My Son, My Son

by Howard Spring

  “Sit down, Bill,” said Dermot. He mixed me a whisky and soda. Donnelly, who had an empty glass alongside his chair, declined another. He remained standing. “If you’ll excuse me, Mr. O’Riorden,” he said, “I’ll be getting along. It’s well past eleven, and I’ve got to get back to town. There’s nothing more we can say tonight. But if you’re of the same mind when the time comes, you can rely on me.”

  He shook hands, and Dermot saw him out.

  “Well,” said Dermot, when he came back into the room. “I’m glad you had a chance to meet Kevin Donnelly. What do you think of him?”

  “He looks like a walking illustration of the dignity of labour, as understood by Ruskin and Carlyle,” I laughed. “The very stuff of integrity. The firm, hard-working basis that makes it easy for parasites like you and me to keep on top.”

  Dermot looked at me queerly. “You wouldn’t be on top for long if Donnelly had his way,” he said. “D’you mean to say you’ve never heard of him?”

  “Never. He doesn’t look the sort of chap one hears of, does he?”

  Dermot pulled at his pipe in silence for a while. “The conceit, complacency and ignorance of the English are beyond belief,” he said at last. “There goes a man who has been working tirelessly, day and night, for years, nibbling away at the very foundation you stand on in Ireland, and all you have to say is that he doesn’t look the sort of chap one hears of.” He tossed off the remains of his whisky. “Well, well. You’ll hear of him.”

  “At least, I’m willing to learn,” I said. “Tell me about him.”

  “Well, he is by trade a printer, living in Dublin. When he’s lucky, I suppose he earns about two pounds a week. He’s married and has a small daughter. His family life is of extraordinary purity and beauty, I know. I’ve lived in his house for a week, and I’ve talked with many of his friends. I wouldn’t entrust Rory to him without taking some personal care.”

  “Rory? What’s all this?”

  “I’m coming to it. I’ve lived with Kevin Donnelly and talked much with him. I’ve seen his library. Be flattered, Bill, that he’s read one of your books. It’s a compliment. He taught himself to read. Figure out what that means. And Bunyan and Cobbett are about the lowest point his reading touches. Figure that out, too.”

  “Thank you. He’s read me.”

  “All right. His writing has the same punch as Cobbett’s and that’s all the worse for you—that is, if you’re interested in keeping Ireland. Have you ever heard—no, I won’t ask you. You’ve never heard of Ireland Arise! It’s a little sheet that Donnelly writes and prints, and I myself don’t know where he prints it. Neither does Dublin Castle, but it would like to. Donnelly gets nothing out of it. The Party funds provided the press and provide the paper. Donnelly does the rest, and the sheet circulates by the thousand. That sheet is one of the things that will help to blow Dublin Castle half-way to Holyhead. Even your bayonets won’t stand against the logic of it much longer.”

  He paused to put a match to his pipe. “Well,” he said, “that’s your walking illustration of the dignity of labour. You never said a truer word, Bill. Add to this that Donnelly’s an orator. Did you notice he had a beautiful voice?”

  I nodded. “You’ve never heard him in full cry. The Party sent him to America a few years ago. One of his speeches charmed ten thousand dollars out of my Uncle Con’s pocket. Not a penny for Donnelly, mark you—all for the cause. I’ve heard him talking to the Dublin toughs on a barrel alongside the Liffey and to the Wicklow farmers, standing on a haycart outside the very door of the village police-station. And he’s irresistible every time.”

  “It’s midnight, Dermot,” I said. “I must be going home. But tell me first—what’s all this got to do with Rory?”

  “It’s got this to do with it: that Rory’s going to be brought up as an Irishman, as I told you long ago he would be. When the time comes, he is going to live with Donnelly in Dublin. I’ll board him there, and Donnelly’ll treat him as one of the family. He’ll go to school in Dublin, and when he’s old enough he’ll go to the University there. And not Trinity College, either. Rory’s going where he belongs, that’s all.”

  “And when is this to come about?”

  “I don’t quite know. A couple of years.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  I stood up to go, and Dermot faced me, pale and angry-looking. “And why should you be sorry?” he demanded. “What the hell—”

  I placed a hand on his arm. “Dermot, this is something we’re not going to quarrel about. We’re not going to quarrel—you and I—about anything. But perhaps it’s just that I’ve got a general idea that the world’s salvation isn’t going to come so much from splitting up as from joining on. See? That’s all. Good-night now.”

  He put out his hand impulsively. “Thank you, Bill,” he said. “We won’t quarrel—you and I—especially about this. But—just on general principles—God damn England.”

  14

  It was Dermot who found Heronwater. I did not move about a lot. I don’t want to intrude myself or my work too much into this book, but let me just say this: that by this time my reputation as a novelist stood higher, and my sales were greater, than I had hoped in my most cheerful dreams that they would be. But that seemed to me no reason for rushing away at once to set up house in London. My work had its roots in the North, so I myself stayed in the North, which I still hold to be healthier and more vigorous than the South; but Dermot’s work took him everywhere. It took him to Cornwall during the week after my meeting with Kevin Donnelly, and when he had been there for a few days he wrote asking if I could come down and join him. He was staying then in Falmouth. I had been working hard, and welcomed the excuse to take a few days’ holiday. I packed a bag and travelled to London, saw my publishers, stayed the night at the old Golden Cross Hotel, and left Paddington for Falmouth the next morning. It was the first time I had travelled into the West country, and once I had crossed the Saltash bridge, leaving Devonshire behind, and had entered upon the strange, riven countryside of Cornwall, with the railway passing over viaduct after viaduct, carrying us above chasms filled with dusky woods, and though tilted, angular pastures, and alongside the great white cones of the clay works that rose against the sky like giants’ tents, and giving us here and there glimpses of a distant sea bluer than any I had known, and nearer views of unaccustomed vegetation: eucalyptus and palms and a profusion of hydrangeas: why, then I felt the North fall like a smoky burden from my back and a deep willingness for lotus-eating take possession of me.

  Dermot was waiting at the station. Even a few days in that climate—days that had been all sunshine—had put a bronze veneer upon his pale cheeks, and his red beard jutted forward with aggressive healthiness. He was casually dressed. He wore no hat; his shirt was open at the neck.

  I had nothing but a handbag with me. I gave that to a boy to carry to the hotel. Then Dermot and I walked together through the narrow twisting street that led to the Market Strand, so narrow that two carts had much ado to pass one another. There were a good many windjammers at their work about the seas in those days, and when we came down to the strand and the blue sparkling floor of the harbour stretched away from my feet, it happened that one of them was coming in under the white towering pride of her sail, making for anchorage in the Carrick Roads. Already some of the canvas was dropping from her, shouted orders came faintly across the water, reaching our ears with the beauty and mystery of all sound that comes across the sea.

  Dermot waved his hand towards the harbour—that loveliest of all British harbours—towards the great ship, and the little steamers, and the yachts that danced like toys upon the sunlit water, hulls of yellow and red, blue and green, trembling above their own shadowed loveliness, towards the green, distant land and the blue enveloping air. “What did you know about that when you lived in Gibraltar Street?” he said. “Is it any wonder Van Gogh went off his head when he found the sunlight of Arles after the grey misery of Brabant? I feel half-crazy myself. Let�
��s get in and take some of those ridiculous clothes off you.”

  The hotel stood just back from the strand, which was then a more care-free place than you see today. It had no concrete pier and clicking turnstiles and pierrot advertisements. It was just the simplest sort of place for embarking and disembarking.

  It was thence we embarked the next morning. Dermot was full of mystery. “You don’t think I brought you down here just to show you the scenery?” he demanded. “Get aboard.”

  I walked down the granite steps, past the wall hung with rags of seaweed and set here and there with iron mooring-rings, to the boat that rocked gently on the water. She rocked and she also shuddered, for she was that fairly new thing a motor-boat. An oily-handed customer, wearing a peaked white cap, was in charge of her. Dermot brought down a large luncheon basket, and then from under the cool sea-smelling shadow of the wall we shot out into the sunlight showering down upon the harbour.

  “You don’t see this place from the shore,” Dermot shouted above the clatter of the engine. “Look at it now.”

  How often have I looked at it since! But always if I think of it when I am away from it now, I see it as I saw it then for the first time: see Dermot knotting a handkerchief upon his head and shouting: “You don’t know what sunshine is till you get down here. Keep your neck covered, Bill!” See the grey old town rising above the water, street drawn parallel above street, the sunshine falling upon hundreds of flat windows that climbed up and up from the water’s edge to the high blue of the sky. See the multitudinous craft, faltering under sail before the light summer wind, or driving purposefully under steam, or, like ourselves, roaring under the new power that soon would dominate everything. See the prospect open up, the water stretch away westward to the broad Atlantic and eastward to the lovely landlocked anchorage of the Carrick Roads. I see all that, and the little villages upon the shore as we speed by them: Mylor and Pill and Restronguet, and St. Just, glimpsed at the head of its creek, and over all the blue sky, beneath us the blue dancing sea, and the wind of our going cool to the feeling, as the hovering gulls were to the eye.

  And then, when we came to the eastern end of Carrick Roads, to the view of the pillared mansions standing on its hill, the summit of the parkland that rolled smoothly down to the wooded fringes of the water, I saw that there was a way out of the roads.

  “You can go right up to Truro,” Dermot shouted, “when the tide’s high. It’s rising now.”

  And on the rising tide we went up the river, cool between the banks clothed with green fleeces of wood right down to the water’s edge. The lower branches of the trees reached out over the water and were bitten off in a long straight line as cleanly as though the tide had had teeth.

  No other traffic was on the water. We chattered on alone between the green cañon-walls. Here and there the water drove right or left into a creek where long-legged herons waded till our coming caused them to spread their wide wings and drift away with slow powerful beats. The river twisted and turned, boring deeper and deeper into the green heart of solitude and peace; and I said to Dermot: “Are we making for the end of the world!”

  “Yes,” he said. “And we’re nearly there.”

  Another twist of the river and we were indeed there. Looking ahead as the boat chugged forward, I could see on the right-hand bank a small landing-place. As we drew nearer, it defined itself as a quay whose side to the water had been stoutly fortified by a wall of grey granite blocks. There were steps leading up to the level land that had been cut in the bank. A few sheds and outhouses stood there, and behind them the trees rose to the line of the blue sky.

  “Look!” said Dermot. “Half-way up. Can you see the house?” You could just see it, deep among the cliff-side trees, and you could not imagine anything more peaceful, anything more free from strain and fret, than that house with the elms and oaks about it, and the water below it, and the high lift of the sky above it.

  “That’s it,” said Dermot. “That’s what I brought you to see.” The engine was shut off. In perfect silence the boat drifted in to the steps. The boatman grasped a ring in the wall and we stepped ashore.

  “Heronwater,” said Dermot. “That’s what they call this place. Lovely, isn’t it?”

  He strutted up and down the little quarterdeck of quay that was somewhat thrust out into the river, so that you could look up and down, comprehending the whole of the lovely reach in a glance to right and left. We sat on a log and lit our pipes, while the man brought up our luncheon basket.

  “It’s almighty quiet,” said Dermot. “Just listen to it.”

  It was indeed a quiet that you could listen to, broken by nothing but a few harmonious sounds: the suck and gurgle of the green water at the foot of the quay, the low drooling of doves in the wood, the almost imperceptible murmur of wind stroking millions of leaves. And those sounds, filtering through the sunlight that burned down upon us where we sat, were good.

  “And the name of the place isn’t a cod,” Dermot said. “There really are herons. Look at that one.” The big grey bird ceased his slow cruising along the edge of the opposite wood, dropped his long legs, and came to a stand in the tide-ripples. “The place is for sale,” Dermot added casually. “I thought you might like to buy it.”

  I nearly fell off the log. “Good God!” I said. “Have you had the cheek to drag me down here to make an idiotic proposal like that?” But even as I spoke I knew that the idea had hit at my imagination.

  “Yes,” Dermot said brazenly. “The thing’s ideal. You’ll never find a better place to work in. The house is quite small. We’ll go and look at it by-and-by. I’ve got the key in my pocket.”

  “You’re all wrong, my boy,” I said. “I’m one of the few northern novelists who believe in staying in the North.”

  “Nonsense. And who wants you to leave the North, anyway? But you ought to vary it a bit. Have two places. Come down here when you feel like it. You’re rich enough. I can’t help knowing what you’re making out of Easifix, and your books must be making a pretty penny.”

  I said nothing, but sat silent under the captivation of the place and the moment.

  “Don’t be afraid of the water,” went on the tempter. “You’re not dependent on the tides. If you climb up through the woods behind the house you find yourself on quite a good road. You can be in and out of Truro in no time. I suppose you’ll be buying a motor-car soon.”

  “Hell!” I cried. “You are arranging my life for me! I suppose I’ll have a motor-boat on the river next.”

  “I’d advise it, if you come to live here,” said the boatman gravely.

  At that I burst into laughter. It was too much. Dermot knocked out his pipe and patted me on the back. “Don’t get excited,” he said. “Let’s have a swim. I’ve brought two bathing-suits and towels.”

  “You’ve thought of everything. I’m to miss none of the amenities of my estate.”

  “That’s the idea, Bill.”

  He began at once to strip, and I followed his example. “I’ll be making a fire, Mr. Essex,” the man Sawle said, “an’ you can have a nice cup o’ tea when you come out.”

  “That’s fine,” said Dermot. “Come on, Bill. Did you ever imagine having anything like this on your own property?”

  No, I said to myself, I had never imagined anything so heavenly. I stood on the edge of the little quay, the granite warm and sparkling under my feet, and looked down into the green enticement of the water. It was so clear that when Dermot suddenly let out a wild yell and plunged, I could see his white limbs going down and down till his fingers pointed upwards, rose and splintered suddenly the silver mirror of the surface. He trod water, shaking the drops from his red beard, and shouted: “Come on!” Then I was in after him, and we thrashed the water like schoolboys, and splashed one another, before settling down to serious swimming. I was out first, sitting on the steps, half in and half out of the water, watching him float on his back with his beard sticking up like a pennon. “Oliver will love this!” I sh
outed. He swung over and came over-arm towards me. “Of course he will,” he said.

  We stood with towels draped round our loins and felt the sun kissing our backs and the warmth of the fire that Sawle had lit warming our shins. We sipped hot tea and ate sandwiches, and then sat down with our backs to the log and our pipes going. It was a grand feeling: the relaxation of body and mind, the sun soaking into every pore, the utter silence.

  In the afternoon we climbed the hill behind the quay by a narrow path twisting through the undergrowth of hazel. It led us to the house, standing on a cleared platform of land. The platform was a fine look-out. A stone balustrade faced towards the water, glimpsed through the trees. There was no attempt at a garden: just a big lawn, reaching back from the balustrade to the house. Behind the house the trees rose again, but here a good roadway had been cut, winding through them for a few hundred uphill yards till it ended in a fine pair of iron gates, with the name Heronwater wrought into them in delicate lettering. The gates opened into the high-road and alongside them was a notice board “For Sale.” It offended me. I wanted to see it taken down at once. I didn’t want anyone else to butt in and snap up Heronwater.

  We turned and looked back down the drive. Not a stone or chimneypot was visible. I noticed that each side of the carriage-way was heavily planted with rhododendrons. That would look good in their flowering season. There would be other seasons. There would be winter nights, with the wind roaring down the gully of the river, and the trees moaning, and the water a dark confusion, where wind and tide contended. There would be a great wood fire, and me writing. I could come down with just one servant. But could you desert Oliver? Well, Oliver will be going away to school soon. So my imagination began racing ahead. “Come on,” I said aloud. “Let’s go and see the house.”

  The shingled roadway came round in a fine sweep to the front door which looked towards the balustrade. It was a plain and simple house, built of grey granite. Inside, it was roomy and comfortable and unpretentious. The entrance hall was panelled in oak, and one of the rooms that opened from it had a good fireplace that Dermot explained had been brought in from elsewhere. “Adam,” he said. “This is the best room in the house. I can see you are already mentally pinching it and fixing it up for your own.”