Tipperary (42 page)

“In eventually finding for Mrs. Burke-Somerville, and in awarding her costs and compensation for Chancery's neglect of the house in its vacated state, the learned judge garlanded his Judgment with caution. The final paragraph of his Judgment reads: ‘I am aware that I am standing on grounds more fought over than anything in the Bible, capable of igniting more fire than Vesuvius. And yet a bridgehead must be established. We own what we know we own, and the knowing forms a central claim to what I may define as Notional Title. If Notional Title can be supported by evidence of any kind—even evidence that has been clouded by the mists of time and unrecorded circumstances, and by the furtiveness of the past—if such cloudy evidence points toward Notional Title, then, as in this case, I feel sure that the law must behave as in Nature, and observe the principle of Natural Home. And so, Notional Title becomes Natural Title.’ ”

The two pieces of evidence asterisked by Mr. Prunty run as follows in the transcript:

Mr. Stephen Somerville: What made you believe in your and your father's rights to this property?

Miss Burke: It is something that I simply knew was right from the moment I heard of it.

Mr. Somerville: How old were you when you first heard of Tipperary Castle?

Miss Burke: I believe about ten years old.

Mr. Somerville: And when you went there—at, I believe, the age of twenty-two?

Miss Burke: I felt that I had come home. It is something that I cannot describe.

Mr. Dermot Noonan, cross-examining: How closely did you observe Miss Burke's demeanor on that day?

Mr. O'Brien: Very attentively.

Mr. Noonan: Which is why you have felt able to tell the court that she seemed “so at one”—your term—with Tipperary Castle and its land?

Mr. O'Brien: She seemed wonderfully natural when there. And it is my belief that she had never been in an Irish field in her life. She lived in London.

Mr. Noonan: You were in love with her in those days, were you not?

Mr. O'Brien: Yes.

Mr. Noonan: And therefore biased in her favor, surely?

Mr. O'Brien: Justice must always supersede love.

Mr. Noonan: But you are prepared to give evidence in her favor?

Mr. O'Brien: If honest to do so, yes.

Mr. Noonan: Are you still in love with her?

Mr. O'Brien: That is an entirely improper question. She has married.

5

T
he estate of Tipperary Castle was awarded to April Somerville in 1911. All over the county few people talked of anything else. The archives of
The Nationalist
in Clonmel show the coverage—page after page, week after week.

Opinion split three ways. The Anglo-Irish welcomed somebody who had married one of their own: now those who wanted to stay on in their estates felt strengthened. Moderate Irish people felt perhaps that some kind of ancestral justice had been done to the name of Burke but also felt a little cheated at the entry of a Somerville—a Protestant. And republicans, dreaming of independence and the recovery of all ancestral lands, fumed at the loss of thousands of rich acres.

By now, Joe Harney had gone to Queen's College in Cork (today, University College Cork). And Charles distributed his life between lingering at home, visiting and staying with various friends, such as Lady Mollie Carew, and—far fewer—bouts of travel as a healer.

During weekends, Harney took the train to Tipperary and stayed with the O'Briens, even when Charles had gone elsewhere. On vacations, though, he traveled with Charles, and his company may have been enjoyable, but it must also have proven distracting. The evidence—or lack of it—suggests that Charles compiled little observation of the country's social and political life during that time. Nor does he seem to have made any significant contribution to newspapers or journals.

It's not as though he lacked matter to report or comment upon. Ireland raged with talk of Home Rule or the possibility of a republican insurgency. Europe—and the world—fretted about the probability of a war declared by Germany. Both issues had a synergy, because Irish activists saw in the likelihood of a war a chance to put on pressure and achieve, as a beginning, Home Rule.

Given all of this material and, as we have already seen, Charles's liking for discussing the events on a large stage, his silence seems peculiar. The answer comes in his mother's journal for Sunday, 25 January 1914. By and large, her weekend entries were her longest; this was an exception.

It is over. The dread that I have carried for more than forty years has arrived. Its cargo will become the weight I bear now to my grave. We buried my beloved son on Friday. In the rain and sleet we lowered him into the ground. I am unable to sit or stand. My heart is screaming. It is against the law of the world that a child should pre-decease its parents.

Poor Euclid, how I shall miss him. When the hour comes tomorrow that I should wake him from his afternoon sleep, and give him a cup of tea—what shall I do? It is ten o'clock and the night outside is quiet. I shall not sleep. Nor will Bernard, who is speechless with grief.

As this is a History of my own life as well as of my country in my time, I shall here acknowledge my brother, Euclid. He passed away on a January day when we all sat with him. I have seen patients die, I have seen them struggle to live, despite their mortal ailments, and I have seen them slip away as quietly and swiftly as a fish into a dark pool. Euclid lingered; he rallied—two, three, four times. If he knew that he was passing from us, he did not say.

In the previous few years he had grown frailer by the month, then by the week; and since Christmas, by the day. Seeing his condition, I had not returned to the road. In the second week of January, Mother asked Father and me whether we should place Euclid's bed by the fire in the larger drawing-room—what we call the Terrace Room—because the long windows give out onto the terrace and thence with a view to the wood. That day, with much effort, we moved a spare bed to a place near the fire; and a day-bed into the room, also, where I lay many nights, talking to him, telling him “tales from the road,” as he called them. I carried Euclid downstairs on the day we moved his bed; I have carried five-year-old children who weighted heavier.

He had, Mother now says, ailed since birth. Food never sat well with him; he picked here and there at his plate, he ate like a bird and not a beast. Thin since infancy, he never gained a continuous robustness. I recall no more than two summers, and those not in succession, when Euclid looked strong and healthy, and even then, the impression came principally from the sun's tanning of his face.

We have never known the name or cause or root of his ailment. I believe that he had a weakness since birth, that he lacked a density of blood. He was born into a household where his three family members bulge with energy—and he was granted none.

But he had the grandest soul. He had wit, humor, quickness, and a fire in his heart that, had it warmed his body, would have taken him upright through life. I believe that he was undermined by his own puzzlement at what ailed him, and that he railed at whatever denied him the same physical force as his father, mother, or brother.

He attempted to compensate with deliberate oddity in his demeanor, and with out-of-the-ordinary intellectual inquiry. Too poorly always to join a college or university, he surrounded himself with books—of all kinds, on all manner of subjects. To Euclid, the discovery of a new fact was as a gemstone to a lady; it thrilled him, he turned it this way and that, to let the light shine on it, and he carried it with him proudly, his beauty enhanced by showing it to the world.

I believe that he decided to die. The new place to lie, close to the heart of the house, rather than remote in his bedroom, seemed to elevate him for a time. He much enjoyed the flames in the larger fireplace; he found the influx of company exciting—because those who called to the house now engaged with him, brought him news. Perhaps we made the move too late— many years too late. Had we sacrificed the Terrace Room earlier, would the energy of the world,as it came to our door, have kept him alive?

But I believe that he had already taken his decision.

He told nobody. On the Sunday, I was sitting with him at two o'clock in the afternoon. The fire blazed; Mother and Father had driven to Holycross, where our long-retired and now ancient housekeeper, Mrs. Ryan, had fallen ill. Euclid took a little soup, no more than a spoon or two, and he had said little all day. Then he spoke.

“What do you offer for a pain in the chest and arms?”

I asked him, “Show me where.”

“It's been here”—he indicated his left shoulder and upper arm— “since Thursday; it keeps coming back.”

I said, “Let me get my bags.”

Euclid shook his head. “I can't take anything. My mouth, my throat—I have no way of doing it.”

I helped him to sit up a little, but after a few minutes he said, “I want to lie flat.”

Those were almost his last words. Mother and Father returned soon and did not need to be told. Their eyes, when they turned to me, were filled with darkness; it is a sight I have seen often, the sight of fear entering a person's soul when they know in their heart that a loved one is going to die.

Did we sleep, any of us, for the rest of the week? I think not. If I went to bed any night, I woke again after an hour or two—and came downstairs to find Mother or my father, or both, sitting in the shadows thrown by the fire. Mother read to Euclid; he liked Tennyson and Coleridge, and I heard “on either side the river lie/Long fields of barley and of rye,” and I heard of painted ships on painted oceans.

We were all present when he went. He had been lying quieter and quieter, taking no food, sweating a little. At eleven o'clock in the morning, he raised a hand to his left shoulder, said, “This hurts,” and then sighed. He did not move or cry out; nor did his throat rattle. None of the things of Death came to his bedside; he merely went away. Father rose from his chair by the fire and spread his hands out from his body, opening and clenching his fists, opening and clenching, and blinking his eyes. And Mother said, looking at me with eyes wide open as though in surprise, “Now what will any of us do?”

Eight months after Euclid O’Brien's death, the Great War began, in September 1914. All summer it had rumbled. After the Serbs had assassinated the Archduke Ferdinand, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire declared war on Serbia, blood began to seep across the jigsaw of Europe. Germany invaded Belgium, and England called for all to rally in the defense of small nations.

In Ireland, the call was accompanied by a seeming promise of Home Rule in exchange for enlisting. There was also the fact that the army was, at least, a job. All in all, around three hundred thousand Irishmen died on the green fields of France. In terms of population, that proportionately represented nearly five times the number of men that England lost. Home Rule never came.

Almost regardless of their age, Irish farmers' sons had turned up to enlist, as had laborers, mechanics, policemen, doctors, clerks, fishermen, bankers, plowmen, bakers, lawyers—and Charles O'Brien. He told Joe Harney that he had “come adrift when Euclid died” and did not know what to do with himself.

Harney tried to stop him. He had successfully dissuaded many other men. Harney had his own reasons for not wanting to see Irishmen join the British army. He knew that any man in a British military uniform was about to become a “legitimate target” in Ireland, according to plans in the pipeline for a rebellion.

Charles, nevertheless, went to the school in Golden and met the recruiting officers. According to the records, he was turned down for military service because the shooting had left him with a slight limp in his left leg—and, a secondary reason, because he was “much too old.” He doesn't record his effort to enlist. Instead, at that point in his writings, he curiously recounts an earlier experience, the point of which becomes clear only later.

When I reflect upon the great changes I saw in Ireland, I am bound to record a remarkable, daily, and distressing occurrence. Riding here and there, I often saw individuals and, sadder still, entire families on the road, laden with baggages, sometimes on a cart, sometimes walking. Always I knew their business, yet always I asked—and always I received the same answer: they were bound for the emigrant ship.

I know that had I kept a count, the numbers would run to many, many thousands. It occurs to me now that the reason I have not discussed them earlier is on account of their commonplaceness—I saw them all the time. Near the great ports of the coast, they grew more numerous. Once, I rode into Galway from the east and I might have been attending a funeral procession, so singular was the line of men, women, and children trudging to the ships. This sight—and this is what I mean by commonplace—had been familiar to me all my life.