Chapter Twenty
He took the train down to Tinahely the next
morning, because he had to do his duty by memory. At Westland Row
station under the great canopy of iron and glass, he felt wearier
than he ever had in the trenches. Some evil spirit had tricked the
youth out of his body. In the night that same spirit had harrowed
and raked him, and planted in him mocking seeds of granite and
flint. At the centre of his body he thought something had perished.
Like an old ash-tree he feared he would slowly hollow out, the rot
taking him inwardly ring by blackened ring, until the winter wind
came and blew him down.
Dublin was no longer like a city intent on the war.
There were few uniforms about of men on furlough. In the streets he
had seen troops, right enough, but they were soldiers about other
matters, shipped in from England. Walking down Sackville Street, he
had viewed the remnants of the uprising, the houses shelled away by
the gunboats on the Liffey Where the wide street had been torn up,
right enough, there was a gang of men repairing setts, no doubt
Gretta’s father and husband among them. But he didn’t look too long
that way; he didn’t want to see. The great street had been wounded
in a cataclysm; it had erupted, spewing its mortar and stones to
the heavens. They could put it all back stone on stone but there
were many things that could never be put back.
In the corner of his eye he saw a little clump of
boys in one of the side-streets that went down to Marlborough
Street. He even saw the throwing arm of one of the boys shifting
down in a throw, but he was still surprised and affronted when the
stone hit him on the arm. He stooped and picked up the missile and
it was a bit of granite from the setts, which a mason had cut with
his hammer and bolster to make a piece fit. It was a little extra
remnant of the city The boys surged forward and the smallest and
bravest of them ran out onto the pavement and launched such a gob
of spit at him that he couldn’t duck before it splashed against his
cheek. The boys broke into wild laughter.
‘Fucking Tommies, fucking Tommies, fucking Tommies,
go home!’
He stopped on the pavement but he didn’t feel
inclined to run after them.
‘I am at home, you little bastards,’ he
muttered.
Of course, the little laughing group was skittering
away down towards the Pro-cathedral. That was the church that stood
in for a Catholic cathedral; it wasn’t a cathedral in itself, it
was instead of a cathedral. They were going to build a proper
cathedral some day. That was where his father went to pray among
the other Catholics of Dublin, loyal or not. He had sat there
himself every Sunday with his three sisters and his father as trim
and polished as a yacht. He could walk in there in his mind and sit
down amid the smell of polish and the Italian statues, but in his
mind the statues had been taken away and there were no ladies now
to polish and scour the floor. Of course, that wasn’t true, he
supposed, things would go on a while longer, till another
earthquake maybe shook the deep roots of the city, God knew when,
and it all fell down. He wondered should he put the bit of stone in
his pocket as a keepsake, but then he threw it roughly to the
ground. Let it lie there to be thrown at another fool, he thought,
another fool passing.
He got out at the little station at Tinahely,
which had been put for some reason in an awkward place well below
the town, maybe at the whim of a landlord. Maybe even the
Fitzwilliams miles away over in Coollattin for at one time their
power had stretched everywhere. For this was all country he knew.
Not so many miles away lay the old realm of Humewood, where his
grandfather had been steward. His grandfather was still alive and
he wondered if he should go over to Kiltegan also, where he kept
the vigil of old age in one of the lodges of the estate. But he
thought, if his father was angry with him, how much angrier would
be his grandfather, who had spent his whole life at the head of an
army of estate workers, gardeners and farmhands, and was the vicar
of the landlord on this earth, and as loyal as a wife. Of course,
he was sure his father would have said nothing to him, because the
two of them met only at funerals and weddings. In Willie’s own
presence the old man had often avowed that his son was a fool, and
all his children were fools, but of those fools, James was the
biggest of them. And he had put him into the police ‘with the other
fools of Ireland’. A fool, and the father of a fool certainly, was
Willie’s sad thought.
But the sunlight was easy in the hedges along the
path; the rowans were heavy with their bright red berries. As he
passed the gates down to Kilcomman church he found himself admiring
the lovely trim of granite blocks, the expertise and the rightness
of them, and the black gates as suitable as a suit. He wasn’t
exactly sure in his memory where the house of the Pasleys was,
though he knew it was this side of the town, so he hailed the
rector who just at that moment was inserting letters in the
postbox, and asked him where the Mount was.
Just up the hill there,‘ said the rector. ’You can
see the roofs sticking above the beech trees.‘
‘Thank you very much, sir,’ said Willie.
‘Have you been overseas?’ said the rector.
‘Yes, sir. To Flanders, sir, these last few
years.’
‘ Are you going up to talk to the Pasleys?‘
‘I am. Because I knew their son, the
captain.’
‘I was afraid you had more bad news. You know the
other son’s in France, too?’
‘No, I didn’t know that, sir.’
‘ Ah yes. I am delighted to see you hale and hearty
We have lost seventeen men from hereabouts. Very terrible and sad
it has been. And what is your name, Private, if I may ask?‘
‘Dunne, sir. William Dunne.’
‘Ah yes,’ said the rector, and Willie by old
experience knew how the rector’s brain was whirring, registering
the name that would be unlikely to be a Protestant one, though the
first name maybe betokened a certain deference to the powers that
be. But, to give the man his due, his tone didn’t alter. His own
name was written in gold lettering just behind him as it happened,
on the black notice that said the name of the church and the
rector-in-charge. ‘Well, my friend, you will find them at the top
of the hill. I’ll bid you good day and God bless you.’
‘Thank you, Rector.’
‘Thank you, William, for taking the time to talk to
me.’
Willie felt curiously heartened by the words of the
rector. In fact, he was close to weeping as he trod on up to the
house among the trees.
He had enough sense to know he must approach the
house from the lane that ran up to the yards. There was no purpose
marching in through the fine gates and traipsing up the
avenue.
He wondered then was he mighty foolish not to have
sent a letter first, and how would he say why he had come? And why
had he come, now he considered it? He had little idea but the
notion of how the captain had stayed in him, the little history he
knew of the captain still vivid in his mind. He was walking now in
the captain’s world that he knew nothing of. He hadn’t even known
he had a brother in the army, or had he? Had it seemed unimportant
and had he just forgotten? There seemed something vaguely
unforgivable about that, in those days without forgiveness
generally.
He knocked at the kitchen door just off the fine,
trim yards. There were maybe two dozen outhouses of varying kinds,
fowl houses and piggeries and turf houses, calf byres, loose boxes
for the horses. It was a grand operation. And yet the house did not
loom over him with grandeur or embellishment — it was low and
simple, with a peaceful air. The sun was content to lie on the
pack-stones of the yard; even the three sheepdogs didn’t bother
with him, but stayed sleeping in their chosen suntraps on their
chains. He knocked with his bare knuckles and after a little while
he heard feet coming, and the door, which was already open a few
inches, was pulled inward. There was a stout woman there in a blue
overdress, just the same as his grandmother would have worn over in
Kiltegan. He thought it must be a servant, the cook maybe, or the
principal maid, because she was elderly enough.
‘How’re you doing, ma’am?‘ he said. ’I’m looking
for Mrs Pasley. My name’s Willie Dunne and I was in the army with -
with the captain.‘
To his dismay, he found he could not remember the
captain’s first name, but the woman rescued him, whether she knew
it or not.
‘George, you were in the army with George, oh bless
me, come in, Mr Dunne, come in.’
Then she drew him into the kitchen. It was like the
kitchen of any farmhouse, with a big fire of turf and logs, and a
scrubbed deal table, and the flagstones a little wet from the mop,
and the old clock going at its work. But there was a door open into
the rest of the house and Willie could see the genteel
transformation there, with flatter plaster walls and pictures, and
an old red carpet, and by another much bigger entrance a brass box
of sticks and umbrellas. It gave him a strange pleasure suddenly to
think of Captain Pasley walking there, and sitting, not as a
captain but the son of the house, a farmer and a living man.
‘Sit down there, Mr Dunne,’ she said, with true
kindness. ‘We won’t go into the sitting-room if you don’t mind it.
I have all the covers off the chairs and it looks like the end of
the world. Let me give you some tea.’
Her accent was a Wicklow accent but he didn’t think
any more she was a servant. The way she arranged her words and
offered them was not the music of a servant, not at all.
‘I’m very sorry,’ she said. ‘I haven’t introduced
myself. I am George’s mother, Margaret Pasley. George was my eldest
son. Now his father is down in the lower fields, but he should be
up in a while, Mr Dunne. Did you come to, to - you’re very welcome,
whysoever you came, but - was there something to say to us?’
‘No, no,’ said Willie, panicking suddenly. He had
walked into rooms where maybe grief had been deep and constant. Yet
her manner was bright enough. He was fearful now, treading in the
shadows and the briars of the captain’s own world.
‘Did you know him particularly?’
‘I did, I did, ma’am. Let me tell you — ‘ But what
should she let him tell her? She handed him the beautiful blue
china cup brimming with the soft coin of tea. He drank it with real
thirst and drained it to the leaves.
‘My heavens,’ said the captain’s mother.
‘You see,’ said Willie, ‘he was my captain in the
first months of my service, and, as you know, he was — ’
‘He was killed, yes, at Hulluch. Were you
there?’
Now she spoke with an eagerness like his unexpected
thirst.
‘I was,’ he said. ‘Not just in the moment of his
death, because — ’ Oh but, again, how could he tell her that
Christy Moran, himself and the others drew back, while the captain
elected to remain? Was that why he had come? Not to say that to her
but to himself? The captain had stayed and they had withdrawn — run
away was the worse phrase for it. And the captain had elected to
remain, though everyone knew it was only death to do so. And then
coming back and finding the poor captain like a twisted hawthorn in
the fuming trench. What was that? Not something to say to a
mother.
‘I can see,’ she said, ‘it is all happening still
behind your eyes.’
Then his eyes were full of tears again. What a fool
indeed he was.
‘Yes,’ he said.
‘His commanding officer did write, you know. Yes,
it was a good letter. He said he died bravely. I suppose they
always say that. I didn’t mind that, I wasn’t thinking of courage
in that moment, I was thinking I would never see him again. He was
a very nice fellow, you know, a great friend to me. He was a bit
stubborn and we had our differences, and he was very finicky about
things, but — truly a fine son. You can tell me anything you
like.’
‘But that’s what I came to say, that he was a fine
man, that’s what I thought about him, and we had other officers
since, and some of them killed too, but the captain, and I call him
the captain, he was Captain Pasley, and — ’
‘You missed him when he was killed.’
Willie Dunne said nothing then; why would he need
to? He missed him when he was killed. He missed them all. He missed
them when they were killed. He sorrowed to see them killed, he
sorrowed to go on without them, he sorrowed to see the new men
coming in, and to be killed themselves, and himself going on, and
not a mark on him, and Christy Moran, not a mark, and all their
friends and mates removed. Some still stuck in the muck, or in
ruined yards, or blowing on the blessed air of Belgium in blasted
smithereens.
He had come, he had thought, to comfort the
captain’s parents. How could there be comfort in a fool sitting in
the kitchen with his tongue tied and his heart scalded?
‘Do you know,’ said Mrs Pasley, ‘it means the earth
to me to see what he meant to you. It does.’
At length Mr Pasley was heard coming in. He
entered the room gingerly because he was covered from head to foot
in a grey dust. He looked like a grey ghost. His face might have
been a carved statue.
‘I’m going to have to have a good bath, Maisie,’ he
said. Maybe the voice was a little like the captain‘s, the same
accent anyhow.
‘He’s been liming all day,’ said Mrs Pasley to
Willie. ‘This is a lad come from George’s regiment, Pappy,’ she
said.
‘How do you do, young fella?’ said Mr Pasley. ‘I
won’t shake your hand. I’ve been liming all day you see. Down at
the Kilcomman end.’
‘It’s a big job, that liming,’ said Willie
Dunne.
‘Aye, it is,’ said Mr Pasley. ‘It is.’
After a fine old tea, it was time to be moving
along.
‘I’ll walk you down the hill,’ said Mr
Pasley.
‘Ah, don’t worry, sir,’ said Willie.
‘Ah, I want to look over the hedge at the fields
anyhow.’
So the two of them strode down the hill again. At
the bottom Mr Pasley went up on his toes and peered into the lower
whitened fields.
‘That’s grand,’ he said.
When they got to the graveyard at Kilcomman, Mr
Pasley brought Willie quietly in. He brought him over to a bright
new stone, with its carving excellently done.
‘There you are,’ said Mr Pasley. ‘Of course, his
body doesn’t lie here, more’s the pity. But you know all about
that.’
It said the captain’s name and that he had died ‘in
the empire’s service in the cause of righteousness and freedom’.
Willie nodded his head. He didn’t think that Mr Pasley would be too
sorry that Home Rule would not be coming after all, as people said.
He didn’t think he would be, no. In the cause of righteousness and
freedom — and farming, they might have put, he thought. And
liming.
Mr Pasley loomed beside him, looking down at his
son’s gravestone.
‘Of course, John’s still away, doing his best,’ he
said.
Willie nodded and smiled. Then, almost without
premeditation, he raised his right hand and laid it lightly on Mr
Pasley’s left shoulder.
‘We called him George for to honour the old Queen’s
son,’ he said. ‘In those former days.’
Willie softly patted the big farmer’s
shoulder.
Mr Pasley didn’t flinch, or move at all, nor did he
speak again for a minute or two.
For some reason they had given him a right old
rigmarole of a journey back. He was to board the train to Belfast
and cross from there. Maybe it was that the Ulster counties still
tried to send soldiers, if they had any.
So he was on the platform in Dublin in the bright
early morning, just stepping on. Of all the things in the world he
expected to see, it wasn’t the little scrap of Dolly coming racing
down along the platform.
‘Willie, Willie!’ she called, ‘Wait, I want to say
goodbye!’
Dolly arrived up at his legs with her usual force
and gripped him.
‘But Dolly, Dolly, you never came out on your own
through the city, did you, Dolly dear?’
‘I did not, Willie. Annie and Maud are after taking
me!’
‘But where are they, Dolly?’
‘They’re over back there by the gate.’
In the distance right enough stood his two
sisters.
‘But why won’t they come down too?’ said
Willie.
‘They said you wouldn’t mind if they stood back,
and you’d understand.’
Willie waved. They waved back anyhow.
‘Of course and I do. I understand. Oh, Dolly,
you’re the best.’
It meant the world to him after all. He kissed her,
and hugged her, and the whistle blew then, and he kissed her again,
and he kissed her, and then he stepped up on to the train.
‘Goodbye, goodbye!’ she called.
‘Goodbye, goodbye,’ called Willie.