“No, no,” said her mother, but she did not seem very convinced herself; outside the rain splashed against the panes, the train plodded wearily into the darkness, crawling as if through clouds of water. The little girl listlessly ate a sandwich, the young woman smoked, the priest picked up his breviary again; now—without realizing it—he imitated the little girl, the names Jesus Christ, Holy Ghost, Mary, emerged from his murmuring, then he closed the book again. “Is California really so beautiful?” he asked.
“It’s wonderful,” said the woman, hunching her shoulders with a shiver.
“Ireland is beautiful too.”
“Wonderful,” said the woman, “really, I know it is—don’t I have to get out here?”
“Yes, at the next station.”
As the train entered Sligo it was still raining; kisses were exchanged under umbrellas, tears were wept under umbrellas; a taxi driver was asleep over his steering wheel, his head resting on his folded arms; I woke him up; he was one of those pleasant people who wake up with a smile.
“Where to?” he asked.
“To Drumcliff churchyard.”
“But nobody lives there.”
“Maybe,” I said, “but I’d like to go there.”
“And back?”
“Yes.”
“All right.”
We drove through puddles, empty streets; in the twilight I looked through an open window at a piano; the music looked as if the dust on it must be an inch thick. A barber was standing in his doorway, snipping with his scissors as if he wanted to cut off threads of rain; at the entrance to a movie a girl was putting on fresh lipstick, children with prayer books under their arms ran through the rain, an old woman shouted across the street to an old man: “Howya, Paddy?” and the old man shouted back: “I’m all right—with the help of God and His most blessed Mother.”
“Are you quite sure,” the driver asked me, “you really want to go to Drumcliff churchyard?”
“Quite sure,” I said.
The hills round about were covered with faded ferns like the wet hair of an aging red-haired woman, two grim rocks guarded the entrance to this little bay: “Benbulbin and Knocknarea,” said the driver, as if he were introducing me to two distant relations he didn’t much care about.
“There,” said the driver, pointing to where a church tower reared up in the mist; rooks were flying round the tower, clouds of rooks, and from a distance they looked like black snow-flakes. “I think,” said the driver, “you must be looking for the old battlefield.”
“No,” I said, “I’ve never heard of any battle.”
“In 561,” he began in a guide’s mild tone of voice, “a battle was fought here which was the only one ever fought in all the world on account of a copyright.”
I shook my head as I looked at him.
“It’s really true,” he said; “the followers of St. Columba had copied a psalter belonging to St. Finian, and there was a battle between the followers of St. Finian and the followers of St. Columba. Three thousand dead—but the king decided the quarrel; he said: ‘As the calf belongs to every cow, so the copy belongs to every book.’ You’re sure you don’t want to see the battlefield?”
“No,” I said, “I’m looking for a grave.”
“Oh yes,” he said. “Yeats, that’s right—then I expect you want to go to Innisfree too.”
“I don’t know yet,” I said; “wait here, please.”
Rooks flew up from the old gravestones, circled cawing around the old church tower. Yeats’ grave was wet, the stone was cold, and the lines which Yeats had had inscribed on his gravestone were as cold as the ice needles that had been shot at me from Swift’s tomb: “Cast a cold eye on life, on death. Horseman, pass by!” I looked up; were the rooks enchanted swans? They cawed mockingly at me, fluttered around the church tower. The ferns lay flat on the surrounding hills, beaten down by the rain, rust-colored and withered. I felt cold.
“Drive on,” I said to the driver.
“On to Innisfree then?”
“No,” I said, “back to the station.”
Rocks in the mist, the lonely church, encircled by fluttering rooks, and three thousand miles of water beyond Yeats’ grave. Not a swan to be seen.
17
IN A MANNER OF SPEAKING
When something happens to you in Germany, when you miss a train, break a leg, go bankrupt, we say: It couldn’t have been any worse; whatever happens is always the worst. With the Irish it is almost the opposite: if you break a leg, miss a train, go bankrupt, they say: It could be worse; instead of a leg you might have broken your neck, instead of a train you might have missed Heaven, and instead of going bankrupt you might have lost your peace of mind, and going bankrupt is no reason at all for that. What happens is never the worst; on the contrary, what’s worse never happens: if your revered and beloved grandmother dies, your revered and beloved grandfather might have died too; if the farm burns down but the chickens are saved, the chickens might have been burned up too, and if they do burn up—well, what’s worse is that you might have died yourself, and that didn’t happen. And if you should die, well, you are rid of all your troubles, for to every penitent sinner the way is open to Heaven, the goal of our laborious earthly pilgrimage—after breaking legs, missing trains, surviving all manner of bankruptcies. With us—it seems to me—when something happens our sense of humor and imagination desert us; in Ireland that is just when they come into play. To persuade someone who has broken his leg, is lying in pain or hobbling around in a plaster cast, that it might have been worse is not only comforting, it is an occupation requiring poetic talents, not to mention a touch of sadism: to paint a picture of the agonies of a fractured vertebra, to demonstrate what a dislocated shoulder would be like, or a crushed skull—the man with the broken leg hobbles off much comforted, counting himself lucky to have suffered such a minor misfortune.
Thus fate has unlimited credit, and the interest is paid willingly and submissively; if the children are in bed, racked and miserable with whooping cough, in need of devoted care, you must count yourself fortunate to be on your feet and able to look after the children. Here the imagination knows no bounds. “It could be worse” is one of the most common turns of speech, probably because only too often things are pretty bad and what’s worse offers the consolation of being relative.
The twin sister of “it could be worse” is an equally common phrase: “I shouldn’t worry”—and this among people who have every reason not to be without worry every minute of the day and night; a hundred years ago, during the great famine, with several consecutive crop failures, that great national disaster which not only had immediate devastating effects but the shock of which has been handed down through generations to this day—a hundred years ago Ireland had some seven million inhabitants, Poland probably had just as few at that time, but today Poland has more than twenty million inhabitants and Ireland scarcely four million, and Poland—God knows—has certainly not been spared by its powerful neighbors. This dwindling from seven to four million among a people with a surplus of births means a great tide of emigrants.
Parents watching their six (often eight or ten) children grow up would have reason enough to worry day and night, and no doubt they do worry, but with that submissive smile they too repeat the phrase: “I shouldn’t worry.” As yet they don’t know, nor will they ever know exactly, how many of their children will populate the slums of Liverpool, London, New York, or Sydney—or whether they will be lucky. But one day the hour of farewell will come, for two out of six, for three out of eight: Sheila or Sean will go off to the bus stop, cardboard suitcase in hand, the bus will take them to the train, the train to the boat; floods of tears at bus stops, at railway stations, at the dock in Dublin or Cork in the wet, cheerless days of autumn—across the bog past abandoned houses, and not one of those who stay behind weeping knows for sure whether they will ever see Sean or Sheila again; it is a long way from Sydney to Dublin, from New York back here, and many do not even return h
ome from London—they will get married, have children, send money home, who knows?
While almost all European countries fear a labor shortage, and many are already feeling it, here two out of six, three out of eight brothers and sisters know they will have to emigrate, so deep-rooted is the shock of the famine; from generation to generation the specter takes its terrible toll; at times one would like to believe that this emigration is some sort of habit, a duty they take for granted—but the economic situation really does make it necessary: when Ireland became a Free State, in 1923, it not only had almost a century of industrial development to catch up with, it had also to keep pace with new developments; there are scarcely any cities, or industry, or any market for the fish. Sean and Sheila will have to emigrate.
18
FAREWELL
It was hard to say good-by, just because everything seemed to point to its being necessary: our money was all gone, new money was promised but had not arrived, it had turned cold, and in the boardinghouse (the cheapest we could find in the evening paper) the floors were so sloping that we seemed to be sinking headfirst into bottomless depths; on a gently slanting roller coaster we glided through the no-man’s-land between dream and memory, across Dublin threatened by the chasms around our bed, which stood in the middle of the room, the noise and the neon lights of Dorset Street surging round us; we clung to one another; the children’s sighs from the beds against the wall sounded like cries for help from a shore we could not reach.
In this no-man’s-land between dream and memory the entire contents of the National Museum, to which we returned every time the clerk at the post office told us our money had not arrived, became as distinct and rigid as the displays in a waxworks; as on a ghost train in an enchanted forest, we plunged headfirst into it: St. Brigid’s shoe shone silvery and delicate out of the darkness, great black crosses consoled and threatened, freedom fighters in touching green uniforms, puttees and red berets, showed us their wounds, their identity papers, read farewell letters to us in childlike voices: “My dear Mary, Ireland’s freedom …”; a thirteenth-century cauldron swam past us, a prehistoric canoe; gold jewelry smiled, Celtic clasps made of gold, copper, and silver hung like innumerable commas on an invisible washline; we floated through the gate to Trinity College, but this great gray place was uninhabited save for a pale young girl who sat weeping on the library steps, her bright green hat in her hand, waiting for her sweetheart or mourning his loss. Noise and neon lights coming up from Dorset Street rushed past us like time that at moments became history, monuments were pushed past us, or we past them: men made of bronze, solemn, holding swords, quill pens, scrolls, reins, or compasses; women with stern bosoms plucked lyres, their sweet-sad eyes looking back through the centuries; endless columns of young girls dressed in navy blue stood in rows, carrying hurling sticks, mute, serious, and we were afraid they would raise their sticks like clubs; closely surrounded, we swept on. Everything we had looked at was now looking at us: lions roared at us, gibbons leaped across our path, we were carried up the giraffe’s long neck and down again, out of his dead eyes the iguana reproached us for his ugliness; the dark water of the Liffey, green and dirty, went gurgling past us, plump seagulls screamed, a lump of butter—“two hundred years old, found in the bog in Mayo”—floated past us like a lump of gold; with a smile a policeman showed us his Rainfall Book; for forty consecutive days he had written an o, a whole column of them, and the pale girl holding the green hat was still weeping on the library steps.
The waters of the Liffey turned black, carrying history out to sea like flotsam: archives with seals hanging from them like sounding leads, treaties with ornate initials, documents heavy with sealing wax, wooden swords, cardboard cannons, lyres and chairs, beds and cupboards, inkwells, mummies with their bandages loosened and, dark and flapping like palm fronds, drifting through the water; a streetcar conductor cranked out a long paper curl from his ticket-mill, and on the steps of the Bank of Ireland an old woman was sitting, counting dollar bills, and twice, three times, four times, the clerk at the post office returned and, with a sorrowful expression, said behind his wicket: “Sorry.”
Innumerable candles were burning in front of the statue of Magdalene the red-haired sinner, the backbone of a shark swam past us—it looked like a windsock—swayed, the cartilage broke apart, the vertebrae rolled like napkin rings one by one into the night and disappeared; seven hundred O’Malleys marched past us, brown-haired, white-haired, red-haired, singing a hymn of praise to their clan.
We whispered words of consolation, clung together, were borne through parks and avenues, through the gorges of Connemara, the mountains of Kerry, the bogs of Mayo, for twenty, thirty miles, always afraid of coming across the dinosaur, but all we came across was the cinema standing in the middle of Connemara, the middle of Mayo, the middle of Kerry: it was built of cement, the windows smeared with thick green paint, and inside the cinema the projector buzzed like an angry captive beast, buzzed Monroe, Tracy, Lollobrigida onto the screen; on our railway of green shadows, still fearful of the dinosaur, we passed between never-ending walls, so far from the sighs of our children, came back to the suburbs of Dublin, past palms, oleanders, through rhododendron woods, headfirst; the houses grew bigger and bigger, the trees taller and taller, the gulf between us and the sighing children broader and broader; the gardens grew till they were so big we could no longer see the houses, and we plunged into the delicate green of infinite meadows.…
It was hard to say good-by, although in the morning, in the clatter of daylight, the landlady’s rough voice swept up the flotsam of our dreams like rubbish, although the tok-tok-tok-tok from the passing bus startled us, sounding so deceptively like a machine gun being fired that we thought it was a signal for a revolution, but Dublin had no thought of revolution; it was thinking of breakfast, of horse races, prayers, and celluloid shadows. The rough-voiced landlady called us to breakfast, glorious tea flowed; the landlady sat with us in her dressing gown, smoking, and told us about voices that plagued her at night, the voice of a drowned brother calling for her in the night, the voice of her deceased mother reminding her of the vows of her first Communion, the voice of her deceased husband, warning her of whisky—a trio of voices, heard in the dark back room, where she spent the whole day alone with bottle, melancholy, and dressing gown.
“My psychiatrist,” she said, suddenly lowering her voice, “claims the voices come out of the bottle, but I’ve told him he’d better not say anything against my voices, for he lives off them after all. You wouldn’t like,” she said in an altered tone, “you wouldn’t like to buy my house? I’ll let you have it cheap.” “No, thank you,” I said.
“Too bad.” Shaking her head, she returned to her dark back room, with bottle, melancholy, and dressing gown.
Downcast by the “Sorry” of the post office clerk, we went back to the National Museum, from there to the art gallery, descending once more to the dark crypt of the mummies which a visitor from the country compared to kippered herrings; our last pennies went on candles which quickly burned down in front of the colored pictures of saints; we walked up to Stephens Green, fed the ducks, sat in the sun, listened to Crimson Cloud’s chances of winning: they were good. At noon large numbers of Dubliners emerged from Mass, spreading out into Grafton Street. Our hopes of a “Yes” from the post office clerk remained unfulfilled. His “Sorry” had become more and more depressed, and he was not far—it seemed to me—from opening the cash drawer and giving us a loan from the Postmaster General; at least his hands twitched toward the drawer, and with a sigh he replaced them on the marble counter.
Luckily the girl with the green hat invited us to tea, bought the children sweets, placed some fresh candles in front of the picture of the right saint, St. Anthony, and when we went back to the post office the clerk’s smile beamed at us all the way across to the entrance. He cheerfully licked his fingers, counted the notes out onto the marble top, in triumph: once, twice, several times, he gave us the money in small bills
because he enjoyed counting it out so much, and the coins fell with a silvery tinkle onto the marble; the girl with the green hat smiled: hadn’t she placed the candles in front of the right saint?
It was hard to say good-by; the long rows of girls dressed in navy blue, carrying hurling sticks, were not threatening now, the lions had stopped roaring, only the iguana continued to reproach us with his dead eyes for his ancient ugliness.
Jukeboxes boomed, streetcar conductors cranked out long paper clouds from their ticket-mills, steamers hooted, a light wind came from the sea, many, many barrels of beer were heaved into the dark bellies of ships, even the monuments were smiling; the darkness of the dream had been lifted from quill pen, reins, lyre, and sword, and it was only old evening papers that were floating out to sea on the Liffey.
In the new evening paper there were three letters to the editor demanding Nelson’s downfall; thirty-seven houses were offered for sale, one was sought, and in a tiny place in Kerry, thanks to the activities of the local festival committee, there had been a real festival: sack races, donkey races, rowing competitions, and a slow-bicycle race, and the winner of the sack race had smiled at the press photographer; she showed us her pretty face and her bad teeth.
We spent the last hour on the sloping floor of the boardinghouse bedroom, playing cards as if we were on a roof—there were no chairs or table in the room; sitting among our suitcases, the window open, teacups beside us on the floor, we chased the knave of hearts and the ace of spades through the long rows of their kind, the cheerful noise of Dorset Street surging round us; while the landlady stayed in her back room with bottle, melancholy, and dressing gown, the chambermaid smiled as she watched us play.
“That was a nice one,” said the taxi driver who took us to the station, “a delightful one.”
“Who was?” I asked.
“The day,” he said. “Wasn’t it a beauty of a day?” I agreed; as I was paying him I looked up, along the black front of a house: a young woman was just putting an orange milk jug out onto the window sill. She smiled at me, and I smiled back.
Irish Journal Page 10
