The Garden

by L. A. G. Strong

  “You shoot cats,” he muttered at last, shifting from one foot to another, and looking on the ground.

  “Only when they do harm,” replied his father. “That is a very different matter, as well you know.”

  “Well—eels do harm.”

  “What harm? ” enquired the cold voice.

  “A lot of harm. Paddy says so.”

  “It seems to me you are more ready to believe what Paddy says than what your parents tell you.” There was a slight emphasis upon “Paddy” which stung the boy. “I’m not sure you are not too much with him and his friends. However——” Mr. Gray paused. “If you must kill fish you do not want, need you bring it here, to be thrown out? ”

  He paused, and, receiving no answer, walked away. He was wearing a white panama hat. Dermot raised his eyes, and stared resentfully after the dignified figure. He found something a little ridiculous in it, though he dared not admit as much to himself. Why bring the eel home! Why, to show, of course. Any reasonable parent would be proud of him: would sympathise…. Dermot turned, and hurried off in consternation. His eyes had filled with tears: tears of anger, but humiliating enough.

  He wandered down the garden, and related his exploit to Mr. Caggen. The gardener gave him all the applause he craved, plus a totally unexpected chance to score against his father. Mr. Caggen knew of a poor Protestant family who had no prejudice against “sarpints,” and would be glad of all the eels they could get. With a real satisfaction, and no little cunning, Dermot contrived to tell Granny this, in front of his father, in such a way that it appeared his bounden duty to catch them eels.

  “Yes, yes, darling,” beamed Granny, in all innocence, “Ye’ll be doing the poor souls a real kindness.”

  Delightful, neat revenge! He carefully avoided looking at his father: and, as soon as he could, withdrew from the room. Scoring like this was a new experience. It brought a sense of fear, almost of sacrilege. To stay in the room after it was more than he could manage. With his mother Dermot got on perfectly. She checked him sometimes, but always in a language he could understand. Left to herself, she was easy-going: she never fussed: she was languidly unconventional. His father would lecture her, would urge her to be more systematic, would interfere sometimes, and overrule their delightful, intimate schemes. Then, and only then, would she lose her composure, and strike out in sudden attacks of nerves which Dermot could understand and allow for. Mr. Gray was beginning to be worried about Dermot’s good—at least, it was becoming apparent to Dermot that he did: the worrying had started long before. One thing he could find no fault with. Dermot’s progress with his lessons was all the most exacting father could desire. In this respect, Mr. Gray was delighted with him: but a very natural and proper fear of making the boy conceited led him to withhold all but the most guarded praise, and gave Dermot the idea that his father did not care about him. So a natural antagonism drew nourishment. The two got on well enough on many occasions—far better at home than in Ireland: but there was a wariness on Dermot’s side. The old simple relationship was gone.

  Chapter XXI

  The fire flickered drowsily over the wide, loaded sideboard. Silver and fat Waterford glass, caught at odd angles, winked back indulgently. Their shadows, bobbing up and down on the wall behind them, forbad them to be staid. Dermot, watching them, was reminded of a number of fat old women bathing, holding on to a rope, and bobbing up and down: a sight often to be enjoyed, from a respectful distance, at the new Victoria Baths, or at Sandycove. Vision displaced reality: he forgot where he was, till the entry of Bessie, lamp in hand, recalled him.

  Grandpapa folded the Irish Times, rose, laid it on the table, and peered over the tops of his glasses at Bessie: ready to admonish, should she show any sign of prematurely raising the wick. “Tang-hoo-hoo! Tang-hoo-hoo! Tang-hoo hoo! ”—the cuckoo clock played its punctual part in the performance. One could just see the dark little space inside the doors, as they opened. Six. Bessie turned up the lamp: stooped for a moment, eying it anxiously: turned it up further: smiled at Dermot, raising her eyes in a comical, expressive gesture ; and withdrew.

  Grandpapa gave a grunt of satisfaction. He looked for a couple of seconds at the closed door. Then, starting with the deliberate effort of the aged, he went over stiffly to the bookcase. Adjusting his spectacles, and peering upward, he selected, lovingly and carefully, a leather-backed volume. Dermot watched him with vague, passive pleasure. He was getting to know the books and their positions pretty well. At the bottom left-hand side, Charles O’Malley, and other works of the same author: the Self-Made Merchant—Dermot did not greatly care for him: the poetical works of Sir Samuel Ferguson: a large volume of the Irish Wits, from which Grandpapa read him, with much relish, the escapades and drolleries of Vousden, for whom the old gentleman cherished an especial admiration. Then, a long row of bound church magazines, and Lecky’s History of European Morals.

  The next row he knew rather vaguely. It was complicated by the situation in it of a biscuit box, cunningly contrived to resemble a row of books. Deceived by this in earlier days, and bitterly mortified by the deception, Dermot fought shy of the second row. All he knew, besides the biscuit box, was that it contained The Cloister and the Hearth, the Speeches of Curran, and a volume, referred to by Grandpapa in tones of solemn piety, recording the briefs and other legal activities of James Mongan, barrister-at-law, an illustrious connection of the family.

  The third row contained the works of Charles Dickens, with a Thackeray or two, in larger binding, at the right hand end, to fill up. It was to this row that Grandpapa now addressed himself. The fourth row—smaller books—was occupied by a whole set of Comic Offerings. Each contained much letterpress, and a variety of illustrated puns: “A ‘Heavy Swell’ at Weymouth “—depicting a large gentleman dressed in the height of fashion: and so on, and so forth, after the manner of their time. They did not seem so amusing now as when he was five or six. There was also a long poem, in three books of manuscript, called St. Pierre, composed between the years 1810 and 1817 by a relative of Grandpapa, and exhibiting in full flower the poetical fashions of its period. It had a hero, a villain (dark and Byronic), and an innocent heroine (who lost her innocence in the third canto) :

  The final aid was lent by thee

  Thou Demon—OPPORTUNITY !

  Dermot was not very clear about this part of the poem, which he had read hurriedly on one occasion because he gathered it was unsuitable for him ; taking advantage of Grandpapa’s short absence from the room. Other parts of it admitted of no doubt. There were murders, discovered and bewailed by a chorus of drooping ladies :

  Don Diego sought in language brief

  The reasons for this scene of grief—

  Grandpapa’s voice read on, in complete solemnity and absorption. He found the poem extremely edifying. Finally, for no reason clear to Dermot, there was a sort of general massacre in a glen, the sight of which was too much for the villain whose machinations had brought it about. He lost his reason :

  And sudden, with terrific yell,

  He fled from the ensanguin’d dell.

  The conclusion sounded very moral, but its precise application was not at once apparent. Dermot thought that, on the whole, Dickens was clearer.

  Opening the book, making great play with a long yellow marker, Grandpapa proceeded with the adventures, begun overnight, of Mrs. Gamp, as that redoubtable lady entered upon her duties in connection with the fever at the Bull. Listening, the boy saw it all: the long, dark passage, the frightened, scurrying maid, the tray, and Mrs. Gamp’s repast: her nose sliding along the rail of the fireguard, her watchman’s cloak, her enormous shadow on the wall: later, the room growing dark and chill: her awakening: and then, after hours of darkness, the coming of day.

  “It was bright morning the next time Mrs. Gamp looked out of the window, and the sun was rising cheerfully. Lighter and lighter grew the sky, and noisier the streets ; and high into the summer air uprose the smoke of newly kindled fires, until the busy day wa
s broad awake.”

  He saw it all, with that sharp, conscious vision, that extending of the bounds of knowledge, which we experience from imaginative writing of the highest class: saw, with knowledge not his own, the colours of the walls, the baggy, faded satins, the queer dark furniture: heard the soft noises of the fire: and then, when morning came to banish the fears and stuffy darkness of the sickroom, he looked out with Mrs. Gamp, over the parapidges and crazy roofs of a London he had never seen, through the clear morning air to the green wooded hills: he drew the air deep into his lungs: he heard the cries, the wheels that rumbled on the cobblestones….

  Grandpapa shut the book, with the phrase that always followed his reading, sure as the amen following a prayer: “Charles Dickens: a great master of literature.” And Dermot, the clear colours fading slowly from his mind, looked at Grandpapa, looked round the room, and knew, somehow, that here, in this one place of all the world, that era still lived on. The world whose beginnings Dickens had celebrated stuck somehow here, its growth arrested. Like branches, borne down a river into a deep pool, and there caught in an eddy, the eighteen-sixties circled slowly round and round ; their time stood still. Some changes had come: the long greyhound mailboat had displaced the paddle boat, and Dublin’s new electric trams were the admiration of Europe, but they ran garishly over the old dirty cobbled streets of a Victorian city. The pool was stagnant ; it smelled like the Liffey at low tide ; and the captive eighteen-sixties were decaying. Development clogged with dirt and cobwebs: Dickens their living author, the scruples and gallantry of a lost period their conviction: Dr. O’Donovan their fashionable doctor, driving to visit his patients in a carriage and pair, pulling off his silk hat and lavender gloves to cross their parlour door: in Dublin City, a hundred offices from Dickens’ world, with their old musty ledgers, their high desks and stools, their low yellow windows looking out on gloomy streets. Here, for a few years more, one might live in two worlds. Here one might turn backwards, and take a walk down the last century. Realisation of this grew in Dermot, year by year, as a landscape emerges from a fog. Grandpapa was born in 1828! He could remember back, right back, easily, into it all. He had seen Tom Moore, and heard the Wicklow Sand-man, with his sack over his shoulder, crying his cry down Grafton Street. When the Famine came Grandpapa was a young man. The old fine head, bending in the lamplight—those eyes had seen Tom Moore! those old ears, with the hair sprouting from them, had heard his voice! Tom Moore was as much a hero to Dermot as Dickens was. The great, green, leather-bound Irish Melodies, with its brass clasp, which was the only book in the drawing-room besides the Bible, was equally sacred in his eyes. He was allowed to read it on special occasions, after washing his hands. The old flowery words, the old flowery pictures by Maclise—how well he knew and loved them. All, even Walmer Villa itself, belonged to an age which collapsed rather than passed: like an old, old woman who defies the years and is snuffed out in a morning. Dickens the only novelist and historian, Moore the only poet: Dr. O’Donovan the only doctor: the Irish Times the only newspaper: John Jamieson’s the only whiskey: Protestantism the only faith, and the voice of Empire re-echoed, in a genteel brogue, from Dublin Castle. Outside the house, in Dublin, great, airy, rushing trams, and foul, clogged gutters: fine coloured ladies driving in high fashion to the Horse Show past rows of ragamuffins spitting on the pavement: great silver churches soaring over filthy hovels, like tall flowers from a dungheap: a world of wild contrasts and contradictions, where the thoughtful few turned bitter and derisive, where it was wiser to belong to the entrenched party, and never think at all. Dermot knew only the graces of that world, the long summer evenings, the light-heartedness, the uncouth characters and the violent incidents that seemed to belong to a play: Dublin, the great, warm, gloomy, friendly city: Grandpapa, Granny, Walmer Villa, and the garden: Delgany, with Eileen, Con, and Uncle Ben: the Sea Wall, the harbour, Paddy, Peg-leg, Mike: happy patches from the great crazy quilt, all lit with the magic light of holiday. This light gave even the cruel and brutal things he saw a look of unreality: a woman, in the streets of Dalkey, her front teeth knocked in, jabbing her husband in the face with a broken bottle: a drunken father, on the Fish Bank, tearing the skirt off his sixteen-year-old daughter and slashing her bare buttocks with his belt: a boy kicked off the Sea Wall on to the rocks below: the screeches of an old woman in the cottages near Walmer Villa, the howls of dogs, beaten insensible so that their owners could say that they were dead and avoid paying the licence for them: all that was savage and bestial never came between him and his joy in the place, because of that magic holiday light, which made everything that was not happy seem unreal. One thing only shook him, and made him angry and miserable for days. A woman in Dublin threw some kittens from the top window of a house into the road. He read of it in the Irish Times.” One or two were killed outright: others lay writhing in agony, or tried feebly to crawl away.” Dermot, who had seen the dirty, blubbering girl beaten with shock, but without pity, cried himself to sleep for several nights over the sufferings of creatures from his own nursery world. To hurt a kitten seemed to him the ultimate unkindness. Another Dublin woman, who knocked out her half-witted servant girl’s teeth one by one with a hammer, seemed to him nothing in comparison. The people in the slums and on the Fish Bank were monsters: he could not take their sufferings seriously. But kittens !

  Dermot’s visits to the city itself were not many. He went once a year to the Zoo. Two or three times Granny took them shopping. They would visit Mrs. O’This in Stephen’s Green, Mrs. McThat in Merrion Square. They would walk up Grafton Street, down Sackville Street, and round by Dame Street. They would look at the Post Office, the front of Trinity, and the Bank of Ireland. Then, tired and footsore, they would have tea at Mitchell’s, and catch the tram home. The tram was the most exciting part of it. Eagerly, as they approached the city, Dermot would note the different trams, with their marvellous, poetic destinations: Drumcondra, Glasnevin, Terenure: Sandymount—that would be a little, funny tram, without a top: Donnybrook—an old, rickety type of tram, with no shelter for the driver or conductor. Besides these, there were the queer, exciting trams that-were-no-trams: the water-cart tram, and the tram that squirted sand. There was the tram-shed at Blackrock: and, then, at the foot of Nelson Pillar, surely the greatest and noblest concourse of trams ever assembled in a single place.

  Very occasionally, he would visit Uncle Ben and Con at their office in Middle Abbey Street. The lower part of the windows was protected with a sort of wire, or gauze, on which the title of the firm was written in faded yellow letters. The top part seemed permanently discoloured, to resemble the little saucers of cold tea that stood in rows in the tasting room upstairs. It was a queer old office. It would have well become the brothers Cheeryble: Dermot all the time expected to see some such figure emerge from its inner gloom, a condensed, idealised, indescribable atmosphere like the brown of a moth’s wing. Everything was brown: the desks, the ledgers, the floor, the walls, the very light that filtered in through the windows: brown, tired, and goodnatured. The smell of the tea upstairs was sharp, clean brown. The smell of the cellars and wine bins was old, rich, sleepy brown. The smell of the beer and porter casks was cool, thick, wet brown. Even Uncle Ben himself, with his lively colours and his ringing voice, seemed mellowed and subdued. Con’s voice, that rich, golden sound, was darkened, like brown treacle. The clerks spoke quietly, in faded, Dublin voices. Even old Ned, the messenger, whose voice was a garrulous quack outside, softened down in the office to the sort of muffled gobbling ducks make with their bills in the water. Brownness dyed everything—the clear stain of tea, the musty stain of ledgers and old furniture, the warm stain of beer, the rich stain of old sherry—all nourished, aged, and mellowed in the brown Dublin air that rose from the brown Liffey water, settled over the old streets, and fell asleep.

  Uncle Ben did not fall asleep. He talked and laughed quietly, by the way not to disturb the other workers, but really, as did they all, deferring to the old brown atmospher
e. Con quite often went to sleep. He sat at his desk, and dreamed of the long wild roads by Glendalough, the thin white ribbon winding over the hills to Sally Gap, and all the other magic places he could reach on his new motor bike. He dreamed of the cool ride home in the evening, with the sweet air rushing upon his eyes and forehead, and the quiet, exultant lapping of the waves upon the rocks below the garden. Then, rousing himself, he would go down into the cellar, and help shift: lifting the smaller barrels in his enormous arms, and handing them up through the trapdoor to Ned and his fellow.

  “It’s a gran’ shtrenth ye have, Mr. Con,” Ned would gabble softly: “A gran’ shtrenth. Gran’ muscles. Damn the lie in that.”

  Ned was clean-shaven, red-headed, birdlike. His walk was a scuttle, his salute an incredibly rapid raising of his finger to the end of his big birdlike nose. He was married, but had, in his own parlance, “chose a bad wan.” They lived apart: Mrs. Ned supported herself by selling fish on the quays. She was there of a morning before Ned, who passed her on his way to work. Every time, by his own account, he would salute her and say politely, “Good mornin’ to ye, ma’am.” Every time, with grim good humour, she would reply, “To hell with ye.” She had a fearsome tongue, as Con could witness. He had been down there one day when she and certain ladies of her trade were busy gutting cod. An altercation had arisen, and continued till Mrs. Ned, seizing a handful, had cried to her opponent :

  “Hould yer whisht, Sarah Dooley, hould yer whisht, or I’ll gie ye a powltice o’ hot guts in the gob.”

  “Oh, bedad, sir, she would,” Ned corroborated. “She would, Mr. Con, sir, and damn the lie.” He spat, and rubbed his hands nervously together. “She would, so. I’m well shut o’ that wan. Terrible wicked, Mr. Con, sir, with hand and tongue.”