The Garden Page 7

  “That’s all right, then, son.”

  “And I know about Abimelech, and Korah, Dathan, and Abiram. And Jemima, and Keziah, and Karen-Happuch, and——”

  “Faith,” said Uncle Ben, “that’s grand.” And he led the way upstairs again.

  A little later, they all set out for a picnic to Dalkey Island. Uncle Ben kept his boat, not at the slip beneath the cliff, but in the little harbour of Coliemore, on the Sound, where it was cared for by the fishermen, and had the advantage of a safe shelter in rough weather. The road down the hill was hot and white with dust, but every now and then appeared cool enchanting glimpses, between the trees, of the Sound and Island, to hearten one on. The harbour itself was dazed and blank with sunlight, its row of fishermen sitting half asleep in the shade on the far side of the road. One of them woke to life at a second hail, and slithered across, down the uneven stone causeway, into the clear, green pool on which the painted boats lay dreaming. Very leisurely the process of unmooring seemed to Dermot. The fisherman tumbled into a boat which was lying beside the causeway. A wide, calm ripple started: the boat rocked slightly, and the ripple, when it left the shade, sent a slow, ecstatic tremor of broken light shivering up the inside of the pier. The man stood up, took an oar, laid it in a hollow in the boat’s stern, and with a lazy, expert motion of his arm propelled her forward. Reaching the nearest of the row of moored boats, he stepped aboard her, and strode from one to another, setting up an outrageous rocking and smacking of lips, till he reached the boat he was seeking. There followed much loosening and splashing of ropes, after which he steered the boat round to the cool well of the steps, where the party stood waiting for him. There he got out, and squatted on his hunkers, holding the edge of the boat, to steady it.

  “Now then, Dermot son. Hop in.”

  Dermot looked up, from one to another of them.

  “Shall I be sick?” he asked, in his clear, high voice.

  “Sick?” repeated Uncle Ben. “Sick? Why ever would you be sick?”

  “I was, a little, on the big boat coming over.”

  “Oh, the big boat! “cried Uncle Ben, waving his head back almost in a circle. “Sure, that’s a different matter altogether.”

  Reassured, Dermot stepped daintily in, and was stowed away in the stern, between Anne and Eileen. Anne moved up a little to make room for him, with a friendly smile. He decided that she was nicer than he had thought.

  There was a short dispute as to who should row, a privilege which fell to Con, as the distance was short. He was very strong, and rolled the blue sleeves back from his great golden, powerful arms with self-conscious pride. Uncle Ben kneeled up in the bow, to watch for breakers, as he put it.

  Con rowed powerfully, with a great appearance of ease, but Dermot could see that beneath it all he was putting forth all the strength he could, for his colour rose, and his face was a little too calm and unconcerned. The boat slid along fast, with a great clop-clopping of water under her sides: and the big shape of the Island rose up every second before them.

  Suddenly Uncle Ben gave an exclamation.

  “Look,” he cried, “The B. & I. Faith, she’s early. She must have had a grand calm passage.”

  Dermot looked where Eileen was pointing, and saw, a long way away, heading for the Sound, the black bows and funnel of a big steamer. She seemed quite motionless. A dim stain of smoke slanted away behind her, and beneath her bow was fixed a clear white smudge, like a piece of cotton wool.

  “We’ll be well over, out of her wash,” grunted Con.

  “There, Dermot son—d’ye see? That’s the line you came over on: the B. & I.”

  “Is that the Lady Hudson-Kinahan?”

  “It may be—no, I don’t think it is. It’s one of the others.”

  “It was the Lady Hudson-Kinahan that we came over on.”

  “Yes, son. We’ll see what this one is, when she goes by.”

  They were now almost at the Island, which lies a bare eight hundred yards from the shore: and when presently Eileen pointed downwards over the side, Dermot could see the monstrous brown forests of the weed, looming suddenly up out of the depths, becoming clearer, waving slow, lazy, rich brown arms—and then Uncle Ben was calling directions, the boat’s bow grated gently against a little, uneven landing stage, and they were there.

  Dermot was led up to the level ground at the head of the stage, and left there, while the provisions were brought up and the boat moored to the satisfaction of Con and Uncle Ben. When they came back, he looked round, and lo and behold, the great B. & I. boat had somehow leaped across the gap of sea, and was entering the Sound. A faint cheer of welcome came from the houses above the shore: handkerchiefs and white napkins began to be waved from the windows, as the boat, looking huge and noble in the narrow channel, came past the point and breasted her way down the Sound. The cheering grew, the waving doubled: then, as she came fairly under the houses, a faint plume leaped from beside her funnel, and there rang out the stately, musical note known all along the coast, her answer to the welcome. Three times it sounded, three long, full blasts, filling the space between shore and shore, leaping from hill to hill, peopling the lazy afternoon with echoes: and the visitors upon her decks crowded in delight and wonder to see the cool greens of the rocky, wooded shore, the clean colours of the houses rising among the trees, and waved their shrill, fluttering handkerchiefs in answer. The last echo leaped away into the mountains, and the great ship passed by the watchers on the Island, the soft, steady crash of the foam beneath her bows sounding over the still water. Dermot could not read what was on her stern, but Uncle Ben positively declared her to be the Lady Roberts, the biggest and newest of the fleet. He knew them all, as he knew every boat that plied along the coast. Next, soon after she had gone by, there was the excitement of her wash. With awe and added delight, Dermot watched the big shining humps of water come slantwise to the shore. They did not break, but came rolling along like disturbances beneath a great smooth, gleaming carpet. When they reached the rocks of the Island they turned out to be far more powerful than they looked, making a great commotion, slapping and flopping up and down at the rocks, making the weed sway heavily, and sending the boat bobbing up and down in great agitation.

  When the last of the waves had died, the party set up the slope of the Island to the picnic place. The Island was quietly rocky, and covered with grass. It had no trees. On its highest point, huge, round, and conspicuous, sat a martello tower, like the tower at Sandycove, which Dermot knew well. One could not get inside it. One could only walk round it, getting a crick in one’s neck from looking up at its high, smooth sides. The place chosen for the picnic was quite close to this, under a rock to the south of it, from which could be seen the sea on three sides of the Island, besides most of the Sound, the Point, and Killiney Bay. The Wicklow Mountains looked for some reason half as big again as they did from the shore. This afternoon, they were a vast, vague blue: and the miles of thick woods about their feet looked like a darker blue smoke, clinging to the ground, not daring to rise.

  At the south end of the Island was a ruined fort. Uncle Ben, at Dermot’s loud desire, took him towards it: but the ground was very rocky, and he was not able to get as far as the entrance.

  “Another year, son, when you’re older,” said Uncle Ben: and for some reason that instant remained always a sharp memory with Dermot. Whenever it leaped up in his mind, he heard the precise note of Uncle Ben’s voice, saw his head and his green tweed suit against the sleepy blue of the sky, saw the white, sun-parched walls of the fort, and the confusion of sea beyond. And all this, despite the fact that he visited the fort again, several times, and once at least with Uncle Ben, in direct fulfilment of that promise. It was one of a few sharply clear pictures, which he could place definitely in its time, behind a haze of others which had no marked beginning. He could not, after so many Irish summers, say when his memory of this or that place began, when he first saw Miss O’Killikelly or another. They seemed to have been always a part of h
is life, to have emerged with him into the full daylight of remembered consciousness. But this was one of a few isolated pictures: and it was followed by another.

  While they sat picnicking, and Dermot devoured with great care a hard-boiled egg, very much afraid of breaking it and spilling its crumbly and delicious contents, there was a sudden exclamation from Anne, and she pointed up at the rock beneath which they were sitting. All looked up. Craning over the top of the rock, with the benign expanse of Martello tower behind them, looked the heads of a dozen goats. Thin, melancholy, and inquisitive, they stared down upon the invaders. Con shouted, and made a gesture with his arm. A tremor ran along the heads on their thin necks, like stalks shaken by a sudden gust. He shouted again, and again. Each time there was a tremor, but the goats did not run.

  “Ah, don’t be scaring them, Con,” said Aunt Patricia comfortably. “Sure, the poor things have as good a right as ourselves.”

  “Better,” said Eileen. “It’s their Island.”

  “Ah, hang it all,” protested Con, “I don’t like being watched at me meals by a crop o’ goats.”

  He took a huge bite, glowering resentfully up at the row of long faces.

  The next diversion, when tea was over, was to watch the mailboat come into Kingstown Harbour. She did not come anything like as near as the first boat, passing a good three miles clear of the Island: but brave she showed, with the sun flashing on her white paintwork ; growing swiftly from a gleaming little bundle to a ship, lengthening, taking shape and grace, and then gliding stately by, under the Hill of Howth, to slow up, and slide presently between the little piers to her distant berth.

  “Tired, little son?” asked Uncle Ben, as he took Dermot down to the boat.

  “A little—but in a most lovely way,” added Dermot hastily. “I think it’s a lovely feeling, to be tired after nice things: don’t you?”

  “Faith, son, you’re right. None better. But we’ll soon be home now. I’m going to take you right down to the tram from the harbour.”

  “Oh, thank you, Uncle Ben: but Mummy’s coming up to call for me at the house.”

  “Is she? Sure, we might have saved the tramp back there. Never mind. I’ll carry you on me back.”

  “I won’t be as tired as that, really, Uncle Ben.”

  The brief passage across the water was heavenly. He trailed his hand in the cool, bubbling water, and sighed for happiness.

  “Now,” said Con, as he stepped out, and lifted Dermot on to the stone steps. “Now, were you sick?”

  “Of course I wasn’t,” said Dermot, and entertained a proper scorn for his inexperienced self of three hours back.

  “There y’are, ye see,” said Con.

  Chapter VIII

  Into the alcove of Granny’s dining-room, that recess where lived the sideboard and the cuckoo clock and Grandpapa’s books, the new-lit fire threw little timid splashes of warm colour. It twinkled in the silver pieces on the sideboard, which gave it back sleepily, as if summer were their time for hibernating, and they had not expected to be roused so soon. Gaining confidence, it began to leap softly up the wall. The room had grown dark, this overcast September evening. The wind, aware that soon the equinox was coming to give it authority, blustered up the road, harrying small companies of early leaves, and flinging an occasional handful of raindrops against the window. At the first and second of these salutes, Grandpapa had jumped and exclaimed, “God bless my soul.” At the third, he had gone to the door, and called for Bessie to light the fire.

  “Ah, sir. I thought, now, ye would be wanting the fire, the way it is outside.”

  “Faith,” grumbled Grandpapa, pulling the long lace curtain aside a couple of inches, to peer out into the road, “I don’t know what sort of weather this is to go give us. In my young days, ye knew which was the winter, and which was the summer: but nowadays, I declare to me God ye can’t tell one from the other.”

  “Oh, that’s right, sir,” agreed Bessie, cheerfully busy on her knees by the hearth.

  “I’m anxious too, d’ye see, because Miss Margaret and her two children will have to be crossing soon. And if the weather breaks up as early as this——”

  “Ah, sir. Sure they could wait a bit, maybe, till it took up.”

  “The’ can do no such thing.” Grandpapa turned round, in never-failing irritation at the easy optimism of women. He saw life as obedience to a number of fixed decrees, a kind of enormous public park run in the interests of law and order. It gave him a grim satisfaction to see women brought up against its regulations, and he never failed to point the moral when they indignantly protested against this interference with their own lawless desires.

  “The’ can do no such thing,” he repeated severely. “Don’t you know very well that Mr. Gray is coming across in a couple of days, to take a short holiday, and fetch them back along with him?”

  “Ah, but, sure, if the weather was agen them——” Bessie kneeled up, and beat her sooty hands together.

  “The affairs of a company, such as the company Mr. Gray serves,” declared Grandpapa impressively, “are not concerned with the weather—nor with difficult crossings of the Irish Channel—nor with anything of the kind. The’ have rules, which must be kept, and are not subject to personal exception. Heh !” He stuck out his beard, and looked down at Bessie with narrowed eyes. “I believe you think a company of that kind is run by a lot of old women.”

  “Oh sir, oh sir,”—Bessie rose cheerfully,—“you’re terrible hard on us poor women, so y’are. There now: I’ve lit your fire for ye.”

  Grandpapa regarded it doubtfully.

  “Ta’ care, now, would it smoke on us,” he observed.

  “Ah, sure, a puff or two, in the first fire after the summer, is only what you may expect. It takes the chimney a while to warm up, and get used to the smoke agen.”

  “Do ye think, now, maybe, there’d be a bird’s nest in the chimney? Do ye?”

  “And you runnin’ a fire on into the month o’ May! It’d be the queer bird would live through that.”

  “Well, well” ; Grandpapa waved his hand sideways at her. “Ye may go.”

  Left to himself, he retreated to the window, and sat, a hand on each knee, watching the fire suspiciously over the tops of his glasses. But the threatened puffs never came, despite the wind, and he was able to resume his reading of The Irish Times, murmuring occasionally “Tcha,” “The robbers,” or “Did ye ever hear the like,” until the light from the window became too bad.

  By this time the alcove looked cosy indeed. The firelight leaped playfully up the wall, the sideboard winked in a score of places, a great peaked shadow shot up every second above the cuckoo clock, and a faint, warm radiance, reflected from the wall, reached even the old leather backs of Grandpapa’s books, which lived in a deep bookcase let into the alcove’s darkest corner. So dark was it, that even in ordinary daylight the old man had often to take a book out, and peer at its title, to be sure what it was. For the most part, however, he knew their places by heart. Gazing around the room, thinking of the long winter evenings which he loved, he could not forbear a chuckle of pleasure.

  Dermot, entering at that moment, stopped spellbound in the doorway. The room was transfigured. He had not seen its winter self: at least, he had, but when he was too young to remember it consciously. He stared, round-eyed, at the warm soft light and the bobbing shadows.

  “Come in, child, come in. Are you frightened, or what is it?”

  The stare left the wall, and was fixed on Grandpapa.

  “No, Grandpapa. I was only thinking how lovely it looked.”

  “Eh, well, come in,” said Grandpapa, well pleased, “and close the door carefully behind ye. Don’t go bang it, now.”

  The admonition was quite unnecessary. Dermot closed the door with the silent, two-handed care of a child, his tongue curling in concentration over his lower lip.

  “That’s right. Come on now, to the fire, and warm yourself.”

  Dermot came on, and copied h
is grandfather, holding up his thin hands to the blaze. There was a great deal in common between old-fashioned child and old-fashioned gentleman. Both, at their extremes of age and in their different way, loved the same things. The man saw his qualities in the child, and approved with grim good nature: the child as yet could only realise the agreement on rare occasions, since, lack of experience apart, he was generally too much taken up with directly experiencing the new, vivid sensations of life to think about anybody else. When, after some seconds, he looked up from the fire at his Grandfather, and saw the big head nodding and the eyes crinkled with appraisal, he was aware only that Grandpapa was looking at him.

  “Isn’t it nice, Grandpapa?” he said, and stood a little closer against his knee.

  “It is,” replied Grandpapa. “It is very nice, as you say.” He was thinking to himself that the boy did not look so delicate as when he came: that the visit would have been a benefit to him. He was heartily glad, at the same time, that this delicacy, or the instincts of self protection arising from it, kept Dermot from rough play and noisy companions. Not having been present, he could not take in the fact that Dermot had indeed become very noisy and aggressive soon after Eithne’s birth: so much so that his parents had only reduced him to order by sending him to a little kindergarten, where the superior abilities of other children along those lines had, for a time, driven him in upon himself again.

  Grandpapa, hearing of the kindergarten and the necessity, had pooh-poohed both. The name kindergarten seemed to him outlandish: some new-fangled idea or other. Characteristically, he did not question the boy directly about it.

  “Tell me, now, Dermot,” he said gravely, “are ye making good progress with your lessons?”

  He pronounced “progress” as if the first syllable rhymed with dog.

  “Oh, yes.” Dermot looked up at him confidently, for this was a subject upon which they were very much at home. He had been a precocious child, in everything except the power to walk, which came to him very late: the physical delay had been compensated by great activity of mind, and Grandpapa, at an age which would make modern parents throw up their hands in horror and unbelief, had made a beginning by teaching him his letters. Now, he read any book, with ease and confidence. The kindergarten authorities, unprepared for these accomplishments, set him to cut out shapes of coloured paper, and paste them in books ; to make islands and isthmuses of sand on tea-trays ; to draw ships, etc: all of which he did with quiet absorption. But he did not call them lessons. Lessons for him meant the continuation, with help from his father, of all he had begun with Grandpapa.