He then said that he had seen me before, on the decks at night, and had sometimes thought to approach and to greet me, but that I often seemed preoccupied by cumbersome thoughts. I explained that I was in the habit of walking the deck in the evening to say my prayers in a private manner, that we brethren of the Society of Friends place a weight on silent reflection and scriptural reading rather than ritual or ceremony. At that, he took from his greatcoat pocket a small leather-bound book which he shewd to me. Imagine my humility when I saw it was a little bible, so perfect and neat.
‘Perhaps Your Honour and meself might read together for a moment,’ he said.
At those words I own I was taken aback, in the first place that he was able to read at all, and in the second that he wished to read with myself; but how could I disagree? We sat down in a nook together and he quietly commenced to share with me from the First of Paul to the Corinthians, on the theme of Christian charity to our fellows. I was moved almost unto tears, he read so simply, and yet with such sincere devotion to the Word. Truly I felt the Spirit of Light come down. For those few moments there was such blessed peace between this stranger and I, with no shallow and worldly sense of myself being Captain and he frightened passenger; rather of both trusting to that same Admiral of Ages whose providence shall pilot all good pilgrims through the tempests of doubt. How preciously remarkable are the ways of the Saviour, that an unfortunate man so down on his luck might find nourishment and sustenance in the immutable verities of the scriptures. When we who have so much for which to be thankful so often want in gratitude to Our Father which gave it. How ashamed I was now of my weakness and self-pity, traits which in men are disgraceful.
‘William Swales’ is the name of this poor distorted man, so I discerned, for there it was inscribed, on the frontispiece of his bible.
I said I had never heard that surname on an Irishman before and enquired if it was characteristic of Connermara, his impoverished homeland now left far behind. He smiled gently and sadly and replied that it was not. The most frequently occurring names among the people there were ‘Costilloe’, ‘Flaherty’, ‘Halloran’ or ‘Keeley’. The name ‘Nee’ was well known in a place called Cashel; the name ‘Joyce’ in a townland called the Recess. ‘Tis Cashel for Nees and Recess for Joyces’ was a thing often said in that locality. Indeed, he smiled again, one could truthfully say that everyone in that little corner of the world had been a Nee or a Joyce at some time in his past. (All those appellations I had heard many times before, and have uttered the words of burial over scores of their bearers, alas.)
He told me an interesting thing: that the surname ‘Costilloe’ is derived from the Spanish noun ‘Castillo’, a castle. And that in the time of the Armada a great ship of Spain was lost and wrecked on the coast of Galloway County, many of the sailors remaining in Ireland thereafter, but I do not know if it is true. In fact I think it is probably not, but a captivating yarn whether yea or nay. (Nevertheless it is conspicuous that a portion of those in steerage do indeed have the dusky features of the Iberian peoples and in their mode of thinking are as remote from our own English race as the Hottentot, Watutsi, Mohammedan or Chinee.)
The more we talked, the better friends we became; and at length he asked if he might speak to me candidly about a certain matter. I said I would be happy to assist him if I could. He said his aged father was extremely indisposed back at home in Galloway, and he hoped soon to raise the necessary to convey him from that place of destitution and into America. I said that was an admirable and Christian plan; respect for the aged conferring dignity on giver and receiver, the both. He then expressed a great interest in any paid work that might be available on board, such as cleaning the First-Class cabins or staterooms or any other duties of that nature. I said regretfully we had no need at present but would bear him in mind should any such opportunity arise.
At that he looked most crestfallen and said he truly was in need of an opportunity. He was loath to ask for charity and vowed he never should. He realised he had the shameful aspect of a beggar at this present hour, but he had been a proud man in former times (before his injury). He was accustomed to the company of fine people, he said, having once been a manservant to a baron in Dublin (a gentleman named Lord Nimmo, of whom I had not heard). No, he had not a testimonial on his person at present, his papers and pocketbook having been stolen by vagabonds at Liverpool, but he was sure his skills must be of use still. And now he came to the meat of his point.
If, for example, our esteemed passenger Lord David Merridith were to need assistance of that kind (or any other kind) on the voyage, perhaps I might be pleased to recommend him as an honest sort. No fine gentleman such as Lord Merridith should be without his personal man, he averred. Perhaps I might accentuate that he, Swales, was a scion of Connermara like Lord David himself; one who had always esteemed Lord Merridith’s family, particularly his late mother, a saint amongst women and greatly revered among the impoverished of that country. Would I please say to His Lordship, poor Swales asked me, that he was a man who had fallen on hard times through injury, but was neither afraid of labour nor loyalty. Even that impairment which had disfigured his body had served only to strengthen his valuation for the gift of life. And now, by the grace of Almighty God, he had almost succeeded in overcoming it compleatly, and could walk and work like a luckier man. It would be the greatest privilege to assist Lord Merridith, he said. He believed he could do him very good service if only permitted that honour and boon. Merely to be close to him he would consider a blessing.
I said Lord Kingscourt was fortunate indeed to enkindle such a devotion as this, particularly in one who had not met him, and should certainly recommend him, should need or opportunity arise. He said he intended no offence but would I possibly oblige him by swearing to that. I replied that we Quakers resile from the taking of oaths, as such, but I would promise it to him as man to man.
At that point tears of gratitude arose in the poor fellow’s eyes and soon threatened to overcome him quite utterly.
‘God and Holy Mary bless Your Honour’s kindness,’ he said humbly, and clasped me by the hand. ‘I will say an Ave for you tonight, and every other in my life, as true as God is my witness.’
Then he asked me to give him counsel as to what work he might turn his hand to in America. I said America was a grand land, a country of the largest liberty, the only nation of equality and federative self-government on the face of the earth at present. Any young fellow who would be industrious and put away national peculiarities might find happiness there, so I told my new friend, and make a success of himself and end as smug as a schoolmarm. The best farmland in the world could there be had for a few dollars an acre; the soil so fertile it was told by a Cherokee Indian I once encountered at Charlestown, Sth. Carolina that a stick placed into the ground would grow into a mighty tree. At this he was amazed as a seraph who had awoken in Manchester. But then he said he had no wherewithal to buy land, having sold all he possessed in the world to sustain his ailing parent, and various little orphaned nephews and nieces, the residue being taken up by the price of his passage. (Such is the desperation of the wretched people to escape their condition.)
I said I had heard that there were good opportunities for a man who would work at ordinary labouring, such as on the railroad building or swamp clearing or mining for silver or gold, where rudimentary food and lodgings were also provided. Canal digging, ditching, laying stone walls and the like. Here I mentioned by ensample the splendid Great Eyrie Canal which runs 353 miles from Albany to Buffalo, its 83 locks and 18 aqueducts being built in the main by his own Irish countrymen; a magnificent adornment to civilisation and Free Trade. Also that tree-fellers were always required, whole territories of that continent being heavily wooded with forests even larger than the entire isle of Ireland. He was very attentive as I spoke about such matters and seemed to regard America as like unto another planet and not part of the Earth. Was it true, he desired to know, that in America at the present moment it was not
night-time but afternoon? And on the Pacific coast of that continent it was now morning-time?
I explained that for every degree of Longitude west we are four minutes earlier than Greenwich, and for each one minute of distance four seconds are gained. So it was already tomorrow in London, he said, and I confirmed that it was. ‘Arrah, what a miracle,’ he sighed. ‘They say that “tomorrow never comes” but it is already here, God and Mary bless us.’ And so it must follow, he further said, that if a man spent a year travelling westwards around the world he would arrive home in Ireland the day before he left. And if he kept at this for the rest of his life he would grow up into a newborn babe instead of a crooked old fellow. How happy to be able to turn back time, he remarked, and thereby undo the impieties of boyhood folly.
At first I thought the poor simpleton had misunderstood my meaning in his childish innocence but then he clarified that he was making a witticism and we laughed together jollily until I bade him good-night. He was still laughing away as I left him. And not one minute ago he walked past my cabin and peeped in through the porthole, still happily laughing and waving. ‘The scriptures instruct that we are to become as children,’ he exclaimed. ‘And now we know how, sir: it is to keep travelling westerly.’ I laughed back to my professor: ‘Tear mahurr!’ And he bade me a peaceful rest and shuffled on humbly by himself.
What an example that man is. Truly the angels are come among us every day. Our difficulty is so often that in our vanity and worldliness we so utterly fail to recognise them for what they are.
… the Irish in America are particularly well recvd. and looked upon as Patriotic republicans, and if you were to tell an American you had flyd your country or you would have been hung for treason against the Government, they would think ten times more of you and it would be the highest trumpet sounded in your praise.
Letter from James Richey, Ulster immigrant to Kentucky
1Aibéis: the sea (archaic, from English, ‘an abyss’). Muir or Mora: Old Irish: the sea. Glumraidh: hunger, devouring, powerful sea-waves. Dia Duit: a greeting, ‘May God be with you’. Mulvey was speaking the truth about words meaning ‘land’. Gaelic is a language of lapidarian precision. (Rodach, for example, is the Irish word for ‘sea-weed growth on timber under water’.) For the following list of words for land, by no means exhaustive, we are indebted to the graciousness of Mr James Clarence Mangan of the Ordnance Survey office at Dublin, and to the scholarship of his associates, Messers O’Curry, O’Daly and O’Donovan. (Occasionally they disagree about spelling or accents.) Abar. marshy land. Ar: ploughed land. Banb: land unploughed for a year. Banba: mythical name for Ireland. Bárd: enclosed pasture land. Brug: land, a holding. Ceapach: a tillage plot, fallow land. Dabach: a measure of land. Fonn: land. Ithla: an area. Iomaire: a ridge. Lann: an enclosure of land. Leanna: a lea. Macha: arable land, a field. Murmhagh: land liable to flooding by the sea. Oitír: a low promontory. Rói: a plain. Riasg: a moor or fen. Sescenn: marshy land. Srath: a meadow or holm along banks of a river or lake. Tír: land, dry land (as opposed to sea), a country (as in Tír na nÓg, the mythical land of youth; a Paradise). Fiadhair is the Scots-Gaelic word for lay or fallow land. Fiadháir is the Irish adjective for ‘a wild or uncultivated person’. – GGD
CHAPTER XI
THE BALLAD-MAKER
WHEREIN IS GIVEN AN ACCOUNT OF THE LOWLY BOYHOOD OF PIUS MULVEY, THE ENDEAVOUR OF HIS HUMBLE PARENTS TO GIVE HIM HONEST BREAD; AND IN SPITE OF THIS, HIS EARLY INGRATITUDE AND DEGENERACY.
Pius Mulvey’s parents were dirt-poor smallholders, his father a local, Michael Dennis Mulvey, born on the estate of the Blakes of Tully. A large-headed, bony-featured shaft-horse of a man who had hammered his cabin’s foundations out of the tombstones of his ancestors, he married Elizabeth Costello, a one-time scullery maid in the convent at Loughglinn in County Roscommon.
Mulvey’s mother, a foundling child of Catholic refugees driven from Ulster, had been taught to read by the nuns who had raised her, and she thought the skill a useful one. Indeed she saw it as more than that; as a sign you regarded the world as fundamentally knowable, your place in it definable and open to change. Reading, to Elizabeth Costello, was an indication of decency. Her husband considered it a waste of time.
You couldn’t eat a book, as Mulvey’s father would point out. Nor could you wear one, or use one to thatch your cabin. He had nothing against reading when practised by others. (In fact he took a certain pride in his wife’s ability to do it and often let it slip to their neighbours that she could, in the forgivable way that lovers brag about each other’s competencies.) It was merely that he saw it as objectively useless, like quadrille dancing or archery or playing croquet, a fatuous amusement for the children of the gentry. His wife disagreed. She ignored her husband. As soon as they were old enough to walk and speak she began to teach her sons the skill of reading.
Pius, though younger, was the better reader of the two. His mind was quick and it worked by a logic that was almost as impressive as it was eerily unchildlike. By the time he was four he could read the simpler paragraphs of the missal; aged six, he could decipher the terms of a rental receipt. Reading became his party-piece. At a family gathering, a wake or a Christmas hooley, other children would step forward to sing a rhyme or dance a hornpipe. Mulvey would open the battered English dictionary his father had scavenged from a midden heap at the back of his landlord’s house and recite from its mouldering pages to the astonished grown-ups. ‘My son, the scholar,’ his father would chuckle. And Pius would explain how to spell the word ‘scholar’. And his mother would quietly weep for joy as he did.
His brother’s reactions were more complicated. Nicholas Mulvey was a year older than Pius; stronger, better looking and far more likeable. Not quite as blessed with his mother’s intelligence, he was sufficiently intelligent to apprehend the loss of his power, and possessed of enough of his father’s determination to fight that loss when he saw it threaten him. It took him many hours to learn what Pius could learn in minutes, but he wasn’t afraid to put in the hours. He was a serious, methodical, religiously inclined boy, with an eldest child’s sense of fussy protectiveness, which waged constant war with his eldest child’s dread of being quietly superseded. He battled with his sibling for the greater part of their mother’s love, and the principal weapon was the ability to read.
Slowly, persistently, with the doggedness of the untalented, Nicholas Mulvey gained on his gifted brother. In time he began to pass him by. His vocabulary grew, his pronunciation improved, his knowledge of the subtleties of grammar became impressive. Perhaps it was simply that Pius wasn’t bothered any more, was sufficiently confident of having already won the honours to display a jaded contempt for the game. By then Nicholas Mulvey could read like a bishop. He needed no dictionary to explain how words were spelled.
Their father died from a horse kick when Nicholas was seventeen, their mother a year later, many said of grief. Returning to their cabin from their mother’s funeral the brothers had wept in each other’s arms and sworn on her memory to make the decent life she had struggled all her own life to give them. For a year they had tilled the stony patch of their father’s tenancy, through a back-breaking winter of work and panic. There was little money. There was never enough money. The few sticks of furniture comprising their entire property were quickly pawned to cover the rent; all except for their parents’ bed. To sell your parents’ bed would invite bad luck, or so it was attested by the local people. The brothers needed no more of that commodity than had already come into their inheritance.
Often enough they went without food. Their rags turned to ribbons on their aching backs. They tried for a while to keep the cabin clean; but it was the bachelor cleanliness of young single Irishmen, raised by a mother who had been their handmaiden. Sheets were turned over instead of being laundered, cups only washed when no clean ones were left. They slept together in their parents’ bed; the bed in whose warmth they had been conceived and born, suckled as babies, soothed as toddlers, worried for
as children, prayed for as young men, and in which their father and mother had died.
Pius Mulvey began to think he might die in it, too.
It frightened him even more than having become what he was; that figure unimaginable to the young: an orphan. More than poverty and hunger it began to claw at him: the picture of himself and his heartbreakingly courageous brother growing old and then dying in that mountainside cabin. Nobody to mourn them or even to notice they were gone. No bedmate, ever, except for each other. The hills of Connemara abounded with such men. Bent, dead-eyed, ancient brothers who shuffled through life with the cross of loneliness on their backs. They limped into Clifden, laughed at by girls, to Midnight Mass on a Christmas Eve. Virgin old donkey-men with womanly faces. They reeked of their isolation, of stale piss and lost chances. Pius Mulvey did not find them comical. He could scarcely bear to picture their lives.