, in the blackness of mid-winter storms, have befallen many a ship on the desperate rocks of Yokawn and Reendhacusán.

It is hard to blame people for being ignorant, equally hard to condemn them for thriftlessness and dirt in such conditions as obtained thirty years ago in what are now called “Congested Districts.” Thriftlessness and dirt were indeed the ruling powers in that desolate country. In fortunate years, desolate and “congested” though it was, its little fields, inset among the rocks and bogs, could produce crops in reasonable quantity, and—as I do not wish to overstate the case—not less luxuriant in growth than their attendant weeds. The yellow ragwort, the purple loosestrife, the gorgeous red and orange heads of the docks, only in Kerry can these fleurs de mal be equalled, even in Kerry they cannot be surpassed. The huge shoulder of the headland is beautiful with heather and ling of all sorts and shades; the pink sea-thrift—would that other forms of thrift throve with equal success!—meets the heather at the verge of the cliffs, and looks like a decoration of posies of monthly roses. Osmunda Regalis fern fringes the streams, and the fuchsia bushes have fed on the Food of the Gods and are become trees. On a central plateau, high over the sea, stands one of the signal towers that were built at the time of the French landing in Bantry. In its little courtyard you stand “ringed by the azure world.” From west to east the ocean is wide before you. On many days I have seen it, in summer and winter alike lovely; a vast outlook that snatches away your breath, and takes you to its bosom, making you feel yourself the very apex and central point of the wondrous crescent line of fretted shore, that swings from the far blue Fastnet Rock, looking like an anchored battleship, on the west, to the long and slender arm of the Galley Head, with its white lighthouse, floating like a seagull on the rim of the horizon. Between those points, among those heavenly blues and greens and purples, that change and glow and melt into each other in ecstasies of passionate colour, history has been made, and unforgettable things have happened. But standing up there in the wind and the sun, on that small green circle of grass, hearing the sea-birds’ wild and restless cries, watching the waves lift and break into snow on the flanks of the Stag Rocks far below, it is impossible to remember human insanity, impossible to think of anything save of the overwhelming beauty that encircles you.

In that climate and that soil anything could flourish, given only a little shelter, and a little care, and the elimination from the cultivators of traditional imbecilities; eliminating also, if possible, fatalism, and the custom of attributing to “the Will o’ God” each and every disaster, from a houseful of hungry children to an outbreak of typhus consequent on hopelessly insanitary conditions.

“How was it the spuds failed with ye?” asked someone, looking at the blackened “lazy-beds” of potatoes.

“I couldn’t hardly say,” replied the cultivator, who had omitted the attention of spraying them; “Whatever it was, God spurned them in a boggy place.”

Things are better now. The Congested Districts Board has done much, the general spread of education and civilisation has done more. Inspectors, instructors, remission of rents, land purchase, State loans, English money in various forms, have improved the conditions in a way that would hardly have been credible thirty years ago, when, in these congested districts, semi-famine was chronic, and few, besides the “little scholars” of the National Schools, could read or write, and the breeding of animals and cultivation of crops was the affair of an absentee Providence, and no more to be influenced by human agency than the vagaries of the weather.

The first of the “Famines” in which I can remember my mother’s collecting and distributing relief was in 1880. The potatoes had failed, and I find it recorded that “troops of poor women came to Drishane from the west for help.” My mother lectured them on the necessity of not eating the potatoes that had been given them for seed, and assured them, not as superfluously as might be supposed, that if they ate them they could not sow them. To this they replied in chorus.

“May the Lord spare your Honour long!” and went home and boiled the seed-potatoes for supper.

Poor creatures, what else could they do, with their children asking them for food?

In that same spring came a woman, crying, and saying she was “the most disthressful poor person, that hadn’t the good luck to be in the Misthress’s division.” Asked where she lived, she replied,

“I do be like a wild goose over on the side of Drominidy Wood.”

Spring after spring, during those dark years for Ireland of the ’eighties, the misery and the hunger-time recurred. Seed-potatoes, supplied by charity, were eaten; funds were raised, and help, public and private, was given, but Famine, like its brother, Typhus, was only conciliated, never annihilated. In 1891 Mr. Balfour’s Relief Fund and Relief Works brought almost the first touch of permanence into the alleviating conditions. My mother was among the chief of the distributors for this parish. Desperate though the state of many of the people was, Ireland has not yet, thank Heaven, ceased to be Ireland, and the distribution of relief had some irrepressibly entertaining aspects that need not wholly be ignored.

My mother had herself collected a considerable sum of money, for buying food and clothes (the Government fund being, as well as I recollect, mainly devoted to the purchase of seed-potatoes). Many were her clients, and grievous though their need was, it was impossible not to enjoy the high absurdities of her convocations of distribution. These took place in the kitchen at Drishane. The women came twice a week to get the food tickets, and the preliminary gathering in the stable-yard looked and sounded like a parliament of rooks. Incredibly ragged and wretched, but unquenchable in spirit and conversation, they sat, huddled in dark cloaks or shawls, on the ground in rows, waiting to be admitted to the kitchen when “The Misthress” was ready for them. Most of them had known nothing of the existence of the fund until told of it by my mother’s envoys. It was my mission, and that of my brethren, to ride through the distressed town-lands, and summon those who seemed in worst need, and in my letters and diaries of these years I have found many entries on the subject.

“Jan. 27, 1891.—Rode round the Lickowen country. Sickened and stunned by the misery. Hordes of women and children in the filthiest rags. Gave as many bread and tea tickets as we could, but felt helpless and despairing in the face of such hopeless poverty.”

“January 30.—Jack and I again rode to the West to collect Widows for the Relief Fund. Bagged nine and had some lepping” (an ameliorating circumstance of these expeditions was the necessity of making cross-country short cuts). “Numbers of women came over, some being rank frauds ably detected by the kitchenmaid; one or two knee-deep in lies.” “The boys walked to Bawneshal with tea, etc., for two of the worst widows.” (The adjective refers to their social, not their moral standing.)

On another occasion I have recorded that my sister was sent to inquire into the circumstances of a poor woman with a large family. The latter, in absorbed interest in the proceedings, surrounded the mother, who held in her arms the most recent of the number, an infant three weeks old.

“I have seven children,” said the pale mother, “and this little one-een that,” she turned a humorous grey eye on her listening family, “I’m afther taking out of the fox’s mouth!” (The fox playing the part attributed in Germany to the stork.)

My sister, absorbed in estimating the needs of the seven little brothers and sisters, replied absently,

“Poor little thing! It must have been very frightened!”

Mrs. Conolly stared, and, in all her misery, began to laugh; “May the Lord love ye, Miss!” she said compassionately yet admiringly, “May ye never grow grey!”

The difficulties of distribution were many, not the least being that of steeling my mother’s heart, and keeping her doles in some reasonable relation to her resources. I should like to try to give some idea of one of these gatherings. Lists of those in most immediate need of help had been prepared, I do not now remember by whom, and, in the majority of cases, the names given were those of the males of the respective households. Therefore would my mother, standing tall and majestic in the middle of the big, dark, old kitchen at Drishane, her list in her hand, certain underlings (usually her daughters and the kitchenmaid) in attendance, summon to her presence—let us say—“John Collins, Jeremiah Leary, Patrick Driscoll.” (These are names typical of this end of West Carbery, and the subsequent proceedings, like the names, may be accepted in a representative sense.)

The underling, as Gold Stick-in-Waiting, would then advance to the back door, and from the closely attendant throng without would draw, as one draws hounds in kennel, but with far more difficulty, the female equivalents of the gentlemen in question.

“Now, John Collins,” says my mother (who declared it confused her if she didn’t stick to what was written in the list), addressing a little woman, the rags of whose shrouding black shawl made her look like the Jackdaw of Rheims subsequent to the curse, “Now, John Collins, here’s your ticket. Is your daughter better?”

“Why then she is not, your Honour, Ma’am,” replies John Collins in a voluble whine, “only worse she is. She didn’t ate a bit since.” John Collins pauses, removes a hairpin from her back hair, and with nicety indicates on it a quarter of an inch. “God knows she didn’t ate that much since your Honour seen her; but sure she might fancy some little rarity that yourself’d send her.”

There follow medical details on which I do not propose to dwell. My mother, ever a mighty doctor before the Lord, prescribes, promises “a rarity,” in the shape of a rice pudding, and John Collins, well satisfied, swings her shawl, yashmak-wise, across her mouth, and pads away on her bare feet.

“Patrick Driscoll!”

Patrick Driscoll, bony and haggard, the hood of her dark cloak over her red head, demands an extra quantity, on the plea of extra poverty.

She is asked why her husband does not get work.

“Husband is it!” echoes Patrick Driscoll, witheringly, “What have I but a soort of an old man of a husband, that’s no use only to stay in his bed!”

Other women press in through the doorway, despite the efforts of the underlings, each eloquent of her superior sufferings. Another husband is inquired for.

“He’s dead, Ma’am, the Lord ha’ mercy upon him, he’s in his coffin this minute; and Fegs, he was in the want of it!”

Yet another has a blind husband.

“Dark as a stone, asthore,” she says to Gold Stick, “only for he being healthy and qu’ite, I’d be dead altogether! Well, welcome the Will o’ God! I might be worse, as bad as I am!”

Philosophy, resignation, piety, humour, one finds them all in these bewildering, infuriating, enchanting people. And then, perhaps, a cry from the heart of the crowd,

“Sure ye’ll not forget yer own darlin’ Mary Leary!”

A heartrending appeal that elicits from the Mistress a peremptory command not to attempt to come out of her turn.

Nothing could be more admirable than my mother’s manner with the people. Entirely simple, dictatorial, sympathetic, sensible. She believed herself to be an infallible judge of character, but “for all and for all,” as we say in Carbery, her soft heart was often her undoing, and her sterner progeny found her benevolence difficult to control. She was, in fact, as a man said of a spendthrift and drunken brother, “too lion-hearted for her manes” (means).

“No wonder,” said one of her supplicants, “Faith, no wonder at all for the Colonel to be proud of her! She’d delight a Black!”

Whether this imputed to the Black a specially severe standard of taste, or if it meant that even the most insensate savage would be roused to enthusiasm by my mother’s beauty, I am unable to determine.

I have a letter from my companion Gold Stick, from which I think a few quotations, in exemplification, may be permitted.