A Love Affair

by T. H. WHITE

I GOT out of the bus in a bad temper — bored, exhausted, and angry about being driven across Ireland in these bloody vehicles, which had remarks written on them in Gaelic that nobody could understand. Korus Umpar Airan: that was what it sounded like. Ridiculous. And Ireland, the one individualistic place which of all places ought not to be nationalized, had turned its transport over to the Farewell State of Mr. De Valera. “Farewell, a long farewell to all my greatness.”

But damn the Nationalists for making me change at half a hundred stops, as it seemed; for writing Telefón on telephone boxes which could just as well have been described in the words of the Italian who invented them; and, more than all, and even more unreasonably, double-damn them for making me bring these two untrained shooting dogs a couple of hundred miles. I had a setter and a pointer, and they had to be taught shooting. Both had been sick more than once, and we were not welcome in nationalized conveyances, and we had had to suck up to ten thousand bus conductors for mere tolerance. The thing was to get the dogs to be sick on the step of the bus. Some conductors could put up with this, some could not. Through Mullingar, through the various bishoprics, we had pressed on with bloody, green-hatted energy. My less rabid companion in the dart was a schoolmaster from the east coast.

This teacher or ollamh, who had taught me whatever I knew of his beautiful but infuriating language, was real. He was a short, determined master—a teaching man who had somehow married a birdlike woman who might have been a ballet dancer. His wife once told me that if he drank one dram too much of whisky, his heart would actually throb the bed. His heart, like a bird’s, really shook his frame, and so it did hers, and so did hers his. They were angels — as if he had been Toscanini and she some famous duchess from Knowle.

He got out of the bus behind me and looked on with amusement while I fussed with bags and baggage. It was night by now, and the vehicle took itself off, diminishing across the boundless turf and under the boundless skies of Mayo, burrowing along in its own cocoon of light between the two, until its bright windows were only a glowworm of the vasty moorland — but still full of women from market and drunk farmers and black shawls and untidy parcels, all of which I equally loathed for the time being. As a matter of fact, the deeper we had got into the adored province, the more we had been recognized by friend after friend, the less the busmen had persecuted us, and the better we had been teased or quizzed or welcomed, until the final conductor had practically been tugging my famous whiskers in good humor and warmth of heart.

I was in no mood for all this. Many months on the east coast and in England, among the fillersup-of-forms, had reduced me to the natural meanness of civilization. I was convinced that we had caught the wrong connection at Mullingar, lost our cartridges or guns at Ballina, been robbed somewhere intermediately, and probably had not got the right kind of ration books or passports or identity cards or dog licenses or shooting permits or practically anything else for where we were meant to be. Those months had made me forget that the body cannot be nourished on bits of paper. I had forgotten that man needs only water, food, fire, and sleep — in that order — none of which were well represented by printed forms. I had forgotten that in the west this fact was remembered. Also, I had forgotten that if you were robbed, you were robbed. The world did not come to an end for that reason. And the incidence of larceny at Piccadilly Circus was above 5000 per cent higher than it was anywhere west of Ballina.

Séamus O’Flynn, the teacher who was taking a fortnight’s holiday at my shooting lodge to help with the dogs (for he was a passionate shooter and trainer of animals), examined my gyrations with sympathetic amusement. I had been bullying him for the last fifty miles about where the cartridges were. He knew that they were either where they were, or were not. He came from the south of Ireland. Although he did not quite share the same accent, he did share the same culture as the western Gael; and he looked down upon me with a friendly smile, rather as the giant Gulliver must have examined the Lilliputians.

Incidentally, in the troubles, Séamus had been on the run, chased by the race and policy then represented and still represented by me. His life had been in his own hands then, and in the hands of his compatriots. I disagreed with his political views, as he disagreed with mine. We held a neutrality of esteem on these subjects. I think he would have shot me if told to do so by authority— because he was a Catholic and therefore conditioned to accept orders.

I do not think that anything would have persuaded me to shoot Séamus, because I had been brought up to protest against authority. I might, as an armed guard detailed to take him away and execute him, have said: Well, run, you ass, while I pretend to do up my bootlace. But I would not have given him this law, I admit, if there had been a sergeant watching, who could shoot me for sparing him.

These heart-searchings were getting us no further toward the sitnation in the now ill-lit hamlet — the bus had been the main illumination — in which I was dashing about, like a cockchafer in a hatbox, proclaiming that the skis and the pemmican and the snow-glasses and the pitons and the important parts of the oxygen apparatus and the infrared camera and every single file of the card index had been lost or stolen, or had strayed, so that we should never get up my mental Everest.

Some amused silence on the part of observers must have brought me to my senses, for I looked up at last. There was Cathal Barrett standing in the light of the grocer’s window—where he had been taking a glass of whisky while waiting to meet us. He was a wiry fellow of sixty or more, with a drooping blond mustache and faded blue eyes, out. of which he regarded me with the wonderful, polite, protective attention which only the best ghillies in Scotland can afford to their lairds.

He had taken over both dogs the moment we alighted, and was holding them on tight leads, so that their forelegs were almost on tiptoe with immobility. This maddened me still further. The Irish, I thought. Barbarians: cruel to animals! As a fact, it was far the best way to hold headstrong puppies, who, if allowed a long leash, simply throttle their windpipes on the end of it; whereas, if only given an inch or two, they support their jawbones on the collar. It was to be at least ten days before it dawned on me that Cathal had been handling setters when my own nurse was handling safety pins.

I took the dogs from him insultingly, signifying that, robbed and benighted as I was, I was ready to mount the local taxi which he had hired for us, with what remained of our luggage.

As to the luggage — what a good word “luggage” is, by the way; we had lugged it across Ireland — the few pieces not there at the time were delivered, without charge, before breakfast next morning. We ascended the taxi.

Five miles further into the bog, wedged together with dogs and gunboxes and the faintly anxiouslooking Cathal —he was anxious not to be rude to me in return for my rudeness —our headlights turned to the right through a broken gateway into a tunnel of overgrown rhododendrons, and into, precisely, the year 1889.

Glenalfron Lodge was like this, and for good reason.

2

IN GUERNSEY, in the Channel Islands, the city of Paris has preserved Victor Hugo’s ridiculous home exactly as he pompously left it. For a small fee, it is possible to enter the house and to experience the uneasy feeling that at any moment the old gentleman may open the front door with his own key, stump upstairs smelling faintly of tobacco, and sit down on his water closet — which has blue cabbage roses on the enormous bowl, and the sort of piston which one has to pull upward in a cataract of Hugolike noises.

In 1889, when Cathal Barrett was scarcely born, its absentee landlords had walked out of it, perhaps on account of some minor unpleasantness about being shot by the locals, and had never come back. For all anybody seemed to know, they might by now have become extinct, though their heirs and assignees did have a solicitor somewhere in Kent, from whom I had hired the mansion.

Cathal’s parents and himself had, since that momentous day, farmed the land and studiously inhabited only the kitchen, dusting the other rooms fairly often, preserving everything in situ against the never-coming day of the master’s return.

How glorious, in the era of atomic weapons and of proximity fuses, to be able to step straight into a smoking room of the nineties — dank and musty, with mildewed leather fringes on the bookshelves — and to pick up the calabash pipe set down by some indignant sportsman in a Norfolk jacket and spats, his backside still tingling from the traditional charge of buckshot inflicted by the tenantry! There, on the round mahogany table, was the very latest number of the Strand Magazine with the globe of its streetlamp on the cover. There for the more highbrowladies, if I am not getting my dates mixed, was an avant-garde periodical calling itsell the Nineteenth Century, and in it —could it have been? — an article by some subaltern called Churchill or by the new writer called Kipling. The smoking cap, unless this is an exaggeration, hung on the door; certainly the deerstalker hung in the hall, among the antlers.

In the ladies’ bedrooms there were curling tongs and rolls of false hair and red books with their covers licked, in lieu of rouge, and bits of rice paper for face powder. In the men’s bedrooms there were cycling breeches and dancing pumps with bows on them, and cut-throat razors marked for the days of the week. Yes, and there was a half-empty bottle of Rowland’s Macassar Oil, still sporting its astonishing list of patrons.

The advertisements in the magazines were entrancing. In blacker ink than we now have, on shinier paper, they displayed babies reaching for cakes of soap out of hip baths; cones or pyramids of some mysterious substance which could be ignited against asthma; ladies in bloomers leaning on bicycles; dressmakers’ busts with knobs instead of heads and cages instead of legs and undivided bosoms leaning forward. The illustrations of the stories were engraved with wonderful detail, showing coy maidens with masses of high hair being grasped in moonlit woods by inhibited gentlemen in high collars. In the Irish stories there were fairies here and there, with dragonfly wings and toadstools and bits of shamrock and plenty of jolly Paddies leading pigs on strings. While in the humor to comment on words, by the way, what an excellent word “shamrock” is: its first syllable is definitive. Nobody in the west cared a fig about its symbolism.

Then there were ancient salmon flies in the drawers, with eyes of gut, now unreliable, and bushy hackles, but still recognizable as Jock Scotts or Alexandras; and machines for turning over the tops of cartridges or measuring their charges; and heavy wooden reels with brass fittings; and glovestretchers of ivory; and tarnished, silver-topped bottles; and a letter or two from Tommy at Simla; and a dance program with its white pencil still attached; and a gamebook in which somebody had defiantly entered 3½ brace of grouse.

In the drawing room, there were fans and peacock feathers and pampas grass.

Among the kerosene lamps, and plush chairs, and tablecloths with bobbles on them, and stereoscopic holders for viewing three-dimensional pictures of the Sphinx, and stuffed pheasants, and mothballs, and albums with clasps, and carriage whips, and enormous hats with sea gulls transfixed by jet hatpins, and boot trees, and dangerous engines for making aerated water, and little flower vases for buttonholes, and golf balls of gutta-percha and a cleek — among these, since it was Ireland, there were inevitably two or three pieces of eighteenth-century silver — candlesticks and the like — with good cut-glass decanters and several empty claret bottles. Over everything there was a microscopic film of dust.

So forgotten, so lost, so distant, so remote from shops was this blissful abode of peace that the Barretts had killed a sheep for our provision; and this, without a refrigerator, we were gradually to consume from top to toe during the next fortnight of summer weather.

3

YES, the word was sanctum or sanctuary. Into this sanctum, Cathal ushered us with deference—by the soft light of an oil lamp with a smoked chimney.

He was a man, we slowly discovered, who was as singular as the house which he inhabited. He was a poet.

There is a secret world of literature, unknown to professional writers and even to collectors of folklore, which covers the globe in an infinitely thin veneer. All the people in this coating know each other, but are unknown outside the layer. They publish in the back pages of Old Moore’s Almanack.

From Chicago to Calcutta to Cork, under signatures or initials or names of the pen, “Erin Go Braw” addresses his melodious rhymes to P.J.W ., while Evan Williams tunes a note of exhortation to “Aussie Boy.” Their subjects are Spring, Moonlight, Patriotism, Colleens, Mother Love, or the merits of one another. They often set versified riddles or anagrams or conundrums. Their interests are studious, their craftsmanship complicated, their minds similar to those of chess players, and their courtesy, if sometimes inclined to a learned dig or leg-pull, invariably above suspicion. Presumably they are lonely people with infinite leisure, living in lighthouses and weather ships and wigwams and igloos and Irish bogs, looking forward to the publication of next year’s Old Moore, doing all the puzzles of this year, inventing the most subtle diversions and “cracks” and “teasers” with which to encourage, improve, reprove, or entertain their friends.

Cathal was one of them, He was one of the chief bards of the Almanack. He frequently set a conundrum to “Semper Fidelis” in the Antipodes; was locally famous and spoken of with awe for having appeared in print; and he was certain that I, as a professional writer, would make fun of him. I do not mean to ao so. It is difficult to rise to the top of any profession, and, the more recondite the profession is, the greater the competition. If I have any claim to be the equal of Cathal, it is that I, in open struggle, heat after heat, on Radio Eireann, was once acclaimed the leading Bard of Erin myself, and was awarded more than one prize of five shillings.

The chastity of the Irish is a subject which never ceases to baffle the Anglo-Saxon. Perhaps they mature later, perhaps it has something to do with their very ancient cenobitic form of Christianity, perhaps there is an economic reason tied up with the poverty of small, unfruitful farms— but the fact is that the Gael marries late. It is a little difficult in the modern world to imagine people who do not divorce one another and who wait to be married until they are fully grown — indeed, until they are middle-aged. Perhaps it is because they mate for life, and expect to be continent and faithful, that they marry so slowly and with such precaution. Perhaps also the occasional violence of the Irish — their eruptions may be due to repression of the carnal instincts. Until they are wedded, the menfolk of Mayo are called “boys.” Cathal remained a boy until the last decade of his life.

Imagine that lifetime on the heathery mountains, and the keen eyes, once brilliantly blue, missing no movement of sheep or cattle, wild goose or hare, hawk or solitary neighbor. What secret longings must Cathal have had, what thwarted and complicated puzzles or daydreams, as he shepherded on the high shoulders of Slieve Fyach in the lonely sunlight. He was noticeably gentle with animals, He had held the dogs that evening on the short leash to help them, not to punish. To beat a dog — and this was rare among keepers — would have struck him as madness. For forty-five years, since the beginning of manhood, he had loitered about Glenaffron in rain or shine, often with his still hand on the head of the dog which helped with the herding — patient, waiting for something, silent and watchful as the dog beside.

So there we were, in this astonishing house with its faithful and accomplished gamekeeper who had bided sixty years for his master to come home and had dusted the calabash or meerschaum at least once a week, lie was slightly on the defensive, could not quite make us out for not being cross about that charge of buckshot in his employer’s trousers, knew perfectly well that I was a bigger gun than he was in the literary world, and, while expecting the Saxon insult which he had every reason to foresee after our first meeting, still watched me with grave and accommodating politeness — while I trained the setter and the pointer quite amiss. The most difficult thing in the world is to know how to do a thing and to watch somebody else doing it wrong, without comment. Cathal managed it.

After nearly fifteen years, when I know better about dogs, I realize that he was training me, just as I thought myself to be training them.

But the point of the story is a love affair. It was over the course of more than one year that I finally discovered its features. He concealed it from me, with the sensitive reticence of the Gael, and I made no particular efforts to ferret it out.

Perhaps it was a commonplace in Mayo.

At one time, when over sixty and a bachelor, it had struck this sandy-mustached, moist-eyed bard and ghostly ghillie that he was now in an economic position to get married. So he had put into action the existing machinery.

He had sent for the local matchmaker, provided him with a bottle of whisky to take away, and had stated his financial position with its possibilities. Leave you all to me, the matchmaker had said, for I have the very girl you need.

The matchmaker had then put the necessary bottle in his pocket, had walked across the mountain into the next glen, and had set the bottle on the table. Glens are as separate from one another as fjords are.

On sight of the matchmaker and the bottle, which had not to be broached until the decent moment, the daughter of the house, a strong and pretty girl about eighteen, had been sent forth to count the chickens. It had been stated, after ceremonious nuances, that Cathal had such and such assets, while the girl might expect in dowry a pig and a cow. The bottle had then been uncorked.

Cathal, over sixty, met his bride, under twenty, for the first time, actually at the altar where they were married.

A deplorable state of affairs!

The only trouble about it was that my schoolmaster and myself were a bit of a bore to the Barretts, during our harvest stay, eating that putrefying sheep. They could never be sure of being alone together; and, however tactful we were about absenting ourselves on mountains or coughing when approaching their small hayfield, they had too little time, what with suckling the happy babies and dodging behind the haycocks for another heartwarming hug, to attend to the less lovely and gentle duties of hospitality.