I shook my head. “No. Not at all.”
Long ago, I had begun refusing that hope, stamping down that aspiration.
“Joe Harney says you're going to marry this woman here. He says it's like watching two stars spinning around each other.”
I said, firmly, “Mr. Collins, that will not occur.”
He walked away from me and came back again.
“Come here to me,” he said.
To my astonishment, he grabbed my forearms and began to wrestle with me. Such strength! He was laughing, and I got over my surprise, went along with it, and laughed also; we wrestled and tugged, hauled and heaved all around the castle hall, that big echoing place and not a soul to see us. Finally, I gripped his hands behind him in a way that he could not break and I heard myself say like a schoolboy, “Give in.”
“Never!”
“Give in.”
“No.”
“Give in,” I said, “or it's the floor for you.”
He laughed, his arms sagged, I let go, he turned around, and we shook hands.
“Mr. O'Brien, can you fire a gun?”
“Why do you ask?”
“You can guess.”
I shook my head. “No. Nor will I.”
Michael Collins said, “I must go; I have a man waiting for me.”
“But you haven't had a drink or a bite to eat!”
He said, “There'll be other times.”
And there were other times, many other times, and I relished them all, no matter what difficulty accompanied them, and in common with the rest of the country I wept on the day he died. He was twenty-six years and two months old the day I first met him; I shall always be glad of that moment, overjoyed that I subsequently saw him so often, and deeply sad that I shall never meet him again.
Michael Collins became a walking legend, a living myth. If he had actually met all the people who said they knew him, he would never have got anything done; he'd have been shaking hands all day, every day. But my own father did meet him; he knew him through a cousin married to one of Collins's cousins.
My father didn't like Collins. He said that Collins “scared” him—although he did acknowledge the legendary coolness of nerve, said to be Collins's chief feature. And when I was a boy, my father told me a story of his own days as a young railway clerk in Dublin, where he worked for some months of 1920.
One summer night, in Sackville (now O'Connell) Street, he ran into a military cordon. He had to wait behind the barricade, as did everybody else. As he stood there, my father saw a man nearby, holding a bicycle. My father told a story well.
“The man saw me, strolled over, rolling the bike, and he said to me, ‘You're John Joe Nugent’ and immediately put a finger to his own lips, indicating of course that I shouldn't reply, ‘And you're Michael Collins'—which is what I might have done, except that I wouldn't, because he was the most wanted man in Ireland; there was a reward of ten thousand on his head, and big ‘Wanted’ posters of him everywhere, on every wall in the city.
“Before I could say to him, ‘What are you doing here—are you out of your mind and all these soldiers everywhere?’ he says to me, ‘Would you ever hold this bike for me for a few minutes?’ and he handed the handlebars to me. I grabbed them and he walked off toward the buildings where all the soldiers were going in and out like bees in a hive.
“The next minute I saw him, on the steps of the Gresham Hotel, and he was talking to the officer in charge of the military action. They were laughing like old pals, and it was the first time I found out that sweat can flow down from under your arms—it was like two little cool rivers down my sides. And then I saw Collins strolling back toward me, the hat on his head, the gabardine coat on a summer's night.
“He took the bike back from me. ‘Thanks, John Joe,’ he says, and I says to him, ‘In the name of God, are you out of your head? What were you up to?’ And he says to me, ‘I had to find out what the soldiers were doing.’ And he winked at me, and he leaned forward, and he whispered, ‘And d'you know what they're doing? They're searching the Gresham Hotel for me.’ And off he goes. That was Michael Collins for you. Cool as a lake.”
Collins turned Ireland—or, rather, the British authority in Ireland— inside out. After the internment in Wales, he developed in practice what he had taught there in theory. He built guerrilla squadrons all across the country—each county had its Flying Columns. And he assembled other hit squads that devastated British intelligence and killed their agents. He saw Ireland's nosiness and gossip as guerrilla assets—with the right contacts, he could uncover any plan. And in propaganda terms he capitalized upon every British atrocity and reprisal; his supporters reported and published them.
Perhaps his outstanding achievement was his capturing of men's loyalty. Collins assembled his unconventional army in a country where respect for authority was considered close to treachery—because all authority was British. This ran so deep that common cause didn't necessarily guarantee automatic obeying of orders. But Collins's men would have gone through fire for him. As they did, and all their lives—and I met them and spoke to them—they would say with quiet pride, “I was a Collins man myself.” There were more than fifteen thousand of them on active duty. All told, he mustered another sixty thousand “helpers” out of a population of three and a half million.
Collins called himself a soldier, not a politician. Yet he took part in the eventual negotiations that brought the War of Independence to an end. Then we shot him, his own countrymen, his political rivals, in the civil war that followed.
My parents often spoke of “the day Michael Collins died.” Both had occasion to be out of the house, and traveling. My father got off a train in Limerick and saw people kneeling on the streets, weeping. Three counties away, in Kilkenny, different city, different province, my mother saw the same. Each said afterward that they knew, without asking, what had happened.
In the summer of 1917, with the work fairly bustling onward at the castle, and an army of human ants fetching and carrying and toiling, April asked me to take her on a tour. By now I had learned to drive the motorcar, and so had she. Her arms had healed wonderfully, and when she had come back to the castle, in early summer 1916, Mrs. Moore had come too. Together, we'd kept bathing the burns with egg whites, honey, and buttermilk, and when the new skin grew back, we saw no scars of any kind.
However, for a period of more than three weeks in July, April took to her bed with a curious but strong influenza, which interfered with her breathing. I feared tuberculosis. Our wonderful predecessor at Ardobreen, the oft-naked Captain Ferguson, had planted eucalyptus in many varieties, and I filled bowls with their crushed and pounded leaves, poured boiling water upon them, and steamed their essence in April's bedroom. Slowly she recovered; but for some weeks she remained frail and scarcely moved out of doors.
The tour that she had requested took us to six Great Houses. She had written ahead to each, and had previously known most of them through either Dan and Katherine Moore or the Somervilles. All replied, all invited us to stay, and we set out on an itinerary that would last about eight days.
We had glorious weather. I loved driving the Dunhill, and we took Jerry Hallinan, the mechanic, with us; he sat behind on the high, overhanging seat as we sped along the road. Sometimes, though not every day, we saw another car, and we always halted on the roadway to talk and compare experiences. And when we stopped in a village or town for lunch, we were immediately surrounded by people of great curiosity and interest; Jerry enjoyed being the main actor in this little drama as he explained the wonders of the engine.
Our tour took us to three counties; we paid one visit in Waterford, two in the county Cork, two in Limerick, and one in the North Riding of Tipperary. When she first asked me to accompany her, April also gave me the reason. She said that she wanted to reassure the other owners of houses such as Tipperary of her intentions to stay and play a full part in the life of her estate and of her new country.
“It is, after all, t
he land of my ancestors,” she said.
Although I suspected that she also wanted some education in how to run a Great House, I made no comment. Since her return to full health, her zeal toward the castle had not diminished, as I sometimes feared it understandably might have done. Instead, it had redoubled. She now flung herself even more intensively into every task in the place, and Harney remarked to me more than once on her energy, and her boundless interest in every aspect. We admired her greatly for it, and liked to be surprised by her, as we were when we first witnessed this city girl's—this English girl's—capacity for understanding how we might stock the fields with cattle and sheep.
She came to every fair and market with us, as we slowly bought herds and flocks. She it was who engaged both of our stock managers—the cattleman and the sheepman. She personally took over all the establishment and management of the piggeries, and she meant, she said, “to be feeding a thousand pigs by 1920.” (The buildings for such farming, the byres and sties, had been in place, we calculated, for at least a century and a half; they had been built solidly and needed little repair.)
We agreed that we would start our tour with the house farthest away, and so we set out for Curraghmore, the estate of the Marquis of Waterford. I had some apprehensions as to such griefs as we might encounter along the way. In the middle of 1917, the news from the war in Europe had already appalled us beyond endurance, and every village and every estate was losing men of every rank and class.
I knew something of Curraghmore; it had been the subject of a Euclid “research” many years before. That winter, he had taken a decision to let his hair grow down over his eyes, then had it cut in a neat fringe that hung like a black curtain upon the bridge of his nose. As ever, he'd rationalized it.
“You have heard what people say—that the eyes are the windows of the soul. I do not wish people to have such easy access to my soul—and besides, I can see their eyes from behind my curtain of hair, which gives me the advantage of them.” Whereupon he would flick his heavy fringe.
During the previous summer, in a different phase, he had taken a decision never to smile again—because somebody had told him what a charming smile he possessed. I remain thankful that he abandoned that posture; when Euclid smiled the sun came out.
He had not at that stage decided how he wished to spend his life (in time it would emerge sadly that he had little choice in the matter). If asked, he would reply, “I am a student of mysteries.” Indeed, he did spend a very great deal of time studying mysteries of which he had heard or read—and Curraghmore and its legends came into his curriculum.
The Waterford estate lies in as lovely a countryside as you will find in Ireland, with the river Clodagh watering the place. We drove in from the main road at about eleven o'clock in the morning. So sheltered is this private valley of Lord Waterford's that, it is said, the leaves of autumn cling until Christmas. As with Tipperary, the house may not be fully seen until the avenue curves out of the trees and into the open plain. The effect is altogether magnificent.
On account of its windows, the building gleams like a cube of light. If each of the four walls has three stories in height, and each story has seven windows, I add that up to eighty-four windows, many of them ten feet high, all reflecting the sun across Lord Waterford's five and a half thousand acres.
“More land than Tipperary? Hmm,” said April, and she frowned.
The sixth Marquis was not present—“war work in London”—and his aunt met us, a large, tall woman of great, imposing style. She wore a red fez.
“You were married to that drunk, weren't you?” she said airily to April as we climbed the steps, and such was Miss Beresford's vivacity that she gave no offense. Some years older than my mother, she looked at me as a butcher looks at a carcass. Turning to April, she raised an eyebrow.
“Convention forbids what I want with him,” she said, and affected a wicked shudder.
In the hallway of the house, she whistled on her fingers like a huntsman. Three dogs raced down the stairs, and the smallest, a terrier, jumped into her arms from ten feet away. Miss Beresford wore a garment of black that resembled a military tent, which seemed—when I looked closer—covered in dog hairs.
She showed us the high rooms and their paintings and sculptures; and deep, dark furniture, on which sat glorious pieces of crystal glass from the nearby city.
“A Quaker fellow started this glass-making,” she said in her lazy drawl. “From England. And there were some brothers, I forget their names. My father gave them all some money, and from time to time they gave us glass. That is all.”
We sat to lunch at a long table. She fed the dogs from her plate, and called to a prowling cat, “Get out, you bitch, you're getting nothing here until you start bringing in some mice. Earn your keep!”
We ate and drank a good meal, and even though I had many times been in the houses of my parents' Anglo-Irish friends, and Mother's relations, I had not visited so grand a residence. It took my breath away, as did this strangely magnificent lady, and I observed how calmly she lived this life of wonder. She wore giant rings of crystal in her ears and talked with the ceaselessness of an engine.
It became clear that April found her delightful—and the regard was reciprocated. I might as well not have been there—except for the fact that now and again Miss Beresford would narrow her eyes, look down the table at me, turn to April, nod to indicate me, and lick her lips, saying, “Ooooooooh!” Somehow she accomplished this without the slightest possibility of offending.
She told us a little of the history—how the de la Poers had come here as Norman barons in the twelfth century and by “shrewd judgment” had not only maintained their place in this exquisite valley, but had actually expanded their holdings over the centuries. Then she looked at April.
“Now, did you get Tipperary justly—or did you fool them all?”
April blushed, and I said, “The judge in the case was more than—”
“I didn't ask you, handsome,” said Miss Beresford. “I want it from the horse's mouth. The whole country said, my dear, that you stole a great march on us all.”
April said, quite calmly, “Then the whole country is wrong. The whole country should find something better to do with its time.”
Miss Beresford clapped her hands, and whinnied a laugh so loud that the cat jumped and the dogs grew nervous.
“Oh, that's my girl, that's the spirit. Anyway, whose business is it what your grandmother did? Whoops—the bladder.”
She jumped from the table, with the dogs following. When she returned ten minutes later, she did so while loudly calling some savage imprecation down on some unseen person in a room off a corridor somewhere.
I had been looking all around the room—such opulence, such delight. When Miss Beresford sat down, I said, “This truly is a splendid house. It must be the finest house in Ireland.”
She looked sideways at me to see whether I flattered her.
“There is a better one,” she said, “and you damn know it. Your damsel here owns it.”
Miss Beresford addressed April again.
“Work the land. Do not have tenants. I hope you do not intend to. You see—these people, I suffer many as tenants; they are dirty and lazy, and they will let the land rot.”
“I mean to farm it all,” said April.
“Now—the fire. Did you go and shoot the fellows who tried to burn you out? Only language they understand, you know—they're like the black fellows out in Africa, although thank God they don't go naked here in Ireland. That's the only benefit of a non-tropical climate.”
April said, sweetly, “I believe your family has an interesting background.”
Jerry Hallinan had regaled us with the story of a curse—in the shape of a dog who haunts Curraghmore, and who has been seen by many, with sworn oaths to that effect.
“Oh, you mean the curses? This place is thoroughly cursed.”
Perceiving April's delight, she went on to tell a tale, but not about a phanto
m hound. The curse came from a widow who lived on the Curraghmore estate. She had one son, her hale and hearty breadwinner. But the young man had a resentment of the landlord and often stole milk, and apples, and straw for his and his mother's bedding. When the widow begged him to desist, he laughed her off. Being a woman of some ethics, she approached the landlord, the first Marquis, and asked him to discipline her son for these petty thefts.
Lord Waterford, however, according to Miss Beresford, his flamboyant descendant, “had a taste for excess, as do I, as do I. And, d'you know—he hung the youth. From the branch of a tree, a beech, I believe. Hung him like a sack of potatoes. Until he was, as you might say, very well-hung indeed.” (Again came the great, sky-piercing laugh.)
When the shocked widow remonstrated, he cut at her with his whip—and in return she cursed his “seed, breed, and generation,” and said that the next seven Lords of Waterford, beginning with him, would meet an untimely and violent death.
“And it's still up and running, you know,” Miss Beresford added. “We've had gunshots, falls from horses, and other misadventures; one Marquis was eaten alive by his own hounds. I think there's only one to go—I lose count. God knows how he'll die.”
Suddenly, something new occurred to Miss Beresford and she looked at me.
“Is your father Bernard O'Brien?” As, nodding, I began to reply, she said, “I think I know the fellow.” Turning to April she said, “Loved the ladies, loved us.”
Miss Beresford rose. “I will show you the rest of the house, dear. You”—she pointed a finger at me—“you can go to the stables.”
I trusted that she meant I could inspect the horses, but it also sounded as though she meant that I should sleep there.
We stayed the night, and dined as we had lunched—at the long, long table in whose polished wood I could see my face. Through dinner, Miss Beresford began to fall asleep. Soon a maid arrived and assisted her upstairs, with April following.
I do not believe that we learned much of how a Great House is run— but April and Miss Beresford became true friends, and soon corresponded.
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