I expect Oliver is at home now. Have you told him? Give him my love—if you think you ought to. I shall stay here at any rate till the school holidays are over. Love, LIVIA.”
*
“If you think you ought to.” It was not an easy question to decide after a wretched sleepless night. I refilled my coffee cup, and was twiddling the letter in my hand when the parlourmaid, looking flustered, came into the room.
“Have you taken the tray upstairs?” I asked.
“Yes, sir. I was just coming to tell you, sir. Mr. Oliver isn’t there.”
“Isn’t there? But he said he’d have breakfast in bed. Has he got up? Have you seen him about?”
“No, sir. And I’ve asked everybody. Nobody’s seen him. There’s this letter, sir.”
She handed me the letter, addressed to me in Oliver’s writing. I strove not to seem excited. “Let me have some more toast. And—yes, and some more coffee.”
When she was gone I opened the letter.
“MY DEAR FATHER,—I am now just over seventeen years old—old enough to know my own mind. I feel much too old to be at school. I am tall for my age, much taller than most boys, and this makes me feel uncomfortable. I should feel worse if I went back to school now that Pogson is gone. In any case, I should have asked you to let me spend a year in private study or something before going on to the university, but now it may turn out that I shall not go to the university at all. You may not want me to, and if I find a satisfactory job, the university may not be of any use to me. For I am going to try and find something to do. There is no need whatever for you to worry about me. As I told you last night, I am a man now and I have no doubt at my age you were looking after yourself. I’ve got one or two things in mind, though unfortunately I’ve never been brought up to do much either with my hands or my head. I will let you know what I am doing as soon as I have got something. I know a boy leaving school ought to give a term’s notice, so I’m afraid I’ve let you in for £100 or so; but I shall doubtless be able to pay this back, with what you paid the pawnbroker for the cigarette case, one of these days. I was very interested, as you know, in steam yachts, and for some time I have stinted myself by paying into what I called my ‘yacht fund.’ This now proves to be fortunate because I have £10 by me which will keep me for a bit.
Yours, OLIVER.”
Not a word of Livia. Not a word of his real reason for leaving home. I brushed impatiently past the parlourmaid bringing in the coffee and toast, and went up to Oliver’s rooms. The sitting-room, the bedroom, the bathroom. This was to be the place where Oliver and I would find one another again. Working in my own room, I was to know that here a young and eager spirit was unfolding near me.
I knew in my bones that Oliver would never live under my roof again. He never did.
Suddenly the house with its servants and superfluities, its too many rooms, its wanton waste in provision for circumstances that could never be, seemed hateful to me. I sat down in Oliver’s chair and buried my head in my hands.
When I got up, I felt worn and haggard. I noticed a heap of charred paper in the fireplace. The drawers of the desk were open. Evidently he had been having a clean-up. I went over to the fireplace and stirred the ashes with my toe. Here and there, on uncharred fragments, my own handwriting appeared. Letters. It looked from the size of the pyre as though there had been a good many. It looked as though he had burned every letter from me that he had hoarded since he was a boy.
Part IV
24
Dermot and I stayed at the Hamman Hotel in O’Connell Street—the great flat-fronted building that was doomed to death by bombardment and by fire. “I was in a house on the other side of the street with the Free State Army. The Hamman had been burning for a long time when I saw the whole façade, in one solid piece, lean slowly outwards, hang suspended for a moment, crash into the street. Then the flames roared to the sky like hell let loose.”
That was how it was described to me by a man who saw it. And as the flames roared, those who had been in hiding there fled, to be shot down like rats smoked out of a hole, shot down by the men who had been their comrades.
The sense of such things to come hung like a doom about the beautiful filthy city. It was early in August when we arrived and late in October when we left. For three months I lived with the sense of being in a dream that must have an evil waking.
We saw a great deal of Donnelly and Rory and Maggie; but it was queer not to know when you would see them. Oftentimes, we had arranged to meet one or the other at this place or that, only to find, if it were Rory, that Maggie would turn up and, with some evasive explanation that explained nothing, let us understand that he was suddenly needed elsewhere. If it were Donnelly, Rory might turn up and tell us that Donnelly thought it “safer” not to be seen anywhere that day.
There was an air of mystery and conspiracy that made men look twice at their neighbours before opening their mouths. Once, when I was walking with Donnelly, he whispered “Keep straight on,” and as I did so he turned to the left and disappeared. Two men were walking towards me, and when they came to the corner they turned the way Donnelly had gone and I heard their boots on the pavement breaking into a run. I kept straight on, as Donnelly had told me to do, and presently, to my surprise, he stepped out of a tobacconist’s shop ahead of me. Smiling, he said: “It’s good to know the back doors.”
Donnelly was now a widower. He lived in a small workman’s cottage, “two up and two down.” He and Rory shared a bedroom. The sitting-room was jammed full of furniture. There were bookcases revealing the tastes of a scholar, a large pigeon-holed desk, a piano, and, as though the place were not congested enough, a huge bird-cage. It must have been six feet long and three feet high, and in it budgerigars kept up an endless billing.
Here we gathered one night—Donnelly and Maggie, Rory, Dermot and I—for one of those festivals of song that Donnelly loved. It was a hot night. The curtains were drawn back from the open window. Maggie played, and, care-free, Donnelly put back his head and sang. We all sang: ballads and music-hall songs and hymns—anything with melody that came into our heads.
The window was a bay, and sitting within it I could see along the street. A youth came unhurryingly towards the house, and as he passed raised his hand and threw something through the window. Whistling, he passed on.
Donnelly pounced upon the stone, gave it one glance, tossed it through the window into the scrap of front garden, and said: “Quick!”
What followed was a matter of seconds, each, evidently, having rehearsed a part. Maggie shut the window and drew the curtains. Donnelly leapt to his desk and took out a lot of papers. Rory in a stride was at the bird-cage, pulling out a false bottom. I should say it was fifteen seconds at the outside before the papers were in the cage, the false bottom slid to, and Donnelly was saying “Right!”
Maggie sat at the piano, heartily hammered out “Annie Laurie,” and the concert began again. We were not through the first verse when there was a knocking at the door. Donnelly went to open it. Maggie continued to play, and the budgerigars kept up their billing.
Two men, branded with the inescapable look of having been detectives from their mothers’ womb, came in, bustling Donnelly before them. They gave me and Dermot scowling looks and said: “Get out!”
We went.
Late at night, Donnelly joined us at the Hamman for a good-night drink. We were relieved to see him. He said nothing about what had happened, expecting us to understand from his presence that the budgerigars had kept their secret.
*
For the first time in my life I saw bloodshed. I saw the great frame of Jim Larkin reared up over an immense throng of men and women. I heard his great ranting voice playing all the tricks of the demagogue upon the responsive instrument that could so easily be supplied by a city where twenty-one thousand families were living in one room each. I saw the crowd sway and wilt as the police charged and belted into them. Dermot seized my arm. “For Christ’s sake!” he shouted, a
nd pulled me out of the mêlée. We bolted ignominiously with the crowd that was melting down side streets and alleys. Three were left dead upon the ground.
*
It was a distressful city, full of distressful sights. The ragged unemployed, locked out by masters who would have no truck with unions, wandered like wolves about the streets, gathered in knots upon the Liffey quays, crowded into Liberty Hall where Maggie helped with the soup kitchen.
“Soup! My God, it’s guns they want, not soup,” Dermot cried; and soon we were to see the guns, too.
We were to see the Citizen Army at Croydon Park, marching and counter-marching; we were to see Donnelly, dressed in the uniform of a high officer, walking with a sprightlier step, glancing with a harder eye; and Rory, wearing an officer’s uniform, too, putting his ragged squad through work which he seemed to know like the back of his hand. He roared at them and cursed them and cajoled them, and they grinned and sometimes answered back, and looked as though they loved him.
I glanced at Dermot, standing by my side, his beard quivering, his eye glistening. “Well,” I said, “how do you like it?”
For the first time in my life, Dermot had no answer. He took my arm and walked away, beyond words.
In the evening of that day we called at Donnelly’s house, and there he and Rory were, in civilian clothes, indeed with their coats off and their shirt-sleeves rolled up, eating their supper as though they had come in from a day in the country.
They had nothing to say about the day’s events at Croydon Park; they were discussing the prospects of a hurling match. Maggie came in. “Well, and what’s the woman been doing all day?” Donnelly demanded heartily, leaping up and laying a place for her at the table.
“Learning to put on bandages,” she said.
*
“Come and see some architecture,” Dermot said. They were lovely houses, built with the decency and restraint of Georgian times. We did not linger, but passing quickly by, we could see here and there the exquisite proportions of a fireplace, the exciting beauty of a moulded ceiling.
We did not linger because of the stench of offal in the streets, because every other window was broken, and the doors were sagging on one hinge or gone altogether, and the doorsteps were occupied by foul old women and the pavements by bawling cursing children. Hags and harridans leaned from windows, mumbling or screeching, and the stamp of hob-nailed boots echoed on the uncarpeted stairs. The lovely Georgian houses were the foulest slum I had ever seen. “Holy Oireland!” said Dermot, his voice between a sob and a jeer.
*
There were days in the Wicklow mountains: there was a day at Howth Head, when all five of us lay in the heather and said nothing and looked at the blue sky and the blue sea and the white gulls wheeling between. Then we had tea at a cottage, boiled eggs and bread and butter and honey; and everything was so beautiful that I could not believe this was the world wherein Donnelly might suddenly vanish from my side, and Rory shouted his young throat hoarse on the parade ground, and there were dead people lying where the police had charged them, and beauty decayed to the filthiness of slums, and Maggie was learning to put on bandages.
I left the others sitting at their meal, and went out to the field behind the cottage whence, once more, I looked at the sea with the westering sun striking it to a dance of sequins. As I stood there, Maggie and Rory came round the angle of the cottage, holding hands. The fierce sunlight was in their faces, dazzling them, so that for a time they did not see me. They were not speaking, but as they walked the face of each was instinctively drawn to the face of the other. They came on slowly, handfast, looking at one another, confidently, steadfastly, with the wide shine of the sea behind their heads and the sun lighting their faces. Then they saw me; their hands fell shyly apart; and I thought of what Maeve had said: “They love one another, but they don’t know it yet.” Ah, well; they knew it then.
*
A letter reached me from Oliver, sent on from Hampstead.
“MY DEAR FATHER,—You will be pleased to know that I am at work. The first thing I did was to lay my case before Pogson, who was very decent and insisted on my staying at his house for the night. All his people were away. They had gone to Scotland, but fortunately Pogson had one or two things to see to in town before joining them. This meant that he had three days to spare, and he very decently wrote at once to his father, asking if there was any sort of job for me in the office. Mr. Pogson replied, enclosing a letter which I was to take to the head clerk of one of the departments in Holborn. Pogson went with me, and it appeared that the letter said I was to be given some sort of job to be going on with till Mr. Pogson came back, when he would more fully go into the matter.
Pogson had to go the next day, and I found some lodgings in Camden Town, but I enclose no address because this is not the sort of place you would like to be seen in. When I have got on, perhaps a different view may be taken of the matter; but the chief thing is I have made a start, though I have very little money and this year I must do without a summer holiday.
Mr. Pogson was away for six weeks, and sent for me when he came back. Of course, he remembered me from the visit to their place in Scotland and from hearing Pogson speak about me. He asked me what I was doing and I said just miscellaneous clerking, and he said perhaps I had better carry on with that and he would see how I shaped. But he was very decent and asked if I was happy, and when I said ‘Yes’ he said that was the main thing, and there was no reason why anyone working for Pogson’s should be otherwise.
So I am very much where I was when I started, but I do not regret the move I made and am determined to keep my shoulder to the wheel though things are tight at the moment.
Your son OLIVER.”
I had arranged to leave Dublin in a day or two, but I did not wait till I got home. I at once enclosed a five-pound note in a letter, addressed to Oliver at Pogson’s in Holborn, congratulating him on the courage he had shown in setting out on his own, and wishing him luck. I suggested that, now that he was a wage-earner, he might feel differently about living at home, and said that, in any case, I should be glad to see him at Hampstead whenever he cared to call.
There was a letter awaiting me when I got back. It said that he would feel happier in Camden Town if he did not have the occasional contrast of Hampstead, and that, having left home, he wished to rely wholly on himself. The five-pound note was returned.
*
Livia had got back to London while I was in Dublin. In my letters I had said nothing to her about the turn things had taken with Oliver. It was a matter to speak of personally, and I decided to call at her flat on the day after my return and take her out to lunch.
But first I must see Oliver. I would not attempt to speak to him: no good would come of that. But my heart was yearning to see him again—yearning the more deeply because for so long now I had been in the company of Dermot and Rory, a sad observer of Dermot’s pride and pleasure in his son.
Only to see Oliver; that was all; and the next day at noon I was pacing Holborn on the side opposite the polished granite façade of Pogson’s Limited. It was the first day of November, but warm and serene still with an aftertaste of autumn. For a long time I paced up and down, scanning the face of everyone who left Pogson’s. All were of interest to me, because all were the faces of men who might know Oliver, who perhaps worked alongside him, who possibly had come out even now from talking to him.
At last I crossed the road. Perhaps it would be a good thing to loiter on that side till I caught sight of Oliver, then quicken my pace and meet him with a start of surprise. “God bless me, boy! Fancy meeting like this! I’d forgotten you worked in Holborn. What about some lunch?”
Two prosperous-looking men came out of the office together. I approached them. “Excuse me, but I wonder whether you know a new clerk here, named Essex, and whether you have any idea what time his lunch hour is?”
The man I addressed raised a supercilious eyebrow and spoke to his companion. “Do you know all your new
clerks, Pogson?”
“No. But there is a fellow named Essex—friend of Philip’s; but God knows when his lunch-time is. I don’t.”
So this was Pogson, laughing so disagreeably at the idea of knowing anything about a clerk’s lunch-time, dismissing Oliver as a bit of a nuisance foisted on to him by his son. He turned a cold shoulder to me and held up his rolled umbrella for a taxi.
And then again I was overcome with fear at the thought of meeting Oliver. I felt that if he came out at that moment and found me loitering there, I should die of shame. The five-pound note returned to Hampstead recurred suddenly to my mind; I felt a hot blush surging to my cheeks, and hurriedly I crossed the road again. There was a bookshop opposite Pogson’s, with a short corridor, book-lined, leading to its door; and standing there, pretending to browse among the books, I could keep an eye on Pogson’s entry.
Then I saw him. Clerks had been coming out in twos and threes. Oliver came alone. He came very slowly down the short flight of steps that led from a swing door to the street. He was without hat or overcoat, and the mild autumnal light that filled the street shone upon his curly hair. He stood there for a moment very erect and debonair, tapping a cigarette upon his nail. If I had expected to find someone crushed and humiliated, I was disillusioned. Upon most of the faces that I had watched come through that door there was the inescapable impress of servitude. Quick, furtive, white-faced men, rushing as though at once they were glad to be out but anxious to waste no time, fearing to be late getting back.
But Oliver stood there in his good-looking clothes, unanxious and unhurrying. He looked content. I felt that all my solicitude was needless, and this, which should have pleased me, was the bitterest ingredient of the moment. What I was looking at was a handsome, well-clothed young man, who appeared to be in need of no one’s help or pity, who looked, indeed, uncommonly well satisfied with himself and the beautiful day about him. He jerked up his left arm, with a gesture I well remembered, to consult a wrist-watch, looked up at the sky, turned to the left, and began to walk slowly down the street.
My Son, My Son Page 36