He was a wonderful little man, Ned, full of resource, and a humour so apparently innocent that people seldom gave him credit for it. Many laughed patronisingly at him, whose measure he had long ago taken. Once, years before, when Con hurt his leg—Con’s boyhood was spent hurting the various parts of his anatomy in succession—Ned was deputed to wheel him about the streets in a bathchair. All jobs came alike to Ned. Adjuring his passenger to “steer careful, Mr. Con, sir, for the love o’ God,” he grasped the handle, put his head down, and charged along the pavement. The invalid, well pleased, did his best, and with a series of alarming swerves and lurches they sped along in the direction of the Hill of Howth.
All went well till, at a sharp corner, they ran down an old gentleman of military appearance, in silk hat and morning coat. Con tried to clear him, but he received a glancing blow, and the off wheel ran over his immaculate boot.
“Confound you, fellow,” roared the military gentleman. “Where the hell are you going? ”
Ned looked up at him, birdlike :
“To the Hill o’ Howth, sir,” he replied, ducked his head, and scuttled on at the same pace as before.
Chapter XXII
“C’m on, Dermot,” Con was saying, as he led the way up to the tasting room. “We’ll play a trick on your Granny and Grandpapa. I’ll mix up a sample of tea——”
“They won’t take it,” interrupted Dermot. “They’ve been had too many times already. I made a jelly of mint and lavender only this summer, and Granny had to go out of the room to spit out her mouthful. And you heard what Eithne did? ”
“No. What did she do? ”
“She made a blancmange—it looked perfectly all right, as pink as the best of them: only she put pepper, and salt, and washing soda in it. Granny wouldn’t try it. Daddy did, though. He knew there was something shady about it, and he pretended to take some to encourage the others. Several people took some, but they all sat waiting for each other to begin, so Daddy had to try a bit: and it was so beastly he couldn’t pretend. Then Eithne took it into the kitchen. Bessie tried a bit, and rushed into the scullery, and spat it out in the bucket. Eithne cornered Katie, and made her eat a whole plateful. She was so afraid of offending Eithne that she ate it all.”
“Serve her right,” pronounced Con, with a huge grin. “The dirty, time-serving old screw.”
“And Bessie warning her, in a loud whisper, all the time, from the scullery,” laughed Dermot. “I should have burst out laughing: but Eithne kept an absolutely straight face. She can.”
“She’s a grand girl, that sister of yours. A grand girl: and you ought to be six times as proud of her as you are.”
“Yes.”
“‘ Yes,’ ” Con mimicked him. “Now listen to me. That girl——”
“So you see, they’ll be very suspicious, now.”
“Eh? ” Con’s wits did not always move very rapidly. “Eh? Wha’? ”
“They’ll be very suspicious. Granny and Grandpapa. We won’t be able to play a trick on them.”
“Oh, ah.” Con brightened at the reminder of his stratagem. “Wait now, till I tell you. I’ve put up two samples, d’you see. One of them is fit for a king. That’s the top one. Do you give it to them, from me. They’ll be suspicious, as you say. Your Granny will say, ‘ Thank you, me dear,’ and put it away in the cupboard. Leave it for a bit, and then say, I was asking how did they like it. Go on at that a bit ; and then, one day, I’ll ask: or I’ll say, Father wanted to know how they liked the sample. Then, at long last, they’ll try it. It’s marvellous stuff: they’ll enjoy it, and feel ashamed of ever having suspected anything. Then”—he beamed with satisfaction—“they’ll try Sample Number Two.”
“What’s that like? ” asked Dermot, beginning to grin.
“The most awful stuff that ever cut the back teeth out of a mule,” replied Con, beginning to shake with laughter. “Half of it is a flavouring you’d only put a pinch of into a ten-pound tea chest. They’ll make an occasion of it: perhaps even give a sup to the old man: they’ll——”
Contemplation of the scene robbed him of speech. His great laugh rang along the shelves with their rows of saucers.
The trick fell out exactly according to plan. It was ten days before Granny could be induced to brew the first sample. Dermot did nothing to allay her suspicions: it was essential that she should have many doubts to be ashamed of. He was not there when she and his mother warily tried the tea.
“That was wonderful tea Con sent us,” admitted the repentant old lady, when Dermot returned for his supper. “Wonderful tea. I must thank him for sending it. It was a great treat.”
“We told you it was very nice,” said Dermot, as one unjustly suspected, who sweetly hides the hurt to his feelings.
“Indeed, ye did, me child. Ye did.”
Dermot tapped her arm.
“I believe you thought we were playing a trick on you, Granny.”
A slow smile spread a score of kindly wrinkles on the old lady’s face.
“Well now, to tell ye the truth, Dermot, that’s just what I did think.”
The second sample was brewed with great ceremony.
“Alfred,” said Granny, “I want ye to take a cup of this splendid tea Ben is after sending us. We had some the other day: and delicious it was.”
The old man looked up at her from his Irish Times.
“Heh,” he said. “Ye’re a great one for making a fuss, Amelia.”
“Well, fuss or no fuss, now: I’m going to give ye a cup of it.”
“Oh, ye’ll do as ye please. I’m sure of that,” he replied, going back to his paper.
A few minutes later, the tea was brought in, and poured out. Grandpapa was given the first cup. Putting down his paper, he took it up, in his shaking hand: he stirred it, blew on it, stirred it again: took a generous sip: spat it out: set down the cup: and delivered a long speech, beginning, “I declare to me God.”
Abashed and confounded, Granny tasted her cup. A slow expression of horror and disgust congealed on her face.
“Aaaaah! ” she cried. “Ye bad child ”: and then, rolling her eyes towards her husband, she began helplessly to shake with laughter.
“Ye took us in well,” she said to Dermot afterwards, with a kind of melancholy admiration, adding, as a matter of form, “Ye bad boy.”
But Grandpapa did not forget the episode, and assailed the astonished Uncle Ben, on the next occasion he dropped in, with bitter reproaches upon the quality of his wares.
Soon afterwards, to Dermot’s surprise, Grandpapa declared his intention of taking him to the Exhibition. Dublin had burst out into one of those White Cities which were to spring up so gaily in the waste places of many a metropolis, and was losing money with every outward appearance of delight. The Exhibition was situated at Ballsbridge. It was to attract visitors from all over Europe. Unfortunately, Irish exhibits, eked out with water-chutes and switchbacks, while they delighted the Irish public, left the Continent unmoved. The Irish public enjoyed itself enormously, and was most indignant when rumours began to spread that the backers were losing money. Sure, and wasn’t the place packed! Will ye look at the queues do be waitin’ for a ride on the waterchute! It took years to convince the public that the Exhibition had been a disaster, and many of them still attribute its natural failure to dishonesty.
Dermot, who had somehow got the idea that Grandpapa was very old and needed looking after, stood solicitously aside, and held open the gate.
“Have you got the money, Grandpapa?” he asked, merely as a gentle reminder.
The old man stopped, and looked at him quizzically.
“Heh,” he said. “Ye must think I’m the funny old fella.”
“Not a bit, Grandpapa,” protested Dermot, flushing. “I only wondered if——”
“The funny old fella—to be starting out without the money. Wait now—there’s the tram. Run out to the post and signal the man to stop.”
Dermot did so, glad to escape for a moment. He sto
od beside the post, and, as the tram approached, he made a shy, half-hearted gesture with his left hand. He did it merely because he had been told, for he knew that, all the time, Grandpapa would be executing behind him the gesture which Con called “poking the tram man’s eye out ”: i.e. standing, with outstretched umbrella, and only lowering it as the tram ground indulgently to a standstill. All the drivers knew Grandpapa. They smiled, as the advancing glass almost hit the end of the umbrella. Grandpapa was still really suspicious of electric trams. He ignored the human element in their direction, and believed that, if he took his attention off them for an instant, they would devilishly gather speed and rush past him. Grimly watchful, he stood, holding out his umbrella, shooting out his trimly clipped moustache in little puffs: then made all haste to scramble aboard, before the machine could run on again.
“Good mornin’, Mr. Conroy, sir,” exclaimed the conductor, taking his elbow, and helping him in, with a wink at Dermot.
“Good mornin’ to ye,” returned Grandpapa, still preoccupied with the need to find a seat and get safely into it.
A minute later, as the tram rattled down Glasthule, and Dermot peered anxiously out, in case Paddy were there to be waved at—Paddy, on such days, sat disconsolate in the street—Grandpapa took out a shilling from his pocket, and said, “Two to Ballsbridge, if ye please ”—and the expedition was begun.
It was a grand day they had together. The old man, far out of touch with boyhood though he was, proved excellent company: and Dermot, whose quick sympathies responded at once to the friendly mood of another, was at his best. He could be very charming, when he was perfectly at ease. His mixture of deference and enthusiasm was exactly right. It was not artificial, nor calculated: it came naturally enough from a personality which lack of confidence put on the defensive, and which, for all its unconscious inward arrogance, and its clear-cut tastes, was desperately anxious to get on well with people and grasped at every outstretched hand. Dermot was quite naturally a different person with different people. He was not a hypocrite. Deep inside him, he knew what was what: sometimes he knew that he knew: but a confident assertion daunted him at once. Other people’s personalities seemed to him so much stronger, so much surer than his own. He was really afraid of Grandpapa, as of all grown-ups (except, perhaps, Granny) ; and he took hold with both hands on his opportunity. Grandpapa unbent more and more. He sent Dermot on the switchback railway, and stood below, amid the crowd, waving to him, and smiling his grim smile. He took him in to see the Indian conjurers. The conjurers did impossible, appalling things. They put a boy in a basket, and stuck swords savagely in and out through it, from every angle. Then they opened the basket, and the boy got out, smiling, and salaamed to the people. Grandpapa laughed contemptuously throughout the performance. He not only refused to consider how it was done: he hardly admitted that anything had been done at all.
“Black fellas,” he repeated, as they came blinking out of the booth into the brilliant sunshine. “Sure, they’d believe anything.”
They sat down to lunch at a little open-air table, which they were lucky to secure. Even so, they had to share it with a large, purple lady who was evidently feeling the heat. She had a husky voice, and apologised amiably for disturbing them. Grandpapa made a courtly reply. The lady commented upon the weather. Grandpapa made another courtly reply. Mopping herself, and breathing loudly, the lady essayed another opening. Grandpapa stared straight in front of him. Dermot wriggled, and finally drew his attention.
“I beg your pardon, ma’am ”: he emerged from his statue-like attitude, and inclined a courtly ear. The lady repeated her observation.
“Yes, indeed, ma’am ”: and he once more became a statue. The lady eyed him doubtfully, and tried no more openings. After a suitable interval, Grandpapa began discoursing very amiably to Dermot. He showed a further unexpected awareness of boyish needs by ordering him a large glass of lemonade. The companionship of Grandpapa, and the suggestion of complicity in his snubbing of the purple lady, warmed Dermot’s heart. He had forgotten what fun it could be to spend a time with Grandpapa. The evenings of Dickens worship were different. There, Grandpapa was high priest, and himself an acolyte. But here they sat, two males, taking their meal together, having repulsed politely, but unmistakably, a female’s effort at intrusion. Still, the score was not all on their side. It was impossible to be unaware of the lady, and her heavy, hot lunch. Purple face downcast, she ate with sulky gusto, like a penitent undergoing his pains. She ate aloud. Dermot’s cool maleness began to desert him. He became embarrassed. He looked almost imploringly at Grandpapa. The old gentleman gave no sign. He took his food with grave and fastidious care: and, in the intervals, poured out a grave, even stream of comment upon progress with a short o.
It was curious, Grandpapa’s insistence upon progress: for he appeared to dislike almost every manifestation of it. Motor cars, trams, telephones—he anathematised them all. Evidently he had imbibed some idea of progress in the abstract, some ascetic enthusiasm, from the days of Ruskin and Carlyle, and applauded in theory what he disliked in fact. Grandpapa’s own learning was immense, but curiously impractical. His amazing memory had grown from servant to master, and a passion for statistics to a notaryship in Cloud-Cuckoo-Land. A few years back, Dermot’s father, half in joke, had made the old man a birthday present of the time-table of every railway with a London terminus. This unusual gift earned him the warmest and most delighted letter of thanks he had ever received. Grandpapa spent hundreds of hours plotting and executing in his mind improbable journeys, memorising routes, and tracing precarious connections, until he had acquired a familiar, if out of date, acquaintance with the entire railway system of the United Kingdom. Seeing in the paper that His Majesty the King was about to journey from Windsor to Balmoral, he would produce his volumes ; there would be great licking of thumbs and turning of thin, rustling pages ; and then, after five minutes, he would look up at the others in the room.
“His Majesty—if he would be said by me—would do well to take the 4.15 p.m. from Windsor as far as Slough. There he would . . .”
No one was so tactless as to point out that the Royal Train had a private schedule: though Dermot, as soon as this occurred to him, had pointed it out in a stage whisper to his mother, and been silenced into understanding.
Listening to Grandpapa, and letting his eyes wander around the brilliant scene, with its sunlight, its colours, the dazzling white of the minarets, the happy, moving crowds, Dermot became aware of a sharp pressure against his leg under the table. At first he thought it was Grandpapa, calling his attention privily to something. He looked up and smiled uneasily, but Grandpapa’s eyes were not upon him. Then the pressure grew so intense that it hurt. It began to vibrate, to jerk uncontrollably. Frightened, Dermot tried to draw his leg away. It must be the purple lady. She was trying to make him look, so that she could start talking again. As he struggled, with bent head, trying to push back his chair, she gave a sudden coughing sound. Lowering his eyes obstinately, he received a sharp kick on the shin. Then he heard Grandpapa’s voice.
“Merciful God! ”
Dermot’s chair fell over backwards with a crash, and he sprang away in horror. The purple lady was lying stretched back, rigid, her mouth wide open, her eyes rolled up so that he could only see the whites. She was making a horrible snoring noise, and, as he stared wildly, her stiff body was racked by a series of violent jerks and spasms. Slowly her chair began to tilt back, and the side of the table to rise. A glass rolled, and crashed upon the ground. Recovering his presence of mind, Grandpapa seized the table, and pressed on it with both hands. For a moment the purple lady projected, stiff as a board: then she collapsed, and became a heap of twitching dusty finery.
“The poor lady is in a fit,” Grandpapa kept repeating, as people rushed up, and knelt round the sufferer. No one took any notice of him: they all shouted confusedly, advocating this or that remedy. They grappled with her garments, to loosen them. They threw water over her. Fresh people came cr
owding up, with blank, eager faces.
“Wha’s happened? Wha’s happened? ” they exclaimed.
“Make way there! Make way there! ”
The deep authoritative voice calmed the crowd at once. They parted, docile and quiet, as a huge R.I.C. sergeant, a handsome, brown fellow with a moustache, shouldered through to the victim, followed by a doctor. The doctor knelt: examined: then looked up, and said something to the sergeant.
“Stretcher! Amb’lance !” the cry went through the crowd, pattering, murmuring away into the distance: and in a surprisingly short time a couple of men in uniform trotted up, laid down a canvas stretcher on the ground, and carried off the purple lady, now limp and moaning, out of the crowds, out of the lives of Grandpapa and Dermot, but not from Dermot’s memory, where she remained for ever.
Chapter XXIII
That year of the Exhibition Autumn came down quickly, adding a sharper pang to the sorrow of departure. Flocks of dismayed leaves, torn from the branches while they had another month of life in them, were whirled up the curve in the road before Walmer Villa, took refuge underneath the wall by Sea Bank and St. Helen’s, were sought out, and driven helter skelter, up the short hill, past Mona’s door, to be scattered and forgotten in the gutters along the desolated tramway on to Dalkey. In a day, the whole aspect of the place was changed. Grey, cloudy skies hurried over Kingstown, as if charged with mournful news for the mountains. These they passed, stooping every now and then in a rain shower or a gloomy pall of mist, and sped over the great central plain of Ireland. Half way across, they met in comers from the West, messengers more urgent, more determined than themselves. The sky over the great plain became congested and thronged with clouds. The westward rush was checked, but its sheer weight held up the charge of the invaders. Like bullocks at a fair, the jostling clouds mounted on each other’s backs. Higher and higher the great sulky mass rose in the air. Then the invaders won, the clouds that had gone westward were pushed back, weeping, and the great depression moved slowly East. Softly, with dull persistent fall, tons of rain came greyly down on the bogs, the fields, the cabins, with their dripping thatch. In a night, it turned the farmyards to malodorous quagmires. It flooded the gutters of the little dead-alive towns, and sent down, outside their tap-room windows, thin, quivering palisades of silver. It turned the slack, surly rivers into muddy torrents, thick with eddies, rolling, just underneath their excited surface, rubbish, worms, and branches. Reaching the mountains, it hid them, and prepared them, privately, to be sponges once again: a skill they had forgotten. Reaching Kingstown it poured, in melancholy, foul cascades down the sloping streets, and into the sea. There, slowly, a grey cloud thickened and rolled out from the shore, fifty, a hundred, five hundred yards, opaque and sluggish, curling stupidly under the pock-marked waters. The rain emptied the Sea Wall and made it a desert ; no feet slid and slithered over the twice-slippery weed. Passing further over, crossing the Bay, it advanced dully on the Hill of Howth, and sent its stupid curse after the last brood of swallows that sped and dipped, and sped and dipped, in pursuit of the sun.
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