To add to the pain of Euclid's death, everything connected with Tipperary Castle wounded him. April, very much the lady of the manor, all furs and servants, was the talk of the place. Yet so remote was she from Charles that she might as well have been in Alaska.
And to cap it all, he was now hearing that the work on his beloved castle was going badly wrong. Stephen Somerville was drinking heavily, taking shortcuts, ordering inferior materials, and refusing to hire the best craftsmen. In other words, Somerville had not only stolen the woman who was Charles's heart's desire, he had stolen Charles's principle of trying to preserve beauty.
As a sensitive man with a deep sense of responsibility, Charles must have been cut to the heart's core. He still thought of himself as the natural warden of the place. He had nowhere to turn—so he might as well leave.
One man's crisis is another's chance—even an old cliché can have truth. (It was recognized among the Irish republican agitators who called for armed rebellion when the Great War broke out, saying, “England's difficulty is Ireland's opportunity.”) On that Easter Saturday, Joe Harney came down from Dublin at Amelia O'Brien's invitation, heard en route that the “drunk in the castle” had died in the trenches—and realized that the one person who could prosper from this development had gone.
Harney and Amelia O'Brien sat down. Bernard did not appear (a fact that will have later, unpleasant significance) and figured between them where Charles might still be found. He might have had a head start, but Harney, from the depths of his affinity, felt that Charles was still in the country.
Always capable of heroic effort, Harney borrowed one of the farm laborer's bicycles. That Easter Saturday night, Harney rode the thirty miles or so into Limerick. He had no light on the bicycle, he knew the road only moderately well—yet he kept going.
At five o'clock next morning, he knocked on the grand front door of Lady Mollie Carew's house in Pery Square. An irritated man—the butler, but Harney didn't know it—tried to shoo him away. Harney shouted through the letter box that he'd break into the house if he had to. The butler eventually opened the door.
But the bird had flown. Charles had left the house at nine o'clock the previous evening for a sailing to New York on a pre-dawn tide at four o'clock.
He that has found a faithful friend, Mr. Yeats told me once, has found an elixir of life. One morning at dawn in the year 1915, my faithful friend Harney appeared, in unlikely circumstances. In a rowing-boat—and he had never rowed before—he took me from a ship that was leaving the port of Limerick. It became a commotion, with crew assisting my luggage to the rowboat, and passengers looking on, not knowing whether to cheer or commiserate.
Only a man as resourceful as Harney could have brought that off; some mechanical difficulty had held back our departure, and before we could get fully under way, Harney was alongside, hallooing. I do not know what he said to the mate who heard his request—but I do know that I forfeited my ticket (I was bound for the New World).
In the rowing-boat, as he pulled the short distance to the Shannon's banks, he told me why he had come for me.
“I believe that you have an important part to play in the life of our country,” he said.
“For this you intercept me?” I asked.
“And for more than our country's good,” he said, very serious. “For your own good.”
“Might I not have judged what could be good for me?”
And he answered, “Somerville's dead. On the battlefields of Picardy.”
I know that I said quickly, “Is April safe?”—and immediately understood that her husband must have joined the defense of small nations.
“Now you know why I intercepted you,” Harney said.
We spoke little more for some time. He tied up the boat where he had found it, on the Shannon's banks; he roused a hackney man to take me and my bags—he rode a bicycle alongside—back to Lady Mollie's house, where we had breakfast and much excited talk.
In the midst of their speculation, I reminded my two friends that in all respects April had thoroughly rejected me. I said that I did not understand why they now believed my chances had so improved, and I told them bluntly that I felt sincere reluctance in approaching her.
They countered with opinions in which they almost matched each other. Lady Mollie said that, after Somerville, I would prove a wonder to the young widow, if only in the relief of being so different and so decent after “the lout” she had married.
And Harney said, “Why do you think Life has given you this opportunity?”
I disagreed, saying, “All that has happened is that a man has been killed. How many are going to die in this war? Each death can't signify a dramatic possibility for someone else.”
The same hackney took us to Tipperary, and I was received at Ardobreen with elation. Harney was hailed and praised by Mother; and the rest of Easter passed in delighted peace.
On Monday morning, Mother said to me at breakfast, “Please shave, Charles, and dress in your finest. We have a visit to pay.”
I knew that she meant the castle, and I balked; Mother overruled me.
“We are neighbors and we shall behave as such.”
“I may prefer to wait outside.”
“You are representing your father, who cannot come.”
At this moment, it is appropriate to reveal how the war had taken over lives in Ireland. Several of the Great Houses had closed down; practical reasons dictated this course. Many of their laborers had been encouraged by the owners to enlist, and had gone off cheerfully to a thankless death in the savage mud of France. The landlords, whether at home in England or still on their Irish estates, gave space to distinguished families fleeing Europe, or arranged rosters of tasks for their estate workers and friends, such as the making of uniforms. Anglo-Irish gentlemen who were of age felt it a duty to offer themselves for the King against Germany's Kaiser, and that is how Stephen Somerville became an officer in the ill-fated British Expeditionary Force, under General Haig.
I drove the pony-trap to the castle. My father had not yet succumbed to the temptation of a motor-car, but the Somervilles had; a blue-and-gray Dunhill sat by the terraces. I had heard about it but never seen it, and I liked it at sight. The domed brass of the headlamps reflected the blue of the lightly clouded sky. Mother saw my glance.
“We cannot afford it,” she said, and chuckled—which meant that Father had already been discussing it.
She reverted to briskness and said, “We shall not stay long, and we shall not talk about ourselves.”
A woman of enormous girth opened the door; she wore a maid's uniform of black and white and had very short coal-black hair, cropped close as a boy; I recognized her accent as Galway.
As we stood in the hall, I surveyed the early attempts at work and felt my heart clench with disappointment. No debris from rain damage had been cleared; and timbers to be used in restoration and renewal had been piled high on top of the rotted plaster. I could see no workmen, and no evidence of work—and yet I knew that April and her late husband had been living here for some years. Perhaps such work as had been done had been directed to the upper floors.
In the clear acoustic of those open rooms, I heard the Galway maid say, “Mr. and Mrs. O'Brien, ma'am.” Then I heard the crisp footsteps that I had known since the streets of Paris.
At the far end of the ruined hallway, April appeared. She wore unrelieved black, a dress with a high black collar and a hem at fashionable mid-calf, black hose, and black shoes. In her hands she held a pen as though she had been writing.
Mother, ever the ice-breaker, said, “Good morning, April”—in that friendly, irresistible way. “Do you remember me, Amelia O'Brien? And of course you know Charles.”
I had taken off my hat, and I made a slight bow. Now I began to assess myself. Was my heart beating? Did my mouth go dry? Do I still think of her every day? I heard myself give an inward groan; and I know that I blushed. However, April—this cold girl, this organized, hard-minded, and brisk yo
ung woman, this assured and beautiful young widow—crumpled. She stood there, ten or twelve yards away, and began to cry. No noise came from her lips, no wail; she held the back of her hand over her mouth and tears flowed down her face.
Mother, her handbag over one arm, went toward her. The women embraced, and April wept on Mother's shoulder. I could scarcely believe it; this ran counter to every impression of April that I had ever carried. Never had it occurred to me that she had any flexibility of emotion; never did I think that I should see the day when I would watch anything but determination in her face.
As she sobbed, Mother looked over at me and with a swift nod of her head indicated that I should leave. I stepped to the door and concentrated my gaze on the distance. As the foliage had not yet come back to the trees, I could see a little of our pink walls, Captain Ferguson's wood, and the Beech Meadow.
Around the castle, however, I saw disorder. Supplies of building materials had also been piled on the stone terraces, and rain had seeped into some of them, rendering them useless. Two cords of timber had been leaned against a window; one had slipped, breaking a pane of glass. On this fine morning I would have expected visible industry all around the place; instead, two workmen sat on the bridge parapet far below. No energy came from that quarter.
I cannot say how long I stood there, waiting for Mother. When she came out she beckoned to me.
“I think she needs listeners.”
We went in and saw April standing at the door where we'd first spotted her, at the far end of the great hall. She gestured and we followed, picking our feet carefully over debris. Soon we found ourselves in the butler's pantry, which seemed to have been restored to some functioning, and we sat down. As yet, I still had not spoken. She must have felt some embarrassment of me; when she spoke, she addressed Mother principally and gave me no more than the occasional glance, too brief to be inclusive.
“I want to tell this,” she said, “and I want to tell it no more. Already I have told one friend in writing, but I need to hear myself speak it.” From that moment, only she spoke.
I did not want Stephen to go. He made the decision, and I think I know why he did it—too much drinking. He thought if he became an officer, with a purpose, and the company of men—it might help. Before he went, it had become unsavory here. I was incapable of dealing with his tempers, and sometimes when he wandered out into the fields at night, I did not know whether he would come back. More than once I went looking for him at dawn and found him lying asleep at the bottom of a sunken fence, or down in the lower garden, disheveled and stained. There is nothing that I dislike more.
When the war broke out, he talked and talked of asking for a commission. He wore me down. At first he went to London in September, in the first few days, when there was scarcely any fighting. He came home, said they weren't ready for him, he was to go again at Christmas. But when Christmas came, he was too drunk to pull himself together, and he finally got to London at the end of January. They gave him some sort of assignment at a desk, and he chafed at it. Four weeks ago, they let him go to France.
I had a letter from him. He was delighted with himself—how can a man be happy at war? And he told me about a song. They were all singing it, he said, and he was the only one from Tipperary.
On the tenth of March, a Wednesday morning, I woke up here with a dreadful headache. And I knew that Stephen had died. I told nobody, but I got Helen, the maid, to drive me to the station. I took the boat to England, went to London to the war authorities, and they had no such dispatch. As far as they were concerned, Captain Stephen Somerville had gone to Béthune with the Royal Irish Rifles.
I caught the train to Dover, but I was stopped there by officers, who would not let me go to France. Back in London, the authorities told me that Stephen was in Armentières. Day after day, I went to the military offices. “Do you know of a Captain Stephen Somerville,” I asked over and over; and I used all my old friends and colleagues to try and get news of Stephen.
One afternoon, an officer to whom I had been introduced by a family friend sat at his desk and pulled lists from his attaché case.
“Madam,” he said to me, “all I can do is look at this list. If his name is not on it, you can call yourself lucky.”
But of course his name was on it, very high up. They told me that Stephen was one of the first to die on the first morning in Armentières— one of the first of thousands. And it was on the morning of my dreadful headache. I said to him, “Thank you.” This officer was about twenty-one. I must have said “Thank you” many times, because he took my hand and offered to help.
“Can you find Stephen? Can I take him back to Tipperary?”
He shook his head. “Madam, they must rest where they fell. Until things settle—until matters are clearer.”
I began to walk. No idea where, or for how long. That was when I heard the song, that dreadful song, in the night; they were singing it, because I walked past British soldiers outside public houses, and they had this song that Stephen mentioned in his letters, and I have the words in my head and the tune; I can't bear it.
Everybody born in Tipperary has been saddled with that song. When my wife and I traveled, we always got the rejoinder “It's a long way” when we said where we came from. It was written by an English music-hall song-and-dance man who had never set foot in Ireland—Jack Judge. He had Irish grandparents.
Somebody in an English pub after a matinee made a bet with him one afternoon. Could he write a song for the evening performance? Nearby, he overheard a man giving directions to someone, saying, “It's a long way to Lancaster,” and he won his bet. Everybody born in Tipperary knows that story.
But the song haunted the men of that frightful war, young men who came back aged, came back gassed and shattered, came back splintered and lame. I knew an old Great War soldier here in Clonmel. He told me that he had stopped going to pubs.
“Mr. Nugent,” he said, “now and again, with drink on him, some fellow will start a singsong. And sooner or later someone'll sing that bloody oul' song and I'll start crying. I hate it.”
As I think I've made clear, when I walked the Treece land, and then found the “leprosy” entry in that 1864 newspaper, I sensed that I was being enchanted a little by Charles O'Brien and his world. Very shortly after that, I recognized that I was irretrievably caught up. I embraced it with open arms. And, as is now clear, I told myself, “Follow every stream to its source.”
Béthune lies not much more than an hour from the English Channel coast, southeast from Saint-Omer, which lies southeast of Calais. This is old Picardy, where, in another old war song, roses are shining in the silvery dew. I went north from Béthune, up toward the Belgian border, looking for the country before Armentières. Now the cemeteries began, rows upon serried rows of white crosses, and I was asking myself, Why are you here?
The answer had several components. I had agreed with myself to dig into the story as deeply as I could. Already I knew that Charles O'Brien was an unreliable witness—and, indeed, that he meant to be. He deliberately left out significant information. What else can you say of a man who puts an entire life change in parentheses, and in seven words: “(I was bound for the New World)”? Above all, I have a powerful belief in the spirit of teaching.
Teaching is about the truth. It's about the truth of the knowledge that you're conveying. And it's about the truth of the effect that such knowledge can have. When I was teaching Shakespeare, I wanted the boys to know that Hamlet behaved in an ugly fashion to Ophelia. But I also wanted them to know that he had been, as we say, “blackguarded” by his own father and mother. His father asked him to become a murderer. And his mother married the man who killed his father.
I'm merely citing this as an example. In the same spirit, I went to France. I felt I needed to see Stephen Somerville's grave, to hear the bolt click home. If Charles, in his text, was less than forthcoming, I would compensate for that. Teaching is—or should be—about the whole truth.
To put it i
n a more concise way: I knew that my reason lay somewhere between checking on a man who had told me to “be careful” about him and getting a deeper grip on this slowly unfolding drama.
Stephen Somerville is buried in the military graveyard at Estaires, among Australians, Canadians, and New Zealanders. His inscription is simple: “Captain Stephen Somerville, Royal Irish Rifles, La Bassée 10th March 1915.”
Official sources say that Captain Somerville died when the Germans returned fire. They had been holding firm on the La Bassée ground for some time and were not about to be driven out. The English bombardment that aimed to shift them was the biggest ever in any war up to that point (soon, of course, to be exceeded by excess in the three years still to come).
Some of the local oral history will tell you that many of those who died in those three hellish days in March were killed by their own shells that fell short or malfunctioned—today's euphemism is “friendly fire.”
Around these villages, if you ask, the local people will show you little hills out in the fields that seem no more than ordinary mounds of earth thrown up eons ago by glacial deposits heaving across the world, as the ice slunk back to the poles or the oceans.
But they have before and after photographs of these hills. And they will point out to you how more than a few were twice, three times bigger after the war than before. When you look puzzled and ask them, they shrug and say, “les corps”—the bodies buried inside those hills.
Incidentally, nobody could be more interested than an Irish history teacher in the fact that the general in that battle was Sir John French— the same man who later took disastrous charge of the British campaign against the Irish Republican Army.
Back in Ireland, the widow Somerville had several choices. She could sell the estate and return to England. Or go anywhere, rich for the rest of her life. Or she could lease most of it and hope to collect rents. Or she could stay; she had enough capital to restore and develop the place.
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