The Garden

by L. A. G. Strong

  An ugly little smile came across Dermot’s mouth.

  “Con said, since you were so particular, he made sure you’d have gone beforehand and drawn a map of the way.”

  Mr. Gray was so indignant he could hardly speak.

  “If that’s the way he looks at it, then, let me tell you, I don’t think the better of him. Nor of you, for listening to him.” He paused, and swallowed. “I might have known that, right or wrong, you’d side against your parents.”

  “It was for Granny’s sake we were angry,” put in his mother, more quietly. “It was thoughtless of them not to remember her.”

  “They made sure Daddy would have found it all out for himself,” protested Dermot. “Even Aunt Patricia said they would none of them dare to make arrangements for him.”

  “I? I was in their hands entirely. This is their town … the expedition undertaken at their suggestion. …”

  “We won’t argue about it any more,” said Dermot’s mother. “Though, I must say, I am sorry to see you always against your parents.”

  Dermot’s face contracted with irritation.

  “It’s all so silly,” he said, and went out of the room. He did not tell them he had been arguing their side at Delgany, and been derided for his pains. The net result of it all was, quite unfairly, to increase his resentment against his father, for having put him in so inconvenient a position.

  He was in this frame of mind when his father decided to take him on a trip round Ireland. Every year Mr. Gray combined business with pleasure by visiting a number of his firm’s clients who lived in out of the way parts of Ireland. In consideration of these visits, he received a longer holiday. He had wished for some time to take Dermot with him, but Dermot did not want to leave the joys of Walmer Villa and Delgany. This year, however, Con and Eileen went off for their holiday in August: Con could not manage it later on: and, in the blank period, Dermot let himself be carried off on the tour. To make it more exciting, Mr. Gray had added to his itinerary a visit to Killarney, as a grand finale.

  The journey certainly amused Dermot, though he was not really at ease with his father. At Waterford, they had to share a bedroom, and this he disliked intensely. But the riverside town left pleasant memories. They walked the quays, visited an old theatre converted to a cinema, and did not emerge into the cool streets till a few minutes before ten.

  “Now,” said Mr. Gray unexpectedly, “we’ll get a little refreshment before we turn in.”

  And he led the way with confident steps to the bar of one of the most palpable public houses Dermot had ever seen.

  Dermot followed in amazement, hardly able to believe his eyes. The bar, a low-ceilinged, timbered place thick with blue smoke, was full of sea-faring men. They all turned round to stare at the newcomers, but Mr. Gray showed not the least concern, walking up boldly to the counter, demanding a Guinness for himself, a ginger beer for Dermot. What was more, having received the drinks, he looked around, and made for a vacant place at one of the tables, Dermot following him in an agony of self-consciousness.

  An old fat man, wearing a jersey with red lettering across the bosom, looked Mr. Gray up and down for a moment. Dermot was terrified that he would make some crushing remark, and bring the whole crowd upon them. To his eyes, the place looked a den of thieves. Instead, the fat man said, with the greatest good humour:

  “Good evenin’, Colonel.”

  “Good evening,” replied Mr. Gray, most cordially.

  “Fine evenin’.”

  “Very fine.”

  Mr. Gray took a short appreciative draught, while, quite casually, he glanced at the lettering on the man’s jersey.

  “Visitor to these parts?” enquired the man, after a short silence.

  “Yes. I’m a Londoner, like yourself.”

  The old man raised his eyebrows. Dermot thought he was going to be angry.

  “You can always tell a Londoner,” said Mr. Gray, laughing. “I believe, if two London men met in the middle of a desert, they’d know one another straight off.”

  The old man smiled, and glanced around the bar. He was clearly flattered.

  “Bein’ here so regular, I’m often taken for Hirish,” he said.

  “That’s a fact,” put in another.

  Mr. Gray turned round in his chair, laughing.”

  “Is there an Irishman here?” he asked.

  “There is,” replied a voice, in humorous disgust—the voice of the barman.

  “You’ll have to mind yourself,” laughed Mr. Gray. “We’re a dozen to one, or more.”

  “Oh, faith,” grinned the barman, “I don’t mind the lot of yez”: and a most amiable conversation ensued, which ended in Mr. Gray’s standing drinks to the entire company, and departing under a hail of the most cordial good-byes.

  Dermot walked back to the hotel more astonished than he had ever been in the whole of his life. His father, so stiff, so starchy, so correct, had gone quite naturally into a pub, made friends with a lot of rough men, and been accepted by them, not with ridicule and sneers, but with obvious respect and liking.

  “Decent fellows, those,” said Mr. Gray, as they turned a corner. “Fancy finding a bar full of them here in Waterford.”

  Dermot learned a good many things about his father on that trip. They visited Mullingar: they wandered down the streets of Ballina on fair day: they saw Sligo, Castlebar, and drove out to Bonnyconlon, the ancestral domain of the O’Dowdas: then, turning back on their tracks, they came down to Cork, and on to Macroom, from which they were to drive by motor coach to Killarney.

  At Macroom, a difficulty arose. Their seats had been booked some time back, and the agent, ignoring this fact, had filled up all the places with latecomers, and told them they would have to wait. This Mr. Gray refused to do. The agent, knowing himself to be in the wrong, lost his temper.

  “And what is it you expect me to do?” he cried. “Am I able to pull out the car like a bloody concertina, and fit in two places? Or do ye want a couple of ladies threw out on the road, to make room for the two of ye?”

  Mr. Gray looked at him.

  “Listen here,” he said. “I’m a journalist. Either you carry out your contract with me, or I’ll go back and blast your route to hell in every newspaper in Ireland.”

  The man’s mouth fell open. His whole manner changed in an instant.

  “Ah, sir,” he said uneasily. “I wouldn’t do that. I wouldn’t do that.”

  “I will, though,” said Dermot’s father.

  “Wait a minute, sir. Wait a minute.” The agent disappeared into an inner room, and held colloquy with someone unseen.

  “Look at here,” he said, when he came back. “We can’t put yez in the coach, because the seats is all full. But I tell ye what we’ll do. We’ll send yez on a car as far as the pass of Keim an Eigh, and there an auto shall come and pick yez up from the hotel. Will that do yez?”

  “We don’t have to pay anything extra?”

  “Not a bloody halfpenny, sir. Not a bloody halfpenny.” “Then that’ll do us very well.”

  And they were sent off, on an outside car, with the blessings of the agent and all his staff. More material for Dermot’s wonder! He thought he knew all about his father. The idea that there were other sides to his character than those called out by home and Walmer Villa and Delgany was new and most disturbing. And—anyway—who was lying now?

  “You have to bluff these fellows sometimes,” said Mr. Gray, as if in answer to the thought. “It’s wonderful how far a little bluff will take you.”

  Good, thought Dermot. Bluff: I’ll remember the word.

  The car jogged them twenty-six miles along the road, past the Lakes of Inchigeelah, past Lone Gougane Barra, to the pass of Keim an Eigh. There, in wild solitude, facing a barrier of mountains, the jarvey put them down, turned, and went clip-clopping his way home. Sitting on a bank of heather by the roadside, they watched him go. Slowly the valley was emptied of his sound. Loneliness poured down upon them from the mountains ; it well
ed up from the heather underneath them. Eagerly, almost affectionately, their eyes followed the last living thing they could see. Far off now, he turned a corner, and the road was silent. The two raised their eyes to the mountains. Enormous, heather-covered slopes, fading away swiftly into the sheer mass of a great irregular wall, that would soon shut out the sun. Dermot moved his foot. It made a whispering sound in the heather. There was no other sound. Ahead of them, the road wound round a corner, and entered the pass. Behind them, it stretched empty. They were alone, in a huge, magnificent loneliness.

  Mr. Gray broke it.

  “I wonder how long this precious auto will be,” he said.

  “I don’t know. Not long, do you think?”

  “God knows. I daresay it was only a blind, to get us off their hands. No—they could hardly do that: dump us down here for the night. Yet I don’t know. I wouldn’t put it beyond them.”

  Silence fell again. There was something almost terrible in the way it came down, in the way nothing moved, not even a breath of air in the heather. The last few days, with all their bustle and quick, suspicious human contact, had not prepared them for the test of being left alone in such huge surroundings.

  Suddenly Mr. Gray burst out with such violence as to make Dermot jump.

  “God damn all Irishmen,” he exploded bitterly. “A dirty, casual, dishonest, un businesslike set of cadgers.”

  Something in Dermot glowed with a cold, pale light.

  “All Irishmen?” he said quietly.

  “Yes. All. They’re all tarred with the same brush. Even your precious Delgany crowd, that you’re so fond of. They’ll all let a man down as soon as look at him.”

  Suddenly Dermot knew that something terrible was going to happen.

  “The Delgany people,” he said, in a voice that came squeezed cold between great rocks of anger, “would never let anyone down. They are Christian people.”

  “Christian !—I dare say. So is that blighter who sold our seats to someone else. Does every kind of dirty trick during the week, and goes off slobbering to a priest on Sunday. My dear boy, they’re all ‘Christians,’ the inhabitants of this blasted island. That’s what’s the matter with them.”

  Dermot was shaking from head to foot. He had never known he could be so moved.

  “Do you put t-the Delgany people in quite the same class? I don’t think you—”

  “Oh, you’re going to tell me, I suppose, that they’re Protestants, and that these other blackguards are Catholics. It’s all the same in the long run. They’re all too damned Christian to carry out their obligations in a decent and business-like fashion.”

  “Do you mean to say that Uncle B-Ben doesn’t carry on his business in a decent and b-business-like fashion?”

  “Now, look here, Dermot. You may think yourself very smart, trying to catch up everything I say. You’re getting a bit above yourself, these days. Just because you do well at school, you think you can come home and lay down the law.”

  “I wasn’t laying down the law. It was you, saying that the Delgany people were as bad as everyone else over here.”

  Mr. Gray compressed his lips for a moment before answering.

  “You know perfectly well what I mean, and you needn’t pretend that you don’t. You know perfectly well—anybody but you would admit it at once—that the Delgany people let us down badly the other day over that theatre business. Being yourself, you prefer to take their side ; out of cussedness, of course. You’d rather have your father labelled a fool and a fussy idiot than admit that, when I left all the arrangements to them, it was caddish and disgusting to mislead me, and then throw the blame on me. Or, leave me out of it: it was caddish and disgusting, when they knew Granny was coming, when they had persuaded her to come, not to make every possible arrangement for her comfort. I may not be a Christian, but I wouldn’t have acted as they did, even to strangers.”

  Dermot sat, white with hatred, waiting an opportunity.

  “I know, of course,” his father went on, “that they didn’t behave in that way on purpose. It’s just that they don’t think. They’re casual, like the rest of the inhabitants of this infernal island. They’re unbusiness-like. If they could extend their Christianity a little further, in the direction of a consideration for other people, they would be none the worse off, and those who come in contact with them would be the better.”

  “It’s the first time I heard that Christianity and business ability were the same thing,” said Dermot viciously.

  “It is possible to be both a Christian and a good business man,” replied Mr. Gray. “However, if I’ve got to choose, give me the business man, every time. I’ve had enough of Christians.”

  The steel rod snapped.

  “And I’ve had enough of you,” yelled Dermot suddenly, leaping to his feet, his face blazing. “For the last four years, you’ve done your best to run down religion to me, and destroy it. You’ve taught me arguments against the Bible, against God, against everything. You’ve filled me up with your cheap little tin-pot logic. I—I’ve heard all you’ve got to say: and I tell you, if I’ve got to choose between you and the Christians, I choose the Christians, every time.”

  Mr. Gray stared at him. He had not for an instant guessed the violence of the conflict. Dermot’s outburst served at once to restore his dignity: he became the father Dermot had known before the trip began.

  “Very well,” he said quietly. “Now we know where we stand.”

  And, shifting his position, crossing one leg over the other, he took the guide-book from his pocket, and began to read it. Shaking from head to foot, unable to trust himself, Dermot wandered a few yards off. Already he was terrified at his outburst. He had behaved like a child, flown into a rage, said more than he meant, been ineffective: done everything the Delgany people would most deplore. He knew that, curiously enough, they would never countenance his being rude to his father. Still, under it all, there was a sort of awful pleasure, a sense of having burnt his boats: of having irrevocably cast in his spiritual lot with Con and Eileen and Uncle Ben.

  As the minutes passed, this pleasure chilled. He felt conscious only of having spoken unforgivably to his father, who was spending time and money in taking him on a pleasure trip. Forlorn, he crept back to apologise. Before he could speak, Mr. Gray put away his book and stood up.

  “I think I hear this precious auto,” he said.

  Dermot listened.

  “Yes. I think I hear it too.”

  Sure enough, there came a hoot, and a big open tourer rushed round the corner, and pulled up at sight of them. Gathering their coats and belongings, they bundled in.

  “Here—tuck this in round you.”

  Dermot’s father leaned across, and helped him fix the rug. Then, catching his eye, he added with a smile.

  “He came after all. One up to the Christians.”

  Chapter XXXIII

  Dermot sat in the drawing-room at Delgany, looking out over the bay. He had drawn a chair up beside the telescope. The hot August afternoon was hazy, though, close at hand, the sun beat heavily upon the rocks and garden. A patch of sea, close in, glittered and hurt his eyes. The telescope was of little use for the long distances, for it could not pierce the haze: it could only bring to him vague, enormous outlines, the muzzy shapes of Kattygollagher and the Stack, lit by a sleepy, imbecile sun: Killiney Strand, closer but still vague, receiving its perpetual tribute of long soundless breakers: Brian’s house, remote and indistinct, with something coloured hanging from one of the windows: a bemused, half-nightmare world, depressing, tiring to the eye. But the telescope was no longer trained on these far objects. It pointed sharply downward, to a cove in the rocks, less than half a mile away. From the window, one could see little slow heads in the water, and hear faint, late cries. It was an unofficial ladies’ bathing place. At the foot of a steep slope, it was hidden from above: and, unless a boat were passing, there was nothing nearer to it than Delgany. Therefore the ladies undressed in the open, on the rocks. N
aturally enough, the idea of a lens which would bring them within twenty yards of the windows did not enter their heads.

  Dermot was not looking at them now. They were in the water. He knew very well, however, that as soon as they came out again, his eye would be glued to the telescope: and he hated the knowledge. Every time he heard a step outside, he had been quick to swing the telescope away, and point it at the distance ; but no one had disturbed him. In England, at home, had there been a telescope, he would somehow have minded less: but here, the clamour of his instincts distressed him, turned sour the lazy afternoon. As the spasms of guilt and self-accusation rose miserably from his stomach, he tried to silence them, and bolster up his decision with an argument which all the time he knew to be false. A few days before, he had caught Con looking through the telescope. Con had been embarrassed, but had made a joke of it, and gone on looking. It can’t be so wrong after all, then, he said to himself, if Con does it. You must take yourself in hand ; you’re getting in a regular state of nerves over it. Dermot began to walk up and down the room, speaking to himself roughly, bullying himself. Con is the best man you know. He wouldn’t do a wrong thing. Look at that Opera business. (A couple of weeks earlier, Con had been offered the chief baritone part in an opera put on by society folk in Dublin, but had refused, since to accept would have meant rehearsing on a Sunday.) Doesn’t that show you the sort of man he is? Well, if a man as particular as that looks at girls through a telescope, why shouldn’t you?

  But it was no use. Dermot was never able to deceive himself. He knew that, if there was any meaning in the terminology they used, it was wrong for both him and Con to look through the telescope. Con had never done anything, though he’d often had the chance: though he’d had more than one woman begging him to. Dermot knew that, for Con had told him. It hadn’t been easy for Con, either, because he was only too apt by nature for that sort of thing. Dermot and he had had many talks together. It was nearly always the woman that started it, Con said: and this, to Dermot, was a new and terrifying idea. He had always thought that no woman could possibly be party to such a thing. He wondered how a man could ever persuade himself that a girl would let him. Con looking through the telescope had been a shock, a far greater shock, deep down, than Dermot was going to admit.