Besides his self-appointed post as door-keeper to the lavatory, Paddy made a nuisance of himself by dismantling the little rockery which stood against its wall. Over this he showed less intelligence than usual. The stones at the top were small, the size of half bricks and upwards. He could easily detach them ; but no amount of experience taught him that it was dangerous to pull at them directly. He never actually succeeded in crushing his paws, but would often leap away just in time, shooting across to his kennel, and dashing as far as he could up the pear-tree, there to hang, swearing and chattering, for several minutes. The rockery became an obsession with him. Despite all punishment, he could not keep away from it.
“Aaah !” Bessie cried threateningly, seeing him there. He started, but remained, not daring to take his eye from those resourceful enemies, the loose stones on top, which might at any moment roll down and attack him.
The only good his attentions did the rockery was to keep one side of it free from snails. As, however, he would delicately remove his captives’ shells, and leave them crawling about in agony on the path, his gardening was not appreciated. After finding the rockery dismantled for the third time in a week, they shortened his chain.
This privation instantly transformed Paddy-monkey into a wild beast. Leaping, gibbering, gnashing his teeth, his eyes gleaming with bile, he tugged, he strained, he rolled on his back, he screeched and fought and cursed. No one, not even Bessie, dare go near him. Grandpapa stood at a safe distance, moralising on the fulfilment of his oft-repeated prophecy. Mr. Caggen, watching with sardonic eye, wagged his beard malignantly at the prisoner. Jem Neill goggled, and said “Bedam.” The slither of his hobnails maddened the monkey. He leaped up with a shriek so envenomed that the man’s face mottled, and he made off up the garden at a run. Katie the seamstress shook her head, looking sadly over the tops of her steel-rimmed glasses at everyone in turn, ready with whatever commentary should be required. No one spoke to her, so she withdrew, sucking in her thin lips and still shaking her head.
For a few moments they all stood, gazing at the monkey. Then, a little shame-facedly, the gathering dispersed. They preferred not to contemplate for too long the results of their disciplinary action.
“We’re only exciting him, by staying.”
“He’s only carrying on like that because we’re here.”
“He’ll soon calm down, once we’re gone.”
Only Dermot stayed, in a place where Paddy could not see him. As soon as he found himself alone, the monkey ceased raging. He sat up, and looked around. Then, with all his strength and cunning, he strove upon the chain. He worked in bursts of silent, terrific energy: straining, arching himself over backwards, wrinkling his face into a little demon’s mask. Then, suddenly, he gave one or two high leaps into the air, shaking the loose chain. It was no use. He rested, panting, baring his teeth from time to time, like a navvy on a hot day. Then, with a sort of controlled frenzy, he began throwing himself about again, leaping from side to side, making movements that would have been laughable but for the despair upon his face.
Dermot went up the garden. There should be nothing troublesome in the sight of a disobedient monkey justly shorn of freedom: but there was. Dermot felt unhappy and ashamed. There were things in the world he had not suspected.
After that, Granny acted with decision. Dermot heard nothing, till the afternoon when he came in to find the kennel empty, and was shown, in explanation, a brief notice in the personal column of the Irish Times. Printed, unbelievable words stared into his eyes, and were lost. “Thanks to Mrs. Conroy, for monkey … The Dublin Zoological Society.” Thanks … for monkey ….
Happily for Dermot, there came a distraction that very evening, to take his sorrow off himself. Anne and Eileen came down from Delgany, with an invitation for Dermot from their mother. Eileen, who had heard of the monkey’s disgrace, went straight out to commiserate with him, and was confronted by the empty kennel.
Then and there, her childhood ended. Brushing aside poor tearful Bessie’s efforts at propitiation, she burst into the parlour, and faced her startled elders.
“Where is he?” she cried fiercely. “Answer me! Where is he? What have you done with him? ”
The words were flung in their faces like hailstones at a window. She was transformed. Her lithe, long-limbed body trembled with passion. She advanced on Granny, as if to shake the answer out of her.
Granny’s jaw dropped in amazement and consternation. “Gracious, Eileen child, how ye startled me,” died on her lips. She had never, as she said afterwards, “seen the child that way before.”
“Oh, answer me, someone! What have you done with Paddy? ”
There was dead silence for a couple of seconds. Then Grandpapa spoke.
“The ape,” he observed with satisfaction, “is in the custody of the Royal Dublin Zoological Society, to whom he should have been sent in the beginning: to whom, if Amelia had been said by me, he would have been sent in the beginning.”
Eileen gazed at him, in wild incredulity.
“What’s more,” continued the old man, turning further towards her in his chair, “this is no way to come rush into a room, and downface your elders. If your father were here, he’d be highly displeased with ye.”
Eileen paid no attention to the rebuke.
“You’ve sent him—to the Zoo !” she gasped at length. “You’ve sent him—oh, how cruel! How could you! ”
Words left her. With a miserable gesture, she flung out of the room, and slammed the door behind her, leaving a circle of faces blank with amazement.
“Merciful hour! ” ejaculated Granny at last. “What’s come over the child? ”
Dermot left them discussing the matter, the ladies quickly concerting to combat Grandpapa’s diagnosis that Eileen was just “a bold girl ” and needed correction. For some time he was afraid to follow her down the garden: then, feeling justified by his undoubted position of second mourner, he went timidly after her.
She was more composed, and had got rid of her tears, but she was in high rage. To comfort himself, Dermot urged feebly that Paddy would be well looked after.
“Yes, yes,” she interrupted him. “But, can’t you see, he’ll absolutely hate it. He’s been by himself, and a pet, all his life: and then, to be put in a great cage, with a crowd of other monkeys——” she turned her back on Dermot, and blew her nose. “He won’t live,” she said, after a few seconds. “He won’t live a month: you see if he does.”
About ten days after Paddy’s departure, they went in to visit him. At first he was not to be seen in the big cage. Bessie, mournful, dumpy, wearing her boa, her big hat, and her funny little in-and-out costume, leaned back her head and peered up into the gloom.
“Paddy-monkey! ” she called. “Paddy-monkey! Paddy-monkey! ”
There was a flash of movement, and the distraught thin figure was at the bars, his face alight, his lips moving in rapturous greeting. When they held out the food to him, other monkeys rushed down, and Paddy cowered pitifully away to one side. With valiant cries and gestures Bessie routed the intruders ; and Paddy partook for the last time of carrot and apple from his own garden. For some minutes they talked to him, and with every minute he grew happier, more confident, more like himself. He chattered gently, holding out his hand through the bars, delicately taking the morsels, snuggling up close while Dermot poked a finger in to tickle him. When at last they turned to go, and he realised that they would not take him with them, his little face went cold. Mournful, incredulous, unprotesting, he watched them go. Bessie kept waving to him, encouraging him. “Paddy-monkey. Paddy-monkey.” They would come to see him again, yes, soon again. She hurried after the others, tears streaming down her cheeks. Dermot turned back in the doorway, and saw Paddy still clinging there, looking after them.
No one spoke for a while. Bessie lagged behind, sobbing openly, and soon Granny too had to stop and lift her veil.
“Ah, the poor animal,” she said, “you couldn’t but be fond of him. He was a
great pet. But sure, what could we do? It wouldn’t have been safe to keep him: let alone the trouble he gave. All the same, I don’t like to think of him, shut up there.”
Dermot’s father began to tell her how well he would be looked after, and what fun he would have, once he got used to the other monkeys. Granny sniffed, and smiled weakly.
“I expect you’re right, Ernest,” she said, “but I can’t but be worried for the poor animal.”
But Paddy did not keep his mistress anxious for long. Three days after their visit, he was dead.
“Broke his heart, ma’am,” said the keeper. “Broke his heart. Ah, the’ will, ye know, when they’ve had it all their own way, and been med a pet of.”
Chapter XV
Paddy-monkey’s death was one of the last definite dates in Dermot’s memories of Ireland. From this time on, when he looked back upon his Irish summers, he began to lose count of them, to be unable to distinguish one from another. He could class them roughly into two periods, the summers before he went to a public school, and the summers afterwards: but even that distinction had blurred edges. Coming back each year to the same scenes and to the same people, taking up life exactly where he had left it the year before, he had an Irish memory, quite separate from his English memory. The Irish memory was qualitative. It had its own time, its own space, its own emotions.
Dermot was happy at home, and only occasionally unhappy at his preparatory school in Plymouth ; yet he lived the whole year through in the hope of Ireland. He saw the year as a great curved track, not circular, but completing an irregular ring. The Autumn was the terrible time, that slightly curving part of the run when one was leaving the wonderful days further and further behind. Then, with the new year, one curved sharply, swinging a wide arc through January and February to March, when, for the first time, one’s eyes caught sight of the golden patch ahead. From then on one sped faster and faster, making straight for Heaven: eight weeks of dazzling gold: so on and on, for always.
The worst flaw in Heaven was still the Sunday. By a law of compensation, the period before Church in the morning had become one of the week’s best joys: the time, above all others, for deliberately realising that he was in Ireland. The walk up and down at the top of the garden, balancing on the uneven stones, had become a ritual. Time and again, at the end of a passage, he would look round intently upon the landscape, letting it soak in to the very back of his eyes: looking down the garden, taking in each seat, each tree, each clump of flowers ; taking in the big fields beyond, the houses of Glenageary, the steeple where the bells still played their same old tunes. He pressed his feet hard on the ground, gripping on tight to the edge of the hot wooden cucumber frame, and repeating to himself again and again and again, “This is Ireland. This is Ireland.”
He usually walked to Church with Grandpapa now, instead of going with the others in the tram. Grandpapa walked very slowly, but he was always good-humoured towards the boy, and to walk with him meant part-escaping from the attentions of Granny’s old lady friends. Besides, he hated taking the tram for so short a journey. Tram-rides were lovely, exciting things. You rode on top, and watched everything. The only drawback was that, even from the very front, you couldn’t watch both sides of the street properly at the same time. To clank along half a mile of perfectly well-known road, sitting inside the tram with your back to the window, was a travesty of a tram-ride.
“Your Granny,” Grandpapa observed, as they went slowly along between St. Joseph’s and Sandycove Station, “your Granny is always one for the talk. To meet with her friends outside the church, and say‘ How d’ye do ’ to this one, and ‘ How d’ye do ’ to that one, and nod her head to each of them in turn, and they to nod back with their bonnets bobbing up and down—Heh!” He chuckled, and turned half left, to look down at his grandson. “What sort of a way is that to be going on, eh? ”
“I don’t know, Grandpapa.”
“Faith, you may well say so. I’ve been married to your Grandmother these eight-and-thirty years, and I’m no nearer to putting sense in her head than I was at the start. With her fussing and bowing here, and her fussing and bowing there, her talk and her comether and her how d’ye-do—”
“Then there’s Miss O’Killikelly, to make it worse,” put in Dermot skilfully.
“Miss O’Killikelly !” Grandpapa stopped in the road and searched his mind for epithets to fit her. “That one !” he said finally. “That one would have a man in his grave, that had to sit listening to her. She comes in ” (Dermot had heard all this dozens of times) “at any hour of the day or night, and a very late inconvenient hour for choice, and down she sits “—Grandpapa made a gesture as of a man setting down a big basket—” and flounces herself, and waggles her head, and ‘ Oh, me dear,’ says she, ‘ do you know what I’m after hearing now? ’ ”
The falsetto squeak was so penetrating that Dermot glanced uneasily at the other churchgoers on the pavement.
“‘No, Letitia,’ says your Granny, ‘I do not.’ And that’s invitation enough to me fine lady to sit there an hour and maybe two or three, pouring nonsense out of her like a barrel.”
He paused, and stood still a moment to get his breath.
“I go up to me bed: for there’s no man’s ears could endure the torment of that woman’s tongue. When I’m half-way undressed, I do open the door, and throw down me boots into the hall, one after the other. That does be apt to startle their ladyships ; and, maybe, it’ll only take Miss O’Killikelly, as you call her “—Grandpapa always affected to treat her name as a jest, or an imposture—“it’ll only take her a matter often minutes to be out of the house: and the last five of them spent on the doorstep, and calling back from the gate. But some nights,” he started walking again, “it’ll take more than the one pair of boots. I’ve had the hall full of them, before this, and their two ladyships tripping over them, and they saying good-bye.”
Dermot gasped, contemplating a vision of the hall filled with boots, like snails and slugs come out after the rain.
“One time,” pursued Grandpapa, with unregenerate chuckles, “she didn’t go till I threw down the poker and tongs.”
“Whatever did Granny say when she came up? ”
“She was wild with me,” replied Grandpapa complacently. “But, sure, I don’t mind her.” He chuckled again. “It’s not only the start they get with a boot, d’ye see, it’s knowing there’s more to come, and waiting for the next bump.”
“The fire-irons must have frightened them,” said Dermot, half in awe.
“Aye. I never had to throw them, only the once.”
They turned the corner, and reached the church gates. Dermot felt almost grown up, half a conspirator with Grandpapa. The old man had the knack of rousing masculine freemasonry. Courtly and decorous to a degree, flattering the sex of even the youngest girl, he took a very simple view of the relationship between men and women. His was the philosophy expressed in a song of Samuel Lover, which he used often to sing, sitting by himself in the dark parlour, waiting for Bessie to bring in the light, in his faded lain-in-lavender ghost of a voice.
Now the pretty flowers were made to bloom, dear,
And the pretty stars were made to shine,
And the pretty girls were made for the boys, dear,
And maybe you were made for mine.
“Do you never be looking after the young ladies, Dermot? ” Grandpapa sometimes asked him in public: and when Granny took him up warmly, for “putting ideas into the child’s head,” Grandpapa gave him a wink of delightful complicity. Dermot adored his Granny: yet, so sure was the old man’s appeal, that although he did not like being quizzed about little girls, he was enlisted by the wink on Grandpapa’s side.
The service at the church did not grow any more interesting with repeated hearing. The hymns were usually the same: he soon came to know the choir’s rendering of them, and the balootherums (Grandpapa’s word) with which the too exuberant organist accompanied their course. The lessons were naturally more or l
ess the same. Certain episodes Dermot came to know almost by heart, and could never afterwards hear without the intonation of Canon M’Gonigal sounding in his head. The reverend gentleman, good-looking, portly, and easy of manner, read in a perfunctory good-humoured sort of way, swaying his body from side to side (like Granny) and eyeing his congregation. “Jurr’bome,” “Rheobome,” and his “charyut ”: a smile came over Dermot’s face at any allusion, during the rest of the year, to these properties of Canon M’Gonigal’s discourse. Better, even, he liked, “Thur is but WAN left, Muy-CAA-yah, the son of Imla: but I hate’m.” Dermot already practised to himself various styles of utterance, though semi-consciously, with no intention of burlesque or mockery. His copying of Paddy was at first involuntary, and brought severe censure from Grandpapa. Not until he came out in front of Con with an imitation of the Canon, and Con, who had suffered much from compulsory boyhood visits to that church, threw back his head and gave a shout of laughter, bidding him do it again, and again, did Dermot realise in the faculty a potential source of credit and entertainment.
Thenceforward he studied Paddy and his friends. Soon he could not only reproduce, but extemporise, the adenoidal snuffle of the ragged boys, the gross bawling accent of the jarveys by the pier, the comfortable, almost motherly tones of the old fishermen ….
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