My Son, My Son

by Howard Spring

  “Three thousand last year.”

  “And your stock’s rising. When you start in on these plays you talk about, it’ll be five thousand before you know where you are. Oh, yes. You’d better chuck it. And go to London. And get yourself a car. They’re reliable things now. I’m buying one tomorrow. And that reminds me. Our little crew will come down to Heronwater this year by road. I’ve been taking some driving lessons.”

  *

  And so they did, but they took two days about it. Cars were, as Dermot said, getting reliable; but roads were not yet the glassy racing-tracks they were soon to become. Dermot wired from Bristol that the party had stopped there for the night and would reach Heronwater the next afternoon. I awaited them anxiously, for Heronwater was proving dull. That was the first time I had been there without a party. On the way down Oliver had missed his chattering companions, and was bored to distraction when we reached Falmouth at the end of the second day’s railway journey. The trouble was, he was imagining Rory enjoying the excitements of a new method of travel. “What if the tyres burst?” “What if they go into a ditch?” “What if they arrive with an old horse pulling them?”—though all those glories were already fading into the dim annals of motoring.

  And then, there we were, Sam Sawle manœuvring the Maeve to the quay. Captain Judas respectfully handing Nellie ashore. Nellie shuddering away from his unusualness and disappearing up the path with hardly a greeting. Oliver went straight to bed. Nellie was no sooner washed than she was fussing off to the kitchen. Meals to arrange for. This and that. The truth was she hated Heronwater. She couldn’t swim and wouldn’t learn to swim; she disliked being on the water; she was sure the children would be drowned every time they went out sailing in the Rory or the Oliver. And especially, I knew, now that there was no one there but our two selves, she hated the thought of sitting in the inimical quiet of the great trees that surrounded us and the water below us.

  We ate a wordless dinner, and then I took a dinghy and pulled across to the Jezebel. It was nine o’clock and the light was fading. Judas’s windows glowed. To my surprise, the rope ladder had been pulled indoors. That was something new. I let out a yell. “Jezebel ahoy!”

  One of the windows above me opened cautiously and Judas’s white mop came into sight. “Who’s there?” he demanded.

  “Bill Essex. Are you too busy to be bothered with me?”

  “No, no!” he cried anxiously. “Oh dear no! One moment. One moment.”

  The window was shut, and a moment later Captain Judas peered over the rail. The rope ladder came down and I went aboard. Then the ladder was pulled in again. Judas took me affectionately by the arm and led me below decks, locking the door behind him. “Worse and worse,” he muttered. “Don’t think me inhospitable, Mr. Essex, but I’ve got to draw that ladder in now, for things are getting worse and worse. Sit down.”

  He pointed to a comfortable chair under one of the swinging lamps. “Smoke,” he said, and when I had filled and lit my pipe he said, leaning towards me mysteriously: “It’s leaked out!”

  I lifted my eyebrows in interrogation and pointed with my pipestem down to the bilge. He nodded. “Believe this or not,” he said. “A week ago I was upon deck when a dinghy came along. A woman sitting in the stern. A parson rowing. What d’you think of that for barefaced impudence! Not even bothering to disguise himself. There he was, collar and all. ‘That’s a nice-looking place,’ he said to the woman. ‘How’d you like to live there?’ She shuddered. ‘Probably full of rats.’ Rats! Think of that, Mr. Essex—rats on the Jezebel! But, of course, that was all part of the plant. ‘Looks all right to me,’ said the parson, ‘like a new pin.’ See the cunning of the man! Flattery! Then he shouts: ‘I wonder if you’d mind our having a look over your boat, sir?’ Can you imagine anything more elementary in the way of a plot? Once have ’em aboard and where am I? Woman! A disguised man, I’ll bet. My answer was to haul in the ladder, shut the door and go below, and the ladder’s been hauled in ever since when I haven’t been about to keep my eyes open.”

  “Quite right,” I said. “Take no risks.”

  “No risks. That’s the motto. And hurry on with the work. Finish. Publish. And then—Whoosh! Bang! Wallop!”

  His face glowed. He beamed over the papers spread upon his littered table. “This is getting near the bone,” he said, tapping the sheet he had been writing upon. “I’m sorry I can’t let even you read it just yet. You forgive me?”

  “By all means.”

  “There’s one thing holding me up. I must learn Greek.”

  “But my dear Captain Judas, that’s going to take you a long time.”

  “That has nothing to do with it,” he reproved me. “Greek is necessary. I feel there are many clues hidden away in the original Greek, and therefore I shall learn it. I have sent to London for the necessary books.”

  He looked at me calmly, combing his long whiskers with his fingers. I knew that he would do it. His mania could overcome obstacles that, I realised with shame, I could never face in my sanity.

  “I see now,” he said, “that I was bigoted in my youth. I despised the wisdom of this world, not knowing how it might help me to the wisdom of the world hereafter. But it is not too late. I am only seventy.”

  He slipped his writing into a drawer and turned the key. “Now let me make you a cup of tea,” he cried gaily. “Let us forget the wiles of the Pope and the President of the Wesleyan Conference and that poor fool who rowed by the other day. A Particular Baptist, I dare say. They’ll all go up when the big wallop comes. What a sight! What a sight! Triple tiaras, mitres, birettas, silk hats, shovel boards and Salvation Army caps! All up in the air together. Ha, ha, ha!”

  He pattered out into the galley and came back with cups and saucers and his inevitable biscuits. A few moments later the tea was on the table and we were talking sanely of sane things. He wanted to know whether I had heard anything of Maeve and his daughter, when Dermot was coming, how my own work was getting on. It was not till we were on deck again and he had let down the ladder, that he took my arm and whispered nervously, pointing across the river to Heronwater, where a single light showed amid the trees: “Is that the Master’s room?”

  “The Master’s? Let me see: whose room is that? Why, it’s Oliver’s.”

  “I shall watch it every night,” he said. “The Master’s room! Some night he will come walking to me across the water.”

  I ran down the ladder and unfastened the boat. I was hardly aboard before the ladder ran up and the sound of locking doors came to my ears. It was a dark night. I rowed across the inky river, looking now and then over my shoulder towards the crack of light in Sawle’s shack. The Master! The old man was beginning to give me the creeps. I was glad when Sawle, hearing the creaking rowlocks, came down to the water’s edge with a lantern.

  *

  There was nothing to be done the next day till Dermot and his party arrived. Oliver was on edge for the unusual sight of a motor-car stopping at our gate. Nellie was in the depressed condition that always came upon her when she had to meet people she did not know. If Donnelly and his daughter had been visitors from Mars, she could not have been in a state of more acute apprehension.

  Oliver and I spent the afternoon loafing near the gate, and at tea-time a cloud of dust and the honking of a large bulbous horn announced the coming of the party. The car was a big open one. It and everybody in it were whitened like the flour-workers on the Truro quays. Dermot sat at the wheel, his beard extinguished, with Donnelly, smiling quietly, at his side. Sheila, wearing a hat tied down by one of those great lawny scarfs that were all the go at the time, sat behind amid what looked like an immovable jam of children. When Dermot brought the car to a standstill and saluted with grave triumph, they unknotted themselves and were resolved into Rory, Eileen, and, appearing as it seemed from the floor of the car, the girl I knew must be Maggie Donnelly. If I had had any doubt in the matter, it would soon have been ended, for Rory, emerging out of the incredible confusion
of that gregarious arrival, and ignoring everybody else, led the child straight up to me, holding her hand, and announced with a sort of shy pride: “This is Maggie, Uncle Bill. She’s just as old as me.”

  “She’s just as old-fashioned as you, anyway,” I thought to myself; and there was, indeed, something remarkably alike about those two children. They had the same serious friendly faces, the same straight eyes, grey and one might almost have said prematurely shadowed by thought, the same dark careless hair and pleasant irregular features. They stood there holding hands, very hot and dusty and excited, and Oliver swung carelessly on the gate, looking out of the corner of his eye at the little girl who had apparently this tremendous power of making Rory forget his friend. Then he leapt down from the gate, and, taking no notice of Rory, went straight up to Maggie. He planted himself before her, fresh and undusty, his hair golden in the sunlight. He offered her his hand and smiled radiantly. “I’m Oliver,” he said. “Oliver Essex. Let me show you where to get a wash.”

  Maggie followed him politely, and Rory stood in the road, with a frown between his brows, kicking at the dust.

  “Hi, Oliver!” I shouted. “Rory wants a wash, too,” and at that Rory set off with a run and went into the house with the others.

  *

  Kevin Donnelly was a remarkable man. Everybody knows that now: everybody, that is, who knows anything of the recent history of Ireland. His name is on the page, among the martyrs.

  But we, who could not foresee what was to come, had to accept into our midst a plain-seeming man who was not equipped with any halo of destiny or, indeed, with anything that we could see beyond a boundless good humour and wholesomeness. The most remarkable thing to us about him then was the way in which self-consciousness died in his presence. I have already described his short, thick-set appearance, the thin hair that was combed carefully across his skull, the big ragged moustache that adorned his homely face. But I had not till now seen the smile that was for ever breaking out, creasing little fans of laughter alongside his eyes, or heard his voice raised in song. There was something about him that instantaneously broke down, not your dignity, but any second-hand armour that had been pretending to be dignity. I have never known any man who could more decidedly, simply by being nothing but his unpretentious self, sweep away pretentiousness from his companions.

  I had dreaded his meeting with Nellie, but there was nothing to fear. Donnelly was, among other things—among so many other things!—a simple artisan; and that was something Nellie understood. They shook hands, looked in one another’s eyes, and I had an instant conviction that all was well between them.

  Dermot had told me that Donnelly was a silver-tongued orator. His speaking voice was sweet and moving, and ever and again he would break into song. Unself-consciously as he did everything else, he would lift up his voice and sing a song through from beginning to end. If Maggie were by, she would join in and he would leave the main business to her, himself elaborating the harmonies.

  And so I remember that holiday not least because it was a holiday of song. It began that night after dinner. We were all sitting in front of the balustrade, looking down upon the water, five grown-ups and four children, when suddenly Donnelly began to sing. He had a rich tenor voice, and he opened his throat and let the music flow out into the night. It was a comic song about an Irish horse-fair. It took us all by surprise and we listened a little uneasily, then with growing appreciation and finally with delight. When he had finished, we applauded, and he smiled, pleased that his efforts were well seen.

  “Now then!” he cried. “Something we all know. Open your throat, Maggie, and the rest of you, too.” And he led off into “Annie Laurie,” and soon had us under his spell.

  That was how the concert began, and before long we were wrangling like children to have our favourite tunes. Dermot started “On Ilka Moor baht ’at,” and if you can’t join in the marvellous harmonies of Ilka Moor, then you don’t deserve a sing-song like the one we had that night. We were on the last glorious absurd verse—“That’s ’ow us gets wer oan back”—when I was suddenly aware of a rustling in the shrubs that lined the path to the river. The next moment, the white hair and beard of Captain Judas showed ghostlike against the gloom. He stood still, watching us breathlessly; and hardly had the last harmony faded across the river than, to my surprise, and to the consternation of those who had not seen him, he suddenly began to sing in a high cracked voice: “When I survey the wondrous Cross.”

  It was a dreadful moment, charged with the possibility of fiasco, but Donnelly whispered “Maggie!” and those two trained voices struck together into the hymn, strongly supporting and carrying forward the trembling reed of Captain Judas. Then Nellie began to sing, and then Dermot’s bass threaded powerfully into the harmony. Soon we were all singing, the captain, pale still against the gloom of the tunnel, solemnly beating time with his skinny hand. The words rolled through the woods and across the water.

  When I survey the wondrous Cross

  On which the Prince of Glory died,

  My richest gain I count but loss

  And pour contempt on all my pride.

  Donnelly knew the hymn and led majestically into the beginning of each verse. We sang it through to the end:

  Were the whole realm of nature mine

  That were an offering far too small.

  Love so amazing, so divine,

  Demands my life, my soul, my all.

  The words died away in a falling cadence. Judas remained for a moment with his hand upraised, his head lifted to the dark sky; then suddenly he was there no more. Donnelly rose. “That was beautiful,” he said. “That was the most beautiful of all.”

  The party split up, drifted away to the house, Sheila and Nellie rounding up the children for bed. Donnelly remained, his elbows on the balustrade, his chin on his hands. I stood for a moment at his side. He seemed to be deeply moved. “Sorrow and love flow mingled down,” he murmured. “Sorrow and love—mingled—always.”

  I think that, whatever had happened, I should have remembered that night and the disturbing irruption of Captain Judas, turning so suddenly the thoughts of all of us to that emotional key which broke up the party and sent us scattering this way and that, as though nothing further were now to be said. But I remember it the more poignantly because the hymn we then sang was the one which, years later, Donnelly’s gaolers heard him singing the night before they led him out and shot him against a wall. It is now part of the Irish legend, Donnelly’s hymn in the prison; and I have often wondered whether in his loneliness that night he thought, and perhaps gained some strength from the thought, of us sitting with him in friendship, and the quiet night, and the trees, and the river running to the sea.

  *

  With wraps over our bathing-suits and towels thrown like mufflers round our necks, we ran down the path to the quay the next morning. When Donnelly threw off his wrap I noticed the great depth of his chest, the breadth of his shoulders, the solid moulding of his legs. We all stood there on the edge of the quay, waiting to leap together. The sun rained down in a diamond sparkle on the water. “Now did you ever see a prettier sight than that?” Donnelly shouted. “The colours of ’em—like jockeys waiting for the flag.”

  Certainly we had come out very colourfully. Oliver was in the lightest blue, Rory in dark red, Eileen, who was standing there arm-in-arm with Maggie, was wearing green, and Maggie was wearing white. Sheila’s bathing-dress was bright canary yellow and Dermot’s maroon. Mine was a vivid scarlet, and Donnelly’s was barred in red and white.

  “Sure, we all look grand,” Donnelly shouted. “But where’s Mrs. Essex?”

  “Don’t worry about her,” I said. “She doesn’t bathe.”

  “In you go,” said Donnelly, and as I leapt I was aware of the coloured figures leaping on either hand. I came up from the dive and lay over on my back. Then I saw that Donnelly had not dived. With his wrap once more about him, he was disappearing up the path. We were still in the water when he cam
e back. He was dressed in flannel bags and an old white sweater. He went to Sam Sawle’s shack and banged on the door. I came out and dried myself and joined them. “Mrs. Essex has no bathing-dress,” Donnelly said, as though that explained everything. “She’ll go in to Truro with Maggie this afternoon and buy one.”

  “But she doesn’t swim,” I said.

  “There’s fun to be had in the water without swimming,” he said. “We’re just going into that.”

  Sam Sawle managed to produce four barrels, and he and Donnelly tinkered about on the quay for the rest of the day. By sundown they had fabricated a fine raft, with rope loops scalloped upon its edge and a cocoanut matting floor. The next morning I was with them when they considered the question of mooring it. “There’s a great chunk of concrete down there, with an iron ring in it,” Sam said, pointing to the water just off the quay. “There used to be a mooring-buoy fixed to it.”

  Donnelly got into his bathing-suit, and we took out a long thin rope in a dinghy. It was coiled to run out easily after him when he dived. He filled his gorgeous chest, stood erect on the stern seat for a moment, then went down like an arrow. We could see his white limbs, ripple-distorted and as if themselves fluid in the water, fumbling about on the bottom. Then he shot up. His fingers splintered the surface. He hurled the end of rope aboard. Sawle caught it and knotted it quickly round a thwart. Donnelly took a great gulp of air and lay over on his back. Then with finny motions of the hands he paddled himself ashore. Sawle watched him with admiration. “I’d never worry about the children if they were out with ’e,” he said.

  Dermot had rowed up in the praam. “Hear that, Bill?” he grinned. “Lay it to heart, my boy; lay it to heart.”

  Sam Sawle fastened the thin rope to one that was as stout as a cable, and we hauled that with difficulty through the ring in the concrete. Then that stout rope was attached to the bottom of our raft, which we had launched with shouts of delight and which the children had christened the Kevin. And the Kevin made a glorious diving raft for the rest of the holiday. Donnelly himself rowed Nellie out to it, wearing the first bathing-dress she had ever put on in her life. She sat for some time on the rocking raft, looking at once pleased and distrustful. With infinite patience, Donnelly, swimming round and round the raft as confidently as a porpoise, with his sparse wet hair in thin black streaks upon the white of his skull, persuaded her to grip the scallops of rope, to lower herself into the water, to hang on, and to kick. Soon she was off and on the raft with confidence. But, more wonderful than that, before the holiday was over she had made the transit from raft to quay steps with a rapid anguished breast stroke, Donnelly at her side covering the distance with one powerful clip of the legs and reach forward of the arms. He was on the steps to help her ashore, to put a wrap about her, and to send her to the house with an encouraging word. Then with a leap like a buck, he dived far out, came up and trudgeoned across the water. Oliver and Rory watched him worshipfully. “Teach us that, Mr. Donnelly,” they shouted. “Teach us!”