Tipperary (31 page)

More probably he suffered from a form of anemia. With poor or, at best, unscientific diet, no blood tests, and with half a century to go before the arrival of modern pharmacopoeia, anemia went undiagnosed and uncured. In a country so medically undeveloped, Euclid would simply have drifted down the years, getting weaker and paler. “His blood is thin,” they'd have said, and they'd have loaded him up with beef and liver.

Given that possibility or something like it, the family would have believed him too fragile for the farm. The O'Briens had a robust existence; they farmed seriously a daily bulk of animals and a full roster of seasonal works. They had a vigorous and involved team of workers, and people came and went all the time; Charles makes the point more than once that his household had a lively knowledge of everything that went on around them.

Any young man who was not in the thick of all that must have had something wrong with him, and therefore the seriousness of the illness could be defined by Euclid's contrast to his environment. He was more than a touch sequestered—we never see him doing anything other than reading or pursuing his “researches.”

Everybody would have seen his condition—and had comments to make. Ireland being Ireland, where envy often wears the mask of kindness, they surely said, “That poor, weak boy—sure, isn't he paying the price for the fine life the rest of them have?”

From Amelia we also begin to understand why Charles mentions Euclid's illness so infrequently, and so insubstantially. It made him feel helpless. Although sickness provided his daily trade, he couldn't heal his own brother.

Or himself. In October 1904 Charles was some months beyond forty-four years old and still suffered from immaturity and uneven development. Worse than that, his continued innocence drifted from naive to foolish. Where a more developed person would have started to make connections—an assault on the street, gunfire through the trees, a sinister horseman—he attempted no penetration, or even inquiry. In today's language, did he not think to connect the dots?

This was a man who, at best, lacked alertness and, at worst, avoided looking at any difficulty in his life—although he confessed to self-examining thoughts once he had met Miss Burke. In that encounter and others, he had but a poor idea of how others saw him. With no talk of a future, or directed ambition, he more or less drifted across the landscape. He had no anchor—except this great, unrequited love.

Oddly enough, his passion, and the naive profession of it, may be the easiest thing about him to explain. Nineteenth-century men had many curbs on the ways in which they could express themselves. Despite some unexpectedly swift mail services, communication was generally limited, so a romance had few escape valves.

As a further restraint, all aspirant lovers were weighted down with Victorian respectability. In any wooing they did, men like Charles were obliged to convey purity of heart. It's even remarkable that he was able to speak to April without a chaperone (although that probably had to do with her self-assurance).

So in terms of managing his own life in his early forties, the most positive thing to be said of Charles O’Brien is that in his lowest moments, he proved capable of taking some sort of action, however indirect. As witness his trip to Bruree, where, unable to heal himself, he had healed someone else.

And, of course, he displayed his historical value by the way he describes his visit—with brief but eyewitness clarity. Against the background of the era's great theme—“land, land, land,” as he earlier put it—he reported, a moment at a time, people's lives. With small, even delicate touches, he captured their moods, feelings, details—as with the tubercular young wife. In other words, such strength as Charles O’Brien had yet developed lay in his acute powers of observation.

The general knowledge of the day has served an important purpose when setting down my History. In this spirit, I wish to record the number of people living in Ireland during the periods about which I have been writing, because the Census findings in descending generations tell a powerful story of Ireland.

If I look at the population in my father's boyhood, a total of 8,175,000 people lived in Ireland in 1841. After Black '47, the worst year of our great potato famine, that number shrank drastically, and in a Census taken the year after I was born, the Census of 1861, the total population amounted to 5,797,000. Of these, 4,504,000 professed Catholicism, and the remaining number of 1,293,000 consisted of “Protestants”—which included in the main Anglicans or Episcopalians, as well as Presbyterians, Methodists, and Baptists.

On the year 1881, I can cast no such light; I have been unable to acquire the figures from the authorities in Dublin, who tell me that they “can't find them.” My most recent figures, which come from the Census of 1901, show the population of the island at 3,221,000, with a thousand fewer men than women. Therefore, from 1841 to 1901, almost five million people—that is to say, sixty percent of Ireland's inhabitants—left the country, whether through migration or death. It is widely understood that almost all of these came from the native, or Catholic, population.

Given my family's mixture, I was most interested in the polled figures of the religious denominations. In the one instance I have been able to acquire, it seemed that the Catholics outnumbered their landlord Protestants by between three and four to one. But I did not need a Census-taker to tell me that; the Irish people know their country. In some Catholic houses, I even heard them claim that the proportion fell closer to ten percent owning ninety percent.

Nor have I ever needed a Census-taker to tell me that I lived in a land of two peoples—and of such marked contrasts. I rode through the country for many years, on early mornings, high noons, late evenings, and often on dark nights; I rode from province to province, from county to county, from town to town, from village to village; I rode into places a horse had difficulty climbing; I rode down broad streets, gay with awnings. And in my journeyings I met and talked to two peoples, all the time, everywhere, deep in their baronies, boroughs, and parishes, two categories of Irish who resembled each other not at all.

They wore different clothes, ate different foods, and read different books; they danced to different music, answered to different Gods, asked different questions. “Many a time and oft,” as the poets and story-tellers say, I reflected upon these divisions on such a small island, and marveled at how wide was the chasm.

When I visited an Anglo-Irish—that is to say, Protestant—residence, I met gentlemen in shiny boots or shoes, in cutaway coats and fine trousers or knee-britches, with rings on their fingers and linen on their backs. They shone in waistcoats or vests made of brocade or silk, often of rich colors. At their throats, they folded elaborate cravats or, sometimes, wide and thought-provoking bow-ties. When going to church on Sunday, they sported hats and greatcoats; some carried walking-sticks. At the hunt, a few affected the red coat of the English—“the pink” as they call it, after Mr. Thomas Pink, the preferred tailor of many Englishmen and, therefore, of many Anglo-Irishmen.

The ladies of the Anglo-Irish wore gowns, and they cultivated airs of fashion. They professed an awareness of London and Paris; some even talked of America and what the “quality” wore there. I took it that the clothes in which I saw them—dressed for receiving visitors on ordinary days or for visiting their friends or for dining—reflected the world abroad.

Therefore, I concluded that London and Paris and the United States of America had a taste for brown and gray, and in summer, yellow and green, with trimmings of lace and other embroidery. Unless faced with a widow—always dressed simply and in black—I encountered bright fabrics and elaborate designs. Most women wore their hair up, except when retiring for the night. All gowns observed the ankle, and only in circumstances of great good fortune did one glimpse a shoe. But in time, I perceived such restraint beginning to ease, particularly among the younger women. When April strode about Paris, she cared not that her ankles showed now and then.

An Irish tenant farmer and his wife, however, dressed very differently. Their appearance generally lacked style; they could not afford fashion; and they scarcely wore any color other than brown for both man and woman, or green, and sometimes an unattractive black. In good wear, on Sundays, they might sport shirts or blouses of white, but in general they confined themselves to drab colors from easily available—and therefore inexpensive—fabrics. Among the Catholics I have seen serge but no silk; they wore tweed but no twill; no barathea, no bombazine, some sleaze, especially among the very poor, and a little cotton and linen.

They had no style; their tailors were often their wives, or a local village man who had little training, no flair, and poor ability. The women's skirts reached to the floor; the men's trouser-legs terminated above the ankle. Both sexes wore boots, and it would be a sign of a certain well-to-do comfort if, to Mass on a Sunday morning, a wife wore shoes rather than boots. Their children, in the main, went barefoot. In the—rare— childless house, a little more quality might be seen in the costume of husband and wife.

As to food: in the great houses of the Anglo-Irish, I have eaten some disgusting meals. I often wondered whether the Catholic cooks of my Anglo-Irish friends spent a deal of time trying to poison their privileged employers. This theory, however, collapses upon scrutiny, because the kitchen staff had so little knowledge of cooking that they would not have known where, or how, or in which dish to apply poison.

Some meals were worse than others. One day in March 1892, having been long expected for luncheon, dinner, and breakfast at L—— House, I arrived at a quarter before noon. The butler (who had bulging eyes, one of them turned to the wall—quite disturbing) led me straight to the dining-room, where sat my old friend Daniel B.

“You are so punctual, Charles. Luncheon will begin presently. Let us pity ourselves in advance.”

I sat down, and in due course, his mother, Lady G., and his sister, Miss K., appeared. Both greeted me prettily and Lady G. said, “Only a true friend would stoop to share our food.”

Miss K. added, “This is not a house that flatters the palate.”

Daniel completed the sentiment: “But excellent for the bowels.”

Luncheon was served. At that moment I began to understand the slenderness of the ladies. Judging from the offering before me on the table, they cannot have eaten much on any day of the week. I still do not know what lay in my plate; I can only describe it, and I shall not permit myself to recall it at length.

All seemed gray or black—excellent colors in themselves, but not in meat or potatoes. I thought I was looking at beef until Lady G. said, “Why must we always have mutton?”

To which her daughter replied, “Mama, this is pork.”

Lady G. replied, “I lost my sense of taste the day that I came to live here.”

Daniel ate his meal heartily and with great speed.

“The only way,” he said, “in which I can address such offerings is by eating very fast. I bypass the mouth and aim straight for the throat. At least the stomach is filled by my method.”

“Mr. O’Brien, please drink much water,” said his sister. “It is necessary.” She did not explain why.

A pudding arrived, which required Daniel to stand up and press the knife down with great force in order to cut it. I was quite unable to chisel even a crumb from my portion; for a while I contemplated licking the side, but I gave up when I saw that the dog, named Disraeli, refused Daniel's piece and left the room.

As the maid took away the plates, Lady G. said, “Mr. O’Brien, are you a religious man?”

“Not at all, madam,” I said, “but it is my principle to respect those who are.”

“Good,” she said. “You will note that we did not say a Grace before our meal, because we simply could not bring ourselves to say, ‘Oh, God, for what we are about to receive make us truly thankful.’ ”

Her daughter said, “Here, we say a Grace
after
we have dined.”

Daniel: “My father began this practice. He passed away soon afterward.”

Miss K.: “He passed away one night after dinner.”

Lady G.: “You may have heard it, Mr. O’Brien—Hebrews, thirteen: eight.”

All three bowed their heads and intoned, “Jesus Christ, yesterday, and today: and the same forever.”