Part 7
The life that she was not to share moved on about her in leisurely squalor; the smoke from the turf fire strayed languidly up the sooty wall, and blundered against the broad mouth of the chimney till the rafters were lost in the blue and settled obscurity. The walls were yellow with smoke; it was easy to imagine its flavour in the bowl of milk that stood on the dresser, ready for the invalid in the inner room. Obscure corners harboured obscure masses that might be family raiment, or beds, or old women; somewhere among them the jubilant cry of a hen proclaimed the feat of laying an egg, in muffled tones that suggested a lurking-place under a bed. Between the cradle and the fire sat an old man in a prehistoric tall hat, motionless in the stupor of his great age; at his feet a boy wrangled with a woolly puppy that rolled its eyes till the blue whites showed, in a delicious glance of humour, as it tugged at the red flannel shirt of its playmate.
"God save all here," said a voice, very dictatorially, at the door; a black-haired old woman shoved her way to the cradle, and parted the blankets with a professional air. She was a Wise Woman from the mountain, and foreknowing the moment when she would spit, for luck, in the faces of the helpless trio in the cradle, I jostled my way to the bedroom of their mother. It had an almost conventual calm. Moderate as was the light that struggled through a hermetically sealed window of eighteen inches by twelve, it was further baffled by an apron pinned across the panes; the air was heavy, reinforced only by the draughts and the smoke that entered hand-in-hand from the kitchen.
In one of two great beds the invalid lay in the twilight, with her hand pressed to her head. She was collected, well-bred, and concerned for the welfare of the visitor, and of all the visitor's relations, mentioned in due order of seniority. The glory of her position burned in two spots of excitement on her high cheek bones, but it could not eliminate her good manners. Her sister loudly recited the facts that she was using no food, only sups of milk and water, that as for puddings or any little rarities, if you ran down gold in a cup she wouldn't let it to her lips.
"There's nothing in the world wide I could fancy," said the sick girl, feebly, "unless it'd be the lick of a fish's tail."
The entry of the Wise Woman, with a stentorian benediction, here drove me forth like a bolted rabbit, and having skirted the evil-smelling morass in front of the house, I breathed the large air of the bogs with enthusiasm. The evening was speechless and oppressive; it held like a headache the question whether it is useful to be sorry for those who are not sorry for themselves, and, unrepining, grope out their lives in the dark house of ignorance; and whether discontent with one's lot is not the mother of good cooking and other excellent things.
A week afterwards an emissary brought to the Big House the intelligence that the mother of the Triplets had in the interval been at the point of death, and had been anointed, had an impression on her chest, and could give "no account of the pain she had in her side, only that it was like a person polishing a boot, and there to be lumps in the boot, and he having a brush in his hand." From out of these symptoms was distilled the fact that she had had pleurisy, acquired while walking barefoot in the yard to feed the calves. She entreated the gift of a pair of boots, and the emissary added, as a rider, the fact that the Colonel's boots would be just her fit. The Colonel was away, but the main body of his boots stood in battalions in his room. A pair of the dustiest was snatched, in a heat of philanthropy, and bestowed, and proved, we were given to understand, an invaluable adjunct to the feeding of the calves. It is worth mentioning that the Colonel, on his return next day, was by no means as gratified as had been hoped; they were, he said, the one and only pair of patent leather boots in which he could walk with comfort and credit in London, and the moving circumstance of Triplets had no power to allay his bitter and impotent wrath. His only tall hat had already been sold at a Jumble sale, and he did well to be angry. The cook, who had been sceptical throughout as to the necessity for the gift, tactfully reported that the Colonel's boots were too tight for That One, and brought from Second Mass the comfortable tidings that they had preyed on her feet.
The cook, always lenient, after the manner of her kind, to the Colonel and all his sex, was at that time much preoccupied with matrimonial affairs. It was soon afterwards that a strange young man in Sunday clothes appeared at intervals in the yard, and melted like a wraith into dark doorways in the kitchen passages. He was found eating trifle in the servants' hall, and in the evenings he fished on the lake. He was, we discovered, the cook's brother, arrived from Loughrea to investigate the position of the swain whom the cook wished to marry. On the fourth day he passed imperceptibly out of the establishment, and the cook fought loudly and venomously with all who crossed her path. It transpired that the brother had visited the home of the aspirant, and had found, she said, that it was a backwards place, and a narrow house, and he wouldn't let her go in it. She had twice at Mass seen the candidate for her hand, she informed us, lamentably, and he was a nice young man, foxy in the face, and she got a good account of him. That it was remarkable, or at all unpleasant, to marry a perfect stranger was a point quite outside her comprehension. She had never spoken to him, she admitted, but what signified, so long as she got a good account of him. It was afterwards discovered that the lover had been rejected because his family had been broom-makers, and that no self-respecting girl would look at him on that account. The point of social etiquette here touched remains still dark, but it was insuperable, and the cook eventually married the gentleman whose lofty calling it was to drive the butcher's cart.
The day before the marriage the battle was waged in the usual manner between the Loughrea brother and the bridegroom; greasy pound notes were slapped down on the table, the bride's savings were vaunted above the bridegroom's heifers and position as heir to his mother's bit of land, and with swaggering and bluff and whiskey drinking the bargain was concluded. Nothing could have been more frankly commercial; nothing, apparently, could have given more satisfaction. The cook departed, and lived in a cabin with a variety of her husband's relatives, who were by no means overjoyed at the circumstance; potatoes for dinner, and stewed tea morning, noon and night were her diet; the hens roosted above her bed, she weeded turnips and "spread" turf, she grew thin and pale, but never, so far as is known, did she repine, or regret the print dresses and the flesh-pots. The butcher's driver was "a quiet boy," better than most husbands; had it been the broom-maker, foxy in the face she would have made him an equally good wife. In a community where old maids are almost unknown, the only point worth considering was that she was married and had a "young son," and every man and woman in the country would have said that she was right. In traversing the point we should run our heads against a wall of primeval instinct.
Writers of novels, and readers of novels, had better shut their eyes to the fact, the inexorable fact, that such marriages are rushed into every day--loveless, sordid marriages, such as we are taught to hold in abhorrence, and that from them springs, like a flower from a dust heap, the unsullied, uneventful home-life of Western Ireland. It is romance that holds the two-edged sword, the sharp ecstasy and the severing scythe stroke, the expectancy and the disillusioning, the trance and the clearer vision.
It is even more than passive domestic toleration that blossoms in the cramped and dirty cabin life, affection grows with years, and where personal attraction never counted for much, the loss of it hurts nobody.
"Their hearts were within in each other," was said of an elderly couple, who, thirty years before, had been married in the priest's kitchen on the last night of Shraft; married as a happy thought, and by the merest chance. The lawful bride had taken her place by the bridegroom, but, changing her mind at the last possible moment, sprang from her knees, and declined the ceremony. As her betrothal was probably an affair of that afternoon it was not so dramatic an action as might be assumed, nor did it cause any hitch in the proceedings. The priest looked round the well-filled kitchen.
"Here, Mary Kate!" he said to his servant, "come on you, and marry the man! Sure you wouldn't let him go away, and he after walking five miles in the rain!"
Mary Kate knelt down by the bridegroom. We do not hear of remonstrance on her part, and thirty years afterwards, when their children were married or gone to America, it was said that this couple's "hearts were within in each other." It was said with perfect perception of the ways and the deeps of devotion; but the absence of it at their wedding was not worthy of remark, and in these things is the essence of the Irish nature, that keenly perceives sentiment, and contentedly ignores it.
"She isn't much, indeed," said a farmer of exceeding astuteness, when questioned about his matrimonial intentions, "but she's a nate little clerk." By this was delicately conveyed the fact that she could read and write, and that he could not. The marriage was highly successful.
Years afterwards a friend said to him in congratulation, "Well, James, I hear you married your daughter well."
"I did, sir, and I got him cheap." Then in a whisper, "He was divilish owld."
The computation by which the years of the bridegroom were set against the purchase money--in other words, the bride's dowry--must have been an intricate one, involving, one would say, the tables of insurance, and the best skill of the nate little clerk.
Congratulations, not unmixed with some genial surprise, were proffered to another parent on the marriage of his daughter, a person by no means in her first youth, and possessed of but one eye.
"Sure I had to give him ten pounds agin' the blind eye," explained the father of the bride, with unimpaired cordiality.
There is here no material, of the accepted sort, for a playwright; no unsatisfied yearnings and shattered ideals, nothing but remarkable common sense, and a profound awe for the Sacrament of Marriage. Marriage, humourous, commercial, and quite unlovely, is the first act; the second is mere preoccupation with an accomplished destiny; the last is usually twilight and much faithfulness. The dialogue is a masterpiece throughout, epigram, heart-piercing pathos, with humour, heavenly and inveterate, lubricating all. Perhaps the clue to success lies here, in the mutual possession of agreeability and the good nature that goes with the best agreeability; certain it is that with a command of repartee that makes fighting an artistic enjoyment, their conjugal battles are insignificant.
The two-fold heart of the race beats everywhere in the confusion; gross worldliness, and a matrimonial standard clear and unquestioned as the stars; Love the negligible quantity, and attachment the rule. It is for us, more singly bent on happiness, to aim at rapture and to foreknow disappointment.
*HORTICULTURAL*
I admit that I hesitate at the thought of pressing into the elect company of those who have discoursed upon gardens. From Lord Bacon down to the Poet Laureate, from the Poet Laureate up to that self-sufficing and yet voluble "Elizabeth," of whose German Garden all the craft have read, there seems no inch of garden sod that has been left unturned. I ask myself: Have I any original suggestions on, for example, The disbudding of 'Mums? (a term of horrid familiarity that I have seen applied to Chrysanthemums). Any high thoughts on Manures? Any special convictions in the matter of mulches?
My conscience, far from admitting ability to treat of these solemn things, reminds me that but little more than a year ago I should scarcely have been entrusted with the weeding of a gravel path, and hints at that Affair of the Coltsfoot. It is, in fact, the Coltsfoot Affair that decides me. I cannot be a guide or a sign-post, but I can be a scarecrow. I would say a moral scarecrow, though it may be conceded that the costume of the gardening amateur often lends itself to the more practical _role_.
I was not at all aware of being in the movement when I found myself snatching at my weekly copy of _Gardening Illustrated_ in preference to the daily paper, and brooding heavily upon delphiniums when I might have been profiting by the sermon. It was only by degrees, as I went about the world, that I noted how quick and strong would beat the answering conversational pulse at the mention of a garden, at the sighing reference to the arrangement of a herbaceous border. It seemed that every second person I met was as much of a gardener as I was, in the matter of enthusiasm, and, as they might easily be, something more in the matter of practice. This discovery revolutionised society for me. It has doubtless done so for many another. The most penal afternoon visit may have its alleviations in a valuable hint on "the desire of the rose"--not for the star--but for the cleanings of the scullery drain; the most inveterate dowager may be found to be a man and a brother, profoundly versed in daffodils, full of lore about "Alpines." How astonishing it is to find oneself cheerfully, even ardently, assenting to what would once have been regarded as the hideous proposal to "Walk round the garden!" Such a walk has ceased to be a penance; it has become something, not quite a scouting expedition, not quite a (herbaceous) border-foray, not quite a "beggar's lay"; but it has something in it of the charms of all three. Which element preponderates depends on the character. There are moss-troopers born, who will twitch off a cutting, and filch a seed head, uncontrollably. There are heaven-endowed mendicants who will yearn and flatter the filling of a flower bed into a knotted pocket handkerchief. It is a useful principle to accept everything, regardless of the accident of the seasons. There are many other accidents of far higher importance to be considered--lapse of memory on the part of the giver, for instance, or repentance. In the amenities of gardeners, as in love, the advice to "Take me when I'm in the humour," is sound, and a cutting in the hand is well worth six in or on the bush, when the bush is another's.
I believe it is the gambling element that gives to gardening so potent a charm--that, and the seedmen's catalogues. One of my first adventures was in response to a singularly seductive advertisement--"Humulus Lupulus," it said, "The finest creeper in the world. Grows forty feet in a single night. Massive clusters of yellowish blossoms. Beautiful; Healthy." I have the constitutional misfortune to believe, unquestioning, the printed word. Even now I find it hard to discount the flights of fancy of that poetic idealist, the advertising nurseryman. I despatched eighteenpence by the next post; received by return an undemonstrative bundle of little roots, planted them prayerfully in a choice place, and then, as it happened, left home for a time. On my return to my garden I found the usual crop of catastrophes and compensations, but disregarding all alike I sped to the site of the Humulus Lupulus. There had been near the same spot a highly esteemed rose, "Climbing Captain Christie." The first thing that greeted me was the wan, indignant face of a Captain Christie, who, having climbed for all he was worth, was none the less overtaken, and was now gazing at me in strangled pallor from the depths of a thicket of common hops. The Poetic Idealist had triumphed.
I have never been able precisely to ascertain to what extent Bat Whoolley found me out in the Affair--already alluded to--of the Coltsfoot. Bat is my gardener, and I value his opinion highly, almost as highly as he does himself, though possibly with more limitations. Winter Heliotrope was what my neighbour called Coltsfoot. I felt there was something not quite sound in the lavish way she pressed it upon me. She said there was nothing like it for covering bare places, and that I might dig it up for myself and take all I wanted. That specious permission might have warned me; so also might the singular fact that my neighbour's shrubbery had for undergrowth naught save the curving leaves of the winter heliotrope. None the less, I planted out two or three colonies of it on the outskirts of the rock garden.
One morning, at the turn by the pine tree (one of my colonies had been unostentatiously planted in a bare place behind the pine tree), I met Bat. His face was redder than usual, and there was something very searching in his eye. Mine did not meet it.
"Look at that!" he said.
He held up a handful of long white roots, and brandished it, much as Jupiter is represented brandishing a handful of lightning. "Look at that dam-root"--he pronounced the words as one pronounces beet-root--"that some"--here a powerful variant on the usual definition of fool--"is after planting in your honour's consarns! See here! If ye left no more o' that in the ground than as much as ye couldn't see itself, it'd have the place ate up in one fortnight! I gave the morning to it, an' if I give the day itself it's hardly I'll have it all dug--Divil's cure to the--" (Here more variants in connection with the imposter.)
Something wavering in Bat's eye, even while the denunciation proceeded, made me conscious of the smirch of suspicion. I remained silent as the grave. Secretly I visited the other colonies, and found that one of them was already swinging an enveloping wing round the rearguard of the Iris Kaempferi, and that another had flung outposts into the heart of the helianthemums. At a bound I ranged myself with the opposition.
"Bat," I said, "the Dam-roots are in the garden!"
That night a fair-sized bundle of winter heliotrope was restored to my generous neighbour. Bat threw it over the wall.
I am slowly acquiring some insight into my gardener's likes and dislikes. He despises anything that he suspects of being a wild flower.
"'Sha! that's no good! That's one of the Heth family! The hills is rotten with it."
But on the other hand, he will lavish such a wealth of attention upon potatoes as would, if bestowed on the despised daughter of Heth, cause it to blossom like the rose. There are, in his opinion, but three flowers really worthy of cultivation. Red geraniums, blue lobelias, and yellow calceolarias. With these, had he his will, should all my garden be glorious. I never buy them; I never see them in their earlier stages, but suddenly, in the herbaceous border, the trio will appear, uttering a note of colour only comparable to the shriek of a macaw.
"Why then, there isn't a gentleman's garden in Ireland but thim have the sway in it!" Bat says, when he finds me brooding over a shattered ideal. "There was Mr. Massy's was the grand place! The garden steps big slobs of marble, and the gate lodges dashed and haberdashed, and the gardens fit to blind yer eye by the dint o' thim!"
What "haberdashed" may mean I cannot say, but "thim" meant the combination so dear to his heart that a stouter than mine would be needed to abolish it, even from a herbaceous border.
Sometimes, chiefly on Sunday afternoons, I am visited by compunction in the matter of the prohibited "calcies" and "lobaylias," for it is on Sundays that Bat is "at home" to three favoured enemies of his own profession. They move, very slowly, and, for the most part, silently, from bed to bed, like doctors making a clinical inspection at a hospital; at intervals they put a horny finger under a patient's chin and gravely study his complexion, or, wishing perhaps to show generosity to a rival, they pick off some malign bug or caterpillar, and squash it between an unhesitating finger and thumb. It is at such times that I feel how far my garden in its lack of that gorgeous trio lags behind that of any other gentleman in Ireland.
But my gardener has his alleviations. There was one bright day which, having begun with the funeral of a relative, culminated in a visit as prolonged as it was satiating from the chief mourner. King Solomon did not exploit his Temple more thoroughly for the discomfiture of the Queen of Sheba than did Bat his gardens for the Chief Mourner. The latter, a "mountainy man from back in the counthry," paced heavily round after Mr. Whoolly, his hands folded on the apex of his back under the voluminous skirts of his blue frieze coat, a stick hanging from them like a tail. The deep silence of his native hills was on him; he suffered his emotions without expression until the tour of the kitchen garden was made, its climax--fortunately stage-managed by Bat--being "a bed of greens." There is that in such a bed that, in such a nature, touches an even more vibrating chord than potatoes.
"And cabbages!" said the mountainy man, almost in a whisper.
The Queen of Sheba herself was not a more gratifying audience. Mr. Whoolley seems to have observed the parallelism of the cases, and assuming that the visitor, in spite of the funeral, had no more spirit left in him, the couple adjourned to a convenient public house and were no more seen.
On the whole, I think I may say that I give Bat satisfaction. He is generous in judging rather by intention than achievement, and he sees the advantages of fostering a disposition to weed. Only once has he been tried too high, and that was when I planted out a bed with what he calls "pushoch-bui," a most pestilent weed whose English equivalent is, I fancy, charlock. To me he passed over the error in a very handsome manner, but I heard him the same afternoon say to the subordinate who was making good my misdoing:
"Is it that one! Sure he's no more good than a feather!"
Another act of folly of mine, however, carried with it more serious consequences. I was so far left to myself as to give permission to a Sunday School excursion of unknown dimensions to disport itself in my domains. Dates were discussed, and times arranged, and then a sponge of kindly oblivion wiped the affair from my mind. It was a couple of months afterwards--I was inspecting my wall fruit in the kitchen garden at eleven o'clock in the morning, and being eaten by midges in a way that foretold immediate rain, when there was a sound of thunderous driving on the avenue. Just then the rain began to fall, and almost at the same moment there arrived to me a rushing messenger from the house saying "there were ladies in the drawing-room."
I am a lone man, and there is no one to share with me the brunt of such a moment. I hurried in, and was confronted as I neared the hall door by four huge yellow brakes, full of children, and roofed with umbrellas. Two, already empty, were emulously pressing towards the yard, one taking a short cut across a strip of lawn, and two more were disgorging their burdens at large. I went into the drawing-room and found it lined with ladies in black. It was explained to me that on account of the rain the party, which comprised the Patrons, Teachers, and Pupils of four Sunday Schools, had "taken the liberty of coming to the house for shelter." Even as they spoke a strange murmuring sound arose from beneath my feet--the hum as of an angry hive. The house, like many old country houses in Ireland, stands upon a basement storey, and I realised that its cavernous recesses were being utilised as a receptacle for the Amalgamated Sunday Schools.