The Fox's Walk

by Annabel Davis-Goff

  “I have a copy upstairs,” Grandmother said to me. “I’ll give it to you later.”

  “I think perhaps, dear———” Aunt Katie said, “I wonder if it is quite suitable.”

  “Absolutely not,” Mother said, still laughing at the image of her mother-in-law as a latter-day Madame Defarge, “We don’t want Alice roaming the upper floors of Ballydavid all night like a miniature Lady Macbeth.”

  There was a moments hesitation, and then both the old ladies laughed. It was a moment I could not afford to miss.

  “Is it true that if you wake a person who is sleepwalking that you kill her?” I asked in a voice that sounded unnatural to me. As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I regretted the use of the feminine pronoun.

  “Of course not. Why would you think so?” Grandmother said.

  “Need you ask?” My mother said, and laughed again.

  Bridie had, of course, been the source of this fear. She had not intended any harm and doubtless believed what she was telling me. My mother reassured me, first by telling me that what I had been told was not true, then by saying that no one would wake me if they met me out on a late night ramble. She added that it was well known that somnambulists, even those who slept in less hospitable surroundings than I did, never hurt themselves.

  The subject drifted—any association of ideas not conscious—to Kitchener’s death and a bizarre phenomenon in its wake. Some—those who thronged the stances and consulted mediums and became the willing prey of charlatans—could not accept the tragedy, and rumors, ridiculous but understandable in the circumstances, began to circulate: Kitchener was not really dead but a prisoner of the Germans or lying in an enchanted sleep in a cave on the Shetland Islands, a sleep from which he would, like a mythic hero, at some moment of his country’s even greater need, awake to save England.

  I had the impression that Mother was on the edge of being tempted by this idea, but Grandmother and Aunt Katie were disapproving. It is possible they appreciated how narrowly, as a direct result of an unsuccessful attempt to communicate with the other side, they had escaped Sonia as a permanent member of the household, but I think it more likely they were afraid of Uncle Williams anger and ridicule if he caught them again flirting with the occult.

  “Almost every culture has some superstition———” Grandmother started, but Aunt Katie, laughing but outraged, was now describing the deep mourning into which, following Kitchener’s death, Mrs. Coughlan had temporarily plunged. Her choice perhaps intended to mitigate an earlier sartorial bêtise. Of all her eccentricities, the one that had most alienated Waterford society had been the scarlet dress she had worn only days after the death of Edward VII. Red was, she had explained, the Chinese color of mourning. Although that year the beautiful and fashionable clothes and hats at Ascot had all been black, nowhere was mourning for the king more rigidly adhered to than among the Anglo-Irish, the political sentiment behind the black as marked as the grief.

  “A huge black hat with a veil like a beekeeper—you could hardly see her face. Indecent. It was as though she thought she was his widow or—I don’t know what———”

  “Or his mistress. You don’t suppose...?” Mother said, playfully.

  “And then,” Aunt Katie continued, “after three days she got tired of it all and went back to her usual outrageous fashions.”

  I was sorry that I had missed this sight and wondered if Mrs. Coughlan had carried a black parasol.

  That evening Mother came up to my room a moment or two after I had climbed into bed.

  “Would you like me to read to you?” she asked, and sat down beside me.

  A copy of Ivanhoe lay on the table beside my bed; I found it slow going and was aware Grandmother had chosen a book for me without fully considering my age. I would be grateful for a chapter read aloud and some help with the longer words. But Mother had brought her own book.

  She looked at me for a moment before she asked, gently, “Do you have bad dreams?”

  As well as having nightmares, I used sometimes to dream that my mother was dead, but I didn’t know how to tell her about either, so I shook my head.

  “Are you happy enough?” she asked, and took my hand.

  I had often thought, lying awake and missing my mother, about the moment when she would come to take me home again. What she was supposed to do now was to tell me how much she missed me and that her other two children in no way made up for my absence. At the time I had felt that these fantasies were shameful and self-indulgent; now they seem perfectly reasonable. I suppose I also wondered whether she intended to take me with her when she returned to London at the end of the summer. It was not a possibility anyone had thought necessary to discuss with me. Now I was aware that in the highly improbable event that my wishes were consulted, I wouldn’t know what to do. I knew what I wanted: to live at Ballydavid and have my mother live there, too.

  Choosing to take my silence and smile for assent, my mother asked no further question and instead opened her book.

  “This is a grown-up story,” she said, “but I think you’ll rather enjoy it. Lots of adventures but nothing frightening. It’s quite funny, too, but I’m not sure if you’ll see all the jokes until you’re older.”

  And she began to read. I still remember the book and am now, even more than I was then, pleased by her selection. Both Mother and my grandmother were admirers of the work of Arnold Bennett, a novelist not much read today, who wrote books that usually described life—and often a preoccupation with money—in the Potteries. The Grand Babylon Hotel owed nothing to the new French realism that influenced his more serious, regional novels.

  Mother read it, her tone not so exaggerated as to mock the story, which had originally been written as a serial for a newspaper, but with sufficient expression to reflect the suspense and surprise with which each chapter was amply laced. I lay wide-eyed, lips parted, excited by the description of high life, intrigue, and extravagance in an hotel “like a palace incognito.” It was while following a plot that never paused for breath or balked at improbability that I first became aware that a book, if sufficiently powerful, could provide an alternate world into which I could, now and in the future, escape. The fear, guilt, confusion, and helplessness that I felt, even as I enjoyed the long summer days spent out of doors, became as distant and unreal as though they, too, existed in a novel.

  At the end of the second chapter, my mother handed me the book.

  “Why don’t you read to yourself for a little while? I’ll come up again after dinner.”

  I read until I heard a footstep that might have been Grandmothers in the corridor, and then I fell asleep, happily considering the adventures of Nella Racksole as she foiled villains and pursued adventuresses in the luxury of her father’s hotel and in Dover, a “port of ill repute, possessing some of the worst-managed hotels in Europe.”

  WITH CASEMENT’S APPEAL came the petitions. There was a small but strong campaign for mercy. I pinned my hopes on it. I was constantly aware that a man with a gentle face and a dignified bearing, a gentleman, was in prison waiting—once the pro forma appeal had been heard—to be hanged. It seemed impossible that it should be so and even more impossible that my mother should accept this as a merely unfortunate, and Grandmother a not undesirable, inevitability.

  America—still neutral and with a large Irish vote—strongly advocated the commutation of Casements death penalty. From Washington, Sir Cecil Spring Rice, the British Ambassador—and father of Mary Spring Rice, who had been part of the Childers’ gunrunning adventure—advised strongly and repeatedly against making a martyr of Casement. The weight of American public opinion was probably that which most concerned the English authorities, but the stance of senior members of the Church of England clergy worried them also. The Bishop of Winchester had been one of the forty distinguished names that had signed Conan Doyles petition. Bernard Shaw drafted his own petition, also counseling the government against making Casement a martyr and suggesting that executing him would o
nly make worse the Irish situation. Although the British man in the street had less sympathy for Casement than for the revolutionaries who had been executed in Dublin following the Easter Rising, there were still those who thought Casement should not be hanged. It was at this time that photographs of pages of what were later called the Black Diaries began to circulate.

  Soon after Casement had been brought back to London in custody, he was interviewed by the Assistant Commissioner of Police, Basil Thomson. During the interview a policeman asked for the keys to some locked trunks in Casement’s former lodgings that they wished to search. Casement told them they might break the locks and there was nothing inside except for some old clothes. The police found some diaries and account books: Casement was in the habit of recording transactions of even small sums of money. The diaries, which have only recently been unsealed to historians and scholars, contain a full and explicit account of Casements homosexual private life.

  There may have been those who thought that Casement's sexual life—although illegal—was a separate issue from the question of whether he was or was not guilty of treason, but, if there were, they held their peace. It is almost impossible, in the permissive moral climate of the second half of the twentieth century, to describe the attitude toward homosexuality of the generation before my own, but one comparison may illustrate the difference. At approximately the same time that Oscar Wilde was sentenced to two years in jail for homosexual offences, Sir Charles Dilke (who as a Member of Parliament had supported Casement’s report on Belgian colonial atrocities) was able to return to politics. Dilke had spent ten years out of public life following a scandalous divorce case in which he had been cited. A prurient and fascinated public had heard Mrs. Crawford, the defendant, claim that a housemaid had been added to the already adulterous bed. For Wilde, such a return to society would not have been imaginable.

  We can, I think, assume that Scotland Yard had the diaries in their possession from the afternoon of Easter Sunday; F. E. Smith, the Attorney General, had copies of some pages before the beginning of the trial. The first reference to the existence of the diaries seems to have been in the newspapers reporting the conclusion of Casements trial and his death sentence. Photographs of excerpts from the diaries began to be circulated during the weeks between the end of the trial and the beginning of the appeal. The king—according to Dean Inge in a letter to Alfred Noyes, the poet and Casement apologist—showed “the Diary” (by which I think he meant a photograph of a page or pages of the diary) to Canon Henson, who in the past had preached in Westminster Abbey on Casement's Putumayo report. Copies were shown to the press (especially American correspondents), politicians, clergy, and to other influential people who might have spoken up for Casement—and nowhere with more effect than in Ireland.

  Since the point that Casement’s perceived moral turpitude was irrelevant was not one that carried much weight, the only other line of defense was to claim the diaries were a forgery. It was a popular partisan theory for a while although too many Casement sympathizers who knew his distinctive hand, Michael Collins among them, saw parts of the diaries and acknowledged the authenticity of the handwriting.

  The appeal was heard on 17 July before five judges. One of them, Mr. Justice Darling, invited the painter John Lavery to paint the scene and gave him the use of the jury box. Lavery had painted a portrait of Darling some years before in legal robes and the black cap that was placed over his wig when he pronounced the death sentence. F. E. Smith, a man whom I have never thought oversensitive, had found the portrait offensive; he was still less pleased when Lavery was invited to paint the Court of Criminal Appeal.

  It is a large painting, with many people, some quite detailed, although there is no distinctive foreground figure. Casement, too small for us to see the expression on his face, is in the exact center of the painting. A clock light enough and large enough to draw the eye is above him, high and a little to the left. The room is paneled; the occupants, with the exception of Casement, are dressed in dark clothing—wigs, collars, and papers making white or pale contrast with the dark wood and foreground shadow. We can see part of three windows above the hall and a smaller one above the section of gallery at the top of the painting, but the room seems to be lit by twelve gas globes suspended from an ornate circular fixture. The judges sit on a platform behind a raised desk on the left of the painting, below them four men at another desk; there are books in front of the judges and papers in front of the four men. To the right, facing them, is a table at which sit three men and three women, the women somewhat concealed. The right of the painting is filled with the crowd, some standing behind the seated and wigged lawyers, one of whom—Serjeant Sullivan, Casements counsel and, like him, dark-bearded—is on his feet, addressing the court. The man in front of him is half-turned, not looking up at him but in a position from which it seems he can hear more easily. Two warders, one seated, one standing, to each side of Casement, peer through the double row of bars that enclose the dock and obstruct their view; Casement, tall and straight, looks out between the upper bars, his beard and black tie contrasting with his light-colored suit.

  The appeal took two days. Lavery, in his memoirs, recalls the drowsy monotony of the proceedings on which depended a man’s life and the casual way in which Darling pronounced the words: “The Appeal is dismissed.” He writes that Casement waved to someone in the gallery before he turned and was taken away.

  Chapter 12

  AUGUST BEGAN WITH a heavy threat of thunder, the dark skies and thick, oppressive air portentous. We waited for the storm to break. There was nothing to limit the named and unnamed fear we all felt. It semed now that anything might be possible.

  Each sultry day, I was conscious that Casement was soon to be hanged. For others the war was about to enter its third ghastly year, and, although it had as long again to go, it could already be seen to be one of the great tragedies of the world’s history. Ahead of us, unsuspected in the specifics, lay the Russian Revolution and the influenza epidemic of 1918 that would kill more than the war and the revolution put together—with anything that would happen in Ireland thrown in for good measure.

  Even though I was too young to read the newspapers and my family felt no need to dwell on the horrors of the moment in history in which we were living, I began to understand that, although the rules that governed my life still applied, they were no guarantee of consequence.

  ***

  CROWDS GATHERED outside Pentonville on the morning of the third of August. There was no last minute reprieve, and, at about the time we sat down to breakfast at Ballydavid, Roger Casement was hanged. Severing another tie with his background, Casement died a Roman Catholic, received into the church during the weeks before his death. The English newspapers would carry the story of his execution the following day; the day after, the second anniversary of the outbreak of war, we would read it at Ballydavid. The Irish Sea put a buffer between the immediacy of the news and our sheltered drawing room; the Irish newspaper read in the kitchen would, of course, offer a somewhat different account a day sooner. Despite the lack of written confirmation, and, although we did not speak of it, the horror of what had happened in London that morning hung over the household. The kitchen no longer a haven for me, I spent much of the day alone, some of it praying that Casement would be granted a last minute stay of execution. That afternoon Rosamund Gwynne came to tea at Ballydavid.

  If Mother had, as I suspect, pleaded Grandmother’s ill health as an excuse to escape her mother-in-law and for her sudden visit to Ireland, her letters home must have been full of half-truths, evasion, and omission. Not only was Grandmother as healthy, cheerful, and energetic as she was ever to be after Uncle Sainthill’s death, but she was engaged in a whirl of social activity. Rosamund Gwynne’s promised visit to Ballydavid was imminent; she had brought her trunks and hatboxes south and was now staying on the other side of Waterford with a friend whose father commanded the garrison.

  “She seems to be rather a favorite with the y
oung officers,” Aunt Katie had said at lunch, her tone benevolent.

  Grandmother said nothing. I could imagine the weight of disapproval she would have conveyed with the same words. It seemed that Aunt Katie’s essential good nature and her reluctance to think ill of anyone with whom she was connected now included her prospective niece, Miss Gwynne. Grandmother, with one son dead and her daughter unsuitably married, did not share her charitable outlook; that the young woman who would in all probability become her daughter-in-law was apparently a flirt did not sit well with her.

  Nevertheless, the Ballydavid tennis party was an annual event, and this year it was to be slightly expanded and to some extent in honor of Rosamund Gwynne. Although most invitations had already been sent out, Grandmother had not yet completely finished with the guest list.

  When I came downstairs to tea, the sun was shining, and Mother, my grandmother, and my great-aunt were sitting outdoors with Miss Gwynne. I followed Bridie who was carrying the tea tray out to the veranda. My mother gestured for me to sit on a footstool beside her.

  “So Alice, still on holiday—you must be missing Clodagh.”

  With her first sentence, Miss Gwynne managed to offend me. While she had been in the north of Ireland and after it had seemed inevitable that she would become one of the family, I had considered the likelihood of being a bridesmaid when she married Uncle Hubert, and had gone so far as to prepare myself with a couple of suggestions as to how I might to the greatest advantage be dressed. Now I felt the wave of instant dislike that, looking back after all these years, I think Rosamund Gwynne managed to induce in most members of my family—with the presumable exception of my uncle. There were few people I wanted less to see than Clodagh, and, surely, it would have been more graceful—although equally improbable—to suggest that Clodagh was missing me.