Scholars and Gypsies: An Autobiography [Reprint 2019 ed.] 9780520339378

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SCHOLARS AND

GYPSIES

Walter Starkie C.M.G., C.BJL, Litt.D.

SCHOLARS AND GYPSIES AN

AUTOBIOGRAPHY

U N I V E R S I T Y OF C A L I F O R N I A Berkeley and Los Angeles 1963

PRESS

Published in the United States of America by the University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California Published in Great Britain by John Murray (Publishers) Ltd London (§) Walter Starkie 1963

Printed in Great Britain

To Pater and Mother in loving memory

CONTENTS PART O N E :

ADAGIO

1

Childhood

3

2

Mademoiselle

28

3

Father and Son

so

4 The Shanachie Casts a Spell

82

5

95

The Last of the Olympians

6 The Easter Rebellion 1916

123

7

158

Dublin and London 1917-1918 PART TWO:

ALLEGRO

8 Italy at War

195

9 The Concert Party

225

10

From Harlequinade to Pirandello Première

239

11

Nemesis and the Poet-Condottiere

261

12

Demobilization

275

13

Sicilian Expedition

300

Index

319

vii

PRELUDE 'You didn't have to be Irish,' Frank Harris says in his biography of George Bernard Shaw, 'for seven hundred years to share their innate love of freedom and culture, nor to share their pride of race. All you had to do was to be born there, and though your own parents may have been the most reactionary and domineering English Tories, you would have grown up to love the land of your birth.' This phrase expresses one of the themes of these memoirs of m y early life in Dublin at the beginning of this century, and during the years leading to Armageddon and the Anglo-Irish conflict. I have included, as background, a description of my childhood and adolescence, when life glided onwards to a leisurely andante rhythm, and we were blithely unconscious of the quaint inhibitions, the casteridden prejudices, and the ridiculous snobberies of our elders. During those far-off years many of my father's distinguished and scholarly contemporaries, especially the legendary figure of Dr MahafÌy, tutor of Oscar Wilde and Provost of Trinity, so vividly impressed me as a child that their idiosyncrasies have remained deeply embedded in my memory and today I can recall their conversation, even the tone and rhythm of their speech. From Dublin, where I had always lived within the orbit of the College of the undivided Trinity, I was sent to England, to Shrewsbury School under Dr Alington, and it was there, and during the visits to my uncle, Arthur Rackham, in London, that my Anglo-Irish sense of divided loyalties began to trouble me: this became acute some years later when I found myself an undergraduate in Trinity College, Dublin, amidst the ferment of the literary movement and the rising tide of Irish nationalism. I had never forgotten the scenes of turmoil at the Abbey Theatre in 1907, when The Playboy of the Western World was produced for the first time; and the première of Synge's posthumous Deirdre of the Sorrows, in 1910, which thrilled me more than any play I had ever seen. On a more personal level, my school and university years were clouded by conflict with my father over my future. He had always

ix

Prelude hoped that I would become a classical scholar and carry on the family tradition, but I was passionately eager to take up a musical career. Then in 1913 ,when I was eighteen, I came under the influence of the dwarflike poet and minstrel, James Stephens, who had just leaped into fame with The Charwoman's Daughter and The Crock of Gold. Stephens, the shanachie, by encouraging my rebelliousness, helped me to discover myself, for he also opened my eyes and ears to another world of folkpoetry and folk-music of which I had caught only stray glimpses in the past. When the first world war swept away my dreams of a musical career abroad, I still remembered the lessons the shanachie had taught me; and wanderlust became the dominant theme in my life, when I found myself in 1918-1919 in North Italy, wandering from camp to camp of the British Expeditionary Force with my ramshackle concertparty in our Thespian caravan. These forays led to many an adventure in the villages of the Venetian plain and the Italian Alps. Sometimes I consorted with barn-storming actors and clowns in Bergamo, Thienc and Vicenza; I listened spell-bound to the oratory of the wizard Gabriele D'Annunzio as he harangued the Venetian mob in the Piazza San Marco from the Loggetta of Sansovino, on the day of Saint Mark, before his dramatic march to Fiume at the head of his legionaries; and, later, when the Condottiere-poet had retired to his dream-casde of the Vittoriale, I visited this strange figure, whose epic life-story exemplified an Aeschylean nemesis. Pirandello had just emerged into world fame as the prophet of the New Theatre in direct antithesis to D'Annunzio whose star was setting; and in Milan I watched the milling crowds of Pirandellians and anti-Pirandellians at the premiere of Six characters in Search of an Author. It was in the hectic spring of 1919 that I unexpectedly ran across the Hungarian Gypsies who laid the raggle-taggle patrin I was to follow ten years later. Those Romanichals from Transylvania gave me my 'Romany nose' which some months later led me to the Gypsy camp in the South, and to my minstrel journey through Calabria and Sicily. From the Gypsies I soon discovered that the fiddle is still the Devil's instrument and enables them to cast their traditional 'glamour'. Hence they call it the King of instruments and even refuse to be parted from it at death. The Romanichals always welcomed my fiddle and taught me more magic tunes than I had ever heard in my childhood from the tinkers of the Western World. Best of all, they taught me that there are two kinds of music and poetry in the world, the tame and the wild. x

Prelude To pick up the wild I had to join the Romanichals in their tents and caravans, learning the wisdom of the sun, moon, stars, and opening my ears to the music of the wind on the heath. Thus in the end I returned to my native country richer than when I set out, with the ghostly words of Jasper Petulengro ringing in my ears: "Life is very sweet, brother; who would wish to die?"

XI

I

CHILDHOOD I came into the world on August 9, 1894, and my earliest memories are of the house where my parents lived the first three years of my life. Harrow House, within its attractive garden, is situated on the Killiney back road near the village of Ballybrack and has a fine view of the Dublin mountains. I remember sitting for long periods on the bony knees of various female relatives, gazing fixedly at the sunlit sea in the distance and, at other times, of rolling about on the grassy slope at the back of the house. The most mysterious being in my world, as a child, was my father, or, as we always called him, Pater. Perhaps the mystery was due to the fact that he was less approachable than my mother. Some mornings I would walk down with him to the gate and watch him collect his mail from the post-box in the tree before setting out on his bicycle at 7.30 a.m. on his ten-mile ride into Dublin to give his nine o'clock lecture at Trinity College. I would see him again for a fleeting moment in the evening after bathtime when he would come in and sit at the end of my bed listening to my mother reading to me Alice in Wonderland or Sinbad the Sailor. Then, after she had recited aloud my prayers, tucked me into bed and departed with my two friends Mick, the Irish terrier, and Puss, shutting the door, my anxieties would begin. The house seemed at night to grow in size and the space around my bed seemed to expand. The stillness produced upon me an overwhelming sense of loneliness, and the longer I remained in the dark the more conscious I became of hidden presences. Even the slightest sounds starded me. The furniture in my room began to creak and the floor crackled as though someone was creeping stealthily towards my bed. I longed to cry out, but I knew from experience that my father would come up and abuse me for being a coward. I would then bury my head beneath the sheets and try to go inside my head, but, alas, in my dreamland the groping figures grew even more threatening. The only 3

Adagio moments of relief came, when I heard the familiar sound of the grandfather clock in the hall below striking the hours. One night when everyone else in the house was asleep I was startled to hear the sound of pebbles rattling on the windows of my room. There was a moon and all was bathed in a silver light. I crept on tiptoe to the window, and down below I saw a tall ghostly figure standing near the hall door. He shouted out the name of my father, and threw more pebbles at the window. Then the dog began to bark and I heard my father go downstairs. W h o could the mysterious stranger be? Surely some evil genie. I crept on to the landing and tried to catch a glimpse of him through the banisters, but missed my footing on the steep stairs and tumbled head over heels into the hall at his feet. My piercing cries awoke the whole house, the two men retired into an inner room far from the tumult, my mother picked me up, soothed me and carried me off to bed, leaving nurse on guard, who then amidst threats and cajoleries told me that the mysterious guest was the Bogey Man who would come for me one night and carry me off on his back. This threat of kidnapping so frightened me that when the tall man called at the house some days later I no sooner caught sight of him than I took to my heels and hid myself in a cupboard behind dusty books. I then heard my father cry out in his booming voice: "Where is Walter? Bring him down to the drawing-room." At last it was Nanny who unearthed me in my lair, and carried me begrimed and struggling into the august presence, while all the time I kept shouting: "I won't meet the Bogey Man! I won't meet the Bogey Man! He'll carry me away!" Even my mother's exhortations and my father's threats did not allay my fears. The stranger, however, knew a better way of calming a frightened child. He took me up in his arms, kissed me and perched me on a high chair, sat down at the piano, and began to play softly, saying to me: "Listen to the tune of the good fairy: it will drive away your Bogey Man." His hands wandered over the keys, transporting me into a vague echoing dreamland. The tune of the good fairy conquered me, and I became at once the friend and slave of Henry S. Macran, and whenever he came to the house I would solemnly take his hand and lead him to the piano to play the tune; and then out into the garden, pointing out flowers, and he would tell me stories about them and about the insects and the birds. Henry S. Macran was a Fellow of Trinity College Dublin and a colleague of my father. They had both been rival candidates for Life 4

Childhood Fellowship in Classics and Philosophy—reputed in those days to be the most difficult examination in the academic world. My father had beaten him, but he had secured the coveted distinction in the following year. Both scholars were Hegelians and enjoyed carrying on their philosophical arguments over a bottle of wine. After my father's marriage Macran often visited him at his Killiney home: on that night he had been celebrating with various bohemian friends in the licensed premises of the neighbouring township of Dalkey, where he lived and, after leaving them at closing time, had wandered in the moonlight along the Vico Road, the loveliest walk in Europe, up through Killiney village pondering on Hegel. W h e n in such a peripatetic mood he needed the dialogue to resolve his doubts, and so he made straight for the house of a kindred spirit—one who would leave even his matrimonial couch to discuss the weightier problems of the soul, like the Athenian 'dawn-chasers' who gathered round Socrates. Fifteen years later, as an undergraduate in Trinity College, I had the privilege of attending the Master's lectures in Mental and Moral Philosophy and many a Symposium in his rooms, but I never forgot that melody from Humperdinck's Hansel and Gretel he played to exorcize the Bogey Man of m y infancy. *

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W h e n I look back into those early childhood days most of m y memories centre in my father whom I feared as a man of wrath, and it was only later, when we travelled together, that I discovered in him an affectionate parent. He always remembered the Biblical proverb, ' W h o spares the rod spoils the child', and he wished to give me a touch of the Spartan education he had received from his father in West Cork. He wanted me to follow in his footsteps and become eventually a classical scholar, and for this reason he gave my mother no peace until she had taught me to read and write. Every evening when he arrived home from college he would catechize me searchingly and make me spell words and would watch the progress of my writing. M y mother, who had been his pupil in Latin at the Alexandra College, carried out his precepts to the letter and devoted the morning to my instruction. The streak of nomadism in my character may have been derived from the early years, when my mother and my father kept moving S A O—B

5

Adagio from place to place. A year after the birth of m y eldest sister Enid in 1897, my parents moved to the West of Ireland when my father, after holding the post of Fellow of Trinity College Dublin for a number o f years, accepted the Presidency o f Queen's College, Galway. I have clear memories of our residence in the City of the Tribes where I was most o f the time an invalid, as it was in Galway that I began to develop chronic bronchial asthma. I always believed that I came into this world with a tendency towards that distressing ailment, but m y mother blamed a young maid we had at the time, w h o took me out on a snowy day and forgot all about me, while she carried on prolonged dalliance with the village plumber. O u r life in Galway was more spacious than at Harrow House, and I remember a stately drawing-room in the College, in which m y mother would preside at afternoon tea, and my baby sister and I would be scrubbed, tidied and presented to the company. After being rewarded with a piece of seed cake and t w o lumps of sugar, I would be set free by the nursemaid and rush off to my favourite spot—the den o f Greely, the old porter. Greely was a pundit in the College and his influence extended not only among the students w h o consulted him on every subject, but also among the local tradesmen, messenger boys, and even among the tinkers w h o passed through Galway. It was Greely w h o introduced me to the first wandering fiddler I ever met, a queer scarecrow o f a man with a straggly grey beard, and a wild eye, w h o travelled from fair to fair. Greely called him 'an oul' boozer' and said he was a tinker. The wild man took his fiddle and bow out of a green baize bag and played a plaintive tune. ''Play us something livelier," said Greely. "I've a thirst on me," replied the fiddler, "but I'll play y e the fairy reel if ye give me the price of a pint." " Y e are a disgrace to our neighbourhood," said Greely. "I won't have y o u casting disrepute on the College." " I ' m doin' no harm," said the tinker. "Sure the little gintleman would like to hear the fairy reel and The Boys of Wexford." After he had gone I slipped away and rejoined him d o w n the road under a tree, where he played for me one tune after another. Another vivid memory of those days in Galway is the picturesque quarter called the Claddagh where I was dazzled by the red petticoats worn by the wives and daughters of the fishermen. The Claddagh, indeed, gave me my first taste o f Spain, for the people are mostly o f Iberian stock with black hair, narrow waists, small hands and feet and the high instep o f the Castilian hidalgo.

6

Childhood In Galway our life was full of excitements. I remember boating expeditions on Lough Corrib and picnics to Menloe Castle and the commanding figure of Sir Henry Blake, about whom our nurse used to tell fantastic tales which I believed, for after Mass I often saw his coachman truss him up with ropes to prevent him falling off his outsidecar after he had visited the pubs in Galway. On one occasion my father and mother took me with them when they went to the fair at Athenry to buy a pony. It rained cats and dogs, and my parents dragged me along after them amidst shouting crowds of grooms and steaming horses. The ground was so slippery and the mud so thick that I could hardly walk. At one point I was so weary that I dropped behind and was lost among the crowd. In the distance I could hear the sound of a melodeon and a fiddle: I walked towards it, and there I saw an old man: the same old fiddler, but so transformed that I could hardly recognize him. He was dressed in a brown suit of homespun with tan shoes, his beard was trimmed, and he wore a broadbrimmed black hat. He and his companion were performing to a crowd in a shebeen. No sooner did he catch sight of me than he stopped playing and greeted me as if I had been his long-lost child, insisting on introducing me to the assembled herds and horse copers. I was hoisted on to the counter in full view of all, like the mascot of the fair, while the fiddler and the melodeon player went on playing. The bartender gave me 'bull's-eyes' to chcw and I enjoyed being the centre of the crowd's attention, when suddenly, I was caught by the hand and snatched away by someone who shouted: "You'll get tally-ho for this, Master Walter! Yer father's raisin' hell out there and your mother's havin' a fit; sure they're after searchin' the fair high and low: they're afraid ye were kidnapped by the tinkers." *

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We had been living in Galway for only two years when my father one morning received a letter which caused great concern to my parents. Later, I learned it was from the Viceroy offering my father the post of Resident Commissioner of National Education in Ireland. So back we went to Dublin. We children enjoyed the nomadic existence and the constant change of scene, but I remember the harassed face of my mother as she began again the weary task of taking the inventory and of packing my father's 7

Adagio large classical library into wooden cases. In Dublin, my father rented one o f the big old houses in Fitzwilliam Place adjoining the attractive Fitzwilliam Square. M y one vivid memory of the year w e spent in that house was the Dublin visit of Queen Victoria in the autumn o f 1900. A t the Leeson Street entrance o f our street a majestic city gateway had been erected in honour of Her Majesty's visit, and from our balcony w e had a clear view of the royal procession. The whole street was decorated with flags and bunting, and we children sat on the balcony which was draped with flags and brocade. So fascinated was I by the troops marching that the arrival o f the Queen in her open carriage came rather as an anticlimax. The little old lady, bobbing to and fro on her seat in her open carriage as she acknowledged the plaudits o f the multitude, bore no resemblance to a living queen, and I thought that she was a doll worked by springs. It was explained to me afterwards, however, that the Queen in her carriage had a mechanical device which made her seat bob to and fro, thus sparing her the fatigue o f moving her head continually. M y only other memory o f our residence in Fitzwilliam Place is a musical one. In the early morning o f that autumn I used to be awakened occasionally by the sound o f military music. M y bedroom was at the back o f the house looking on to the Canal and from the windows I saw the red-coated soldiers of the Dublin Fusiliers marching by to the tune o f The girl I left behind me, one o f the songs my mother used to sing. It was their song o f farewell, for they were marching to the boat on their way to the South African War. In the grey dawn the music sounded remote and forlorn, and I have never since heard that tune played without feeling the deepest melancholy. Although m y father's work was centred in Dublin he was determined to move out to Killiney as soon as possible, because its proximity to the sea would enable him to bathe all the year round and keep in health. A t last he discovered the house that suited him, and w e moved into Undercliife just before Christmas 1901. There we were to live for the next five years, the happiest years o f my father's life. Undercliife had been selected by my father because of its wonderful position. It was only separated from the sea by the Dublin, W i c k l o w and Wexford railway line, and a subterranean lane led under the track to the seashore. The house was built under the brow of Killiney Hill, 8

Childhood and the rambling garden descended terrace by terrace to the wall separating it from the railway line. It was an old Victorian house but with its ivy-covered walls and its turrets it assumed in my eyes all the mystery of a fairy castle. Here my father was able to indulge one of his hobbies, which was sailing. In those early days of 1902-1904, between my eighth and tenth year, he used to take me sailing with him, and he bought me a cork lifebelt which I wore over my jersey in case the boat capsized. Dublin bay, even in midsummer, was treacherous to the unwary yachtsman, and I have vivid memories of the sudden onslaught of squalls and my father's calmness in an emergency. Even when the sea was like glass, and our light craft, true to her name Water-Wagtail, flew gracefully over the waters, my father would suddenly shout: "Look ahead, a squall's coming." In the distance the sea was ruffled and fretted like shot silk, but I could see no sign of an impending squall. Then all of a sudden it would swoop down like a bird of prey on our frail wagtail and in an instant all was chaos: she would writhe and quiver like one in agony. On one occasion my father was caught unawares by one of these lightning squalls and momentarily lost control. The boat heeled over, throwing me into the swirling sea, and although I had on my cork belt I went right under and swallowed my fill of sea water. Before my father managed to pull me out of the water by my hair I had time to feel the prolonged agony of suffocation followed by resignation when I realized my helplessness in the face of doom. M y sailing expeditions brought me into touch with the fishermen of Killiney and Dalkey and I became close friends with a family called Homan, who fished for mackerel and herrings and lived in a group of cottages along the beach, a little distance from UnderclifFe. I used to spend many hours with the father of the family, a bronzed old man of the sea, who occasionally took me out fishing and told me stories of the waifs and strays who camped in caves along the coast. There was one big cave in the white rock which became for years a secret camp of mine where I used to retire by myself and lie on a rock, listening to the ebb and flow of the tide and reliving the tales old Homan had told me of the Wreckers along the coast who used to light false flares and lure the ships on to the rocks. That cave in the white rock gave me the taste for cave life—a taste which has lasted all my life, for even today there are moments when I long for the sensation of living inside a mountain. T o enter a cave is

9

Adagio t o enter the dream world and it gives me the sensation I used to feel as a child of five years when I was certain that all I had to d o was to say to myself: "I shall go inside m y head." Old H o m a n used to tell me that in such caves by the sea one could discover treasure stored by pirates in the past, but I wonder whether such tales did not spring f r o m a much more ancient tradition which is perpetuated in Celtic countries by the legends of the cave-dwelling fairies w h o spun gold in the early dawn and hid their treasure in the hide of a dappled ox. *

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In Killiney my uncles and aunts on m y mother's side began to influence our lives and in particular t w o of my mother's sisters. Looking back I feel that their importance was due to the perpetual comparison I used to make between their personalities and that of m y mother. M y mother, as the eldest sister, possessed far more dignity and sense of responsibility, but she lacked their gay temperament and insouciant u n conventionality. She had been a brilliant and hard-working student at the Alexandra College and was always interested in the things of the mind. It was as a Latin student that she met m y father, and even after marriage he was still in her eyes the Professor. As a result she set him upon a pedestal and strove always to raise herself intellectually to his level. In many cases a successful marriage is due to compensatory qualities which each partner discovers in the other, but in m y father and mother's marriage their unbroken happiness was due to their similarity of outlook. M y mother acquainted herself with all the c o m plexities of my father's academic or administrative w o r k and backed him up loyally to the best of her ability. She followed implicidy his counsels in her reading and mastered the intricacies of the Ministry affairs, Educational reforms, ministerial changes, Irish, English and European politics, so that she was always able to discuss them with him. This community of spirit developed in her a genuine taste for literature, which deepened as she grew older and she was never happier than when she was able to welcome scholars and writers to the house and bring them into contact with her o w n musical and artistic friends. In musical matters my father accepted m y mother's ruling without question but he was not deeply interested nor did he feel spiritual need for music. As time went on, however, m y mother's passion for music, which was inherited by her children, communicated itself to him. 10

Childhood M y mother, though she kept herself au courant with world affairs as well as literature, music and the arts, belonged to the old school as regards morality and conduct. Later there arose a perpetual battle royal between her and my sister Enid, the esprit fort of the family, over such subjects as bobbed hair, cosmetics, make-up and lipstick, but I believe the real cause of the antagonism between mother and daughter was the eternal struggle between Conservatism and Liberalism which in w o m e n in those days was expressed through the symbolism of face powder, cosmetics and hair fashions. M y mother's rigid principles belonged to the fin de siècle Anglo-Irish ascendancy, m y sister's modernism to the Shavian early twentieth century, and the tussle between the two was inevitable. M y father, unlike Jane Austen's M r Bennett, sometimes committed the fatal blunder of allowing himself to be dragged into the conflict, with the result that he was never sure on which side to impose his paternal authority. As head of house and paterfamilias, old-style, he was bound to uphold authority and back m y mother, but his logic and love of the esprit fort attitude inclined him towards my sister's point of view. In the end he was no more effective than Wagner's Wotan, when the latter tried with his old-fashioned spear to prevent the youthful Siegfried from crossing the fire barrier to reach the captive Briinnhilde. Nevertheless there was far less difference between Enid and m y mother than there was between the latter and my three aunts Ida, Helen and Elsie. Aunt Ida and Aunt Helen as girls were famed for their beauty, and the former, w h o was next to my mother in age, had classical features and beautiful white skin. O f all the family hers is the face that looms most insistently in m y memory because of its deep sadness. She wore a mask of sorrow and disillusion, yet no one in the family had a keener sense of ridicule or a broader vein of Rabelaisian humour. W h e n she was in one of her naughty, iconoclastic moods n o one escaped the lash of her tongue. From that mood she could pass straightway to the opposite—a mournful self-pitying mood—which reduced me to the nadir of depression, for no one had greater power to paint in sombre colours or draw logical conclusions that all was for the worst in the worst of all possible worlds. Helen was the most sparkling and irresistible of all the sisters. Helen, with her golden hair, her apple-blossom complexion and a springlike quality of gaiety and wistfulness, radiated happiness like an April morning. She completely transformed our lives. ii

Adagio In front of our house and hidden by tall trees a hillock became the centre of the magic realm created for us one day by Helen, our Fairy Queen. Once she had waved her wand, the place became for us like one of the mysterious raths in the Irish countryside haunted by leprechauns and I believed that it was there that the earliest crocuses, primroses and cowslips always sprouted in the spring. W e would follow her up there on sunny mornings and she would he on the grass under a tree telling us one fairy story after another, while she wove daisychains and crowns of primroses for her two nieces. Most of the stories she told us came originally from Grimm and Hans Andersen, but she enriched them with many extra details selected from her observation of nature and she would link the stories together as if she had been Scheherazade. Aunt Helen not only transformed our lives by her stories but she also became a disturbing force in our well ordered family for she had no trace of austerity, discipline or sense of duty, and she was temperamental and the slave of her emotions. In her early youth she had learnt the violin and was intuitively musical, but music made her sad and I remember at concerts how the singing of John McCormack, or the playing of Kreisler, would bring her to the verge of tears. When she was not in one of her emotional moods she could be mischievous, especially when with her sister Ida. She made a point of shocking my mother whom they both considered prim and proper, and they would also try their best at family meals to disconcert us in front of my father whom they both accused of being too puritanical. There was a great deal of leg-pulling in their banter, but my father generally fell into the trap and flew into a temper, blaming them for leading his children astray. When he exploded Aunt Ida would gaze at him, without saying a word, with an expression of mock gravity and Aunt Helen, her eyes sparkling with puckish mischief, would make fun of him and fool him unmercifully. His annoyance, however, was never given time to simmer for Helen would then cajole and humour as well as fool him, so that after a few minutes he would begin to purr and soon he was roaring with laughter at her jokes. My glamorous aunt too was able at an early age to initiate her little nieces into many of the mysteries of woman's life and background. She established a kind of ritual for them and I was allowed as a soupirant or a cavalier servente to have tantalizing glimpses but no more, for my aunt was very firmly convinced that boys should be boys and should 12

Childhood be kept ignorant of the intimate secrets, of cosmetics, powders, perfumes and les dessous troublants, so that they might not become blasé, effeminate and disinclined to woo romantically when they reached the age. Enid, however, would whet my appetite by her lyrical description of face creams, Parma violet sachets, beribboned camisoles, elaborate corsets and drawers of ninon trimmed with lace and frills, and I longed to be admitted to those early morning séances when the two little girls were allowed to play with her in bed. *

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Between my eighth and ninth year I developed a craze for locomotives, and when m y father or mother used to ask me what I wanted to be when I grew up I used to answer immediately, 'engine-driver'. Kit, one of the sons of our next-door neighbour William Hone, made me a present of his fine brass steam-engine and tender which was bigger than any model I had ever seen, and he helped me to make a model railway at the bottom of our garden. Building my garden railway became a more hazardous enterprise than I had ever imagined because I was continually threatened with invasion from beyond our frontiers. Over the wall at the bottom of the garden at UnderclifFe was a group of cottages beside the railway line, originally built for workers on the railway or else the remains of an old station. The family inhabiting the cottages were called Dowling and consisted of a number of boys and girls of varying ages w h o have faded from my memory, with the exception of the eldest, Paddy Dowling, a wild, shaggy-haired youth, at least three or four years older than I was, with w h o m my relations varied from vigilant neutrality or non-belligerancy to frontier skirmishes and even open warfare. I was at first attracted to Paddy, for he was a handsome youth, and I envied him his muscles and his great skill in climbing trees and finding birds' nests. He was, however, fierce and untamed and he loved to test his muscles as a wild boar does its tusks. When we met he would suddenly grapple with mc and throw me to the ground, pull me to my feet and throw me down a second time, all in the space of a few seconds. I soon learnt my lesson. W h e n he tried a third time I bit his hand savagely and threatened to brain him with a small golf putter which I had with me. W e soon became friends again, for secret expeditions with Paddy Dowling appealed to my sense of adventure, and also 13

Adagio because they were strictly forbidden by my mother and father, who did not want any of us to mix with the cottage children beyond the wall. I always regretted as a child that I was not so well versed as Paddy in the accomplishments that really counted in my life, such as climbing trees, tickling fish in a pool, snaring rabbits, driving a locomotive or working railway signals and points, and was compelled instead to waste the best part of the day working at arithmetic, Latin and English history. Even today after three score years I still feel a pang of regret that my early years were not spent in the untamed school of nature, learning how to live like an animal, strengthening my muscles like Paddy Dowling, so as to be able to stand my ground when attacked, and picking up what the Spaniards call gramatica parda—the earthy folk-culture which has been handed on through the ages. If my parents had only trained me first in the outdoor school of nature, following the traditional methods of peasant, tinker or caravan-dwelling Gypsy, before teaching me to read and write, my mind, trained already to observe, would have been more alert than the minds of those reared for a sedentary existence. My quarrels with Paddy increased as time went on, and the climax came when my railway line at the end of the garden was nearly complete. To my horror, one morning I discovered that the embankment I had constructed with infinite care had been trampled flat, a bridge had been broken and part of the track damaged. I knew at once that Paddy was the culprit and in a fury I went down to the wall and challenged him to fight. Fortunately on the day the battle took place I had with me my friends the two White boys, as well as Enid and Muriel. With Dick and Lylie to back me up I felt stronger and we advanced towards the wall, but we received a volley of stories and Paddy jumped on top of the wall hurling defiance. The stones made us retire for consultation. At that moment Barker, the gardener, who had been observing the conflict from the potting shed in the kitchen garden, let out a roar at Paddy and rushed towards him shouting: "The master will call the police and have the whole lot of you clapped in jail for trespassing." After Barker came out our two dogs, Gyp and Dan, who no sooner saw Paddy in our garden than they became our most effective allies. They always fought with system. Gyp, the red-haired Irish terrier, who was the most impetuous, always dashed on ahead and made first contact with the enemy and after him at a slower pace came Dan, the grey-haired Skye terrier, a ca'canny Scot, watching for his opportunity 14

Childhood to get an effective bite, once his partner had taken the edge off the enemy's attack; and it was he who completed mopping up operations by nipping the calves of those who were slow in crossing the frontier wall. In those days at Undercliffe my father used to invite guests to lunch on Sundays. One of the most frequent visitors was my godfather, Dr Mahaffy, who was a legendary figure. Many of my early memories of Dr Mahaffy are localized in Marino, the luxurious mansion in Ballybrack belonging to Lawrence Waldron, Dublin's fattest man. There Larky (as he was known to his friends) held a symposium every Sunday. In Dublin's social life of the first two decades of our century, Larky Waldron played the part of a local Dr Johnson, though I am sure the lexicographer would not have admitted the resemblance, and would have called him a mere dilettante. Larky was not, however, ashamed to be a dilettante, for he was above all an eminent stockbroker and man of substance, who spent his wealth in collecting Chippendale furniture, rare china and first editions. He loved to gather around his table the princes of the humanities and give them plenty of good food washed down by a Château claret of a good year and a fruity vintage port in return for their scintillating wit; but he also took a malicious pleasure in pulling down the Olympians from their rarer air to the matter-of-fact world of today. For this reason he would intermingle with the Olympians some of his practical bridge-playing friends from the Royal Irish Yacht Club. Their lives were spent in the noisy world of the Law Library, the Dublin Stock Exchange and Big Business, and their complete lack of what Waldron called 'guff', but which in our unregencrate Dublin days is called 'cod', would, he considered, act as a pleasing antidote to the souls from Olympus. Those tough habitués he would call by their Christian names, in contrast to the great men like Dr Mahaffy, whom he addressed as 'General'. Larky Waldron used to see me every morning on Killiney beach with my father and at first he took a fancy to me, because I had not reached the shyness of school age; I amused him by my uninhibited comments. He therefore frequendy invited me to attend those Trimalchian lunches, and I used to be put at a little side table whence I could observe the scene. As I listened from my vantage point, catching a phrase here and there in a chaotic jumble of voices, I learned to distinguish musically the voices of the principal speakers. There was the booming voice of our Gargantuan host making a spirited comment on some topic of the 15

Adagio day, then the lisping arrogant voice of the 'General* qualifying the statement and the piping voice of my father's dear friend, Professor Tyrrell, 'the Benign Doctor' as he was called, pointing out in querulous tones some fallacy in the 'General's' statement. Then followed a crescendo of strident cacophony mingled with the rattle of knives, forks and plates, for we were at the roast beef, Yorkshire pudding and horseradish sauce stage; but again I heard the booming voice of our host calling for the faithful Browne, the butler, whose duties ranged, so my father told me, from those of buder, valet, majordomo, to verifier of quotations. Several times during the meal he was sent to the library to look up the quotation which would enable our host to score off the Olympians. But in such a symposium, no matter how tempestuous the chorus of comment with its strophe and antistrophe, there would always come a moment of silence when Dr Mahaffy would monopolize the attention of all and draw from his immense store of knowledge of men and affairs. Meanwhile we had passed the ice pudding stage, when I in my corner scored a double helping, but I soon found it difficult to breathe for the air was redolent with cigar smoke. A litde light diversion was needed, so our host, stroking his patriarchal beard, solemnly boomed across to my father: "Does your boy practise mental arithmetic?" My father nodded assent, and then all attention was focussed upon me. A series of questions were fired at me in quick succession: I blushed, paused, stumbled, stammered and gave the wrong answer. The booming voice then announced to the company that I was no credit to the Resident Commissioner of National Education, that I was losing my originality as I grew older, and that I must have adenoids, which needed extirpation at the hands of the celebrated throat and nose specialist, Robert Woods, there present, who at once scrutinized me through his fierce eye-glass, making me think of the Ancient Mariner. I was saved from my confusion by Dr Mahaffy who would always take up the cudgels on my behalf. How I blessed Dr Mahaffy that day, for I knew that my father would give me a wigging as soon as we reached home, and I should henceforth be condemned to the daily torture of mental arithmetic at meals. Larky Waldron, in spite of his effusive geniality to us children, had undoubtedly sadistic and ogre-like tendencies and would not have minded devouring a child in order to have the laugh of its progenitor. 16

Childhood When my sister Enid and I used to be told to run down the road to meet Mr Waldron and his satellites as they plodded along on their morning walk towards Dalkey, litde did we realize that we were offered as victims to the Dublin Gilles de Rais. The tyrannical Waldron had imposed this morning constitutional upon his unwilling courtiers as a kind of digestive act of contrition after the mammoth Sunday banquets. Mopping his brow with his huge red and purple silk handkerchief, and brushing away the drops of sweat that glistened in his beard, he strode manfully paunch-bearing onwards. By his side pattered his faithful dog. Browne the butler had taken the train to Dalkey, where he would await his master's arrival and take the dog home to Marino. Larky was more genial than usual on Monday mornings because he had imposed his sacrifice to the lower bowel upon his disciples, and only a few had cried off and taken the Dublin train from Killiney station. Enid and I, in our ignorance, used to race joyfully down the road to meet the throng, and foolishly we would submit to the morning ordeal, which consisted in replying to a series of questions propounded solemnly by our tormentor for the benefit of the peripatetic expedition. If we did not give pert and smart answers to Larky Waldron we knew that we should eventually get into trouble at home, for our tormentor would mortify my father and wound his paternal ego at the Royal Irish Yacht Club dinner on Friday evening, or else at the symposium at Marino on the following Sunday, and he would return home in an irritable mood and take my mother to task for employing such inefficient teachers for her children. *

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I paid two visits to London in my childhood; the first was when I was barely five years of age, but I have few memories of that visit. My first impression of London was that of noise, jingling of harness and the all-pervading stench of horse dung. My sense of smell has always been acute and I remember places and countries by smells, but I am sure that my first impression of a London street was influenced by our mode of conveyance from Euston to Haverstock Hill. We rode in a hansom cab, and right in front of our feet rose the huge hindquarters of a brown horse that relieved itself copiously as it jogged along. We were staying with my father's mother whom we called 17

Adagio Grandma Starkie, to distinguish her f r o m m y D u b l i n grandmother, w h o m w e called just Grandma. Grandma Starkie used to live in C o r k w i t h m y grandfather, the Resident Magistrate, but in later years she suddenly was bitten b y wanderlust and w e n t o f f to Germany for a year w i t h Edith, her youngest daughter, and left the old man alone in C o r k . A f t e r m y grandfather's death she gave up living in C o r k and came to L o n d o n to be w i t h A u n t Edith w h o was devoting herself to painting. I became immediately very fond o f the latter, w h o did everything in her p o w e r to spoil me. She was the youngest o f m y father's family, and I remember her in those days as tall and brown-haired w i t h blue eyes like those o f one o f our pretty maids at home, but so full o f mischief that I wondered h o w she could be the sister o f m y austere father. In later years he told m e that Edith was the romantic member o f the Starkie family, and a m y t h sprang up a m o n g the Starkies about her l o v e affairs in Germany and the duels that were f o u g h t on her behalf w h e n she was an art student. She had also studied in Pahs and had k n o w n there the celebrated Marie de Bashkirtseff whose neurotic journal still attracts those w h o wish to recapture the atmosphere o f the Quartier Latin in the later years o f the nineteenth century. O n e day, w h e n I was w i t h A u n t Edith in her studio, she introduced m e to a strange wizened man with g o g g l e spectacles, w h o , she said, w o u l d tell me all about fairies and elves. I thought he was a goblin w h e n I saw him in his shabby blue suit and carpet slippers, hopping about the studio w i t h a palette on one arm, w a v i n g a paint-brush in his hand. After presenting me to the painter m y aunt said: "It's your turn, Arthur, to take m y nephew under y o u r w i n g . I ' m dead beat." I did not k n o w at that time that Arthur Rackham was already engaged to m y aunt and that they w o u l d get married in the following year, 1903. " Y o u may call h i m U n c l e Arthur already," said m y aunt as she handed the painter a shilling w h i c h he was to spend on a bun and a glass o f milk for me. M y n e w uncle took m e on many exciting journeys through London, but the most enjoyable days were those w h e n Arthur Rackham allowed m e to accompany h i m on a painting expedition. W e w o u l d sally forth early on a sunny morning and m y uncle, loaded w i t h all his paraphernalia o f paints, paint-brushes and easel, reminded me o f one o f the kobolds I had read about in A n d r e w Lang's Blue Fairy Book; but when w e were installed in Kensington Gardens and the painter had armed himself with his palette and his paint-brush, he became in m y eyes a 18

Childhood wizard who with one touch of his magic wand would people my imagination with elves, gnomes and leprechauns. He would make me gaze fixedly at one of the majestic trees with massive trunk and tell me about Grimm's fairy tales, which he had illustrated, and about the little men who blew their horns in elfland. He would say that under the roots of that tree the little men had their dinner and churned the butter they extracted from the sap of the tree. He would also make me see queer animals and birds in the branches of the tree and a little magic door below the trunk, which was the entrance to Fairyland. He used also to tell me stories of the primitive religion of man which, in his opinion, was the cult of the tree; but he made my blood run cold when he told me of the punishment meted out to those who injured trees. This consisted in impaling the culprit by the navel to the trunk and winding his guts round and round. And he told me to warn any little boy I noticed cutting the bark of a tree of the punishment that would be inflicted upon him for his barbarism. When Arthur Rackham brought me back to my grandmother's house after one of these expeditions the old lady would catechize me upon all that I had seen during the morning. She would test my powers of observation and deduce from my answers whether I should in my future life follow the path of William (my father) or my Uncle Robert. N o two personalities could be in greater antithesis than my Aunt Edith and Arthur Rackham. M y aunt quizzical, ironic, imaginative like the Irish; my Uncle Arthur prim, precise and very English in manner, in spite of his bohemianism and his elfish kinks. Aunt Edith always did her best to shock him. He knew that she expected him to react according to pattern, and he would do so, but he would cock his head like a jackdaw, and his eyes would twinkle through his goggles. *

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The great event of the following year, 1903, was the state visit of King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra to Dublin in the month of July. On this occasion the crowds in the streets gave a wildly enthusiastic reception to the royal pair, and everyone commented on the beauty and graciousness of Queen Alexandra, and the good humour of the King, who seemed to revel in all the pageantry which accompanied him on his triumphal cavalcade. The King, my father said,

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Adagio wished to be a King-peacemaker and break down the barriers of prejudice which had kept the English and the Irish so long apart. "What he wants," my mother added, "is to arrange for the Prince of Wales, his son, to spend a month every year in residence in Ireland, touring round the country, attending race meetings and entertaining his Irish subjects." " A noble ambition, but a misguided one," replied my father, "as his own chief secretary, George Wyndham, could tell him. Why, even the Dublin Corporation decided to boycott the official welcome." Nevertheless the pessimists were confounded in 1903. The King was prepared to meet the Irish half-way and, sympathizing as he did with poverty, he wished to give practical help to the distressed country. "What do the Irish want?" the King asked. "Education and security in their land," the Chief Secretary replied. " I shall come to Ireland," was His Majesty's reply, "with an Education Bill in one hand and a Land Bill in the other." With such promises to back up his graciousness of manner can we wonder that the royal visit produced a wave of popular enthusiasm that recalled the welcome given to James II in 1689? I vividly remember the review in Phoenix Park, which was the climax. Edward VII, as it was said at the time, 'drove a whole population into hysteria' and confounded the Cabinet and the Chief Secretary who described in his memoirs his own discomfiture. The rest of Ireland followed Dublin and with the exception of the revolutionary leaders, whose interests lay in fomenting disaffection, capitulated to Edward VII. *

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In the summer of the following year, 1904, my father took me with him on an extended tour of national school inspection through the counties of Cork and Kerry. I felt a certain amount of misgiving when I learnt that he had invited our tormentor, Larky Waldron, to join our party. We started off from Cork city on a sunny morning in a landau drawn by two horses, and I was perched on a seat facing our massive guest whose protruding paunch wobbled as our vehicle clattered over the cobble stones. While we drove along through the countryside my father and Mr Waldron, in the intervals of arguing on different matters, fired questions at me, and the latter tried to stimulate my faculties of 20

Childhood observation by asking me the names of birds, animals, plants and flowers. I was relieved when we halted at schools, for I was then left to my own devices and could talk to old T i m our coachman w h o thrilled me by his tales of ghosts, goblins and tinkers of which he had a limidess store. Grey-haired, red-faced, with a beard and mutton-chop whiskers, his voice fascinated me by its musical rise and fall, and he knew the secret of keeping me in suspense as he described the haunted houses we had passed on our journey towards Ban try. O n the first day, after the inspection had ended, m y father decided to have a picnic lunch by the lake of Gougane Barra, near the source of the river Lee. It is a lonely lake reflecting in its calm waters the lofty mountains, and on a litde wooded island joined to the mainland by a short causeway stands the shrine of St Finbar, Cork's patron saint, who, old Tim said, had exterminated the last of the Irish dragons. "But, Tim," said I, "was it not Saint Patrick w h o drove snakes and dragons out of Ireland?" "It must have been a Mayo man told you that tale, son; our Saint down here is Saint Finbar who founded the monastery by this very lake, aye, and after he had slaughtered the fire-spitting dragon he plodded his way on Shanks's mare through the pass of Kemenagh— the pass of the deer yonder, and through the woods of Gearagh down to the marshes of the river Lee where he founded our great city of Cork." I was often interrupted in my talks with old Tim, for my father would call me to join them when inspecting a class of my age and, after introducing me to the boys and girls, he and M r Waldron would fire history questions at me, and I blushed for shame when I was unable to answer and felt indignant when I saw the class making goggle-eyes at me, as if I had been some strange animal on show. After county Cork we visited county Kerry. There, too, old Tim satisfied m y curiosity and answered m y questions about the shee or fairies, w h o m I imagined as tiny beings, like the elves and goblins of Grimm's and Hans Andersen's fairy tales. During our drive to Killarney he argued with me about them: "You're wrong in thinking them small. M y mother, God rest her soul, told me she had glimpses of them. O n one occasion when she was watching a hurling match in Dingle a stranger said to her: 'I can show you a finer sight.' So saying he handed her a ring, and as she looked through it she saw fairy hurlers playing a game. They were, she said, tall, strapping fellows with golden hair that shone in the sun, and every S A O—0

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Adagio one of them looked like a king. Right noble they were, surely, for weren't they of the Tuatha De Danaan who live in eternal youth." After some days at Killarney we made for Tralee, where we visited m y mother's aunt, the Reverend Mother of the convent of Mercy, w h o m we all called Aunt Louis. O n the way we halted at the little t o w n of Killorglin, at the head of Dingle Bay. It was fair day and the main street was crowded with carts of every description. " W e ' r e in luck," said old Tim, "the Puck Fair is on." While m y father and Larky Waldron went off to see the priestmanager of the local school, old Tim drove the landau to the central square which was crowded with shouting people. He pointed with his whip to a high platform on top of which stood a white billy-goat gaily bedecked with ribbons presiding over the fair. He was chained by the horns and was busily munching cabbages which lay in heaps around him. " T h e Puck is the King of the August Fair, sonny, and here he presides for the three days which are called Gathering Day, Fair Day and Scattering Day. Today is the last day and this evening the crowd will bear the Puck triumphantly back to the bridge yonder." I could hardly hear Tim speaking as m y ears were deafened by the commotion of the crowd and the raucous shouts of the horse-dealers and cattlemen. Old Tim was evidently longing to meet some of his old friends, for he hinted that he had a raging thirst on him, and he said he would give me a nice botde of lemonade if I came along with him to a big public house at the corner of the square. I knew my father would be kept busy for a couple of hours with the school manager, and I was so tempted by Tim's invitation that I went with him. As soon as we entered the bar he was greeted by a group of horse-dealers carrying long whips w h o slapped him on the back, shouting his name. I had never seen him so gay and excited, and I watched the pot-boy serving them tall tumblers of black foaming porter. Old Tim, however, didn't forget me, for a moment later a young barmaid brought me a glass of lemonade and a pink cream cake. While I was happily munching and drinking I heard through the noise the distant sound of music and the tune was vaguely familiar. Jumping down off my stool I made m y way through the throng into an inner snug where a fiddle and a melodeon were playing the Rakes of Mallow, a tune I knew very well. T o m y joyful surprise it was my old friend of Galway days, Shamus the tinker, but wilder and more unkempt than I had ever seen him. 22

Childhood Although I stood facing him he did not recognize me and went on with his frantic fiddling. His hair had become greyer, his haggard face more wrinkled, and his dingy clothes hung loose on him. When he paused for breath I said to him: "Shamus, have you forgotten Galway days when you played the fairy reel for me?" The fiddler gave a start and peered at me shortsightedly, then a grin spread over his face as he shouted: "Sure I'd sooner forget my own name. Is it forget you? Never. Didn't they say at the fair in Athenry that I was after kidnappin' you and handin' you over to the tinkers? Come with me, my child, and I'll play you some tunes, but first o f all meet my friend Shaun, the best melodeon player in the West." As we stood talking by the counter I noticed a large group o f wild-looking men nearby who were tossing off large glasses o f whiskey and arguing fiercely. Most of them were ginger-headed and freckled, with coarse brutal faces and shifty eyes, and so strange looking that I thought they were foreigners. Even their clipped speech sounded like some language from beyond the seas. " W h o are they?" I asked Shamus. "Those are tinkers, too; tinkers, or rivet folk. They belong to the Coffey clan; they think themselves the lords of creation because this is the Puck Fair which the Coffeys and their tribe have attended since the dawn o f the world." "They frighten me, Shamus." "Don't you be afraid, my boy. They wouldn't touch a hair o f your head as long as you're with Shamus. Sure I myself am related to the Coffeys. Do you see that red-haired crippled fellow in the corner over there with a stick in his hand. That is my cousin Joe, who knows more tinker tunes than I do meself." He then brought me up to Joe who made me sit beside him and the two men, after swigging a pint of porter, led me out into a lane at the back o f the house, and Shamus began to play tunes for me. Then began an amusing contest between the two fiddlers. Each wanted to show me that he knew more magic tunes than the other. "Some o f the tunes I'll play you have to do with plants," said Shamus as he picked a sprig o f foxglove from the side o f the lane, telling me it was called a fairy cap or Lusmore. "In my county of Tipperary, the golden vale o f Ireland," he continued, "we tell a story o f a hunchback, who was called Lusmore 23

Adagio because he always wore a sprig of the fairy cap on his hat, an' he trampin' the roads. One night as he passed by the ouT rath near his home he heard a strange distant music and voices sin gin' the words: Da Luatt da Mort, da Luatt da Mort, da Luan da Mort (Monday and Tuesday, Monday and Tuesday, Monday and Tuesday). The voices came from within the rath and Lusmore at first was fascinated by the quaint tune, but as it went on and on he began to get tired o' hearin' the same again and again, so he joined in, singin' the words agus da Caideen (and Wednesday, too). On he continued singin' the Gaelic words and always ending the tune with the cadence agus da Caideen. So delighted were the shee when they heard the cadence and the extra words that they whisked Lusmore into the rath and made him dance in the moonlight, praisin' him above all musicianers. And Lusmore became as light as a bird, and as he capered about like a goat he saw his hump drop off his shoulders. Then he became dizzy, and down he fell into a deep sleep. When he awoke the sun was shinin', the birds were singin', an' he was lying at the foot of the rath. There wasn't a sign of a hump on him, and he was dressed in a brand-new suit of clothes." " N o w remember the followin' tune, my child," said Shamus, "for it is the luckiest I could give you." da

Lu-an da Mort, da

Lu-an da Mort, da

Lu - a n da Mort a gus da

(jrtndaMar^da Uj-an da Mort, da Lu-an da Mort o-gus da

Cm-iten,da

Cai-deen

While Shamus was playing, Joe listened impatiendy, grunting and banging with his stick on the ground. "Hand me that fiddle," he cried when his companion stopped, "I'll play the young gendeman a better one. Do you know what a banshee is?" he asked me eagerly. "She's a fairy," I said, "and her wailing song foretells death, and she is sometimes seen drawing her comb through her hair." "Well, here's an old banshee song," said the lame tinker, stumbling to his feet. He seized the fiddle and played:

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Childhood "Don't tell me, son," said Shamus, "that your family name begins with O or Mac. If that is so, 'tis mighty poor service Joe has done you, for anyone of the tribes of O and Mac who hears that tune will die as sure as night follows day." "I'm not afraid of it, Shamus," I replied. "I'm not an O'Brien, O'Flaherty, nor a MacDonnell or Mac Egan." While we were talking I heard shouts coming from the bar, and the sound of broken bottles and glasses. "The Coffeys are beginning as usual to raise hell in there," said Shamus. "I must be off with the boys," said Joe, hobbling into the public house rapidly. "Joe is a Coffey, so he must join in the fun," said Shamus, "every Puck Fair it is customary for the tinkers of the Coffey tribe to run a-muck in Killorglin. It is their ancient privilege, and if you'd wait until the evening after the goat procession starts you'd see the peelers drivin' them tinkers out of the town. An' they'll all go out together in their carts with their women and their donkeys and their pots and pans, and they'll raise their fists and bawl out blisterin' curses at the town. But if I were you son, I'd give that bar a wide berth; it's no place for the likes of you. Follow me." I followed him down the lane and out into the central square. As we were pushing our way through the crowds that were milling below the platform, where the white goat still presided in lonely state, I heard my name called, and I saw old Tim waving to me. Fortunately when I returned to the landau my father and Larky Waldron were so deeply immersed in a discussion on the significance of goats in Greek Tragedy and fertility magic that they did not notice my absence. My father said that Puck was a symbol of fertility and good luck. *

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As I was becoming too undisciplined at home my parents decided to send me to school. They accordingly sent me to Aravon school in Bray, which was well situated and had playing fields in the outskirts of the town. I was delighted to go to school, and it was with a light heart that I set off on the first day with my satchel on my back. Enid accompanied me to Killiney station, where we were joined by my friends the White boys who had already been enrolled as pupils. Some of my most vivid memories of my time as a day-boarder 25

Adagio concern adventures on that short train journey between Killiney and Bray when we made confounded nuisances ofourselves, especially on the return journey in the afternoon when the train was full of tired business men returning to Dublin. W e shouted, we let off squibs and slap-bangs in the carriage, frightening the lives out of the old ladies, we flung trailers from the window of one compartment to the window of the next carriage and floated balloons. Fortunately my friendship with the bearded old station-master at Killiney and Ned the signalman secured me a certain amount of immunity, but there were many complaints about us. M y own career at that school ended a year later in 1905, as the result of an accident. One day, during the morning break between classes, I found myself involved in fisticuffs with some other boys, and during the affray, which was fast and furious, I received a kick on the head. I felt stunned at first, but revived, and tried to carry on as usual. An hour later at the dinner in hall I began to feel a violent throbbing pain in my head and I could hardly see. The school doctor diagnosed severe concussion, and ice-packs were applied to my throbbing brow. When I could be moved, my parents brought me back to Undercliffe where I remained an invalid all the summer, for when I recovered from the concussion I had exceptionally severe and prolonged attacks of my chronic complaint, bronchial asthma. M y closest friend during those summer months was our family physician, Dr Wright, who visited me daily. N o doctor I have ever met had a better bedside manner, and to see him arrive, fat, rosy-faced, debonair, always cheery, was like a whiff of fresh air and a tonic to the patient. M y general despondency was not due merely to ill-health but also to the feeling that I had disappointed my parents by my lack of stamina and my failure to make, as my father said, the grade at Aravon. Now that I was confined to my room he kept impressing upon me the necessity of making up for the lost time and striving to keep abreast of my own age. As he was always drastic in his methods of dealing with an emergency he agreed with Laurence Waldron that what was wrong with me was that I needed to have my adenoids and tonsils removed. I was, therefore, sent into town to Robert Woods, the ear-nose-throat specialist in Merrion Square for a look-over. I accompanied my mother in fear and trembling, but my fears vanished like magic, for the worthy specialist, whose rugged exterior concealed a heart of gold and who 26

Childhood knew that a timid boy will be as brave as a lion if he is only encouraged and put on his mettle by a few kind words, said at the end of his examination that I was a stout-hearted youngster and a credit to my pater. So elated was I by his words of praise that I would have willingly faced three operations, and I returned to Undercliffe eager to show my father that I was as tough as the Spartan boy with the fox. The operation took place in Undercliffe, and my memories of that day are associated with the Ballade in G minor of Chopin played by the newly arrived French governess, Mademoiselle Cora, which I heard in the distance as I lay on the schoolroom table waiting for Dr Wright to give me ether. She was destined to play a dominant role in our lives during the following years.

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MADEMOISELLE As my father was engaged in reforming education in Ireland he thought he had better start by reforming his own family. Many complaints from neighbours were retailed faithfully by nursemaids and governesses to their mistresses, to the effect that Mrs Starkie's litde girls were getting out of hand, and these complaints were magnified in the Killiney whispering gallery and eventually percolated through to my parents who gave orders that a well-trained French governess should be brought direct from France to take charge of the children, and one day Mademoiselle Léonie Cora arrived at Undercliffe from Paris. Her arrival in our household caused unprecedented commotion, for it was the invasion by France undiluted. As a rule French governesses in their earlier lives have some link or other with England, which prepares them for the society they will find in the neighbouring island—L'île Inconnue as it was called in an amusing book by Pierre de Coulevain. Mademoiselle Cora, however, knew next to nothing about England and the litde she did know did not impress her, but o f Ireland she had read that it was called la verte Erin and was more primitive and Catholic than Protestant England. She resolved at once that Ireland should be civilized by France. She was small, sallow-complexioned, with black hair and fiery eyes, and when she became excited, which was on an average o f every three minutes, an invisible electric battery seemed to set her in violent motion and her eyes would sparkle, her hands weave gestures and her speech become spasmodic. Even my old friend Heffernan, the jarvey, as he handed down her exotic collection o f trunks and band-boxes o f various sizes, looked at her in blank amazement. My mother tried to get a word in but Mademoiselle, after giving my three sisters a kiss on each cheek that resounded like a smack, raised her hand, crying out dramatically: "Quel voyage, Madame, c'est à ne pas y croire: après cette sacrée traversée je suis à bout de forces—oh, là là!" She disappeared gesticulating to her room

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Mademoiselle followed by my three sisters, who crept along on tiptoe as if they had seen a ghost. They listened in rapt attention to the sounds that came from within, as Mademoiselle unpacked and titivated herself: the banging of boxes, splashing of water, energetic tooth-washing, prolonged gargling and the pulling of chains, and the humming of French songs. My father and mother, though they were nonplussed and reduced to silence by the volubility of Mademoiselle, capitulated to her after the first meal in the dining-room. My father as he listened, trying desperately to remember his school French, understood only a word here and there in her excited harangues, but he felt he was getting full value for his money, and henceforth his daughters and, perhaps, even his son, would willy-nilly have to absorb French. This would redound to their advantage at school. Mademoiselle Leonie Cora, having won her first victory over our parents, proceeded to follow up with a series of minor engagements, which left her dictator of the whole household. Her tactics resembled Napoleon's by their lightning rapidity and ruthless efficiency. Her hawk's eyes warned her that one of the chinks in my mother's armour was the household laundry, always an expensive item in domestic economy. Mademoiselle's control over the children's washing was the thin edge of the wedge which she opened in my mother's domestic economy: by a light skirmish against Ellie, the housemaid, a raw young convent-bred girl she captured the bed linen; by a frontal attack on the parlourmaid Kate Hyde she captured the table linen. This was a quasiPyrrhic victory, for it brought Mademoiselle the undying enmity of an influential servant and one who was in league with the cook, our beloved Lizzie O'Beirne, a household institution, who had nursed us as babies. At the moment, however, Mademoiselle's star was in the ascendent, and she now kept the keys and controlled the linen of the household with all the austerity of a French housewife who knows what it had cost her parents to dower her married sisters with the full complement of sheets, towels, petticoats, chemises and pantalons, laceedged and plain. Once Mademoiselle had settled the household economy on a basis of efficiency, which it never had possessed before, she devoted herself to the education of my three sisters, and here she outdid even my father by the drastic efficiency of her methods. At first I did not come within her ken as I was kept hard at work at my school subjects by an old ex-National school teacher called James Waldron who used to give me 29

Adagio lessons daily in the turret off the dining-room, or in the summer-house when the weather was fine. M y mother, however, insisted that every morning, after my Latin lesson with her, I should do French exercises for Mademoiselle. She also began to take me in hand and impress upon me the need for opening m y mind to other subjects as well as French. At first I tried to take a superior attitude, owing to my three years' seniority to Enid, but she discovered many ways of breaking down m y Anglo-Saxon complacent superiority. She fascinated me by her piano playing. U p to the time of her arrival I had always been bored by the piano, for I associated it with the few lessons I received from m y sister's prim governess, Miss Allen. Mademoiselle Cora, after giving me an hour's grammar lesson and dictation, showing that I had sixty mistakes in a short passage, would play pieces by Chaminade and Chopin for me. Her playing had all her defects as well as her qualities: her touch was hard, and when she became excited she would press down the loud pedal and bang the instrument, with the result that the old squinteyed tuner of Pigott's piano warehouse became one of our most familiar visitors, and after replacing a broken string he would say to me, laughing hoarsely: "Poor piano! I've never known one so downtrodden!" Mademoiselle, however, was very proud of her execution, and her methods of teaching were thorough and basic. She made m y sisters sing their solfège regularly every morning, and at all hours the schoolroom upstairs echoed and re-echoed with scales. She used in the evenings to play special pieces for us, and I always wanted Chopin. I associate with m y earliest impressions of music as an art those few Chopin works, which she used to play over and over again, the Waltz in C sharp minor, the impromptu in F sharp minor, and especially the Ballade in G minor. And during the period of convalescence my favourite enjoyment was to lie in bed and listen to her playing Chopin, for I always associated the melodies of certain of his works with my mood which, at the time, was loneliness and despondency. W i t h her rapid intuition she soon guessed the cause of my depression. It was unnatural she said. "Ici ça sent trop le renfermé, il faut se secouer et avoir du courage". She would then chase me out into the garden and challenge me to a game of croquet or tennis, and I noticed that she wore very tight clothes which showed the curves of her plump figure, and Enid so amused me, by her description of h o w she and Muriel had to lace her tightly into her whalebone corset, that I used to play peeping T o m 30

Mademoiselle and watch her at her toilette. It was at night before she went to bed that I had the best opportunity of observing her en intimité, for she never closed her door altogether, and when she slipped on her pink night-dress she would sit for a long time in front of the looking-glass with her hair in long plaits tied with pink bows, and she would kneel down and say her prayers before leaping lightly into bed. I would then feel ashamed of my eavesdropping, and longed to beg her pardon. Her life seemed far removed from ours and yet so much more definite and complete. *

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My father in his early married life was so full of health and energy that he continued to bathe all the year round at Killinery and to ride his bicycle into Dublin every morning, though occasionally, when pleasant company was forthcoming, he would walk to Dalkey and catch the train into Westland Row station. As time went on, however, and his official duties increased, he could not afford the time in getting to his office, and there was also the problem of arranging for the schooling of his children, so after much deliberation he moved in towards Dublin to a house called Somerset, near the village of Stradbrook, about a mile and a half from the town of Blackrock on the sea. Everything was on a much bigger scale than at UnderclifFe. The house stood in its own gardens and there was a gate lodge and a short avenue. The spacious drawing-room opened out into a fine conservatory full of palms and flowering plants, and this led to a series of greenhouses stretching across the garden. There were tennis courts and lawns decorated with flower-beds and herbaceous borders, an oldfashioned high-walled fruit and vegetable garden, stables, poultry yard, and creamery, and several acres of grazing land for horses and cattle. Thus in 1905, when I was eleven years of age, began the five Sybaritic years of my father's life, years of the Edwardian era, which as I recall them today seem to belong to another world. As I was at the moment in delicate health my family arranged for me to continue work with my old teacher, Waldron, and Mademoiselle was to give me daily tuition in French. During our lessons she questioned me searchingly about religion and soon discovered that this had been completely neglected. I knew a good deal about the Bible, because

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Adagio my father had given me as a small boy a fine illustrated edition full of reproductions of the pictures by the great masters, and I went to Mass regularly on Sundays but my parents had never, since my early childhood, given me any systematic religious instruction. Mademoiselle was the first to voice her indignation: "C'est une honte! Vous ne savez pas même vos prières." She told my mother that I should be prepared for my first confession, Holy Communion and Confirmation without more delay. My mother's aunt, Reverend Mother of the Convent of Mercy in Tralee, Co. Kerry, advised her to have me prepared by the nuns of the Convent of Mercy near Blackrock where Mother Keenan, the Reverend Mother, was the sister of a predecessor of my father, Sir Patrick Keenan. The Convent of Mercy stood amid trees in Carysfort Park, and near the entrance was a small lake with two white swans gliding gracefully over its glassy surface. The Reverend Mother after asking affectionately for news of my parents assigned as my teacher an old nun, Sister Michael, who, I can gratefully say, presented me with a golden key which unlocked the secret door to the world of the spirit. She did not merely teach me my catechism, but spoke to me for hours of the saints, especially of St Francis, and she read to me passages from the Fioretti or Little Flowers and spoke to me of the music of the soul, showing how it corresponded with the measured harmonies of the spiritual universe. Whenever I think of Carysfort Convent I smell incense mingled with the scent of lavender and beeswax and I recall the nuns singing at Benediction, the priest raising the thurible to the Blessed Sacrament, the visit after my lesson to the sacristy where she would open drawer after drawer full of lavender-scented vestments, explaining the significance of the different colours, and finally the long walk through interminable corridors over highly polished wooden floors. Her teaching was supplemented by long sessions with the Reverend Mother who used to talk to me of St Teresa and her voices, and show me the pictures of the walled city of Avila and the Convent of the Incarnation outside the walls, where the saint at fifty years of age began to hear the insistent voices urging her to undertake the reform of the Carmelite Order. St Teresa, one of the most practical women who ever lived, was the embodiment of Martha as well as Mary, for although she was an administrator of genius like the former and used to say that she found God very easily among the pots and pans, she had what she called intellectual visions when she was conscious that Jesus Christ 32

Mademoiselle stood by her side, although she saw Him rather with the eyes of the body, not of the soul. M y relations with Mademoiselle varied as capriciously as a day in April, and there were plenty of showers. As the eldest in the family I was very conscious of my prerogatives, and at first I resented any assumption of authority on the part of m y sisters' governess. Mademoiselle knew that I was in some respects outside her jurisdiction, but she also knew that once she interested me in any subject I would sink m y absurd boyish pride and come within her orbit. Some mornings when she got up in a bad humour a stormy atmosphere prevailed and my sisters would suffer. O n such days I tried to keep out of the way, but this was difficult for Mademoiselle, having a keen sense of drama, preferred the French explosive method of relieving her feelings to the English one of bottling up her temper. O n one occasion, a few days before making my first Communion, we had one of our habitual skirmishes, and I abused her roundly. She retired deeply offended and our relations were broken off. I was ostracized, but Enid and Muriel were employed as envoys and they informed me that I was considered to have behaved like a voyou and I was required to make an apology. At the moment I was suffering the pangs of remorse, for Mademoiselle possessed all the arsenal of feminine wiles and made me every hour more conscious of the enormities of my past behaviour. Nevertheless m y pride and my obstinacy would not allow me to capitulate, and so the schoolroom became like a group of neutral frontier states and Mademoiselle and myself, like two hostile powers, forever threatening one another, did all we could to attract to our side the wavering neutrals, my three sisters, by cajoleries and bribes. Enid's attitude was one of non-belligerancy rather than neutrality, for she secretly sided with me but, fearing lest she might be the next victim, she temporized and acted as go-between. As for Muriel and Chou Chou, they were frankly neutral, and accepted bribes from both parties. The climax came when Enid, the morning before my Communion, brought me from Mademoiselle a little blue casket containing rosary beads of mother-of-pearl and silver—a costly gift which must have swallowed up a considerable amount of her hard-earned savings. M y pride and my self-respect were shattered in an instant, for Mademoiselle had heaped coals of fire upon my head. Enid negotiated the peace and the tearful reconciliation was followed by embraces all round. 33

Adagio On the following morning my mother and father accompanied me to Carysfort Convent, and I was given a separate prie-dieu in front of the pew reserved for my parents, Mademoiselle, Enid and Muriel. Even today I look back with a pang to that morning, when for one instant I felt as if my soul had fled from my body to be united with God, leaving me dazed and rapt in a kind of trance. All things I then forgot, My cheek on Him who for my coming came, All ceased, and I was not, Leaving my cares and shame Among the lilies, and forgetting them.

So concentrated had I been in my preparation during the Mass that when, at the Domine, non sum digttus, Sister Michael came to lead me to the altar rails, I saw her as in a dream, for I felt as if all my faculties had suddenly been suspended, and the voice of the priest as he administered the sacrament reached me from a great distance as I knelt at the rails with closed eyes waiting for the supreme moment. When I joined the family outside the chapel I felt as if I had awakened from a refreshing sleep. My face was fanned by the morning breeze as we walked in the garden under the trees, and I saw the two white swans gliding gracefully over the sunlit lake. I felt as if my inner happiness illuminated all our company—my mother who seemed to be so close to me that I could read my own joy in her eyes, my father who radiated bonhomie and good-fellowship, and Enid who gazed at me inquiringly with her dreamy blue eyes. The nuns filled our plates with dainties of all kinds, for a first Communion breakfast in a convent is a joyous feast to which the nuns invite not only the family of the communicant but also the priest who had officiated. Among our company the gayest of all was Mademoiselle Cora. Already there was a strong bond between us, for I felt that all along she had been the guiding spirit, encouraging me to persevere and strengthening my will which hitherto in my life had been fitful and vacillating. Mademoiselle Cora's influence over our family grew day by day, and as my father had a 'Mr Bennett complex' he welcomed anyone with a personality strong enough to keep his volatile children in check and prevent them from worrying him, when he wanted to get on with his Aristophanes. 34

Mademoiselle As the months passed my father and mother had plenty of opportunity to study the personality of Léonie Cora with all its complexities, but they closed their eyes and their ears to many of her vagaries in the interests of peace. Mademoiselle thus had carte blanche for her reform of the entire Starkie family. She made our parents take out a subscription to a French weekly for children called Mon Journal which stimulated our imagination as well as our French, and gave us many a theme for discussion round the schoolroom fire. She loved to read out to us the books by La Comtesse de Ségur in La Bibliothèque Rose series, especially Le General Dourakine, and I remember with what glee she described the sardonic general's method of punishing the sinister Madame Papowski, by making her fall through a trap-door in the floor which imprisoned the upper part of her body while down below the general flogged the helpless baroness sur le derrière. Mademoiselle Cora had sadistic tastes and her favourite books for children were those which described the corporal punishment meted out to naughty children, such as the Le Mauvais Génie and Les Malheurs de Sophie. Our favourite book in those days was Madame de Ségur's Mémoires d'un Ane, and I remember vividly the tone and inflections of Mademoiselle's voice as she described the death of the girl who is poitrinaire, and the reflections of Cadichon the donkey: her voice would become richer and warmer, her eyes would sparkle and fill with tears. She was an ardently patriotic Frenchwoman as well as a Parisian, and as we listened to her inspired reading of Alfonse Daudet's Contes du Lundi we grew not only to love France and Paris, but even various districts of the city which she described so graphically. On one occasion, when I was ill and sunk in the deepest depression owing to the recurring spasms of asthma, she sat by my bed and read out to me by the hour Sans Famille by Hector Malot—a book which became for me, ever after, a symbol of France as seen through the eyes of the cheminots and clochards on the roads, theforains and the Romanichels in their roulottes and caravans, the canotiers in their barges on the canals, the free life of the wanderers from fair to fair. Our exotic French governess roused contradictory reactions in the different members of the family. Whereas by her ménagère outlook and rigid sense of discipline and le devoir she awakened the nomadic streak in my character which lay dormant; in my sister Enid she provoked rebelliousness and obstinacy. In me she encouraged independence and the desire to strike out by myself, and as I did not really come under 35

Adagio her jurisdiction I was rarely forced to have tussles with her. She could, in fact, become a useful ally in differences I might have with my parents. Enid, on the other hand, was under her ferule, and felt obliged to fight step by step for what she considered her independence: hence the punishments that fell to her lot and the innumerable French verbs she had to copy out as a penalty for arguing. M y father was responsible for making Shakespeare familiar to all the boys and girls in the National schools throughout Ireland, and there was n o more efficacious method for a headmaster of a school to win his favour than by getting his students to perform a Shakespeare play. At home he established the custom of reading out to us plays on Sunday evening, and thus at an early age we even became familiar with some of the more difficult plays, such as King Lear, The Tempest and The Winter's Tale. I often went off on my own to see the Shakespeare plays, but I enjoyed them more when I went with Mademoiselle and m y two sisters. Generally we went to matinées, and we were given enough money to buy upper circle seats, which necessitated waiting in queues. Mademoiselle, who was a Parisian, had invented a special skill in manoeuvring which always landed her at the head of the queue. This skill consisted in drawing up beforehand a plan of operations, and of employing the ruthless tactics of a veteran of the Grande Armée. She ordered the two little girls, who were small and as agile as cats, to weave their way through those ahead, crawling under their legs if necessary, then to dash up the stairs ahead of the queue and to expand in size once they reached the front seats. In this way they would keep a place for Mademoiselle who was fighting a rearguard action, pushing her way and brandishing her umbrella as she strove to reach her two charges. Knowing that we should have a long wait she had provided a regular commissariat consisting of ham and beef sandwiches, cakes, sweets, fruit and bottles of lemonade. Every play of Shakespeare was for Mademoiselle un frisson nouveau. The tragedies made the greatest appeal to her dramatic character. To see Othello with her was a shattering experience, for she lived every moment of the tragedy with such intensity that her questions became exteriorized in excited gestures and comment which at times worried her neighbours. Iago was a 'scélérat' from the start—'un sale type'. OfDesdemona, 'quelle pureté d'âme, pauvre petite!' When we came to the fourth act and Othello's downfall Mademoiselle became inarticulate, her tears began to flow and they continued uninterruptedly up to the end of the play. As she wiped 36

Mademoiselle her eyes with her little lace handkerchief she said: "Comme cest beau! oh, how happy I am with Shakespeare!" *

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The most exciting theatrical experience of my youth took place in my thirteenth year when J . M. Synge's play The Playboy of the Western World was produced for the first time at the Abbey Theatre in January 1907. It was my first visit to the Abbey Theatre, and Paddy Tobin, whom at school we all considered an expert in theatrical matters as he had acted with his three cousins, the Wogan Brown girls (all of them excellent actresses, and one of them, Dorothy, so vivacious that she appealed to Bernard Shaw as the ideal embodiment of Dolly in You Never Can Tell), promised to bring me round to the Green Room to introduce me to Lady Gregory. "Tonight," he said, when I met him at Nelson's Pillar, " m y father says there will be the hell of a row as the newspapers have been publishing attacks on the play, saying that it is an insult to Ireland." When w e reached Abbey Street we found a great crowd assembled in the streets adjoining the theatre. Inside, the atmosphere was electric and there was suspense in the air, as though everyone in the auditorium expected a political revolution to break out. Instead of waiting quietly in their seats for the play to begin, many gathered together in groups talking excitedly, and I was struck, too, by the varying types I saw in the audience. In addition to the usual middle-class theatre-goers, there were numbers of workers, and here and there gentlemen and ladies in evening dress, and young men whose tousled hair and beards proclaimed them initiates of the Dublin Latin quarter. A wizened old man sitting next to me pointed out the literary and political celebrities as they took their places. "See that long thin rake of a fellow, that's Best the Librarian arguing with Dr R. M. Henry, one of the Belfast HomeRulers. Next but two to him is a fine upstanding man with a beard: that's AE, our Irish Buddha! Over there by himself is the victim of the evening, John Millington Synge. Every one of the Irish intellectuals are present, but it's not the play they've come to see, but to spy on one another." I longed to ask the old man for an explanation for his cryptic words, but just then the lights dimmed and I heard a dismal gong sounding the knell as it seemed to me, and the curtain rose. Although I tried very hard to concentrate upon the play it was 8 A O—D

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Adagio impossible to hear the actors after the first few minutes because of the interruptions and disturbances which took place all over the auditorium. W h e n these reached a climax, one of the company advanced to the footlights and tried to appeal for silence. He said, as far as I could make out, that anyone in the audience w h o did not like the play was at liberty to get up and leave, but nobody left. Instead, pandemonium broke loose, and m y wizened neighbour, w h o m I had considered an inoffensive old man, jumped to his feet shouting: "Clear the decks! D o w n with Willie Fay!" And his shouts were taken up in chorus by the gallery. Then came shouts f r o m the pit below and many started to sing the revolutionary song, The West's asleep. While all this rumpus was going on the actors and actresses on the stage continued valiantly to act their parts, but they were puppets; I could see their Hps move but hardly a word reached me. Paddy Tobin and I recognized some friends w h o were from Trinity College. They had come at the request of Lady Gregory's nephew with other students to support the play. Seeing that the disturbances increased in the second act they thought the best way in which they could show their support of the play would be by singing God Save the King in chorus. Even today, when I look back at that fateful night in the history of the Irish National Theatre, I cannot imagine h o w such a crazy notion as singing the British National Anthem could have entered their heads. Instead of pouring oil on troubled waters they enraged the Irish patriots in the pit by singing what the latter considered a political song. Paddy Tobin and I enjoyed ourselves immensely in the hullabaloo. Through the tempest of shouting and hissing we heard cries 'Sinn Fein Amhain and 'kill the author', and from our seats at the side of the gallery we had a wonderful view of the milling m o b in the pit and gallery. Then suddenly the doors of the auditorium opened and a posse of Dublin Metropolitan police entered, and many of the rowdy elements were cast out. W e expected the burly giants to draw their batons and made ready to join the wild stampede, but there was a momentary lull as another figure advanced to the footlights to speak to the mob; but he was no more successful than his predecessor had been in the first act, and his voice was drowned by catcalls and the strident tones of toy trumpets. Those w h o thought the display of force by the police would calm the rioters were mistaken, for Act III of the play began amidst scenes of even greater chaos. As we were unable to hear a single word of the play, and knowing that the fight was spreading to the 38

Mademoiselle streets outside, we left our seats and mingled with the crowd in the vestibule. Following Paddy during the interval I managed to reach the back of the stage through a side door leading into the lane, and we joined the actors and their supporters gathered round Lady Gregory and J. M. Synge. While to me it seemed that all the players were wringing their hands, tearing their hair and running hither and thither, Lady Gregory stood at the door of the Green Room as calm and collected as Queen Victoria about to open a charity bazaar. Seeing Paddy Tobin and myself, she beckoned us over and handed each of us a piece of the huge barmbrack which she had baked at Coole and brought up to Dublin for the Abbey cast. While we were munching our cake we observed the author, J. M. Synge, mooning about among the actors like a lost soul. I had seen him on various occasions in Kingstown, and when I passed him striding along the Dalkey road swinging his stick I used to wonder whether he was French or Austrian, for he had moustaches and a little goatee or 'imperial*. W h e n I saw him on the night of the Abbey riot his face was pale and sunken, and he looked like a ghost of the sun-tanned wanderer I had seen walking by the sea. I watched him closely as he sat motionless through the dumb-show of his play, amidst the rioting and insults of the mob, but not a trace of emotion could I discern in his pale mask-like face that gazed unseeing at the raging auditorium. *

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It was Mademoiselle Cora who gave the impetus to the study of music in our family. M y mother had always been a music lover and a pianist, and when my father came to Somerset he bought her a Schiedmayer grand piano which was installed in the drawing-room. U p in the schoolroom there was a dingy upright Collard which became the weary drudge of the family daily music practice. Early in the morning the house gradually awoke to the sound of scales played monotonously hour after hour by m y sisters, and this was followed by their vocal exercises in solfege conducted by their energetic governess. By breakfast time we had reached Mademoiselle's practice hour, and as I ate my porridge I heard the strains of Chopin's Ballade in G minor followed by the metallic tones of the Allegro de Concert by Guiraud—her cheval de bataille. I preferred not to see her in the early morning, for she was generally in a sour temper, and Enid used to tell me that she and Muriel 39

Adagio knew what kind of a day boded by the songs that Mademoiselle hummed when she was splashing in the bath. If the song was Mon cœur s'ouvre à ta voix from Samson et Déliîah we might rest assured that the weather for the day was set fair, but if they heard the strains of the Habanera or the Toreador song from Carmen the weather would be stormy with floods of rain. I followed Enid's musical barometer and kept out of the way until visibility was good again, and I knew that she would be all spruced up and corseted in her black skirt and smart light blue lace-trimmed crêpe-de-chine blouse. One day she said to me: " W h a t a pity your mother never made you study music. Franchement je ne le comprends pas! I am sure you love music: cela se voit!" "I was always interested in the violin," I answered, "but my father doesn't want me to learn music as it would interfere with my school work." "Votre père a tort: one day you will be sorry that you did not play music." Some time after that conversation Mademoiselle heard that a famous boy violinist called Mischa Elman was giving a concert in the Theatre Royal Dublin, so she and I went to hear him. I have only the vaguest memories of the other artists at the concert, for I was entirely rapt up in the personality of the pale-faced boy dressed in black. Three of the pieces he played were the Symphonie Espagnole of Lalo, the Rondo Capriccioso of Saint-Saëns, and the Nocturne in E flat by ChopinSarasate. It was for me a revelation. Ever since early childhood I had been fascinated by the sour-sweet tone of the fiddle I had heard played b y Shamus the tinker fiddler in Galway, and by Drennan, the gardener at Undercliffe, but the playing of this boy prodigy opened up a completely fresh world. His violin seemed possessed of every variety and nuance of sound; at one moment fierce and strident; at another soft and caressing, it seemed to be part of the body and personality of the virtuoso who played it as he breathed. I returned home in a daze. Mademoiselle Cora, too, was deeply moved. "You must begin learning the violin at once," she said, " I will help you with musical theory." At first my parents tried to belittle m y musical aspirations, for they thought it was a passing phase, and my father warned me that I was backward in m y classical studies and would have to make up for the time I had lost through illness. Mademoiselle, however, kept urging 40

Mademoiselle mc to persevere. She even bearded my father in his den. The indefatigable woman made me practise scales on my sister's quarter-size violin, and she accompanied me at the piano. Meanwhile she persuaded my mother to prevail upon my father to buy me an instrument and to allow me to become a student at the Royal Irish Academy. B y the end of the summer holidays my father became convinced that my love for the violin was not just a passing craze, for he noted that where music was concerned I was unusually energetic and industrious and, whereas I had resisted all his efforts to rouse me in the early morning to do my Latin and Greek exercises, I now rivalled him as an early riser to practise my scales. In those days I read every book I could find on music and musicians, especially violinists, and on one occasion I even sent a letter to Pablo Sarasate, Mademoiselle Cora's idol, and it was she who drafted it in French. To our amazement the master sent me a photograph of himself with a charming dedication au jeune violiniste irlandais. The letter was dated 1908 from Hôtel des Quatre Fils D'Aymon in Biarritz, a few days before he died. Another great violinist who became one of my heroes at the time was Eugène Ysaye who gave a recital that year in the hall of the Rotunda in Dublin. Mademoiselle and I went to the concert, and afterwards she pushed her way into the artists' room and presented me to the massive Belgian virtuoso who towered over me like a colossus. He had recendy returned from Russia and was wearing a heavy fur coat with astrakhan collar and a fur cap. Soon after we came to live at Somerset, my father sent me to a day school in Dublin in St Stephen's Green. At first I used to bicycle from Somerset to Blackrock railway station, take the train to Westland Row, and a tram up to St Stephen's Green. Our classes started at 9 a.m. and continued with just a short break at 1 1 a.m. until 2 p.m. As I had to have my violin lessons, theory classes and orchestra practices in the afternoon I was given money for lunch which I used to take at a little restaurant in Merrion Row called the D.B.C. I was supposed to spend certain afternoons at the school grounds at Merton Park playing tennis or cricket in the summer, and football in the winter, but in those days I continually found myself in a dilemma due to the contradictory forces struggling for supremacy within me. When I became fully absorbed by the daily round at St Stephen's Green School and by musical life at the Academy I felt morose at times, because at home I was more cut off than formerly from the life of my 4i

Adagio sisters in the schoolroom. I looked back with sadness to the old days at UnderclifFe when Enid and I lived in glorious freedom. If we, the dowdy country-bred Starkies, exercised intellectual and artistic influences over our city-bred Hoey cousins, they and their governess, Mademoiselle Savy, in turn exercised a modifying influence upon our Mademoiselle Cora. She became gradually milder, romantic and self-indulgent and I noticed that she thought more of her personal appearance, for one morning unobserved I watched her doing her hair, plucking her eyebrows and gazing with rapt expression at her image in the mirror. When we used to play together she wanted romantic and passionate music. She was no longer satisfied with Guiraud, Chaminade, or even Saint-Saëns. She wanted 'la grande passion et Wagner!' When she saw by The Irish Times that the Moody Manners Opera Company were playing Tannhduser she urged me to buy a gallery ticket for myself: "Va, mon chéri à Tannhduser: tu adoreras cela! I shall be in bed when you come back, but do wake me and tell me what you think!" With the exception of Gounod's Faust, Tannhduser was the first opera I had ever seen. After waiting nearly two hours in a queue outside the Theatre Royal I obtained a good seat in the gallery for one «¡billing and sixpence. The theatre was crowded, as the company included Madame Fanny Moody and Joseph O'Mara in the leading roles. That evening I entered a new world, which combined music and the drama. What fascinated me most was the bewildering variety of colour and timbre of the instruments of the orchestra in Wagner. I had reached thirteen years of age without realizing the infinite possibilities that music possesses of suggesting the varying emotions of the soul in conflict. When I arrived home by the last Blackrock tram everyone had retired, but there was a light in Mademoiselle's room at the top of the house. She was in bed reading and her hair was arranged in plaits which gave her the air of a coquettish young girl. "Eh bien," she said, "que'est ce que tu en penses?" She wanted to know every detail and, sitting on the edge of her bed, I tried to describe my emotions as I had listened in the hushed and darkened theatre to the strange varieties of tone-colour of the instruments unfolding the drama. She still kept questioning me more searchingly. Did I not understand the personality of Tannhauser and his yielding to temptation and damning his soul because he was the lover of Venus, the pagan goddess of love, while

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Mademoiselle all the time his true love, the long-suffering Elizabeth, was struggling desperately to redeem him by her prayers? Mademoiselle became so excited trying to make me understand the full significance of Tannhauser as a Christian drama of sexual passion and renunciation that she seemed to identify some personal drama of her own with Wagner's opera. At the same time I was conscious of a desire on her part to sift and analyse my feelings and to discover how this or that song or passage had affected me. She took one of my hands and began stroking it and putting it to her neck. " Y o u see how feverish I am: what you say excites me too much. Je ti'en peux plus!" She then suddenly put her arms around my neck and held me tightly, and bending over me she gave me a long slow kiss on my lips. So dumbfounded was I that I remained inert and unresponsive, feeling her lips burning mine. I noticed that her eyes were closed, and she lay as if asleep. She then in a weary voice bade me go at once to my bed. *

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The Dublin International Exhibition of 1907 was perhaps responsible for the evolution that took place in Mademoiselle's character from the stern ascetic and slave to duty we had known in the early days. In the country there was little to distract her, but when she found herself in the cosmopolitan atmosphere of the Exhibition with its crowds, its gaiety and glitter, and its concerts, she remembered her life in Paris, and she suddenly realized with a pang that she had never lived in the fullest sense. Also she was far more often in the company of our cousins' governess, Mademoiselle Savy. Mademoiselle Savy was the placid and lymphatic type of Frenchwoman and it made me laugh to contrast her with our fire-eating dynamo, but in reality Leonie Cora was unworldly and as simple as a convent girl in comparison with the sophisticated Mademoiselle Savy, who was calculating hypocrisy personified. I once overheard the governesses exchange confidences. Our Mademoiselle in her naive passionate way was giving vent to her feelings: Life was hard, and she felt the years passing: "on voudrait jouir un tout petit peu de la vie", she added with a sigh. In the summer of 1908 my mother was anxious that we children should spend our holidays together in the country while she and my father were absent on a long tour of inspection in the south of Ireland. She arranged for us and Mademoiselle Cora to stay in a farm house in 43

Adagio the Wicklow mountains. Mademoiselle, when she saw the view of the Sugarloaf f r o m the farm, was in a radiant mood: she sniffed the air and muttered ecstatically: "Sapristi quel beau pays! Comme on respire bien: ah, it is romantic the turf from the Irish bogs!" She sang loudly in her metallic French voice Viens Pou-Poule, Viens, as she moved about unpacking the trunks in the room above. "Her character is changing," I said to myself, "but she is so temperamental that tomorrow she may be singing La Berceuse de Jocelyn which she always does when she becomes homesick, and thinks of the village church." In Wicklow her health improved and she shed her aggressive manner, her sallow complexion and tightly corseted appearance. I then suddenly saw her in a detached way, not as my sisters' governess, but as a woman, and I became physically aware of her vivacious temperament and charm. I noticed that new colours came into her cheeks, and her eyes sparkled with the j o y of life. Where I noticed a marked change was in her figure. I had always been repelled by the tight casing that she called her 'soutien-gorge'. Her body now seemed, as it were, in revolt against her mind and one day, when I put my arms round her waist to dance, I noted that she had shed all vestiges of whalebone. She developed in Wicklow a sudden passion for dancing and, whenever a melodeon player appeared, she would demand a waltz and beckon to me to dance with her. "You must show me," she said, " h o w they dance in this country. Come on, chéri, you are too cold: hold me tighter and let us pretend we are amants de cœur." I felt embarrassed by her exaggerated gestures and especially by the manner in which she pressed her body against mine in her endeavour to waltz romantically to the Blue Danube. I preferred dancing with her when she was whalebound than in the robe collante which she n o w wore and which made me feel as if I was dancing the dance of the veils with Salomé. She developed other even stranger mannerisms during the Wicklow holiday. One Sunday, when I was waiting in the crowd outside Kilmacanogue church for the most crowded Mass of all at eleven o'clock, I saw Mademoiselle and my three sisters drive up in the pony-trap. T o my horror she was dressed like a little girl of ten years of age in a skirt to her knees, showing lace-edged drawers, bare legs and diminutive socks. Her long wispy black hair hung down her back and she had put on one of Enid's straw hats. She skipped out of the trap with all the juvenile mincing graces, smiling ingratiatingly at Muller, who gazed at her dumbfounded. Her entry caused a sensation, and I saw people 44

Mademoiselle nudging one another and turning round to look at her. I was furious, and I resolved to have a scene with her. Later, in her room, I had an opportunity and said: "You disgraced yourself and our family today: it was sacrilege to go masquerading in church: you ought to be ashamed." She jumped at me like a tigress, and hit me a resounding gifle on the face, calling me idiot and mufle. I blazed out at her: "I should like to treat you as if you were a little girl o f t e n and give you a fessee." She struggled and tried to scratch my face, but I lifted her up and pushed her face downwards on the bed: then seizing her hairbrush off the dressing-table and lifting her skirts I administered the punishment. She made no attempt to move, but remained inert like one drugged. She began to sob: "Oui, tu as raison, Walter, je suis une folk." As she was now in the self-recrimination stage which I knew would turn to sentimentality, I thought it more prudent to beat a hasty retreat. Her Sunday escapade naturally reached the ears of old Donovan and his wife who were deeply shocked, but I noticed that one of the sons, Alan who worked as a mechanic in a bicycle repairing shop in Bray, was making glad-eyes at her. Alan Donovan had evolved beyond the clodhopper stage and, being more in contact with the city than his brothers on the farm, was attracted by Mademoiselle's exotic appearance. She was, as he said to a fellow mechanic, "the goods!" Alan Donovan never appealed to me, for he was too much of a smart Alec: what endeared him to Mademoiselle was his reputation of being a pastmaster at the waltz, the polka and the old-fashioned veleta, and even the dances that were beginning to invade Ireland from the United States. "She's mighty heavy on her feet," he whispered to me as he struggled to keep her in rhythm. The great local celebration came when, at the gathering of the harvest, we joined with the Donovans in their harvest festivities: there was open house and all the neighbouring farmers, who had helped in the haymaking, were eating scones, potato cakes, soda bread, slices of ham and beef, and there were barrels from which glass after glass of black foaming porter was drawn and passed to the men who toasted their partners. Then the fiddlers and melodeon players, or musicianers as they called them, when they had slaked their raging thirst, for music is a thirsty profession, struck up a jaunty jig and the boys and girls attracted by the infectious rhythm began to dance. Soon the ceilidh was in full swing. Alan Donovan did not dance the Gaelic dances for he was reserving himself for the waltzes and veletas when he would have 45

Adagio Mademoiselle for a partner. She was frankly bored by the Irish sets and reels: "I do not like," she said disdainfully, "it is too acrobatic, c'est toujours la même chose." I sat under a tree talking to Alan's eldest sister Maggie—a goodlooking fair-haired girl of twenty-three who, as an active member of her branch of the Gaelic League, disapproved of the foreign dances. " I ' m always telling m y brother Alan," she said, "that he shouldn't encourage the waltzes, polkas and all those English dances here in the country. I declare to God he's becoming more of a West Briton every day." "What's a West Briton, Maggie? I suppose I'm one myself." "Sure of course you are! But we forgive you, for how could you be otherwise? You know less about your country than if you were a foreigner. Your parents have never given you the opportunity of understanding our struggle for our country's right to be free and independent." "But Synge understood, didn't he?" I replied. "He, too is a Nationalist and wishes Ireland to be free and independent." " H e is the more guilty because he understood. He should never have given the English the opportunity to abuse the Irish as a godless and lawless people." "I'll not argue with you, Maggie, because you'll only say that I am a West Briton. And you are right. I wish I had been reared here in the Wicklow mountains and had learned Irish from the first. But there you a r e . . . that's m y fate. Listen, they're playing an Irish reel, Maggie: let us dance together: I want to learn Irish dancing." The dancing and the convivial festivities of the harvest home ended at about three o'clock in the morning, and Mrs Donovan said it was time for all Christians to be in bed. "It is time you were in bed, sonny, you're too young to miss your beauty sleep. Your sisters went to bed hours ago. I haven't seen your governess lately. Perhaps she, too, has gone off to bed." She and her daughters went round extinguishing the lamps, and Muller and Donovan, after emptying the dregs of porter and the scraps into the buckets for the pigs, put up the shutters. One by one all departed, yawning wearily, and I was left alone amidst the débris of the feast. The reek of stale porter and tobacco fumes gave me a slight feeling of nausea, so I resolved to climb to the top of the neighbouring hill and wait for the sunrise. I was feeling in a melancholy mood.

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Mademoiselle The sky in the east was now crimson but the countryside was still enveloped in the shades of night. All at once when I turned a corner I saw ahead of me two ghosdy figures in the dim light: Mademoiselle and Alan. They were walking along slowly and he had his arm round her waist, and every few steps they halted. I followed them at a little distance and saw them lie down on a grassy bank under a tree. He bent down over her, and she threw her arms around his neck and pulled him down upon her. I turned heel and fled. When I reached the farmhouse I found the door unlocked (I had reminded Jim to leave it unlatched), and I wondered what would happen to Mademoiselle if old mother Donovan rose early to feed the hens and saw her returning at this hour with her son Alan? I left the door unlocked, and crept stealthily up to my room. At six o'clock, when the sun was already high in the heavens, the cocks were crowing and the birds were singing in chorus, I heard pattering footsteps, and Mademoiselle appeared. She was pale, weary, dishevelled and her eyes were sombre. She stood at the door fumbling in her bag and found that she had forgotten her key. She paused wondering what to do, then tried the door gendy and finding it, to her infinite relief, unlocked, crept stealthily to bed. When I came down later to breakfast Chou Chou, looking more like a Celtic sheogue than ever with her reddish golden hair and her green eyes, announced to me with a Puckish grin that Mademoiselle had very bad migraine. "I suppose the stout she drank last night didn't agree with her," said Enid drily. *

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There is no doubt that Mademoiselle's escapades in the Wicldow mountains lost none of their piquancy in the embroidered tales that reached my mother and father from various sources. Again they laid their heads together and decided that all of us had got out of hand and that a change had to be made. Enid, Muriel and Chou Chou were to be sent to the nuns at Carysfort Convent to be prepared for first Communion. In future a fraiilein would be imported from Germany as their governess, for my father wanted his daughters to be as proficient in German as in French. I heard indirectly through my mother that the question of my future had given my parents sleepless nights. Periodically an explosion would occur at home, due generally to some self-righteous, interfering gossip who would say casually to my father 47

Adagio in his office or at lunch in the Fellows' Common Room in Trinity or at Larky Waldron's Symposium: " I hear that your boy spends all his time practising the fiddle: who would have said that your only son would become a fiddler instead of a classical scholar? O témpora o mores!" This drop of kindly administered venom would seep into my father's mind all through the afternoon during the interminable committees and would emerge to the surface by the time he had walked the mile from the tram stop at Temple Hill to Somerset. The thunderstorm generally broke at late dinner which was always a lugubrious meal because of the absence of my sisters. M y tête-à-tête dinner with my father and mother was often an occasion for holding a kind of post-mortem on the work and behaviour of each member of the family in turn, but on the days when the storm was imminent my father dropped all preliminary generalities and plunged in medias res. " I hear, Walter, that you've not been doing well lately at school." " W h o told you that? As a matter of fact Mr O'Dell was very pleased with my last Latin composition." " I have been telling you again and again that you must not let your violin practising interfere with your school work, and I gave your mother strict orders to see that you do your home-work in mathematics when you come back from school. Instead I hear that you are gadding about in the Academy of Music every afternoon." M y mother tactfully tried to intervene on my behalf but she was browbeaten for her pains: "When I give an order I expect to have it obeyed." " I think Walter really does try to do his best," interposed my mother plaintively, "but his asthma has been troubling him lately." This was always a fatal defence, but experience never taught my mother that to mention my disability to my father when he was abusing me was like putting a load of slack on a blazing fire: it damped down my father's wrath but enabled it to preserve its heat longer. He always reacted the same way, using the selfsame phrases, which became for me like the leading motives in a Wagnerian opera—guides to the proper understanding of my parent's mind. " Y o u r asthma is worse this year because you take no exercise and are flabby. You used to be good at cricket: old Hone said you played with a straight bat and MahafFy said you must be a bowler, but since Mademoiselle Cora got it into her head that you had musical talent you do nothing but moon about the house practising your fiddle. A 48

Mademoiselle fat lot of good all that fiddling will do you. I am in despair when I see you growing more incapable year after year without any thought for your future." As for Mademoiselle Cora she had become so much part and parcel of our lives that even when she left she continued to exercise a subtle influence upon us. Her own life became at first more drab and monotonous, and she lost a good deal of the fire she once possessed. When I met her again I spoke reminiscently of our Wicklow holiday and she answered: " I was mad, or, as you say in English, I had bats in the belfry." "When I mentioned the name of Alan Donovan she blazed out indignantly: "C'était un lâche et un voyou!" She would say no more. Some years later she met in Dublin two excellent French musicians, a violinist and a cellist, Jean and Jacques Grandpierre. They became very attached to Mademoiselle, and she toured with them playing their accompaniments and joining them in duets and trios. From the first I could see that she was in love with Jacques the cellist, a pale sensitive type with classical features, grey eyes and a dreamy expression. He had all the compensatory qualities for which her generous and dynamic nature craved: he was gende, submissive and sensual in his tenderness. "C'est un type qu'il faudra dorloter," she said laughing when describing him to me. After they married they settled in the North of England and I used to receive a card or a letter every Christmas, or a photograph of their three boys. In the early years of the war of 1914 she was living at Scarborough on the east coast of Yorkshire, which was heavily attacked by the Germans. It was said that they perished in the bombardment. W e never heard from her again.

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3

FATHER A N D S O N Alas! how light a cause may move Dissension between hearts that love. SHAKESPEARE

The three years between the twelfth and the fourteenth are the most significant in a boy's existence, for the imprint stamped in those years will last all his life. The mysterious force which germinates and sprouts towards the close of those three years is the awakening of sex. This awakening in some boys is sudden and violent; it catches them unawares, throwing them completely off their balance: in other boys it is gradual and inevitable, like an advancing ride, producing slighter but periodic disturbances that modify their character. In my case it was a slow process dating back even to the Killiney days when Auntie Helen, the embodiment for all of us of the Fairy Queen, had kindled in me a precocious consciousness and awareness of feminine beauty. This awareness lay quasi-dormant, but became accentuated in my twelfth and thirteenth year owing to my relations with Mademoiselle Cora and the two picaresque maidservants of our household. But this bodyconsciousness and awareness of my own nakedness, and the nakedness of others, seemed at the time of small importance in comparison with the deeper manifestations of the mysterious force that now began to surge in me. In spite of the cultured surroundings amidst which I was born and reared, I remained an untamed and unkindled soul up to an unusually late age, with the result that during the vital three years I was forever conscious of the necessity of catching up with all that I had failed to learn in the years of childhood. Whereas most children made their first Communion at eight or nine years of age, I did not make mine until I was twelve, with the result that the impact was all the greater, and I felt the agonizing lack of breathing space which would have allowed me to adapt my existence to this new spirit that religion had given me. And some months after my initiation into the doctrines

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Father and Son of my religion came my casual initiation into the world of music, at an age when many boys and girls were already accomplished virtuosi. Here, too, there was lack of breathing-space and I was tortured by the burning desire to make up for the lost years as I had tried to do in religious instruction. It was thus that I came into conflict with my father—a conflict that perpetually saddened me, because from early childhood I had heard him say that he always hoped I would inherit the gift for classics and carry on the family tradition. The worst about a conflict of wills between father and son is that each misinterprets the personality of the other and fails to understand that, in spite of the clash of temperaments, there are the harmonizing influences of the family and, above all, of love that is always willing to compromise. In many families the relationship between father and son suffers, too, from an intimate shyness which is present in both, and prevents them from achieving complete mutual frankness. During the three vital years leading to puberty shyness and reserve between father and son may produce deep misunderstandings, especially in the thorny problem of sex. Here the puritanical shyness of both my parents was excessive, for I was never given any instruction whatsoever about the facts of life, and I came to consider everything relating thereto to be tabu and unmentionable. A great deal of my childhood was spent in learning the absurd tabus that civilized man in all Englishspeaking countries has woven around the normal functions of the body. Those tabus, I am sure, are responsible for that universal tendency in the English and even Americans, when they reach middle life, to place a pathetic and even a mystical faith in the significance of their lower bowel, and to convert their bathrooms at home into their hospitals. When a boy reaches the age of twelve he needs to be enlightened by one of his parents, and this duty should naturally fall to his father who can more easily broach the subject of sex if he has won the confidence of his son. In my case this should have been simple as my father and I travelled so often together, when I accompanied him on his tours of school-inspection through Ireland. Although I was precocious in my reading and had read, before I was twelve, nearly all Thackeray and much of Dickens, Walter Scott and the Brontes, I was very much of a Simple Simon in sex matters, and the tabu words I had picked up from my school companions were mostly onomatopoeic slang-words connected with the daily functions of the body. The religious instruction I had received at a later age from the nuns 51

Adagio in the Carysfort convent introduced me then into a new and rarer world o f the spirit with which I tried to become acquainted through the Imitation of Christ, the Little Flowers of St Francis and the Life of St Teresa which strengthened my love o f music and religion; that is to say, not only the music o f the senses but the music o f m y newly discovered soul, making me feel at certain moments as if I had entered in communion with distant rhythms or harmonies in the universe. A s I had no friendly spiritual director I longed to question my father about the condition o f joyous and awakened love to which the mystic passes when his purification is accomplished, and which is, according to the writers I had read, above all else, a state o f Song. The mystic, they say, does not see the spiritual world, he 'hears' it and thus for him, as for II Poverello of Assisi, it is a 'heavenly melody, intolerably sweet'. I remembered how my father had once told me that in his youth he had intended to enter the Society o f Jesus, and he had presented me with a litde volume containing The Dream of Gerontius by Cardinal Newman, which he had given in 1881 to his friend Florrie Burd w h o m he had converted to Catholicism. I read that beautiful poem again and again, repeating over and over the passages which were marked in pencil in the margin, either by Florrie Burd or by my father, and I began to see him in another light. It was as if he had suddenly opened a shuttered window in his soul and permitted me to catch a fleeting glimpse o f a former visionary life of his I had never suspected. Very few fleeting glimpses did my father give me of that earlier visionary life, or o f his sorrows and disillusions. He was too shy to tell me about them, and this was w h y I was too timid to ask him to guide me through the inextricable maze in which I found myself. It saddens me to think o f all he might have told me, for even among the ancient Greeks and Romans the period of the awakening of sex had its appropriate ceremonies and the ancient Roman celebrated youth's assumption o f the toga virilis with solemn ritual. One incident remains engraved in my memory as an example o f the misunderstanding that could occur in those days between a father and his fourteen-year-old son. At Somerset in 1908 my father used to encourage me to read some of the books in his classical library and he lent me some on Greek sculpture and pottery. One day, while I was looking through one o f the books containing photographs o f the numerous statues of Hermes, Apollo and Aphrodite, I took some tracing paper and traced out

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Father and Son various figures of naked statues of Hermes and placed them side by side with figures of the naked statues of the various Aphrodites, for it suddenly came to my mind that the ancient Greeks believed that the ideal human being was the fusion of the perfect male body of Hermes and the perfect female body of Aphrodite, and from the miraculous fusion they created the fantastic beings they called hermaphrodites who always puzzled me, and about whom I had received no elucidation from my father nor from any teacher at school. I left the tracings lying on the table and forgot about them. Later in the morning my iather called me to his study and, without asking me for an explanation, accused me of drawing grossly obscene pictures; then seizing a big stick, which he had evidently searched high and low to find, he lashed out at me ferociously as I stood there dumbfounded. I made no attempt to move, so he went on striking me again and again on my back, my legs, my shoulders and at one moment I thought he would hit me with the stick across my face. When at length he paused, I stood gazing at him without saying a word, and then I walked slowly out of the room. I took my bicycle out of the yard and rode ten miles into the Wicklow mountains where I lay under a tree in a stupor all day until the evening. At first there was nothing in my mind but overwhelming fury and resentment at the injustice he had done in judging and condemning me as guilty without even asking me if I had anything to say in my defence. What did his accusation mean? Wherein lay the obscenity of those male and female naked gods and goddesses of the Greek religion to which he so litde objected that there were actually two aggressively naked statues, of Narcissus and a Satyr in Pompeian bronze, on pedestals in the drawingroom for all of us to see? If he had explained my offence to me in fatherly fashion and convinced me that I had obscene thoughts in my mind when I traced the statues of the Greek gods and goddesses I should not have complained. I often wonder why one trivial beating of the many administered to me by my father could have so embittered me at fourteen years of age that I have nursed my grievance in my heart for fifty years. It was not, however, the actual beating that embittered me, but the burning sense that my father, who always prided himself on his fair-mindedness, should have proceeded so unjusdy against me on this occasion. His puritanical attitude towards me was all the more incomprehensible when I reflected that he and my mother had rarely preached to me on morals. Occasionally when we children became unduly obstreperous, S A O—E

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Adagio and the gossips began to spread scandal, drastic changes were made, but my father never intervened directly and delegated authority to my mother. I then came to the conclusion that whereas he had earned in the Education Office the reputation of being a hard master, hasty in judgment and dynamic in action, he was in the bosom of his family a weak ruler. And like all weak rulers he occasionally made ruthless display o f force, partly to foster the illusion that he was strong and partly to salve his conscience which continually pricked him because o f my mother's vacillation and laissez faire. After Mademoiselle's escapades in W i c k l o w and the subsequent scandal m y mother, w h o was more puritanical in sex matters than he was, convinced him that a show of force was necessary as an example to the family. As a result o f my quarrel with my father I became for a while the most morose member of my family and I spent most of the time sulking in my room. M y pride had been hurt and I resolved to make my resentment patent to all. Nevertheless in my heart o f hearts I was ashamed o f m y sulky behaviour, and I longed to discover a way o f approach ing my father which would enable us to resume normal relations. He at first made no gesture that I could interpret as propitious to a cessation o f hostilities, and my mother played cautiously, letting things run on as before, faithful to her adage that the devil you k n o w is better than the devil you do not know. I slaved at my school work and w o n even a grudging compliment from M r Chetwode Crawley, the headmaster, for my mathematics, an event that had never occurred before. M y only consolation in those days was music, not only violin playing and trios at the Academy but Grove's Dictionary of Music (the first edition o f 1889) which had become for the past two years my favourite reading. In spite of my concentration on my work in school and at the Academy I was in the doldrums, and I felt as if m y father and I could never agree as long as w e lived. Our recent quarrel was symptomatic of the situation that had arisen during the past two years because of my determination to preserve my independence ofjudgment instead o f dutifully submitting to his will. One morning, when I woke up depressed as usual, I said to myself: "Why not go and call on my godfather, D r Mahaffy, in College? He always said he would be delighted to receive me. I had no intention of asking him to be a peacemaker, nor would I even mention my quarrel with my father, but I might receive a word o f encouragement from 54

Father and Son one who had always taken up the cudgels on my behalf and had encouraged me in my musical studies. By good fortune I met him in the front Square of Trinity College. He came towards me, a majestic figure over six feet tall, dressed in clerical black with open collar and white clerical tie. As he walked slowly towards me I noticed that his feet turned slightly in. He wore no hat and his magnificent head, with grey hair brushed fiat down and side-whiskers, or 'mutton chops', gave him the air of an eighteenthcentury squire, a contemporary of Grattan. He greeted me affectionately, and when I asked him for an interview he said: "There is no need for an interview: leave that to the students: there is something far more important: I have a treat today for you, my boy: it is lucky you have called. You must lunch with me in College where you will meet our Professor of Music, Dr Ebenezer Prout, the most celebrated musical theoretician in the world, but first of all I shall take you to hear the two singers he has brought over from London to sing the Bach Cantatas." I was keenly interested in meeting Dr Prout as I was at the moment working at the exercises in Prout's manual of harmony. Dr Ebenezer Prout was a slender wizened little man with bright beady eyes and jerky manner, who cocked his head on one side like an aged jackdaw. His voice as he lectured on Bach was a croak with occasional shrill overtones when he seemed to cackle. The singing of the Cantatas, however, thrilled me, for he had brought over with him a young tenor and a very good-looking soprano, both of whom had lovely voices, and had been specially trained by the master to sing Bach. At the end of the concert, which was well attended by Mus-Bac. and Mus-Doc. candidates, and by Fellows and Professors among whom I saw my father's old rival Dr H. S. Macran, the Hegelian philosopher, who had been the terror of my infancy. "I hear you have taken up music," he said as he shook me by the hand. "You, Sir," I replied, "cast the spell upon me that night in Harrow House when you threw the pebbles at my window. Why didn't you cast a spell also over my father? I should have had an easier time with my music." "Don't let him browbeat you!" answered the Doctor. "Music is as necessary as classics in life!" At the beginning of lunch the sprightly birdlike Dr Prout began by referring to the remarkable musical memory of our host who knew some of the Bach Cantatas by heart and was able to write out the score 55

Adagio of the St Matthew's Passion from memory. At these words of praise from such an authority the Master glowed with satisfaction, and radiated urbanity upon us all. "The older I become," he said, "the more I am convinced that the moral characters of our musicians are directly influenced by the music they cultivate. Hence the great lesson to be derived from the singing of the Bach Cantatas, for Johann Sebastian Bach was a most worthy representative of the middle-classes—a traditional God-fearing German, educated on the ancient German chorales, whose life was a model of domestic virtues. Alas, we moderns have unduly lost sight of the moral side of music. Take, for example," he said, turning towards the young soprano, "the passionate love songs of the newer Italian opera—I assure you, my dear young lady, they are directly injurious to the character. In fact the more beautifully and perfectly the music corresponds to the words of those operas the more mischievous they are likely to be." The young lady was not impressed by the Master's theories and defended Verdi's arias valiantly, and she warmed to her argument by referring to the rapturous thrill she had experienced at performances of Parsifal and Tristan and Isolde. The Master shook his patriarchal head reprovingly, saying in lisping tones: "Wagner, my dear young lady, was an unutterable cad and should have been hounded out of all decent society. When he was writing the Liebestod he was living in sin with the wife of his best friend, Wesendonck. Such music is most offensive to our taste and must produce pernicious effects upon the characters of those who sing it. When, therefore, we hear it commonly remarked that musicians are jealous, quarrelsome and rakish, or that a young man with a good tenor voice is sure to go to ruin, there may be musical reasons for such observations which did not escape the ancient Greeks, though they are completely ignored nowadays." "Do you consider all Wagner's music immoral, Dr Mahaffy?" said the young lady turning her wide blue eyes upon him appealingly. The sage acknowledged the mute appeal and purred as he answered: "You must not think me a rabid old puritan. I know that even the devil takes a holiday. You have the overture to Die Meistersinger." After the guests had departed, and I was preparing to say farewell, my host said: "Walk over with me to my rooms, I want to show you something." When he had installed me in an armchair by the fire, he opened a press and extracted a battered black wooden violin-case, say-

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Father and Son ing: "Some months ago when I was lunching at home with your dear father we talked about Italian violin makers, such as Antonio Stradivari, Nicola Amati, Giuseppe Guarneridel Gesu, and we mentioned a Tyrolese maker called Jacobus Steiner of Absom. Well, I have here a Steiner which has been in my possession for many years. I never play now, though it used to be one of my great consolations in life. As I noticed when I was in your father's house that you had not much of a violin I thought perhaps you would care to have it." I was so overwhelmed with astonishment and joy that I was unable to answer. I stuttered ineffectually, but the old man smiling benevolendy said: "I am delighted to give it to you, for I know you will appreciate it. It has been a very faithful friend of mine for over sixty years and it enshrines many memories. The bow is not a Tourte but it was made by a good English bowmaker. But one last piece of advice, my dear boy. Do not overdo your fiddling and your music. Remember that your first duty is to your classical studies. You must work hard in order to follow in the footsteps of you father who is a very dear friend of mine. Try to keep the true balance—the firjdev ayav of the Greeks." I tried to murmur my heartfelt thanks, but I broke down, and the Master took me affectionately by the shoulders and gendy pushed me and the fiddle-case out of the door. I could not resist the temptation to open the case there and then and take out the instrument. I looked through one of the holes, and there was the label with Jakobus Steiners Absom 1673. My father was all smiles when I met him that evening at late dinner, and he was jovial as if no shadow of dissension had ever fallen between us. "You are indeed fortunate," he said, "and I did not think Mahaffy had it in him to be so kind to boys." My father was gready impressed by my godfather's marked interest in me, and it made him look at me in a new light. He was particularly struck by Dr Mahafiy's whole-hearted support of my original contention that it was possible to carry on a classical and a musical education simultaneously, and he recognized the subde implication contained in the old Professor's parting words of advice. Years afterwards he confessed to me that Dr Mahaffy's ingenious method of winning over a boy of fourteen put him to shame. *

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Adagio So grateful was m y father to D r Mahafiy for his felicitous intervention in m y problems that he invited him to join him on a tour o f school inspection in Northern Ireland. He included me, hoping that as I was a hero-worshipper I would pick up the crumbs o f classical learning that w o u l d fall from the lips o f the great humanist during our roaming symposium through Donegal and Antrim in our hired motor-car, a Darracq, 1907 model. I sat in front beside our chauffeur, James M u l ligan, a tall, lanky, red-haired Dubliner with a rich brogue. M y father and D r Mahafiy sat in the back. W h e n m y father's secretary from the Office o f Education, A n d r e w Bonaparte W y s e , and one o f the C h i e f Inspectors, John McNeill, joined us our symposium was complete and w e set out early in the morning for the town o f Buncrana on L o u g h Swilly which was to be our next centre o f operations; but in the meantime m y father wished to inspect his daily quota o f schools on the w a y . W h e n w e arrived at some outlying village accompanied by his t w o officials he w o u l d enter the school and present all o f us to the headmaster, and while w e were talking to the children he would examine the report given b y the Inspector o f Education and talk school problems with the headmaster. Then he w o u l d single out children and ask them questions in mental arithmetic. Meanwhile D r Mahafiy gathered a group o f girls and boys and, with the permission o f the headmaster's assistant, led them outside into a field where he talked to them about wild flowers and birds. Then m y father called the Doctor, and both sat in solemn state beside the headmaster. M y father asked some o f the boys to recite a poem, and after that a group o f children read the Casket Scene f r o m the Merchant of Venice. T h e encouragement o f Shakespeare in all the Irish schools was an article o f faith o f m y father, and there is no doubt that due to his policy the works o f the immortal dramatist became very popular in the small towns and villages throughout the country, as a later pioneer o f Shakespeare, the distinguished actor A n d r e w McMaster, discovered when he toured triumphantly with his Shakespearean company through Ireland. W h e n m y father found the reading o f Shakespeare o f a high standard his whole manner would change towards the headmaster and he would give cheerful and optimistic words o f advice as he walked towards the car. As our roaming symposium moved on, an argument started between the learned Doctor and Bonaparte W y s e on the conflict in Ireland between tillage and pasture. " T h e Irish," said m y father, "in-

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Father and Son tuitivcly divined the beefsteak in the ox as the ancient Greeks divined the statue in the marble." When we passed through the suburbs of Londonderry and crossed the Foyle we found ourselves in a different country altogether. Grey clouds swept across the sky, casting shadows upon sodden fields and grey boulders, and we caught glimpses of distant panoramas bathed in radiant sunlight. "This is the landscape of Donegal painted by that queer eccentric, George Russell, who writes under the initials A E , " said Bonaparte Wyse. This caused a heated argument which continued until our arrival at the Lough Swilly Hotel, Buncrana. In spite of the presence of my father and Dr Mahaffy, the subject of ancient Greece had hardly been touched upon in all the day's run. The two scholars, however, made up for their silence on their pet topic during the day by devoting themselves exclusively to it at dinnertime and during the evening. I became so wearied of hearing them both argue hour after hour on the validity of A. W . VerralTs textual emendations in thcMedea and the Bacchae of Euripides that I left the company and went down to the little fishing harbour where I spent the rest of the evening in the company of fishermen, listening to yarns of the sea and tales of the McSwineys who, I was told, came originally from Scotland and were called fighters or gallow-glasses by the English, and were armed with battle-axes. The next most interesting county we visited was the Innishowen Peninsula, extending to the most northerly point in Ireland called Malin Head. Here in 1908 we caused a sensation, for no motor-car had hitherto been seen on these primitive roads. The children fled from us as if we had been strangers from another planet, and many of the people did not seem to speak English at all and answered us in Irish. The bleakgrey cliffs of the Bloody Foreland buffeted by the Atlantic struck me as the most awe-inspiring landscape I had ever seen. Malin Head, on the other hand, with its narrow promontory and its comfortable coastguard station, which we visited on a sunny day, was so inviting that my father and I bathed. Many were the misfortunes that befell us in that Innishowen Peninsula due to the primitive state of the roads. In one place we killed two pigs; in another we ran into the back of a cart; we entered Carndonagh with two wheels stuffed with straw; and we were towed into Donegal town by two carts. What amazed me was the stoicism and unfailing good humour of Dr Mahaffy in all the vicissitudes of our tour. When we were stranded 59

Adagio for hours by the side of the road, he sat in the ditch arguing with my father about Aristotle or Aristophanes, or else he spoke to me about birds and wild flowers. When Bonaparte Wyse asked him how he had learnt what he used to call his philosophy of travel, he replied: "The answer is very simple, my dear man: on horse-back in Arcadia. It was a hard school in the seventies of last century, and patience coupled with good humour were the virtues most needed by the Hellenists." My memories of the rest of the tour of inspection are hazy: day after day we visited the humble schools of Innishowen which were of special interest to my father, for he discovered a brightness, vivacity and a keenness to learn that contrasted with the slower and more sluggish children of the inland regions. I remember a few days' stay in a beautiful oasis at the foot of Mount Errigal called Gweedore where some earlier philanthropist had created a paradise for anglers with all the comforts of refined living, surrounded by gardens and woods beside a trout stream. Gweedore I must confess still clings to my memory because, when I visited it in 1908,1 became acquainted with the prettiest little postmistress in all Ireland whose green eyes, red hair, upturned nose and merry laughter still haunt me after all these years. Neither my father nor my Olympian godfather, nor the rest of the party, ever suspected my adventure, no one except James the chauffeur whose Harlequinesque resourcefulness won me my tryst in the ancient moonlit garden at the witching hour of midnight. Only he knew the significance of the pale face behind the latticed window next morning, the whispered farewell, and the kiss wafted after the car as it sped away. On the way back to Dublin, while my father talked about schools with his two assistants, my godfather tried to impress upon me the contrast that existed between the Greek attitude towards music and our own. As music, he said, was more universal and a more important feature in their education than in ours, they attached deep moral significance to its influence. Statesmen and philosophers constantly referred to this public aspect of music, and Plato and Aristotle insisted that only certain kinds of scales should be allowed in their ideal state because the others were relaxing or over-exciting to the nerves. "For this reason, my dear boy," he said, "I must impress upon you that there is a real danger in allowing yourself to become too absorbed by violinplaying, to the detriment of your classical studies. Remember that it was the philosopher Plato who was the most vehement in his denun60

Father and Son ciation of instrumental music apart from words. Such music he branded as immoral." This statement seemed so absurd and so contrary to what the Master himself believed and practised that I blurted out: "But you, sir, who were a violinist could not be in agreement with Plato's denunciation of instrumental music. Why, you yourself were the first to inculcate into me a love for what you consider the highest form of music—the string quartet. You said that there was nothing greater in all art than the later quartets of Beethoven dedicated to Prince Galitzin, and I remember how you hummed the adagio theme of one of those quartets, that in B flat, which was your favourite . . . " The old man smiled at me, and a tender look came over his face as he closed his eyes and hummed in his weird cracked voice the melody of the Cavatina. *

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It was in 1908 that the Halle Orchestra came to Dublin under the world-famous conductor Dr Hans Richter, Wagner's friend. I was thrilled to hear that the great Richter was coming. One day, when I was having a violin lesson with Adolf Wilhelmi, he gave me a graphic description of his father August's relations with Richter and Wagner. Hans Richter and August Wilhelmi had been members of the inner circle of Wagner at Bayreuth in the anxious period that culminated in the first performance of The Ring in 1876, and Richter had directed the rehearsals under the guidance of the Master and acted as deputy conductor for a number of years. The day before the concert I was surprised to receive through my father a message from Dr Mahaffy saying that he would be very pleased to present me to Dr Hans Richter after the concert. Knowing my godfather's strong prejudices against Wagner's character and music I could only marvel at what seemed to me a volte face. Hans Richter, bearded, Teutonic and tall in stature, impressed me by the restrained manner in which he produced his great climaxes. He stood before his men like a Viking, aloof, impenetrable, but with the movement of a finger, the flicker of an eyelid, he conveyed his exact meaning. The most moving performance was the Siegfried Idyll which the conductor's magnetism transformed into the quintessence of all Wagnerian drama, and it thrilled me to think that Richter had been the 61

Adagio first to conduct that work which Wagner had written for Cosima on the occasion of the birth of his son, Siegfried. After the concert I met my godfather and we made our way to the back of the stage. Dr Mahalfy pushed through the crowd to the conductor who was talking to Signor Esposito, composer, conductor and senior piano-teacher at the Royal Irish Academy of Music. They were an incongruous pair: Hans Richter, a massive Nordic giant, talking gutturally through his thick beard; Esposito, a small, sallow-faced Neapolitan, waving his arms with excited gestures and sputtering Italianized German. Dr Mahaffy, however, was as tall as Richter and not less imposing. The two men towered above the crowd of chattering devotees like twin peaks and, bowing to each other ceremoniously, conversed rapidly in German. Meanwhile the tiny Neapolitan Maestro, once he had recovered from his surprise at the interruption of his conversation with the conductor, reasserted his pre-eminence with violent gestures and the duet became a trio in English, German and Italian. After the usual compliments and mutual backscratching in which the illustrious Hellenist took little part, as such trivialities, in his opinion, were the stock-in-trade of professional musicians, he thought it his duty to inject on this occasion a dose of his pet anti-Wagnerian bias into this Aposde of Bayreuth. This he did by introducing me as a student of the violin and saying: "He loves Wagner, but I tell him he must only listen to that music in small doses—and certainly not to Tristan and Isolde. Much better for him to study his Plato." The Nordic giant frowned at such heresy about Tristan. "Vat is wrong with Tristan?" "Such music, Herr Doktor, is a danger and must produce evil effects upon the young." "Gott md Himmel!" cried the conductor, rising up in all his majesty like Wotan in The Ring. "Vat is the matter with you?"—he then burst into a flood of turbulent German, waving an admonitory finger at the Doctor who replied in equally torrential German, but with a haughty stare and a supercilious curl of his hps. Meanwhile our Italian Maestro Esposito, whose knowledge of German was more extensive than his speech, stood aside looking at me and raised his hands despairingly, saying: "Ma dove andiamo? . . . che sciocchezza!" Gradually the torrential flood became a purling brook meandering through the woods like the Andante of the Pastoral Symphony, and the two great men laughed as they embraced. "All is veil, my young philo62

Father and Son sophcr," said Hans Richtcr, "don't be afraid of Richard Wagner: he vill not corrupt you." When we left, Dr Mahaffy said to me in a mysterious voice: "Today my boy I have proved to my satisfaction that the celebrated quarrel of my youth between Wagnerites and the Brahmsians is still as active as ever. And Hans Richter is as touchy today about his idol Wagner as all the rest of the Bayreuth clique in the old days. In College I never agreed with Macran's craze for Wagner whom he idiolized as he did Hegel. I still am a Brahmsian, though, as I said to Dr Richter, I would except the Overture and Prelude to the third act of Die Meistersinger from my general condemnation of Wagner's art. Brahms and his friend, the violinist Joachim, personified all that was noble in music. Remember, my boy, that it was Joachim who, by his classical style of violin-playing, raised the status of the soloist, and by his example as a quartetplayer made the world familiar with the last quartets of Beethoven. Since his death in 1908 there has been no artist worthy to take his place, except the Belgian violinist Ysaye whom I look upon as the last of the Mohicans. Ysaye, Walter, is the only one who plays like a gentleman; he has the religion of his instrument, and he doesn't play with that abominable'tremolo—a degenerate and effeminate habit which destroys the playing of most virtuosi today." *

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During the winter of 1908 my father and mother made up their minds that my education needed to be radically modified. My father came to the conclusion that as long as I stayed in Dublin I should for ever be exposed to manifold musical temptations which would prevent me from concentrating upon my classical studies. He saw that I was learning nothing at St Stephen's Green School because during the winter months I was continually absent through asthma attacks and thus could not keep up with my classmates. An unusually severe congestion of the lungs, which laid me low for weeks, finally decided him to ask our family physician to give his opinion. Dr Wright then said that, leading as I did, such strenuous scholastic and musical life with irregular hours, lack of sleep and exposure to all weathers, there was no possibility of diminishing my asthmatic attacks. In his opinion only life at a boarding-school with fixed hours for meals and bedtime would produce a general improvement in health and relief from attacks. My

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Adagio father then decided to send me to his old school Shrewsbury with which he was still in touch through the Old Salopian club, and he wrote to his old school-friend, E. B. Moser, who reserved a place for me in his house for the summer term 1909. The decision to send me to an English school meant in my case a more radical change of direction than for other boys. For one thing I was fourteen years and nine months old when I arrived at Shrewsbury, decidedly old for a new boy. Then there was the problem created by my obstinate and long-sustained determination to study the violin and be educated musically which had worried my father. He was certain, however, that if I went to Shrewsbury, which maintained its prestige as one of the best classical schools in Great Britain, I should be compelled to concentrate on Latin and Greek to the exclusion of music and that my ambition to excel in classics would develop in the competitive atmosphere of an English public school. My godfather when he heard that at last my father had resolved to send me to England invited himself to lunch to wish me Godspeed. As a subde reminder of the work that lay before me he presented me with the complete Oxford text of Virgil in one volume.

SHREWSBURY

SCHOOL

There is now less flogging in our great schools than formerly; but then less is learned there; so that what the boys get at one end they lose at the other. DR

JOHNSON

By the time the Irish mail-boat passed the Kish lightship my initial attack of home-sickness had passed and when we reached Holyhead I began to enjoy the sense of freedom and self-reliance. The rural hamlets of the isle of Anglesey, the delicate silhouette of the Menai Suspension Bridge, the gay seaside resorts of North Wales flashed by me as I sat in the dining-car consuming my cold chicken and ham, biscuits, cheese and watercress, watered down by Bulmer's cider. At Chester, where I had two hours to wait for the connection to Shrewsbury, I remembered my father for the first time since my departure from home. He had urged me insistendy not to miss the opportunity of visiting the town walls of Chester, which, as its name 64

Shrewsbury School testifies, had been in days of ancient Rome the castrum or fortified camp that kept the wild Celts at bay. When I walked on the walls and gazed down at the surrounding countryside, I realized why a Roman fort such as Chester possessed significance in English history. It signified the Romanization of Britain, the urbs that was a miniature Rome, the towns, the great roads, the aqueducts, the baths and all the benefits of a superior civilization which was never altogether to disappear, in spite of coundess barbarian invasions. The Romans, alas, had never taken it into their heads to invade our neighbouring island, a neglect which always seemed to me an injustice to Ireland on the part of Divine Providence. When I arrived at Moser's house I was ushered into the housemaster's study. M y father, who had not seen E. B . Moser since his Cambridge days in 1880, described him to me as a tall lanky man who could run like a hare and was a good oar. Today I saw before me a white-haired dignified figure who held himself erect and walked with heavy stride like a military man. Hence the nickname of Captain which he was given by the boys. "Tonight," he said genially, " y o u will be my guest as the term does not begin until tomorrow—hah! It is always a wise plan for the new boy to acclimatize himself before the arrival of the rest of the house, or, as we say in bumping races on the river, get a flying start—hah?" He then introduced me to his sister, an aged spinster who kept house for him. Both were very gracious, and asked many questions about my father. "Let me recollect," said the housemaster in his precise pedantic voice, "your father was head boy of the school in 1879, wasn't he?— hah! I know he was a contemporary of my excellent friend and colleague T. E. Pickering who is one of our senior masters. He, by the way, wants to greet you as soon as is convenient. Does your father keep in touch with Mr H. W . Moss, our former headmaster who retired last year after forty-two years' tenure of the post?" " O h yes, sir. M y father stayed with him at his farm near Oxford. He told me that Mr Moss called his nine cows by the names of the Muses." Miss Moser who had been following intendy gave a shrill cackle at this point saying: " H o w whimsical! Do you remember, Edward, how he used to describe the antics of one of them—incidentally the best milk-giver—whom he used to call Terpsichore. She was known as the dancing c o w ! " I observed that Miss Moser and her brother had the same mannerisms 6$

Adagio of speech, but they were more pronounced in him, though she spoke much more slowly. One mannerism was the inteijection 'Hah'! which he used like a Greek enclitic to emphasize the end or beginning of each affirmation, and the other was a sudden intake of breath through his Hps which prolonged the sentence giving it a sibilated emphasis. Both mannerisms gave a pungent tang to his remarks, and so impressed schoolboys that they constantly mimicked him. My diminutive study, which was to contain three boys with all their books, exercises, note-books, geometrical instruments, inkpots, tuckboxes and photographs of the family at home, would have been considered too small for a cell in a monastery. Most of the space in it was taken up by the three desks with locked cupboards above them. The desk next to the window with the best light belonged to Hinmers, the study monitor, and that nearer to the door to Hartley, my senior by a couple of terms, so I was given the desk in the centre. "Now, Starkie," said Hinmers, "let us settle the amount of fagging you will have to do. Hartley, too, is a fag but as he has been in the house a little longer he will hand over to you certain duties such as cleaning my shoes every evening and bringing my shaving water. I'm not very particular, but I do like everything done regularly, and above all, tell me, have you ever cleaned a pair of shoes?" "I have often tried to clean my own, but I do not expect I'm much good: at home a man used to clean them for us." "Neglected education! Ask Hartley to teach you. Now to come to other duties, remember that you must always be on your tiptoes ready to run on messages to other studies. By the way you have not yet seen the head of the house. I'll bring you." A. J. Dickinson, the head of the house, had a bigger and more luxurious study than the rest and I felt shyer and more ill at ease in his presence than in the presence of the old housemaster. He appeared to me more Olympian and conscious of the enormous hierarchical distance that separated me from him. He was affable and kind, but I felt that his graciousness resembled the outer mask which a member of Parliament assumes when he is speaking to his massed constituency. Our first ordeal as new boys came that evening in hall at Moser's when all gathered to elect by ballot the house offices. There were three. First, that of Hall Constable, which had few duties but was given as sign of popularity, then came the two humble offices of hall-postman and hall-crier to which new boys were always elected. 66

Shrewsbury School "Come on, Starkie," cried the head of the house. "You're elected hall-crier and you must make your first announcement." He handed me a piece of paper with an announcement of the forthcoming hallsinging which I had to proclaim as follows: "Oyez! Oyez! Oyez! This is to give notice that hall-singing will take place next Thursday, May 15, at 7.30 p.m. God Save the King! Down with the Radicals!" Hall-singing filled me with misgiving, for I remembered the stories I had heard from old Salopians in Dublin about being howled down and having to drink a mug of salt water. Friends had given me some risqué French-English songs which I had memorized and which would have made the audience rock with laughter, but I doubted my capacity to put them over; so I resolved to sing The Vicar of Bray. Hall-singing, when it did take place, was a tame affair, and my song passed muster and did not cause a ripple of interest in the audience. M y most vivid memory of my first term was my meeting with the headmaster, C. A. Alington, who had only been appointed to Shrewsbury two terms before my arrival. He was very youthful in appearance and I mistook him for a young Oxford undergraduate when I saw him pass by one day in flannels wearing the striped blazer of the Authentics Cricket Club. That day I saw him play for a scratch team against the school and make sixty runs in twenty minutes, hitting out with all the gusto of a public school boy in his last year, and next morning I saw him play fives against the captain of the school team, Cecil Campbell, and beat him. With such daily feats of athletic prowess to his credit the new headmaster's prestige rose by leaps and bounds among the boys as well as the 'Old Salopians'. Dr Alington resolved to be a new broom at Shrewsbury and began immediately to introduce drastic innovations and abolish certain customs which in his opinion had lost their significance. He was encouraged in this policy of reform by the example of his two brilliant contemporaries—his brother-in-law, Dr Lyttelton, headmaster of Eton and his nephew, Dr Ford, headmaster of Harrow. The greatest obstacle all those reformers had to face was the stern opposition of the older masters. In Alington's case this opposition reached its zenith in the summer of 1909, my first term, and I have a vivid memory of the dramatic way in which the young headmaster counter-attacked and defeated his entrenched opponents. Knowing that the majority of the older, and a good number of the younger masters, were bitterly 67

Adagio antagonistic to his reforms, and had already created the myth that he was unpopular among the boys, he nipped their intrigues in the bud by suddenly assembling the whole school one morning at 12.30 p.m. The majority of the boys who gathered in the long hall stretching from end to end of the school building called 'Top Schools' or more briefly 'Toppers' were in a defiant mood: we had already spent three hours in classes and were eager to dash off to the cricket field or to the river. The older masters looked at one another uneasily: " W h y did their arrogant young chief forever keep them guessing? What new fad was in the air?" For one full hour he gave us all the most brilliant display of oratory it has ever been my privilege to hear. Pacing up and down the narrow dais like a lion in a cage the headmaster cajoled, defied and threatened: at one moment I mentally compared him to Cicero defending Milo, as I heard the seasoned advocate plead his own cause with faultless logic. Then I heard echoes of fierce invective recalling the quo usque tandem abutere patientia nostra? of the Second Philippic, in the long peroration with which our headmaster came to a triumphal close. Custom and tradition of the past, he said, must be observed so long as they are necessary to the life and continuity of a great Institution, but how long will those diehards, who live only in the past, continue to abuse our patience today by their ineffectual attempts to hamper reform and stifle progress? Dr Alington's Philippic swept the boys off their feet and won over most of the masters. His words of defiance " I do not care a rap for popularity," appealed to the schoolboys' sense of drama and ensured his popularity ever afterwards. A few weeks after die beginning of the term I received an invitation to breakfast from the headmaster. When I arrived after chapel at his study I met six other boys from various houses and we were ushered into the breakfast-room, where Mrs Alington presided at a large coffee urn. Under the dining-room table several children were romping with dogs of various kinds and sizes. As soon as they saw us the children clutched us by the feet and pulled us under the table to romp with them. The headmaster, when he entered a moment later, pulled us out one by one by the hair from under the table and introduced us to Mrs Alington. When it came to my turn he said: "Here, my dear, is Walter Starkie, a wild Irishman; you and he ought to get along: he fiddles: music means nothing to me: it is only a noise." Mrs Alington then 68

Shrewsbury School told us to help ourselves to porridge, bacon, sausages and eggs which were to be found in dishes on the side-tables, while her husband opened the pile of letters that lay on his plate. Mrs Alington, sister of the headmaster of Eton, Dr Lyttelton, was the exact antithesis in character to her husband: where he was handsome, nervy and temperamental, she was bulky, plain and placid: he loathed music, she loved it: he mocked the boys in his acrimonious way, she mothered them. The Jack Sprat and his wife method, which the two adopted at Shrewsbury, was extremely effective because it was a compound of sophistication and good-natured kindness. Mrs Alington's motherliness included all the school from the head of the upper sixth to the youngest new boy who had just arrived. She possessed, too, an uncanny faculty for discovering that a certain boy in some house was either seriously ill, or had received bad news from home, or was in need of the help only a mother can give. Straightway she would interest herself in his case and do all in her power to bring help and consolation. Shortly after the headmaster's breakfast I mentioned casually to one of the assistant masters that I was very depressed owing to the puritanical ride that prohibited me from playing music on Sundays. He replied that it was an old-established ordinance, so I thought no more about the matter. Ten days later, however, I received a note from the headmaster granting me leave to play music on Sunday, on condition that I would always play good music and never descend to waltzes, foxtrots or other frivolous dances. I discovered a long time afterwards that it was Mrs Alington who had interceded for me personally with her husband. During my first term I needed desperately at times the consolation of music for, after the excitement of the first week, I became so incurably homesick that for a time I actually contemplated running away. As my attacks of depression generally came upon me at three or four o'clock in the morning after a sleepless night, I knew that the only possible relief was to rise at 5.30 or 6 o'clock, get into the school buildings as soon as the doors were open and practise while nobody was about. The advantage of this scheme was that I was able to have a free hour to myself without any necessity of wearing a mask and playing a part. Nobody in the dormitory would suspect my motives for getting up early, for my violin lessons were at 6.30 in order not to interfere with my other work. These hours of violin practice in the early morning were my great consolation and gave me a feeling of

Adagio intimate self-confidence as I noted that my technique was improving. I had the good fortune to have as teacher Hubert Salt, a pupil of Jaochim, and first violin of the Hallé orchestra. He was aristocratic in appearance, and with his classical features and his white hair cut en brosse, he reminded me of Henry Eccles, a violinist of the court of Charles II. On Speech Day in the summer term of 1909, the great yearly gathering of parents from all quarters of Great Britain was held in a huge marquee on the lawn in front of the school buildings, and I remember how Dr Alington, when proclaiming the school's urgent need of funds for a building that would serve as speech and concert hall, sarcastically warned the old Salopians present not to allow anyone to convince them that the correct translation of the School motto Intus si recte tie labores was: " I f you are all right in a marquee, don't bother about building a hall." The Old Salopians, however, had already rallied nobly to the cause and in 1910 a new Speech Hall was inaugurated which was not only fully equipped for concerts, plays and gym displays, but also with small rooms available for private music practice. The study of music increased by leaps and bounds in the School and the greatest fillip to classical music itself came that year with the arrival of two assistant masters, both of them distinguished amateur musicians, A. J. White and E. K. Southwell. The former, a Cambridge graduate, was an excellent violinist and had studied with Halir, the second violin in the Joachim quartet; the latter, an Oxford graduate, was a pianist of equal standing, who had made music his special hobby-horse, in addition to winning a first in Greats and a rowing blue. It was not through music alone that these two men exercised so deep an influence upon the boys that passed through Shrewsbury in the years leading up to the Great War, but through a variety of qualities which, when combined with music, enabled them to give an entirely new outlook on life to all the youth that came within their orbit. Each of the two men achieved in his own life what the ancient Roman philosophers would have considered the perfect balance between thought and action—the mens sana in corpore sano. White was a competent scholar, a graduate in History and had rowed for his college. He was in mind and outlook an all-round representative of Cambridge University. Southwell, on the other hand, in spite of his brilliance in classics and his fame as a rowing blue, was likewise a characteristic all-round representative of Oxford. It was the partnership at Shrewsbury of those two men, picked 70

Shrewsbury School representatives of the two great universities, that produced the deep spiritual change in all of us who had the privilege of consorting with them, and this came about mainly through the music of Bach. Every Sunday evening we devoted to playing the concertos and sonatas for two violins, and the works of Vivaldi and Purcell. We gave our performances in White or Southwell's rooms before a select and appreciative audience of masters and boys. And when I look back at my years of adolescence at Shrewsbury I find that my friendship and close association with those two men meant more to me then than anything else in the world. *

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When I arrived at Shrewsbury I was at first very sensitive and full of inferiority complex because of my lack of proficiency in football, cricket and athletics. My first débâcle came when I was ordered to take part in the compulsory cross-country paperchase known as the 'Tucks'. Being too shy to claim exemption on the score of my infirmity I tried valiantly to keep with the pack, but my efforts were unavailing and I made a pitiful exhibition of myself. I thus realized very early in my school career that cricket in the summer and football in the winter would have to be taken even more seriously than my work in school, for until I obtained the games passport I felt like the cat that walks alone, a pariah excluded from the convivial circle. Once I discovered that the place of goal-keeper was the only one in the house team that I physically could fill, I practised with might and main and I used to spend hours out on the common with Tom Leake and others who would practise their shooting at goal on me. I learnt the secrets of throwing myself down in front of goal and tipping the ball over the line for a 'comer' and I did my best to compensate for my lack of inches in height by practising jumping high and pushing the ball over the top of the goal. As most boys shunned the place of goal-keeper as too sedentary I soon became a specialist, and played in second house matches. At the end of my first winter term Moser's team won their league matches and we were all given small pewter mugs. In my second winter I was selected to play on the third and even on the second school teams. One of my proudest moments came in the semi-final match of the inter-house contest against Riggs, the former 7i

Adagio holders of the cup and our eternal rivals. I felt faint and sick with anxiety, but on and on came the Riggs forwards and peppered me incessantly at close quarters. Then came a really nasty shot at goal from the Riggs centre-forward—it was hard and well-placed for the far corner of the net: I heard a shout of despair from the touch-line and I thought it was hopeless, but I threw myself wildly to the ground, hoping I might just reach the ball. My luck was in, and I just succeeded in tipping the ball wide for a 'corner'. Moser's won the match and K. Jackson came up to me and there and then awarded me my house colours. That year I just missed my school colours, but was chosen as twelfth man in the team that visited Repton. My most vivid memory of the Shrewsbury-Repton match was not our unexpected defeat by Repton (we had been very confident of winning as we had already beaten Malvern that year) but my vision of our headmaster, C. A. Alington, muffled up in a heavy black overcoat, with his black clerical hat pulled down over his brow, striding furiously up and down the touch-line like Napoleon at Waterloo. When he came within speaking distance he said to me in a loud voice: "As you fellows of the sixth form are incapable of winning a school match I must make you work: I'll keep you fellows of the sixth form in until five o'clock every afternoon— that will teach you not to lose matches." He kept his word after the Repton match, and on another occasion in the summer term, when Rossall unexpectedly beat Shrewsbury in cricket, he kept us hard at work in the afternoons. It was the creation of my new extrovert personality that made possible my life at Shrewsbury, for at first I had felt an outcast owing to my particular circumstances. I became happier when my mask enabled me to escape more easily into my own private world without my companions being any the wiser. For this reason the moments of music with my violin teacher Salt and the 'Two Men' gave me the illusion of being released from the monastic life of a narrow community, and were so precious that I worked all the harder to perfect my mask of extrovert. Sometimes when I could slip away from school I would pay a hurried visit to the Old Schools down near the railway statioh, where home-sickness would descend upon me like a pall. As I walked back to Moser's I thought over the long struggle between my father and myself because of my obstinate determination to educate myself in music as well as in classics and I bitterly regretted that I had 72

The Finale of our Edwardian Era not created years before a mask which would have enabled me to escape into my own private world without allowing even my father to suspect my mental alibi.

T H E F I N A L E OF O U R E D W A R D I A N E R A W h e n the long vacation came and I returned to Dublin on a sunny afternoon at the end o f July 1910, Ireland became for me an enchanted island. Over the peaceful waters came the gentle tolling of church bells as our ship glided into her moorings at Kingstown. Dublin and Ireland belonged to a dream-world from which I had exiled but never separated myself. The greatest event of that summer vacation was the birth o f my youngest sister, Nancy. She was born seven years after Chou-Chou, and w e all considered her a prize baby. She was a chubby infant with a lovely head of golden curls, a mischievous glint in her brown eyes, and she reminded me always of my father, for she had his forceful temperament and was as wilful as she was precocious. Being the youngest she was more spoilt than any o f the rest o f the family and even as a tiny tot she was an enfant terrible for she inherited, in addition to my father's forcefiilness, a Rabelaisian strain from my mother's side of the family which prompted her to shock the prudish ladies who peered at her when her nurse displayed her in the drawing-room on party days. All the legends of Christmas were revived for Nancy, and Santa Claus brought so many presents down the chimney for her that they could no longer be accommodated on her bed and had to be piled up on the schoolroom table. Late on Christmas Eve after Nancy had fallen asleep, Enid, w h o was always the fairy godmother o f the family, would get up very early on Christmas morning, light the candles on the Christmas tree and sprinkle artificial snow over everything. M y last memory o f our life in Somerset was the big dance my parents gave in the Christmas holidays of 1910 which for us was the grand finale o f our Edwardian lavish days. Never did our home look more beautiful than that night. The avenue was lit with lamps and the house was a blaze o f lights. The music in those pre-jazz days was simple and consisted mostly of waltzes, two-steps and polkas with 73

Adagio occasional foxtrots. Already, however, American ragtime tunes were gradually infiltrating such as Mandy on the Marsh and Alexander's RagTime Band which Miss Gasparro, a bright-eyed dynamic player, introduced that night. The drawing-room where she and the band played became the heart of that dance, for it led into the long conservatory which was lit by Chinese lanterns and the whole length of the greenhouses was left open, and tiny coloured fairy lights were concealed among the flowers and plants. My father's Persian rugs were laid down here and there and chairs for dance-partners sitting out were hidden away in discreet nooks behind palms. This farewell dance at Somerset was a great gathering of the clans, for Starkies, Walshs, Hoeys, male and female were represented. From the beginning of the dance Enid and I had anxiously been looking out for Aunt Helen, for she had returned to Dublin on leave from South Africa. She had, alas, ceased to be the fairylike Aunt Helen I remembered in the early days, and she was too much absorbed by modern life to remember the days when she lay with us under the trees on the fairy hill in UnderclifFe. She arrived late with Aunt Ida and a number of smart young English Army officers, most of whom I did not know. She was radiandy beautiful and, with her pink and white complexion, golden hair, swanlike neck and white shoulders, was still the image of Romney's portrait of Lady Hamilton, but she had lost the elusive, wistful quality which had so bewitched us in former years. Aunt Ida followed her, as though carried along in the trail of light of the blazing comet, but as soon as she entered, the party, which had been naive and adolescent, became sophisticated and exciting. Even the music seemed to change, for Miss Gasparro, who possessed an Italian temperament, responded to the increased animation and, giving the cue to her fiddler, launched into a rousing foxtrot. And once Aunt Ida set the ball rolling all the adults present followed her as if she had been the Pied Piper. Even Uncle John and Uncle Charlie, whom I rarely saw on a ballroom floor, cruised merrily round the room with the mothers of two of the flappers present. I watched the transformation of the children's party into a grown-up dance in which fathers, mothers, aunts and uncles swept aside their own sons, daughters, nephews and nieces, who stood around the wall watching in speechless amazement the demon of the dance bewitch their elders one by one like a St Vitus' Dance or the bite of the Tarantula. Even my father and mother were fascinated by the spectacle of crabbed age triumphant over youth and 74

The Finale of our Edwardian Era at the adult whoops which turned the party into the rollicking revelry of an Irish hunt ball. The cocks in our barn were crowing but the dancing still continued unabated. I saw my father standing in the doorway, presiding like Tithonus at Aurora's revels, and looking infinitely old, weary and sad. "Next vacation, Walter," he said, "you will find us in another house. Tonight is the grand finale. I think the girls will be sorry to leave this place where we have been so happy, but there is no alternative. Our life here has been one of mad extravagance. We have given all of you the life we used to have in old Gregane in Cork, when I was a child, and we have stinted you in nothing. We have had cows, chickens, ducks, pigs: we have enjoyed the cream from the dairy, the vine in the greenhouse has given us grapes, and the garden fruit in plenty for the table and for jam-making. But in Ireland the days of abundance are coming to an end, and I see a much harder time ahead of us. Remember the res angtista domi of Juvenal which you were reading last term: pinching poverty will be our lot and the lot of many of our friends: this is why I keep urging you to work as hard as you can to fit yourself out for a profession. Our troubles need the surgeon's knife as Ajax said: Tigdg roficovzi nrjfiari. Only a drastic change can save us!" * * * * * When I entered the Upper Sixth at Shrewsbury I felt for the first time a sense of achievement. Even in the Fifth form I still was harassed by general subjects and had to interrupt my classical or French studies to work at mathematics for school certificate. But once that obstacle had been surmounted I was able to look forward to two years in the Sixth Form under the headmaster, and I remember that period as the happiest of my life up to then. I had advanced in Latin and Greek beyond the dry-as-dust stage of slavery to grammar, and I was now beginning to appreciate as literature the Greek and Latin authors we read in class. From now on the classes we attended were more in the nature of lectures and seminars than cut-and-dry classes and we were encouraged to read outside our set courses. The Sixth Form library with its formal desks, book-cases, its hallowed relics of the former headmaster H. W. Moss (who still was grotesquely referred to by his nickname 'Bum') and of the celebrated Old Salopian classical scholars, like A. T. Barbour and Smale, who had sat in that room, impressed 75

Adagio mc by its dignity, and when I stood at the appointed spot by the bookcase, ready to construe for the class the text of Virgil or Euripides, I felt as if I was taking part in a solemn ritual and that it would be quasisacrilege to make a howler for, if I did make one, I should not only have to face an irate headmaster, but should also hear echoing through that room the shocked whispers of the ghostly past. Dr Alington, once he made his new Sixth Form students proudly conscious of their rise in the world of scholarship and eager to cooperate in upholding the dignity of their form, never missed an opportunity of mocking those who took themselves too seriously, and shattered pomp and circumstance by his witty paradoxes. He never allowed the pundits of the Sixth Form to rest on their laurels, and kept them forever guessing. With them he often was as capricious and as wayward as an eighteenth-century lady of fashion surrounded by her gallants. Some days he would come in nonchalantly sucking a daisy, and this we always knew was a sign that he was in his Alice in Wonderland mood, when he would quote Uncle William or The Walrus and the Carpenter or the nonsense verse of Edward Lear. This mood would lead to C. S. Calverley's brilliant translations into Latin of some English doggerel, and we knew that our task for the next day would be to put into Latin verse a couple of familiar nursery rhymes. Other days he came in slightly flushed and frowning grimly. We knew that before the afternoon was out he would be striding up and down the long Sixth form like the Angel of Wrath. He would then put us through our paces with merciless precision and wither us with scorn when we failed to answer his questions. When he was in one of his pleasant moods, however, his teaching was a perpetual delight, for he was always opening new vistas, not only in the classics, but in English literature, history, even politics. In the classics his paradoxical intuitive methods of teaching needed to be supplemented by solid class work under the direction of an able assistant master, for he fired brilliant suggestions at us just as he did paradoxes and quotations, and had no time to spend on the minutiae of scholarship. He was forever planning surprises for us, and I remember our amazement one day when he announced that on the following day we should have a visit from the world-renowned classical scholar J. E. B. Mayor. As we were at the moment actually studying the Satires of Juvenal we had heard of the editor and commentator Dr Mayor, but we all thought he had died years before in the days of

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The Finale of our Edwardian Era Porson. Next day a very old man tottered into the Sixth Form followed by the headmaster, who told us that Dr Mayor would give us a short lesson on the first Satire. The old scholar sat down and in a monotonous droning voice spoke to us of Juvenal, and read out word for word from the voluminous notes at the end of his edition of the Satires. Later on the headmaster, after explaining to us the brilliant textual emendations made by Mayor's successor at Cambridge, A. E. Housman, led us over hill and over dale as he quoted from the latter's Shropshire Lad. Another celebrity whom our headmaster brought to us in 1 9 1 0 - 1 9 1 1 was the Rev. Ronald Knox who gave us Latin classes for part of the term. I remember him as pale-faced, with black hair drooping over his forehead, dressed in clerical black with the black gaiters of an Anglican archdeacon. He appeared shy, dreamy and introspective, and used to sit motionless and abstracted for hours while we wrote Latin proses and verses for him, which he would correct with meticulous care and discuss with us in many a pleasant tete-d-tete. I little thought then that Dr Ronald Knox was soon to be converted, and would become a very good friend of mine in later years as Catholic Chaplain at Oxford and preside over lectures of mine to the Newman Society. One of my most precious musical memories of Shrewsbury was the visit of Dr Alington's friend, the great singer Gervase Elwes and his accompanist Liddle, who gave a recital in the Speech Hall, and stayed at the headmaster's house. Gervase Elwes had not a rich or colourful voice, but so intimate was his phrasing and so perfect his diction that his singing became like conversation raised to transcendental pitch, and when he sang The Dream of Gerontius or songs of Schubert, Schumann and Brahms his voice possessed an ethereal quality which affected me like a spiritual experience. He was tall, pale, bald-headed and statuesque as he stood on the platform, resting one arm languidly on the lid of the piano. His singing of Over Wenlock Edge from the Shropshire Lad by Vaughan Williams and La Belle Dame Sans Merci by Roger Quilter was unforgettable, owing to his uncanny power of suggesting the tragic implication of the two poems, not only musically but poetically. When I met him after the recital he spoke reminiscently of his school days at the Oratory, Birmingham, where he had known friends of my family. He had a mystical devotion for Cardinal Newman and told me anecdotes of the latter's love for the violin which he played. " N e w m a n , " he said, "had no faith in education as a moral deliverer of the world

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Adagio from its evils and consequent sufferings, for those giants, the passions and the pride of man, were too strong. The best that could be expected from a University education was a habit of mind characterized by calmness, alertness, freedom, moderation, wisdom and self-discipline. As for the formation of soul and character that should be left to the home and the Church." I came away from my meeting with that great artist feeling that his personality was that of a recluse condemned to live in a world of turmoil. He had been a diplomat, and it was only by untiring efforts he had reached the higher regions of art and discovered that poignant serenity which made his singing and phrasing so memorable. * * * * *

The most inspiring classes during my last term were those given by Dr Alington on the foreign news page of The Times, for they served in some strange way to sum up all the history we had learnt at school, both ancient and modern, and to explain the significance of the past in relation to the present. Alington supplied each one of us in the Upper Sixth with a copy of The Times of the day, and after making us read page five, the foreign news page, he would ask us in turn to describe precisely what was the most important item of foreign news and to give our reasons. When we had given our answers he would then ask us to analyse the reactions of other countries to that news item, and when he listened to us for a while he would give us a short talk on the political situation in Europe and the world at the moment. In the autumn of 1912 The Times was full of reports on the Balkan War, and I have never forgotten the masterly analysis which the headmaster gave us of the dangers to world peace that loomed ahead as a result of that disastrous conflict which, following as it did on the heels of the ItaloTurkish War in Libya, foreshadowed the Armageddon of 1914. Dr Alington was the only headmaster or teacher I have ever known who possessed the power of portraying in Time and Space for an intelligent youth of eighteen years the historic stage upon which he would shortly be obliged to act his part in life. When I recall retrospectively his striking analysis of the motives which inspired the statesmen in the various countries in 1 9 1 1 - 1 9 1 2 , 1 understand why his telling phrases, his Tacitean epigrams and solemn climaxes, when he held the entire class in hushed silence, seemed to us

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The Finale of our Edwardian Era in those days as universally significant as the speech o f Pericles to the Athenians at the outbreak o f the Peloponnesian War, or the tragic comments of Thucydides on the end o f the ill-fated Syracusan expedition. Alington made us for the first time in our lives grasp the deep humanistic meaning o f the classical education he and his staff had endeavoured to give us at Shrewsbury School. He made the ancient civilization of Greece and Rome serve as symbols or allegories wherewith to judge the trend o f present-day events, which were precipitating mankind into the abyss, and he showed us the deep modern significance o f the words Nemesis and Hybris which Aeschylus, the world's first and greatest dramatist, himself a priest o f the Eleusinian Mysteries, had applied to the tragedy o f Agamemnon, the King o f the Greeks, and the Curse of Atreus. And when he spoke o f the Athenian expedition to Pylos and Sphacteria, so graphically portrayed by Thucydides, he made us meditate not only on Kleon, the demagogue of Athenian democracy, but also on Lloyd George and our modern demagogues in the Mother of all Parliaments. Day by day on page five of The Times he would follow the telegrams from Vienna and Budapest concerning the manoeuvres o f that stormy petrel o f Mid-European politics, Count Tisza, who, incidentally, fascinated me because he never moved from one political group to another in Hungary without a Gypsy fiddler playing to him in his carriage, or else w e would follow the more tortuous intrigues o f the sophisticated Count Aerenthal against the Russian minister Safonov. And nearer home in British domestic politics our mentor kept us forever on the alert to watch the threatening situation in the North o f Ireland, where the Orangemen had discovered a fiery leader in Edward Carson, a graduate of Trinity College. Shrewsbury had close connections with Belfast and in Moser's house in 1912 I met Savage-Armstrong, an old Salopian-Orangeman w h o gave us graphic descriptions o f his gun-running expeditions which were landing German arms in Ulster under the nose of the British police. The boys at the table applauded the prowess of SavageArmstrong and his fellow gun-runners, but Freddy Prior, w h o had succeeded the Captain as our housemaster, in his bantering tone then asked me what had become o f the wild Irish revolutionaries from the South and West of Ireland. " W e don't buy arms from our enemies, the Germans," I replied pointedly. " W e in the South hope to win Home Rule lawfully through the British Parliament." "In that case," 79

Adagio replied Savage-Armstrong doggedly, "Ulster will fight, and Ulster will be right." I still remember today Alington's solemn words condemning the action of Sir Edward Carson. "There you have a classic example of hybris," he said. " N o w that he has unleashed the hounds of civil war in Ireland and has called in the help of the foreign enemy to enable the Orangemen to crush their political and religious opponents, what is to stop the Irish in the South from following his example and importing arms from abroad? Such was the policy of Athenian statesmen like Themistocles and Alcibiades which led to the destruction of their native country." *

*

*

*

•

The school concert at the end of the Michaelmas term 1 9 1 2 was the final climax of my career at Shrewsbury, and the one and only occasion when I was conscious of winning a triumph that was accepted unreservedly by boys and masters. The shouts of the boys, the general applause from the crowded hall, the congratulations from the headmaster, and Mrs Alington, and from White, Southwell, and my beloved teacher, Herbert Salt, made me forget for a moment my sadness at leaving Shrewsbury at the end of the Michaelmas term instead of staying on with the rest of my companions until July 1 9 1 3 . M y father's original intention had been to allow me to finish my last year at school in the Upper Sixth and present myself for an entrance scholarship in classics in Oxford, but now, owing to financial difficulties, he decided to send me to Dublin University where, as son of an ex-Fellow of Trinity College, I should be given a special reduction in fees, and be able to live at home. M y thoughts however, at the moment, were all centred in one idea—to study the violin under a famous master in France or Germany and become eventually a concert violinist. The masters did their best to encourage me in this ambition, and Salt and White advocated Germany, while others recommended the Conservatoire in Paris. T o my surprise Mrs Alington made me play for Sir Alfred Lyttelton, her brother, who advised me to go to London and play for Sir Henry Wood, promising me a letter of introduction to the great conductor. D r Alington, in his final report to my father on m y marked improvement in classics and modern languages, devoted much of his letter to my 'wonderful' performance 80

The Finale of our Edwardian Era at the concert and quoted the general opinion that I should be 'sent to London to play for an expert who would map out my future.' Needless to say my father took no notice of the headmaster's letter. He had decided that my future was to be in Ireland.

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4 T H E S H A N A C H I E C A S T S A SPELL Ever since my exciting experience in 1907 at the riotous first performance of Synge's Playboy of the Western World I had felt attracted towards the ramshackle old Abbey Theatre on the banks of the Liffey, and in the vacations I never failed every week to take my accustomed seat in the second row which had been reserved for me by my friend, Jack Larchet, the conductor of the Abbey orchestra. Between the acts he would invite me round to the Green Room where I met the members of the company. During the Christmas holidays in 1909 he told me that they were producing for the first time Synge's unfinished posthumous tragedy, Deirdre of the Sorrows, on January 1 3 , 1 9 1 0 . "Mind you keep that night free, Walter," he said. "Molly Allgood, to whom Synge was engaged, will be playing the part of Deirdre." Jack later gave me a moving description of the death of Synge in the previous year. His last year had been a desperate struggle, for the doctors had diagnosed a cancerous disease and had operated; they had seen that there was no hope, but he kept working away feverishly at Deirdre of the Sorrows, and had reached the third act. Molly Allgood had strange premonitions of Synge's death: some years previously when the Abbey company were on tour in England she and Synge were sitting in a tea-shop and as she was looking at him the flesh suddenly seemed to fall from his face and all she saw was a skull. Just before the operation, and at a time when she felt confident that he would be cured, she dreamed that she saw him in a coffin being lowered into the grave and a strange sort of cross laid on the coffin. " H e died," Jack Larchet added, "on March 24, 1909. In the early morning he said to the nurse: 'it is no use fighting death any longer', and he turned over and died." Looking back I can remember no play that produced so deep an impression upon me as Deirdre of the Sorrows. I still see clearly in my mind's eye the wild young princess gathering up her rich robes and jewels, and I hear her voice saying prophetically: " I will dress like Emer in Dundealgan, or Maeve in her house in Connaught. If Con82

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chubar'll make me a queen, I'll have the right of a queen who is a master . . . I will not be a child or plaything; I'll put on my robes that are the richest, for I will not be brought down to Emain as Cuchulain brings his horse to the yoke, or Conall Cearnach puts his shield upon his arm; and maybe from this day I will turn the men of Ireland like a wind blowing on the heath." T o a youth from an English public school accustomed to plod through a Greek tragedy word by word in class and learn by heart passages from Shakespeare, Deirdre of the Sorrows was a revelation: it seemed as if some new kind of drama combining the qualities of the Agamemnon of Aeschylus and Antony and Cleopatra had been conjured up before me by the ghost of the departed dramatist whom I had seen three years before, a forlorn figure, sitting alone while pandemonium raged around him. The fascination of Deirdre has lasted all my life, and I have only to turn the pages of the printed play to recapture instantly the emotion I felt that night. The theme which sprang from ancient Irish folk-lore had become for every Irish man and woman what the legend of Helen of Troy was for the Greeks, and Deirdre's beauty has inspired the Gaelic poets for centuries. Deirdre is the prophecy that gave her her name, the meaning of which is Alarm; but Synge, who was treating the character of Deirdre alone, replaced the original theme of the folk legend by the more dramatic one of the horror of old age and the decay of love, and Deirdre says to Naisi: "Isn't it a small thing is foretold about the ruin of ourselves, Naisi, when all men have age coming and great ruin in the end." Synge was haunted by the fear about his forthcoming marriage to Molly Allgood. He felt that he was too old for her, and in his last play he writes the tragedy of a young girl betrothed to an old man and in love with a young one. Deirdre too constantly reminds us that Synge's reveries over his own approaching death had already gripped him when he wrote the lines: 'Death should be a poor, untidy thing, though it's a queen that dies'. Even his obsessions in this play with 'the filth of the grave' spurred him on to write and emphasize the vitality, the wilfulness and wild beauty of the heroine which appears in the farewell scene where Deirdre says, " G o to your brothers. For seven years you have been kindly, but the hardness of death has come between us." The open grave in the last act of the play was a grim reminder of the playwright's frantic race to dramatize the tragic end of his heroine before death came for him likewise. 83

Adagio There was a poignancy in the acting of Molly Allgood that night which I have never felt in any subsequent performance I have seen: a ghostly quality, as though the slight brown-eyed girl, with her pale face the embodiment of tragedy, still lingered under the hypnotic spell of the dead author, and she moved about the stage as in a trance, and her voice had the ring of uncontrollable pathos when she murmured: "I have put away sorrow like a shoe that is worn out and muddy, for it is I have had a life that will be envied by great companies. It was not by a low birth I made Kings uneasy, and they sitting in the halls of Emain." O n my return to the Abbey Theatre in 1912 I heard from Joe Kerrigan, one of the principal actors of the company, the story of their odyssey in the United States during their 1911 tour, when The Playboy excited riotous scenes in the theatre, especially in New York and Philadelphia. In the latter city the trouble became more serious, with the result that the whole cast of The Playboy were arrested for performing 'immoral or indecent plays'. Joe Kerrigan, who had been playing the part of Shoneen Keogh, gave me a graphic account of the scene in the court before the magistrate. The first witness for the prosecution, a publican, said that he had sat out the play until Shoneen's 'coat of a Christian man' was left in Michael James's hands. Then he made a disturbance and was ejected from the theatre. "I found," he declared, "as much indecency in that conversation as would demoralize a monastery." His brother, a priest, however, endured the play to the end, and found that Synge had committed every one of the sins mentioned in the act. " W e actors," said Joe Kerrigan, "were all raging from the start, but when that priest started to attack my—that is to say Shoneen Keogh's—character, I got so mad, Walter, that I bawled out 'Oh my God!'The magistrate then said: 'If that man interrupts theCourt again, turn him out,' forgetting that he was speaking of a prisoner in the dock! I declare to God the whole lot of us burst out laughing." "What did Lady Gregory say to all this, Joe?" "She sat amongst us, looking like a queen. She placed all her trust in our lawyer, John Quinn, who was a tower of strength. You should have seen her face during the cross-examination of the witness when Mr Quinn asked the witness if anything immoral took place on the stage, and the latter replied: 'not while the curtain was up!' She smiled when the same witness, the publican, stated that 'a theatre was no place for a sense of humour!' W e won the day hands down, Walter, for the Director of Public Safety, when he was called, said that he and his 84

The Shanachie Casts a Spell wife had enjoyed the play immensely and had seen nothing to shock anybody." The attacks against the Abbey Theatre continued in Dublin and Kerrigan told me that Yeats was urged by many prominent men in the city to throw over Synge. " W e like your work," they said, "and we like the plays of Lady Gregory, Padraic Colum and Boyle, and the Abbey Theatre looks like prospering after the lean years. Why insist on forcing on the Dublin public what they detest? We condemn Synge because his is not like the Ireland we know." In spite of all the attacks and hostility W . B. Yeats never budged. He knew that Synge had given to Ireland the best plays she had ever seen, and he and Lady Gregory were resolved that the theatre would not yield to the mob. They received, however, very little support from their fellow-workers in the theatre, and Boyle and Colum, two of the most popular of the Irish dramatists, seceded in sympathy with the protests against The Playboy. But Yeats and Lady Gregory were heroically adamant, though the company for months played to empty seats. Within a couple of yean, however, after The Playboy had been welcomed enthusiastically in London and in the United States, it was produced in Dublin without causing a ripple in the audience. Thus Yeats by his courageous championing of Synge rendered a noble service to dramatic art, but after the death of Synge he became so irritated with the endless procession of second-raters clamouring about the wrongs of Ireland that on one occasion, when he could stand it no longer, he cried: "When a country produces a man of genius he never is what it wants or believes it wants: he is always unlike its idea of itself. In the eighteenth century Scotland believed itself religious, moral, and gloomy, and its national poet, Robert Burns, came not to speak of these things but to speak of lust and drink and drunken gaiety. Ireland since 'the Young Irelanders' has given itself up to apologetics, there i s no longer an impartial imagination delighting in what is naturally exciting. Synge was the rushing up of the buried fire, an explosion of all that had been denied or refused, a furious impartiality, an indifferent turbulent sorrow. His work like that of Burns was to say all the people did not want to have said." * * * * *

In those days in the Abbey Theatre I used to meet that strange little dwarf of a man, James Stephens, with a big head, the sallow complexion SAO—O

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Adagio and dark hair o f a Gypsy, and a face whose wistfulness could pucker up into gaiety and malice and just as rapidly deepen into a look of brooding melancholy. He cast the glamour on me with his brown eyes full o f laughter and tears, irreverence and affection, that peered out at me from under bushy eyebrows. He became at once my hero and champion, not a hero riding out in gorgeous panoply, but one o f the goblin heroes I had seen m y uncle Arthur Rackham sketch in Kensington Gardens amidst the gnarled trunks o f the trees. Born in Dublin in 1882 in abject poverty, he had played as an urchin in the streets, and he worked in a lawyer's office at the wretched salary o f fifty pounds a year. Then, one day he had the good fortune to stray within the orbit o f A E , w h o urged him to write and publish his Little Stories of a Philosopher, as he called them, but for years nothing happened. Then all o f a sudden in 1909 he produced a little volume o f poems entitled Insurrections (15)09) which so captivated A E that he hailed the gnomelike poet as the latest arrival on the slopes of Parnassus. "James Stephens," said A E , "writes with all his body and all his soul, and it is refreshing to find a poet w h o does not ransack dictionaries for dead words as Rossetti did to get living speech." For a generation the Irish bards lived in the Palace o f Arts in chambers hung with embroidered cloth made dim with pale lights and Druid twilight, and the melodies they sought were half soundless. The melodies of the new school began close to the ear and died away in the distances of the soul. 1 The annus mirabilis o fJames Stephens came in 1912, the year that saw his ascent to fame with his t w o books, The Charwoman's Daughter, and The Crock of Gold. The former, also entitled Mary Make-Believe y a prose story of the Dublin streets and tenements, is one o f the little masterpieces of Irish literature which for tenderness, humour and sweetness o f temper has only one rival in the world, The Vicar of Wakefield by the beloved vagabond o f the eighteenth century, Oliver Goldsmith. It is a novel about Dublin stripped o f conventional romance, in which the squalor o f poverty is seen through the dispassionate eyes of experience, without bitterness or cynicism: T h e night droops d o w n upon the street Shade after shade. A solemn frown Is pressing on to A deep hue The houses drab and brown . . . * G. Russell (AE), Imaginations and Reveries, London, 1913.

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The Shatiachie Casts a Spell When I met James Stephens in 1912 I was eighteen and had just left Shrewsbury. My formal training as a scholar did not satisfy me, for I was conscious of having closed my eyes and my ears to another world of folk poetry and folk music of which I had caught stray glimpses in the past. During the eight months after leaving school, before I entered Trinity College in October 1 9 1 3 , 1 led a limbo existence between the two worlds of the public school and the university. At first I felt dismally lonely because I had left my Shrewsbury companions and had not yet acquired new friends in Dublin. It was then that I began to mingle with the devotees of the Abbey Theatre and turn my thoughts towards the poetry and music of my own country. James Stephens no sooner met me than he opened my eyes to the shadowy world of tinkers, leprechauns and wandering fiddlers. After listening to me play he said on one occasion to my sister Enid that I lusted after my fiddle as if it were a woman, hugging it, fondling it and covering it with the warmth of my love. When I confided to him that I was working away at classics for the university, he puckered his brows and said to me solemnly: "You are not made for that university world. You should break away from it altogether." Stephens would then expatiate on the joys and sorrows of a minstrel's life and would start an argument on the relative merits of the fiddle and guitar, both of them instruments of the jongleur. He would sit crosslegged on the table and sing Irish and French songs to his guitar accompaniment. He had returned after a year's absence in Paris dressed in a blue French pèlerine which turned him from a leprechaun into a Scandinavian kobold. Most of the time in Paris he had spent in the Café des Lilas in Montparnasse, watching the crowds pass by, noting the strange types and cocking his ear to catch any strange rhythms that pierced the dull roar of boulevard traffic. "The café is the best place in the world for writing a book," he would say sententiously, "the bustle and the varying sounds give me ideas. I'll write the rest of my books in a café." On his return from Paris he was appointed Assistant to the Director of the National Gallery of Ireland and had his office upstairs above the gallery in a room which was approached by a spiral staircase. Seated at his desk surrounded by books he tried pathetically to wear the staid mask of an Irish civil servant, and in order to give himself dignity he wore a monocle which made him pucker up his face and close the other eye, thus giving him the appearance of a diminutive Cyclops. He loved all things that were foreign and exotic, for, as AE 87

Adagio used to say, when a poet is really national and has discovered the secret lore of his own race, he becomes aware of all peoples. That explains why the Japanese and Chinese professors who continually visited Ireland in those years used to tell me that they preferred the poems of Yeats to those of any English poet of the time, because they were based upon folk themes which were the patrimony of every country. In Stephens, the Irish shanachie and story-teller, we find not only the ancient legends, but also old forms of speech, even curses. He used to say that the inspiration of many of his poems came from tunes, and I used often to play the fiddle to him, as I did in later years to W . B. Yeats. Yeats, however, w h o was tone-deaf, only liked music at certain moments and of a special rhythmic kind, whereas James Stephens was steeped in music and loved what he called magic tunes. He used to say that some tunes brought good and others bad luck, and certain tunes should only be played to lay a curse or a ghost. At other times, when in a roguish mood, he would change places with the vagabond Mac Dhoul and cock snooks at the solemn company of angels. Mac Dhoul was hurled to earth for his irreverent intrusion, but impenitently vowed he would sing a song celebrating the Devil or Pan the God of Nature. Like all Celtic Shanachies, James Stephens had a great repertory of cursing poems which he would declaim in the traditional manner, twisting his dwarf face into a grimace of malice, writhing his body and gesticulating with his hands as he cast the evil eye on the tight-fisted landlady who would not satisfy his thirst: The lanky hank of a she in the inn over there Nearly killed me for asking the loan of a glass of beer; May the devil grip the whey-faced slut by the hair, Ana beat bad manners out of her skin for a year. If I asked her master he'd give me a cask a day; But she with the beer at hand, not a gill would arrange. May she marry a ghost and bear him a kitten, and may The High King of Glory permit her to get the mange. James Stephens always wanted to write what he claimed would be an Irish Arabian Nights in which he would in his own fanciful way evoke the great heroic legends of Ireland. At the time he was a devoted disciple of Stephen MacKenna, the author of a magnificent translation of Plotinus. MacKenna was intensely Irish yet cosmopolitan, a lineal descendant of the Wild Geese w h o carried their sword, their Catholic88

The Shanachie Casts a Spell ism and their engaging qualities to France and Spain in the seventeenth century. In his youth he had gone off to Greece to fight the Turks, and he had lived many years in the Latin Quarter in Paris, and spoke French and Irish as fluently as English. He now lived a monk's existence in his library in Dublin, polishing his translation which eventually was issued in luxurious quarto volumes by the Medici Society. MacKenna, in addition to being an Irish speaker, was a collector of Irish folk music which he played on the concertina, and it was he who encouraged James Stephens to deepen his knowledge of Irish, and to study the old Irish texts, with the result that the poet produced Irish Fairy Tales, a work which sums up the impish and haunting qualities of his storytelling art. Even today, the moment I open the volume and start reading aloud, I conjure up the little poet as I saw him one day in Stephen MacKenna's library perched on a ladder with his feet resting on a rung, and his body bent forward, reading out to us one afternoon one of his Irish Fairy Tales: "There are people who do not like dogs a bit—they are usually women—but in this history there is a man who did not like dogs. In fact he hated them. When he saw one he used to go black in the face, and he threw rocks at it until it got out of sight. But the Power that protects all creatures had put a squint into this man's eye, so that he always threw crooked . . . " The little Shanachie would say that there were more worlds than one, and in many ways they were unlike each other. But joy and sorrow, or in other words, good and evil, were not absent in their degree from any of the worlds, for wherever there is life there is action, and action is but the expression of one or other of these qualities: "After this Earth there is the world of the Shee. Beyond it again lies the ManyColoured Land. Next comes the Land of Wonder, and after that the Land of Promise awaits us. You will cross clay to get into the Shee; you will cross water to attain the Many-Coloured Land; fire must be passed ere the Land of Wonder is attained, but we do not know what will be crossed for the fourth world." In the Irish Fairy Tales we meet the heroes of the Gael, such as Tuan Mac Cairill, Fionn and Mongan, and fair princesses such as Becfiola the Dowerless, Brotiarna, the Flame Lady, and Dur Laca of the White Hand and where in Grimm could we meet a stranger monster than the Hag of the Mill with her tall skinny dog and her old, knock-kneed, 89

Adagio saw-boned, one-eyed, little-winded, heavy-headed mare? So fascinated was I by that world of Fairy revealed to me by James Stephens that I resolved to give my uncle, Arthur Rackham, no peace until he had illustrated these stories. Eventually I succeeded and to my great j o y the book appeared in 1920 with his illustrations. The first occasion on which my uncle, the English goblin, met his counterpart the leprechaun from Ireland was on a moonlight night in June, in the garden of my uncle's studio in Hampstead. While I fiddled an Irish fairy reel, Arthur Rackham's fair-haired daughter Barbara, then a tiny tot, flitted here and there under the trees, and the poet intoned softly his poem The Whisperer: The Moon was round! And, as I walked along, There was no sound, Save when the wind with long Low hushes whispered to the ground A snatch of song. * * * * *

I always returned home in a state of elation from my meetings with James Stephens, for in a subtle way he helped me to discover myself. In the early spring of 1913 I was in a state of storm and stress, practising away at the Wieniawski Violin Concerto for the Feis Ceoil and slaving at Classics, French, English and Mathematics for the Junior Exhibition examination in Trinity College. Every evening I had to face my father who now quoted one of Dr Percy Buck's 1 unguarded statements to the effect that the study of music tended to make youths languid, selfindulgent and devoid of will-power. I tried hard to concentrate my attention on my forthcoming examinations, but my violin was now more of a temptation than ever before, because at the Royal Irish Academy of Music the Senior Professor of violin was the celebrated Italian virtuoso and composer, Achille Simonetti, a master who had been taught by Camillo Sivori, the only pupil of Niccolò Paganini. I revelled in the lessons I received from Simonetti, for he initiated me into the Italian classical tradition of violin playing. He insisted on my presenting myself at the Irish Music Festival—the 1

Professor of Music in the University of Dublin and successor to the late Dr Ebenezer Prout.

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The Shanachie Casts a Spell Feis CcoiL"If you practice hard," he said, "you will be the dark horse this year for the gold medal." The test piece was the concerto of Wieniawski in D minor which required a considerable amount of virtuosity. In the spring of 1913 I spent a great deal of my time with Simonetti who used to give me extra lessons in the Concerto, and I used to play Spohr duets with him. He knew that I suffered agony from nerves when I had to play in public, and for that reason he made me play for other students. Some days, when I was asthmatic and felt the approach of a spasmodic attack, those ordeals were beyond my strength. The position in which one held the violin was particularly trying for a sufferer from asthma and, in addition, owing to nerves, my fingers used to perspire and my bow arm to tremble when playing. I tried to give myself Dutch courage by bringing with me from home a small flask filled with port wine which I used to gulp down when it was my turn to play, but this only heated my head and made my fingers inaccurate. My master could never understand why my performance, which the day before had seemed so brilliantly confident, now faltered, as though I had lost heart. One day when I told him about my asthmatic attacks, he cried out excitedly: "Eccoi Finalmente ho capitol You have the same disease as Wieniawski: you have ze nerves sick: that is why you have ze nervous staccato like Wieniawski who suffered from asthma." He then told me that Wieniawski once had an attack of asthma while he was playing the Chaconne of Bach to a large audience. So violent was the spasm that he was unable to continue. Immediately Joachim, who was sitting in the front row of the audience, mounted the stage, took the violin and bow from the hands of the stricken virtuoso and finished the Chaconne, receiving a huge ovation from the audience in appreciation of the generous gesture of one great master to another. Fortunately when the day for the violin competition came I was free from asthma, but my nerves attacked me with redoubled violence. With a sinking heart I walked on to the stage and faced the examiner and the public. Then to my joy, after the first few bars, I began to feel hypnotized by my own playing and my self-confidence returned, when I found that I had full control of my bow, and the fingers of my left hand seemed to respond more rapidly than usual, as though they had acquired extra nervous energy. By the time I reached the Zingaresque third movement, my fiddle like a hobby horse took the 91

Adagio bit between its teeth and swept me along at such a vertiginous pace that all I could do was to cling on and let it cany me to kingdom come. At the end I felt as if I had awakened from a crazy nightmare without the haziest notion of how I had played. When at the end the examiner announced the award of first prize and gold medal to me I could not believe my ears. What had happened was that the excitement of facing the public had disenthralled me and enabled me to get outside myself and discover, as it were, my demon, who would give me the magic power to forge ahead, oblivious of everything but the music, which had become second nature to me through constant practice. As soon as I had won the prize I determined to rush off and break the news to my Shanachie, James Stephens. I ran him to earth in a teashop in St Stephen's Green. The little man curled himself up on a chair, cocked his head on one side, and hummed a tune without saying a word, beating the time with his hand on the table. "Do you know the tune?" he said, gazing at me quizzically. "Do I know it? Why I played it for you dozens of times; it is the tune I learnt from the tinker in Killorglin when I was a boy." "Well, I'm only reminding you of it in case you might forget it now that you're all flushed with triumph . . . What a pity, Walter, you're a toucher!" "A toucher?" "Whenever you walk down the street you're always imagining what kind of person you're going to meet round each bend in the road, and that's why you're always saying 'touch wood' under your breath, for whether' tis a friend, an enemy or a bore, you want to have an answer ready that you can fling at him like a bone to a dog, so that you can dash away down the nearest side street before he begins to bark at you. What a pity you are not the black sheep of your family: you would then go your own sweet way far from this whispering gallery, and you would put away those books that keep moidering your head. Remember Angus Oge—Angus whom men call the young: he is the sunlight in the heart, the moonlight in the mind: he is the light at the end of every dream, the voice forever calling you to come away." "I must follow the example of Mrs Makebelieve in your novel and put my hopes in the miracle of the unexpected." "If the unexpected did not happen," replied the Shanachie, "life would be a logical, scientific progression which might become dispirited 92

The Shattachie

Casts a Spell

and repudiate its goal for very boredom, but Nature has cunningly diversified her methods whereby she coaxes or coerces us to prosecute, not our own, but her own adventure. Beyond the skyline you may find a dynamite cartridge, a drunken tinker, a mad dog, or a shilling which some person has dropped; and any one of those unexpectednesses may be potent to urge you down a side street and put a crook in the straight line which has been your life, and to which you have become miserably reconciled." With Stephens as my mentor I often wandered through the streets of Dublin, and I learnt how to look upon my native city through his humorous and kindly eyes. The Dublin he made me see was the Dublin of the poor who never starve but are perpetually hungry. Stephens held that hunger stimulates us to create, for we shall never create anything if we are satisfied. There are, however, the worries that spring from the practical common politics of existence. All through his works we feel James Stephens's sympathy with the mothers and children of the poor, and with animals, birds and all nature. "There is no tragedy," he says, "more woeful than the victory of hate, for hate is finality, and finality is the greatest evil that can happen in a world of movement." And in The Crock of Gold the Poet and Philosopher, who is the author himself, tells me that the duty of life is the sacrifice of self: it is to renounce the little ego that the mighty ego may be freed, 'for everything must come from the Liberty into the Bondage that it may return again to the Liberty comprehending all things and fitted for that fiery enjoyment. Until there is a common eye no one person can see God, for the eye of all nature will scarcely be great enough to look upon that Majesty.' Such was the message that Ireland's little spell-binding Shanachie gave the world. Many used to say that he was a changeling, a tiny dwarf who was substituted for a healthy child at birth, but I always compared him to Demophon, the wandering hero of Greek mythology, who in his infancy was nursed by Demeter, the mother of Nature. She anointed him nightly with ambrosia and placed him like a brand in the fire, so that there was burnt out of him some portion of the gross and earthly element. But one night the mother of Demophon saw the strange woman put him in the heart of the fire and rake the ashes over him. She shrieked out "witch!" to the stranger and Demeter, after rebuking her for interfering with a goddess who would have made her son 93

Adagio immortal, drove off in high dudgeon in her charger-drawn chariot. But there was still left a portion of immortal spirit in Demophon; he grew up different from other children, and he was filled with immortal longings that made him wander far from his ivory tower. To James Stephens, Demeter gave the gift of minstrelsy as well as story-telling, but in order to counterbalance her gifts, she imparted to him a quivering sensibility which made him forsake the golden world of the demigod for the gloomy depths of humanity, where he might mingle with the waifs and strays, the grotesque madmen, and the madder they were the more he would seek them out in order to lighten their lives with his gende comfort. No Gypsy I have ever known had a swifter eye to spy out the secrets of birds and beasts in the woodland, or had keener ears to hear the cry of a hunted creature. Whereas the leaders of the Irish literary movement moved on the higher slopes of Parnassus, conscious of the revelation, Stephens drew me away from the dusty main road into the society of tinkers and leprechauns, and so imperious was his psychic power that I became as familiar with the fairy world of The Crock of Gold as I did with the world of the Dublin streets, where he would amble along slowly, telling me quaint anecdotes about the hawkers, pedlars and fiddlers whose struggles aroused his compassion.

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THE L A S T OF THE OLYMPIANS Trinity College in 1913-1914 still housed so many famous eccentrics that all the undergraduates collectively created around them a mass of legends which were transmitted to the later generations. Undoubtedly the dons who exercised the deepest influence over their disciples were those who had already been consecrated in College folk-lore as eccentrics. This was the case of my godfather, the Reverend Dr Mahaffy who became even more of a legendary figure to me when I entered College, because of the enormous fund of true and apocryphal stories that were related about him by students, Fellows and Professors. He towered over the College like a colossus and people came from all over the world to visit him. It had been one of the bitterest disappointments of his life when he failed to obtain the Provostship in 1904 from the British Government, and Nemesis played one of her ironic tricks upon him by denying him the throne he had so coveted. George Wilkins, one of the most eccentric of the Fellows, took a positive delight in dispelling any illusions I might have had about the Provost, or the Senior and Junior Fellows. He was immensely fat, baldheaded and bearded, and he carried his voluminous paunch with sluggish dignity as he strutted through the College. One day as he was apostrophizing me in the Front Square he saw the stockish figure of the Provost, Dr Traill, hurry past towards the board-room, puffing and blowing, followed at a distance by the imposing figure of Dr Mahaffy and the patriarchal theologian John Gwynn, father of famous sons. "There goes the bull of Bashan," said Wilkins in scornful tones, pointing to the Provost, "butting his way through thick and thin, followed by our great Master, the tutor of Oscar Wilde; the man who missed the tide: Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, Humpty Dumpty had a great fall; all the King's horses and all the King's men, and even his bosom friend, King Edward VII himself, couldn't give Humpty Dumpty the Provostship in 1904 when Salmon died. But my boy, remember that—Pride goeth before the fall." 95

Adagio To which I replied: "It was the Ulster Members of Parliament that browbeat the British Government into electing Traill: they were able to name their price." "And now," replied the bitter old don, "the Master is all attentive to his erstwhile rival: thicker than thieves they are. He tells us all that the Provost has not been well lately. Who knows what Nemesis has in store? There they go, the College's twin sons of Atreus, followed by the patriarchal Nestor, John Gwynn, begetter of so many Gwynn prodigies that the place is now called Gwynnity College!" Years of monastic residence in College, instead of mellowing Wilkins, had embittered him and turned him against all men. He had, however, been correct in his reference to the Provost's ailments, for a few weeks later I heard in College that the tireless old stalwart who used to boast of his former prowess in wrestling, was dangerously ill. Through my father I was able to follow each successive scene in the closing drama of Provost Antony Traill's demise. His fatal illness was, my father said, due to his Spartan habits. He refused to wear an overcoat, even on freezing winter days, and he caught a chill when travelling to represent the University at a meeting in London. When, on his return, he took to his bed, he spurned doctors at first, for he always claimed that he was his own best physician, and calling for hot-water jars he determined to sweat out his chill. Next day he complained that his cold had passed lower down and he became alarmed at the violent pains he felt in his abdomen. The doctor was called and found that the pain in the belly he complained of was not incipient cancer, as the patient thought, but was self-caused, for the tough old stalwart had held a burning hot jar tenaciously against his belly, even after he had burnt the skin off. Meanwhile the medical bulletins concerning the illustrious patient's condition were commented upon every day in the Fellows' luncheon room and my father would tell me in the evening that the most solicitous visitor at the Provost's House was Mahaffy. He would come into the luncheon room daily and say: "The poor man is obviously sinking: I found him much weaker than yesterday." "But," said my father, "the doctors' report say that he has rallied." "Merely temporary," replied the Master, "he is indubitably weaker." Day after day when Mahaffy would come into the luncheon room announcing the latest bulletins, many of the Fellows would nudge one another and murmur: "The wish is father to the thought," and unkind remarks about jackals, and walking into dead men's shoes. At last the 96

The Last of the Olympians day came when the dismal tolling of the College bell announced the Provost's death. When I called to congratulate Dr Mahaffy upon his appointment to the Provostship he answered sadly: " M y dear boy it is too late: there is little I can do in these troubled times." Mahaffy's fame as a scholar gave lustre to the College throughout the world and his diligent researches into its past history were a valuable addition to Irish history. As Senior Fellow and Provost he took great interest in all the College celebrations and was most insistent on the necessity of observing the ancient rituals. He was punctilious in all the details of college etiquette, whether in the lecture halls, the dining-hall or the College Park, because he knew that ritual and tradition are inseparable from the spirit of humanism. A university is not a technical school: it has grown through the centuries out of the mediaeval monastic studium generate, and it must never lose its universality or cortesia, as the Italians would call it, which belongs to polite learning. Nothing escaped the Provost's notice: when walking across the Front Square he was as vigilant as Argus of the hundred eyes. He would notice at the entrance of Commons that a student was not wearing his gown. "Come here, b o y ! " This was accompanied by an imperious beckoning finger: "Who's your tutor?" The undergraduate gives a stammering reply. "Don't you know that you are imperilling your immortal soul by being without a gown"—then after a slight pause—"and what is worse the fine is five shillings." Dr Mahaffy was always a keen supporter of cricket, and one of my earliest memories of the College Park was on the occasion of a match between the Gentlemen of Ireland and the South Africans when I sat on a seat between him and my father. He spoke of cricket matches sixty years before in the days of Irish pioneers of the game, such as Arthur Samuels who played under the name of Samuel Arthur and William Conyngham Greene who was the first to bowl round arm and was nicknamed 'Bowling Greene'. Mahaffy's strong point was his bowling, but he was also an excellent batsman and often opened an innings. He frequently appeared in the Gentlemen of Ireland side and in 1878 scored seventy-six when playing against an All England Eleven captained by Dr W . G. Grace. It was, he used always to add, on the same occasion that W . G. hit a six and the ball soared over the College railings and broke the bow window of the neighbouring Kildare Street 97

Adagio Club. One anecdote which shows Mahafiy in a characteristic light I owe to my old friend Joseph Hone, who heard it from Ernest Browne, one of the Provost's old friends. Browne and Mahafiy played in 1874 in a match between the Viceregal team and the touring team, I Zingari. The Zingari batted first and in the second over of the match Browne took three wickets with four balls, and later two more, making a total of five wickets. Then it began to drizzle, and Mahafiy then said to Browne: "I am going to get the next five wickets, Browne. I love rain." Browne saw him go and dip the ball in the wet grass. He then took the next five wickets and he and Browne bowled the Zingari, a very good team, out for fifty-four runs. After the match was over and the Viceregal team had won by seven wickets, some of the party organized a race between the Marquis of Abercorn, the Lord Lieutenant, and Mahafiy, the handicap being that Mahafiy had to run in his ulster and with an open umbrella. Lord Bandon and the Marquis of Abercorn's youngest daughter acted as judges. It was a very good race, but the Marquis's daughter and Lord Bandon pulled the rope at the winning post and tripped up Mahafiy in the last stride, and he fell into his open umbrella. Although the Provost was all his life a keen supporter of games and had been captain of the cricket eleven, he would in conversation always uphold the Macedonian ideal of field sports. He was very fond of doing this when surrounded by the young men of the Kildare Street Club who belonged to the landowner class, and he would lay down the law incisively in lisping tones with a touch of well-bred arrogance, saying: "The Macedonians were very like the young men of our best county families: they could afford to neglect strict training, they ate and drank what they wanted, nay, they often drank to excess, but they worked off the evil effects by those field sports, hunting, fishing and shooting— which have always produced the finest type of men." Alexander the Great, he asserted, always favoured the Macedonian against the Greek ideal of the athlete, and would quote the retort given by the former to those who advised him to race at Olympia, that he would do so when he found Kings for competitors. All his life Dr Mahafiy was renowned for his snobbery, but it would be very difficult to fit him into any of the categories of snobs enumerated by Thackeray, for he was too much of an Irishman and possessed too much wit and volatility of temperament. He wore his snobbery with such grace that it became an adornment to his personality and, besides, 98

The Last of the Olympians he would continually make fun of his own foibles. His snobbery sprang from his Anglo-Irish characteristics and it can be explained by a remark made by W . B. Yeats when he was asked whether Oscar Wilde was a snob: " N o , I would not say that: England is a strange country to the Irish. T o Wilde the aristocrats of England were like the nobles of Bagdad." I remember reading the following passage in a letter written by Mahaffy to a friend in 1886 which he begins thus: " I am down here in Abbey Leix on a spree, shooting with the de Vescis. Nothing but Lords in the house except myself: Drogheda, Ormonde, Kingston, Castletown, etc. and their wives. So I am really in a snob's paradise, if that were my object." One can visualize him lisping the last sentence with a twinkle in his eye. In College when he became Provost it was his custom to invite undergraduates to cold supper on Sunday evenings. On one occasion when some of us were guests and knocked at the back entrance to the Provost's house he himself opened the door and welcomed us into his study saying: "Come in, boys: I have a great treat for you this evening —cold woodcock pie shot by lords—Lord Granard sent the birds to me yesterday." Where the learned Doctor's snobbery rose to heights of lyricism was when he described his meetings with royalty. So famous were his powers as a conversationalist that he was in great demand in royal circles, and on a number of occasions he was invited to Sandringham and Windsor by King Edward VII who delighted in his reminiscences of Greece and Germany in the days of Prince Edward of Saxe Weimar. He would return from those Olympian expeditions and dazzle his colleagues in the Common Room with his descriptions in which there was always a mixture of naïveté and malicious humour. On one occasion he told us at home that he had been at Windsor Castle at the time of the Coronation of George V. " I was in the drawing-room with seven Kings and seven Queens. I was talking to her Majesty, the Queen of Spain, and I was paying her a pretty compliment. 'Madam,' I said, 'Spanish is the language of Kings; French is the language of diplomacy; Italian is the language of love; German I speak to my horse!' As ill luck would have it, the Kaiser was standing nearby, and he turned to me saying: 'What is that you say about German?' I was taken aback for a second but I quickly recovered and replied: 'Her Majesty and I, Sir. are already on terms of intimacy: we have a secret!' "

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Adagio As a rule snobs are full o f inferiority complex and fawn upon the great, basking in the sun o f their favour. N o t so D r Mahaffy w h o was far too conscious o f his o w n dignity. He was past master in the art o f devastating repartee and he was able to convey b y his looks and b y the curl o f his Hps every nuance o f withering scorn. O n one occasion, during the W a r o f 1914, he was taken to task b y one o f his colleagues in the Fellows' C o m m o n R o o m for his friendship with the K i n g o f Greece, Cons tan tine, w h o had taken sides with the Germans. T h e Doctor, unabashed, immediately replied: " I ' m deeply disappointed in him—I'll cut that K i n g . " D r Mahaffy's peculiar type o f snobbery was successful because o f the innate courtesy and graciousness that is traditional among royalty. W h e n , however, he employed his direct and arrogant technique upon a rara avis among monarchs, the aged Queen Victoria, he encountered his Waterloo. T h e sad defeat occurred during the Queen's visit to Dublin in 1901. T h e learned doctor at the drawing-room advanced proudly up to Her Majesty and extended his hand, saying: " M a d a m , I have brought y o u a message from your son." T h e only response the grim-faced old Queen made was to say, turning to her 'entourage', " W h o is this man?" D r Mahaffy did not suffer unduly from the snub but passed it off airily, saying in lisping tones to all w h o w o u l d hear: " P o o r old lady, she is at death's door. The Prince says she has been ailing lately." The legends about D r Mahaffy were legion, even in m y undergraduate days, but today, forty years after his death, they flourish and increase as though the ghost o f the Master possessed Vampirish powers that enable it to pursue the living. A t every spree held in College somebody is sure to mimic in an undertone the voice o f the great Mahaffy: Yclept Mahoof by those of heavenly birth, But plain Mahaffy by the race of earth. The sayings o f ' M a h o o f have been collected by successive generations as conscientiously as those o f his celebrated pupil Oscar Wilde, and most experts agree that the talented Oscar derived a great deal o f his epigrammatic superciliousness from attempting to imitate the Master. In one o f the letters I possess written b y the Master to his wife in 1879 from Greece he describes the youth, Oscar Wilde, w h o was one o f the party: 'He has come round under the influence o f the moment from Popery to Paganism. He has a lot o f swagger about 100

The Last of the Olympians him which William Goulding vows he will knock out of him as soon as he gets him on horseback in Arcadia.' In the same letter occurs a significant passage which illustrates the learned Doctor's ascendancy over Wilde and his profound anti-Catholic bias. 'The Jesuits,' he writes, 'had promised Oscar Wilde a scholarship in Rome, but, fhanlc God, I was able to cheat the Devil of his due.' I have often speculated on what would have happened if Oscar Wilde had resisted his tutor's blandishments and the temptations of Arcadia and accepted the Jesuit scholarship in Rome. Would he have written another Duchess of Padua and gradually veered round in the direction of Baron Corvo, or would he have soared upwards and become an ascetic and a modern mystic of the Church? The influences of his brilliant tutor and of his first Alma Mater, Trinity College, won the day in 1879, and the pagan gods of Greece took him under their wings and launched him on his meteoric career that the decrees of Nemesis might be fulfilled. There is no doubt that the brilliant epigrams in Intentions, Lady Windermere's Fan and The Importance of Being Earnest sprang up naturally in the mind of one who was brought up in the atmosphere of Dublin, in the days when Irish society was unrivalled for its spontaneous wit. Dr Mahaffy has explained Irish wit in The Principles of the Art of Conversation (1887), a book which contains many autobiographical touches: 'So strongly do we feel this use for spontaneity in Irish Society, where wit is less uncommon than elsewhere, and where it is no less highly prized, that a kind of social religion warns us not to study it beforehand, and anyone suspected of coming out with prepared smart things is received by the company with ridicule.' He explains that the very meaning of the word conversation implies a contribution feast, an eranos as the Greeks would say, not the entertainment provided by a single host. In Dr Mahaffy's day we were present at many such contribution feasts, for the Master was by no means unchallenged. Dr Johnson said of the Irish that they were an eminently fair-minded people for they never spoke well of one another. The Fellows' luncheon-room in those days saw many a batde, and wits were sharpened in those duels of repartee. In such an atmosphere it was impossible for the selfish talker to monopolize the table. The Provost shone with brightest lustre at private dinners where the attentive host had chosen with loving care the company and the wine to harmonize with the guest of the evening. As Dr Mahaffy believed that the sine qua non of good conversation S A O—H

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Adagio was to establish equality among the members of a convivial party, he always tried to do so when he took his place at such a dinner. His smile, his slight touch of well-bred jocularity, his condescending dignity were all calculated to put the rest of the company at their ease. Nevertheless his commanding presence, his flat hair combed straight down both sides of his noble head, his open collar, and white clerical tie, at the outset overawed the guests. At times his guttural speech recalled that of King Edward VII and my father believed that he tried to copy His Majesty. But once the Master had established friendly contact with the company through the three universal themes of polite Irish conversation—hunting, fishing and shooting—it was time to settle down to the serious business of dining and wining. When the omens were auspicious the Provost would gradually expand in urbanity, just as a rose unfolds its petals under the genial warmth of the sun. The hock would remind him of a heady Liebfraumilch he had savoured some years previously at a banquet given him in Berlin by the celebrated Hellenist, Herr Professor WillamowitzMoellendorf; the claret, which was a Larose and came from the College cellars, would give him an opportunity to tell how he personally had instructed the College Bursar to order clarets in cask directly from Bordeaux from his friend Guischard. " W e are," he would say, "thank God, always loyal to claret, and our friends from Oxford and Cambridge call it the classic wine of Trinity College Dublin." The Master as he spoke savoured with his purple hps the purpler vintage, gazing round beatifically at his fellow-guests. My father who was always eager to get the serious business of the symposium going, would then suggest some subject which he knew would infallibly goad the Master into action—such as St Paul's sermon before the court of the Areopagus at Athens. "I have always thought," my father said, "that St Paul in his sermon on that occasion went very far in his sympathy for the tenets of the Athenian Stoics when he quoted the words of Aratus: ' W e are God's offspring: in Him we live, and move, and have our being!' " "Ah, my friends," said the Master in his lisping voice, "do understand clearly what St Paul's position was when he stood that day at the top of Mars's Hill, the most hallowed spot in Athens, and addressed the group of distinguished Stoics and Epicurean philosophers, who were curious to know what the little upstart Jew would have to say. He first of all paid them an ironical compliment by calling them a very 102

The Last of the Olympians religious people because of the great number of votive statues they had in their temples. Then he gratified them still further when he described to them the great One God, not from the Jewish but from the Stoic point of view. When, however, he proceeded to preach the Resurrection of the Dead, those who had listened to him so far and even sympathized with him, turned away in disgust and would not listen to another word." The Master then declared that the rejection of St Paul, the apostle of Christianity at Athens, was curiously prophetic, for it was the first expression of the feeling which still haunts the thoughtful visitor today who wanders through that city's ruins. The feeling that while other cities owe to the triumph of Christianity all their beauty and their interest, Athens has to this day resisted this influence; and that while the Christian monuments, such as the beautiful little Byzantine churches, so lyrically celebrated by Renan, arouse the enthusiasm of travellers, they are dismissed by the Athenians as of no importance compared with the city's heathen splendour. After the Master had given his discourse, which a carping critic might have condemned as a deliberate breach of his own rule against selfish talkers, the conversation became more of an eranos, and some spoke of the Greek pessimistic beliefs about the next world. The Master who had sat back puffing a big cigar listening with eyes half closed, suddenly again broke into speech saying: "Those of you who are so dogmatic about the gloom and pessimism of the Greeks and their lack of hope in a future state surely forget the most wonderful religious feast of the Mysteries called the Greater Eleusinia which had been celebrated from the remotest antiquity, and maintained their splendour down to the days when Greece was living Greece no more. Even Cicero, who had been one of the initiated and a sceptic, looked upon those Mysteries as the supreme achievement of Athens by which man was moulded from a rude and savage life into humanity. And if you want to corroborate Cicero turn to dear old Plutarch who describes the blazing light illuminating the initiates. "Plutarch," added the Master, "was as much of a mystic as any modern Evangelical preacher. For him as for the Platonists or the Hegelians mysticism meant simply ascribing objective existences to ideas or feelings of his mind." In spite of the lofty philosophical level maintained by our Master of the art of conversation, a more unbuttoned mood had developed in the company, owing to the multiple revolutions of the port-wine decanter. 103

Adagio 'The Master of those who know,' sensing the change and wishing to attune his style to the ivy-crowned god's diapason, resolved to relax or, as his Roman model would have said desipere in loco, and called for music. While I was playing a Tartini sonata, the Master sat still on his chair keeping his eyes shut and his lower lip protruding disdainfully and as I watched him I felt sure that he would make some pointed reference to my musical craze. And at the end, when the applause died down, he and my father reopened the symposium with a general discussion on the artistic temperament. The Master took the Emperor Nero as the example to point his moral and adorn his tale. Nero, he said, was obsessed with the mania of shining in public: applause from the courtiers in the palace did not satisfy him. He wanted to face the rabblement, as Shakespeare called them, in the pit of the theatre. He displayed the remorseless constancy of the artist in his training as public singer; he lay on his back with a heavy sheet of lead over his chest to strengthen his breathing, took laxatives and emetics and practised several diets to reduce his weight. His one aim in life was to triumph on the open stage in Rome, but he dreaded facing the verdict of the public in the capital and found success easier in Naples and Cumae, where the public were mainly Greek: from there he could sail for Greece where as Emperor he would get himself awarded crowns which had once been consecrated by the great figures of the past. "Nevertheless," said the Provost, "when Nero became Emperor and for the first five years of his reign, he behaved like a gentleman and was popular with the people, and those five years became known as the golden Quinquennium Neronis, one of the most fortunate epochs of human history, and the only phase of peace in that century of ceaseless dynastic feuds and invasions until the reign of Trajan. That peace lasted as long as the young Emperor worked under a master, but once he got beyond his tutor Seneca's influence he rusticated himself, so to speak, and chaos came again." The Master was very fond of using the phrase 'working under a Master', and he employed it in the Oxford, Cambridge or Dublin University sense of disciplining one's mind under the guidance of a don in one of those three centres of learning. One of the guests then asked whether Nero had been responsible for the great fire in Rome, and did he fiddle while it burned. The Master replied that the historians agreed that Nero had watched the mighty 104

Trinity College and the Solid Men conflagration from the summit of the tower of Maecenas, and so bewitched was he by the vision of the flaming ruins that he sang the lay of Ilium dressed in actor's robes. "Nero," the Master continued, "was an extreme case of the artistic temperament, but in spite of all his faults I have a warm spot in my heart for a Roman Emperor who was so fond of music and the theatre and did so much to help the Greeks. Remember that it was Nero who ordered the cutting of the Corinthian Canal." My father and I often had fierce arguments about Dr Mahaffy's religion. Although Mahaffy was a clergyman, I found it hard at times to believe that he was a Christian. His religion always seemed to me to be that of pagan Greece—an Olympian religion of Plato and Aristode. My father thought that Athenian democracy for Mahaffy, the Olympian, as for Xenophon, was an empire of one leading man, but as he often reminded us even Alexander the Great worked under a master—Aristode. "Let us both agree," said my father as we parted for the night, "that Mahaffy is the last of the Olympians."

TRINITY COLLEGE A N D THE SOLID M E N The two years leading to the outbreak of Armageddon stand apart in the story of my life, as though they belonged to a dreamlike existence. In spite of gloomy portents on the horizon and grim prophecies from Cassandras who declared enigmatically that the hegemonic plans of the Germans and the Anglo-Franco-Russian coalition made world conflict inevitable, few of us imagined the possibility of total war. Dublin in 1913 was a city of feasting and gaiety. I remember polo matches in Phoenix Park between the Irish and the visiting team of the Duke of Westminster, racing at Baldoyle, Leopardstown and Punchestown, cricket in the College Park and out at Woodbrook the extensive demesne of Sir Stanley Cochrane near Bray, where we saw Jack Hobbs, England's crack batsman, and the veteran Rhodes pile up runs against the Australians. Stanley Cochrane, a Maecenas in music as well as cricket, had built in his grounds a concert hall, where in the evening crowds would gather to hear concerts of classical music given by the London Symphony Orchestra under the direction of the Irish conductor and composer, Sir Hamilton Harty. In Dublin the cinema had 105

Adagio not yet started to monopolize public attention, and the only picture house I remember was that in Grafton Street which had opened in 1912, but, in compensation, the theatres played to packed houses and each had its own dramatic speciality. The Gaiety, one of the most attractive playhouses in these islands, catered for the sophisticated theatre-goer and presented well-known plays which had already received the London hall-mark and included Dublin on the provincial tour: the Royal, with its two performances at 7 and 9 p.m., like the Coliseum and Alhambra in London, fulfilled the Dublin public's constant demand for Music Hall stars, and with the added attraction of its Winter Gardens it became the favourite haunt of undergraduates from the two universities. Before the beginning of the cinema era the most popular form of entertainment was undoubtedly the variety show, and those who could not squeeze into the Theatre Royal patronized the Empire in Dame Street or the Tivoli, a cosy little theatre on the banks of the Liffey near O'Connell's Bridge. But those of us who were enthusiastic students of the drama turned our backs on the music halls, except occasionally on Saturday nights, and wended our way across the river to the Abbey Theatre to see the latest play of Yeats, Lady Gregory or Lennox Robinson. Friday was my Abbey night and I continued to go regularly week after week to see the entire cycle of plays in the repertory. There was another theatre, the Queens, devoted to blood and thunder melodramas of the Sweeny Todd variety which had been imported from the Adelphi Theatre, London. W e , Trinity undergraduates, always felt that we possessed proprietary rights in the Queens as it stood on Trinity property and adjoined the Brunswick Street gate, giving access to the square of College, known as Botany Bay, because most of the wilder spirits in College dwelt there.1 Occasionally a number of us used to foregather at night in the Bay and climb over the wall into the theatre through one of the windows in the actors' dressing-rooms. It was a hazardous enterprise, for the porters had orders from the Junior Dean to watch that back wall of the College, but our allies were the actors and actresses who left their dressing-room windows open and welcomed the College boys. In this way I soon became familiar with the dingy theatrical apartments in Queen's Square off Brunswick Street, inhabited from time immemorial by actors, variety artists and barnstormers. 1 Many Irish political prisoners were sent to the Australian penal settlement after the 1798 Rebellion. Hence the origin o f the name.

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Trinity College and the Solid Men In retrospect university life in 1913-1914 was memorable for its processions, or 'Rags', w h e n the students momentarily overflowed the C o l l e g e grounds and invaded the streets, claiming with all the arrogance o f youth the right to paralyse the traffic in the centre o f the capital at the busiest hours o f the day. Trinity Monday, 1914, was the last occasion on which a 'Rag' o f the traditional kind was performed, though sporadic attempts were made after the Great W a r to revive the tradition. Alas, the grim years o f political trouble in Ireland after 1916 were not propitious to processions through the Dublin streets, for clashes w i t h the c r o w d became a risky business when revolvers might be drawn. T h e greatest mine o f information on the subject I discovered in the aged C h i e f Steward, Marshall, a massive giant, over six feet in height, bearded and brawny, with a stentorian voice that boomed through the Examination Hall when, as mace-bearer, he announced the ceremonious arrival o f the Provost on his round o f inspection. Marshall had been C h i e f Steward and mace-bearer for over fifty years and his ancient experiences as a member o f the Dublin Metropolitan Police had made him an unrivalled peacemaker in all disputes between T o w n and G o w n . W h e n any student got into trouble with the police, all his friends had to d o was to tip the wink to the Chief Steward w h o straightway stalked over from College to Store Street police station for confabulation with the sergeant on duty, and the offending student w o u l d be escorted back to College. "All's as right as rain, M r Starkie," said the C h i e f Steward; " w e settled it over a bottle o f Guinness and the sergeant is satisfied. M u m ' s the word: nobody's any wiser. If only the y o u n g students w o u l d give me a call when they're in a bit o f trouble I could settle everything without a summons." I was able to verify the truth o f old Marshall's statement at the time o f the General Strike o f 1913 w h e n a number o f m y friends became mixed up in the mêlée in S arkville Street and were casualties when the police batoncharged the mob. T h e C h i e f Steward, however, went about his duties imperturbably and strode across to Store Street to negotiate their release. I used to divide m y fellow-undergraduates in College into t w o general classes—the extroverts and the introverts. T h e extroverts were those to w h o m w e in College always applied the term 'Solid Men'. 1 T h e y were bluff, hearty and cocksure: they looked y o u straight in the face, crushed your hand in an iron grip, called a spade a spade, and 1

W . B. Yeats would have called them 'objective* as opposed to 'subjective'. 107

Adagio did not beat about the bush. As they were rarely troubled by doubts on any question, life for them resembled a College cricket match played according to fixed rules, and their conscience decided what was orthodox or unorthodox. The important point was 'to play the game' and avoid any conduct that people might say was not cricket. They were confident that if this were done their salvation was assured. The 'Solid Men', thus, had their own code of honour which they observed scrupulously, for they were inordinately sensitive of the opinion of their fellow men and strove to win the respect of the chosen pundits who set the standard for College ethical behaviour. Those who entered the university with a school reputation in football, cricket, rowing, hockey, tennis, athletics or water-polo were well on the way to become 'Solid Men', because the clubs in the College devoted to those sports would be the social centres wherein they would continually rub shoulders with those already initiated. Those whose ambitions at entrance were exclusively centred on winning prizes in classics, mathematics, modern languages and literature, experimental science or whatever other subjects were their special study, soon learnt to damp down their enthusiasm and conceal it from their fellows if they wished to be well-considered, for inordinate 'swotting' and the exaggerated display of interest in things of the mind was contrary to the ethics of the 'Solid Men'. When I entered College the 'Solid Men', though they constituted the most active element of the student community and controlled most of the sport and social activities, were always searching among the Fellows for one who would become the figurehead and personification of their species—totus teres atque rotundus; one in whose personality they would see perpetually reflected the ideal image of themselves as they were in their undergraduate years. Their spontaneous choice fell upon R. W . Tate—whom everybody called the Major, because he was in command of the Officers' Training Corps which had been formed in 1910. Educated at Shrewsbury and St John's College, Cambridge, he had been elected to classical Fellowship in 1908. He became in my eyes the king of the 'Solid Men', for he had the solid and soldierly qualities of leadership and comradeship and above all an optimistic faith in the old school tie. When he presided over the 'Solid Men' he shelved his Latin or Greek scholarship and drew upon his repertory of Kipling's poems. And at the slightest excuse he would spring to his feet and recite for the company one of the three Kipling poems which possessed 108

Trinity College and the Solid Men for him the value of mystic symbols: If, The Ladies, and Gunga Dhiti. Though those poems seem to me among the weakest and most garish of Kipling's poems it was always an experience to hear the Major declaim them in his emphatic lilting manner, for his sincere and childlike nature believed in the message of the Anglo-Indian writer, and the intensity of his feeling made an instinctive appeal to the audience of 'Solid Men', most of whom were to spend their lives amid scenes described in these three poems. Looking back to the eve o f Armageddon I often wonder why Kipling was the characteristic voice o f so many of the pre-war Trinity generation. In Great Britain at the time there was also G. K. Chesterton who personally made a far deeper appeal to me as a writer than Kipling, with the exception of the latter's two masterpieces The Jungle Book and Just So Stories. Chesterton is English of the English and to follow his mind is to enter into communion with the English soul, for he is a mirror of England. "He writes with an English accent," said his friend Hilaire Belloc, "whereas Kipling has no sense of the past, nor of things natively and essentially English; he is rather of Asia and of the transplanted."1 Nevertheless, Kipling in 1913 was the voice of modern Great Britain through his enormous audiences and the suburbs of the cities were full of Kipling devotees, and to his verse more even than to his short stories the British middle class spontaneously responded. What appealed to them was Kipling's gospel of action which they discovered in his energetic short stories as well as in his verse. His poetry fascinated them by its swinging rhythms which reminded them of the old English ballads, and they were attracted all the more towards him because his verse was the direct antithesis to the Pre-Raphaelites and to the early Yeats whose name had become the batde cry of their opponents, the intellectual introverts in College. After all I have said about 'Solid Men* it would appear as if the Trinity College of my youth mainly consisted of that genus, and that the number of the introverts was negligible. Nothing however could be further from the truth. The tradition of small groups of individuals passionately interested in Irish politics or literature lasted well into my undergraduate days, and I remember one very constant devotee of Thomas Davis—Bolton Waller, who used to gather us in his rooms late at night and cook for us a frugal meal of sausages and bacon on his Primus stove. Then as he filled for each guest from a big brown teapot 'the cup that cheers 1

Hilaire Belloc, G. K. Chesterton.

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Adagio but not inebriates', he spoke like one inspired o f 'a nation once again' such as had never existed before; a nation in which all Irishmen, no matter to what religion or class they belonged, would collaborate together in making a nation that would be rooted in the affections o f Ireland's people, not in any exclusive principle o f blood or creed or culture. Often the dwarf-like poet James Stephens would suddenly appear in the door like a visitant from another planet and, squatting tinkerwise on the floor before the hob, would insist on interrupting the symposium on Davis and Y o u n g Ireland to tell us about Paris and the cafés where he used to sit from morn to eve, watching life pass by, in the intervals of writing his books. Sometimes he aired his Stratford atte B o w French and made me rock with laughter at his adventures with waiters, landladies, gendarmes and poules in which he always emerged victor, because he left them gaping dumbfounded at his torrent of Gallic gibberish. O r else he would arrive with his guitar and begin to thrum the strings abstractedly as he sang songs in Gaelic. Bolton Waller, w h o was a solemn-faced idealist, tried hard to curb the irresponsible Stephens and return to his muttons, but in vain, for the little Shanachie would then adjust his monocle, which he had learnt to wear in London, and mocking his host he would say in a hifalutin voice: " Y o u omit to mention that Thomas Davis was an economist as well as a poet and set great importance on the development o f Ireland's turf industry and water-power. The root cause o f all the calamities o f Ireland, he was well aware, was the agrarian system." W h e n Bolton Waller and the rest of us took up the dialogue with earnestness the little minstrel became bored and, dropping the eyeglass, interrupted to say that his solution for Ireland's troubles would be to revive the imagination of the Irish people by retelling the legendary epic of the Gael as it had never been done before. The irresponsible Shanachie at last was too much for Bolton Waller, and we unanimously agreed to postpone further consideration o f Thomas Davis and United Ireland to another night when James Stephens would not be present. Many o f us placed great hopes in Bolton Waller in later days, after the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921, when men of his calibre and tolerant humanism were desperately needed in the new Ireland, but, alas, he died after a short illness. Bolton Waller is but one example selected out of a multitude o f strong personalities I came across in those years w h o pursued their o w n individual course through life without allowing themselves to be deflected either no

The Struldbrugs to left or right. I came to the conclusion that the very position of Trinity College standing like a walled fortress of the spirit in the midst of the Irish maelstrom fostered idiosyncrasies of the individual.

THE S T R U L D B R U G S In Trinity we were never allowed to forget past traditions, for the destiny of the College lay in the hands of the aged Provost and his still more ancient colleagues of the Board. One Saturday morning I stood in fascinated wonder watching the aged Senior Fellows of the College totter into the doorway of Number One leading up the winding passage to the Board Room for a meeting and saw the porters unload a number of long metal cases. "What are those for?" I said to my old friend Sheppard, a veteran of the Egyptian campaigns, who had been on duty at the front gate since before the days when my father entered Trinity. "They're footwarmers for the old gentlemen at the meeting," replied he. "Sure many of them already have a foot in the grave and 'tis necessary to revive them." The procession of the aged reminded me ofJonathan Swift's description of the Struldbrugs in Gulliver's Voyage to Laputa. Senior Fellowship lasting unto death had given them longevity, but like Tithonus they endured the curse of infinite decrepitude. What had kept them alive? Surely not joy of life, unless, perhaps, in the case of the Provost and 'the Benign Doctor'. According to my father all that kept them alive was their profound hostility to their colleagues whom they had seen day by day declining towards the tomb. Hatred gave them zest to rise from their beds on Saturday mornings and get themselves transported in cabs into College to vote against any project of reform. True to their mediaeval traditions the Board made no attempt to broaden the scope of the examination or adapt it to a changing world until 1903, when the abolition of compulsory Greek in the Arts Course and the inclusion of French and German as alternatives to Greek drove the more progressive Junior Fellows to advocate the claim for more adequate instruction in Modern Languages. At last in 1911 the King's Letter gave power to modify the Fellowship examination, and some years later the Board passed a decree whereby Modem Languages would be added to the Fellowship examination, but the decree was not put into effect then because of the outbreak of the World War in hi

Adagio 1914. Thus the vision I had seen of the Struldbrug Senior Fellows gathering for the meeting of the Board marked the end of an era. I was surprised to observe that, with the exception of'the benign Doctor', most of them were mathematicians. Mathematics, I mused, must be conducive to longevity. When I questioned my mathematical contemporaries they argued that classical humanists were encouraged by the very nature of their subject to wear themselves out in the pursuit of worldly pleasures, for their reading of the pagan classical authors sharpened their senses and made them more inclined to succumb to the temptations Nature continuously offered them, and thus by dint of burning the candle at both ends they exhausted the sap of life more rapidly than the man who spent his days over mathematical problems. Charles Rowe, a brilliant mathematician who became one of my closest friends in College, was an only son of Cork parents and had already studied in University College in that city. Shy and self-centred, he was at first difficult to know, but in the rough and tumble of university life his introspective nature attracted me and I discovered that his hobby-horse like mine was music. His piano-playing was passionless and disembodied, as though all that interested him in a piece of music was its bone structure, not its colour, and what surprised me was that his main interest was in the modern French composers, Debussy and Ravel; but he played them as if they were geometrical problems. Rowe possessed, in addition to critical acumen, a keen sense of the ridiculous, and soon we became so intimate that we used to speak to one another in symbols. It was he who encouraged me to be continually on the look out for the contrasting types of Eccentrics and 'Solid Men', and we both kept lists of our cherished specimens of extroverts and introverts in College. Charles Rowe and I soon gathered confederates among our contemporaries who became such close friends of ours that we used to meet at regular intervals. One of the earliest of these friends was Leopold J. Richardson, a native of Dublin, who had entered College a year before me from High School, winning every available prize in classics. He was tall, sallow-faced with stringy black hair and a moustache that gave him the look of a Tartar. He was given the nickname Reekie. There were two sides to his nature in perpetual antithesis. There was the scholarly side which was imaginative and exotic, driving him in quest of the highways and byways of learning. I soon discovered that the second side of his personality came into action as if to shadow 112

The Struldbrugs cautiously the exotic first side. Reekie's classical talents soon tempted him to explore other fields, and when I became acquainted with him he was already noted among undergraduates for his spirited parodies and witty poems in the University magazine, T.C.D. He later became Professor of Greek in University College, Cardiff, and Hon. Secretary of the Classical Association of Great Britain. No less versatile than Richardson was William R. Fearon who combined eminence in Science (he became later Fellow and Professor of Biochemistry) with play-writing. His play Pamell of Avondale was quite a success when performed by the Abbey Theatre. Last of our group came John Bennett, who had already left university and was headmaster of Sligo Grammar School, but still kept up his close connection with undergraduate life and with the University Philosophical Society of which he had once been President. We generally met on Saturday nights in one of our three favourite eating-houses in Dublin, the Moira, the Dolphin or The Bailey. The Moira was our most frequent meeting place because the chief waiter, James, was an old friend of many generations of Trinity men, and because there was a good claret at three shillings a bottle, known as Number Twelve, which graced our homely meal. Reekie generally kept us informed of the gossip in College, for one of his friends, a sandy-haired mathematical student whose nickname was Growler, had a humorous, picaresque streak in his character and was well known in the hostelries of the city. One night Growler, when he was on his way back from The Stag's Head where he had been drinking with a Manchester Doctor, a friend of Oliver Gogarty, ran into the Professor of Mental and Moral Philosophy, Dr Macran, who was tipsy. Growler immediately played the Good Samaritan and offered to accompany the learned professor to his rooms in College. When they arrived in Nassau Street Macran insisted on entering by one of the small private iron doorways in the College wall at the bottom of Dawson Street, saying that he had his master key. With great difficulty Growler managed to extract the key from the professor's trouser pocket and open the iron door. No sooner inside than the professor collapsed at the foot of the steps, murmuring something about the Well of St Patrick. Fortunately Growler was not ignorant of the dim past history of his Alma Mater, before the suppression of the monasteries by Henry VIII when the site of the College was occupied by the monastery of All Hallowes. He knew that the sacred well of "3

Adagio Ireland's patron saint, a centre of pilgrimage visited by thousands, centuries before the foundation of the monastery, was situated inside College, in close proximity to the iron door leading to Nassau Street. 1 Groping his way in the dark to the well he bathed the Master's congested face with his handkerchief moistened in the holy water, and led him slowly towards his rooms in College. When he had propelled the bulky professor into his bedroom he carried his good Samaritanism still further by divesting him of his clothes and tucking him up in bed. Before leaving the professor, who had recovered enough to inquire the home and status of his benefactor, Growler informed him that he always had wished to attend his lectures on Hegel's philosophy. The result was that he left Macran's rooms full of determination to compete for an Honours Degree in Mental and Moral Philosophy. "That is one way of carrying out Provost Mahaffy's favourite axiom of the necessity of working under a master," said John Bennett. "But I wonder none of the faithful were at hand to accompany the philosopher home. In the old days there were always the cherished disciples near by, especially in the hostelry of his old French friend Jammet, for whom he devised the Latin inscription that is engraved in gold on the clock in the bar—Pereunt horae et notantur." "Other chroniclers attribute the Latin inscription to Tyrrell, 'the benign Doctor' a much better Latinist," I said, "but I prefer to think we owe the Latin to the 'benign Doctor's' curiosa felicitas, and the philosophic thought to the Hegelian master. It is a thought that should make us pause and meditate whenever we cross the threshold: 'Time passes and is scored against us.' From the contemplation of Time reason leads necessarily to the belief in an eternity which comprehends all things that have a beginning and an end." "It was Gogarty," said Reekie, "who heard the 'benign Doctor' quote the impromptu translation given by one of the horse copers present in the bar: Pereunt horae et notantur: 'the whores pass by and are spotted'." "Still more significant," Fearon replied, "was Macran's definition 1

In a pamphlet of 1612 a Catholic priest called Fr. Tady Mac Mareall from Waterford tells a young student of Trinity College, Patrick Playne, of the multitude that yearly frequent the sanctified pool, St Patrick's Well. "They are not stark mad," he says, "to be running thither, if they did not find some sanctity in the water. They are not so arrant fools as those that take tobacco and stuff themselves with smoke."

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of Time which he made one Saturday when carousing with the faithful. When closing time came that night, Jammet cried out as usual in his staccato voice: 'Time, shentlemen, time!' Oliver Gogarty, the faithful chronicler, who was present, relates how the Master, being incensed at a mere restaurateur presuming to proclaim Time to a symposium of philosophers, rebuked him saying: 'What do you know about Time, Jammet, let me define it for you.' The latter, who was impatient to close down his bar, lest police snoopers might be lurking in die offing, began to shoo the laggard revellers into the street. Meanwhile the thoughtful disciples, having collected from the waiter the two bottles held in reserve as a nightcap for the Professor, deposited one in each pocket of the Master's overcoat and led him slowly to the door where a venerable cab was waiting. Pushing him carefully into the fourwheeler, they told the jarvey to drive on, but the Master putting his great red face out of the window cried out solemnly: 'Jammet I'll give you the definition of Time. Time is the moving shadow of Eternity!' As he spoke the cab rumbled into the mists of the night." At this point our attention was diverted to a noisy group of men who had entered the restaurant and taken seats a few tables away from us. James padded up silently to me and whispered " Y o u know who's with that party, don't you, sir; that's 'The Bird'." "Who's The Bird?" we asked. " I thought everyone knew The Bird—Bird Flanagan, elder son of Alderman Flanagan. Sure, he's known all over the country. He's an artist,1 I'm telling you! Y e must have heard through the papers of his goings on one night at the Gresham Hotel, when he rode his horse up the big staircase there. Y e never know what piece of divilment he'd be up to next." 'The Bird' was the most intoxicated of his party, and after he and his companions had done a bout of back-slapping and guffawing they called James over and began to order. The Bird, however, after scanning the room to see if he could recognize any acquaintance, stared fixedly at our table, then came over and bent down over Reekie's chair, peering into his face intently for a long time, as though he wished to unfathom some secret. Then he suddenly exclaimed in a loud voice: " M y God, it's not true, he's a bloody Arab!" 1

Among authentic Dubliners the word 'artist' means a playboy, a fellow with many strings to his bow. "5

Adagio As he evidently had solved the mystery to his satisfaction, he walked back to his place, called for a drink and began to eat with voracious appetite, leaving the hapless Reekie speechless with mortified indignation at finding himself the cynosure of all neighbouring eyes, and all of us puzzled lest we might have been too dense to appreciate some subtle joke by Dublin's celebrated playboy. James's comment was: "Sure there's no understandin' that artist. He's a hard case right enough! He has his father the old Alderman worried stiff." "Does anyone," said Fearson, "know how he got his nickname, 'The Bird'?" "I heard," replied Reekie, "that on one occasion he went to a fancydress ball at the roller-skating rink in Earlsfort Terrace wearing wings and a tail and laid a huge egg on the dancing floor, to the scandal of all present. Ever afterwards he's been called 'The Bird'." M y friends and I agreed that there have always been three distinct types of eccentrics in Dublin—the Playboys, the Passives, and the Quixotics. The playboys are the direct descendants of the eighteenth century when the 'Bucks' from Trinity College roamed the streets of Dublin, the Swashbucklers among them trailing their coats and spoiling for a fight, the wags seeking an opportunity for hoaxing the credulous or startling the crowd. 'The Bird' was the belated descendant of those waggish playboys of the Provost Hely Hutchinson age in the eighteenth century and his exploits would have gone unrecorded, had it not been for Oliver Gogarty, for after 1916 there was no room for such insouciant merry-Andrews in a grim Ireland stripped for civil war. I also knew in those days before 1914 a more famous Irish playboy called Horace Cole, whose greatest exploits were accomplished at the expense of the English, as on the occasion when he impersonated His Majesty the Sultan of Zanzibar, and received the salute of the British fleet. In contrast to the dynamic playboy eccentrics there were numbers of Irish Passives whose eccentricities arise from their particular hobbyhorse which allows them to step aside from the surging tide, thus renouncing modern life and closing themselves, as it were, within their cell and garden. Their brains are still active and their logic sound, but their whole existence is absorbed by the particular branch of what the worldly Philistines would call 'useless knowledge' in which they specialize. As they have no eyes for modern life that surges past them, their thoughts, dress and behaviour are the same as they were forty 116

The Struldbrugs years ago, when, like Pope Celestine, they made the great renunciation. Passives do possess, however, a Rip Van Winkle significance for their fellow countrymen who treat them as Greek statesmen treated the seer Tiresias and carefully chronicle their humblest platitudes for the benefit of posterity. One of the Passive eccentrics of my days was J. Van Someren Pope, an ex-education officer of the Anglo-Indian service, who lectured prospective Indian Civil Service candidates in oriental languages. Possessing a quasi-mystical passion for trees and plants, he obtained permission from the Board to plough up the tiny strip of ground beneath his window in the New Square, ten feet by three, and there he planted a cherry tree and a laburnum and lilacs, and under the trees he sowed various sweet-smelling flowers. Every day I used to watch old Pope working away at his flower bed, and in the late spring the cherry tree was the first to blossom, followed by the lilacs, and later the laburnum shed its golden rain over the diminutive plot which was universally called the Vatican Gardens. Old Pope lived apart from modern life, and with the exception of his lectures and the lunch hour, which he spent in the congenial society of the Common Room, the rest of his day was devoted to reading and writing in his rooms. He always retired after watering his plants at sundown, and I used often to meet him a little later in the vestibule of Number Thirty-six in singlet and underpants preparing for bed. He slept during the early part of the night in order to obtain his 'beauty sleep', as he called it, and rose at three o'clock to begin his daily work before the dawn. His life was one of clockwork routine except on Saturday nights when he disappeared from College, only returning at dawn on Sunday. A student who lived in neighbouring rooms told me that early on Sunday mornings the aged scholar used to be visited regularly by a mysterious lady, evidendy an unwelcome visitor, for her voice rose in shrill and threatening tones and his thunderous volleys of expletives bore no resemblance to the gentle purring voice we knew so well. Old Pope was a great admirer of my father, and he occasionally intervened in the discussions at lunch on foreign politics with reminiscences of his long life on the Northern frontier of India. He faded out of my life as mysteriously as he had entered it, and I do not know whether he is alive or dead. After he disappeared, his garden lay parched and uncared for, and an unsympathetic Bursar ordered the cherry tree to be cut down as its roots encroached upon a drainpipe. When I was elected Fellow in sA

A—I

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Adagio 1924 I was assigned old Pope's rooms and the Vatican Gardens began to blossom once more. My earliest memory of a Quixotic eccentric dates from a summer day in 1908 when I went with my father to see the cricket match between the Gentlemen of Ireland and the Australians. As we sat under the trees I saw coming towards me the weirdest figure of a man imaginable. He was dressed in a brown swallow-tail coat with gold buttons, yellow plush waistcoat, white riding breeches and top boots, and he wore a tiny bowler hat stuck with fishing flies and sported a monocle. Out of the pockets of his breeches projected a large bone which he said he had retrieved from the tomb of an ancestor. What was more eccentric was that he carried under his arm a sword, an umbrella, and a fishing rod. As he walked haughtily by, some mischievous little boys began to guy him and make rude remarks, but he brushed them off contemptuously and walked on wrapt in his own dreams. " W h o is that strange individual?" I inquired from my father. "He is called Endymion because he was touched by the moon. He was not, however, lying asleep on the mountain side when he was stricken, like his Greek namesake whom the Moon goodess touched for love, but wide awake and at his post in Guinness's brewery. He tried to save a workman who had fallen into one of the huge vats of fermenting liquid, and when they fished him out he was already moonstruck. His harmless lunacy consists in believing himself the living embodiment of an Irish country gentleman, and so he dresses up to the part and carries with him the emblems and accoutrements of his caste, the sword, the fishing rod, and sometimes even a cricket bat. The Hones told me that on one occasion when the great W . G. Grace was here he allowed Endymion as a joke to bowl at him during the luncheon interval, and the latter knocked out his middle stump." "Sometimes," said a friend who was sitting beside us, "he varies his attire, and I've seen him wearing starched cuffs on his ankles, and if you watch you'll see him take a kitchen alarm clock to look at the time, and in the street he would look at a compass he carried and find his bearings. He's always worrying about his pedigree, and he drives them daft in the National Library yonder by insisting on writing out all his names—Boyle, Tisdall, Stewart, Fitzgerald, Farrell." I used to see Endymion on frequent occasions, either in the College Park or at the Zingari cricket matches in the Viceregal grounds. He always walked with stately dignity around the cricket lawn, occasion118

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ally pausing to adjust his monocle and watch the game abstractedly. So familiar a figure was he at cricket matches that he was looked upon as a deus ex machina, and my friend Pat Hone, formerly Captain o f All Ireland, told me that when things were going ill for Ireland Endymion would change the direction and detail of his stride round the field, and when he did so the wickets o f Ireland's opponents were sure to fall. * * * * *

Although philosophy was not my subject I often attended Professor Macran's lectures, and the enthusiasm they roused among the Honours students reminded me of the scene described during the Renaissance when famous scholars, such as Peter Martyr o f Anghiera and Luis Vives, lectured at Salamanca and Oxford. O n the days when our philosopher was hale and hearty he towered over his crowded lecture room in the Rubrics, and without a note or a book he talked to us as one who had absorbed the cycle of Plato, the vast universe of Aristotle, and their mediaeval and Renaissance offshoots before arriving at Hegel, the Master Mind, w h o had inspired his life. What fascinated us in his discourses was that he was never dogmatic, nor did he fulminate against the philosophers of alien systems. Equanimity and toleration were his watchwords, and he enriched our minds by his parallels from the works o f other writers, such as Goethe, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. In them he discovered myths and parables wherewith to liberate our minds and draw us upwards after him into the higher regions o f Hegel's Absolute Idealism. There were, however, days when he lectured like one in a daze, and the light seemed to have been quenched in his soul. Only too conscious o f his state he tried to cover his uneasiness by an affected gruffness which was in complete antithesis to his good-natured bonhomie. M y most precious memories of Macran in his later years are of occasions when he invited me to his rooms. Sometimes I would find him playing the piano wistfully to himself, and he would play softly leit motiv and passages from "Wagner, for whose music he had genuine admiration. He also loved the earlier violin composers of Italy such as Corelli, Vivaldi, Tartini and Veracini whose sonatas I used to play with him. " D o you," I asked, "agree with D r Mahaffy that w e modems should be blamed for our indifference to the moral effects of music?" 119

Adagio "Mahaffy," replied the professor, "derived that obsession of his from Plato who condemned instrumental music apart from words as immoral. You have never heard him play the violin, have you? He used to produce rather an ugly tone, and his playing often was slighdy out of tune. He never made a fetish of such frivolities as tone or intonation." The College Park never looked more lovely than it did in the summer term of 1914. Old Pope, who on a frosty morning in the previous January, had begged me to notice the first snowdrops in his garden, calling them the harbingers of spring, now pointed triumphandy to his cherry tree laden with white blossom. Soon the lilacs appeared followed by the beds of flaming tulips near the Library, then came the feu de joie when the golden shower of laburnum and the glamorous kermesse of pink and white scented hawthorn trees in the New Square chanted their paean to summer, the season of the poets. The College Races, the most important social event in Trinity Week, attracted an unusually large crowd that year, and confounded the gloomy Cassandras who said that they were no longer as popular as in the seventies, when over thirty thousand attended and every inch of standing ground was occupied. In the years leading to 1914 the popularity was due not so much to the athletic contests as to the general garden-party atmosphere with its touch of ceremonious formality indicated by numbers of tall hats and morning-coats scattered among the serried throngs of athletes in white and girls in bright muslin frocks with their coloured parasols. Before the end of term my godfather invited me with my two friends, Charles Rowe and Hal Mack, one Sunday evening after chapel to the Provost's house for supper. He was in his most polished and urbane mood, and when the claret began to circulate, he directed at first his remarks to his undergraduate guests, questioning us in turn. I was secredy amused when I heard him fire a series of questions at Rowe on Irish literature, for I knew the latter, an enthusiastic Gael, would fall into the trap. The Provost had always been unsympathetic to nationalism, the Gaelic League and the Irish Literary Movement. When Rowe mentioned W. B. Yeats, the Master stuck out his chin and enquired gruffly: "What do you admire in Yeats?" "Well, Sir," Rowe replied timidly, "we are all proud of Yeats not only as a poet, but as the founder of the Abbey Theatre which is making Ireland known throughout the world." 120

The Struldbrugs The sage pouted bad-humouredly, saying in his icy lisping tone: "Dowden gave me some of the little poems of Yeats to read: it is twilight stuff, vague and insubstantial. I couldn't read them. Poor fellow! He is an autodidaktos—he never worked under a Master." As the name of Yeats and Irish literature generally seemed to cast a shadow over the festive board, the Provost with characteristic abruptness changed the subject, saying genially, "I wonder how many of you have ever heard the history of the ass in Ireland?" W e all pricked up our ears at this topic, for we felt that there must be some catch in it. This time Charles Rowe was resolved not to be the whipping-boy, so I jumped into the breach, replying that the ass had always been the beast of burden in the Irish countryside, and I remembered when a child in Galway seeing the bare-footed colleens in the claddagh in their red petticoats, driving their creel-carrying donkeys, and I supposed they had been in Ireland since time immemorial. "I thought I should catch you out," said our host as he sipped his claret. "I have for some time been amusing myself by investigating the history of our Irish ass, and I have discovered that it was only at the beginning of the nineteenth century, while our Great Duke was subduing Iberia, that the little donkey was conquering Hibernia. What happened was that, as our Irish horses had to be supplied in such great numbers to Wellington's British cavalry regiments in the Peninsula War, Spanish asses had to be imported to replace them. Although they were at first introduced into Ireland by way of Scotland, they were found unsuitable in the severe climate of the northern coast of our island, and it was in the west of the country that they fitted best into the physical and social environment. Surely it is strange to reflect that this little beast, so familiar a sight in Galway, Connemara and the western coast, which have always had human relations with Spain, should have taken so long to reach Ireland, and should have entered by the back door, through Ulster, for there is no evidence of the use of the ass as a beast»»of burden in Ireland until the beginning of the nineteenth cen-

tury. The conversation now became general, as everyone aired his knowledge of the Iberian-Irish, Lynch's casde, the Spanish Armada, and Ireland's western connection with Spain, but our learned host soon changed the subject again. He now addressed his remarks to us generally and spoke about the true function of a university. "Make no mistake about it, my young friends," he said, "in the 121

Adagio present era of superficial knowledge the university is the last home of true intellectual freedom, where old age and mature experience still possess special virtues. It is natural I suppose for raw untrained youths to be full of insolence and arrogance, but within the walls of the university they must, like young colts, be broken in gradually, and that task is reserved for the older men. You see, my young friends, even old men, laudatores temporis acti, have their uses, and under them you will learn to look upon their harmless foibles with sympathy." With that peroration delivered in his most earnest manner the Provost dismissed us. Hal Mack and I, as we were living in College, walked down the dark winding passage from the Provost's house into the front square, discussing the supper. "What will Trinity be like," I said, "when Mahaffy, the last of the Olympians, shuffles off this mortal coil?"

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6

THE E A S T E R R E B E L L I O N 1916 Those are the Fates—Daughters of Necessity: Lachesis singing of the past, Clotho of the present, Atropos of the Future. P L A T O , The

Republic

I received an invitation from the headmaster of Shrewsbury to give a violin recital at the school at the end ofJune 1914 and I crossed over to England on a Sunday evening. On the afternoon of my departure one of my father's old friends and a colleague of Queen's College Galway days, the Jewish-German Professor Steinberger, came to tea, and cast us all into the deepest gloom by his prognostications on the international situation. My father considered him rather an alarmist, and discounted many of his theories as due to his national prejudices. Nevertheless that Sunday he was impressed by the old professor's apparendy first-hand information on the plots that were being hatched in Serbia by a secret organization known as 'the Black Hand'. " I am afraid," he cried, "and I cannot sleep at nights, for I see the world crisis sweeping down on us all like a hurricane. Even here in Ireland all threatens: you do not keep the ear close to the ground: here, too, there is plotting and I hear from Germany that the Irish have been buying arms there: everywhere there is war chaos and destruction." I never saw the German professor again. During the war, after the Rebellion of 1916, he was interned in the Isle of Man, and he died soon afterwards. His visit saddened us all, and it was with a heavy heart I departed for the mail-boat at Kingstown. Next morning at dawn when I changed trains at Chester for Shrewsbury, I bought a newspaper, and on the front page in huge letters I read the account of the assassination the previous day of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife at Sarajevo by the Serbian revolutionary Prinzip. At Shrewsbury I stayed with my old housemaster, Freddy Prior, whom I found sad and full of gloomy foreboding. There was a note of

123

Adagio anxiety in the air, especially among the older masters. Nevertheless, few of the older boys in the Sixth to whom I talked, during that week, visualized the possibility of world war, and their main thoughts were centred on the short summer O.T.C. camp on Salisbury Plain, leading to the long vacation. Even at the beginning of July 1914 most English people were optimistic, and were confident that the Serbs would investigate the responsibility for the crime of Sarajevo, never suspecting that two weeks would elapse without any action being taken, and that during that period the Serbian press would glorify the assassins and proclaim Prinzip's act a noble patriotic achievement. During my week at the Schools I slipped back again into my mentality of two years before. Where I felt die change most poignandy was in my conversations with my housemaster. During my last two years at Shrewsbury I had felt so close to him, and we had shared the same ideas about life. I admired his worldliness and mild cynicism devoid of bitterness, and the zest for life which impelled him to join the boys on the river and in the fives courts, and afterwards to converse with them and guide them unconsciously towards a sane and balanced philosophy of life. But now that I had shed the public school mentality, I suddenly discovered in Freddy Prior and in all those masters who had moulded their lives in harmony with the public school system, a consciously protracted youthfulness, as though, out of regard for their schoolboy charges, they had deliberately restricted their own minds to keep them youthful, and sacrificed the normal process of evolution which they themselves would have followed after the university, in the world. I began to look upon Freddy Prior, Moser, Pickering, Chance, and all the veteran public school masters who had taught me, as lay monks whose Gran Rifiuto or Renunciation of the world transformed them into eternal schoolboys—educational Peter Pans who refused to grow up. After a devoted life they passed the torch to the next generation, and transmitted the British ethical codc with its lay saints of the past, such as Arnold of Rugby, Lyttelton of Eton, Alington of Shrewsbury, Thring of Uppingham, and its slogans, such as 'The batde of Waterloo was fought on the playing fields of Eton'; 'Play up, play up, and play the game'; 'an Englishman's home is his casde'; 'Live and let live'; and, 'It is men and not machines that constitute a nation'. In Ireland, on the contrary, I had the feeling that we lived on the edge of a volcano and waited fatalistically for the cataclysm that no power of man could stop. The climax had come in March 1914 with 124

The Easter Rebellion igi6 the 'affair of the Curragh' when the British garrison troops there refused point blank to serve in any campaign against Ulster. In Shrewsbury I was now disconcerted to find among the majority such complacent unconcern on Ireland, where army mutiny, gunrunning and drilling for war were the order of the day. I tried to tell them of the serious repercussions such incidents would have upon world affairs, but I soon realized that they considered me a wild Irishman and an alarmist. The word 'hatred', as we Irish (North and South) understand it, is incomprehensible to the English. They did not believe me when I told them that the strongest feeling of an Irishman was his hatred of England. This hatred sometimes slumbers, as it had done in most of my childhood, but I had watched it grow every day more vehement since my return to Dublin in 1912.1 had seen it even in the gentle nuns I met in the convents I visited with my father when he was on his tours of inspection. Their anti-English prejudice, I suppose, was partly due to religion and partly to the tradition of hatred inherited from penal days. But if the Catholic Irishmen were demon haters, so, too, were the Northern Presbyterians against their Catholic fellowcountrymen, and they were fiercer today than they ever had been. Tracing their descent from Scottish 'Planters' they looked upon Scotland, which was visible thirteen miles away—as their real home. T o them it seemed far nearer than Southern Ireland. Anyone, who had witnessed an Orange procession on the Twelfth of July and observed the drummers beat their 'wee drums' till their fingers bled, could understand the ferocity and fanaticism of these Northern Celts, and not be unduly surprised to learn that the humble Catholic inhabitants of Falls Road, Belfast, had tunnelled their row of tenement houses so as to escape from the raids of their Orange neighbours. My English friends shrugged their shoulders incredulously when I told them that Irish hate still smouldered because Oliver Cromwell in 1649 sacked Drogheda and massacred the population, and because William III won the batde of the Boyne in 1690. Their retort—"Let bygones be bygones"—was, I admit, an excellent definition of their own English character, but it was a sentiment that would have awakened scanty response in the Emerald Isle, where wrongs were never forgotten and where assassination was a political instrument. Those homely sayings of the British ethical code had a ring of pathos in those agonizing days before the Great War, because they seemed to date from a happier world, when life could still be regarded as a game of cricket with rules which 125

Adagio had to be observed, and limits beyond which animosity must not be carried. It had been the tacit recognition of the community and of each member's reciprocal obligations that had made British parliamentary government possible, and such had hitherto been the guiding principle in domestic as well as foreign policy, but the Englishman, when he had to deal with either Machiavellian intrigues or unscrupulous fanaticism, found himself in great difficulties, and instead of adopting a firm attitude, he attempted to compromise, thus giving rise to the accusation that 'the great cruelty of the English lies in permitting evil rather than doing it*. As Dean Inge says, 'Force, in spite of a foolish saying to the contrary, is often the only remedy, but it is a remedy which the Englishman hates to use. All his instincts are in favour of a square deal which shall be accepted by both sides.' I lay on a rug in the school park watching cricket matches through those long summer afternoons, as I used to do in m y school-days, and tried in vain to discover that instinctive peace of mind I had felt in those days, and I envied young English contemporaries of mine w h o could become completely absorbed in their game of cricket to the exclusion of all else. The world might be in crisis, governments might fall, armies might mass behind their frontiers, but here in England the Test Match would draw its thousands to Lords, and county cricket would continue peacefully, as though all the world was at peace. Can we wonder, then, that the Englishman has always expressed his deepest moral convictions in terms of a game, and that cricket became the symbol of the British way of life, and the spirit of fair play, which is the basic tradition of public school teaching and stood the British in good stead when they became administrators of outposts of their Empire. It is that essential English quality of just and reliant leadership to which the Spanish philosopher Santayana refers when in Soliloquies in England1 he pays the following significant tribute: 'Never since the heroic days of Greece has the world had such a sweet, just, boyish master. It will be a black day for the human race when scientific blackguards, conspirators, churls, and fanatics manage to supplant him.' Had I read Santayana's tribute during my days at Shrewsbury, when I was indoctrinated in the English ethical code, I should have applauded it as enthusiastically as any of my English classmates, but when I returned to 1

G. Santayana, Soliloquies in England.

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The Easter Rebellion 1916 Ireland in 1912 and tried to reconcile that code of chivalry with English rule in my own country, the scales fell from my eyes. When I broached the subject with my father he took down from the book case The History of Ireland in the Eighteenth Century1 by his old friend, the late Professor of History in Dublin University, William Hartpole Lecky, and read out to me the closing words of the fifth and final volume summing up his great work: 'There is no fact in modern history more memorable than the contrast between the complete success with which England has governed her great Eastern Empire with more than two hundred million inhabitants, and her signal failure in governing the neighbouring island which contains at most about three million disaffected subjects.' When I returned to Dublin at the beginning of July the rest of the family had already departed to Cork, where we were all going to spend a month's vacation. In Killbrittain, situated at the foot of the Old Head of Kinsale, we were fortunate enought to have our wing of the hotel almost entirely to ourselves, and we made a merry party, for in addition to the family there were two inspectors of Education who accompanied my father on his tours to the schools. My father during that month ofJuly became seriously worried at the political state of the country, and the daily disturbances that took place between the Nationalist Volunteers of the South and West, and the Ulster Volunteers of Sir Edward Carson. His pessimistic prognostications were fulfilled only a few weeks later, when we returned at the end of our vacation to Dublin. We all set out from Killbrittain in my father's car early in the morning on Sunday, July 26: my father and I rose at 5 a.m. to have our last bathe. The sun rose over an unrippled ocean, and we swam far out to enjoy the vast panorama of coast and mountain. " I feel sad, Walter," my father said, as we regretfully plodded up the sand towards the hotel, "at leaving this lovely spot. We shall probably never more enjoy so care-free a holiday as the month we have just spent." *

*

*

*

*

Our journey was uneventful until we arrived at the outskirts of Dublin when we were stopped by police who informed us excitedly that 'holy murder' was let loose in Dublin. "There's after bein' a gun-runnin' at 1

W . H. Lecky, The History oflreland in the Eighteenth Century.

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Adagio Howth," said a burly police sergeant to my father, "an* a lady in white was steerin' the yawl, an' it full of arms an' ammunition. Yous had better give a wide berth to the Quays and O'Connell's Bridge because they say the military are firin' on the crowds." Even though we entered the city by a devious route we soon found ourselves jammed in the crowded streets near O'Connell Bridge, and we heard shots fired from the direction of the river. After leaving the rest of the family at home I returned to the city and made my way through the crowds to O'Connell Bridge. There I ran across a college friend who had witnessed the stirring events of the day. According to my friend, who had been spending the summer at Howth, the gunrunning had been accomplished by a white yawl of about fifty tons navigated by a young lady dressed in yellow oilskins and a sou'wester. The yawl entered Howth harbour on Sunday morning and took up moorings in the mouth of the harbour. She had on board a big number of men, most of whom were obviously not professional sailors. As a stiff westerly gale was blowing, people of the vicinity were surprised when she left her moorings after noon and approached the pier. While she was being tied up, a couple of hundred men rushed on to the jetty from the direction of the railway station, and about three hundred more took up their positions nearby. Some were in uniform, others only had badges, but all carried long wooden life-preservers, and their officers were armed with revolvers. While the men were forming up on the pier the hatches of the yawl were opened, and Lee-Enfield rifles wrapped in straw were handed out to them. As there were more rifles than men, many were removed in taxi-cabs, and about fifty boy sea-scouts took away boxes of ammunition on their patrol carts. While these operations were in progress three coastguards in a boat approached the yawl, but withdrew in response to a warning from the men on board. M y friend noticed that every one of the men who had run on to the pier knew what he had to do. After the yawl had handed over the guns and ammunition to the volunteers, she hoisted sails and left the harbour, sailing off between the Kish Lightship and Lambay Island in a westerly direction. Meanwhile the three coastguards and a policeman, who had been prevented by the volunteers from approaching the quay, telephoned to Dublin and W . V. Harrel, the Assistant Commissioner of Metropolitan Police, at once called up his available men and had them dispatched to Fairview. Also two companies (160) of the King's O w n Scottish Borderers Regiment were called out and 128

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1914

were sent by tramcars to Clontarf, where they took up their positions on the main road with the police. When the Irish Volunteers marched from Howth towards Dublin they were stopped by the police and soldiers, who ordered them to hand over the rifles. Amidst the scenes of confusion, which ensued when the police tried to disarm the Volunteers, there were several casualties among the Volunteers and the soldiers. The Scottish Borderers then marched back to Dublin to their barracks, but an attack was made on them with missiles by an angry crowd, principally in Bachelor's Walk between O'Connell's Bridge and the Metal Bridge, and they were obliged to maintain a running fight with the mob which was rapidly growing in numbers. At intervals the troops scattered the crowds at the point of their bayonets. In the scuffle that followed a soldier was thrown down. It was then, according to my eye-witness friend, that the men of the last four ranks turned round and, levelling their rifles fired. Many in the crowd fell, and there were cries of pain as the people fled to the sidewalks and down the adjoining streets. Sunday's affray, which came to be dignified as the batde of Bachelor's Walk, aroused a storm in the House of Commons. W. V. Harrel tendered his resignation. A great deal of publicity was devoted to the diminutive affair but, though only a mild illustration of the perils underlying the Irish situation, it foreshadowed far greater disasters that were to follow in the succeeding years. According to the editorial in the Irish Times for July 28, 'the real moral of the situation is that the Government has so muddled the Irish problem that only a speedy settlement can prevent still graver perils. Unless they can adjust existing differences with great rapidity, we shall soon have a repetition of the deplorable incidents of Sunday.'

ARMAGEDDON 1914 Meanwhile the European situation became really alarming when on July 25 Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia, and Armageddon was seen to be at hand when on July 30 Russia ordered general mobilization. On that day, while the Russian War Office was issuing its order, the House of Commons assembled to consider the Irish Amending Bill. Members were deeply impressed by the seriousness of the European 129

Adagio crisis, and the appeal of The Times for a settlement in face of grave national peril found many echoes in the lobbies. In such an atmosphere the feeling uppermost in all the members was the necessity of closing the ranks. The concrete suggestion for an immediate settlement of the Ulster question based on the exclusion of six northern counties was received with approval by many Unionists and moderate Liberals. The constitutional way out of a deadlock, a General Election, could not be entertained for the time being, and Parliament had to devise an Irish settlement, if only a provisional one. The Nationalists were the most serious obstacle, for they would never agree to the exclusion of the six counties. John Redmond, however, was heart and soul in favour of the Allied cause. In his speeches in Ireland as well as in England he was continually associating his country with the allies, and I remember his glowing tribute to Belgium in those days. To us Redmond appeared as a noble Christian gentleman whose patriotism had soared above the narrow limits of nationality. When he made his historical offer in the House of Commons on August 3, 1914, he did not close his eyes to the sacrifice he was imposing upon his followers. He went down to the House resolved to make his offer, and the moving speech of the British Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, gave him his cue with the words: "The one bright spot in the very dreadful situation is Ireland. The position in Ireland—and this I should like to be clearly understood abroad—is not a consideration among the things we have to take into account now." 1 Redmond then rose to his feet, and in the hushed House of Commons declared that the present hour of Empire crisis would not permit him to touch upon any controversial topic, and thus the question of Home Rule for Ireland could be passed over in silence; but he was quite certain that the democracy of Ireland would turn with the utmost anxiety and sympathy to England in her hour of need and support her in every trial and every danger that might overtake her. He ended his speech with the following pledge: "I say to the Government that they may tomorrow withdraw every one of their troops from Ireland. I say that the coast of Ireland will be defended from foreign invasion by her armed men." Nowhere was Redmond's speech received with greater acclamation than in Trinity College, Dublin, where numbers were eager to enlist. 1

Sir Edward Grey, Twenty-Jive Years, New York, 192J, II, pp. 302-32$. 130

Armageddon 1914 On the fourth of August a long procession of students gathered at Lansdowne Road to join the Rugby Football contingent of volunteers for the army. I followed the example of my college friends and went to a recruiting depot to offer my services. No sooner did the doctor listen to my chest than he said to me: "What you should do is to go straightaway to your own doctor and get him to put you under treatment. You would be more of a liability than an asset to the army." M y father genuinely sympathized with me and understood my feelings. He knew that I, too, felt the moral obligation to join up with my companions. He was, I believed, wrong in not agreeing to my proposal that I should go over to England and volunteer for national service for the duration of the war, but he was adamant in his refusal to countenance such an alternative. "Can't you see, Walter," he said, "that it is vital for you to work for your University degree here which will enable you to earn your living. This is your duty as you are not fit for active service abroad." The war did not make such a great change in the life of our family as it did in corresponding families in England. The study of the war, however, became my father's constant obsession. In the early days his enthusiasm for following the movements of the troops on the map communicated itself to the rest of the family, and Muriel and ChouChou helped him to paste up large-scale maps of the war fronts on the doors of his study. This craze for sticking in flags, however, only lasted during the early months of the war, and served to stress my father's and my mother's growing anxiety as they marked the German onrush towards Paris. My mother vied with my father in her devotion to the allied cause. During all the war she worked day by day at the Red Cross depot, rolling bandages and making dressings for the front, and in those early days of the war we children realized how deep was the attachment of our parents to France. France was the country my father most admired, for in the clarity of the French mind he discovered traces of the radiance and elegance of the ancient Athenians, whose eternal boast was that they walked in clearer air than the rest of mankind. At the beginning of the war the general feeling of the people in Ireland was decidedly favourable to England. This enthusiasm was not confined to the middle class and the Rugby footballers who volunteered, for we noted it among the mass of the people in Dublin, Cork and other big cities, which sent many recruits to the British army and 131

Adagio navy in those early months. John Redmond constantly emphasized in his speeches in Parliament the enthusiasm in Ireland for Great Britain's cause. Nevertheless by September 15, 1914, he had already begun to feel the chill of disillusion, and had written to Asquith, expressing his deep discouragement as a result of his meeting with Kitchener, the new Secretary of State for War. Kitchener, who was partly Irish, regarded himself as an authority on Irish politics and was determined to oppose, as far as he could, the arming of the Irish Volunteers. Not only did he treat Redmond's proposal with haughty disdain, but he showed his partiality to Ulster by appointing to posts in the War Office Ulstermen who had been connected with the gun-running at Lame. Redmond already began to realize the difficulties of his position. He had struggled from the beginning to control the Irish Volunteer organization, which had been founded in 1913 by Eoin McNeill, and he had succeeded in having his nominees appointed to the committee. He realized, however, that the funds his followers had raised throughout the Irish world were a mere drop in the ocean in comparison with the large Irish Volunteer fund, which had been raised in America by John Devoy and the Clan-na-Gael. All that money he knew would be remitted to the Irish Republican Brotherhood to further the cause of Irish independence through direct action. For this reason he kept insistently urging Asquith to visit Dublin, and the Prime Minister arrived on September 26, ostensibly to back up Redmond's plan of creating an Irish league—or better still—an Irish Army Corps, in which the Irish recruits would not lose their identity in units which had no natural cohesion of character. At dinner in the Provost's House my father met the Prime Minister, who told him that the War Minister would sanction the formation of an Irish Army Corps. Although Kitchener never made any announcement concerning an Irish Army Corps, Redmond still continued to trust Asquith, even though Carson truculently proclaimed in the press, a few days after Asquith's Dublin visit, that the Home Rule Bill was nothing but a scrap of paper. And after General Parsons had written to Redmond, informing him that the 16th Division could be called an Irish Division, as it was formed of three essentially Irish Brigades, the latter received some days later a further letter stating that Kitchener was issuing an order dispersing the Irish recruits. As an additional and more direct snub to the Irish leader, General Parsons refused to grant a commission to his son. During 1914 and 1915 bitter feeling grew in Ireland owing to the 132

Armageddon 1914 broken pledges of the British Premier, especially as regards Irish troops. In the retreat from Mons the second battalion of the Royal Munster Fusiliers had fought a gallant rear-guard action, and had nearly been wiped out, while waiting for orders that never arrived. There would not have been such bitterness in Ireland if only the British Press had given a modicum of praise to Irish regiments for the benefit of the families who had sent their sons to fight in France and on the far-flung frontiers of the British Commonwealth. The most flagrant example of injustice was the failure to give recognition to the heroic actions of the 10th Irish Division, which lost most of its effective troops in the disastrous expedition to Gallipoli in 1915. At Suvla Bay in the Dardanelles on August 15 the 'Pals Battalion of the Dublin Fusiliers, as it was called, was virtually annihilated, and on that day perished eight of the dearest friends I had known at St Stephen's Green School in Dublin and at Shrewsbury. The departure of the 'Pals Battalion' and other Irish troops from Dublin, the Bacchic kermesse and the sad parting at North Wall which I had witnessed, lives for me today in the great first act of Sean O'Casey's play, The Silver Tassie. My main reason for accompanying the 'Pals Battalion' to the boat was to say farewell to my oldest school friend, Paddy Tobin, but there were many others, including former school companions and masters. The needless slaughter of the Irish troops in Gallipoli was scarcely an encouragement to the British recruiting campaign in Ireland, nevertheless the Irish continued to enlist, and Redmond was able to announce proudly in January 1916 that 150,000 Irishmen were serving with the colours.1 Many sinister events, however, were happening behind the scenes, of which neither John Redmond nor Augustine Birrell, Chief Secretary, seemed to be aware. One sign that I noted of the changing times was the appearance of a number of new nationalist publications of small circulation, printed on poor paper, which were snapped up by the young Dublin revolutionaries as soon as they were hawked in the streets. In one of them, Fianna, Dr Eoin McNeill, chairman of the Irish Volunteers, published an article in September 191 j referring to the pitiful situation of Ireland under British rule as follows: 'If most Irishmen are not absolutely pro-German or pro-Turk, it is not the fault of English domination up to date. Our country has been depopulated, our 1

t A O—K

D . Gwynn, John Redmond, London, 1933, p. 440. 133

Adagio people degraded, our industries destroyed. If Hell itself were to turn against English policy, as it is known to us, we might be pardoned for taking the side of H e l l . . . ' In spite of those inflammatory words Eoin McNeill's consistent policy was to avoid taking the initiative in armed conflict with Great Britain, but to be alert, and to drill, arm and strengthen the discipline of his volunteers, and above all not to play into the hands of the enemy by allowing themselves to be drawn into the open. Eoin McNeill, be-spectacled and ascetic, was a typical professor, and so disarming in manner that few who met him ever suspected him of being a revolutionary leader. Even more hostile to John Redmond and his pro-British Nationalists was Arthur Griffith, who early in the war declared in the press that Ireland had no quarrel with any Continental power. 'We arc Irish Nationalists', he cried, 'and the only duty we can have is to stand for Ireland's interests, irrespective of the interests of England or Germany, or any other foreign country.' I soon discovered, however, in 1915 that Redmond and his Home Rulers had even more fanatical foes than the tenacious Arthur Griffith or Eoin McNeill, whose cautiousness won him the nickname Quintus Fabius Cunctator. These belonged to the Citizen Army, and had their headquarters at Liberty Hall, on the banks of the LifFey. I had met James Connolly, their leader in Trinity College, on a few occasions when he, James Larkin and Cathal O'Shannon had attended public debates in the College Historical Society. I had, however, been so fascinated by the leonine figure and personality of Larkin, the Czar of the Transport Workers, that at first I paid little heed to his henchmen. Then in 1915 I learnt from one of my Sinn Fein friends in College that Connolly was the editor of The Workers' Republic, and belonged to the council of the Irish Republican Brotherhood. One of the members of this ring was Padraic Pearse, Headmaster of St Enda's School, Rathfarnham where education was given through the medium of Irish language. Pearse at his school had for some time been preaching to his boys that the moment was approaching when Irish youth would be called upon to strike a blow for freedom. None of the Irish leaders possessed to a greater degree than Pearse those passionate qualities of leadership that appeal to high-spirited youth, and I was not surprised to hear that his students at St Enda's worshipped him. He was the antithesis to the dynamic and practical Connolly, but as poet and dreamer he attracted the young intellectuals into the Citizen Army movement. In the early summer of 1915 I used with my friends in College to

134

Armageddon 1914 gather in the evenings on the sea front at Sandymount, near the M artel! o Tower, a spot sacred to the memory of James Joyce, who laid there the scene of the Nausicaa episode in Ulysses. One sunny afternoon when I was sitting alone on the sea wall gazing at the distant Irish Mail boat entering Kingstown harbour, I saw a tall, good-looking woman approach, whose face seemed vaguely familiar. The woman smiled and said as she came up to me, " I see you don't recognize me. I've a better memory. You should not have forgotten the days you spent in our farm in Wicklow in 1908." " O f course I remember! You are Maggie Donovan: I remember our long political arguments in those days. Since I saw you, Maggie, I have become much more of a Nationalist and Home Ruler." "Then you are worse than you were," snapped Maggie, "if you're a Redmonite we're going to quarrel. I'd prefer to see you a die-hard." "Come, come, Maggie, you're too intolerant." "So you West Britons say, now that Redmond has become a recruiting sergeant. We, however, beg to differ. We look upon John Redmond as a traitor, who is driving Irish men and boys into the British army to be exported overseas and slaughtered like cattle in France and Belgium." "Nearly all my friends have volunteered. And most of them didn't need any persuasion from John Redmond. They were West Britons like myself." "Here in Dublin and throughout the country things are changing. The Citizen Army arc on the move. Countess Markiewicz has always backed Connolly ever since the celebrations in 1898, when as a young man he headed a procession in O'Connell Street and threw a coffin inscribed with 'British Empire' into the Liffey." Maggie Donovan and I walked up and down the Strand Road, Sandymount, arguing until evening began to fall and she remembered that she had to rush off to her branch meeting. But before leaving she invited me to join her at a ceilidh in Parnell Square on the following Saturday. Although I entirely disagreed with her politics and felt an abyss between us, I could not help admiring her selfless devotion to her cause. On the Saturday night I went with her to the ceilidh and met many of the young followers of Arthur Griffith, and a few of those who belonged to the Citizen Army. Every one of them talked quite openly to me of a rising, and condemned McNeill's cautiousness, calling him a 135

Adagio logician who only armed for defence. " W e have no country," they cried, "no liberties to guard; nothing but our half-established right to possess guns. Each man's gun represents the value of his life-lease." It was useless to argue with any of the young men I met at the ceilidh. They would not have listened, so completely were they engulfed in their dream. After spending several evenings with Maggie and her men friends from the local branch of the Volunteers and attending a number of ceilidhs I wondered what was at the back of the Government's weakkneed policy of laissez faire. Perhaps, I thought, the Irish Executive actually welcomed the increased activities of Sinn Fein, in the hope that the sense of discipline of the Volunteer organization would inspire courage in all who had placed their hopes in a brighter future for this country. In any case the Government policy of vigilant inactivity unleashed the hounds of war against the helpless Redmond, who became every day more of a scapegoat. Meanwhile in England Lord Derby's recruiting system was put into operation, and in two months over two million men were 'attested', but in Ireland, where the Viceroy, Lord Wimborne, undertook to speed the recruiting, only ten thousand volunteered. It took me a long time to accustom myself to the quasi-monastic atmosphere of Trinity College in war time. Gone were the boisterous meetings on Commons, the carousals in Botany Bay and the adventurous expeditions over the wall into the Queen's Theatre. Trinity seemed to have returned to the peaceful days of the seventeenth century when undergraduates were expected to preserve a strict sobriety of manner. Even aimless loitering was frowned upon. The scholarship examination monopolized our attention for the first half of 1915 and to my delight I heard my name read out by the Provost on Trinity Monday as third scholar in classics, after my friends Hal Mack and R. H. Micks who obtained the first two places. M y heart, however, was not in my work, for I was passing through one of my most dispirited moods as the result of my meetings with Sinn Feiners and Irish Republicans of the Citizen Army. In these days I felt as if I lived again in a shadowy Umbo poised between two antagonistic worlds. On one side there were my College contemporaries who were taking part in the war: on the other side there were the Sinn Feiners and the rank and file of the Citizen Army whose ideals were diametrically opposed to my own. M y father was able to shut himself up in his study and become so ab136

Armageddon 1914 sorbed in his books that the exterior world did not exist for him, and he could not understand that I was unable to do likewise. I delivered a final ultimatum to him, saying that I could not conscientiously stay in Trinity College when so many men I knew were being attested. The officer at the depot of the Dublin Fusiliers attested me and passed me on to the medical officer, who after examining my chest, placed me in the category of C3, which ruled out foreign service. The Colonel, however, gave me a khaki armlet with a red crown on it which I was supposed to wear as a badge that I had been attested. " Y o u will find it useful, my boy," he said, "if some old spinster busybody hands you a white feather." Wearing my khaki armlet with the red crown I felt nearly as decrepit as some of the pathetic old men I used to watch parading on Saturdays and holidays through the streets dressed in a weird greenish khaki uniform and carrying dummy rifles. These veterans, some of whom were distinguished citizens of Dublin and celebrated in sporting circles, made a bold gesture of patriotism at a moment when the recruiting campaign of Lord Wimborne was at a low ebb, and there was a Quixotic touch about their leader F. H. Browning, one of Ireland's greatest heroes of the cricket field. "There goes a true blue die-hard," I said to myself, as I watched him march his aged platoon up Lansdowne Road before turning down to Beggar's Bush barracks. When they had passed, a gardener, who was clipping a hedge in front of one of the houses, stopped and said to me: " Y o u ' d think them fellows would have more sense than to go gallivanting about the roads with their toy guns playing at soldiers. The whole world has gone mad!" So saying he spat derisively and went on with his clipping. One Saturday night in February a large body of the Volunteers in the city decided to practise street fighting. They gathered with rifles and bayonets at eleven o'clock at Blackhall Place, an open space near the Liffey, and for a couple of hours they engaged in strenuous mock battles. Some policemen watched these street exercises with perfect unconcern, but a number of residents who were unused to the antics of the Volunteers became alarmed. Not many weeks later another incident took place which clearly foreshadowed what would happen in the near future. One night in March a number of armed men appeared about midnight outside Dublin Casde. The Sinn Fein officer in charge of them posted one body of troops at the upper and another at the lower gate. A third body went round to hold the exits at the rear. After those 137

Adagio dispositions had been made to the officer's satisfaction he inspected and dismissed his troops. Dublin Castle had thus, in theory, been captured. Such affairs might perhaps have been regarded as play-acting, and the English would have said that they were symptoms of the impish tendencies of the Celtic character. Those of us who were aware of those night exercises outside the Castle saw little impishness or histrionics in them, for we knew that this was the dress rehearsal for the rising which we had been expecting for months. *

*

*

*

*

I had met Sir Roger Casement first in 1910 with his friend from Northern Ireland, Francis Joseph Biggar, when they had lunched with us at Somerset, and his personality cast a glamour upon me. He seemed to me then an heroic figure who had exposed with unflinching courage the most appalling human abominations known to man in the Putumayo rubber region in Brazil. Like so many Irishmen he was full of contradictions due to his family heritage. His father was an Ulster Protestant and ex-captain of the Third Dragoon Guards, and his mother, Annie Jephson, a Catholic, allowed her children to be brought up Protestants, though she arranged during a visit to Wales to have them baptized by a Catholic priest. Casement's career was no less contradictory than his character. When his celebrated report on conditions in the Congo appeared, he was denounced in Belgium as the mouthpiece of the English Protestants seeking to discredit the Catholic missionaries, and Cardinals and Bishops fulminated against him. B y a strange irony of fate it was the Irish Americans who made the bitterest attacks upon him. Passionate, temperamental and quixotic by nature, he was indignant at the chilly official response given by the British Foreign official to his arduous labours. Then he came within the orbit of my father's friend, Mrs J . R. Green, the widow of the celebrated English historian. She, at that moment, was writing with Bulmer Hobson a pamphlet to encourage young Irishmen to stay at home in their own island instead of enlisting in the British Army. The influence of Mrs J . R. Green roused Casement's interest in Irish politics, with the result that in 1913, under the pen name Shan Van Vocht, he supported the Sinn Fein cause. He had then retired from his post as British Consul-General at Rio de Janeiro. His thesis was that Ireland in the impending world war should ally herself with England's enemy, Ger138

Easter Monday 1916 many, and in that way emerge into a position of great prosperity.1 His next step was the gun-running at Howth, which he engineered with his English friend Erskine Childers, after which he sailed for the United States to confer with John Devoy and the Clan-na-Gael. With John Devoy he approached Count Bernstorff, the German Ambassador at Washington and the military attaché, Captain Franz Von Papen, with a view to obtaining a supply of arms, munitions and trained officers for the Irish Republican Brotherhood in Dublin. Although other prominent Irish Americans, such as Bourke-Cockran and John Quinn (the staunchest supporter of the Allies) tried hard to dissuade Casement from his German adventure, he set out in October 1914 on the fateful journey that was to lead him to the gallows. Pathetically childish was his conviction that he could emulate Wolfe Tone and raise an Irish Brigade in the German prisoners-of-war camps. Only a victim of the gods, blinded by Hybris, and lured towards his doom by Nemesis, could have imagined that he could prevail upon Irish soldiers of the regular British army, who had taken part in the retreat from Mons, to desert, especially as his appeal was made chiefly to non-commissioned officers who had served at least ten years with their regiments. In general, the Germans are never sympathetic to rebellious projects and they regarded Casement with suspicion as a spy, or with indifference as a crack-brained idealist. In the winter of 191 j he became certain that England would ultimately win the war by her command of the sea, and he also believed that Germany had betrayed him and would now betray Ireland by sending a wretched cargo of outdated rifles which would be useless for military purposes.2 When he heard from Monteith that the I.R.B. in Dublin had definitely planned to start the rebellion on Easter Sunday, April 23, 1916, he resolved to return there in time to stop the rising, though he was only too well aware of the doom that awaited him if he fell into the clutches of England.

EASTER MONDAY

1916

Now let us turn to that eventful Good Friday, April 21,1916, when news reached Dublin that Sir Roger Casement had come ashore in a 1 1

W . J . Maloney, The Forged Casement Diaries, Dublin 1936, p. 133. Denis Gwynn, Life and Death ofR. Casement, London, 1930, p. 376. 139

Adagio collapsible boat at Ardfert from the German submarine. John McNeill, the chairman of the Irish Volunteers, had been purposely kept in the dark about the date of the rising by the I.R.B. members of the Executive Committee, Tom Clarke, Sean MacDermott, James Connolly, and Padraic Pearse, but at midnight on Good Friday they sent an envoy who bluntly informed him that the rebellion would start on Easter Sunday. At first he was shocked at this announcement, but when he was told that a shipload of arms and ammunitions had arrived that day from Germany he consented to abide by the decision of Tom Clarke, Pearse and the others. When, however, he learnt on Saturday morning, April 22, from the Limerick and Kerry men, of the scuttling of the And off Qucenstown, and received Sir Roger Casement's desperate message through Father Ryan, a priest the latter had met on landing, he at once issued an official notice in the press, cancelling the parades and marches arranged in Dublin for Easter Sunday. He also sent special delegates to different parts of Ireland to prevent the contingents from the outlying and less easily accessible districts from setting out for the capital. Notwithstanding this, the fire-eaters, Tom Clarke, Padraic Pearse, Sean MacDermott and James Connolly, at a stormy meeting of the Executive, refused to accept the countermand of McNeill, and decided to go on with the rebellion and challenge their destiny. They therefore gave orders for the manœuvres to start on Easter Monday, April 24. On the morning of that Easter Monday it was our milkman who brought news that the rebellion had broken out and that the Sinn Feiners had seized Harcourt Street station. W e were surprised, as John McNeill had published a notice in the Irish Times that morning cancelling the manœuvres. When in the early afternoon I passed along St Stephen's Green I found all the gates of the park closed, but inside there were detachments of armed Volunteers standing up to the shoulders in freshly dug trenches parallel to the streets near the outer railings. Here and there in the streets nearby groups of people gathered together and described excitedly the scenes they had witnessed. Some said they had seen Countess Markiewicz in Dame Street dressed in Volunteer uniform, accompanied by armed Volunteers, and that she had gone up to the policeman on duty outside the gates of the Castle and had shot him dead. Others had seen a lancer on horseback shot dead in O'Connell Street. There was that day an air of bewildering unreality about Dublin. Life seemed to be in suspended animation. Where were the British author140

Easter Monday 1916 ities, I heard a woman ask, as though she expected the figure of Mr Birrell to rise out of the ground and calm the people. The police were not to be seen anywhere, and the only people in authority were the Volunteers in green uniform, armed with rifles, standing here and there on sentry duty at the street corners. One of them at the corner of Cuffe Street, seemed to be nervous of the rifle he was holding in both hands, but when I drew near to the door of the College of Surgeons he warned me away with a wave of the hand, and when groups of people gathered nearby he dispersed them, but kept an uneasy watch, looking around on all sides as though he expected an ambush. There were no trams running but there were motor cars and innumerable bicycles. The Volunteers, however, stopped many of the cars and warned them not to go down O'Connell Street where there was shooting. College Green, usually the busiest spot in the city, was strangely deserted, for most of the crowd gathered in Westmoreland Street near the firing line in O'Connell Street. The Bank of Ireland no longer had any of its sentries, for the iron gates were closed. Trinity College, too, had closed its gates and I had difficulty in getting the porters to open the doors. The outbreak of the revolt found the College totally unprepared. It was vacation time, and the number of students in residence was small. O f these, many had started off for an Easter Monday excursion, but fortunately for the past three weeks a permanent guard had been maintained at the Officers Training Corps headquarters. To those few men— a corporal and privates—fell the responsibility of organizing the defence of the College. Situated as it is in the heart of the city and commanding all the principal streets, Trinity is one of the most important strategic positions in Dublin. It is also an almost ideal fortress, for its grey stone walls are so thick as to defy all but the heaviest artillery, and the buildings are so situated that men posted on the roof have an uninterrupted field of fire down all the thoroughfares which radiate from this central hub of the city. The parapets provide excellent cover, and the various buildings are arranged so as to enfilade each other and subject attackers to a devasting cross fire. I imagined, at first, that the object of the rebels, who wished to establish themselves in Dublin, would have been to take possession of such a stronghold. It was unlikely, however, that artillery would be used to ruin the Alma Mater of Wolfe Tone, Robert Emmet, and Thomas Davis, and if artillery were not used against its walls it could be held by a few hundred men against almost any numbers. When I arrived in College the corporal had just given orders for the 141

Adagio front gate to be barricaded, and all members of the O.T.C. in College were hastily summoned. The two officers of the contingent were not available, but in their absence my tutor, Dr Alton, who was a captain in the O.T.C., deputized for them. One of his first orders was to post a watchman at the front gate, and to bring into College any soldiers who might be seen in the street, and every student and professor within the walls was summoned to take part in the defence. Fortunately, several Australian and New Zealand soldiers took refuge inside the walls followed by a couple of Trinity men back from France on leave, and the Aussies immediately stationed themselves as sharpshooters on the parapets above, from which they could command the full extent of College Green and Dame Street on one side, and Westmoreland and O'Connell Streets on the other. As I was at the time living at home in Shrewsbury Road, in the suburb of Ballsbridge I was given a special permit enabling me to pass the barricades at the front gate. When I reached home I found my father calmly working away in his study at his Aristophanes. M y mother was not so philosophic in her outlook, for she thought of the morrow when there would be no food in the shops, and I found her closeted with Lizzie, our faithful old cook, who was always a tower of strength in an emergency. When I called at my Uncle Charlie's house at 16 Shrewsbury Road, I found far greater excitement. M y uncle was in a villainous temper and was cursing the world in general and Nationalist Ireland in particular. M y Aunt Ida, unlike my uncle, became calm and serene at moments of crisis, but she took a positive pleasure in magnifying the disasters and dispelling any illusions that might still linger in the minds of the more optimistic members of the family. With her was my Aunt Helen, who had returned on leave from Malta. The two aunts had already collected a vast crop of blood-curdling rumours from the various tradesmen who still called at the house, and Ida possessed a special talent for extracting scaring news of what was happening in the city. The sudden arrival of my cousin Cyril Hoey in khaki on a motor cycle produced great commotion in the family, for he had disappeared early in the morning, and everyone at home was afraid he might have been waylaid by the Sinn Feiners. He was already a student in Trinity College and had joined the O.T.C. with a view to volunteering for service in the Royal Flying Corps. He pointed triumphantly to a battered motor cycle outside the door saying, " I have been 142

Easter Monday 1916 appointed despatch rider to act as liaison between the College and certain units outside in the city." After leaving Shrewsbury Road in the afternoon I walked in towards the city. When I arrived at the corner of Lansdowne Road I heard shots and I noticed a crowd of people around an ambulance. "What has happened?" I enquired from a man who was standing on the outskirts of the crowd. "There has been a bloody massacre here a few minutes ago", he replied. "They're after killing a number of the old men in the veteran's corps: they're just taking away the last of them." As he spoke shots rang out and I could hear the bullets whistling overhead. As the veterans had disappeared, and the shots had ceased, I walked towards the intersection of Haddington and Northumberland Roads, where I saw a deep pool of blood in the roadway near a tree. I then learnt from one of the bystanders that the pool of blood marked the place where F. H. Browning, the cricketer, had been shot dead a few minutes before. Only the week before I had seen him marching up that road at the head of his old men with their dummy rifles. What kind of insanity prompted the rebels to kill unarmed old men? "The old veterans must have been living in another world," one man replied, "for they came marching up in the middle of the road in their uniforms, carrying their dummy guns as if no rebellion had broken out at all." Just then a car came towards us from the city. In it were six British officers returning from the Fairyhouse races. As the car dashed by, a volley of shots rang out from the window of the corner house. "This is getting too hot," said a bystander. " I f I were you, Sir, I'd get under the wall below the corner house: you'll be safe there." I did as I was bid and crouched under the wall. Up above I saw the two snipers at the window when they raised the blind and peered out. During the hour that I crouched there I counted seven or eight motor cars that they fired at. At length there was a lull and I was able to continue my walk into the city. The railway station at Westland Row was in darkness but I heard the voices of the patrols. When I reached O'Connell's Bridge I had to thread my way through vast crowds who seemed to be there as spectators. In the middle of O'Connell Street I could see the carcass of a horse ridden by one of the lancers who had been shot from the General Post Office. Near the Post Office there was a barbed wire fence across the street, and here and there I saw Volunteers in green uniform on guard. Up above in the G.P.O. the windows were filled with sand

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Adagio bags for defence. In spite of the continual volleys from the G.P.O. the crowd in O'Connell Street were busy looting the shops, and around Lawrence's toy shop and bazaar a regular free-for-all was taking place, which proceeded in riotous good humour. Only once did I witness a quarrel when a woman in a shawl tried to snatch from another some of her gain. Although the latter had both hands fully engaged and was so laden that she could hardly walk, she was more than a match for the shawlie in vituperation. "Get back to yer slum, ye thievin' slut, if ye don't let go I'll call the polis." The word 'polis' was greeted by shouts of sardonic laughter by the other looters, but the threat served its purpose, and the women departed with her loot unmolested. The scene in O'Connell Street that Monday night reminded me of Goya's haunting pictures of the Witches' Sabbath, and the looters, who had come from the surrounding slum districts, were as macabre and fearless as the Madrid street arabs and their doxies who rose against the French troops of Murat on May 2, 1808. I saw one very fat matron emerge from Manfield's with an armful of ladies' shoes which she had managed to grab in the tumult. She went over to a solemn-faced little girl, who stood waiting with a perambulator, and into this she dumped the shoes. The cool and self-possessed behaviour of the fat woman and the little girl in the midst of all the chaos so intrigued me that I followed them. They passed on to Lemon's, the confectionery shop, which had already been extensively pillaged and the little girl, as before, took up her position at the side, out of range of the crowd, while the woman slowly and obstinately butted her way through the looters like a whippet tank at the front. A few minutes later she reappeared carrying a large jar of lollipops and a number of large cartons of milk chocolate which she deposited in the perambulator. The two then walked across the street, made an onslaught on the outfitting shops, where they adopted the same procedure. The fat woman then emerged into the street arrayed in a fur coat and a large picture hat trimmed with lilac feathers. Noticing the child's look of frank amazement she said: "It's no wonder, child, your eyes are popping out of your head: you've never seen your Mummy so grand, have you? But look what I've brought you." She handed the little girl a red-riding-hood cloak and pushed on the perambulator saying: " W e must hurry and store the things." The two scurried away down a side lane towards Marlborough Street. Following them I noticed to my surprise that they went into the ProCathedral. They did not say their prayers, but proceeded to the back of 144

Easter Monday 1916 the porch, where in a dark córner they stored the objects they had looted in O'Connell Street. Many of the poor people from the slums, I was told, hid their loot in the Pro-Cathedral, believing that the windfalls Fortune had bestowed upon them would be safe within the consecrated walls. The revelry was frequently interrupted by louder volleys of rifle fire from the G.P.O. and suddenly a wild rumour swept through the crowd that the British were arriving. There was a frantic stampede and I was literally carried along from O'Connell Bridge into Westmoreland Street by the retreating mob. While I was leaning against a lamp post to recover my breath, who should appear but my friend L. J . D. Richardson or Reekie. Reekie had been wandering about most of the day and had witnessed the proclamation of the Sinn Fein Republic at Nelson's Pillar at noon. "It was," he said, "very unimpressive. A small man in plain clothes with a bundle of papers under his arm addressed the crowd, but there were not more than thirty men present. 'Citizens of Dublin,' he cried, 'the last of the public buildings of the city is now in your hands. We have captured the General Post Office, and on this memorable day Ireland as a Republic has freed herself from the Republic of England.' " "Hold your horses, Reekie," I replied. "England is not a Republic." "That is what he said anyway, and he went on bleating about Ireland's wrongs and England's oppression, becoming more and more rhetorical and excited, but the thirty bystanders made no response whatever, and as looting across the street had already begun, most of them rushed off to join in the fray. The one titbit of gossip of the day, which I picked up in Rathmines, was that Padraic Pearse, one of the leaders, would be made Provost of Trinity College if the rebellion succeeds. This will make Provost Mahafiy shake in his shoes!" On Tuesday, April 25 there were no newspapers, and rumours increased. The city still seemed to be in the hands of the rebels, but there were continuous rumours of the military from England. Meanwhile the looting continued unchecked, and only one Dublin citizen had the public spirit to protest against the lawlessness that was rampant, Francis Sheehy Skeffington, a fearless, true-hearted idealist. He visited the various shopping centres in the city, and made personal appeals to the people to stop the looting. On the previous day he had been in Dame Street near the Castle during the shooting, and had gone to the assistance of a British officer who was bleeding to death in the street.

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Adagio Skeffington, who was a passionate pacifist, would never carry arms, but alone he would have faced an enemy battalion. On Tuesday afternoon I again saw Sheehy Skeffington in the streets haranguing the people, telling them it was the duty of the citizens themselves to police their city, and prevent such spasmodic looting as had taken place. He was a small, pathetic, bearded figure in his grey knickerbockers and black hat, but there were immense reserves of spiritual strength in that gentle voice of his, and few could resist the appeal of that lonely patriot. On his way home on that Tuesday evening at six o'clock he was arrested unarmed and unresisting at Portobello Bridge by British soldiers, and taken under military custody to Portobello barracks. Later the same evening he and two other victims were marched out as hostages with a military raiding party. As hostages they were liable to be shot as reprisal if rebel shots were fired. The following morning by order of Captain Bowen Colthurst, the Commanding Officer, Skeffington, with two editors of local papers, was put up against a wall in the barracks and shot. Later it transpired that Colthurst made up his mind to have Skeffington shot after reading a blood-thirsty passage in the Old Testament, and when the latter threatened to appeal to a higher power, the ruthless captain gave him ten minutes. Sheehy Skeffington met his death heroically, refused to be blindfolded, and said that the authorities would find out after his death the mistake they had made. He was given no trial, no priest was summoned to attend him, and he was not allowed to send a message to his wife, who was wholly ignorant of his whereabouts. According to the information we received at the time, he was not only murdered but tortured to death, for two hours after the firing party had done their job Skeffington was seen to be alive writhing on the ground in the barracks yard, and a second firing party was ordered out to despatch him. The grim details of the Skeffington case would not have been known but for Sir Francis Vane, the successor to Colthurst at Portobello, who insisted on making in person a report to Kitchener. Colthurst was tried by court martial, and found guilty of murder, but held to be insane. He had been wounded in France and certified only for home service. On Wednesday the military forces from England began to arrive at Kingstown, and the excitement shifted to the suburbs through which the soldiers would pass on their way into the city. At noon my sister Enid rushed in from the garden saying that a soldier had been shot at 146

Easter Monday 1916 the end of our road, and that a boy had come to the gate asking for water. We saw a number of people racing down Shrewsbury Road with tumblers and buckets of water. When we reached the end of our road we found a battalion of soldiers lining the main road into the city. The day was hot and sunny and the men were exhausted. They were recruits from English midlands, who had been called up under Lord Derby's scheme, and their regiment was the Sherwood Foresters. They were pleasant young fellows, mosdy country yokels, who had not the remotest idea where they were, and some of them even inquired if they were in France or Belgium. They had never heard a shot fired in anger, and we wondered how they would stand the strain when facing sniping from the roof tops. Some officers during the halt came back to my uncle's house for a drink, and I found to my surprise that one of them, a captain of the Wiltshires, was an old Salopian. Before the battalion moved on we warned the officers that their troops would run into a death-trap beyond Ballsbridge, for all the houses on both sides of Northumberland Road, Haddington Road and Lower Mount Street near the bridge over the canal were nests of snipers. In the afternoon, when I reached Ballsbridge, I found a regular battle in progress, and the troops were firing at the invisible enemy. They had already verified the truth of the information we had given them. The casualties, I was told, were heavy, and eighteen officers were wounded or killed, and many men. In spite of the violent gun-fire, however, spectators stood in serried ranks in the streets, watching the fighting as though they were at a football match. In view of the severe rebel gun-fire the soldiers had to take cover, and some lay flat on the road and directed their fire at the big house of Dr Lane Joynt at the corner of Lansdowne Road, which commanded the main road along which the troops were advancing. The ambulances were in continual demand, but many of those wounded were the men, women and even children among spectators. When the shots rang out from the Sinn Fein snipers the sightseers would stampede and flee into neighbouring roads, but only for a few minutes, for their curiosity was so great that they could not resist the temptation to creep back again and join the crowd of stalwarts who shadowed the advancing soldiers. I was surprised to find several middle-aged friends of the family prowling about on the outskirts of the crowd, and in one of the periodic stampedes I had to push one portly gendeman over a garden wall. Most of the old people, however, became surprisingly athletic at

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Adagio moments o f panic, and I saw a decrepit matron, w h o walked with a stick, hoist herself over a wall with lightning rapidity when the shooting came her way. During rebellion week I found m y bicycle a godsend, for it enabled me to follow the progress o f the fighting in the various zones o f the city, and I enjoyed exercising m y ingenuity to discover ways o f bypassing the cordons, barricades and sentry spots. St Stephen's Green I knew was in the hands o f the Volunteers, and I believed that it was quite safe for me to ride up Grafton Street and pass along the Green to the Shelbourne Hotel. W h e n I arrived at the hotel, however, I received a shock when I discovered that the front entrance had been barricaded with mattresses, tables and chairs, and at every window a British soldier was stationed with a rifle. After leaving St Stephen's Green I rode round by back streets to the nearest point to O'Connell's Bridge where Butler's musical instrument house, the tall building across the river at the corner o f the bridge, was being attacked b y the military with machine guns and rifle fire. I managed to push m y w a y through the crowd o f spectators standing on Aston Quay, in shadow o f McBirney's store, from which I obtained a ring seat view o f the attack on Butler's across the river. Even warfare becomes at times monotonous to the observer, and m y attention wandered from the shooting to the individuals in the crowd about me. Sometimes I pinched myself to prove that I was not dreaming, for the crowd watching the fighting behaved as if they were watching a circus. Even the booming of the guns o f the gunboat Helga down the river near the Custom House did not terrify them, and they paid no more attention to the bullets whistling over their heads than if they had been droves of starlings. Their foolhardiness and disregard o f danger was due, I believe, to insatiable curiosity plus a good dose o f fatalism. Dublin, even in normal days, is an inquisitive city. A n y little incident that occurs —the break-down o f a car, a fight between husband and wife, a dog fight—collects a crowd of interested onlookers quicker than in any other capital in the world. Once w e admit the insatiable curiosity o f the Dublin people, male and female, young and aged, w e can understand w h y in the 1916 Rebellion there were more casualties among the civil population than among the insurgents or British military. The Dublin crowds, when they walk through the streets o f their city, do so, expecting to see at every corner a miniature comedy or tragedy, and are ready to burst into tears or roar with laughter at the broken-down hobo 148

Easter Monday igi6 or the drunken old vagrant who hobbles along airing his sores in the sun. In 1916, among the Sinn Feiners, a conscious cult of heroism had begun and was to develop by leaps and bounds in the following years. It was a cult that drew much of its strength from heroes of the past, especially Wolfe Tone and Robert Emmet. But to the spirit of those two heroes the modern Irish patriots added a strong religious and ascetic trait derived from the early Fathers of the Church—the belief that the flesh must be mortified. Some have explained this tendency, saying that it was due to the influence of the numerous French Jansenist priests, who came to Ireland when Maynooth was looking for professors, but it really sprang from a deeper national conviction that the Irish belonged to an ancient spiritual Empire that was christianized by the Irish missionaries who preached in the Dark Ages in Europe north and south. To those who held such views the materialistic civilization of England was anathema and, being dreamers all of them, they believed quixotically that they could create afresh a pure Gaelic Catholic civilization. When the Rebellion started, the reaction of the man in the street, after recovering from surprise, had been decidedly hostile. While those who lived in the maze of dingy streets behind the chief centres of the rebels began to suffer acutely from hunger, even the middle-class residents of Dublin, living outside the danger zone, found their food supplies drastically restricted, and in our road most of the families spent their days wandering from shop to shop in search of provisions. Scrounging supplies became the order of the day, and some families established a regular system of barter. After Friday I found it more difficult to cycle freely through the city owing to the new military regulations, and one never knew from what direction the firing would come. It was a sinister kind of warfare consisting of sporadic shooting that suddenly took place before one's eyes without any warning, on a sunny day, in streets crowded with shoppers. As the week advanced it became more risky to move about the city by night than by day as rifle fire, machine guns and cannon kept on incessantly, and in the dark the city was overhung by smoke from the fires that had been burning since Tuesday. In spite of the tragic atmosphere of the Easter Rebellion many humorous stories were current in the Dublin streets. An amusing anecdote was told about a friend of the family, a staid, respectable lawyer, I A O—L

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Adagio who was arrested near St Stephen's Green by the rebels and escorted to Countess Markiewicz's headquarters at the College of Surgeons. His captors said to her: "We've brought you Admiral Tirpitz! He says he has arrived to help Ireland." The Countess replied: "Damn your eyes! He's no admiral, but a drunken Dublin solicitor, who sent me a writ last week for the green trousers I'm wearing this instant." On Saturday, April 29,1 cycled into Dublin and tried to approach as near as possible to Jacob's factory, one of the strongest posts of the Sinn Fein army, but I was turned back by a British sentry. Already, according to the general opinion of the people in the streets, the rebellion was near its end, and I was told that the Prior of the Carmelite Church off Grafton Street had visited the rebels in Jacob's factory and pointed out the madness of their actions in fighting England. "Do you think," he said, "that a fly can fight an elephant." His first visit was unsuccessful, for he could make no impression upon them, and in the excitement of the argument one of the Sinn Feiners from above dropped a bag of flour on the worthy Prior who came out of the factory white as a miller, much to the amusement of the crowd. During the afternoon the rumours of surrender were more insistent, and Enid told me that while she was in the chemist's shop in Ballsbridge a British officer came in and told the chemist that Connolly and Pearse had been taken and that the other leaders had given themselves up. The sinister red glare over Dublin which we could see from our roof made me recall the burning of Walhalla at the end of Wagner's The Twilight of the Gods. All Sunday we watched an interminable procession of people pass along our road through the day carrying bundles, and wheeling perambulators and carts with pieces of furniture. They had been ordered out of their houses in Sandymount and Serpentine Avenues and along the Merrion Road, as a result of the fighting the previous night, and they plodded along the road with their carts and their squabbling children, like refugees in France fleeing before the invading Germans. On Monday, May 1, when we went out to buy provisions, we found that the Rebellion was over. My friend, Dr Myles Keogh, witnessed the surrender of De Valera. The doctor had been working very actively in the streets all the week, rescuing the wounded and trying to arrange for the burial of the dead in Glasnevin cemetery. On Sunday, April 30, when he was returning from Glasnevin on a hearse in which 1 jo

Easter Monday 1916 he had carried a number of dead for burial, and was passing St Patrick Dun's hospital, a voice hailed him. Two men had come out of the Sinn Fein centre opposite the hospital. The two were so thickly covered with dust that at first he thought they were dressed in khaki. One was a military cadet who had been captured by the Sinn Feiners, the other was De Valera, the Sinn Fein leader. De Valera surrendered with a hundred men, and Dr Myles Keogh understood that they forced their leader to surrender owing to the casualties they had suffered. "De Valera," said the doctor, "knew the situation was hopeless, for he said: 'Shoot me if you will, but arrange for my men.' Then he added as he walked up and down: 'If only the people had come out with knives and forks.' " On Monday my father and I walked up O'Connell Street to see the ruins after the great fires had raged uninterruptedly during the latter days of the conflict. Although I had prowled about the streets during the past week and had seen some of the fighting in Lower O'Connell Street, the sight of the gutted buildings and the hideous gaping shops came as a great shock, for it seemed impossible that so much destruction could have taken place in so short a time. Those who had come back from the front told us that the destruction challenged comparison with the ravaged cities of Belgium at the beginning of the war. A few days after the end of the Rebellion I suddenly ran into Maggie Donovan. "Where are you off to, Maggie?" I said. "Surely you weren't going to cut me?" She was pale and haggard, and when she looked up at me I noticed her eyes were full of tears. She had been in the College of Surgeons with Countess Markiewicz, but had managed to escape just before the surrender and slip through the cordon without being arrested. I was astonished at the change in her appearance. She seemed to have become smaller physically, and all her vivacity and vitality had evaporated. "The police," she said, "are tracking us down in Dublin, house by house. One of my friends escaped with the help of one of the inmates by hiding in a coffin, and it was arranged that he would be able to escape when he was deposited in the mortuary chapel, but he was so scared of being buried alive that before they put him in the chapel he burst open the lid, and with a leap out of it that put the fear of God in the burial party, away he dashed for dear life. Although I'm sick to death with all the tragedies I've seen, I have to laugh when I think of the fear Paddy put in those fellows."

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Adagio "What about those who were in the G.P.O.?" "Jim Connolly was game to the end, but he was badly wounded in both legs and they carried him out on a stretcher. The one I'm most sorry for is The O'Rahilly. He was the life and soul of them all in the G.P.O. Poor Connolly and O'Rahilly; they believed all along, and so did De Valera, that the Germans and the Irish in America would come to our help." *

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The Easter Rebellion left Dublin dazed and bewildered. The great mass of the people still vaguely believed in the allied cause and did not want Great Britain to be embarrassed. The newspapers published an interview with one of the rebel officers in custody, which reflected the attitude of the young Irish intellectual minority who had joined the Sinn Fein movement after 1914. He was young, intelligent, and well spoken, and reminded me of young nationalist officers, like our friend Brendan Fottrell, who had gone out to the front in the Connaught Rangers or the Dublin Fusiliers, and his uniform was a green replica of that of a British officer. " W e were not badly led," he remarked to his interviewer, "we were misled." "On Easter Monday morning," he continued, "orders were received by the Volunteers to assemble at certain appointed spots in the city, bringing our arms and provisions for eight hours. There was nothing surprising in this, for similar parades had taken place on several occasions previously. But when we arrived at our stations we were surprised to find large quantities of ammunition ready to be served out, and still more astonished when we were told to occupy specified buildings and hold them at all costs until May 2 or at the latest May 8, when a foreign army would land in Ireland and march to our assistance. Many of us did not like the project, but we were in it and we could not desert our comrades." Sir John Maxwell, the Commander-in-Chief of the British troops in Ireland, certainly meted out stern punishment to those who took part in the Easter Rebellion. Courts martial began as soon as the rising ended, and when the people were beginning to resume their normal life the series of executions began. If the seven leaders who signed the proclamation announcing the birth of an Irish republic, and the eight others who were the next in importance, had been condemned by courts 152

Easter Monday 1916 martial, shot immediately after the Rebellion and their death published in one list in the newspapers, little would have been said of the collective shooting, for it would have merged into the final holocaust after a week of terror. Instead, the military authorities dragged out the executions over ten days, and shot the leaders one a day, or so it seemed to the people in the streets, who heard day after day, at five o'clock in the afternoon, the mournful monotonous cry of the newsboys calling "Stop Press" to announce the execution of yet another one of those young misguided patriots. Day by day the executions continued, and I could feel that the exasperation of the people was increasing hourly, for many in Dublin began to idealize these young men who had sacrificed their lives, quixotically perhaps, but wholeheartedly, for Cathleen ni Houlihan, and the quotations in the newspapers from the poems of Pearse and MacDonagh, and anecdotes of the tragic bride, Grace Gifford's wedding to Joseph Plunkett on the eve of his execution, fanned the fire of indignation that was growing. Grace Gifford in the English papers was already turning into a symbol like Sarah Curran, the bride of Robert Emmet. One day I met the surgeon Tobin, father of my friend Paddy Tobin, who had been killed the year before at Suvla Bay. The old man had been attending James Connolly after he had been carried out of the General Post Office when the insurgents surrendered. "God knows," he said, "I have never had any love for the Sinn Feiners, but I must take off my hat to James Connolly. I have spoken to him and I have attended him when he seemed at the point of death. So grievously wounded was the poor fellow in both legs that he could not stand up to face the firing squad. But they tied him to a chair, and thus he met his death with genuine heroism." Meanwhile, across the Irish Sea, in Parliament Irish affairs were the order of the day but, as The Times correspondent noted from Dublin on May 8, people who have just been scourged by bullet and flame, and had counted their innocent dead by scores, can hardly be expected to live up to the amenities of the House of Commons. The nice things which Asquith and John Redmond said about Birrell, the Chief Secretary, in the debate were not appreciated in Dublin. Sir Edward Carson, as a rule, carried the Irish Unionists with him, but on the occasion of the debate on Ireland after the Rebellion, they did not enjoy his polite excuses for the Chief Secretary, who had resigned a few days 153

Adagio before. In a letter to my father's friend, Lawrence Waldron, the exChief Secretary wrote: 'I am reading Don Quixote as a consolation. The Spaniards bear trouble better than we do. If I had been a more stupid man, I would have done the obvious things, and should probably have fared better. I wished to avoid shedding blood during the war. I did not err through indifference or want of thought.' He ended his letter saying that he would not see him before leaving Ireland because his emotions would not allow him to visit Dublin.' 'A manly letter,'' said my father, "but we cannot forget that his sins began long before the Great War. I feel very sorry for him. He will now go down to history as the most incompetent figure in the whole gallery of Irish Chief Secretaries.'' * * * * *

At home we were all convinced at first that the Prime Minister would find a majority in Parliament willing to impose conscription in Ireland, and on May 9 Sir John Lonsdale did propose the inclusion of Ireland in the Conscription Bill, basing his plea on military necessity. Sir John Lonsdale was backed up by Sir Edward Carson, who stated that compulsion was all the more necessary in Ireland, owing to the Government's mismanagement of the recruiting campaign. John Redmond, however, replied that it would be not only wrong and unwise, but insane to attempt to enforce conscription. The Prime Minister then announced that the Government had decided to exclude Ireland from the Bill. If our Unionist friends counted upon the government initiating at last a strong policy in Ireland they soon were forced to admit that the initiative had already passed to the Nationalists, for on May 11, two days after the Prime Minister's exclusion of Ireland from conscription, John Dillon made a violent speech in the House denouncing the government's handling of the situation in Ireland. The speech certainly produced a dramatic change in Asquith, the Prime Minister, for he abruptly terminated the debate and announced that he was leaving at once for Ireland. The Irish Unionists assumed that the Prime Minister would arrive in Dublin as a grim avenging Cromwell, but to their surprise they saw a benevolent old gentleman who was all smiles and sympathy. My father was present at the large meeting of the Privy Council which swore in the Prime Minister. He was struck by the marked deterioration in his

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appearance, and wrote in his diary: 'He looked tired and puffy with a very pink complexion, and his eyes wandered about much, as if he was nervous. He was heavy-faced, lifeless and confused. I don't feel comfortable when I think of such a man as master of the destinies of the British Empire.' Asquith, at any rate, learnt during his short Irish visit that the Easter Rebellion of 1916 was just as much against John Redmond and his Home Rule as against Great Britain. He smiled ruefully when my father quoted Birrell's last words on leaving Ireland: "I diagnosed the Irish disease as measles, but it turned out to be smallpox." In Richmond Barracks the Prime Minister had interviews with a number of rebels with whom he chatted affably and expressed to all of them the hope that they were being well looked after. The 'Heartrending desolation' of the city, and the no less heart-rending desolation of the Irish Government for which he had been responsible during the past eight years must have immediately dispelled any optimistic hopes his liberal mind may have entertained of producing in Dublin a plausible constitutional settlement, as a conjuror pulls a rabbit out of a top hat. He came to Dublin, took one look at the chaos, went straight back to London, and with the approval of all his colleagues at the Cabinet, begged the Welsh wizard, Lloyd George, to tame the Irish Monster. The Prime Minister bluntly blurted out to the House that the existing machinery of Irish government had completely broken down, but there was a universal feeling in Ireland that there was at the moment 'a unique opportunity for a fresh attempt to settle outstanding problems'. Meanwhile the Royal Commission of Inquiry appointed to investigate the causes of the outbreak of the Rebellion, the conduct and degree of responsibility of the military and civil executive in Ireland, began its sessions in the Shelbourne Hotel, Dublin. The Commission was presided over by Lord Hardinge, the other Commissioners being Mr Justice Sherman and Sir Mackenzie Chalmers. It agreed in condemning the hopelessness of the Castle system of government and the incompetence of the individuals who constituted it. "The worst of it all," my father said, "is that this failure to govern in any sense of the term springs from causes which affect much more than Ireland. It is really the outcome of our British method or want of method in conducting national business during a great war." At a ceremony held on August 7,1916, in the garden of the Provost's House, silver cups were presented on behalf of the citizens of Dublin to 155

Adagio the members of the Officers Training Corps of Dublin University, in recognition of services rendered during the Easter week rising. The two um-shaped cups were given to the Commandant of the Corps, Major R. W. Tate, who handed them over to the Provost of Trinity College, the Rev. Dr John Pentland Mahaffy, C.V.O., to be held in trust in perpetuity.1 The Provost in reply said that this presentation from the citizens of Dublin was not the first gift to his family. It was exactly one hundred and twenty years since his great-grandfather, whose name he bore, was presented by the citizens of Dublin with a silver snuff box, testifying to the part he had taken against rebellion in 1798. "People will say," the Provost added, "that I should be proud of this distinction; nevertheless I have mixed feelings, for those against whom my great-grandfather, John Pentland, fought and held Dublin, were also Irishmen. Both sides knew in 1798 that they had many grievances to redress. But the Sinn Feiners had no grievances, except that they were not allowed to form a republic and join with Germany against the power of Great Britain. Still it was in the nature of a civil war, and I am very sorry, indeed, to think that any virtues my family may have shown were not used against an external enemy but against the dangers of home rebellion." The Master had certainly mellowed with age! All traces of the peculiar arrogance which his contemporaries had stigmatized in the past had disappeared, leaving in its place a kindly toleration towards all men. As Provost he had seen the downfall of the elaborate civilization erected in the nineteenth century when men had an optimistic belief in Progress as a doctrine. *

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The epilogue to the Easter Revolt of 1916 came with the trial of Sir Roger Casement. After an investigation at Bow Street on May 16 of that year he was returned for trial for high treason in the King's Bench Division of the High Court, before the Lord Chief Justice, Viscount Reading, Mr Justice Avory and Mr Justice Horridge and a jury. Sir F. E. Smith, the Attorney-General, led the prosecution, and Serjeant A. M. Sullivan K.C. defended. 1

After the Rebellion His Majesty conferred the Grand Cross of the British Empire upon the Provost who became Sir John Pentland Mahaffy, G.B.E. Major Robert Tate received the K.B.E.

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Easter Monday 1916 In spite of a striking speech in defence by Serjeant Sullivan, who at one moment collapsed in a faint, the jury returned a verdict of guilty of high treason. Before the Lord Chief Justice passed the sentence of death, Sir Roger Casement was allowed to make a statement in his own defence. The following words from that last speech are still remembered: In Ireland alone in this twentieth century is loyalty held to be a crime.. . . If we are to be indicted as criminals, to be shot as murderers, to be imprisoned as convicts, because our offence is that we love Ireland more than we value our lives, then I know not what virtue resides in any offer of self-government held out to brave men on such terms. Self-government is our right . . . a thing no more to be doled out to us or withheld from us by another people than life itself.

Casement like Pearse, Connolly, MacDonagh and Plunkett, knew that the Insurrection of 1916 was a forlorn hope and a deliberate blood sacrifice. They did not expect to win, for they knew that the people were against them, and that they would be hated for doing it. But they believed that their martydom would save Ireland's soul. What made the hanging of Casement so peculiarly tragic was that he had returned to Ireland on Good Friday to warn his friends not to attempt the rising as no adequate help could be expected from the Germans. The poet W. B. Yeats, whose play Cathleen ni Houlihan (1902) on the Rebellion of '98 had prophesied the Rising of Easter Week 1916 fourteen years before the event, wrote 'September 1913' in a mood of bitter disillusion: Romantic Ireland's dead and gone, It's with O'Lcary in the grave.

In that poem he had sneered at the revolutionary leaders coming with vivid faces from their counter or desk, and had underrated them. But now in 1916 'a terrible beauty is born'; they are transfigured by their sacrifice, and all discussion is useless as passions have been roused by martyrdom, and he wrote: O but we talked at large before The sixteen men were shot, But who can talk of give and take What should be and what not While those dead men are loitering there To stir the boiling pot? 157

7 DUBLIN AND L O N D O N

1917-1918

The Name of the Slough Was Despond. J O H N B U N Y A N , Pilgrim's

Progress

In January 1917 my father's financial worries reached a climax when he received a letter from his bank warning him that his overdraft had reached perilous dimensions. As he explained to me with entire frankness he had let matters slip and had not scrutinized his pass-book for a long while. Now he suddenly learned that his overdraft had reached several thousands of pounds and the Bank requested him to cover the deficit. It was thus necessary to reduce at once general expenditure. I was shocked when I saw how deeply the news had affected him for suddenly he seemed to become aged and enfeebled. When in 1910 we had abandoned our Edwardian style of living extravagantly and moved from Blackrock into the suburbs of Dublin he had told me that he would have to retrench, and he had made it clear to me when he took me away from Shrewsbury School and interrupted my last year there in the Upper Sixth form that one of his main reasons for sending me to Dublin University1 instead of to Oxford or Cambridge was that I should be able to live at home and earn most of my fees through Junior Exhibition, Classical Scholarship and prizes. In this I had been fortunate in Trinity College, for these had not only covered my fees but had given me sufficient money in addition to pay for music lessons and supply me with all the pocket money I needed. What surprised me was that he had not foreseen his present predicament. It was as if he had suddenly awakened from a dream to a terrifying reality. I had always seen him dominate difficult situations and face them calmly and 1 The University of Dublin was founded in 1591 by Queen Elizabeth who granted a charter incorporating the College of the Holy and Undivided Trinity as 'The Mother of an University', intending it to be the first of a number of Colleges. As no other colleges have been established, Trinity College alone enjoys the rights of Dublin University.

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Dublin and London 1917-1918 resolutely, but now he seemed momentarily to lose his balance. The morning the letter arrived he did not go to his office but stopped in the house, and I found him pacing up and down his study sunk in gloom. My mother, who remained surprisingly calm, tried to pour oil on troubled waters but he refused to be comforted, and he began to quote again Sophocles' dictum that palliatives were no use when what was needed was the surgeon's knife. In the evening he told me at dinner that he had decided to transfer the whole family to London. There we should have to look out for a flat at about £ 1 0 0 or ¿ 1 2 0 a year. He had accordingly written to the landlord of Melfort to give notice. The next urgent step that had to be taken was to write to Enid to break the news that he was unable to pay for her at Oxford. Accordingly my mother was instructed to write explaining the serious state of the family finances and the necessity of reducing expenditure at once. She would have, therefore, to leave Oxford and go to Trinity College, Dublin, where, as the daughter of a former Fellow, her education would cost very little and she, too, could live at home. Once my father's impetuous imagination began to work it led him over the hills and far away. He would send Muriel 'au pair' to Paris, and thence to Milan or Switzerland. Next day, however, after a good night's sleep, he became his practical self once more, and he was actually glad when he received an answer to his frantic note from our landlord, informing him that he could not give up our house before December 1920! Then he closeted himself with my mother for a whole morning to work out a living allowance, and by lunch-time he emerged carrying sheafs of bills and a piece of paper on which he had written down the arrangements which would enable him to weather the storm without curtailing his children's education. Meanwhile he worked away with undiminished energy, touring every part of the country, visiting even the smallest schools in the outof-the-way parishes, presiding not only over the National and Intermediate Boards but also at war committees such as the Strength of Britain and the Registration Council, and giving interviews to the Press. We only saw him between journeys, and he would say that he felt very well, but my mother told me that he was losing weight too rapidly. He had been 14-7 stone and in a month he had gone down to 13 stone. Although his energy was still unbounded and his authority as chairman of the National and Intermediate Boards unimpaired, I 159

Adagio felt that his physical decline started the day when he received the letter from the Bank.

THE IRISH C O N V E N T I O N 1917 Trinity College in 1917 was the centre of the Anglo-Irish political struggle, for Lloyd George's Irish Convention to settle all the country's problems was held in the dilapidated old hall in the Front Square looking out on College Green, called the Regent House. This was now painted, spruced up and completely transformed into a majestic assembly hall with green baize circular tables and comfortable chairs for the national representatives from the four provinces who were to decide the future of Ireland. I visited the Regent House one day with the Provost who told me with great satisfaction how he had persuaded the Government authorities to select Trinity College as the locale of the Convention, and he chuckled at the thought that the British Government were defraying the cost of renovating the dingy Regent House which had been the eyesore of College. During the meetings of the Convention the entrance porch of the Front Gate and the Front Square were daily thronged by politicians, secretaries and pressmen waiting to buttonhole the members when they descended for a breath of fresh air after the heated debates. I used occasionally to meet my godfather and accompany him to the passage leading to the Provost's House: some days he was in his most urbane mood, and I knew that he wanted to consult my father, for he would give me special messages and typewritten statements which I was to deliver without fail. If, however, he saw me talking to AE, who also was a member of the Convention, he would pout bad-humouredly and pass me with a curt nod, for he instinctively distrusted all Gaels with beards and mystics who were politicians, and AE he looked upon as a lunatic. Both men were impressive: the Provost an Olympian, with his eighteenth-century mutton-chops and towering figure: AE likewise over six feet, a King Conchubar in stature, but beneath those bushy eyebrows his long grey-blue eyes were pleasant and welcoming and his hands, as he used them in gestures, were finely modelled. As I walked with him through the college park he spoke in his slow lilting voice enlightening the tyro on the Irish problem. "What is at the root of the Irish trouble?" he said. "The Irish people 160

The Popes Little Island want to be free. Why do they desire freedom? I think it is because they feel in themselves a genius which has not yet been manifested in a civilization as Greeks, Romans and Egyptians have in the past externalized their genius in a culture, in arts and sciences peculiar to themselves. It is the same impulse which leads an imaginative boy to escape all the traps a conventional family set for him. They wish him to be a doctor, to enter one of the money-making professions. All reason is with them. But the boy hears music in his soul, and it calls him out of the beaten track. He will say: 'I believe the healer's profession is a noble one. I do not despise it. But I wish to be a musician.' If we understand the passion of the boy to be himself, we can understand the passion of the Irish nation for freedom." "Surely, AE, the Irish have shown by their rebellions in every century how antagonistic they are to the British; what is the fundamental cause?" " I believe, Walter, that Irish antagonism springs from biological and spiritual necessity. Whether it is good or evil I know not. The moralist in me will hear of nothing but a brotherhood of humanity, and race hatreds are abhorrent to it. But I don't believe it possible to make contented Britons out of Irishmen." Some months later those two antagonistic Irishmen, Dr Mahaify— the Provost, a dyed-in-the-wool Conservative and Protestant of the Anglo-Irish ascendancy—and George Russell—AE, a Nationalist from Ulster, poet, economist, mystic—were, according to my father, mainly responsible for the collapse of the Convention, in spite of all the peacemaking efforts of Sir Horace Plunkett: Dr Mahaffy, because he distrusted the wing of the Southern Irish Unionists led by Lord Middleton and Archbishop Bernard, who were, he believed, ready to abandon some of their Conservative principles and negotiate a peace with Sinn Fein, and George Russell because he, unlike John Redmond and the Parliamentary Nationalists, saw the writing on the wall and knew that the Sinn Feiners would sweep the country in the elections.

THE POPE'S LITTLE ISLAND Irish politics in 1917 began to cause friction even in our West British family. M y father, who used to lunch regularly with Sir Horace Plunkett, the Chairman of the Convention, would on his return home 161

Adagio quote the latter's political pronouncements with so much confidence that I felt compelled to argue with him, pointing out that he and Sir Horace and a number of his fellow Unionsts were wasting time with their futile proposals, when the Sinn Feiners and the Irish Bishops were clearly determined to smash the Convention. I was puzzled by his failure to understand the significance of the election of De Valera to the seat of John Redmond's brother Major Willie Redmond (killed in action in France), and the election of W . T. Cosgrave to the seat in East Kilkenny. De Valera and Cosgrave had been heroes in the Easter Rebellion of 1916, and their success in these elections meant that the forces of Sinn Fein were advancing by leaps and bounds. I saw that he was taken aback by my account of my conversations with AE and with my companions, who were friends of some of the Sinn Fein leaders, so I went on to quote the arguments of Darrell Figgis, one of their experts, on the repudiation of Irish debts to Great Britain, telling him that many friends of mine in Trinity and University College held them. M y father was now annoyed, and said that I seemed to be turning into a Sinn Feiner. This I insolently characterized as a stupid remark, which infuriated him, and rightly so I admit, but I was irritated past endurance because nobody knew where my sympathies lay better than my father. In my rage I sincerely wished I had been born under other auspices, and I even envied the tragic youngsters of 1916 who, mad as they were in their idealism, felt, as the poet Yeats said, 'the victim's joy among the holy flames'. And that thought prompted me to reply to his taunt saying that if I had been alive in 1798 I would have shouldered a gun myself. My answer profoundly shocked my father, who noted in his diary that I seemed to be swayed too much by what I had heard in Trinity College. I pitied my father; for day by day he saw his world crumbling away, and in his pessimism he even wondered whether perhaps the only cure for world chaos would be German tyranny or papal autocracy. The French Revolution, he declared, had struck off man's shackles centuries before he was fit for freedom. Since 1789 man had been like an infant playing with fire-arms, and in future he would hasten at an increased velocity to the devil. N o w under the looming threat of German world domination my father prophesied that the day might come when Little Willie would be crowned in Rome as well as Aachen, for the Kaiser had a taste for history, and might like to restore the age of Charlemagne 162

The Popes Little Island or Otto. In the meantime he preferred to remain in Ireland and, a la Lucretius, view the drilling of pacifists, Bolsheviks, Social Democrats and all of them from afar. And if the 'Law of God' were exploited loudly enough by the Press, England might think it worth-while to give Ireland a couple of millions a year to keep quiet and not bother her any more. It would suit England in the long run to allow Ireland to become 'The Pope's little Island', in the centre of the stormy waters of a Bolshevized or Germanized ocean. M y father doubted whether the human race had yet reached the stage at which it was safe to throw off authority, whether civil or religious. Man was millions of years old, and we should not anticipate his possible eventual evolution into a free, self-determining being. What was certain was that self-determination, which President Wilson was proclaiming to the world as the panacea for all ills, was leading to chaos, and the wisest policy for Ireland would be to give up masquerading as democrats, and rather think of her 'damned soul' as Mitchell had said. Even those who would prefer to exile themselves from Ireland would always return when they had made enough money, and build a house in their country town where they were reared, and while they were abroad they would send back from Boston ('the next Irish parish' as that city was called in Galway) the Christmas cheque for the family at home, and when they died, plenty of money would be left in their wills to pay for thousands of Masses to be said in the Irish chapels for their souls. M y father could never understand why the Irish Bishops in the past had been hostile to Home Rule. Surely Home Rule at any price would now be preferable to being swept into the maelstrom of social revolution which was likely to arise in England as the result of this war. Ireland under the rule of its Catholic Bishops might easily become what it was after St Patrick—a refugium from the barbarian invasions which flooded Europe for ages. *

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I was glad to reach at last the end of my university course, for I looked upon my liberation from examinations as an emancipation from my father's dominant hold which pressed upon me more grievously than upon any other member of the family. I did better than I expected in the two Finals, and obtained a second place in Classics, Senior Moderatorship, first class, and gold medal; and second place, 163

Adagio Senior Moderatorship, first class and gold medal in History and Political Science. I missed University Studentship, the first prize of the year, but I obtained the Brook Prize, which is awarded to the candidate who comes second in the double final. I was gratified when my father invited me to lunch in the Fellow's luncheon-room after my classical moderatorship, where I met the Provost, and my tutor, Alton, and Macran, Goligher, Edward Gwynn and others, whom I remembered meeting in the same room twelve years before when my father had brought me to lunch as a boy of eleven. I found it difficult to realize that I had reached the end of my college days, with no more examinations to work for, and my only feeling was one of void and futility. A few weeks after my degree I received a letter of invitation to become a Senior Classic master in a boys' school in Dungannon in the North of Ireland, but with the war on I could not endure the thought of enclosing myself within the walls of a boys' boarding school. I was eager to get away from the influences of my family and away from all that recalled my Dublin years. The war was in its acutest phase, and the news from the many fronts gloomy. M y father and mother tried desperately to keep alive the festive spirit during that lugubrious Christmas of 1917, and in one sense we were all happy, for Muriel and Chou Chou had won a record number of prizes at the Royal Irish Academy of Music. Muriel celebrated my father's birthday on December 10 by winning the top scholarship in violin, and Chou Chou another in the violoncello, in addition to prizes in string quartet, trio and duet. Enid arrived back from Oxford looking, as my father said, like a Doge of Venice, for she had cut her hair short. " I think she looks awful," cried my mother. "Certainly the back view is not becoming," said my father, trying hard not to contradict, but rather admiring Enid's Renaissance profile. W e all tried hard to make 1917 a gay Christmas, and Nancy's godmother, our devoted nun, Sister Bonaventure from Cork, had sent a bottle of champagne, which enlivened the family banquet to which Aunt Ethel, Uncle John and our cousin Dudley were invited. Uncle John, who always mellowed under the influence of wine and good cheer, was in his most Panglossian mood, and considered that all was for the best in the best of all possible worlds. Although the Italian army in the Asiago Plateau was collapsing; although every day brought news from France of hundreds of allied guns and thousands of prisoners captured by the Germans; although the Bolsheviks had won the elections, and the 164

London 1918 Russian and German terms of peace signed at Brest Litovsk seemed equivalent to our defeat in the war, my Uncle John still obstinately maintained that all was well. His optimism, instead of reviving m y father's spirits, depressed them and reduced him to the pathetic state of one with 'le vin triste'. " M y dear John you bask in blissful ignorance," he said irritably, "but I suppose you never bother your head with what is happening outside 'dear, dirty Dublin'. Even that is depressing enough, I must say, and should act as a healthy dose of pessimism." "Ireland, Will, has never been so prosperous," replied Uncle John. "Plenty of money is being made in Ireland. And what about the Americans—are they not landing twenty thousand men a week in France?" M y father's depression increased when he heard of the death of John Redmond. "There goes," he said, "our last hope for a stable and reasonable government in Ireland. The rest of his followers are ignoramuses and violent partisans. Heaven help us among them! I am genuinely sorry for him, but he was felix opportunitate mortis. His policy was doomed to failure." Death had indeed been merciful release for Redmond, for affairs in Ireland were rising to a climax. From my friends in College I heard that De Valera, the President of Sinn Fein, had chosen as his Chief of Military Operations a young man called Michael Collins, who had fought and had been taken prisoner in Easter Week and had become a Member of the Supreme Council of the Irish Republican Brotherhood. He had been a Post Office clerk in London, and was already known to be a wonderful organizer of civil disturbance. The Government on their side now began to act in response to the 'Call' for law and order issued by the diehard southern Irish Unionists. Already, an old friend of our family, General Sir Bryan Mahon, whom we had known in Galway, was appointed Commander-in-Chief of the British Military Forces in Ireland, and orders were issued prohibiting the carrying of arms by unauthorized persons. I felt convinced that conscription at last was coming.

LONDON 1918 Ever since the beginning of December I had been expecting daily a letter from London with news of a war job. I had hoped to obtain a •AO-m

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Adagio post in the Foreign Office or in the Ministry of National Service, and my father's friends, Mr Duke, the Chief Secretary, and Sir Horace Plunkett had been active on my behalf. I hoped that my job would be under the Foreign Office as I should then be able to make use of my knowledge of foreign languages, but Walter Long, the Minister for Colonial Affairs, to whom my father had spoken, wrote enclosing a letter from the Dominions and Colonial Office to say that there was a temporary vacancy in the Upper Division of the Office, and inviting me to present myself in London for an interview. This was a chance not to be missed, so a few days later I set out for London, where I was to stay at 16 Chalcote Gardens, Hampstead with my aunt Edith and Arthur Rackham. The Irish Mail train was held up for over half-an-hour in a tunnel outside Euston Station owing to an air raid which was in progress overhead, and Arthur Rackham, who met me, said that he had taken refuge in a tube station. He had changed little since I had seen him fourteen years before, except that he was more bald and more elf-like, with his pale wizened face. Aunt Edith, who showed more clearly the ravages of the years, was completely white-haired and suffered from heart disease. The air raids and the difficulties of catering in London had affected her nerves, and she stayed mostly down in their house in Sussex. In spite of her ailments and the stress of war she was gay and ironic as I always remembered her. Next morning I went to Downing Street where the Dominions and Colonial Office was situated. I was ushered into the office of T. C. Macnaghten, a nephew of the Vice-Provost of Eton, who had been at Cambridge with my father. This enabled me to break the ice of the interview more easily, and a further bond between us was the music of Wagner in which he found no difficulty in drawing me out. I came away from the interview feeling that I had not done too badly, but there was still the medical examination. During this preliminary stay in London I spent most of my time with Arthur Rackham, and I used to sit in his studio reading while he went on silently and patiently with his painting. I looked upon him as the only truly happy man I had yet come across because he was absorbed in his work to the exclusion of everything else, and even the grim war news and the air raids left him untroubled. In addition to his detachment he possessed an innate stoicism which made him endure austerity without complaining. Nevertheless, no one could be more 166

London 1918 thoughtful and good-natured in his concern for the comfort of others. His kindliness and broad-mindedness made him very popular among other artists, and I used to look forward to our meetings with Augustus John, who was in those days the most colourful personality in London. At first his swashbuckling air rather intimidated me, but when I heard him speak Romani I called him King of the Gypsies. Wherever he was, whether in the Café Royal surrounded by poets, musicians, artists, bookies and bankers, among the Gitans of Provence in their roulottes, among the Irish tinkers at the Puck Fair at Killorglin, or at the Galway races, he was always the King: he had the genuine nobleza of the Spaniard, and the instinctive consciousness of the erraté, or race, as the Gypsies say in their Caló. Owing to his rich tolerant humanity he was at home with everyone, and he could talk to scientists, dry-as-dust scholars, on their own specialities as easily as he could bandy oaths with the tinkers, because every phase in life interested him, and he was entirely devoid of pedantry or self-consciousness. Among those I met in London in those days he towered like a giant, and I loved seeing him when he had taken drink and was in a roistering Rabelaisian mood. He and my uncle were great friends, but when the former was in his cups it was very funny to see the two of them together. My uncle never lost his timid elf-like expression, even in the most dishevelled Bohemian orgy, and he would cock his head on the side, and peer at the milling revellers of both sexes through his spectacles with such a quaint and puzzled face that Augustus John would give a Homeric roar of laughter, pointing him out to the company, saying: "Don't shock little Arthur too much, ladies and gentlemen: he is learning about life from you and he must not advance too quickly." Arthur Rackham never minded his friend's playful bantering, but every now and then he would give a dry chuckle, and then relapse into his puzzled watchfulness. I knew that at the end of the orgy he would play the Good Samaritan and see Augustus John home. In clubs and pubs I heard many unkind things said about us, and I found it difficult at times to drink my Guinness in silence when my neighbours at the counter began in a loud voice to hurl abuse against 'the bloody Irish'. At last I received the letter from the Dominions and Colonial Office confirming my appointment as temporary clerk in the First Division at a salary of ¿200 rising to £250 by increments of £ 2 0 per annum and informing me that I was expected to take up my duties at once. 167

Adagio M y first problem was to find suitable lodgings not too far away from my work in Downing Street. After visiting a number of unattractive basement apartments at exorbitant rent I decided to live at a private hotel—The Stuart, 161 Cromwell Road, South Kensington, where I paid only jQ2 12s. 6d. a week for partial board and lodging. It was a modern and well-furnished hotel patronized by men and women working in government departments. I discovered that frequent air raids had broken down a great many cherished barriers that English men and women used to erect between the sexes, and at night when the sirens sounded we used to gather in our dressing-gowns in the basement, and many a romantic friendship developed during those long watches. At the office my special work was on prisoners of war and was under Lord Newton whom I hardly ever saw. One of the most cheerful people I used to meet at the daily office tea-parties was Henry Batterbee, the private secretary of the Minister. After I had been at the office a few weeks he told me that Lord Long wanted to see me, and I was ushered into the sanctum. The Minister from the first moment put me at my ease, for when I- said 'sir' he stopped me, saying: " M y dear boy, don't 'sir' me: you must not 'sir' anybody in this office: we are all on equality." He was a strong, open-air type of man, an English squire with the touch of the guardsman about him. After he had asked me about my Irish background he was interested to hear the latest news about Ireland, saying that my father had called him a prophet in 1905 when he had seen troubles ahead. " I grieve," he said, "that my prophecy has turned out to be a true one." I made friends with one of our Senior officials called Davis, a genial humanist who, when he met me, questioned me on French literature. He wanted to dazzle me by his knowledge of the more bawdy passages of Rabelais, but I soon called his bluff by quoting one of the long litanies of synonyms in the book of Gargantua. With Davis and a few kindred spirits in the office we instituted a little Rabelais study circle and held readings o f ' T h e Great Laugher' from time to time after a cosy dinner washed down by a few bottles of claret. The daily moment for social intercourse in the Colonial Office came at four o'clock when all the senior officials gathered for tea, and it was then that I met the two Under-secretaries, Sir Henry Lambert, who dealt with Dominion questions and Mr Grindle who dealt with Colonial. The former was a severe-looking little man whose minutes I enjoyed reading for he

was a 'pince sans rire and had a caustic sense of humour. Grindle was 168

London 1918 pleasant and urbane and the antithesis to Sir Henry. More Olympian than Lambert and Grindle was Sir George Fiddes, the Parliamentary Secretary, a tall languid-looking man, who seemed for ever lost in his own dreams. He was the mildest of men, but when his ultraConservative prejudices were jolted, he suddenly awoke from his dreaming, seized his pen and wrote one of his coruscating minutes, emptying the vials of his sarcasm on his pet bugbear, the Radical press in England. Through Irish friends I met Marie Motto, an Italian-born violinist, who had built a great reputation in England by her string quartet. She was a person towards whom lonely souls would instinctively gravitate and her little house at 9 Scarsdale Villas, in a recess oif Cromwell Road, was a refuge for many wanderers like myself. Her beauty was essentially Italian, and she reminded me of a Madonna of Luini with her pale face and great dark eyes that would sparkle with vivacity when she became excited, but soften when she remembered some sad story. She worked very hard as a violin teacher and gave concerts with her quartet, but she always kept open house on Saturdays or Sunday evenings. Her favourite hobby was to make pilgrimages to the monks at Buckfast and she would often present her guests with pots of honey from the bees of the Abbey. Although mystical by nature she had, like every Italian woman, a practical side to her nature, and this enabled her to become an excellent teacher. Her musical vision she had derived from the lessons she had received from Joachim whom she looked upon as her idol. Anyone who came within the orbit of Marie Motto could not avoid being profoundly stimulated by such a saintly character, and her appeal was not merely through religion, but through her music, her love of beautiful pictures, architecture, and last but not least by her optimism and zest for life. I used to go to her house in order to recover belief in myself, for she had, as she said herself, an Italian peasant woman's way of facing up to problems, which meant simply that she brought them down to bedrock and proposed simple solutions. Through Marie Motto I became intimately acquainted with Westminster Cathedral and Brompton Oratory and I used to go with her to hear the boys' choir which was directed by Sir Richard Terry, who would sometimes come to 9 Scarsdale Villas on Sundays for supper. He would engage in fierce arguments with her, not only about music and religion, but about every subject that came into his 169

Adagio head. "I am," he said, "advocatus diaboli and I want to shock you by my heresies." It was a relief to be able to escape to the refuge of Marie Motto's house after the week in the office where unrelieved gloom prevailed throughout that March. Even the news from home did not raise my spirits, for my father writing to me about the German advances in France tried to imitate the ancient Roman chronicle style, telling me that near Roscrea a child three hours after birth cried in a loud voice that there were going to be great battles and slaughter, and that the war would be all over in April. 'Livy and Tacitus,' he added, 'would have chronicled this with glee. The baby died soon after.' Day by day the papers announced the fall of our strongholds: after Peronne and Hans came Bapaume and Noyon, and the Germans claimed 45,000 prisoners. The French now were helping the British and retiring slowly, fighting every step. The correspondents from the front, however, were surprisingly optimistic, for they reported that the Germans had already thrown in forty of their fifty-two reserve divisions, and this would mean defeat in the end. But meanwhile the bells in Berlin were ringing and flags were flying. The gloom in London mounted; March 29 was called 'Black Friday', and I well remember the depression at our office tea-party that day when we spoke in whispers. The Germans had taken Roye and were threatening Albert. Reports came in that we were throwing troops and guns across the Channel and there was talk of raising the military age to fifty-five. Even in The Times there was talk of immediate conscription in Ireland, but my father wrote that he did not believe the Government would be strong enough to carry it through, even if the country were in danger, for they would need too many troops to enforce it. 'Besides,' he wrote, 'conscription in Ireland would not save Paris: it is too late for that, now that the Germans have taken Montdidier.' How depressed my father was on Black Friday 1918 was evident in the words he wrote on March 29 at the end of a volume of his diary. I see that Debussy has died. As nearly everyone worth talking about has died since the war began, we are certainly at the parting of the ages. We are on the brink of a new era, in which England, I fear, will not be preeminent, unless she is saved by her middle class, which, as Euripides says, is the salvation of the State. Matthew Arnold thought differently hut he was wrong. The aristocrats are too few, and the lower classes are given up (emancipated) to

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London 1918 Seconal interest. At least they seem to be, but one never knows. England has developed great qualities in this war, but it is too late to save her now: she will have to pay the penalty for past contempt of Reason; the "melancholy Dean" is right, but his prophecies come after tne event. *

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My closest friend at the Colonial Office was Arthur J. Dawe who had been appointed at the same time as myself a temporary clerk. He served in the R.N.V.R. and had been gassed in an attack on the French front, and after a long convalescence had been invalided. He was an Oxford graduate from Brasenose College, and had been editor of The Isis before the war. After his convalescence he had been able to turn his talents as a writer to useful account, for he went as War Correspondent to Verdun at the beginning of the siege and wrote a graphic account of the defence for The Times. At Oxford he was one of the brilliant group of young poets which included Edward Blunden, Sherard Vines and Hugh Lunn (who wrote under the name Hugh Kingsmill). When I met Dawe he still suffered from the effects of his gassing, and had moments of deep depression due to the poor condition of his lungs. He was flaxen-haired, pale, sharp-featured, pungent in wit, and possessing a zest for life and adventure, in spite of his poor health. When he learnt that I lived in the Stuart Hotel he said that he hated his lonely lodgings and proposed that we should share a flat together somewhere in Chelsea, near Cheyne Walk. I inquired from Marie Motto whether she knew of one, and after searching she suggested Ashburnham Mansions, which we discovered was a few hundred yards from our favourite pub, the World's End. A few days before I was to move in I awoke with a severe asthma attack and a temperature of 103. I got up and went to the office as usual but by the afternoon I was shivering as if I had the ague, and my friends thought I had malaria. When I reached the hotel I called a doctor who diagnosed influenza and ordered me to bed. My only visitors during those lonely days were Marie Motto, who brought me religious books, and my two aunts, Helen and Elsie, who came to see me, laden with grapes and plums and spicy sexy magazines, including La Vie Parisienne, the London Mail and the Pink 'Un. The entry of my aunts interrupted my religious tête-à-tête with the violinist, who had 171

Adagio been questioning me about a book on Pope Celestine she had given me to read, and I blushed furiously w h e n I saw m y A u n t Elsie lay the lurid magazines on the bed, for on the front page o f La Vie Parisienne was a Kirchner coloured drawing o f a glamorous and curvaceous midinette in transparent cami-knickers and red garters. M y discomfiture was only momentary, for m y aunts also brought w i t h them sunlight, gaiety and a bunch o f sweet smelling narcissi. Marie M o t t o took to m y aunts f r o m the start. " I am sure Walter's aunts always helped him in his religion," she said. " H o w I e n v y the Irish Catholic home where religion is part and parcel o f daily life, and where it comes quite natural to say the rosary together w h e n the family gathers round the fire after the daily task." I shifted uneasily in m y bed, for I noticed a glint in A u n t Helen's eye, as she gazed at me before replying: " W e , " she said, " w e r e brought up strictly at home, and were sent to convents abroad, but I am afraid m y religion lapsed w h e n I left the convent." She, then, to m y dismay, began to speak passionately o f Theosophy, and to pour into Marie Motto's ear the disjointed scraps she remembered f r o m her desultory reading on Buddhism. T o m y surprise, however, Marie Motto's calm serenity was not ruffled, and w h e n she stood up to leave she said to me in a l o w voice: " T h a t lovely aunt o f yours is a pure soul: I shall pray for her tonight. She is longing desperately for guidance, but she will only receive it w h e n she approaches the altar again as a little child. She will do so, I am sure, as she is an Irish Catholic." As soon as I was able to persuade the doctor to allow me to leave the hotel I m o v e d all m y belongings to 31 Ashburnham Mansions, where I found Arthur D a w e already comfortably installed. W h e n w e arranged to share lodgings I had certain misgivings, for I wondered h o w long it w o u l d take us to discover that w e were mutually incompatible. Arthur evidently had pondered for a long time over the problem, for he presented me w i t h a list o f his quirks and eccentricities the first night w e dined together in the flat, asking me to make a corresponding list o f mine. O n e o f his most characteristically English quirks was his rigorous discouragement o f conversation at breakfast. W e sat glumly and hoisted our newspaper barriers against one another. After the early breakfast and pottering about Arthur began to thaw, and b y the time w e were ready to set out for Whitehall he became his cordial and good-humoured self, and he used to say quizzically as w e sallied forth to catch the bus overcoated, bowler-hatted and armed 172

London 1918 with umbrellas: "Behold two British Civil Servants in embryo!" When we reached Downing Street I never saw him until we met for tea at four o'clock at the conversazione of the senior staff. One of the difficulties that we both foresaw in our ménage à deux was how to ensure privacy when we invited our girl-friends, en intimité, to the flat. Dawe was most insistent that we should plan such meetings ahead and write the day and the hour in a black note-book which we placed in the hall next the telephone. As the drawing-room held our Erard grand piano I claimed it on certain evenings in the week when I would ask a pianist to come and play Sonatas with me. At first we kept stricdy to this independence and I generally went off to the snug in the World's End when I knew that Dawe was entertaining his girl-friends at home, but as time went on we became less punctilious in pencilling our reservations in the little black book, and one evening when I thought the drawing-room was free, I invited Julia, an attractive pianist I had met, to play. When we reached the flat we found a wild jazz party in progress, and my fair pianist, when she saw Dawe and his dishevelled maenads, turned tail and fled like a frightened doe after accusing me of leading her astray. All that Dawe said in answer to my protests was: "It is your fault, Walter; you will insist on running after prim and prudish girls who are all beef and Brahms without a Gallic glimmer!" *

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With Dawe I used to dine at the Café Royal, where we met Sherard Vines, the poet, and Hugh Kingsmill. Sir Henry Lunn, Hugh's father, was a Trinity College graduate, and my father always considered him a fortunate mortal, for he had been able to devote his life to promoting the two most wonderful expeditions in the world—mountain climbing in Switzerland and travels to Greece. I had not in 1918 yet met Sir Henry and his eldest son Arnold, who were in after years to be such good friends of mine, but Hugh Kingsmill seemed to me one of the most brilliant young men of the day. He had recendy come down from the university and had all the epigrammatic brilliancy and flippancy of the young graduate whose mind has been trained by the Oxford tutorial system to interpret current events and personalities through the medium of the essay. But Hugh Kingsmill possessed in addition, a highly original mind and a touch of wistfulness in his character which 173

Adagio he derived from his Irish mother who came from Skull in County Cork. Hugh Lunn and I immediately fraternized because he also was a devotee of James Joyce, and when I quoted from the Portrait of an Artist and Dubliners, he outdid me altogether by reciting from Ulysses the passage where Leopold Bloom apostrophizes his naked body in the public bath. He had read the initial episodes of the book in the avantgarde Little Review and he sent Dawe and myself the numbers containing them. Henceforth Joyce's Ulysses became the rival of Rabelais among my friends at the Colonial Office. Davis said that it did not compare with Gargantua for roistering sensuality. "It is dull as pornography," he added. "It is slyer," I said, "because it springs from our Jansenist isle of Saints and Scholars." "I prefer the unrepressed laugh of the Cure de Meudon," said Davis, "to the squalid snigger of Joyce, which has a tang of bitterness in it, I suppose, due to sex-starved life in the murky Limbo of the Celts." "I'm not interested in the sexual obsessions of Ulysses," said Dawe sententiously, "but in Malachi Mulligan, Joyce's friend, who invited him to live in the Martello tower. He accuses Joyce of having the Jesuit strain, only it was injected the wrong way." "Malachi Mulligan is Oliver Gogarty," I said, "the wittiest goliard in all Ireland, a poet with a light touch, and a great throat and ear specialist. He certainly tried to turn the Jesuit Joyce towards Greece, just as Dr Mahaffy did his pupil Oscar Wilde in Trinity." "I wish Gogarty had given Joyce more pagan gaiety," said Davis, "though I agree that some of the grotesque epithets and synonyms are as wonderful as Rabelais: 'Snotgreen, scrotum-tightening sea' is the grotesque antithesis to the sublime Aeschylean 'the innumerable laughter of the sea'." "Remember," I replied, "how Oliver Gogarty renders it 'and up the back garden the sound comes to me of the lapsing, unsoilable, whispering sea', but Joyce had in him a vein of pure and simple lyricism which appears in Chamber music. Gogarty has often recited some of the poems to me, and he said that Joyce named them in mockery after the sound he made by accidentally kicking a chamber-pot. When disillusion drove Joyce from Dublin into exile he saw himself as a tragic figure, like the French poet Rimbaud whom he admired. According to Gogarty he compared himself to a stag at bay, and he tried to revenge himself 174

London 1918 on all that he held most dear. But every line of Dubliners and Ulysses shows that like all Irishmen he is obsessed by his native city and haunts every street like a genius loci." *

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During the spring of 1918 I was convinced that the Government at last was determined to impose conscription on Ireland. This at least, was the interpretation given by the newspapers to the appointment of Lord French as Viceroy. Some London papers, however, held the view that as long as the Chief Secretary, Shortt, remained in office, nothing would be heard of conscription and my father, always sceptical, believed it had been Lloyd George's scheme to appoint Lord French as Viceroy to reassure the English, who were becoming daily more indignant against the Irish, and Shortt as Chief Secretary to comfort the Radicals and the Sinn Feiners. Meanwhile the Irish Bishops who had the Government in a cleft stick, continued to fulminate against the calling-up of Irishmen. One of the Archbishops declared that Irishmen were not bound to obey the manpower act as it was 'inhuman*. Surely this was the limit of cynicism! Was it not equally inhuman in Scotland or Wales? It was, however, very difficult to obtain a clear idea of the situation from the English newspapers as they were so contradictory. When I read the account of the alleged pro-German plot and the arrest of the prominent Irish leaders I wondered why, if the Government had known that German-Irish intrigues were again in full swing, they had released on June 18, 1917, the ringleaders whom they had arrested after 1916. Some of the papers in England, such as The Daily News and The Daily Chronicle, were unconvinced of the authenticity of the plot and demanded that the Government should publish evidence, or submit it to a committee of the House of Commons. In Dublin, at a meeting of the Anti-Conscription League at the Mansion House, a resolution was carried protesting at what it called 'the wicked plot of English politicians to poison the English mind against the Irish prisoners'. What brought home to me the true state of tension between England and Ireland was a letter of warning to the farmers in Ireland written to The Irish Times by the patriarch, Standish O'Grady, on May 28, 1918. I had not seen the old man in recent years, and my memories of him were so linked up with my boyhood in Killiney that his letter 175

Adagio written from his retirement in Bray seemed like a voice from the tomb. We have never seen England in a temper [wrote the sage in his peroration]. Our ancestors have. Once before, the legal owners of Ireland, the Cavalier aristocracy, proud and powerful, inheritors of famous names, with land-titles originating in the mists of antiquity, rose against the Imperial Parliament, succouring the deadly enemies of the same; and not in one generation, but in a few years they were swept away, and the land cleared of mem. The berserk wrath of England, which is there always, if reserved and latent, had arisen, and the land-titles of that great aristocracy, and the men themselves disappeared in the resulting storms—and with them, it is worth remembering, the political and martialist sacerdotal persons who had thrust themselves into that quarrel.

The letter of Standish O'Grady stirred me because I recognized the prophetic voice of the great spirit whose History of the Bards had inspired Ireland's national poet, Yeats, in his youth to dream of founding an Irish National Theatre. In that voice there was noble comfort for Irishmen like myself who were not Sinn Feiners, but believed in the greater cause for which we were fighting by the side of Great Britain, France, Belgium, Italy and the United States. *

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In the months of April and May I spent many happy hours at 28 Montagu Square, the house of Cecil Harmsworth and his wife. Cecil Harmsworth, younger brother of the two titans of the Press in England at that moment, Lord Northcliffe and Lord Rothermere, had been for many yean a Liberal member of Parliament, and was now Parliamentary Secretary for Foreign Affairs. Anglo-Irish by birth and upbringing, he had taken his degree in Trinity College, Dublin, and had married his cousin Emilie Maffett, daughter of the Church of Ireland Rector of Finglas, near Dublin. Cecil and Emilie Harmsworth, though they had lived in London for many years, never lost touch with Ireland, and welcomed to their house Irishmen of every denomination and political colour, and in peace time, when they used to stay at their summer residence, Magdalen House on the Thames at Henley, they would keep open house for their friends during the Regatta. Whenever I entered their liberal home I knew that I would find myself at once spirited into the 'coulisses' of world events. The house was always thronged with politicians, journalists, war correspondents, and officers on leave from the war fronts. Sometimes my hostess would 176

London igi8 invite me to the House of Commons instead of to 28 Montagu Square, for as Cecil Harmsworth had to be in the House at the evening sessions he used to reserve a private dining-room for his guests. The charm of these dinners at the House of Commons or at Montagu Square lay in the variety of guests present, for Cecil and Emilie enjoyed introducing among the stolid politicians and press pundits some of the younger intellectuals and eccentrics. Cecil Harmsworth was a contrast to his two more celebrated elder brothers: whereas Lord Northcliffe was an Olympian figure and lived on a pinnacle outside my ken, and he and Lord Rothermere only appeared now and then amongst us surrounded by secretaries, and were abrupt in manner, Cecil was always accessible, and enjoyed convening with his guests young and old. Tall and handsome, he was gifted with a sunny disposition. I remember how in those tragic days of March, when we all feared the German army might sweep on to Paris and the channel ports, Cecil and Emilie never lost their quiet optimism, and strove valiantly to give confidence to others. The two possessed, not only the secret of truefriendship,but also some indefinable quality of human sympathy, which enabled them to administer just the right amount of comfort each one needed in an emergency. Cecil had the British qualities of balance and judgment, and his long experience in the House of Commons had given him a profound knowledge of English politics, and in latter years he had made a special study of foreign affairs. His Irish blood and his years in Dublin University had given him more insight into Irish affairs than any of the rest of his family. By nature a Liberal of the old school, he had acquired through his extended travels to the outposts of the British Empire a breadth of outlook which I found in few British politicians I met in London in those days. Had he possessed the imaginative genius of Northcliffe or the driving force of Rothermere he, too, would have become a leading force in England at a moment when a great statesman was vitally needed. But Cecil at heart was a humanist, and his calm philosophy of life shunned a life of struggle and ambition. He had never forgotten the early years of poverty when as one of a large family he had lived ascetic and laborious days. In those days, he used to say, the British Museum had been his place of refuge. His life in Trinity College had given him the humanistic training he needed, and he had been fortunate to spend his undergraduate days in Dublin during the last brilliant years of Anglo-Irish domination. As he belonged to the generation that followed that of my father he was more closely 177

Adagio in touch with some o f the Irish personalities that were rising in opposition to British rule, and he was thus able to take a more balanced and unprejudiced attitude towards the y o u n g revolutionaries without sacrificing his British ideals. From m y conversations with Cecil Harmsworth I gathered that he had put personal pressure on the Prime Minister to drop conscription in Ireland for the moment, and to concentrate on raising a large voluntary force, but according to the news I n o w received from Ireland there seemed no possibility o f voluntarily recruiting a hundred thousand or even fifty thousand more men, especially since die Government announcement o f the so-called German plot and the arrest o f D e Valera, Countess Markiewicz, Arthur Griffith, Darrell Figgis, Mellowes and other prominent Sinn Feiners. O n e o f m y correspondents wrote that as a result o f the Government's action Arthur Griffith w o u l d romp home for Sinn Fein in the Cavan election. Certainly English folly had no end! The Westminster Gazette was one o f the few English papers to perceive that it had been a fatal tactical blunder o f the Viceroy to take proceedings against pro-Germans, to threaten to impose conscription and at the same time to launch an appeal for voluntary recruitment o f an Irish expeditionary force. During the month o f M a y Cecil and Emilie Harmsworth used to spend the weekends at Magdalen House at Henley-on-Thames, and I remember the weekend o f M a y 19 as it coincided with one o f the severe German air raids on London. Emilie Harmsworth, a dainty figure with her pale quizzical litde face and bright eyes, had something ghostlike about her. After dinner she and Cecil took me out in their punt on the river as there was a brilliant m o o n and the whole landscape was bathed in silver. W h a t a contrast she was to her husband! Whereas he was calm and undemonstrative she was all quicksilver, and forever snatching at will-o'-the-wisps. Cecil's placid manner longed for peace and meditative tranquillity. Emilie yearned for busde and excitement. W h e n w e returned to Magdalen House w e heard news o f the air raids, and all that night there was commotion in the house, the telephone never ceased ringing, and cars kept arriving from London with news o f the destruction o f buildings in the W e n d End. From m y w i n d o w I gazed d o w n at the peaceful lawn sloping d o w n to the river, over which still echoed the voices o f the girls o f our party as they glided past in their punts over the silent silvery waters. N e x t day there was a gathering o f the Harmsworth clan at Magdalen 178

London 1918 House in honour of the matriarchal old Mrs Harms worth the mother of the famous sons. She was indeed a majestic figure: like Madame Mère, tall, red-faced, impressive in manner, and with a determined jaw. I understood at once where Lord NorthclifFe derived his Napoleonic characteristics. On another occasion, seeing him and his brother standing beside their mother, I observed how certain Anglo-Irish characteristics of the mother appeared in each of the sons. In NorthclifFe the broad forehead, the frown and piercing gaze; in Rothermere the gruffness and bulldog expression were exaggerated. It did not, however, take me long to discover that the old lady was, as the Italians would say, una burbera benefica, for after catechizing me in detail about ancestors on both sides of my family I noticed a sly twinkle in her eyes as she fired questions at me about the GermanIrish plot. The Irish, she considered, were like the proverbial Kilkenny cats, always trying to eliminate one another, but she could not understand their plotting with the Germans. W h y should the Catholic Irish want the Germans to win the war? At dinner the old lady spoke of her sons' early struggles. "My boys were never afraid of hard work, and they knew how to work together. Each of the six had different talents, and though Alfred was the one who had the imagination, the brain waves, and the intuitive knowledge of what was going to happen, he needed Harold's great gifts of calculation and finance." After dinner, hearing from Emilie that I played the violin, she asked me to play her Scottish and Irish melodies. After I had played 'The Coolin', 'The Londonderry Air', and 'Avenging and Bright', she began to remember incidents of her life in Dublin and the tunes I played seemed to revive hidden memories of her former life of which even her children were unaware. The folk tunes penetrated beneath the aggressive outer mask which she had fashioned to enable her to face the world. She questioned me about the tunes and asked me to repeat some of them which she had sung in her youth. I was amused, however, to watch with what speed she readjusted her mask when I stopped playing. The spell was broken, and she began to lay down the law about women. They must, she said, learn to keep their place, and not set themselves up to try and ape men. I wished Christabel Pankhurst or some of our militant Irish suffragettes could have heard the heresies she uttered. Emilie reminded the old lady of all that women were doing in war time as ambulance drivers, bus conductors, munitions 179

Adagio workers as well as nurses, but the latter brushed her arguments aside, saying dogmatically that women should be purely domestic. Their duty was to the home, and they should stay there, look after the children, and keep the home running while the men are away fighting. She agreed, however, that the unmarried girls should take up nursing, for that was a woman's job, and plenty o f nurses were needed these days.

T H E G H O S T OF O S C A R W I L D E In London at the end o f May 1918 public interest switched temporarily from the war and Irish troubles to a cause célèbre which filled the newspapers. The plaintiff in the case was Miss Maud Allan, the celebrated American dancer, who took an action against M r Pemberton Billing, a Member of Parliament, on two grounds: first for publishing in his paper Vigilante a scurrilous libel against her and her impresario Grein, and secondly, for the obscenity of the said article. Pemberton Billing, the defendant, w h o combined a crusading passion for exposing the sins of those in high places with an acute awareness of the value of publicity, was a familiar figure in London, and I had often watched him driving furiously through the streets o f London, in a shining contraption shaped like a torpedo. The case fascinated me from the outset, for it was evident that Pemberton Billing and Maud Allan were not the real protagonists in the trial, but the wraith of Oscar Wilde, which had been conjured up from the tomb, and placed in the dock to face another tornado o f English outraged Puritanism. Miss Maud Allan based her action upon a paragraph in Pemberton Billing's paper which stated that all those who wished to attend certain private performances of Oscar Wilde's Salomé in which she would play the tide part had been requested to give their names to Miss Valetta, 9 Duke Street, Adelphi. If Scotland Yard, the article added, obtained a list of the names inscribed at the above address they would discover that many thousands of them were also included in a certain notorious book. The Black Book of the Forty-seven Thousand, it transpired, was a list compiled in Germany of men and women, all of them English, and belonging to the highest and most influential circles, whose notorious vices and perversions rendered them peculiarly vulnerable and liable 180

The Ghost of Oscar Wilde to yield to German spies and agents under threat of exposure. Mr Justice Darling, the presiding Judge, by his asides and repartee turned that London court into a replica of a scene from one of the comedies of Oscar Wilde, and provoked so much laughter among the public that at one moment the defendant, Pemberton Billing, who conducted his own defence, was emboldened to ask the Judge whether the court might • > also laugh at his own jokes, but the answer from the bench was no. The case became really exciting when one of the witnesses, Mrs Villiers Stuart, referred to the existence of The Black Book. The Judge: "Can you describe the book?" Mrs Villiers Stuart: "It was a big black book printed in Germany." Pemberton Billing then insisted on cross-examining the witness, and this led to a difference of opinion between the Judge, who considered many of the questions unnecessary, and the defendant who became visibly more exasperated every moment. The rapid passage of arms between the voluble defendant and the caustic judge was highly amusing, and the latter's demeanour on the bench, when the defendant pointed out triumphantly that he was one of the guilty names in the mysterious book, reminded me of that of the King of Hearts presiding at the trial in Alice in Wonderland. The spirit of comedy, however, departed when the ghost of Wilde was placed in the dock by the next witness, Lord Alfred Douglas. The presence of the noble lord in the witness box reminded us of the scene at the Old Bailey in April 1895 when Oscar Wilde, after refusing to leave the country, faced his trial by Society, preferring 'to make of infamy a new Thermopylae'. Frank Harris did his best to convince him to flee for safety to the continent and even took him to Queen's Gate where he had hired a brougham and fresh horses to carry him to a steam-yacht anchored at an obscure landing-place on the Thames. But Oscar was determined to stay and face the music, and when Harris pressed him insistently he repeated significantly: " O Frank, you talk as if I were innocent." Other friends of the accused, such as Ross and Sherard, blamed Lord Alfred Douglas as the evil genius of Wilde ever since the day when Lionel Johnson brought the two men together. And although Bosie'sfriendshipwas the pivot of the whole case, Wilde stubbornly refused to allow him to appear on the witness stand at the trials. Fatally and inexorably the Nemesis of'love that dared not speak its name' tracked down its victim. No sooner was he released from

Adagio gaol in 1897 after two years hard labour than we find him struggling in vain against the temptation of seeing his dear fiosie again. In spite of the frantic letter from Ross appealing to his will to resist, and warning him that if he succumbed again it meant cutting himself adrift from his wife, his children and society forever, he hastened off to Rouen to meet Bosie who was waiting for him at the station. Already in Paris French friends, such as Henry Bauër, Mirbeau and Adam had planned his triumphal come-back as a dramatist, as a result of the successful first performance of Salomé at the Théâtre de L'Oeuvre by Lugné Poë on February 1 1 , 1896. 'It is something that at a time of disgrace and shame I should be still regarded as an artist,' Wilde had written to Ross from gaol. But immediately after the performance of the play an article by his evil genius Bosie had appeared in the vanguard Revue Blanche in Paris, arrogantly pleading the cause of Uranian love, and hinting that Wilde had been sacrificed as a scapegoat in order to save the Liberal Party from collapse through certain scandals.1 The article in the Revue Blanche certainly destroyed any hopes of the author's revindication, if we may believe Henry Bauër, the most active of his French champions, who wrote at the time: One might have hoped that Wilde, forgiven, might find on his release from prison the hospitality of French letters. The recent success of Salomé augured well for it, but now here comes Douglas who with a scandalous, self-advertising article ruins everything. In England Lord Alfred made a convict of Wilde; he is now depriving him of the possibility of living in France; he brought him to hard labour; now he makes Paris impossible for him on the morrow of his release. And all, so that he may make a noise about his pretty person, and get some advance publicity for his forthcoming verses.2

These words came to my mind when I heard the evidence given by Lord Alfred as witness at the trial of Wilde's ghost in 1918. Claiming to have known the dramatist and his work intimately from 1892 to his death, the noble lord declared at once that Wilde's reputation as critic, author or poet, had been grossly overrated. Lord Alfred Douglas, as witness, certainly excelled himself in portraying the hapless Oscar Wilde's perversions, and spared the crowd no petty detail in the long catalogue of his friends's failings. I thought of the ancient tag de mortuis with which the ancient Romans consoled themselves when they were 1

A. Douglas, Une introduction à mes Pointes, avec quelques considerations sur l'affaire O. Wilde, Rev. Blanche X , 1896. • F. Winwar, Oscar Wilde and the Yellow Nineties, p. 329. New York, 1940.

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The Ghost of Oscar Wilde dying, and I wondered what deathless hate could so distort the mind o f this ageing peer that he could thus pursue the soul o f his victim beyond the grave. The name Wilde, he then informed the court, had become proverbial in England as a synonym o f invert. Even the moon in Wilde's works, he added, had a sinister and occult meaning. Pemberton Billing's crusade was reminder that there still existed in England an undercurrent o f puritanical public opinion ready to rouse itself to periodic fits of ruthless morality, and he had not hesitated to prosecute the ghost o f the dead author and have him tried and condemned again, in the name o f that ever-vigilant Puritanism. As the celebrated Spanish novelist Ramón Pérez de Ayala wrote in his account o f the case, the question the trial had to decide was whether the work o f Oscar Wilde fell within the moral limit admissible in a work o f art, or whether, on the contrary, it was to be banished to the dingy suburbs o f London where clandestine vice has its hunting grounds. If the twelve jurymen—twelve like the Apostles—absolved Pemberton Billing this was clear indication that the English people repudiated the work of Oscar Wilde. If they condemned Billing this would mean that Oscar Wilde's fellow-countrymen were resolved to make posthumous amends to the author they had formerly condemned. 1 The verdict given for the defendant, the frantic enthusiasm o f the crowded court, and the cheers in the streets celebrating the crusader's victory showed that public opinion had not changed, but they were, I am sure, also due to the people's general belief that there was some truth in Pemberton Billing's charges against Asquith, Haldane and other prominent statesmen included in The Black Book of the Forty-seven Thousand. Even though no normal person could believe such a farrago o f absurd charges, mud always sticks, and the revelations, however false, would prevent Asquith becoming Prime Minister again, during the war at any rate. W h e n I mentioned the accusations against Asquith to m y mother's cousin, General Sir Desmond O'Callaghan, a die-hard Conservative, he snapped at me: "I think he is Number One o f Britain's guilty men; he sold the pass in Ireland in 1916. His visit to Dublin after the Rebellion was fatal. He mixed with the Sinn Feiners and their associates, and he shook the foundations of the British Empire by his withdrawal o f General Sir John Maxwell." I was sorry for the veteran Asquith, but after all he belonged to a 1

R. Pérez dc Ayala, Máscaras, V o l . I. Madrid, 1919.

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Adagio more philosophical generation, and could console himself with his beloved classics. His attitude towards the world resembled that of the Pococurante in Voltaire's Candide.

Y.M.C.A. IN L O N D O N At the end of June I fell ill again with severe asthmatic attacks. I felt quite certain that this second illness would be the last straw, and that the Colonial Office would terminate my engagement. The general hostile attitude in official circles in London towards Irishmen of military age convinced me that there was no hope of obtaining a reprieve. I was therefore fatalistically prepared for the suggestion, which was made to me tactfully by the senior clerk, T. C. MacNaghten, that I should send in my resignation on the score of ill-health. My first feeling was one of deep depression. I knew how disappointed my father would be when he heard of my resignation, but on mature reflection I felt relieved at the prospect of leaving the Colonial Office and seeking some other job which would give me more scope for my languages. There was my staunch friend Marie Motto to consult. I found her practising Brahms-Joachim Hungarian dances, but she stopped and said: "Let us play Spohr duets together." Then came an Italian dinner which she and her New Zealander friend, Phyllis Fell, had prepared for me: a huge bowl of spaghetti al pomodoro, sprinkled with Parmesan cheese, followed by slices of ham with melon, and she had ordered specially a bottle of Chianti to toast my departure for Ireland. "You should make a complete break-away from your father's influence. Indeed it would be still wiser to exile yourself from your whole family. I know what a sacrifice that would be, for you love your family and have always been a dutiful son. But you need to win your freedom in the world and be yourself, Walter Starkie, and open the windows of your soul to all the winds that blow." " H o w shall I break away and where am I to go?" "You are young, talented and ambitious. Your chronic ailment is a terrible handicap in this island with its filthy climate. W h y not break with all your past life and set sail for the other side of the world? Why not go to New Zealand, where the climate is ideal for asthmatics, a country that is crying out for musicians, especially violinists." A few days later, when I received a letter from home, my spirit 184

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sank, for my father wanted me to return at once to Dublin and to settle down to study law with a view to being called to the Irish Bar, and while working at law I should do historical research for a special prize called the Helen Blake Scholarship and pick up stray sums by journalism. 'I strongly advise you to return,' he wrote, 'as you will not get any decent job in England. Being a Catholic and Irish you have no chance in most English Departments, and besides, the men who served at the front will get all the jobs at the end of war.' By good fortune the day after my dinner with Marie Motto I met in Mooney's hostelry in The Strand a man who was back on leave from Cairo. He was serving with the Y.M.C.A. in Egypt as he, like myself, was in a low category of fitness, and he gave me a glowing description of his activities in running huts and concerts. As soon as I could I went off to the headquarters of the organization in Tottenham Court Road. Although the Y.M.C.A. was Protestant like the Church Army and the Salvation Army, it included a number of Catholics who joined it during the war. I put my name down as a volunteer for service in the Middle East and Egypt, North or South Italy, or France, and returned to Dublin to wait for my marching orders. "When I reached home I was worried at my father's appearance, for he had lost over three stone in weight, and looked frailer than I had ever seen him. Now it was he who rebuked me for being too portly and for not minding my waist line. He was, however, energetic and in good spirits, especially when he had fresh war victories of the Allies to announce. We went together by tram to Dalkey and walked up the Vico Road to the bathing place where we were able to swim in the open sea and I was delighted to see him take seven headers into the sea from the springboard. I told him of the New Zealand project and the Y.M.C.A. engagement, and I was glad to find he approved. In August the summons arrived and I returned to London to attend a short course of instruction at the Y.M.C.A. Centre at Mildmay Park. *

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I shared a small room with a Catholic youth called William Gee, who hated quill-driving in London and wanted more active work in France. During the fortnight at Mildmay Park we became good friends, and when I told him I was Irish he shook hands with me, saying: "Put 185

Adagio it there! I'm so glad you're from the old country. My mother is Irish, but Dad was English and we live out at Clapham Junction where everyone is Irish." In the mornings we were given pep talks and practical demonstrations on how to run canteens in railway stations abroad, and on certain days we were taken on tours of inspection of Y.M.C.A. work in different parts of London. More important, however, were the talks given by men who had worked at the bases in France, Italy, Salonika, Egypt, and who had followed the troops to the front. The Y.M.C.A. organization evidently was also a haven of refuge for conscientious objectors and lonely eccentrics, who would have found it impossible to adapt themselves to the rigid discipline of military life or face the attitude of their fellow recruits. There was one individual, for instance, whom I noticed immediately, for he seemed to be a complete stranger to his surroundings. He sat stolidly through all the talks without taking a note or asking a question, and gazed aimlessly in front of him, as if in a trance. He was tall and muscular, brick-red in complexion, with black hair parted in the middle, fuzzy eyebrows and a carefully waxed moustache. When I greeted him he paused, as if trying to rouse himself from his brown study, and replied in a raucous Cockney voice: "My name is Robert Benzley: delighted to meet you, I'm sure." He had only lately landed in England, he said, and had travelled over most of the world. When the ice had been broken he told us that he was sorry he ever had let himself in for the Y.M.C.A. "Will they ask me to put down my religion?" he continued, gazing at both of us in turn with such a look of puzzled alarm that I could not help smiling. "I don't think it will be used against you," said Gee. " W h a t is your religion?" "I've damn all religion," said the man squinting at us. "Never 'ad time nor use for it. A rollin' stone gathers no moss, and I've done all right up to now without it." Just then one of our instructors passed with a bundle of forms in his hand and said to us that we all had to be vaccinated before we could go abroad on active service. This announcement produced great perturbation in our Benzley. He stretched out his long neck like a stork, goggled his eyes, bristled his antennae, saying fussily: '"Ave a heart, 'ave a heart, that's a bad egg, mister. On principle I don't hold with vaccination: it's against my principles." "I'm sorry, sir, that's one of the rules. W e have to obey the army authorities." 186

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"Blimey! 'ave you ever 'eard the like? What 'as this country come to? Nothing but bureaucracy and tyranny. What right 'as any darned doctor to graft me with cow pox?" Our eccentric friend had now focussed the attention of everybody upon himself. N o one hitherto had refused to be vaccinated, and our precise little mentor was quite nonplussed, but a tall grey-haired clergyman drew near and put his long arm lightly on Benzley's shoulder, saying in a clearly articulated high-pitched voice: " M y poor man, are they ill-treating you? D o tell me your trouble and I shall see if I can setde matters. Come this way and let us have a little confabulation." He disappeared with Benzley and although, later, I looked for him in vain, I was determined to seek him out when I had an opportunity. During the afternoons we assembled at the Y.M.C.A. headquarters in Tottenham Court Road in order to hear addresses given by the pundits of the organization to a large audience from different parts of the world. There I was introduced to Basil Yeaxlie, one of the most active promoters of education schemes in the Y.M.C.A. whose lectures I attended regularly, and through him I met J. O. Dobson, one of his educational assistants with the troops. Dobson and his opposite number at the War Office, Major Cameron, were to be my guides in my education work with the British Expeditionary force in Italy. Through them I ascertained that my work would be threefold. First of all, I should be required to take part in any general Y.M.C.A. work that might be necessary on the Italian front or at the bases, such as organizing Y.M.C.A. huts, libraries or clubs; secondly, there was educational work to initiate, such as schools for troops, lectures, language classes, conducted tours of historical cities such as Venice, Padua, Verona, Vicenza: thirdly, there were also many musical activities to be arranged, and for this part of my work I was to receive my instructions from the music department of the Y.M.C.A. which was under the direction of Mr Percy Scholes, the musicologist, with whom Sir Henry Hadow acted in a consultative capacity. I was already familiar with Sir Henry Hadow's writings on music, for Dr Percy Buck, our Regius Professor of Music in Trinity College, had lent me his book on Beethoven. He was gracious but rather distant at first with the studied manner of a well-seasoned University ViceChancellor. He was, I discovered, when I visited his house, an ardent escapist, and was easily tempted to play truant in order to devote himself to his twin loves—the ancient classics and music. Consequently 187

Adagio when I had inspected the great collection of Greek and Latin authors in his sanctum, I expected to be taken to his music room. But I saw no piano in his rooms, and he declared sententiously: "The greatest musical treat I give myself is to take from my bookcase the full orchestral score of a Beethoven or a Brahms symphony, ensconce myself in my armchair by the fire, and read the great master's score as I would a play by Aeschylus or Shakespeare." "That is an excellent preparation for a concert," I inteqected. "It is initiation rather than preparation," replied Sir Henry in a louder and more defiant purr, "in fact I say in all sincerity that I derive a deeper and more rewarding pleasure here in my library than I should in die concert hall. Reclining in my easy chair with my full score propped up before me, my 'inner ear* hears the mass of harmony; I distinguish the timbre of the different instruments; my 'inner eye' watches the composer's marvellous pattern unfold like a miraculous flower, and my pleasure is more intense than if I were listening to the work performed by the Hallé Orchestra under the baton of Arthur Nikisch." All I could reply for my humble self was to murmur the words of Shakespeare: "Such harmony is in immortal souls; But whilst this muddy vesture of decay Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it."

Sir Henry patted me paternally on the shoulders, saying, "Most musicians are too closely bound up with the external, physical side of music, and never listen with their mind. That needs concentration which only comes with training. They never look inwards with Wordsworth's 'inner eye which is the bliss of solitude', and so, poor souls, they cannot hear the music Shakespeare celebrates." Percy Scholes, the Director of Music at the Y.M.C.A. was in every respect a contrast to Sir Henry Hadow, for he was forthright, energetic, and so mercurial that he seemed to be forever tugging at the leash like a greyhound before a race. In practice the two men were admirably suited to one another, for each possessed qualities that the other lacked. The former, owing to his prestige as a humanist, and his skill as a writer, lent distinction to the cause of education and the Fine Arts; the latter, with his uncanny eye for detail, and his talents for organization, combined with his crusading campaigns to bring great music within the orbit of the common man, was destined to play an impor188

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tant part in post-war musical life in Great Britain, and he had already made an important start with his Listener's Guide to Music. From Scholes I obtained more practical help than from anybody else in the organization. I always felt, however, that he was wasted in a work requiring administrative efficiency. His unique value to Great Britain at the a i d o f the war lay in his power o f rousing enthusiasm in English music, not only in the revival o f folk-music and folk-dancing initiated by Cecil Sharp, but in the modern composers such as Vaughan Williams, Bliss, John Ireland and Butterworth. He recognized the significance o f Vaughan Williams, whose genius like that o f Bela Bartok and Kodaly in Hungary, and Manuel de Falla in Spain gathered within its orbit both the folk-musicians and the art composers. Scholes in those days seemed to me to possess the enthusiasm and clarity o f style needed b y the spokesman for English music.

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A t Mildmay Park one evening I had a long talk with the strange vagabond character Benzley who told me the story o f his wanderings. He was a Cockney and his father kept a pub. Even when he was a lad he had followed the racing crowd, and never missed the Grand National, Goodwood, Ascot or the Derby. His other craze was amateur theatricals and he was always putting on fancy dress. One day when Lord Lonsdale and another peer were in his father's pub after a race meeting, he dressed up for a lark in a striped jersey, shorts, and with a tin mask on his face he entered the saloon wheeling his sister's pram. The two lords were very amused and nicknamed him 'The Man in the Iron Mask*. Lord Lonsdale and the younger peer then bet Benzley that he would not be able to make his w a y round the world dressed in that get-up, wearing his mask and wheeling the pram. The stakes were ¿10,000. So Benzley set off a week later pushing his pram. O n June 15, 1912, he left London and made first for Africa. He had his ups and downs, but made his way as best he could, and he was his own press agent. He had thousands of picture postcards o f himself made, and to supplement his income he sold them in theatres and music-halls in every town he came to. It was easy going in the Englishspeaking countries, because he generally sold his story to a newsman, but it was more difficult in France, Germany and Italy where he didn't 189

Adagio speak the language. W h e n I inquired whether he was ever ill or involved in an accident he replied that he had been poxed in Johannesburg, d o w n with spotted fever or some such disease in Lagos, knocked over by a truck in B o m b a y with three broken ribs and t w o months hospital, knifed b y a dark-eyed whore in Teheran: " L u c k i l y , " he added, "she didn't geld m e . " H o w e v e r , he reached London in M a y 1914 with a couple o f months to spare before the Great W a r , and the bet was paid up to the last penny. Benzley poured out his story to me in a j e r k y Cockney monotone with Irish overtones. I was so fascinated by his account o f his wanderings that I put him d o w n as one o f the performers in the concert o f hidden talents w e organized for the last Saturday night before breaking up. It was not easy to make up a programme as many were shy in coming forward, and it was only indirecdy that I found out w h o had been an acrobat, or a conjuror, or a knock-about comedian on the music halls. Some o f the Oriental men and w o m e n were less timid in showing o f f their talents than those from the West. O n e o f the successful performers, for instance, was a dainty little Chinese girl w h o offered to recite Chinese poetry. " T h e y will not understand what it means," she said, " b u t they will think it is a song as the voice goes up and down." That evening I received the letter giving me m y marching orders with m y ticket, by boat f r o m Southampton to Havre and to Paris by train. " Y o u ' r e in luck, I wish I were going with y o u , " said Gee ruefully. " A s t o m o r r o w is your last day here do come out to Clapham to our ceilidh." W h e n w e reached Clapham the following evening Gee brought me to a local hall near his home where a large concourse o f young men and girls were assembled. I rubbed m y eyes incredulously wondering whether I had suddenly passed into a dream, for I seemed to be back in Dublin at a Saturday night ceilidh in one o f the dance halls off Rutland Square. T h e place was decorated with Irish flags, many were gabbling Irish, and above the hoarse voices I heard the rousing strains o f ' The Boys from W e x f o r d ' played by a score o f fiddles in unison. First o f all I was introduced to Gee's mother, a matronly Irish w o m a n in the early fifties, red-haired, freckled, and proud that she had been born and bred in Tipperary, Ireland's golden vale. "Mama's the Sinn Feiner o f the family," said Jack's sister w h o came up with her dancing partner. 190

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"Clapham," I said, "should be called 'Little Ireland': it seems to be more Irish than Dublin itself." "That's what they all say," she replied. "The whole place is full of Sinn Feiners, and on Saturday nights there are dozens of ceilidhs. The Irish are not popular in the West End, but down here there are many Irish workers, and when they get together, they like to start arguments to air their political views." This was certainly true for during that one evening in Clapham I heard more scarifying sedition talked, and learnt of more fanatical plans for future warfare against England than I had ever heard in Dublin. Jack Gee's mother said, "Though I'm Irish and proud of it I found it most restful to be married to a pure-blooded Englishman: at least I had moments of rest from Irish politics, for my poor ouT man, who was as staunch a Catholic as ever lived, used to make the sign of the Cross whenever I mentioned Irish politics. He used to say: 'the English don't know how to deal with Ireland, that is why they always leave loyal Irishmen to do the work of coercing the Emerald Isle.' The English slumber on over here, saying that the Irish menace has been finally scotched. The blithering idiots have not the sense to see that here in London, in the heart of the British Empire, the two chief rebels are still at large, Michael Collins, the Irish leader of the future, and Cathal Brugha, alias Charles Burgess, as Irish as they make them, but whose mother was a Yorkshire woman." "You'll soon hear plenty more about Mick," said a hatchet-faced young man. "As Mrs Gee says, Mick Collins has already begun to organize his intelligence staff, not only among the post office workers but among the clerks in railway companies and shipping lines, and even among the London police. He is the brain behind the future policy. As for Cathal Brugha—he is marked out to be a Minister of Defence in the future Dail, though English people here consider him merely the efficient manager of a well-known firm of ecclesiastical candle-makers." Those words were a chilling reminder of my former political discussions with my father. He and his Conservative and Liberal friends, even those who were considered enlightened like Sir Horace Plunkett and Cecil Harmsworth, all lived in a fools' paradise and had allowed themselves to be completely misled on Irish affairs. But who could blame them for being obtuse and blind when the members of the 191

Adagio Cabinet were not aware of the perils which threatened the British Empire in London itself? Later that night I returned to my hostel to make the final preparations for my journey to Paris and Italy.

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ITALY AT W A R On the eve of my departure for Paris news reached me o f the torpedoing o f the Irish mail-boat, the Leinster, off the Kish lightship, a little way out from Kingstown. Over six hundred lives were lost, including many old friends. I had crossed to and fro between Kingstown and Holyhead many times in the past sixteen years, and everyone from the Captain down to the youngest steward and stewardness was a personal friend. I felt sick at heart at the news that one o f the twin sons o f my father and mother's dear friends, Sir Lucas and Lady White King, a nephew of Cecil and Emilie Harmsworth was a victim. Only recently my sister Enid and I had been present at a gay gathering at their hospitable house in Dundrum. At Southampton I played the good Samaritan to a French girl and her aunt who, though it was war-time and porters were scarce at the docks, were rashly travelling with enough luggage for a world tour. Telling the girl to soothe her fussy aunt I managed with the help o f several obliging fellow-passengers to collect the multiple pieces o f luggage and stow them safely on board, with the result that I received my full quota o f smiles and heartfelt gratitude from the French girl, who was a dainty little brunette, with pale oval-shaped face and black hair parted and drawn back, giving her the expression o f a southern Madonna. When she smiled, however, there was just a tinge of mischief in her green eyes that betrayed her Gallic origin. She was more practical in her method for dealing with her eccentric aunt than with the luggage, for she marooned her at once below in a cabin, gave her a stiff sleeping draught which would keep her comatose for the rest of the voyage and spent most o f the night on deck with me. W e reserved our seats in the same compartment o f the Paris train, and the old lady, who since the morning was in a more submissive mood, soon dozed off. The girl, finding the compartment stuffy and seeing that her aunt was fast asleep, escaped into the corridor and, after stepping upon a number o f sleeping poiltis, we managed to find refuge

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Allegro in a half empty guard's van where there was more air. A gay party developed, as an army doctor had a botde of wine which he passed round, and we all drank to La Victoire. The journey from Paris to the Italian frontier was uncomfortable, for though my seat was reserved the compartment was crowded. O n one side sat a very fat woman who had drenched herself with some strong scent of the patchouli variety and, when she moved her arms resdessly, the pungent perfume mingled with her abundant perspiration, produced a nauseating effluvium. O n my other side I had to face a barrage of a different kind, for m y neighbour had guzzled garlicseasoned food and absorbed quantities of lager, with the result that he kept up an insistent fire of belching, a symptom which I have heard diagnosed as reverberating katapepsia. I thus found myself hemmed in between two fires and I wondered which was least intolerable—harem patchouli cum armpits or the fumes of beer cum garlic. I started to lower the window, but before I could do so the whole compartment brisded into instant activity: the lights blazed, the Circean lady bobbed up from my shoulder, raised her arms, nearly stifling me with perfume, the dyspeptic garlic-breather belched defiance, and glared as if to exorcise me, even a prim school marm sitting opposite adjusted her spectacles and gave me a severe homily on the dangers of night air when travelling. As we approached Modane the weather became much colder and snow began to fall. The physical appearance of the people, too, changed and the corridors of our carriage were invaded by heavily muffled chasseurs Alpins and by mountaineers with guns and knapsacks, and youths equipped with skis. After a long wait at the station where our papers were scrutinized and our luggage searched we revived our spirits with a tasty rago&t, a botde of Beaune at the auberge, and warmed ourselves at the fire until it was time for the Italian train to start. After leaving Modane our train groaned and grunted querulously as it followed its winding upward course through valleys, on the edge of precipices, but we had only momentary glimpses of the mountains as we were enveloped in mist and snow. U p and up we crawled painfully through the Mont Cenis Pass, and at last we emerged from the long dreary tunnel into radiant sunlight at Bardonecchia, and before us stretched the panorama of Italy. The mist had rolled away and there was blue sky everywhere. The peaks towered above like giants, and below I could see valley after valley stretching away into infinity, and 196

Italy at War here and there on the edge of slopes, and deep in the valleys, towns and hamlets like clusters of variegated plants clinging to the grey rocks. O u r compartment was invaded by young Italian soldiers belonging to a regiment of Alpini, and I enjoyed having an opportunity to air m y Italian. I found it difficult to understand the mountain dialect, especially when they spoke rapidly, firing off their excited comments like the patter of bullets from a machine gun. They shouted triumphantly when they saw we were British: "Bravo! gl'Inglesi, gl'Inglesi!" The oldest, a sergeant, said after a pause, as though reciting a lesson: " W e Italians welcome the Eng-el-ish soldati—our allies!" "Vivagl'Inglesi!" shouted the rest in chorus. The sergeant became reminiscent after he had produced a flask of Chianti and salami and passed them round the compartment. " W e Alpini are only happy when we breathe the air of the mountains. That is why this war suits us. The life in the trenches among the rocks £ una vita naturale e primitiva, si, Signore! It is at times monotonous and we have nothing to do but play sette e mezzo—that is a game of cards—e poi bisticciare." " W h a t do you do at nights?" I said. "It must be desperately cold in those dug-outs." "Ah," replied the sergeant, "it is at night that we do our work: in the day time we have little to do except to visit our friends in the various companies and distribute the rations. Ma la notte i un altro affare: w e creep along the rocks like cats, and our eyes are as good as any tabby's. Being on outpost duty is like hide-and-seek but you have to have your hand-grenades ready for those jiio di cani who are looking for us— I'eterno giuoco difarsi la pelle a vicenda." An elder soldier in the corner extracted a mandolin from his kitbag, and after preluding on it sang a plaintive song which made all cease talking and listen intendy. It was a tender Venetian barcarolle describing the pangs of the exile separated from wife and family. The sincerity of the singer, and the gentle pathos of the melody, created the vision of far-off homes, of farm-houses, not only in the Euganean hills, but in the mountains of Tuscany and distant Calabria. At Alessandria the Alpini departed with friendly greetings. As I was speaking about Italo-British relations to one of the passengers, I noticed that a grey-haired gentleman in the opposite corner was listening carefully to what I was saying. W h e n there was a pause in our conversation he addressed me in perfect English. " D o forgive me, 8 A O—O

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Allegro Sir, for intruding. I am an Italian, an avvocato, and an old admirer of Great Britain. Hearing your noble defence of my country I feel I must introduce myself." The lawyer, whose name was Ippolito Raimondi, was a native of Turin and had travelled extensively, especially in England and the United States, and he told us with pride that his son who was a lieutenant in the Italian navy had visited England before the war. " I am, sir, an old fogey, a laudator temporis acti, I worship the memory of those fellow-countrymen of yours who helped my country in her Risorgimento. I still read with emotion what Jessie Mario wrote about our great Garibaldi, and in my library you will find wellthumbed copies of Lothair by the Earl of fieaconsfield and the poems of Robert Browning as well as those of Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley." " H o w lucky I am, sir," I replied, "to meet you on my first day in Italy. This is for me, a superstitious Celt, a lucky omen." " W e Italians consider it a lucky omen whenever we meet the British. W e need all the help that Great Britain and France can give us these days." " I know what a wonderful recovery you have made in recent months. In the dark days last year after Caporetto we feared the Austrian army with the help of the Germans would overwhelm your defences and sweep down into the plains of Lombardy." "What was not appreciated abroad," said the Italian in his quiet penetrating voice, "was the heroic resistance of those Neapolitans, Calabrians and Sicilians from the sunny land of dolce far niente, who were obliged to fight the Austrian* in the glaciers and snows of the Alps after lives spent in the tropical climate of Southern Europe." The train was now entering Genoa and the grey-haired lawyer bowing to me gravely, took leave of me saying: "L'avvocato Ippolito Raimondi at your service. I hope that during the coming months we may run across one another either here in Genoa or in Turin, where we may converse as we have done today in friendly intimacy on what is in store for us in the New Europe."

G E N O V A LA SUPERBA At the local Y . M . C . A. office in the Hotel Londres I was received by Alan Rodie, a British Shipping Agent, who was in charge of the Genoa 198

Genova la Superba office. He and his daughter, an attractive brunette, who worked as secretary in the office, received me most hospitably and made contacts for me with Italian families in the neighbourhood. At first I did a number of odd jobs, one of which was to help those who ran the nightly services supplying tea and coffee to the numerous sick and wounded from the Northern front passing through Brignole Station. We often had hours of yawning boredom on the draughty platform, but when a hospital train arrived our work had to be accomplished at high pressure and with hectic speed, with the result that I soon became breathless and exhausted as I hastened through the narrow passage in the carriages between the bunks, endeavouring not to spill the boiling liquid over the nurses and the patients. We established the library on the ground floor of the Villa Acquasola in Piazza Corvetto, while upstairs in the imposing tower with its fine view of the city and port we adapted the rooms as classrooms. On the sunny days when I walked in the deserted garden surrounding the palace and listened to the fountain murmuring beneath the palm trees, I had the illusion of living in the heyday of the Genoese republic, when art and letters flourished as well as trade, and the city became a meeting-place for the brilliant spirits of Italy under the benevolent aegis of the great Andrea Doria. With the help of Italian friends it would be possible to make the villa, not only a library and a school for learning languages, but also a cultural centre where Britons might acquire knowledge of Italian history, art and general culture in their meetings with Italians, who in their turn would gradually deepen their knowledge of British civilization. Looking back over my memories of the last months of the Great War I always feel that Genoa initiated me into Italian life. Whenever in my mind I try to conjure up the exquisite loveliness of Italy I see before me the vision of Genoa from the sea as I saw it in 1918. In the clear air the city rises like a gigantic jewel glittering in its rugged Alpine setting. In the distance the bright-hued buildings soaring tier by tier give the impression of having been honeycombed out of the Ligurian mountains. To one coming from the northern climes and grey skies it seemed to me a dream-city fashioned by the caprice of a genie who might with sudden Satanic impulse cast it hurtling into the calm waters at its feet. In the early days, when I used to wander about the city, I discovered 199

Allegro that there were three Genoas which I learnt to distinguish. First of all as I ascended from the port I penetrated into a crowded district, leading from Via Soziglia and Piazza Banchi to the Cathedral of San Lorenzo. That ancient Genoa with its maze of exotic, highly-coloured streets, echoing and re-echoing with the hoarse cries of hawkers and the shrill shrieks of children inspired the Flemish and French painters to paint their bustling genre pictures, but here and there I would come across a tiny silent piazza where life had not changed since the days when Christopher Columbus had played there as a boy. It came as a shock to pass from the Genoa of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries with the Palazzo San Giorgio and the Cathedral into the garish twentiethcentury decorations of the Via Vend Settembre, but I soon rediscovered the greatest Genoa of all—Genova la Superba—the Genoa of the Republic in the t w o princely streets, Via Balbi and Via Garibaldi, the two which I had seen on m y arrival. Those t w o streets, lined with majestic palaces, tell us the history of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries when Renaissance architecture overspread the mediaeval city during an age when there was peace and liberty after the ceaseless internal strife. Some days when I had plenty of time to spare I would take the little tram from the tunnel in Piazza Corvetto that travelled noisily along the Via Balbi to piazza Principe, passing the statue of Christopher Columbus and then begin its slow meandering and circular course upwards along what was called circonvallazione al monte through streets, from every corner of which I could see panoramas of sea and Alps. In the brilliant October sunshine the tall modern buildings glisten white, pink, yellow and orange. The broad roads curve round and round towards the fort at the summit called il Castellaccio. The exciting moment of the morning comes at noon when the cannon booms from the fort above. Then begins a vast migration f r o m the lower commercial part of the city to the upper; it is like an ant-hill in sudden movement: the steps and the lane ways resound with the patter of countless footsteps as the workers hasten up to their homes above for the midday meal and siesta. O u r residence in Via Acquarone was a large roomy apartment owned by a German woman who ran it for the Y.M.C. A. as a private boardinghouse. Sometimes we were short of space and had to share rooms, at other times we enjoyed a modicum of privacy. The place was spotlessly clean and the food was simple but plentiful, for our landlady, a Bavarian widow of an Italian, was a thrifty housewife and placid in temperament. 200

Genova la Superba She needed great reserves of patience, for she was often the victim of vagaries and caprices of our roving population of Y . M . C . A. workers who boarded with her. Some of them kept irregular hours, criticized the food she provided, and expected every kind of odd service from the two maidservants who slept on the premises. One of them, Manina, a pretty brown-haired girl with demure expression had an Italian speaking voice that sounded like pure music to my ears. With her sunny smile and her coaxing ways Manina always pacified her irate mistress and cheered up the hungry guests at table. I soon discovered that dainty little Manina was the life and soul of our establishment in Via Acquarone. Our German hausfrau evidently thought so too for she said to me one evening: "Vat vould I do if I lose Manina. She is a jewel. She is an orphan; her father, a Calabrese killed at Caporetto, ze mutter also dead in Milano, and ze girl she sing in the theatre. I tell her to come to me and she come. As she is gut moral girl I let her sing in ze evening at ze opera in ze Politeama if she come back at midnight." Manina kept her musical talents well hidden from the inmates of the boarding-house, however, for none of them even suspected that she sang in the chorus of the local opera company to make extra money. When I rose early in the morning I would find her already busily at work, and I sometimes heard her humming una fuTtiva lagrima from I'Elisir d'Amore of Donizetti, and I tried to persuade her to tell me about her singing, but she was very reserved. The case of Manina impressed me, for it showed how deeply rooted the tradition of opera is in the Italian people; singing is the most characteristic gift of the Italian race, and as soon as they sing they begin to make gestures and develop the theme of drama within them. Opera in Italy really springs from a spirit of festival and carnival, and it was therefore natural that our little maidservant should put on her cloak and rush away to swell the chorus at the local theatre. As soon as the library in the Villa Acquasola was established we had many visitors, and I was fortunate in finding two intelligent youths, Aldo Schuepps, a Swiss, and Tony Leader, British, who volunteered to help in running it. Then from Via Acquarone itself I received unexpected help from an Italian family called Sommaruga who lived a few doors away from our residence. It was the second sister, Helvezia, who came to offer her services in our new venture. Helvezia, though not as attractive as her dark-eyed sister, was a tall

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Allegro strapping girl, grey-eyed and rather Germanic in appearance, but hardworking and of affectionate disposition. She was one of those rare women who long to devote themselves to a cause which will absorb their unbounded energy. When they have discovered their object they toil and slave without expecting gratitude, for their reward springs from the work itself and the opportunity it affords them of pledging their loyal service to the cause and to those whom they look upon as leaders. Helvezia's assistance was invaluable to me, for she mobilized other enthusiasts among her girl friends who helped in the library, and later three of them organized a tea room for the benefit of British soldiers. Now that I had my two efficient youths, Aldo and Tony, to run the library with the help of the faithful Helvezia, who acted as a kind of public relations officer with Italian visitors, I felt free to devote myself to extending our influence. In addition to giving classes to soldiers in French, Italian and even Spanish, I cooperated with the various Y.M.C.A. centres in the city, and at nights I still helped the hospital train workers. Another of my self-imposed duties was to visit the hospital in Genoa and play to the patients in the wards. I had done this in Ireland and I resolved to continue the practice in Italy, for I discovered that some of the medical officers in the Italian as well as in the British army had a firm belief in the therapeutic value of music. I knew that some were inclined to sneer at those who expressed belief in its curative powers but, after all, history has consecrated the tradition even as far back as Homeric times, when in the Odyssey the poet relates that when Odysseus was wounded, they stopped the black blood from flowing by means of a magic song. Pindar, too, tells us that the god of medicine, Aesculapius, used to cure his patients by lulling their sores with sweet songs. Even the austere Plato, who would not allow the enervating tone of the flute in his ideal state, yet held that of all the methods of cure for illness singing was best, and that no cure could be efficacious without music. During those days with the Italian Expeditionary Force the title of minstrel was the only one I mentally conferred upon myself. A man with a fiddle in his hands, and a host of anecdotes on the tip of his tongue, could win his way into the hearts of all the soldiers in the world. From my roving minstrelsy I gathered a host of acquaintances among the inhabitants of Genoa, and every day I was besieged by Signorine who were eager to learn the English language. 202

Genova la Superba Other girls would come begging me to assist them in humbler and more intimate tasks, such as writing letters to English admirers. It was difficult to switch one's mind from the pressing problems of the day's war task to arts that belonged stricdy to the cavaliere servente of the days o f Casanova. As I found the task decidedly difficult, I resolved to consult Helvezia Sommaruga and make her jot down some model love letters containing all the endearing phrases that love-sick Signorinas wish to see written by their jxdanzati. In those war days large numbers of British soldiers fell madly in love without being able to babble more than buona sera or bella bambina. I used often to wonder what would be the outcome of those war-time love affairs. Times without number I was called away from the library to help a British soldier explain his matrimonial intentions to the parents of a young Italian girl. Among the humbler populations of the villages along the coast of Genoa the language bar certainly did not discourage the British Tommies from consorting with the fishermen's daughters, for on Sundays when I used to walk through Sturla and on to Quarto and Nervi the promenade was thronged with British soldiers arm-in-arm with Italian girls. There is no doubt that it was a fortunate day for me when J. O . Dobson, the head of the Y.M.C.A. Education Scheme, arrived from England. O f all the organizers I met, no one had such a clear-sighted knowledge of the problems confronting our work abroad and certainly no one possessed greater reserves of strength and tact in negotiating with the British army authorities on the one hand, and the Y.M.C.A. on the other. In appearance a scholar, though many, when they saw him in khaki, took him for an army chaplain, he was a silent fighter and past-master in the art of by-passing many obstacles raised by army and civil service bureaucrats. I believe his success was due to his unruffled temper, Christian optimism, and unfailing tact. And furthermore, he insisted that my work should not be limited to Genoa, but should extend later to the army centres in the north of Italy near the front. It was through Dobson's influence, too, that lecturers and preachers came out from England and I was able to arrange talks from such well-known figures as the Reverend Studdart Kennedy, known to all the troops of the Seventh, Twenty-third and Forty-eighth divisions as 'Woodbine Willy', and Dr Hudson Shaw, another noted preacher. 203

Allegro The whole scope of Y.M.C. A. work in Genoa changed the moment Dobson arrived from London and explained the plans that had been made for the organization after the Armistice. Henceforth encouragement was to be given, not only to classes for troops, but also to lectures, plays, concerts, and especially concert parties which would mobilize and use the talent available in the army, the Y.M.C.A. and the Red Cross. *

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In those early days in Genoa two of m y closest co-operators were M r and Mrs Burn-Murdoch. The former, a much-travelled Scotsman, w h o had lived for many years in Italy, had joined the Y.M.C.A. but he was enormously fat, suffered from heart-trouble and was a semiinvalid. His Dutch wife Alida, however, made up for any lack of vitality on his part by her vivacity and boundless energy. Alex was a soft, good-hearted uncle Toby, forever trying to soften his wife's asperities, but his attempts to do so rarely succeeded, for Alida, I think, enjoyed baiting him and pretending to be an enfant terrible. From Alida I derived inside information on all the lady volunteers of the British colony and their husbands. "Have you ever in your life," she said, "rubbed up against the British colony abroad?" " N o , I haven't had any experience. But are they so formidable? I think they are very charming." "Individually they are very nice women, but as a rule they remain very English and stand-offish when they have lived out of England for a number of years, and they mix with very few of the Italian families, with the result that they become bored and self-centred, and without realizing it they gradually turn into caricatures of English women, by trying to imitate a type that has disappeared in their own country. The troubles of these British colony women arise when they come into close contact with English women of today w h o come out from home." "Don't let Alida put the wind up you," said Alex Burn-Murdoch in a slow drawl. "She paints too gloomy a picture. Bless your stars that you are not an English clergyman abroad, like old pastor Pullen, who has to preach to them, marry them and bury them." Pastor Pullen, I may add, was the one British subject in Genoa w h o m 204

The Condottiere I treated as an oracle, for he had carried on his ministry for many years in Spezia, and during the great Messina earthquake had performed heroic rescue work. Pastor Pullen, and, indeed, the clergymen of all denominations, had a strenuous time in October 1918 in Genoa, for the epidemic called 'La Spagnuola', which had decimated the armies at the front, now swept down through Italy and raged with particular violence in Genoa and its suburbs. So crowded were the military and civilian hospitals that beds for the patients had to be improvised in the corridors and out-houses. The epidemic spread like wildfire, and its symptoms recalled the stories one had read of plagues in the past. One of the early victims was a British Red Cross officer called Davies, whom I used to meet when I worked on the hospital trains. He was particularly beloved by many poor Italian families whom he had helped during the past year. 'La spagnuola' carried him off in a few days, and I was impressed by the number of Italian men and women of all classes who walked all the way out to the Campo Santo to pay their last respects.

THE C O N D O T T I E R E One evening when I was sitting in the Olimpia, one of the big cafes in the Piazza de Ferrari and a favourite meeting-place of British residents, who should I see sitting alone at the next table but my fellowtraveller on the Turin-Genoa train, the lawyer Ippolito Raimondi? "I have been looking for you," he said, when we greeted one another. "I heard you were transferred to Thiene." "I may be moved any day," I replied. " W e hear many rumours of movements of troops. They say the poet Gabriele D'Annunzio has returned from a triumphal visit to the Italian contingent on the French front at Chalons-sur-Marne. W e may expect the advance any moment." "So you British are acquainted with our quasi-legendary condottiere?" "I wish I knew more about D'Annunzio. I always think of him as one who is exquisitely refined, temperamental, self-indulgent and obsessed by sex." "There are some Italians who would agree with you, even though the poet has confounded his bitterest critics by his heroic deeds throughout this war. As his motto has always been me ne fiego—I don't care a damn—I suppose he enjoys playing the paradoxical hero." 205

Allegro "In England, I must say, the papers at the time gave him the credit for bringing Italy into the w a r . " " I was present at Quarto on M a y 5, 1915, the anniversary o f Garibaldi's departure from there in i860, but no sooner did the poet begin to speak than I fell beneath the magic spell, as though hypnotized b y his fiery words." "His photographs d o not favour him. Some o f m y Italian friends say he is tiny, unimpressive and bald." " H e never tries to make a coup de scene the moment he mounts the rostrum, but begins to speak quietly and slowly, knowing that all in the audience will strain their ears to hear the words that fall from his hps slowly, very slowly, and those words will gradually penetrate. As he himself has said, every sentence must have 'four horizons and bring to the people the mystery o f lives lost in the infinite'. If y o u j o i n m e for dinner this evening at the Gambrinus, I shall introduce y o u to a young Italian officer w h o served with the poet on the Isonzo river last year and k n o w s him intimately." W h e n I arrived at the restaurant that evening the avvocato introduced me to a tall, athletic-looking infantry captain—Giovanni Bertelli, w h o had his arm in a sling. Captain Bertelli, solemn in manner, but with a touch o f the mystic about him, paid eloquent tributes to Gabriele D'Annunzio " I remember," said the lawyer, "that day in 1916; it was in February, I think, w h e n w e all feared w e had lost our Condottiere." " T h a t was February 16," replied the captain, " w h e n he made a crash landing at Grado, and a splinter from the propeller blinded him. It was then that he wrote the wonderful Notturno to commemorate the comrades that had died. A n d as he lay in pitch darkness, with bandages over his eyes, his daughter Renata cut little strips o f paper on which he wrote each w o r d . As he lay there he had remembered that the ancient Sibyl had written her prophecies on stray leaves o f papyrus, and so, following her example, he wrote on the strips o f paper the Notturno, which is his tribute to Miraglia, the pilot o f his first flight, w h o was killed and to Solorno w h o became the captain o f the squadron." " T h e D ' A n n u n z i o I k n e w , " continued the captain, " w a s a comrade in arms w h o never spared himself, whose first thought was for his men, and w h o was always the first over the top. Y o u therefore realize that he was obsessed b y Nietzsche and resolved to live his life as a superman. W e call h i m our Archangel because his life he regards as constant 206

The Condottiere tension and aspiration to a spiritual state transcending the lives of other men who live on a lower plane. When he dedicated himself in 1915 to his country he sublimated his vision, and transmuted it into patriotism —into something beyond himself—and in so doing rallied all his nation to his side. It is, alas, difficult, even impossible," continued the captain, "to separate the former D'Annunzio, the self-indulgent dilettante as you call him, from our Archangel Gabriel, war hero and prophet. He himself has declared in writing that the outlines of his supreme doctrine are set down in his novel The Flame of Life, where his hero saves himself because he is ever striving in a constant aspiration. It is the need, the holy need of this striving in him that makes him a noble character." "Surely," integected Ippolito at this juncture, "Nietzsche had written that wherever he had found Life, there he heard words of obedience. Everything that lives, obeys. But wherever he found Life, there he also found a will to dominate. Even in the soul of the slave he found a longing to be a master. And just as the little man yields to the great man, that he may the better rule those who are smaller than he, so the great yield to the greater, and will even die for love of power. Their sacrifice, says Nietzsche, lies in the risk they take. It is throwing the dice with Death." "Let us draw conclusions from your argument, Ippolito," said Bertelli triumphantly, "where there is Life there is Will, not will to live, but will to dominate. There is no imperishable Good or Evil. The Evil and the Good must also go beyond themselves and surpass themselves. Wherefore supreme Evil is necessary to the supreme Good, to the Good that creates." "And so," I replied, "you both come to a conclusion in unashamed Manicheanism. If this is the meaning of Gabriele D'Annunzio's vision I begin to lose faith in his redemption. I now understand the words of warning Croce gave in his essay on the characteristics of the most recent Italian literature. Croce even prefers the former rhetorical bombast, for it rose from something solid. 'The new rhetoric,' he says, 'is the unspeakable. There is in addition to that superficial insincerity, another deeper manifestation of it which comes from being untrue to ourselves. It is the psychological state when a man does not he to others any more because he has already lied to himself.' " " W e shall see," I continued, "what will happen after peace is declared, and the Archangel has to ground his plane forever. Nemesis 207

Allegro will then force him to make the fateful decision between being a poet or a statesman." Just at that moment w e heard shouts in the distance of newsboys, and many in the restaurant started to their feet, and rushed out to buy the stop press. Captain Bertelli cried out solemnly—"iacta alea est: the offensive has started."

VITTORIO VENETO The Italian offensive began on October 24 and the inferno raged up in the snowy Alps and down upon the parched ridges of the Carso near the Gulf of Trieste. The days that followed were hectic, and every hour had its sussuhi e angaria, as one Italian lady said to me tearfully. The papers were full of huge black headlines, and the news often contradictory. During the calm hours of the night, on the chilly platform of Brignole, w e would await anxiously the arrival of the long convoys of wounded soldiers. From the Alpini and Bersaglieri we picked up the vivid scraps of news that enabled us to follow the kaleidoscope of war. For us in Genoa the last week of October was a period of suspended animation, for our thoughts and the thoughts of everyone were centred in the front in the North, and we vegetated in a dim unruffled Limbo. Sometimes with Y . M . C . A . and Red Cross colleagues I made expeditions to Arquata Scrivia, Novi and Tortona, which were important bases of the British Expeditionary Force, and here and there I discovered friends I had known at Shrewsbury and at Trinity College, Dublin. Many men had been transferred directly from the front in France and had not seen Blighty for three years. "But this is a grand war," said one of them, a Scottish Highlander, and lover of mountain climbing, "in comparison with the monotonous trench fighting in France. Up in the Alps there's plenty of thrills among those batteries behind rocks camouflaged with trunks of trees and bushes, and it's no joke to haul one of those heavy guns across dizzy precipices with wire hawsers, not to mention the danger of avalanches and skidding off the ice-bound roads on the hairpin bends. It's a great life if you don't weaken!" Never do I remember a gayer Hallowe'en than I spent that year in the apartment of the Sommarugas in Via Acquarone. The wonderful news from the front and impatient expectancy now that the Italian 208

Vittorio Veneto troops were on the outskirts of Trieste and Trento cheered the Italians, and we British were even more elated, for the news from the Western Front pointed to an imminent collapse, and parleys for peace, while in Germany itself there were rumours of a revolt of the navy. Helvezia and her sister had invited a number of our staff from the Library, and we played dominoes for prizes. On All Saints I spent most of the afternoon wandering round the wards of the eleventh General Hospital, which was full of British sick and wounded. The hospital was housed in the Grand Hotel Miramare—a mighty caravanserai perched on a slope overlooking the port of Genoa. I was particularly anxious to see a friend of mine, a young Irish officer in the Flying Corps, FlightLieutenant Dowse, who had fallen victim to the sinister 'spagnuola, which raged among the troops with the ferocity of the Black Death. Dowse had crashed on the Piave front in October, and had been sent to recuperate in Genoa, but while in hospital he had contracted influenza which culminated in pneumonia. When I reached the ward where my friend lay, the nurse would not allow me to see him, for he was delirious and screens were drawn round his bed. Later on I met sergeant Turner from the Signal Corps, and corporal Wood whom I used to call my musical body-guard. Sergeant Turner, an excellent pianist and ex-pupil of the Royal Academy of Music in London, was my principal accompanist, and we visited all the centres, giving recitals together. When he was busy I would call upon his friend, the beady-eyed little corporal Wood who, though not as good a technician as the sergeant, was a good sight-reader, and knew all the popular songs by heart. On All Souls' Day I found myself short-handed, for Helvezia and my other Italian assistants had asked for the afternoon off duty to go to the Campo Santo to tend the graves of their dead relatives. The Campo Santo had an uncanny attraction for me, and although I was up to my ears in office work and engagements I nevertheless felt impelled to make the pilgrimage as a pledge to Davies, the lonely friend I had known for a few weeks, and to all the other souls whom I had known and loved who lay buried in Flanders, France, Gallipoli and elsewhere. When I reached the Campo Santo I mounted the slope and made my way to the grave of my friend. All around me I saw women in black silently praying by the graves, busily arranging flowers, and laying wreaths besides the tombstones. I saw Helvezia kneeling by the grave of her father. The afternoon was dark and cloudy, a bitter wind blew 209

Allegro through the valley, yet those women dressed in black lingered on, praying and performing some little action of remembrance that would bring the souls of their beloved ones nearer to them. *

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On the morning of November 3 I awoke hearing all the sirens in Genoa harbour announcing the Italian victory of Vittorio Veneto and their entry into Trento and Trieste. Our hausjrau appeared pink with excitement and gesticulating wildly: "Vat has happened? V y the ships they blow ze sirens?" "The war is over, meinefrau! Bring the glasses. We must drink to Victory." "Ah so! dat is wonderful! Manina, scimeli, vieni subito!" Manina had been quicker to understand the significance of the moment than her mistress, and had risen early, and, without saying a word to a soul, had gone down town to make her own purchases. She now made a dramatic entry carrying a large tray laden with a mammoth Genoese panettone, a plate of amaretti biscuits, two bottles of Asti Spumante and glasses, followed by Caterina carrying a bunch of red and white blossoms mixed with greenery and the Italian flag. "Vat is dis, Manina?" asked the hausjrau. "Vere did you buy all dis?" "Chiedo scusa, Signora: I heard from the milk boy that the sirens would sound at eight o'clock, and I knew the Signori would want to celebrate the victory a poi fare un brindisi a tutti. . ." "Viva Manina! What a girl!" we all cried. "Fancy going out on her own and spending her own money too. We must pay you back what you spent, Manina." " Y o u offend me: anch' io sono Italiana, e voglio fare il mio piccolo brindisi." "Manina is right," I insisted, "and she shall give her brindisi in song, and we shall all sing the chorus: for let me tell you a secret. Manina is an opera singer, and knows all the popular Italian songs. Sing the Campane di San Giusto, Manina." When eventually I reached the office the telephone rang and I heard the voice of General Broadbent, R. A.M.C, from the Miramare Hotel. "Pack up that fiddle of yours and go this afternoon to Red Cross Hospital Number One; there's a big celebration in honour of the battle of Vittorio Veneto." 210

Vittorio Veneto That morning I was giving a class on English Literature to a group of Italian girls, and I was deeply immersed in a discussion with Signorina Gira, a self-conscious has bleu, who fancied herself in English and despised the rest of the class. There was a knock at the door and Aldo came to tell me that there was a great crowd of students of both sexes who wished to salute the British flag and would I speak to them from the terrace overlooking the piazza? "Come ladies, you must give me support," I said, as I led the way on to the terrace. There were about forty or fifty young men and women, mostly of the university type, carrying Italian banners and colours of the Allies. As soon as I appeared they all shouted Viva Vlnghilterra again and again, waved the flags and demanded a speech. It was fortunate for me that I had been diligently reading D'Annunzio's plays La Nave (The Ship) and La Fiaccola sotto il Moggio (The Torch under the Bushel) and making notes, for they gave me the brain wave of capitalizing my ignorance and pedestrian Italian by employing the D'Annunzio dramatic method of turning his speeches into a dialogue with the audience. I found little difficulty in uttering the usual platitudes expected from citizens of an allied country, especially when I put them in the form of questions to the public which my chorus would answer for them. " W h y have we fought this War?" I said, looking back at my chorus, and answering the question: "In order to make a world fit for heroes (per creare un mondo degno di eroi)." The chorus repeated "degno di eroi." (Great applause from the crowd.) " W h y is Vittorio Veneto so important?" "Because it is the beginning of a new Italy (e ilprincipio di una Nuova Italia)." "Viva Viva l'lnghilterra," shouted the crowd. "Why do the English love the Italians?" "Because Italy has always been the home of the great English poets." "Viva Lord Byron! Viva Shelley! Viva Browning!" shouted my girls with gusto for they had been writing essays for me on the three of them. The crowd in the street now began to sing the Bells of San Giusto and the Hymn ofMameli punctuated by Vivas to General Diaz and the English Commander-in-Chief, Lord Cavan. Then came our turn to respond with God Save the King and Rule Britannia, which was followed by La Marseillaise and the Italian National Anthem which they sang before departing. In the afternoon when I set out for the Italian Red Cross Hospital I found the streets of Genoa so crowded that progress was difficult. The

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Allegro Hospital was situated in a building that had been a primary school— dilapidated and full of dark passages. The great central ward was decorated with Italian flags, paper garlands and bright lights of various colours. Here I found r o w after row of wounded Italian soldiers dressed in white hospital uniform. Against the wall were the bed eases, and in the centre, in serried masses sat the others, with here and there groups of Red Cross nurses. O n the stage, which was draped in the Italian Tricolour, the musical and dramatic performance was given. There were songs, there were short dramatic sketches and there were speeches. After playing the usual selection of fiddle pieces with a hop, skip and j u m p in them, such as the Zigeunerweisen of Sarasate and the Hejre Kati of Hubay, I went on to our war tunes and played them one after another, introducing them with a few Italian words of comment. W h e n I told them those tunes had resounded on every British battlefield there was a roar of applause. Then some of them called out: "Signorina Italia! Sigttorina Italia!" A young Red Cross nurse came on to the stage and sat down at the piano. After preluding for a moment she began to sing in a beautiful high soprano voice, the Canzone dell' Alpino. She was a beautiful girl with pink and white complexion and golden hair that glittered in the lights of the hall. As she sang, her voice, which at first had faltered nervously, began to swell in volume, and her face became fixed in a mask of sadness. There was a strange quality of pathos about her singing, which brought tears to the eyes of those soldiers. While she sang she became the personification of the spirit of womanhood, because she possessed the magic power of reminding every lonely soldier in that crowded hall of his mother, sister, wife and daughter. The wounded soldiers next to me whispered: "She is a mother to us: not a day passes without her coming into the wards and singing to us the songs we need, she makes us weep when she sings the tunes we used to hear in the village. She is indeed a mother to all of us." As the girl sang on I thought of Dante's lovely line to Beatrice in the Vita Nuova—'Amore e'l corgentil sono una cosa'. I then understood the meaning of that beautiful Italian quality of gentilezza which we find among all classes of the people, that graciousness towards the sick which springs from innate courtesy of heart. Her singing was youthful in its freshness, but its deep appeal sprang rather from an inherited tradition of centuries. I also remembered how Castiglione had said that beauty was the result of emotional struggle in past lives. And it was necessary that all the sufferings and agonized memories of those 212

The Eyes of the Dead wounded soldiers should project and dissolve themselves in the singing of that golden-haired girl.

THE EYES OF THE DEAD Although the Italians had been celebrating victory uninterruptedly ever since November 3, Genoa went as wild as London, Rome or Paris when the sirens of the ships in the port announced on the morning of November 11 that the World War was over. For three days and three nights the people surged through the streets, singing songs, shouting, and all life became one huge kermesse. As for me, November 11 was a day of sad memories, in spite of all its orgies. When I reached the ward the sister told me that my Irish friend, the aviator, had died just after the sirens had announced the end of the war. As she spoke I heard ceaseless hammering near by. "What is that row?" said I. "They are hammering at coffins out in the yard. The men are dying like flies in here. The undertakers in Genoa have more than enough to do, and they say there is not enough wood for the coffins." I left the hospital so depressed that I resolved to go back to my billet. After all why should one spend Armistice Day in an orgy of junketing? Surely it is a day of memory when we should call up the ghosts of friends who have died in the war. But one of the strange peculiarities of the human heart is that it fights stubbornly against the phantoms that arise from the depths, and soon after I had descended from the hospital into the crowded streets my black-winged phantoms flew away, leaving my heart and mind completely devoid of any thought that was not of the moment. My musical bodyguard, too, did their best to chase away the blues. My beady-eyed little Corporal Wood had draped a flag around his waist and was prancing up and down like a bucking bronco, and as for Sergeant Turner he had been doing an early pub crawl, and was already jovially tipsy and eager to explore the picturesque lower haunts of Italian cities. With him was another bohemian friend of mine, Alan Smith, one of the British military mission who always dressed in civilian clothes and roved through the Italian cities collecting information and, incidentally, obtaining firsthand knowledge of the red light districts and the haunts of roguery. "Let us start our Odyssey by visiting the more posh places," said s * O—P

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Allegro Alan Smith, "where we may see the bloated pesrecani, or sharks, as the Italians call them, who frequent the Olimpia." Inside, the place recalled pre-war luxury with its crowds of smartly dressed men and women, but the air was stifling and my friends were bored and out of sorts. " N o t many of those blighters ever heard a shot fired in anger," said Sergeant Turner. "Last year they squealed after Caporetto and would have made a separate peace with Austria. Tonight they'll binge in honour of the glorious Victory to which we have contributed." Outside in a side alley we met a trio of wounded Italian soldiers hobbling painfully along. They were peasants from the Venetian province just released from hospital, and they had not a sou in their pockets with which to buy a drink on this night of victory. Taking them along with us, we wended our way to the humbler cafés off the Piazza de' Ferrari to drink the health of Italy in Chianti and Barbera. Soon all the miseries of the war were forgotten, and those three Italian soldiers became our brothers. There was a fiddler in one of the cafés, and Wood made him hand me his fiddle, and I started playing. Rhythm intoxicates people more than drink, and in a moment everyone in the café became as wild as a troop of Indians dancing their war dance. When we became wearied of the enclosed space I made for the street and continued playing, followed by about a score of excited people singing and capering. My mind was in a maze: the Chianti I had drunk and the frenzy of the people made me play as in a dream. W e halted at the Carlo Felice theatre in the shadow of the statue of Garibaldi on horseback. There a mad idea struck Corporal Wood. " W h y not climb up on top of the statue, Walter, and play your fiddle from there for the crowd." No sooner said than done. Intoxicated as I was I managed to hoist myself up the slippery side of the horse aided by my two British friends, but when I got to the top I longed for the powers of a Blondin. Only he could have balanced securely on the perilous saddle. My two companions then climbed up and held me while I played. Meanwhile the crowd below cheered me and called out Viva Vlnghiltena and I felt the urge to play God Save the King, followed by the Marseillaise and the Hymn to Garibaldi. Mentally I begged the pardon of the great old hero of Caprera for playing the fiddle standing on his horse. I felt it was blasphemy, for it made me think of Nero fiddling while Rome was burning. We were now wearied of singing and shouting, and the piazza had no more adventures for us, so we started off to discover the street of 214

The Eyes of the Dead the Red Lanterns, but though wc searched we could not find any house that suggested women, wine and song. We walked up and down many of the narrow streets leading to the Piazza di Caricamento, deep in the heart of the Port of Genoa, but in vain. The night was hot and stuffy, the smell of garlic, rotten fish and latrines overpowering. Out of every window hung the inevitable ragged sheets and underclothing to dry, and in the dim light they gave the street a fantastic appearance: they were like countless white shrouds fluttering to welcome the approach of the skeleton Death with his scythe. These narrow streets that night seemed strangely silent and our voices sounded hollow, as though we were in the passages of a deep dungeon, but I could still hear distant echoes of the crowd, and every now and then the long-drawn hiss followed by a bang of fireworks. Our footsteps, too, echoed as we walked. There was rottenness and decay in the air, and it seemed to seep into my bones. All my excitement had evaporated, and black depressing thoughts began to crowd upon me like a flight of illomened ravens. Every step we took I saw ghosdy phantoms flit by which were all the more macabre because they peered at me from dark corners. In a doorway I saw two wizened, toothless old hags whispering: in another two deaf mutes with their faces close together gesticulating with fingers and thumb, making gurgling sounds in their attempts to convey their meaning. At the corner of the street we ran into a group of men dressed in black, shuffling along noiselessly, carrying on their shoulders an empty coffin. At last we came to a house with lights in the windows and a lamp above a blue door, which had been newly painted. I heard shouts of laughter and drunken singing as a door opened at the end of a passage. The ravens had now completely surrounded me, and I was dazed by their black flapping wings. Corporal Wood hastened down the passage. I rushed away and walked aimlessly along the narrow streets, looking neither to right nor left. I was in a maze and I felt that my only relief was to continue walking on and on through those streets, in the hope that I could rid myself of my attack of'blues', which now so fiercely beset me that I seemed, though fully awake, to be passing through the progressive stages of a nightmare. The moment I stopped walking and sat down through sheer weariness on a doorstep I became again the prey of my thoughts, which raced to and fro, unearthing painful memories I had buried years ago. Again and again the vision of the charnel house in the Campo-Santo appeared before me with its white 215

Allegro slabs glistening under the moon and the thousands of human beings like buzzing black flies crawling over the corpses lying stiff in their shrouds beside the white slabs. Then the scene would change to Glasnevin cemetery in my native city, where I saw women in black, kneeling on the graves praying, and then flitting away like phantoms, for ghosts appeared of dear friends I had known years ago, of classmates in Dublin, members of the Pals Battalion who fell in Gallipoli, of others I had known at Shrewsbury, of White and Southwell, two men, united in their death . . . in the Battle of the Somme. I plodded on and on wearily, trying to drive these memories from my mind, but they continued to surge like spectres before me in this unending nightmare. Why such despondency? Why on this night more than many others? Was it not rather a secret unconfessed longing for death that had suddenly invaded my mind? The silent streets began to glow in the crimson light of the rising sun. As I passed by the Cathedral of San Lorenzo I noticed that one of the doors was open. "Here is rest at last," I thought as I subsided on one of the pews in the side aisle. The church was in darkness except for the tiny light before the high altar, and not a soul was to be seen anywhere. I rested my head against one of the rugged stone pillars as sleep began gendy to envelop me.

ALBERTO AND DELFINA

On the Sunday following the Armistice, I resolved to wander out of Genoa in quest of Capo Santa Chiara where lived Colonel Alberto Porchietti of the Italian Red Cross, the father of the golden-haired signorina whose singing had so bewitched me at the celebrations for Trieste and Trento. So, after leaving the crowded Via Venti Settembre I followed the picturesque coast road towards Portofino. The rocky shore of the Gulf of Genoa which unfurls itself like a gigantic fan edged with the green of its luxuriant vegetation, is studded with tiny inlets, where from time immemorial the rugged Genoese fishermen have made their setdements. Amongst these little colonies none is so full of tradition as the community of Boccadasse which nesdes at the foot of Capo Santa Chiara. From the summit of the Cape a network of stone steps leads down to the rocky beach, where the boats are drawn up out of reach of the waves. Here was a colony of 216

Alberto and Delfina sea wolves, and in the evenings the bronzed old fishermen sit on those steps and gaze out to sea as though they were sentries of the coast. After rambling through the tiny village I ascended the steep stone steps and reached the ledge of Capo Santa Chiara where I discovered the narrow laneway leading to the Colonel's villa. When I rang the bell, I heard the sound of a dog barking. A moment later the door sprung open and Signorina Italia appeared to welcome me. "How delighted I am that you have come. Giù Matigoré! Don't be afraid of Mangoré: he is a good watch dog but does not bite. My father was afraid you would not be able to find our house." It was late afternoon; from the terrace of the villa the glorious panorama spread out. The calm sea shone in the glory of the setting sun: in the distance the graceful head of Portofino, purple-covered, completed the background of the picture. So incredibly beautiful was the scene that after the preliminary salutations to all the family there assembled, no one said a word, and I relapsed into silence, for everyone's thoughts flitted away over the calm sea into dim distant recollections. Below in the wilderness of green emerged here and there gaunt silhouettes of cypress trees, and the sunlight catching the window-panes of the neighbouring red houses turned them into dazzling jewels: an atmosphere of peace hardly broken by the gende tolling of the church bell of the litde hamlet of Apparizione in the hills behind, completed this unforgettable scene. After a moment we left the terrace and went into the dining-room where a Sunday merènda was richly provided with Italian cakes and exotic wines. While the ladies were busy and the Colonel went down to his cellar, I joined the group of men, an old Genoese lawyer who was called by everybody Papà Goffredo, Mario, a captain in the Italian navy, married to one of the daughters, and a young artillery officer. The Colonel after filling our glasses with the golden wine of Pantelleria, toasted me. I felt embarrassed and deeply touched and said: " I wish I could thank you in Italian for your welcome here, and tell you how much I love and admire Italy and the Italians and Dante's beautiful language. There are many things I want to hear and to learn about your people and your history. Tell me," I said, addressing myself to the old lawyer, "why was Mazzini called 'the Prophet in the Black Coat'?" "The Prophet in the Black Coat," said the squat white-haired man 217

Allegro with a small tuft of beard on his chin, "one day as a youth was accosted in the street by a tall bearded man, who held out a white handkerchief saying, 'for the refugees in Italy!', so deep was the impression that Mazzini ever afterwards dressed in mourning for his country. And he gave the world a book worthy to be set beside the Bible: if the men of today would study the Duties of Man they would discover a panacea for all ills." " I warn you," intercepted the Colonel, "you are talking to a Mazzinian republican enrage, who has been Mayor of Genoa." "Mazzini," went on Papà Goffredo, "was Genoese to the core, and was born a republican, for his father, a professor in the University o f Genoa, took part in the democratic movement of the time, and gave his son the vocation to become the prophet of a United Italy. One immortal phrase was murmured by our soldiers who came back from the front to build up their country: 'Una nazione non è un'esistenza naturale, ma una realtà morale' (a nation does not exist by nature: it is a moral reality)." There was a loud ring at the gate outside, and I heard a buzz of voices coming from the narrow lane at the back of the house. "These are the fishermen from Boccadasse," said Donna Delfina. 'E l'ora della minestra. Girls, put on your aprons and let us get to work. Please, you will excuse us," she said to me. Signor Alberto then explained to me that it was Donna Delfina's custom to feed every evening the poorer fishermen of Boccadasse and their families. Downstairs in the spacious kitchen there was great excitement. The three daughters of Donna Delfina—Eva, the wife of Mario Bonetti, the naval commander, Italia, and Tina, the youngest, were dressed in long aprons and were ladling out a thick reddish-coloured soup full of macaroni, under the vigilant eye of their mother. The fishermen were of all ages; some of them old sea-wolves, bronzed and gnarled like oak-trees. While Donna Delfina and her daughters were attending to their wants, the Colonel told me tales of the fishing-folk. They were, he said, the backbone of Italy. In the navy most of the sailors were Genoese. They had been sea-wolves from time immemorial, and even today a folklorist would find among them traces of customs going back to the dawn of history. Their minds were stored with fairy lore mingled with faint echoes of the ancient wars between Rome and Carthage. Hannibal appears in the local folk-lore as a wizard in league with evil spirits who inhabit deep grottos in the cliffs. 218

Alberto and Delfitia After all the fishermen and their families had gone Donna Delfina called out to us: "A tavola, Signori..." Night had now fallen, and the sea had become transparent and turned from gold to shimmering silver beneath the crescent moon. In the tiny pool in the garden beneath, clusters of stars shone like glowworms. The magic of the moon had bewitched the landscape into the silence of death: the cypress trees with their slanting shadows stood motionless like rigid sentinels. The moon turned us to the mood of reminiscence, for her rays searched out the hidden corners of our minds, drawing out by slender threads a thousand uncertain thoughts. She awoke notions of romance, of wandering over hill, over dale, far from the smoke of cities and buzzing crowds. All the toils and troubles of the sun-world faded away and petty ambitions seemed but false illusions created in this visionhouse of life. N o wonder the moon was called the only base runagate on earth; she wanders up and down the sky like an antic, drawing us all after her. Signorina Italia began in a low voice to murmur the lines of Leopardi, poet of the Moon: E quando miro in del arder le stelle Dicofiame pensando: A thetentefacelle? Che fa Varia infinite, e quel profondo Infinite seren? Che Vuol dir queste Solitudine immensa? Ed io che sono? M y host then began to talk of his early days in his birthplace: Pinerolo in the heart of Piemonte, where his parents carried on a silk industry. His father gave all he had to the national cause, and as for the silk industry it declined before the competition of French silk of Lyons. Alberto when he went to Turin University came under the influence of Arturo Graf—a romantic poet of pessimism, who made him study Leopardi deeply. Soon, however, he neglected Leopardi for Carducci who had become the civic poet of united Italy. "Carducci," said Alberto, "was the personification of rebellion against obscurantism and outworn ideas. N o w that I am older and mellower I admire him for his classical measure and balanced mind. But even today I am bewitched by his paganism, for I know that it sprang from his intense love of Nature. Italy for him was the farm of Horace in the Sabine hills or the vineyards of Virgil's Mantua, and its 219

Allegro rivers gliding beneath the ancient walls of cities." Carducci, however, turned Alberto into a rebel, and he was unable to settle down in Piemonte to a h u m d r u m life. "I wanted adventure," he said, "and I was terrified of becoming Monssü Travet, the hero of the Piemontese dialect plays, a symbol of the honest, diligent beast of burden civil servant, w h o never complains, but shrugs his shoulders and says— Pasienssa! I forswore him." " Y o u were quite right, Papá," said Alberto's daughters in chorus. " Y o u were ambitious and you wanted to see the world." "So one day," continued Alberto, " t o the consternation of m y parents, I disappeared f r o m home and went to sea. For years I wandered f r o m one side of the world to the other like the Flying Dutchman sailing on the ship with the blood-red sails. Then I determined to emigrate to South America." "I imagine you, Signor Alberto," said I, "setting out for that continent with the spirit of the conquistador." "Yes, I had something of the conquistador in me as far as education was concerned, for I remembered that Papá GofFredo's idol Mazzini had called education 'the bread of the soul'. In a vigorous new country like the Argentine there was plenty for me to do in those days. After a bitter struggle with adversity, I saved enough money to buy land by the River Plata near Buenos Aires and there I founded my own International College based upon the newest European systems of Pestalozzi, Froebel and others. W h e n Delfina came out to join me we made our college a centre of culture, linking Italy with Argentine. Many politicians, writers or professional men in the Argentine today came to us as students, and our house always was a meeting-place of poets, artists and men of letters. The great Rubén Darío was a regular guest at our tertulias in Olivos." "Did you never regret your mother country?" said I. "Every day that passed made us more conscious of our exile. W e forever dreamed of Italy, and as soon as the Great W a r began we returned to give our services to our beloved fatherland." "Alberto," said Delfina, "has told you all about Piemonte and North Italy. I want to tell you about the South which played no less noble a part in Italy's Risorgimento. W h e n I think of m y father I feel myself a Meridionale and I call to mind those Neapolitans and Sicilians who died to emancipate Italy. They, too, heard the burning words of Mazzini when he said: 'Without country you have neither name, token, 220

Alberto and Delfina voice nor rights; no admission as brothers into the fellowship of the peoples. You are the bastards of Humanity, soldiers without a banner.' " M y father's destiny was decided at birth. He was bom in prison in 1810. His father, Domenico Landi, a Neapolitan, had taken part in an insurrection against the Bourbon King, and he was confined as a political prisoner in the bleak island of La Favignana off the coast of Sicily. Queen Carolina, as a special dispensation, allowed his wife to share imprisonment with him since he had been condemned to penal servitude. In that fetid gaol, which was built into the rocks beneath sealevel, my father lived the first seven years of his life amidst terrible privations, which ended by killing Domenico. When he and his mother left the gaol and returned to Naples they found their home destroyed and the coral industry of the family ruined. My father then entered the military college at Naples, and obtained promotion in the Bourbon army. But, then came the year 1848, when the wave of revolutionary Nationalism swept over Europe: in Paris there were barricades, in Berlin there were risings, in Italy everyone sang the song of the Green, White and Red—the banner of Italy. " M y father at this point deserted from the Bourbon army and entered the ranks of the Northern army of King Carlo Alberto. Green for hope, red for joy and white for brotherhood: those were the colours that henceforth he followed under the leadership of the hero of Caprera. It was during the campaign of 1859 that a night surprise attack on Fort Laveno had been planned by Garibaldi, and he entrusted the task to a chosen band ofcacciatori delle Alpi under my father and Captain Bronzetti. The night was dark and cloudy, Bronzetti lost his way, and my father was left to sustain the whole attack with a small band of men. Urging on his Alpini, he charged the enemy and drove them back to the Fort, where a fierce hand-to-hand fight took place. All at once a tall Austrian bore down upon my father, and raising his gun, discharged it into him. The bullet passed through his side and lodged itself in the spine. Although grievously wounded he managed to retire with his men. Garibaldi awarded him the medal for valour on the battlefield." As I walked back to my lodgings in Genoa I pondered over Donna Delfina's story. For me that was a fateful evening. Soon I was to become a member of Alberto and Donna Delfina's family.

221

Allegro THE MESSIAH FROM THE W E S T M y next meeting with Alberto and Delfina was the day o f the visit of President Woodrow Wilson to Genoa, on his way to Rome. They had excellent seats at a window in Via Balbi near the Church o f the Annunziata, and I was fortunate to find a place beside them. The streets were thronged, the windows o f the buildings were adorned with the coloured brocade of Zoagli, and the flags and bunting were flying. The sky was overcast and rain fell intermittently, but it did not damp the ardour of the multitude. One song after another rang out in full-throated chorus: first the National Anthems o f the allies, then the Italian hymns. But there was another song which the crowd wished to shout to the skies—The Star-Spangled Banner—for no king entering the capital of his realm after a victorious war ever received a more delirious welcome than 'The Messiah o f the West', as he was called that day, by the Italians who cheered him. " Viva VAmerica! Viva Wilson!" I stood by the side of old Papi Gof&edo, w h o in his excitement kept haranguing me on the virtues of the President o f the United States. " H o w little," he said, "did I imagine when I brought you the other day to visit the tomb of Mazzini and I quoted some o f his great maxims, that only a few days later I should be cheering the arrival of another prophet who will follow in the steps of the great Tribune of 1848."

Meanwhile the car containing the President and his suite passed slowly down the Via Balbi in front of us amidst the frenzied cheering and waving of flags. I had the vision of a tall, grey-haired man bowing stiffly from side to side. A vision in grey, for his hair and his clothes were grey, and there was a grey tinge about his skin. His face was like a mask, set in a stereotyped smile. It was the face o f a university don— a puzzled dreamer with heavy-lidded eyes and a forehead deeply furrowed with wrinkles. Although the upper part o f his face was that of a dreamer, the strong jaw and thin pursed Hps stamped him as an obstinate man, accustomed to impose his will. But when he passed I felt that the spirit of George Washington had descended on earth and inspired him to lead our world away from the mean, petty animosities of mankind. He was here, a visitant from another planet who would judge our strife with calmness and clear vision. 'The self-determination of peoples', and 'a League of Nations': the words resounded through 222

The Messiah from the West my mind as through the minds of us all like magic refrains. W e all had visions of a League of strong, self-respecting nations, each taking her place in a new international structure as an independent element, like a single crystal in an ordered group o f crystals.1 The Italians, no less than the French and the British, believed that a new era had arrived, and Wilson was acclaimed as a Messiah throughout the length and breadth of the country. In Genoa one of the main streets leading from the Piazza de Ferrari was called Via Wilson in honour of the hero of the day. The Peace Conference met in Paris, the capital which had suffered most from the tragedies of invasion and bombardment, with results that disturbing reports of the chaotic conditions prevailing in Paris began to echo and re-echo through Italy. Paris, it was rumoured had ceased to be the capital of France, and had become a vast cosmopolitan caravanserai filled with curious samples of every conceivable race, tribe and tongue of four continents, all of them eager to be near the crucible in which the political and social systems of the world were to be melted and recast. The map of Europe lay open in front of him, and it was for him to draw the boundaries. Men compared the present conference with the Congress of Vienna, where a religious spirit of peace had descended upon Europe, and kings representing Orthodoxy, Protestantism and Catholicism abandoned their differences and declared themselves united in the noble cause of peace. Instead, to its dismay, the world saw President Wilson and his colleagues forswearing one by one their lofty principles. As General Smuts said later: "It was the spirit of man which failed at Versailles." The conquerors, in fact, spoke in the words of the Tiger Clemenceau when he said: "I conceive of life after the war as a continual conflict, whether there be war or peace. I believe it was Bernhardi who said that politics are war conducted with other weapons. W e can invert this aphorism and say that peace is war conducted with other weapons." The Treaty of Peace was conceived in a spirit of revenge and fear, and it provided the means of continuing the war against the defeated enemy in an even more rigorous form by its arrogant demands. Soon there was discontent everywhere, and nowhere more than in Italy, whose just claims were neglected or side-tracked by her more voluble allies. 1

N . Murray Butler, Is America worth saving?, p. 135. N e w York, 1920. 223

Allegro One thought was uppermost in the minds of the Italian ex-servicemen. Italian prestige had been shaken by politicians who preferred to barter their country's claims for the sake of party interests. Amidst all this clamour of European nationalities battling for peace, the grey statuesque figure of President Wilson was buffeted about like the effigy of a patron saint bobbing up and down over the heads of a drunken, gesticulating mob. For one brief moment he had been the Prophet of Humanity redeemed from War. But then even his friends began to discover in him the defects of certain well-meaning, religious pastors, who are convinced that they cannot make a mistake, and many would repeat the dictum attributed to Clemenceau. The Tiger, shrugging his shoulders had exclaimed: "Monsieur Wilson m'embête avec ses quatorze points: le Bon Dieu n'en a que dix!" Then Europe learned with amazement that the Messiah had been rejected even by the West. Wilson became the butt for attacks at home and abroad. One day, some months after the apotheosis in Genoa, when I was walking down a street in Vicenza, I saw a band of men carrying on high a wretched scarecrow of a figure. It was the effigy of the Prophet in Grey, which they proceeded to burn amidst exulting cries of "Down with Wilson!" History will look upon President Wilson as a tragic idealist, whose sentiments were universally applauded but not followed—a vague, unpractical, obstinate personality, who appeared for a brief moment in a flash of radiant sunlight, only to disappear suddenly into the Umbo of forgotten heroes. He was a blind and deaf Don Quixote, tilting at windmills which he could not see—a grey figure of disillusion creeping home to die.

224

9 THE C O N C E R T

PARTY

After the Armistice the main problem was to keep the fighting men busy and entertained. " T o demob or not to demob, that is the question," was the eternal refrain I heard in every Y . M . C . A . hut and canteen. During those early months of 1919 in Northern Italy, a comic actor, a female impersonator, a juggler, even a fiddler was worth his weight in gold in the camps up the line. In Genoa I had my own troupe called by the high-sounding title of 'The Riviera Concert Party', including professional entertainers and a pleasant variety of amateur talent. During my pereginations as fiddler and lecturer I had always kept a watchful eye on the men who offered to take part in our informal singsongs and recitals. It is only by degrees that one can draw out the many hidden talents of the British tommy. One day, to my delight, a tour of Northern Italy was arranged by the military authorities. I celebrated the star performance of our party in Genoa with repeated rounds of Capri wine with my companions. In a few days we set out and were feted like princes in Thiene, Vicenza and in all the camp coliseums in Lombardy and the Venetian province. But misfortunes fell upon us like a curse from heaven. One by one my artists began to disappear: the local majors and colonels refused pointblank to release the men, saying that owing to the stress o f demobilization they could not be spared. I spent many days wandering from one site to the other in a desperate attempt to break through the barrage of red-tape and army arrogance, which was all the greater, seeing that I was but a camp-follower from the Y . M . C . A . I had one staunch friend and adviser in Miss Kit Bowen-Cooke—a tall, handsome girl who had come out from England with die Y . M . C . A . to help in concerts and canteen work. Miss Kit had a pleasant voice and a winning personality: I have never seen anybody refuse her anything she wanted. She possessed the most uncanny faculty for wangling. Her wangling was artistic because it was imaginative in its indirectness. She had a special technique for the various military ranks and could change from one 225

Allegro method to another with astonishing rapidity. I knew from the first that my only chance of working up a concert party would depend upon her co-operation. At last Kit and I set out with the remnants of the party. With us travelled my squire, Sniper Kelly, a diminutive Irishman from Cork who boasted of his talents as a conjuror. When we arrived at Vicenza we were lodged in a gloomy, ramshackle house near the Cathedral belonging to a locksmith, who had his workshop on the ground floor. M y first task was to persuade the Y . M . C . A . chief in Vicenza, a charming Cambridge graduate called Elmslie, to drive me from one camp to another so that I could collect my full quota of performers. The next task was to bring the artists together for a rehearsal and fix their programme. It was a dark day in January when they all arrived. The one room big enough for die rehearsal was the kitchen which the owner of the house and his daughters shared with us. Let no one imagine that it is easy to arrange military concert-party programmes. The jealous temper of the most sensitive prima donna in the world is naught as compared with the susceptibilities of a soldier female impersonator or knockabout comedian. The first clash came when I arranged the order of the programme; the whispering baritone would not sing after the knockabout comedian because the public would be more in the mood of laughter than tears; the female impersonator would not sing after Miss Kit; and the Shakespearean actor wanted double the amount of time of the rest, in order to recite the whole of the Death Scene of Othello. The only person with a sense of humour was Sniper Kelly, the Irishman, but at a glance I saw that he would need all his Hibernian wit and charm to put across his very patent conjuring tricks. One of the more important duties of the director of a military concert party is to discover a means of conveyance—after all, Thespis needed a chariot to carry his drama round the Greek countryside. Eventually a big lorry was given over to be our Thespian car and we set off in great spirits. W e arrived at Arcole at 4 p.m., dusty and tired: Miss Bowen-Cooke and I were shown into the officers' mess and at six-thirty we joined the officers at dinner. At half-past seven I strolled over to the theatre to see if all the arrangements were in order. I met the female impersonator and the knockabout comedian at the entrance to the stage door gloriously drunk. Sniper Kelly was in the middle valiantly holding them up. At the first moment I felt my blood freeze with horror, but there was no 226

The Concert Party time to be lost. I ordered Sniper to bring diem into the wash-room and put their heads under the pump. With difficulty he dragged them along, for both kept saying in a sing-song: "Where's the bloody concert on now? We've been off on the booze, tra la!" The jazz pianist was not drunk, but in vitriolic humour. "Look 'ere, Mr Starkie," he snapped, "when we came on this 'ere concert work we thought as 'ow we'd get decent grub. Why we ain't 'ad anything but bully beef and chunks of bread." My sorrows were not yet at an end, for I saw my Shakespearean actor approach very much the worse for wear. "A good sherris sack hath a twofold operation in it. It ascends me into the brain; dries me there all the foolish and dull and crudy vapours which environ it; makes it apprehensive, quick, forgetive, full of nimble fury and delectable shapes." Then, in an attempt to strike a pose, he slipped and subsided to the earth at my feet. "Look here, Sniper," I cried, "another candidate for the wash tap. It was now about five minutes before the programme was scheduled, and I could hear the chorus-singing of the men in the audience. I determined to go on first myself so as to measure the public. After a few bars of Wieniawski I felt that they had settled down, and at the end of a fiery csardds they roused themselves to a fair degree of enthusiasm. One of the characteristics of Sniper was that he was an optimist. If you said to him, "Sniper, go off at once and bring me the moon," he would have departed smiling. As I saw him push his little tables into the middle of the stage I felt confident he would blarney the audience. He started all right, but unfortunately conjuring is not all gag: occasionally one must perform a trick. I watched Sniper closely as he took the little coloured balls and put them under the cloth. "Gentlemen, this is a celebrated trick, and I have had the honour of performing it before most of the crowned heads of Europe. With one touch of my wand I shall transfer one of these balls to die other table." Alas, Sniper's magic did not work; his hand faltered and at the precise moment when the ball should have been travelling invisible through the air, it slipped and rattled along the floor. Long laughter from the audience. "Butter fingers," shouted one voice. "Don't let your mother send you for eggs," shouted another. Sniper smiled and tried the trick a second dme, but this time the ball did not travel at all. At last at the third effort belated success came. The next item on the programme was the Shakespearean actor. At the back he was incoherent, and he hiccoughed 227

Allegro loudly as he lurched up the steps leading to the stage. According to the programme he was to recite the Death Scene in Othello, but he boldly started off the apostrophe of Macbeth to the dagger. Strange to relate, the moment he found himself before the public all signs of inebriety disappeared. He braced himself up and rolled out the great words in a style that brought down the house. After his turn I knew that the concert was safe, and I left the comic knockabout and the female impersonator to do their w o r s t . . . I was saved. A few days later we had to give a concert in a camp at Arcóle, the scene of one of Napoleon's most romantic victories in the campaign of 1796, and we arrived there in our lorry under floods of rain. On this day Arcóle was a marsh, nothing but mud on all sides. The British guns were lined up, sunk in the morass. In the officers' mess, before the concert, Miss Bowen-Cooke captivated the hearts of everyone by her charming manner. She was able to draw out the fat old colonel (old style with mutton-chop whiskers), and make him tell all his chestnuts. As for me, I was deeply engaged in conversation with an officer who was a keen musician—a highbrow, in fact. He insisted on playing the piano for me at the concert, much to the disgust of my jazz player, who looked on himself as the official accompanist. As bad luck would have it, the officer pianist insisted on my playing highbrow music. "We must give these fellows something good; you know soldiers appreciate classical music, so let us play some of the César Franck Sonata." With misgivings I agreed, and we played the first movement. We reached the end amid silence, but when we started the tempestuous second movement I heard murmurs. Suddenly a voice cried out from the back. "For God's sake play something with a bit of tune in it—give us Annie Laurie." Soldiers who are restlessly awaiting demobilization become bitter critics, and it is no easy task to win their praise. Kit was popular because, being a woman, she made them think of home. Many of them had not been back to England and Scotland since the first year of the war, and when they heard a girlish voice sing the old songs, they went wild with enthusiasm. After the concert we packed again into our lorry and splashed through the rain and mud towards Vicenza. Hardly had we gone more than thirty kilometres through the blinding rain when the lorry broke down. Not an inch would it budge. Here we were, stranded by the side of the road with not a cottage in sight. On this occasion the alcoholic tendencies of the Shakespearean actor saved us 228

The Concert

Party

from despair, for he apologetically drew out of his pocket a small flask full of issue rum which he carried with him for emergencies. With the help of that medicine we were able to endure until the lorry was started again, and we reached Vicenza without further mishap. Soon almost every small town in the Venetian province became identified in my mind with the adventures of our ramshackle concert party. The two ruined castles at Montecchio Maggiore of the rival Montagues and Capulets were a favourite halting-place for us, as various detachments of troops were encamped in the vicinity. The leading spirit there in those months after the Armistice was Miss Talbot, a good-looking and resourceful young woman of commanding presence, who had come to North Italy after running ambulances with the Serbian Army. She was our impresario and gathered large audiences to hear us. If I had not been so thrilled by her tales of the Serbian retreat and her adventures in the mountains of Albania, I should have been keeping a hawk-eyed vigilance over our performers, and thus prevented a bloodthirsty quarrel that broke out between Sniper Kelly, the female impersonator and a local juggler from the Motor Transport. The acutely feminine vanity of the female impersonator was always leading to tussles and bitter words, and on this occasion it was he who set the juggler against the Sniper. Egged on by the impersonator, the former agreed to beat up the little conjuror, but although the two made a surprise attack on him in the dark, armed with cudgels, the fiery little Irishman was more than a match for them. Arzignano's chief claim to fame, as far as I was concerned, was that it possessed the prettiest little vivandière in all Italy. Her father owned the chief local tavern, which was crowded every evening, not so much because the wine was the best in the district, but because of Tonina's black eyes, her roguish repartee, and the little Venetian songs which I collected from her one night in a pliant hour after all the guests had left and her father and mother were sound asleep above. In Trissino, alas, there was no vivandière, but the wine was headier and more generous than that of Arzignano, with the result that I drowned my sorrows so effectively in company with the Shakespearean actor that as the hour of the show drew near we both resolved, as a novelty, to brighten it with the introduction of improvised gags. We mimicked the regular army types, the colonel, the adjutant, the raw second lieutenant, the captain's batman, even the sergeants, and especially the sergeant-major. The gags and the mimicking were received with • a a—a

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Allegro acclamation by the crowded audience, and I thought my witticisms at the expense of the sergeants were harmless, but, to my dismay, I discovered later that I had unwittingly ruffled the tender susceptibilities of the local quartermaster-sergeant who happened to be our host. Our visit to the little mountain town of Schi61 shall always remember because near there one Sunday I listened to the finest sermon I ever heard. It was in a small rustic church and the congregation was mainly composed of the humble peasantry of the district. The priest who said Mass was a young man who had fought in all the battles of the Isonzo, and had been wounded several times. He had been awarded the Silver Medal for gallantry on the field. He preached his sermon standing in front of the altar, and at his feet many tiny children rolled about on the ground, for it was the custom for the mothers to deposit their infants within the altar rails to keep them out of harm's way. The young priest took as his text, "Love your enemies." He spoke of war and the hatred it engenders; he spoke of nights in the trenches, of bayonet attacks, of battles in the snows, and he told tales of heroism and sacrifice. Then he showed us how the same heroism took place a short distance away on the enemy side. What lessons could all of us learn from this terrible war, he said, but the divine message of love and charity. As, forty-two years later, I read these lines from my diary of the early months of 1919 I can still visualize that young priest, speaking like one possessed by a divine flame to that congregation of peasantry, while the sunlight streamed through the windows of the little church illuminating the curly heads of the children at his feet. In Montebello Vicentino, a small town I was to know intimately some months later, I had a strange adventure with Hungarian prisonersof-war, which was to have future repercussions upon my life. One day I gave a violin recital in a Y.M.C.A. hut near Montebello, and at the end, after the audience had departed, I noticed five men loitering near the door of the hut. They were Austrian prisoners who were employed in rough jobs in the camps by the British Army authorities until their repatriation. Our orderlies said they were Hungarians, but one look at them convinced me they were Gypsies, for they had skins as dark as mahogany, and they had the queer penetrating eye of the Cigany. One of them, acting as a spokesman for the rest, asked me in a mixture of Italian and German to allow him to examine my violin. When I handed him the instrument he took it up reverendy, as though it were a priceless treasure, and held it aloft with both hands for all his com230

The Concert Party panions to sec. They all made a weird concerted sound which began as a long drawn-out sigh and ended in a swelling murmur of astonishment, and they crowded round their spokesman, talking excitedly in what I supposed was Magyar. For the next few minutes they turned m y fiddle upside down and examined the back, then lengthwise, crosswise, tapping its back and belly lightly with their fingers, pinching each string—G, D, A, E—ping! ping! ping! ping! Then, came the turn of the bow which they lifted on high, flourished, stretched out, tightening and loosening the screw, all the time chattering away excitedly, making gestures with their hands, and turning around slyly, peering and squinting at me. Finally the spokesman came up to me and bowed formally, asking whether I could possibly do them a favour. They were Hungarian Gypsies, w h o had been called up as conscripts into the Austrian army, and they belonged to the musician caste of Romanies. "Could we persuade y o u , " said the spokesman, " t o use your influence with the British officer in charge of the Y.M.C.A. hut and persuade him to give us some wood—any old packing-cases." W h e n I inquired the reason for this strange request the spokesman replied: "Ah, signore, if you give us the packing-cases we shall make violins out of them and then bdshavdv." W h e n he said the word bdshavdv he took up my fiddle and bow and pretended to play. The four companions immediately followed their leader and raised their arms as though playing fiddles. "Ah, signore," continued the spokesman, " w e die for want of music, and our blood runs cold for lack of a lassii and a friss csdrdds to make us dream of the Puszta." Then I remembered George Borrow's test: Can you rokra Romany? Can you play the bosh? Among Gypsies bdshavdv, to play the fiddle or boshomengro, has a magic significance, for it means the dance of life, the expression of the slow, sad lassii and the quick rhythmic friss that leads to the wild csdrdds. A Hungarian Gypsy prisoner will die of melancholy in gaol unless he is given wood to make himself a fiddle. Without more ado I went round to the quartermaster-sergeant at the neighbouring depot of Tavernelle and scrounged a number of empty packing-cases of Woodbine, Ruby Queens, Cup ties and other rationed cigarettes, and to those I added some strings and resin from m y own supply. All these I handed over to the Gypsy and took leave of them. About ten days later, on my return 231

Allegro from giving a concert in the monastery of Praglia near Padua, I called in at Montebello to see what had become of the five Gypsies. To my amazement they had fashioned violins and bows out of the packingcases and they were playing away like demons. Their devilish music seemed to assail one at every corner. I heard it as I lay resting in my bunk; its racing rhythms pursued me faintly over the breezes as I walked from the camp towards the town. So contagious was the wild music that it infected the stolid British soldiers with Gypsy rhythms and made them dance like Dervishes. In the end the Colonel had to give orders to use the five Gypsy fiddlers as a dance orchestra. "If we don't control those blighters," he said to the adjutant, "and ration their accursed music, there will be an end to discipline in this camp. Better see to it that they restrict their fiddling until after sundown." Those raw white packing-case fiddles were indeed a grotesque sight, for they had only a string here and there, and how the Gypsies had managed to scrounge hair for the bows, I know not, but their fiddles worked a potent spell when throbbing under the devilish fingers of the Romanichals. Such glamour the five cast over me that I would stand and stare at them time and time again like one in a trance. In the intervals of feverish fiddling they would say to me: "Why don't you come to Hungary, the country ofmulatni? You are a violinist and every door will be open to you once you play a Magyar tune. No need for you, Signore, to bring money or food; you can wander over the length and breadth of the Puszta, living on music alone." Farkas, the one whose playing fascinated me the most, said to me: " Y o u must come to Transylvania, the land of mountains and forests, where the fiddle originated. I am a Gypsy from Kolozsvar, and those of my tribe know the secrets of the violin and how it came into the world. Do you, stranger, know the story of the violin?" When I shook my head, Farkas told me all his people believed that the violin had a miraculous origin, but the Devil had a hand in it and had fashioned it for a Transylvanian maiden who had prayed to him for assistance. "She was a beautiful girl," said the Gypsy, "and had a rich dowry too, but the people thought her bewitched and no man would ask her in marriage. She was head over ears in love with a farmer, and seeing that he would never cast a look her way the poor girl sighed for him from morn to eve. Can you blame her for praying to the Bengi 'I 232

The Concert Party will give you a magic instrument,' said he, 'but first you must give me your father, your mother and your four brothers.' The girl was bewitched, as I've said before, and she gave them all up without a murmur. Then the Devil out of the body of the father made an instrument, and out of the white hair of the mother's head he fashioned the bow, and out of the four brothers he made the four strings and strung them across the fiddle. 'Now, off with you,' said he, 'and play that fiddle into the youth's ear and he'll follow you to the ends of the earth!' "The girl obeyed and the young man followed her with his eyes set on her as in a trance. And she took his arm and both were wending their way home full ofjoy, when suddenly the Devil appeared in their path and said: 'Now is the time for me to collect my due; both of you must come off with me to hell.' And off they went. As for the violin it lay on the ground in the forest until a ragged Gypsy happened to pass that way, and he found it. And he, stranger, is playing it ever since through the world, and because it is the Devil's instrument men and women go daft when they hear it, and the Gypsy alone knows its secret." Farkas, the Transylvanian Gypsy, taught me many Magyar tunes during those days of 1919, and I remember still the haunting effect that the following lassu had upon me when he played it on his raw white packing-case fiddle. A

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