No matter how great the person he meets, or how absorbing the event he reports, he gives the impression of wishing never to stray far from his pursuit of April Burke. And he interrupts his narrative time and time again to cry out his passion for her. Sometimes his outburst occurs unexpectedly, and he becomes almost lost in a strenuous hymn of love.
I know that I am a Romantic—I am more influenced by my imaginings and more driven by my passions than anyone of my acquaintance. In this, I also feel myself to be deeply elemental. The mountains enchant me and I think of each peak as I would of a person; the clouds cast shadows on them as moods traverse a human face. I love rain and often tilt my face to feel its full cool sheet and I thank it. How often have I lain on the ground merely to gaze at the traveling clouds and thought of myself pillowed upon them, like some sultan of the universe.
When I first saw her whom I have made the love of my life, I instantly wanted to share such things. I wanted to point out to her the small but infinite wonders that fill me with pleasure: the webbed filaments of a chrysalis tucked into the angle of a leaf; the brown impertinence of a sparrow pecking crumbs; the austerity of a hilltop tree leafless against a winter sky; white gravel in the bed of a clear stream.
I owe the awareness of these mysteries to my wonderful parents, who ever availed of an opportunity to show me how the hidden world works. One afternoon, I remember, when I was very young, my mother spent many minutes coaxing a ladybird to open the wings beneath its black-spotted red back. Another time, she showed me the paper hulk of a wasps' nest long after the summer—and the stingers—had left.
“Nobody loves a wasp,” she said, “except another wasp,” and she told me how a wasp will give its own life for its comrade. In general, never did we observe an unexpected insect without her inquiry being excited.
Let me now describe the instant when I first saw my beloved. I shall recount all the circumstances later, but for now I must tell how she looked; how she filled the space in the air of the room all around her; how she seemed to me both human and divine; and my own physical reaction, so strong that I feared it must become noticeable to others present.
She was standing on a chair, arranging a picture's hanging, when she first looked into my eyes. She is, as it happens, notably tall anyway— when she stepped down from the chair I then believed she stood five feet ten inches, and she has confirmed this.
“Force of presence!” cried my mind at once; but she did not consume the air, as some very strong people do. She occupied her space like a slim perpendicular column of some classical style.
Her being was composed of warmth and energy; she had a capability, an aura of efficiency; she gave off a feeling of knowing what to do, not just in the instant, but in life generally—and she possessed great beauty.
I stood and stared; my manners must have abandoned me. She had the courtesy to ignore my staring and she turned away—and of course she had the good breeding not to address me until we had been introduced, which did not occur for some days. As to my reaction—I began to sweat; the back of my neck grew damp and my skin began to prickle. My eyebrows shot up almost beyond retrieval, and my mouth felt dry.
Believe me, I have trawled for comparisons of that moment—and herein lies the value of writing a History of myself that is also a History of my country. I have had the privilege of looking back at each and every great event that I have witnessed, and accordingly I have been able to trace those that seemed remarkable and important, and I have been able to measure how they influenced and even altered my life. Through them all, November 1900 in Paris shines unchallenged.
In today's terms, Mr. O'Brien's reaction may seem excessive. Not in Queen Victoria's reign, when the idea of romantic love, descended from the times of the troubadours, had well and truly taken root. In an era where prudishness and repression were equated with prudence and responsibility, all that was left to a man by way of expressing love was the report of his own passions.
The poets had led the way; “Byronic” had long been a shorthand term for passionate emotion. Charles O'Brien, in common with so many other men of the day who fell suddenly in love, had solid precedent for seeing himself as a dashing and romantic figure. Windswept and interesting, moody and wild with love pangs, he was prepared to surrender all for love.
But he was a little older than the typical Byronic figure with the brooding lips and flowing white shirt. This was a man who had already lived well more than half the male lifespan of the day. He had claimed no prospects that he could offer a girl. And he seemed to depend upon his paternal family and home far more than the typical man of his time.
My first complete memory—that is to say of a cohesively remembered moment with its own Beginning, Middle, and End—comes from my life at the age of almost four. I have other fragments from times before then, the commonplace memories that I expect are found in all small children: my father lifting me high while I looked down at his laughing, exerted face; a curtain fluttering at an open window; a butterfly finding its way into the drawing-room and mistakenly alighting on a flower in the furniture's fabric; the taste of sugar upon buttered bread, which Cally gave as a treat; the tightness of a shirt-collar, worn to be gracious when Grandmother Goldsmith or Aunt Hutchinson came visiting; the quiet hum of deep, approving conversation as my parents pored over my mother's ledgers. (Father was an excellent and successful farmer.)
That very first memory, though, brought my introduction to fear and its thrill, and it took place in the safest of surroundings. Our domestic bathing arrangements never varied; Cally or Mrs. Ryan took responsibility for my hygiene until the age of ten—when my father, with whispered asides to my mother, consigned it to me alone. He supervised me, and in due course taught me to shave: “Keep the razor wet!” One evening, early in 1864, Mother came rushing to the kitchen, where I was often to be found among the women (I was quite their pet), and she cried, “Bathing! We must bathe Charles now!” Her urgency puzzled all until she explained in whispers—and then Cally became urgent and raced me to the bathroom, half-carrying me. Mrs. Ryan, who was as stout as a hippopotamus, huffed along after us.
Hot water was brought upstairs, and I was washed as never before. So distressing did I find this that Mrs. Ryan and Cally conspired to tell me.
Mrs. Ryan: “A girl's after dying in Limerick. You have to be scrubbed and scrubbed.”
“Why?”
Cally: “She died of an awful thing.”
“What?”
Mrs. Ryan: “An awful thing altogether.”
“What's an awful thing?”
They looked at each other and agreed with their eyes.
Mrs. Ryan: “She was a leper.”
I thought they meant that the girl had somehow jumped off some great height and died.
“Why do I have to be scrubbed because she leapt?”
The women began to laugh; Mrs. Ryan had her hands in the tub washing my feet, and her great forearms all but heaved the water everywhere. When they subsided, the women grew serious again.
Cally: “She had the leprosy.”
Mrs. Ryan: “She caught it off a sailor's clothes that she was washing.”
Cally: “An African sailor, he was—he had it. A black fella.”
“What's leprosy?”
Cally: “Your nose falls off.”
Mrs. Ryan: “And your hands with it.”
Cally: “They have to give you a bell to tell everyone you're coming and they're to get out of the way—so's they don't catch it.”
“How can you ring the bell if your hands have fallen off?”
Mrs. Ryan: “Well, you can.”
“Is it a big bell?”
Mrs. Ryan: “No, no, a small little bell and you've to shout and warn them.”
“What do they shout?”
Mrs. Ryan: “I s'pose they say, ‘I have the leprosy, I'm a leper.’ ”
Cally: “No, they say, ‘Unclean, that's what I am, unclean.’ ”
Such a gift to a small boy! That night
, to Mother's horror and Father's delight, I took the serving bell from the dining-room table and went about the house calling out, “Unclean! Unclean!” But it was true; a young servant-girl had contracted leprosy in Limerick and died.
Another memory: three years later, early in 1867, our house became a place of secrets and furtiveness. At night I would wake suddenly at the sound of hooves or a cart or carriage rattling and jingling. Once or twice, I went halfway downstairs and watched as big men with long beards came through the front door, hauled off their greatcoats, and greeted my father. I heard much talk of “ships” and “landing” and “rising”—which I took to be the motion of the ship on the crests of the sea.
Beyond my imaginings, I achieved no knowledge of what lay behind or beneath these visits, and my questions at breakfast next day accomplished nothing other than deflection and a caution from my mother: “Charles, we don't like people knowing our business.” Even if I didn't understand the words, she conveyed an unmistakable force of meaning.
Years later, I discovered the reason for this nocturnal activity, which lasted many months. The Fenians, an international assembly of zealous republicans dedicated to the independence of Ireland from England, had planned—and, indeed, carried through—an insurrection or uprising, hence “rising.” Much of it had been focused in our province of Munster and, in due course, with Tipperary as a crucial member, the other five Munster counties, Cork, Kerry, Clare, Limerick, and Waterford, intended to flame with rebellion, which would then spread to the rest of the country.
Unfortunately, as has so often been the case in Ireland, two constant facts of Irish life prevented the rebels from gaining wide ground: the weather and loose tongues. On the night of the rising an unprecedented snowstorm hit the country. In addition, everybody around us—the local priests, the local newspaper editor, the local washerwomen and shopkeepers, the police and the army—knew all the plans in advance. Wagging tongues saw to it that little blood would be shed for Ireland that night.
“All cloak and no dagger,” said my father when speaking of it to me years later. “Too many saddles, too few horses.”
I asked him what he meant.
“They were generally useless as rebels,” he said. “Great company, though. Great to argue with over a drink.”
Yet History has credited them with “the Rebellion of 1867,” even though handfuls of men here and there, with old muskets and some pitchforks, were merely rounded up by police, the more threatening ones lodged in the cells for a few days and the rest sent home. The Cork Examiner newspaper carried reports of numerous arrests, but the Fenians had, as yet, been mainly drilling and marching, and had not fired a shot. Such was the level of Irish uprising in the middle of the nineteenth century.
Then, when I was ten years old, the countryside resounded excitedly to a significant political development. Mr. Gladstone, the Prime Minister, saw his government pass a Land Act for Ireland that permitted tenant farmers some new rights. They now had to be compensated for any improvements to their farms, and eviction could occur only for non-payment of rents. However, since the landlord could raise the rent at a whim, the protection, when scrutinized, seemed infirm. My father's pronouncement seemed to echo the country's response: “Well, it'll give us something to talk about for a long while.”
To confirm: The Limerick Reporter & Tipperary Vindicator dated 29 January 1864 printed that “Mary Hurly, aged 23 years, a victim of leprosy, died in the County Infirmary Limerick, on Sunday last. This disease, it appears, she contracted by washing the clothes of some foreign sailors.”
Charles O'Brien was born into a theater of national events. Not since the heaving of the earth's plates beneath the North Atlantic Ocean finally split the island off from England and Europe has Ireland had a more dramatic, compressed passage of history than the period of Mr. O'Brien's lifetime.
Such a claim, in such a vivid land, requires justifying. True, she was a sophisticated country socially and politically—and even economically— around the time of Christ. A system of “kingships” governed the country. Chieftaincies in local structures observed and paid taxes to overlords in the south, the east, the north, and the west. These provincial kings of Munster, Leinster, Ulster, and Connacht (or Connaught, in the anglicized version) paid homage and tribute to the high king at Tara.
True, too, that the stability of this structure resisted all invaders, and over time the country developed a social and artistic culture that continues to this day. Then, beginning in 1167, came the Norman barons, owing allegiance to the king of England. Soon, the long British shadow began to darken the country.
All of these movements took place over many centuries—but the most significant convulsions, the most conclusive politics, happened inside sixty years. They had begun in Ireland before Charles O'Brien was born. Events abroad had stirred the Irish and set an example. The Americans in 1776 had thrown out the English, and the French of 1789 had overthrown the upper classes.
The Irish sought to combine these influences. In 1801 the country had lost all sovereignty. An Act of Union bound it with vicious indissolubility to England. For two centuries before that, we had been steadily losing all human rights. We lost education, the right to our Catholic faith, and above all the ownership of our own land.
When the tide began to turn, it became a wave. The first crest was a law forced through the English Parliament in 1829—Catholic Emancipation. It restored freedom of religion to the massively larger Catholic population of Ireland. From it, everything else began to follow. Up rose the political agitators fighting to recover native acres from the English landlords. Revolution became a certainty.
In all of this, Charles O'Brien's family was unusual. They had some-how contrived to hold on to their lands down the centuries (and had expanded by buying adjoining fields and woods). As a consequence, they occupied one of the safest possible positions; they became witness to all that went on, yet party to none of it. And they did so through astute social politics, through vigilance during every successive political shift, and through care for each successive generation.
Just before the time of my birth, the teaching of children became a matter for everybody, not just the ruling classes of the Ascendancy. By law, village “national” schools opened all over Ireland. At last, after many generations of enforced ignorance, our Irish people were allowed once more to have learning. Reading was no longer banned; Catholics were no longer flogged, deported, jailed, or executed for owning books; their teachers were no longer outlaws, to be shot on sight. As the new schools opened, many of the illiterate parents almost carried their children in their arms to the school doors, so intent were they on bettering their families' future. Some refused to engage with this system; old suspicions died hard—and in any case the Irish language, spoken by the majority of the people, was banned in the schools.
My parents, for their own reasons, wished to have no part of this, and I believe that it caused some difficulties between them; such national matters often did. Mother desired that I should have the more formal and classical education of the English—perhaps go to a school in England, and thence to Oxford or Cambridge University. My father wished me never to be away from home as a child. He told my mother that he would suffer “unendurable lonesomeness” were I to be boarded away at school.
But Mother could not countenance one of her children mixing so intimately with so many Catholics every day. So they settled their differences by choosing four tutors for me, two from each parent. (They would later do the same for my brother.)
Rarely in life can a boy have been exposed so closely to four such different people. One of these tutors I never saw sober, though he was marvelously entertaining, and from him I learned what he called “Greek mythology, Latin scandal, and Catholic nonsense.” His name was Buckley; he had everyone call him that—no “Sir” or “Mister” or Christian name. Many years after he died (he fell under a military cart in Paris), I learned that he had been a priest unfrocked for persistent adventures “
incompatible with the calling” (as they say), and that he had also elicited money from many women.
Buckley had wonderful sayings: “A bird never flew on one wing”— meaning that one drink would not suffice; “A woman with a hard heart is more dangerous than a runaway bull” (he seemed to have known some, because they came calling, grim-eyed and intent, to our house and my parents always concealed him); “Never trust a woman that wants you to guarantee tomorrow”—meaning that Buckley did not like ties of any kind.
My other three tutors offered more orthodoxy. Buckley had been Father's choice, as had the meek John Halloran. Mr. Halloran specialized in mathematics and drawing. His chief teaching later enabled me to calculate complicated odds for the placing of bets on horses and roulette (and I have sometimes won). He also left me with the ability to draw swift and reasonable likenesses of people's faces.
Mr. Halloran taught me French and Italian, and he excelled in what he called “General Subjects”—he would discourse for an hour or two on the business of Luck; or he would speculate about whether foretelling the future had any validity. In the course of such lessons, he dragged in extraneous facts from all sorts of sources.
“The smallest dwarf in history stood one foot four and weighed five pounds. Her feet measured two and one-quarter inches, and she was called the Fairy Queen.” And: “You can never fold a piece of cloth or a piece of paper double more than seven times.” And: “If you tie both ends of a cord and make a circle, you can then turn that circle into any other perfect geometric shape.” I never met a man with so much superfluous knowledge, except perhaps my own father.
Of women, however, Mr. Halloran (unlike Buckley) taught me nothing at all. He blushed when he encountered a female of any species, and when I once asked him had he ever been married, he murmured a throbbing and passionate “Oh, my Heavens, no!” As he did when Buckley called out to him each morning, “Did those bowels of yours move yet?”
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