OLD ACQUAINTANCE.
The most vivid remembrance of my first return to Ireland is the sharp
sensation of ugly sound conveyed in the flat Dublin drawl. I have never
since been able to surmount this unjust antipathy to the accent of my
native town. The intolerable length of the syllables, the exaggerated
roundness of the vowel sounds, the weight and roll of the eternal
r's--it is all like the garlic of Provence, more seizing than
captivating.
And then the squalor, the mysterious ugliness of the North Wall! The air
of affronted leisure that greets you on all sides. A filthy porter
slouches over to you, with an indulgent, quizzical look in his kindly
eyes. "Is it a porther ye'll be wanting?" he asks, in suppressed
wonderment at any such unreasonable need on your part. When he has
sufficiently recovered from the shock, he lounges in among the boxes,
heroically resolved to make a joke of his martyrdom. He meets your
irritated glance with a reassuring smile, nods, and drawls out cheerily:
"Aisy, now, aisy. Sure an' 'twill be all the same in a hundred years."
When at last your trunks are discovered in the disorderly heap, he
volunteers, with the same suggestion of indifferent indulgence: "I
suppose 'twill be a cab or a cyar you'll be wanting next." By
implication you are made to understand that the cab or the cyar is
another exorbitant demand on your part, and that properly speaking you
should shoulder your trunk yourself and march off contentedly to your
inn or lodging or palace. "If ye loike, I'll lift it on to the cab for
you," he adds, good-naturedly.
There are travellers whom these odd ways of Erin amuse; others there are
who are exasperated to the verge of insanity by them. But they amply
explain the lamentable condition of the island and the imperturbable
good-humour of the least troubled and least ambitious of races. The
porter's philosophy resumes the philosophy of the land: "Aisy, now,
aisy. Sure an' 'twill be all the same in a hundred years."
With patience and good-humour on your side, and much voluble sympathy
and information on that of your driver, you are sure to arrive
somewhere, even from such remote latitudes as that of the North Wall and
the Pigeon-house. You are jerked over two lock-bridges, and you thank
your stars with reason that the discoloured and malodorous waters of the
Liffey have not closed over you and your luggage. The catastrophe would
find your driver phlegmatic and philosophic, with a twinkle in his eye
above the infamous depths of mire that suffocated you, assuring you that
when a man is ass enough to travel he must take the consequences of his
folly. For Erin and Iberia, moist shamrock and flaunting carnation, meet
in their conviction that the sage sits at home and smokes his pipe or
twangs his guitar in leisure while the fool alone courts the perils of
foreign highways.
As soon as the hall-door opened, and I stood with my foot upon the first
step of the familiar stairs, a chorus of young voices shouted my name in
glee. "An--gel--a!"
How flat and strange and inharmonious sounded that first greeting of my
name in ears attuned to accents shriller and more thin! The English
Angela was quick and clear; but the long-drawn Dublin Angela set all my
teeth on an edge, and such was the shock that the ardour of my
satisfaction in seeing them all again, and of appearing in their midst
as a travelled personage, was damped.
"How odd you all talk," I remember remarking at tea, and being promptly
crushed: "It's you with your horrid English accent that talks odd."
Still, in spite of this slight skirmish, they were glad enough to see
me. The quaint little booby of Kildare, whom they had bullied to their
liking, had grown into a lean, delicate, and resolute fiend, prepared to
meet every blow by a buffet, every injustice by passionate revolt. I no
longer needed Mrs. Clement's submissive protection. I had tasted the
glory of independent fight, and henceforth my tormentors were entitled
to some meed of pity, though justice bids me, in recording my
iniquities, to remember that their misfortunes were merited and earned
with exceeding rigour.
The first thrill of home-coming, that inexplicable vibration of memory's
chord, which so early marks the development of the creature, and
signifies the sharp division of past and present, ran like a flame
through all my body when the noise of Mrs. Clement's big bunch of keys,
rattling below stairs, reached me through the open drawing-room door.
"Mrs. Clement is down-stairs!" I shouted joyously, and instantly the
band of blond-headed scamps carried me off in triumph.
Into whose hands has that sombre town-house of my parents passed? Heaven
grant the children that play there are happier than ever I was; but if
the old store-room, with the big linen-presses, and the long china-press
with upper doors of wire-screen, the long table and square mahogany and
leather armchairs and sofa, gives to the occupants to-day half the
pleasure it always gave me, they are not to be pitied whatever their
fate.
The wide window looked out upon a hideous little street, but in front
there was a stone terrace, with two huge eagles, where Mrs. Clement kept
pots of plants and flowers that, alas! never bloomed, watered she them
never so sedulously; and above the terraces, if you ignored the sordid
street, the sunset traced all its fairest and rarest effects upon the
broad arch of heaven that spanned the street opening. Those Irish skies!
you must go to Italy and Greece to find hues as heavenly. How many a
sorrow unsuspected, that filled me with such intensity of despair as
only childhood can feel, has been smoothed by that mysterious slip of
sky between two dull rows of houses, against which in the liquid summer
of blue dusk the eagles, with all the lovely significance of a romantic
image, were sketched in sculptured stone. I dried my eyes to dream of
lands where eagles flew as common as sparrows. I cannot now tell why,
but I remember well that I grew to associate that distant glimpse of
heaven from the old store-room with the isle of Prospero and Miranda.
And when I learnt the Sonnets--which I knew by heart, as well as "The
Tempest" and "The Merchant of Venice" before the holidays were over--I
always found some strange connection between the abortive, sickly
cowslips and primroses Mrs. Clement cultivated on her terrace in wooden
boxes and those magic lines--
"From you have I been absent in the spring,
When proud-pied April, dressed in all his trim,
Hath put a spirit of youth in everything."
What can it be that poetry says to children, since they can neither
understand the rhythm, nor metre, nor beauty, nor sentiment of it? And
the child who (as I was then) is susceptible to the charm of poetry that
sweeps through the infinite, weeps with delicious emotion without the
ghost of an idea why. I was but a child of nine, when my sister in
response to my prayer, with my cheek still stinging from that blow
along the Warwick road, opened the fairyland of Shakespeare to me. With
a rapture I would I now could feel, I thrilled to the glamour of the
moonlight scene of the "Merchant." We never went to bed without
rehearsing it, each in turn being Jessica or Lorenzo. I only remember
one other sensation as passionate and vivid and absorbing, my first
hearing of the Moonlight Sonata, also at an age when it was perfectly
impossible that I should understand more than a mouse or a linnet a
particle of its beauty or meaning. Yet there they stand out in
extraordinary relief from a confusion of childish impressions, two
distinct moments of inexplicable ecstasy, the reveries of Lorenzo and
Jessica and the impassioned utterance of the master's soul in the
divinest of sound played, possibly not well, by my eldest sister's
governess in a soft summer twilight so long ago.
Meanwhile I have left Mrs. Clement, excited and pathetic, holding my
thin little visage in the cup of her folded palms. She was just as faded
and fair and melancholy as ever, and the same young man's head showed in
the brooch frame on the unchanged black silk gown. She kissed me several
times, and stroked my hair, and expressed amazement at the change in
me. And while she, dear kindly soul, was only thinking of me, there was
I, volatile little rascal, looking around me, delighted to see again the
beautiful big red-and-white cups, and smell the spices of the cupboard.
Has tea, have bread-and-milk, ever tasted again as these modest luxuries
tasted in those beautiful cups? The very remembrance of them brings the
water of envy to the mouth of age. I forget the miseries of childhood
only to recall the pleasure I took in that warm and rich pottery, and
the brilliant effect of bowls and plates and cups upon the morning and
evening damask.
And that first night at home, four little girls sleeping together in two
large beds, three night-dressed forms perched on a single bed, while I,
the stranger returned from abroad, mimicked Mr. Parker for their
shrieking delight, and held my night-dress high up on either side to
perform the famous curtsey of Queen Anne. And then a furious shout
outside on the landing, and my mother's voice--
"What's the meaning of that noise? Go to sleep instantly, or I'll come
in and whip you all round."
A sudden scamper of white-robed limbs, and in a twinkling four heads
are hidden under the sheets. Silence down the corridors, silence
throughout the high old house; only the breathing of night, and four
little heads are again bobbing over the pillows.
"Oh, I say, Angela, we didn't tell you, there's a new baby up-stairs.
Susanna! Did you ever hear of such a name? Everybody has pretty names
but us. Birdie was so jealous when it came, because nurse said her nose
would be out of joint, that she tried to smash its head with a poker one
day. She was caught in time."
And so there was. Another lamentable little girl born into this
improvident dolorous vale of Irish misery. Elsewhere boys are born in
plenty. In Ireland,--the very wretchedest land on earth for woman, the
one spot of the globe where no provision is made for her, and where
parents consider themselves as exempt of all duty, of tenderness, of
justice in her regard, where her lot as daughter, wife, and old maid
bears no resemblance to the ideal of civilisation,--a dozen girls are
born for one boy. The parents moan, and being fatalists as well as
Catholics, reflect that it is the will of God, as if they were not in
the least responsible; and while they assure you that they have not
wherewith to fill an extra mouth, which is inevitably true, they
continue to produce their twelve, fifteen, or twenty infants with
alarming and incredible indifference. This is Irish virtue. The army of
inefficient Irish governesses and starving illiterate Irish teachers
cast upon the Continent, forces one to lament a virtue whose results are
so heartless and so deplorable. If my most sympathetic and most
satisfactory race were only a little less virtuous in its own restricted
sense of the word, and a tiny bit more rational! And not content, alas!
with the iniquity of driving these poor maimed creatures upon foreign
shores in the quest of daily bread, hopelessly ill-equipped for the
task, without education, or knowledge of domestic or feminine lore,
incapable of handling a needle or cooking an egg, without the most
rudimentary instinct of order or personal tidiness, incompetent, and
vague, and careless,--these same parents at home expect these martyrs
abroad to replenish their coffers with miserably earned coin. I have
never met an Irish governess on the Continent who had a sou to spend on
her private pleasures, for the simple reason that she sent every odd
farthing home. It's the iniquitous old story. Irishmen go to America,
marry, and make their fortunes; but the landlord and shopkeeper at home
are paid by the savings of the peasant-girls, without a "Thank you" from
their parents. Let Jack or Tom send them a five-pound note in the course
of a prosperous career, "Glory be to God, but 'tis the good son he is,"
piously ejaculate the old folk. Let Bessy or Jane give them her heart's
blood, deny herself every pleasure, not only the luxuries but the very
necessaries of life, and the same old folk nod their sapient
heads,--"'Tis but her duty, to be sure."
Needless to say, this inappropriate burst of indignation was not
inspired in those days by the sight of my new little sister in her
cradle, as white as milk, with eyes like big blue stars, the eyes of her
Irish father, soft and luminous and gay. She dwelt on earth just
eighteen months, and then took flight to some region where it is to be
hoped she found a warmer nest than fate would have offered her here
below.
My grandmother was dead, but Dennis and Mary Ann still lived with my
uncle Lionel. What a joy our meeting! So "thim English" hadn't made
mince-meat of me! I was whole and sound, Mary Ann remarked, but mighty
spare of flesh and colour. "Just a rag of a creature," Dennis commented,
as he lifted my arm. "Why didn't ye write and tell us ye were hungry,
alannah?"
"I did so," I promptly retorted; "but Sister Esmeralda rubbed it out,
and put in something else which wasn't a bit true."
"Troth, and 'tis meself 'ud enjoy givin' that wan a piece of me moind."
The whiff of the brogue was strong enough to waft you to the clouds. But
how good to be with these two honest souls again! Uncle Lionel gave me a
crown-piece, when he had tortured my check with his chaven chin, and
called me a little renegade because of my English accent, and then I
went out to the garden, neglected ever since the death of my
grandfather.
Where was Hamlet, and whither had vanished Elsinore? Where was the youth
with the future revolutionary name, who used to come bounding over the
hedge, cheerily humming "Love among the Roses"? There were no roses now,
and the house next door was to let.
After the trim gardens of England, this desolate old slip of garden,
where weeds and thick grasses grew along the uncared paths, seemed a
cemetery of dead seasons. Fruit-trees that bore neither blossom nor
fruit; flower-beds where never leaf nor flower now bloomed; alleys
where last year's autumn leaves still lay; broken pots that used to
make such a gay parterre of geraniums of every hue when my grandfather
lived; defoliaged rose-bushes, now mere summer urns of unfulfilled
promise, and scarce a red bunch on the currant-boughs. And the pool,
with the circle of watering-cans above, now rusty and untouched, where I
used to watch for the first faint line of shadow cast by the gathering
dusk, which stole across its clear face in keeping with the stealing
flight of light above--how dead and sad all this seemed, despite its
quaint familiarity. I was but a child, and yet as I stood once more in
that neglected garden, I had some premonition of the immitigable sadness
of remembrance, the feeling that there was already a past that had
slipped through my fingers, as the waters run ceaselessly from the
fountain of life to mingle with the still river of death.