The Star of the Sea (17 page)

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

¹
Aibéis
: 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

W
HEREIN IS GIVEN AN
A
CCOUNT OF THE LOWLY BOYHOOD OF
P
IUS
M
ULVEY, THE ENDEAVOUR OF HIS HUMBLE
PARENTS
TO GIVE HIM
H
ONEST
B
READ; AND IN SPITE OF THIS, HIS EARLY
I
NGRATITUDE 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.