The Year of the French (96 page)

Our Derbyshire Christmas was all that I had expected of it and more, and the greatest of my Christmas gifts was the brightness which returned to Eliza’s eyes and face. All of that season’s cheer was welcome to us—the Yule log, the holly, the waits who gathered outside the windows to sing, the bowls of hot, spiced wine. It was a snowy Christmas. I took many walks through a countryside which had been familiar to me from childhood—for here I had been born—but now mantled in white. No other countryside could have offered a more vivid contrast to the one which I had left. Our village was a proper village, and our inn a proper inn with its warm, snug, and well-appointed taproom.

And Nicholas is a proper English squire. He could sit for his portrait by artist or novelist, the very type of his excellent species. He has also, alas, a mind circumscribed by the boundary line of his county. If I had returned to him from a mission to Tartary, I could not have seemed a more exotic traveller. And yet he had no desire to learn from me. Rather, he wished to give me instruction, as though all of the British interest in Ireland were vested in my poor person, and he the Voice of England.

“It is intolerable, brother, intolerable that you should permit the populace of that wretched island to conspire and band together in open disloyalty and armed treason. Are there not laws, an army, militia, yeomanry? And yet you permit the island to explode.”

“I myself did not, brother,” I replied. “I have described my parish to you. I have the care of a few hundred souls, cast away in a remote part of the island, surrounded by untold thousands of miserable wretches.”

“Untold thousands? Where? In Mayo? I don’t believe you. What is the population of the island?”

“No one knows. Millions, certainly. There is much dispute upon the point.”

“Much dispute? Why should it be a matter for dispute? Mayo has its landlords, and each landlord has his tenants. Let the landlords count up the tenants, add the totals, and there you have the population. Good God!”

“No, no,” I said. “There are tenants and subtenants and sub-subtenants and drifting men. There are mountain wastes with hundreds of Gaelic-speaking wretches clinging to the sides, and there are wretches clinging to the sides of bogs. Entire communities. Now, in winter, there are families of beggars upon every road, a pathetic spectacle. I assure you, Nicholas, it is not like England at all.”

We were seated in his library, as he chose to call a combination of office and tackroom, with a few dozen books gathering dust upon shelves. We were facing a blazing log fire, and comforting ourselves with madeira and biscuits. Nicholas’s broad, sturdy legs were stretched towards the fire. He was not angry, not even very interested. It was his manner.

“Laziness,” he said. “Laziness and Popery and treason. The curses of Ireland. The landlords are as bad as the rest of them. I’ve seen them in London, gambling away their rents. And I have heard them, with brogues that you would need a carving knife to cut. Expect people like that to govern properly? I don’t.”

“They may not be governing much longer,” I said. “In Dublin and London all the talk is of a union of the two kingdoms.”

“There is a fine Christmas present,” Nicholas said. “An island swarming with beggars dropped into our lap. You were mad to take up your task there. Look at your poor wife, harried out of her wits by savages. And in the end we had to settle things for you, send over good English lads to die in your pestilent bogs. Always the same. Cromwell had to go over, and William after him. There is treason in that air; it is bred into men’s bones. What did the rebels want?”

“They could not even speak English, most of them. The King was a word to them, they did not know where England was. They have their own language, music, customs.”

“What did they want?”

“I do not believe that they knew. They followed a banner of green silk. They had prophecies and superstitions. There were stories that a hero would come from France to save them. They may have had him confused with the Young Pretender. They were punished most dreadfully. There are gallows from one end of Mayo to the other. They are a leaderless people.”

“Let them bide at home, and no harm will come to them. Let them heed their landlords. Let them look to the great houses.”

It was no use. I looked out the window at the snow-covered landscape. The village rooftops were visible. I thought of the village inn, curtains at the windows, prints on the wall, rows of pewter tankards. And then I remembered Castlebar High Street, a mean laneway straggling towards courthouse and gaolhouse, toward gibbeted bodies. Memory carried me northwards from Castlebar, a vault of sky arching towards blue mountains. I saw the beggars on the road. I remembered a barn at nightfall, the sound of fiddles, feet on the hard-packed earth. I saw the army of the Gael swarming into Killala, ragged, unshaven, boisterous in an unknown and barbarous tongue. It was no use.

No one, it would appear, knows how many Irish there are, and few care to know. This I discovered with the assistance of William Clifford, the vicar of Nicholas’s church, a young man of scholarly bent and of decent family, near-sighted and with a companionable stoop. Several evenings did I spend in his modest but well-appointed house, refreshed by his gentle good spirits and those of his wife. He knew as little of Ireland as did Nicholas, but he possessed a fund of Christian sympathy and a small library. As to the population of Ireland, he believed that I might find what I sought in a book which had been published in that very year of 1798, and he pressed it upon me, commending it as a salutary Christian response to Rousseau and Godwin, reminding us of the inevitably melancholy nature of our earthly existence.

In fact, he lent me that evening two books which had appeared in that fateful year, of which one was a volume of verses, some of which were pretty enough in their way, although strained and artificial in their very effort to appear natural; but there was also a long and ludicrous ballad or “rime,” in which a sailor slays a large bird with an arrow, for which apparently heinous offence he is pursued around the world by all the powers of hell and his shipboard companions perish miserably. All this set forth in a wearisome style of false innocence and simplicity.

The chief work which he lent to me was not this flight of fancy, but an
Essay on the Principle of Population
, by an acquaintance of his, a newly ordained clergyman named Malthus. Mr. Malthus began simply enough, by demonstrating that populations will always grow at a rate swifter than that of the food which they require, unless checks be placed upon their growth. These checks he divided between the positive and the negative, of which the former included famines, plagues, and pestilences. What an awful vista his words opened up! I could not force myself to accept the inevitability of his argument, yet try as I would I could not escape from it. It was as though, like some darker Newton, he had hit upon a formula which had for centuries lain hidden just beyond the edges of men’s minds. Clear and cold as iced water, it clarified and chilled the brain. And all set forth with an air of unimpassioned calm which contrasted most vividly with his abominable conclusions.

I would have thought that Ireland, with its centuries of recurring famines, was well suited to his thesis, but I sought for it in vain. His first volume ranged over the entire world, and brought before our consideration the naked wretches of Tierra del Fuego and Van Diemen’s Land, the yet more wretched savages of the Andaman Islands, the paint-bedaubed warriors of North America, the furry Laplanders, the horsemen of the Asian steppes. But of Ireland, which lay at Mr. Malthus’s doorstep, there was not a word, until I came to the very last page, where tersely he informs the reader that the natives are too barbarous to admit of counting up their numbers. And then he adds: “The checks upon the population are of course of the positive kind, and arise from the diseases occasioned by squalid poverty, by damp and wretched cabins, by bad and insufficient clothing, by the filth of their persons, and occasional want. To these positive checks have of late years been added the vice and misery of intestine commotion, of civil war, and of martial law.” He says not a word more, and his disdain was painful to contemplate. All that I had witnessed, all that tumult and passion, that confusion and blood, were but checks upon population. The dead in the streets of Killala, the obscene weights upon the Castlebar gibbet, the peasants hunted down in the Belmullet wastes, had contributed their lives to an equation. The Irish, it would appear, were doomed to an endless sequence of spawning and starving, spawning and starving.

“It is a most salutary and Christian work,” young Mr. Clifford assured me. “Mr. Malthus reminds us that man is not a perfectible creature. He strives blindly to propagate his kind, but the very laws of nature press down upon him. There is no salvation within nature or within society. I need not remind you of that.”

“As it is now,” I said, “even without famine, the poor are reduced each winter to beggary. Oh, Mr. Clifford, if you could but see them! And we sit snug in our warm houses.”

He then described to me a tract society, newly founded in London, which proposed to distribute Bibles in the west of Ireland, for which purpose sums of money had been collected and agents hired. I did not know whether to cry or laugh.

“But they cannot read,” I said. “They do not speak English. What folly is this, what new folly? It would serve as well to cram pages of the Testament into bottles and cast them on the waters to drift to Africa and the Sandwich Islands. Better still, let them translate Mr. Malthus into Gaelic, and thus instruct the poor that they starve by theorem and die to conclude a syllogism.”

He was abashed by this, for as I have said he was a good-hearted young man. But he could only rub his hands together, as though washing them.

“What would you have?” he asked at last. “I know nothing of these matters. Perhaps they are indeed inevitable, as Malthus suggests. We must seek to clothe the naked, to feed the hungry. We must be charitable.”

“With great caution,” I said satirically. “Malthus warns us that unbridled philanthropy can be perverse or even wicked, interfering with the operations of a system nicely calculated to maintain a population upon the edge of grinding misery.”

“You are too hard upon him,” he said. “Too hard upon yourself.”

Dark musings in a season of Christmas joy: I did not long dwell upon them. And yet nagging memories remained with me of the land which I had left, to which I would again return. Clifford’s evasive delicacies, my brother’s gruff indifference reminded me that the world did not share my concern. Derbyshire was my warm winter blanket, thicker than the snow, woven of childhood memories, certitudes, good cheer. Here I was not an alien, but moved once again among my own, their accents mine, their habits mine. What need had a Derbyshire squire to know the population of Ireland, or a Derbyshire parson to take upon himself the burdens of a foreign island? Thus, and most comfortably did I reason with myself.

Lord Glenthorne, however, was a different matter, and I still remember, with something akin to horror, my conversation with him. In that hour with him, seated side by side in a quiet London room, lies the meaning of what I experienced, and yet I cannot puzzle it out, an oblique meaning, set at a grotesque angle. I may be mistaken. Truth baffles us. We seek it out in vain, and then it leaps upon us and we are unprepared.

I had resolved that I should visit him on my way back to Ireland, for, as I have said, he had the benefice of my parish. I knew that he would welcome an account of events which so closely touched his interests. He had already received from Dennis Browne an account of the murder of Creighton, his agent, and of the damage wrought upon Glenthorne Castle by the insurgents. But letters are cold instruments, they convey little. Accordingly, I wrote to him of my wish and in due course received a civil reply: “My compliments. I am at home every afternoon. Glenthorne.”

On the afternoon of the eighth, therefore, I presented myself at his door. The house was by no means prepossessing, built of pink bricks with bow windows overlooking the park. A servant girl opened the door, simply attired, and with her hair caught beneath a mobcap. She showed me into a small sitting room, sparsely furnished, and dominated by two works of art, an ill-executed oil painting of a Highland stag standing in lonely eminence upon a crag and a large cheap engraving of Abraham and Isaac. I seated myself upon a small upholstered chair, which sent up a puff of dust.

This, then, was the dwelling place of the legendary ruler of Tyrawley, an absolute monarch, the “Big Lord.” A simple London house, not footmen but a servant girl in a mobcap, walls decorated in a manner which a Dublin grocer would find coarse. I was not surprised. Friends in London had informed me that he was known there not for his wealth or his power but for his benevolence, being a prime mover in the Society for the Amelioration of the Condition of Chimney Sweeps, and a generous contributor to that most worthy of causes, the Society for the Abolition of Slavery.

He did not keep me waiting longer than five minutes, and then entered to greet me with simplicity and cordiality, taking my hands in his two. He was a small, bent man, dressed in a suit the colour of snuff, with a long, thin nose and full lips.

“You are most welcome, Mr. Broome,” he said. “Most welcome. It is seldom enough that I have a visitor from Ireland. That unhappy land has been much upon my mind these past months, much upon my mind. As you can readily believe.”

“Most readily,” I assured him.

“Come into my library, Mr. Broome. Into my library. It will be a pleasant place to talk, and we have much to tell each other. Much to tell.” His habit of repeating phrases needlessly was a settled one. It was as though he spoke once for my ear, and once for his own, telling himself what he had said. A harmless mannerism.

But at the door he hesitated and turned. “Do you see that fireplace there?” It was small, with a trim white mantel above it. “Do you know that fireplace for what it is, a place and instrument of oppression?”