Tipperary (20 page)

The house spoke of grandeur, with great windows set in walls painted an excellent cream color. A bell jangled to my touch, but no servant appeared, and no sound issued from within. I pulled the bell again.

“Shhhhh!” came an indignant whispered bellow from behind a garden wall. “Do you want to wake the whole house?”

It was past three on a bright afternoon. Then a garden door opened, and I knew my man and he knew me. We exchanged a most vigorous handshake.

“Come in here, come in,” he whispered and led me to the garden. He wore a straw boater with a green hatband, an elaborate shirt, and a waist-coat of yellow, which he tapped.

“I look like a goldfinch, don't I?” He stopped and raised an eyebrow.

“
Carduelis,
” I said.

“Great out,” said Buckley.

“
Elegans,
” I said. “For once you might like the second word.”

“I do. I do.” He wheezed. “And what do you think of the britches?”

“Elegantissimus.”
He wore trousers of broad green and yellow stripes, surmounted by a white cummerbund.

“Show the flag,” said he, still whispering. “The boss loves it,” and he indicated a window upstairs.

Buckley led me to a garden table on which tea service had been set out. He gestured.

“D'you want a cup?” he said. “I always make it for the boss.”

We sat. “I miss you. I'm healing now,” I told him. “I travel the country.”

“D'you know, didn't I hear that? A woman from Kilmacthomas, a Marge Callanan, said she met you. I've sore eyes myself.”

“Use your spittle,” I said. “But you look wonderful.”

We gazed at each other and smiled for the sheer joy of being together.

“Tell me, any news of Mrs. Curry? I often think of her. But she had a bit of the rose-bush about her—enticing to look at and spiky to the touch.”

“How do you come to be here, Buckley?”

“Well, Charles, 'tis a long story but for telling somewhere else. Tell me, did that Miss Taylor ever catch any man? Your mother used to despair of her—the bit of a mustache, I s'pose.” Then Buckley looked past my shoulder and rose to his feet with more respect than I knew he possessed. “Hah, the boss.”

I turned—and I have remembered the moment ever since. Striding toward us came a man I had dreamed about, whom my parents had dreamed about, and he walked in Euclid's dreams too, a man whose name had been spoken in our household many times a day for a decade, a man whose name, stature, and spirit I'd heard being called down in every corner of Ireland that I had so far visited. It behoved me to stand, it behoved me almost to kneel—but I could scarcely move for being awestruck.

Yet I somehow rose as Buckley scampered across the lawns to meet the man he called “the boss.” That Buckley should ever exhibit a sliver of deference speaks in itself volumes for the gentleman approaching. They had a swift and urgent exchange; I was looked at, and the gentleman seemed to be receiving reassurance from Buckley—who then beckoned me.

“Sir, this is Charles O'Brien, from Tipperary. Charles, you know who this is.”

“Well, your name is a good one,” said Charles Stewart Parnell—Father's hero, Mother's hero, Ireland's hero. “I'm well disposed to the name Charles.”

“Sir, it's an excellent name for you to have.” I confess that I did not know what I was speaking.

“I'm pleased that you approve,” he said, and sat down.

He seemed altogether more stern than I had thought. Yes, I had heard my father talk of his fiery speeches, his fearless challenges in the Parliament; and yes, I knew that he had defied the might of the Crown, who'd imprisoned him for his political beliefs and then had to release him, so greatly did the people love him. This man, though, seemed quite consumed with his own authority.

He gestured to me, and I sat down.

“For all your appearance, you do not look like the son of a tenant farmer. Which O'Briens are you?”

“Sir, my father is Bernard O'Brien.”

“Married to a Goldsmith?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Hmm, near Cashel, yes? Your father has what? A hundred and fifty acres? And no tenants?”

“No tenants.”

“And a Catholic?”

“Yes, sir.”

Mr. Parnell rapped the table.

“You see! That's what we're driving for, that's what we want! The O'Briens—they survived all plantations or they refused to be planted? Which was it?”

Buckley intervened. “Sir, if you met Mr. Bernard O'Brien—nothing would drive that man off his farm.”

Did Mr. Parnell's demeanor soften because of my father's—to him politically ideal—status? Perhaps—but how can I judge? At that moment, another ameliorating factor materialized, in the form of a lady who drifted toward us across the grass as though on air. I stood again.

“We have a guest?” she said. “Good!”

“My dear,” said Mr. Parnell, “this is Charles O'Brien.”

“How do you do, madam?”

Mother had impressed upon me to bow slightly when introduced to a married woman, and as I took her hand I observed with pleasure the lady's many rings.

We all conversed easily, Buckley, the Parnells, and I. Mr. Parnell talked of Avondale, his family's home in County Wicklow. I had not been to Rathdrum, I said—the nearby town—though I had heard that it was very pretty.

“No, not at all,” he said, “Rathdrum cannot be recommended, but my family estate is several hundred acres and we have perfect tenant relationships. If the other landlords would but listen to me, we should get a good way toward resolving many of our difficulties.”

His lady said little in all our discourse. She laughed once or twice—I think that she found Buckley amusing—and as she sat a good distance from me, I was able to have a clear view of her. The word “gracious” sprang to mind, though I found her not as gracious perhaps as Mother, by whom I set all standards.

I asked permission to sketch the couple; after some whispered exchanges, it was agreed. I made a rough sketch of them side by side—I knew that I should improve it later.

The sun shone and the tea flowed. We talked of many things, but principally we listened to Mr. Parnell, and I could have listened to him all evening and all night and all next day. Still, I wondered that he had gained such great fame for his filibustering ability in Parliament; he seemed to me a halting speaker, and of a reticent inclination. Yet it must be reported that nobody had such capacity to stay so closely on the point of the argument. Land, land, land was his topic—and soon the shadows changed the light in the garden and the temperature of the air.

When darkness began to gather, it seemed polite to take my leave. To my pleasure, Mr. Parnell accompanied me to the gate. That is how I shall remember him: slight, the beard deeper in texture than I had thought, the eyes wide apart, the face a little round perhaps—and the voice hypnotizing.

We shook hands.

“The best meetings are often in private, Charles O'Brien.”

“Sir, this has been the greatest privilege of my life.”

“You seem a discreet young man.”

“Sir, I like to cultivate distinctiveness.”

He seemed about to ask something of me, but he changed his mind and stepped back from the gate; the night's shadows took Charles Stewart Parnell, and I never saw him again.

In the history of Ireland, few people ever achieved the heroic and poignant stature of Charles Stewart Parnell. Under the political system of the Victorian British Isles, Ireland held elections for the English Parliament. The candidates often came from the more educated—that is to say, the upper—classes. Their voters sent them to the Parliament at Westminster with strong and clear mandates to press for land reform.

For the House of Lords, operations were constructed in a mirror of what had always taken place in England. An Irish peerage was created, of Irish landlords, taken exclusively from the Anglo-Irish. (One of Oscar Wilde's more famous lines was “You should study the peerage, Gerald. . . . It is the best thing in fiction the English have ever done.”)

Thus, among the Irish politicians and peers who sat and spoke at the Parliament in London, an interesting and typically Irish anomaly arose. Some of the voices calling loudest for land reform came from landowners of the Anglo-Irish ruling class.

Parnell was a perfect example. He was elected to the British Parliament in 1875, one of many Anglo-Irish landowners who wanted to change the relationship between Ireland and England, between tenant and landlord.

Close behind that ideal came thoughts of Irish self-rule. The Act of Union, passed in 1800, had cemented the political relationship between Ireland and England so brutally that it rankled more and more.

Over and over, the country's orators pointed to the success of the Americans in 1776 and the French in 1789. One populace threw out the English, and the other threw out the upper classes; in Ireland the targets were, heavenly possibility, as one. With land agitation achieving results, the talk of “Home Rule,” as self-government was called, buzzed louder.

Parnell became key to this. After all, he was the one who had famously said, “No man has the right to set the boundary to the march of a nation.”

Throughout his public life he pursued a policy of obstructionism. Resorting to all-night filibusters, he attacked existing legislation, and then joined the major Irish land reform movements. Hundreds of thousands of people turned out to hear him speak at rallies all over the country.

His stature began to worry the London authorities. They tried to silence him; for his encouragement of—and active part in—violations of the existing land laws, he was jailed.

He had the political astuteness to use the moment as a way of turning up the heat; from prison he told Irish tenants to stop paying their rents. The government made a deal; if Parnell would stop advocating such resistance—which had begun to cause violence—they would release him.

The militants, though, had momentum. Even though Parnell kept his side of the bargain, the killing began to spread. By an unfortunate coincidence it culminated in a major assassination. In 1882, in the Phoenix Park, near Dublin, the Irish Invincibles, an armed secret society, killed Lord Frederick Charles Cavendish and Thomas Burke, respectively chief secretary and undersecretary for Ireland.

Parnell denounced the killers—but he couldn't stop them. The Irish Party, which he led, had habitually voted with the government, keeping it in power. When the government extended tough Irish anti-terrorist laws in response to the assassinations, Parnell and his colleagues voted against them and, in 1885, brought down the government. This gave Parnell a power like no other member of Parliament, and he and the government knew it.

Then came scandal.

That night in London, I visited my cousin in Farringdon. Edward Goldsmith worked as a barrister at the Inns of Court and knew many people. We dined in a chophouse near his rooms, amid a great crowd. Though he is senior to me by several years, he and I have always liked each other; the fact that he near-worships my father would have made us friends in any case. Edward had long professed an admiration for the letters I wrote to him, and he had suggested many times that I work for newspapers. Now he raised it again.

“I know so many people here who would find such an erudite correspondent in Ireland rather appealing. Good Lord, look at the news from Ireland; look at the need for us all to be informed as to what is occurring there daily.”

“This afternoon,” I said, “I took tea with the leading actor in the drama.”

“You mean whom?” Edward put down his chop, which he had held by the lug of the bone.

“And his wife.”

“Whose wife?”

“Mr. Parnell's.”

“Parnell doesn't have a wife.”

“He does. She's named Katharine. I met her today.” And I showed him the sketch, now much improved.

Somebody called his name; and Edward—still startled at my information—looked across the room. He waved and leaned forward to me.

“Now, here's a man who will take an interest in you.”

A lean, pale individual came and stood by us; his black eyebrows met.

“Billy, this is my cousin from Ireland, Charles O'Brien—a writer-in-waiting, if ever there was one.”