Could the arm of coincidence be so long? For a brief moment the two men, so strangely met, looked out beyond the ocean and the years at the same face. Thomas was learning to restrain his impulses. No need to tell this embittered stranger that that same horrified little girl—for of course it must be Sterrin—had told him all about that incident that had happened on the way to Carlow Races in the Repeal year of ’43!
‘I wonder, will she wait for me?’
Thomas half turned. Had Bergin’s mind become unhinged?
An awkward laugh scraped the darkness. ‘Someone else I was thinking of. She said she’d wait the length of the sentence for me. Hmph! Romancing; I was the young hero of a drama. Who’d expect a girl to give the whole of her life to waiting for someone who used to please her when she was too young to know her own mind? Who?’
The First Mate didn’t feel like doling out bland assurance. His own aspirations had been growing steadily more remote; more improbable. Now, all of a sudden they looked downright silly. He sprang to his feet. ‘Look,’ he cried with an upward sweep, ‘there is the Southern Cross. Over there people are waiting for you also; waiting for men with your fine physique. They say that there are gold nuggets to be picked up there like cabbages.’
*
Often on the long trek from Melbourne to Ballarat, Thomas regretted his decision not to sail on to America as First Mate to the self-appointed Captain Ballantyne. Compared to this raw, wild territory, America seemed near and homelike; only three thousand miles from Ireland! Kitty and Mark had bought land there with the money they had earned in Canada. John Holohan had become a rich man in Chicago.
It was Christmas Day when Bergin and Thomas reached the gold fields. No one gave thought to the day. No one gave thought to anything but the gold that had decoyed this motley throng from all parts of the world; peers and preachers; book-keepers and navvies; the scum of Norfolk Island, all bedevilled by the same dream of sudden wealth that so few of them ever realised.
And yet it was here in this outlandish place that Thomas realised—in a dim way—his youthful dream of attaining to the stage of a theatre, through some actor forgetting his lines or becoming ill.
An actor became, not ill, but drunk. The stage was a platform of planks in a canvas entertainment tent. The audience sat on rows of up-turned kegs. Thomas was sitting between Bergin and a young gentleman whom Thomas was assiduously cultivating. The young man, he had discovered, possessed a high and ancient title, temporarily discarded amid the democracy of the gold field. Thomas was wasting no opportunity of equipping himself for the young nobleman’s world. It was Sterrin’s world. Technically he was word perfect in its speech and its book-learning. He would not, should occasion offer, err by asking for a second helping of soup, by carrying a parcel in the street, by walking abroad without gloves. But all this unapplied knowledge had been gleaned from the wrong side of the green baize door. He longed to apply it in the atmosphere of accepted equality. And, here in this medley of unqueried identities, the young nobleman had accepted Thomas.
In the tent, the audience of diggers chewed and spat and offered rude suggestions to the floundering actor. Suddenly, strangely, from that riffraff group there came a prompt. Thomas looked back. In the dim lamplight, the faces were indistinguishable from one another; all of them caked with the mud of the day’s toil; then, from the clay-matted whiskers and beard of one man, Thomas located the outflow of those lines from Richard III; beautifully enunciated!
The player took up the prompt. When he muffed again Thomas twisted round on his tub watching for the next one; but the anonymous digger had clamped down on his erudition. And suddenly Thomas heard his own voice calling out the lines he had often mouthed silently when he sat at the back of the Assembly Rooms at Templetown and watched them acted forth by the Travelling Players.
Bergin looked at him amazed. ‘It’s you who should be up there,’ he said. The words held a young enthusiasm long lost to the toneless voice.
On the other side, the young nobleman came suddenly to life. He had been lounging, bored and somnolent, his wideawake over his nose, his gauze neck veil clayey and grimy, falling in stiff drapes over his cheeks. He pushed back his hat and sat upright. ‘Bergin’s right; up you go. Chum!’
The occupants of the adjoining tubs supported the motion. Anything for a bit of diversion! They hoisted Thomas from one to another. He was thrust on to the stage just as the actor was being assisted off.
He stood there gaping down at the cheering, jeering, raucous crowd. This was not the dream of his young aspirations. This was a nightmare; like when he used to dream that he was in a crowded Bianconi in his nightshirt!
Then his brain cleared. This was no Bianconi. This was a crowded play tent; a real audience, real actors, drunk or no; a real stage, even if it wobbled a bit, and by the piper that played before Moses, he was going to stay put on this stage!
With a sweep he tossed his wideawake from him and finished off the interrupted speech. It was King Richard’s oration to his army and Thomas as he progressed, started to enjoy himself. Some of the words might have been applied to the mob in front of him. ‘...A sort of vagabonds, rascals and runaways... whom their o’er cloyed country vomits forth in desperate adventure...’
Drunkenness was no isolated happening in the canvas theatres that played the gold sites. A few nights later Thomas lent a hand to drag an actor blind drunk from a grog shop within minutes of curtain up. The part was a small one and the theatre manager questioned Thomas about his previous experience. Thomas managed to check himself just as he was about to confess that he had no experience whatever. He assumed the Keep Off The Grass look that he had seen on the titled digger whenever people questioned him about his previous life. That look was enough for the manager. Thomas was a ‘quick study’. He got the part, but it only lasted him a night. The players closed in their ranks against ‘digger’ competition. They decided to postpone all serious drinking until after the performance.
By day, Thomas probed the earth but never did his ears gladden to the music of his pick catching in a nugget. The nobleman’s white hands grew hornier with welts and warts. By night, it was he whom Thomas helped from the grog shops.
One morning the claim they worked on filled in with water. Johnny-the-lord pulled Thomas to safety. ‘I’m finished with this dump,’ he said through chattering teeth. ‘I’m off to dig liquid gold from a brandy keg.’ Thomas too, was sick of the unrewarding toil; sick of the fanaticism on the faces of men who refused to give in. He decided to go with Johnny-the-lord. He would try to take his chances with the theatre manager. Silently, Bergin fell in with the two.
On the way back they paused to watch a group of men standing around a cavity on a hill. There was something dramatic about the way the men handed the pan of gravel from one to another for inspection. Thomas thought that they must have brought up the colour; but the last man, when he had pawed through the gravel, flung it from him with a gesture of disgust. Without another word the group picked up their belongings and walked off.
A piece of the flying gravel hit Thomas. ‘It’s all yours,’ said the man who had tossed it. Thomas recognised him. He was a London book-keeper who had sold up everything he possessed to seek gold in order to get his employer’s consent to marry his daughter.
Bergin looked curiously at the ‘cradle’. It was a new type that he hadn’t seen before. ‘Damn fool,’ he said in his grim, toneless way. ‘Suit him better to have kept his money and his cushy job in London! Fat chance the likes of him has of marrying the boss’s daughter.’
For a weary, sodden moment, Johnny-the-lord reverted to caste and muttered something about the absurdity of a ‘clerk-fellow’ getting notions because he had learned to push a pen across his employer’s ledger.
Thomas, chilled to the bone, felt the sudden heat of rage. He thought feverishly that they had discovered his own foolish aspirations. Who were they, an escaped convict and some discredited squib of nobility, to scoff at the decent aspirations of
love?
Some affinity with the hapless clerk who had made such a bid to win his employer’s daughter made him reach out his hand to the abandoned crank and set the cradle rocking. The others called him to come on. When he persisted in working it they returned and worked with him. They were loyal mates, as well he realised. What he didn’t realise was the rasped state of his mind and body from continuous toil and setbacks; from the continuous bare blueness of the undraped sky above him and the ochre desert of clay all around him. He longed for soft, grey clouds; for little roads that meandered between green hedges; for the sentient winds that breathed into the mind and stirred its thought; but most of all he longed for the softness of lips that had touched his and that held him forever; ensorcelled to the undeliberate witchery of their magic.
Suddenly he ceased to long; to think. He became a mindless frenzy. In the gravel at the bottom of the ‘cradle’ his scalded eyes had caught the glitter of yellow streaks. Gold! Gold! They had struck gold!
The strike proved a small one; less than a thousand pounds’ worth. Johnny-the-lord went on a spree with his share. Thomas and Bergin put theirs into shares that had started to rise. It might as well be making more money for them while they worked their claim. They reminded each other of the Gaelic saying—‘Have a goose and you’ll get one’. They had only skimmed the surface. They worked like maniacs. They went on working when water began to pour in. Bergin forgot his past and his bitterness and his half-cherished hopes, just as men there forgot home and wife and child. Thomas forgot at last the face that had haunted his dreams, sleeping and waking.
But it came back to him in fever when he collapsed with dysentery from working waist-deep in the ice-cold water. He reached his burning hand for the bright nugget. It wafted from him, darkening as it went and melting into soft rings and spirals; like the dark gold that sheened around a young girl’s face.
When he recovered he had to face calamity. The shares he had purchased had dropped to worthlessness. The pit they were working had caved in. Bergin had escaped with his life. But Johnny-the-lord had not escaped. Johnny with his fine elegant speech; Johnny with the slender hands that had pulled Thomas to safety from the first pit, who had returned against his inclination to the bookkeeper’s abandoned claim only from loyalty to Thomas! Johnny was entombed in the collapsed mine. He would have been alive but for Thomas’s obstinacy over his slighted dream!
Thomas felt sick with guilt; sick of the gold fields. He returned to the theatrical manager, but he found him breaking up camp for America... ‘Can you pay your passage to America?’ he called as Thomas turned away. Thomas couldn’t. The barest necessities of life cost more out here than they had in the blackest pitch of the Famine.
The manager assessed the emaciated features, the dispirited air. Not so cocky this time! He questioned him about previous stage experience and demanded explicit replies. No stand-off-the-grass looks this time! But Thomas had no heart to ape Johnny-the-lord again.
‘Are you a convict?’ asked the manager. Thomas’s quick resentment convinced him; so did his renditions from different dramatists. A born actor, he thought. But he said, ‘I don’t employ amateurs,’ when Thomas confessed to no professional experience. Cannily he watched the hopelessness etch itself around Thomas’s lips and nostrils then he made his bargain; good and hard. A signed agreement for Thomas to work for him for an unspecified period in return for having his passage paid to America—and, of course in return for the inestimable value of the experience he would receive.
Thomas would sign anything that would be the means of getting him to America. He grasped the quill to sign with a flourish then suddenly faltered, the quill drooping uncertainly.
The actor-manager noted the hesitation. ‘Are you afraid to sign your own name?’ he demanded. He was convinced now that the digger was an escaped convict. But Thomas was back floundering in the void of his namelessness; mocked by his own presumptuous aims and apings. He could see the reflection of their folly in the other man’s smile. And suddenly with a flash of memory he saw something else! Dublin in Repeal Year, the stage of Crow Street Theatre, Thomas Young, the great actor proclaiming, ‘...alas, then I was young—’ and the galleryite yelling, ‘And now you are Winterbottem!’
For the second time in his life he reached for the actor’s discarded name.
A few days later Thomas’s foot met the ribbed deck of the America-bound ship as though it were a long-lost friend.
36
Sterrin took the Bard’s tray from Pakie Scally. It was no great burden to carry these days. Since her father’s death the old man had lost his zest for food.
He peered out at her from under his brows. ‘The young Sir never brings me my supper tray now.’ It’s funny, she thought, when Young Thomas used to bring the tray, the Bard would call him every name in the family calendar, but it is only since he left that the Bard went so far as calling him that name.
‘He has gone away, Bard. I’ve told you.’
‘He is a long time gone.’ She moved and opened the window. The smell of hawthorn blew past on a little wind and there was a lingering scent of apple blossoms. Her eyes followed a little roadeen that went wobbling like a child against the brown shoulder of the hill. ‘A year,’ she murmured, ‘a week, and three days—’
‘You are keeping a tight count on the days since that lad left, Miss Sterrin.’
She whirled back. He’d hear the grass growing! ‘Bard, there is no knowing you. One minute you talk as if today was a hundred years ago. The next minute you are spotting everything that goes on around you like a pet fox. Young Sir, indeed! And it Young Thomas you had in mind!’
The old man let out a sigh. ‘He was the kind to hang a wreath upon one’s harp. Thank you for the snack, Sterrin, Daughter of O’Carroll. Maybe the next time ’twill be a meal.’ She chuckled and took the tray. ‘I’ll get you more. You don’t usually eat so much.’ She liked to bring his food. He was the one person she could talk to about Young Thomas. In the kitchen they talked of him, but they talked of him as one of themselves. The Bard spoke of him as a person. It pleased her, strangely, when he confused Young Thomas with the family.
He watched her as she lifted the tray. ‘You’re changing,’ he muttered, ‘and ’tis no harm so. I’ve always found red-haired women to be treacherous. Your hair is turning into a sweet dark hood for the little face of you. ’Tis a pity about that wart. You inherited that from the princess who married the tinker.’
She looked critically at her reflection in a silver cover dish. ‘It is not a wart. It is a mole and I could not inherit things from her once she left the family. She probably passed on her warts to the tinker’s line.’
‘Oh, she left the tinker and came back with a fine looking male child that had a wart beside his eye.’
‘You’re making that up, Bard.’ She knew every word of the manuscript about the O’Carroll princess who was so ugly that her father had fobbed her off upon a tinker.
‘I don’t have to make up. I know the O’Carroll breed. Her face might have been ugly but her blood would be proud. It would never let her live out her days, wife to a base-born person without name or home or origin.’
Sterrin picked up the tray. ‘I’ll send them with some more supper,’ she said coldly. Even the Bard had no right to go that far!
He watched her leave him without a farewell word, head high, true daughter of all the Sirs and chieftains who had gone before; their chivalric lineage stamped in her features that were cold against him. He called to her pleadingly; she was the sun’s warmth coming to him in the winter of his days; she was all of the past glory, coming out of it in gentleness to tend to him.
‘You belong in high places, bright love. Storm and famine, aye and murder too—hell roast them that did it—have kept you too near the ground and the groundlings. You were meant to soar like the golden eaglet that yourself resembles greatly—eagle to eagle—your father would want it that way. ’Tis soon I’ll be meetin’ him and it’s the short greetin�
�� he’d have for me if I didn’t say what has to be said to the little one whom he had to leave unguided. Do you know,’ he went on, ‘’twill be a great gathering of us in the parlours of heaven; your father and my father and his grandfather, and my grandfather, that was near a hundred when he died. He was a lad when he came to Kilsheelin from Strague Castle. ’Twas the day that Cromwell rode up to its door and Calvagh O’Carroll handed him up the castle of his fathers without as much as a Go-to-hell. “Whose house is this?” sez Cromwell. “’Twas mine yesterday, Lord Cromwell, ’tis yours today.” My grandfather’s father said he would not sully his harp there again... You were talking about warts grá gal—’
‘I was not!’
‘What harm: my great-grandfather saw Cromwell that day, a block of a man with coarse nostrils, eyes hard, like a crab that can never ripen into an apple. He was thick in mind and body, and a wart on his chin as big as an onion and another over his right eyebrow. The foolishness of men to rate themselves so high! They are only as important as the little space of life that holds them. Let you go now, grá gal, for there is an air in my head I must set to music.’ He dropped off to sleep.
She tiptoed out, smiling. That air had been in his head for as long as she could remember. But a few nights later it seemed as if he had put it to music at last. The sound of the harp startled Pakie Scally as he carried the tray for her to the Bard’s door.
‘’Tis good to hear him play at last, Miss Sterrin, but it is a terrible lonesome tune.’ The old man was humming in Gaelic as he plucked at his knee harp. She stood without lowering the tray for the words made her heart lurch with dread.
Long seems to me your coming.
Old Herald of God
Oh, friend of friends
To part me from my pain!
...Oh, footstep not heavy!
Oh, hand in the darkness!
Your coming seems to me long...
The Big Wind Page 39