MY FRIEND MARY ANN.
Seven has been described as the age of reason. I am curious to know why,
since many of us at fifty can hardly be said to have attained that rare
and sublime period. John Stuart Mill, for his misfortune, at seven may
have discovered some rudimentary development of sense, but no other
child of my acquaintance past or present. But if seven is not marked for
me by the dawn of reason, it is important as the start of continuous
reminiscence.
Memory is no longer fragmentary and episodic. Life here begins to be a
story, ever broken, ever clouded, with radiant hours amid its many
sadnesses, quaint and adorable surprises ever coming to dry the tears of
blank despair and solitude; an Irish melody of mirth and melancholy, all
sorts of unimaginable tempests of passion and tears, soothed as
instantaneously as evoked, by the quickening touch of rapture and racial
buoyancy. Mine was the loneliest, the most tragic of childhoods, yet I
doubt if any little creature has ever been more susceptible to the
intoxication of laughter, more vividly responsive to every mirthful and
emotional claim of life.
After my singular and enchanting experience of the police-station,
where, as a rule, the hardened instruments of justice are not permitted
to show themselves in so gracious and hospitable a light, it was decided
to expatriate the poor little rebel beyond the strip of sullen sea that
divides the shamrock shores from the home of the rose. There, at least,
vagrant fancies would be safely sheltered behind high conventual walls,
and the most unmerciful ladies of Mercy, in a picturesque midland town
of England, were requested to train and guide me in the path I was not
destined to adorn, or indeed to persevere in.
Pending the accomplishment of my doom, I was removed from the centre of
domestic discord and martyrdom to the suburban quiet of my grandfather's
house.
This decision had its unexpected compensation. The cross old cook, whom
I had not seen since the day I stole her bowl of damson-jam, had
disappeared to make way for Mary Ann, the divine, the mysterious, the
sublime, the ever-delicious Mary Ann. Where did she come from, whither
has she vanished, the soother of the sorrows of those most lamentable
days?
Alas! now I know the secret of her enchantment, of those perishable
surprises of mood and imagination that so perpetually lifted me out of
my miserable self, diverted me in my tragic gloom, and sent me to bed
each night in a state of delightful excitement. Mary Ann drank punch,
and on the fiery wings of alcoholism wafted herself and me, her
astonished satellite, into the land of revelry and mad movement. How
ardently, then, I yearned for the reform of poor humanity through the
joyous amenities of punch. Had my grandmother up-stairs consumed punch
instead of her embittering egg-flip! Had the ladies of Mercy, my future
persecutors, drunk punch, the world might have proved a hilarious
playground for me instead of a desperate school of adversity.
Mary Ann possessed a single blemish in a nature fashioned to captivate a
lonely and excitable child. She worshipped my uncle Lionel. My uncle
Lionel was his mother's favourite--a Glasgow lad, my grandfather
contemptuously defined him, without the Cameron nose; a fine, handsome,
fair young fellow, the picture of my mother, extremely distinguished in
manner and appearance, and reputed to be a genius. He is said to have
written quantities of superlative verse which he disdained to publish;
but as nobody ever saw even the manuscript, we may regard the
achievement as apocryphal. He had finished his studies in Paris, which
explained a terrifying habit, whenever he met me--frightening the wits
out of me the while by his furious look--of bursting out into what I
afterwards learnt to be an old French song: "Corbleu, madame, que faites
vous ici?"
I wish grown-up persons could realise the shudder of terror that ran
through me and momentarily dimmed for me the light of day, when I heard
that loud voice, encountered the mock ferocity of that blue glance, and
then felt myself roughly captured by strong arms, lifted up, and a
shaven chin drawn excruciatingly across my tender small visage. These
are trifles to read of, but what is a trifle in childhood? A child feeds
greedily upon its own excesses of sensation, thrives upon them, or is
consumed by them. To these early terrors, these accumulated emotions,
these swift alternations of anguish and rapture, which made opening
existence for me a sort of swing, perpetually flying and dropping
between tears and laughter, from radiant heights, without transition, to
pitch darkness, do I attribute the nervous illnesses that have so
remorselessly pursued me in after-years. The wonder is the mind itself
did not give way.
Big language for a handsome young man with a blonde moustache and an
elegant figure to have provoked, with his Corbleu, madame! his
theatrical fury, and his shaven chin. He now and then gave me a shilling
to console me, which shilling I spontaneously offered to Mary Ann, whose
real consolation it was, since it filled the steaming glass for her and
my friend Dennis, the red-nosed coachman, and permitted me to sit in
front of them, a grave and awed spectator of their aged frolics.
Immoral undoubtedly, yet that evening bumper of punch converted Mary Ann
into a charming companion. She and the fire in front of us--for it was
on the verge of winter--cheered me as I had not yet been cheered since I
had left my kind Kildare folk. The tyrants sat above in state, while I,
enthralled below, listened to Mary Ann, as she wandered impartially from
legend to reminiscence and anecdote, and not infrequently burst into
song and dance.
Her sense of hospitality was warm and unlimited. Dennis she welcomed
with a "Troth an' 'tis yourself, Dennis, me boy." For me she placed a
chair opposite her own, and sometimes, in the midst of her enjoyment,
stopped to help me to a spoonful of the stimulating liquid from her
tumbler, remarking with a wink that it brightened my eyes and
considerably heightened my beauty. It certainly made me cough, sputter,
and smartened my eyelids with the quick sensation of tears, and then she
would meditatively refer to the days when she too was young, and had
pink cheeks and eyes the boys thought were never intended for the
salvation of her soul. I was a curious child, and was eager for an
explanation of the dark saying, on which Dennis would chuck my chin,
with the liveliest of sympathetic grimaces across at the irresistible
Mary Ann, which made the saying darker still, and Mary Ann would fling
herself back in her chair convulsed with laughter.
"Ah, Miss Angela, 'twas the devil of a colleen I was in thim days, most
outrageous, with a foot, I tell ye, as light as thim cratures as dances
be moonlight. Sure didn't I once dance down Rory Evans in the big barn
of Farmer Donoghue's at Clonakilty, when there was that cheering, I tell
ye, fit to lift the roof off the house."
At this point she invariably illustrated the tale of her terpsichorean
prowess in a legendary past by what she called "illigant step dancing,"
and endeavoured to teach me the Irish jig. She observed with indulgent
contempt that I showed a fine capacity for the stamping and whirling and
the triumphant shout, but I failed altogether in the noble science of
"step dancing."
But what I preferred to the dancing, exciting as it was, were the
ghost-stories, the legends of banshees, the thrilling and beautiful
tales of the Colleen Bawn and Feeney the Robber. Those two were for long
the hero and heroine of my infancy. Gerald Griffin's romance she, oddly
enough, knew by heart. I forget now most of the names of the persons of
the drama, but at seven I knew them all as dear and intimate friends:
the forlorn young man who wrote those magic lines, "A place in thy
memory, dearest"--did even Shelley later ever stir my bosom with fonder
and deeper and less lucid emotions than those provoked by those tinkling
lines, breathed from the soul of Mary Ann upon the fumes of punch?--the
perfidious hero who once, like Mary Ann, drank too much and danced a
jig when he ought to have been otherwise engaged, Miles, Anne Chute, and
the lovely betrayed Eily.
I knew them all, wept for them as I had never wept for myself, and was
only lifted out of a crushing sense of universal woe when Dennis
produced an orange, which was his habit whenever he saw me on the point
of succumbing under alien disaster.
Sometimes, to entertain my hosts, I would volunteer to warble my strange
symphonies, and was never so ecstatically happy as when I felt the tears
of musical rapture roll down my cheeks, when Dennis, by way of applause,
always observed lugubriously--
"Ah, 'twas the poor master was proud indeed of her voice. 'She'll be a
Catherine Hayes yet, you'll see, Dennis,' he used to say, 'or maybe
she'll compose illigant operas.'"
Alas! I neither sing nor compose, and listen to the singing and the
music of others with unemotional quietude. So many different
achievements have been fondly expected of me, that I have preferred the
alternative of achieving nothing. Better demolish a multitude of
expectations than build one's house of the perishable bricks of a single
one!
Preparations for my departure around me must have been going on, but I
perceived nothing of them. I vaguely remember daily acquaintance with a
dame's school in the neighbourhood, whither Mary Ann conducted me every
morning. But remembrance confines itself to the first positive delights
of a slate and pencil. Next to my own operas and Mary Ann's stories, I
could conceive nothing on earth more fascinating than a certain slate,
after I had arduously polished it, a slate-pencil, and leisure to draw
what I liked on the blue-grey square. There were little boys and girls
on the benches before and behind me, but I only see myself absorbed with
my new pleasure, making strokes and curves and letters, and effacing
them with impassioned gravity.