On an Irish Island (25 page)

However Mary got to Maynooth, it is tempting to see at work the able, well-connected
hand of Father
Paddy Browne, professor at Maynooth and a summer and holiday resident of
Dún Chaoin. He may have been trying on his own to defuse an entirely chaste, if awkward, situation between Mary and George. Or, knowing Dr. Grogan—and his uncle knew all the priests at Maynooth, says the doctor’s nephew—he may simply have spread word of the opening around Dún Chaoin; or else, the other way around, spread word around Maynooth of Mary’s readiness for a move. Then again, as one perhaps muddled account has it, Dr. Grogan may have been vacationing on the island himself and actually brought Mary back to Maynooth when he and his wife returned.

In any case, Máire Pheats Tom Ó Cearnaigh worked for Dr. Grogan as his maid, and sometime during this period, perhaps around 1925 or 1926, was visited by George, who stayed on in Maynooth for a couple of days. We know this because in 1965 George wrote to his wife and told her so. While he was in Greece, a chance meeting with an Irish priest from Maynooth had stirred memories of once spending a night there as Paddy Browne’s guest, and how, earlier, “
I visited the Blasket girl, Mary Kearney.”

George likely took a train from Dublin that left him a few minutes on foot from the center of town. Did he call at the Grogan house, or meet Mary somewhere else? Did they talk of things they’d done and people they knew on the island? Did they resurrect the religious issue? Or was this actually the first time he’d poured out his heart to her?

In 1928, the Irish journal
An Phoblacht,
the republic, published a
poem by George. Conceivably, it was the product of an active imagination only, not drawn from his own life.
More likely, it enacts a pained moment with
Mary on the island or in Maynooth. The poem tells of the narrator’s love for a girl. Lost to her charms, unmanned by lovesick distress, he long remains mute. But then, one cool, crisp night, the sky alive with stars, it all comes tumbling out: His silence has been unbearable. Now, more unbearable yet, is her rebuff. It is “crueler still,” he writes, “that she didn’t care.”

The following year, probably in October, Mary arrived in
Queenstown, bound for America.

Typically, a West Kerry emigrant made
arrangements for departure through a Dingle travel agency, Galvin’s. She or a relative would make a four-pound deposit toward the total fare of about twenty-one pounds; one pound then bought about what seventy-five American dollars does today. An additional seven shillings, for what a clerk recorded as “certs,” went to register the emigrant’s birth certificate. Transactions were recorded, usually in black ink, in a large, leather-spined ledger two inches thick. A page might record half a dozen transactions, each representing an Irish man or woman lost to his native land. And there, on page 285 of one of these ledgers, on August 6, 1929, was listed “Miss Mary Kearney, Blasket Island, by cheque for fare to U.S., 21.10.4.” All together, the evidence suggests that
this
Mary was
our
Mary, and that she left on
October 22, 1929, on the Cunard liner
Scythia
from Liverpool, stopping at Queenstown, and bound for
Boston and
New York.

Queenstown—which since Ireland’s split from Britain had been renamed Cobh, pronounced “cove”—was located on the south shore of a large island a few miles east of Ireland’s second city,
Cork, linked to it since 1862 by a busy rail spur. Convicts bound for penal colonies in
Australia had shipped out from Queenstown. The
Titanic
had docked here in 1912, picking up 123 passengers, mostly emigrants from the south and west of Ireland, most of them to go down with the ship. The town occupied a spot commanding fine views of the bay that opened before it. An imposing Roman Catholic church sat perched on the hill above it. The harbor front was crowded with small awninged shops where emigrants could buy food and supplies for the voyage, hotels and cheap rooming houses in which to spend their last nights in Ireland. Queenstown was one great stage on which was enacted the national tragedy of
emigration, a place of high hopes and bitter tears.

Mary’s first time in Queenstown came sometime before departure,
for the much-feared
medical examination. “A lot of boys and girls didn’t pass,” she’d recount years later. You needed to show you could speak and read English, and pass a physical exam. She was “scared stiff”; the medical examiners were said to be ruthless. “We were washed and scrubbed and cleaned, and our hair was washed and cleaned, and we went through doctors and nurses, and we had to be in perfect condition.”

After two days in Queenstown, now back on the island, she met her sister Siobhan at the slip, and mischievously told her she hadn’t passed. Told you so, said Siobhan, who didn’t think Mary even wanted to go to America. Actually, she didn’t, Mary would say later. But “I wanted so much to help my father and mother,” who by now were in their late forties, with five children at home; money from America would help them “get along better and have better things,” maybe help get her brothers and sisters to school in
Dingle. It was only once she and Siobhan reached their house at the top of the village that she told her the truth.

Weeks later, with the arrival of her passport, it was really time to go. Her parents took her to Dingle. When her mother came down sick, Mary insisted that she stay in bed and arranged for a friend to get them to the station the next morning in time for the six-thirty train. In Queenstown, it dawned on her that she knew no one boarding the ship with her. “I was all by myself,” save for some cousins from Dingle, two boys whom she’d never met before, the barest tendrils of connection. “It was really very sad, you know? At that time, you never thought of going back.”

The voyage aboard the six-hundred-foot-long steamer, probably about a week, was not unpleasant. “We used to go up on deck, the whole crowd from
Kerry,” she’d say. They’d buy cookies and drinks. “The boys who were with us, five or six of them, they were so good to us.” She heard shipboard stories of boys who might be up to no good, of course, “that we were too innocent, that we didn’t know anything about anything.” But there was no trouble that way. The Kerry boys saw the girls to their bunks at night, patrolled the passageways, then would be “waiting for us,” their manly protectors, in the morning. On the way over, “all the Kerrys stayed together. But it was lonesome, very lonesome.”

Mary was part of what
Marie-Louise Sjoestedt had termed the “interminable procession” of emigrants from Queenstown. What did she think aboard the tender? Or as the big liner steamed out of the harbor and into the Atlantic? Did she think of her time in Maynooth? Or of the island? Did she think of her parents, brothers, and sisters? Did she think of George?

Did he think of her?

Maybe not. Late 1929 had been eventful for him. He’d left behind his
Cambridge University lectureship and moved back to Dublin; though he retained his King’s fellowship, he was no longer tied down by Cambridge’s academic shackles. He was hard at work writing now—both scholarly projects, such as a
translation of Aeschylus’
Prometheus Bound,
and stories and criticism for Irish-language publications. He was very busy. Late that year,
his father died. He may not have known that Mary had left at all.

A few years later, George was at a festive theater opening in Cambridge when
“the wife of a distinguished historian, a professor, got up, looked through her lorgnette, and remarked, in a very superior voice, ‘I think everybody who is anybody is here.’ ” George cringed. Here, the way his wife told the story, was Cambridge at its worst, smug and elitist. All in all, “he’d rather be in Ireland talking to a fisherman than gossiping in Common Room,” his daughter Margaret reports him often saying. In 1928, he’d been lecturing at Cambridge. He was a fellow of King’s College. His thesis would soon be published as a book. He was proceeding along a well-marked academic career path, Oxbridge-style. And he wanted to get off.

In May 1929, George advised his colleagues at King’s he was resigning his lectureship. By July, he had cleaned out his Cambridge digs, left England, and moved to
Dublin. There, for the next two years, he lived in
Raheny, a suburban enclave stretching back from Dublin Bay north of the city. When he returned for a visit to Dublin almost two decades later, he wrote, “
I felt drawn irresistibly to my old haunts at Raheny, where I spent some of the most impressionable years of my life.”

In Raheny lived
Moya Llewelyn Davies, whose grand old house,
Furry Park, had so impressed
Maurice O’Sullivan on his memorable visit to Dublin two years before. Moya herself left an indelible impression on everyone. She was slim and lovely, and sported the kind of intriguing personal history that can stoke personal and sexual allure. Her father,
James O’Connor, was an ardent republican who was imprisoned (the year Moya was born) for his political activities, and later served on the council of the
Irish Republican Brotherhood. When Moya was nine, her mother and four sisters died, in the span of a few hours, from eating poisoned shellfish; she was spared, she always said, because she’d been sent to her room without supper for misbehavior. When she was twenty-eight, she married
Crompton Llewelyn Davies, an official in Britain’s Liberal government, thirteen years her senior.

Two years later, at a dance—she was wearing her wedding ring, but introduced herself as Moya O’Connor—a nineteen-year-old man, drinking lemonade, looked over to see a pair of “
dazzling blue eyes fringed by a mane of golden hair and a face of extraordinary vitality.” This, according to Vincent MacDowell, one of his many biographers, was the young
Michael Collins, who was to become one of the chief architects of Irish independence and command the pro-treaty side during the
civil war, only to be gunned down in County
Cork in 1922. Moya would insist they’d had an affair. In somewhat less doubt is that, during the tumultuous years of the independence struggle, Collins visited her at Furry Park. Moya, it was said, stored guns and ammunition in hat boxes scattered around the house, then delivered them across the city. Delivered them, her granddaughter
Melissa Llewelyn-Davies would write, “
in an open-topped car, her long hair flying in the wind. Her hair, my father told me, was brushed by a maid a hundred times a night.” In March 1921, Moya was arrested and imprisoned at Mountjoy, a Dublin prison, and was released only after the truce that July.

Intoxicating and larger than life, she bathed herself in drama. She never installed electricity at Furry Park, said her granddaughter, “
believing she looked more desirable by candlelight.” In her mid-forties at the time George first met her, she cut a striking figure to which he was in no way oblivious; why,
he’d loved her almost from the time he met her, he told his wife a few years later. In 1932, he dedicated to her his
translation of Aeschylus’
Prometheus Bound.
She, Maurice, George, and George’s novelist friend
E. M. Forster, as we’ll see, would make for an unlikely four-leaf clover of a literary team.

George lived about a mile across the sprawling Saint Annes Park from
Moya’s home, in a picturesque cottage called
Watermill, which looked across to a low, flat island and beyond that to Dublin Bay. He’d remember the “pools left by the low tide, with stretches of
shining wet sand, Howth Head and Irelands Eye in the distance, the Dublin mountains across the Bay, and the air full of the music of curlews and oystercatchers and plovers of all sorts.” The cottage, which took its name from a mill situated on a nearby creek, was no mere “cottage,” really, but a substantial thatched-roof affair, all chimneys, gables, and greenery, that went back at least a century, approached through a gate George had himself
painted bright green; his mother, who visited him there, would write of “
the velvety peace of Watermill.” Later, when he moved to Galway, Forster wrote to him:
“I expect I should like Galway … but we mustn’t expect to find anything like Watermill there.”

While at Watermill in 1930, George wrote a piece for a Dublin publication called
The Star,
about the place of Irish among Ireland’s intelligentsia. “
Every day, when I am not working at Greek, I am working at Irish,” he wrote.

He wrote much in Irish during these years, too. He wrote about Irish-language education and a visit to Greece, came out against what he deemed a silly Dublin land-development scheme. He translated Shakespearean sonnets. He wrote a number of short stories, including the two cited earlier about young women with
illegitimate children.

Another story, “
Barra na Trá” top of the beach, is set on the Great Blasket, above the White Strand. An old man sits alone facing the sea. His reverie is broken by “the bright, long laughter of the young girls, as is
usual when they are out walking together at night and know there are boys nearby.” The boys corral them. Revelry ensues. “They’re lively enough tonight,” says a bystander. “They’d want to be,” says another, a big man with a deep voice, lying back in the heather. “They have youth, but not for long.” Working himself up, he complains that the young people of the day lack courage, generosity, dignity. He turns to the old man at the top of the beach: would they ever again see the likes of the old island worthies? “The old man doesn’t move,” George’s story winds down. The wind is strengthening from the north; it will rain. “ ‘I don’t see them,’ ” he says flatly, and “ ‘I never will.’ ”