The parish priest was in a very great hurry and yet anxious for a talk
on his pet subject. He wanted to speak about the new temperance hall.
Would I mind walking a little way with him while he did so? He had a
great many things to attend to that day.... We made our way along the
street together, left the town behind us, and presently reached that
sinister appendage of all Irish country towns, the workhouse. The priest
turned in the wide gate, and the porter, old, official, spectacled, came
to meet him.
"Has the funeral gone?" asked the priest, a little breathless.
"I'll see, Father." The porter shuffled over the flags, a great door
swung open; there was a vista of whitewashed walls, a chilly, vacant
corridor, and beyond it a hall where old men were seated on forms at a
long, white deal table. They were eating--a silent, grey, bent, beaten
group. Through a glass partition we could see the porter in his office
turning over the leaves of a great register.
"I find," he said, coming out again, speaking as if he were giving
evidence at a sworn inquiry, "that the remains of Martin Quirke,
deceased, were removed at 4.15."
"I am more than half an hour late," said the priest, regarding his watch
with some irritation.
We hurried out and along the road to the country, the priest trailing
his umbrella behind him, speaking of the temperance hall but preoccupied
about the funeral he had missed, my eyes marking the flight of flocks of
starlings making westward.
Less than a mile of ground brought us to the spot where the paupers were
buried. It lay behind a high wall, a narrow strip of ground, cut off
from a great lord's demesne by a wood. The scent of decay was heavy in
the place; it felt as if the spring and the summer had dragged their
steps here, to lie down and die with the paupers. The uncut grass lay
rank and grey and long--Nature's unkempt beard--on the earth. The great
bare chestnuts and oaks threw narrow shadows over the irregular mounds
of earth. Small, rude wooden crosses stood at the heads of some of the
mounds, lopsided, drunken, weather-beaten. No names were inscribed upon
them. All the bones laid down here were anonymous. A robin was singing
at the edge of the wood; overhead the rapid wings of wild pigeons beat
the air.
A stable bell rang impetuously in the distance, dismissing the workmen
on the lord's demesne. By a freshly-made grave two gravediggers were
leaning on their spades. They were paupers, too; men who got some
privilege for their efforts in this dark strip of earth between the wood
and the wall. One of them yawned. A third man stood aloof, a minor
official from the workhouse; he took a pipe from his mouth as the priest
approached.
The three men gave one the feeling that they were rather tired of
waiting, impatient to have their little business through. It was a
weird spot in the gathering gloom of a November evening. The only bright
thing in the place, the only gay spot, the only cheerful patch of
colour, almost exulting in its grim surroundings, was the heap of
freshly thrown up soil from the grave. It was rich in colour as
newly-coined gold. Resting upon it was a clean, white, unpainted coffin.
The only ornament was a tin breastplate on the lid and the inscription
in black letters:
Martin Quirke,
Died November 3, 1900.
R.I.P.
The white coffin on the pile of golden earth was like the altar of some
pagan god. I stood apart as the priest, vesting himself in a black
stole, approached the graveside and began the recital of the burial
service in Latin. The gravediggers, whose own bones would one day be
interred anonymously in the same ground, stood on either side of him
with their spades, two grim acolytes. The minor official from the
workhouse, the symbol of the State, bared a long, narrow head, as white
and as smooth as the coffin on the heap of earth. I stood by a groggy
wooden cross, the eternal observer.
The priest spoke in a low monotone, holding the book close to his eyes
in the uncertain light. And as he read I fell to wondering who our
brother in the white coffin might be. Some merry tramp who knew the pain
and the joy of the road? Some detached soul who had shaken off the
burden of life's conventions, one who loved lightly and took punishment
casually? One who saw crime as a science, or merely a broken reed? Or a
soldier who had carried a knapsack in foreign campaigns? A creature of
empire who had found himself in Africa, or Egypt, or India, or the
Crimea, and come back again to claim his pile of golden earth in the
corner of the lord's demesne? If the men had time, perhaps they would
stick a little wooden cross over the spot where his bones were laid
down....
The priest's voice continued the recitation of the burial service and
the robin sang at the edge of the dim wood. Down the narrow strip of
rank burial ground a low wind cried, and the light, losing its glow in
the western sky, threw a grey pall on the grass. And under the influence
of the moment a little memory of people I had known and forgotten went
across my mind, a memory that seemed to stir in the low wind, a memory
of people who had at the last got their white, clean coffin and their
rest on a pile of golden earth, people who had gone like our brother in
the deal boards.... There was the man, the scholar, who had taught his
school, who had an intelligence, who could talk, who, perhaps, could
have written only--. The wind sobbed down the narrow strip of ground....
He had made his battle, indeed, a long-drawn-out battle, for he had only
given way step by step, gradually but inexorably yielding ground to the
thing that was hunting him out of civilised life. He had gone from his
school, his home, his friends, fleeing from one miserable refuge to
another in the miserable country town. Eventually he had passed in
through the gates of the workhouse. It was all very vivid now--his
attempts to get back to the life he had known, like a man struggling in
the quicksands. There were the little spurts back to the town, the
well-shaped head, the face which still held some remembrance of its
distinction and its manhood erect over the quaking, broken frame; that
splendid head like a noble piece of sculpture on the summit of a
crumbling ruin. Forth he would come, the flicker of resistance, a pallid
battle-light in the eyes, a vessel that had been all but wrecked once
more standing up the harbour to meet the winds that had driven it from
the seas--and after a little battle once more taking in the sheets and
crawling back to the anchorage of the dark workhouse, there to suffer in
the old way, in secret to curse, to pray, to despair, to hope, to
contrive some little repairs to the broken physique in order that there
might be yet another journey into waters that were getting more and more
shadowy. And the day came when the only journey that could be made was a
shuffle to the gate, the haunted eyes staring into a world which was a
nightmare of regrets. How terrible was the pathos of that life, that
struggle, that tragedy, how poignant its memory while the robin sang at
the edge of the dim wood!... And there was that red-haired, defiant
young man with the build of an athlete, the eyes of an animal. How
bravely he could sing up the same road to the dark house! It was to him
as the burrow is to the rabbit. He would come out to nibble at the
regular and lawful intervals, and having nibbled return to sleep and
shout and fight for his "rights" in the dark house. And once, on a
spring day, he had come out with a companion, a pale woman in a thin
shawl and a drab skirt, and they had taken to the roads together,
himself swinging his ashplant, his stride and manner carrying the
illusion of purpose, his eyes on everything and his mind nowhere;
herself trotting over the broken stones in her canvas shoes beside him,
a pale shadow under the fire of his red head. They had gone away into a
road whose milestones were dark houses, himself singing the song of his
own life, a song of mumbled words, without air or music; herself silent,
clutching her thin shawl over her breast, her feet pattering over the
little stones of the road.... The wind whistled down over the graves, by
the wooden crosses.... There was that little woman who at the close of
the day, when the light was charitable in its obscurity, opened her door
and came down from the threshold of her house, painfully as if she were
descending from a great height. Nobody was about. All was quietness in
the quiet street. And she drew the door to, put the key in the lock, her
hand trembled, the lock clicked! The deed was done! Who but herself
could know that the click of the key in the lock was the end, the close,
the dreadful culmination of the best part of a whole century of
struggle, of life? Behind that door she had swept up a bundle of
memories that were now all an agony because the key had clicked in the
lock. Behind the door was the story of her life and the lives of her
children and her children's children. Where was the use, she might have
asked, of blaming any of them now? What was it that they had all gone,
all scattered, leaving her broken there at the last? Had not the key
clicked in the lock? In that click was the end of it all; in the empty
house were the ghosts of her girlhood, her womanhood, her motherhood,
her old age, her struggles, her successes, her skill in running her
little shop, her courage in riding one family squall after another! The
key had clicked in the lock. She moved down the quiet street, sensitive
lest the eye of the neighbours should see her, a tottering, broken thing
going by the vague walls, keeping to the back streets, setting out for
the dark house beyond the town. She had said to them, "I will be no
trouble to you." And, indeed, she was not. They had little more to do
for her than join her hands over her breast.... The wind was plaintive
in the gaunt trees of the dark wood.... Which of us could say he would
never turn a key in the lock of an empty house? How many casual little
twists of the wrist of Fate stand between the best of us and the step
down from the threshold of a broken home? What rags of memories have any
of us to bundle behind the door of the empty house when the hour comes
for us to click the key in the lock?... The wind cried down the narrow
strip of ground where the smell of decay was in the grass.
There was a movement beside the white coffin, the men were lifting it
off the golden pile of earth and lowering it into the dark pit. The
men's feet slipped and shuffled for a foothold in the yielding clay. At
last a low, dull thud sounded up from the mouth of the pit. Our brother
in the white coffin had at last found a lasting tenure in the soil.
The official from the dark house moved over to me. He spoke in whispers,
holding the hat an official inch of respect for the dead above the
narrow white shred of his skull.
"Martin Quirke they are burying," he said.
"Who was he?"
"Didn't you ever hear tell of Martin Quirke?"
"No, never."
"A big man he was one time, with his acres around him and his splendid
place. Very proud people they were--he and his brother--and very hot,
too. The Quirkes of Ballinadee."
"And now--"
I did not finish the sentence. The priest was spraying the coffin in the
grave with the golden earth.
"Ashes to ashes and dust to dust." It fell briskly on the shallow deal
timber.
"'Twas the land agitation, the fight for the land, that brought Martin
Quirke down," said the official as the earth sprayed the pauper's
coffin. "He was one of the first to go out under the Plan of
Campaign--the time of the evictions. They never got back their place.
When the settlement came the Quirkes were broken. Martin lost his spirit
and his heart. Drink it was that got him in the end, and now--"
"Requiem æternam dona eis, Domine: et lux perpetua luceat eis," the
priest's voice said.
"All the same," said the official, "It was men like Martin Quirke who
broke the back of landlordism. He was strong and he was weak. God rest
him!"
I walked away over the uneven ground, the memory of the land agitation,
its bitterness and its passion, oppressing me. Stories of things such as
this stalked the country like ghosts.
The priest overtook me, and we turned to leave. Down the narrow strip of
the lord's demesne were the little pauper mounds, like narrow boxes
wrapped in the long grey grass. Their pathos was almost vibrant in the
dim November light. And away beyond them were a series of great heaps,
looking like broad billows out to sea. The priest stood for a moment.
"You see the great mounds at the end?" he asked. "They are the Famine
Pits."
"The Famine Pits?"
"Yes; the place where the people were buried in heaps and hundreds, in
thousands, during the Famine of '46 and '47. They died like flies by the
roadside. You see such places in almost every part of Ireland. I hope
the people will never again die like that--die gnawing the gravel on the
roadside."
The rusty iron gate in the demesne wall swung open and we passed out.