Lit at the stars and sent
To burn the sin of patience from her soul,
The Scandal of Content.”
A life, or rather an impressionist study, of “the Chief’s” career was a work he frequently projected but unfortunately never accomplished. The plinth at the back of Parnell’s Statue in O’Connell Street should, he maintained, have been broken to symbolise the wrecking of Parnell’s career. “Parnell,” he wrote, “died with half his music in him.” Once in a discussion on the eighties he remarked: “What is the history of the eighties? It is the history of two Irishmen—Oscar Wilde and Parnell.” For G. K. Chesterton my husband had a great admiration. In The Open Secret of Ireland, he refers to him as wielding “the wisest pen in contemporary English letters. There is in his mere sanity a touch of magic so potent that although incapable of dullness he has achieved authority, and although convinced that faith is more romantic than doubt or even sin, he has got himself published and read.” The only flaw he found in Mr. Chesterton was that he was not a suffragist. My husband was, of course, an ardent supporter of the Women’s Movement, and wrote a brilliant pamphlet entitled Why Bully Women? Mr. Chesterton paid him a noble tribute in the course of an article in the Observer: “The former case, that of the man of letters who becomes by strength of will a man of war, is better exemplified in a man like Professor Kettle, whose fall in battle ought to crush the slanderers of Ireland as the fall of a tower could crush nettles.”
Another book projected but unachieved was on Dublin. His idea was to, follow the method of E. V. Lucas in his Wanderer in London. For Dublin city he had a great love and pride: “Of no mean city am I,” he often quoted proudly of his native city. For its poor he had a tremendous pity. The city beggars always found him an easy victim. I remember one night on coming out of a theatre, an urchin of about five years came clamouring after him. I began the usual stunt on the parental iniquity that allowed youngsters to go out begging at eleven at night; but Tom, unheeding, was already chatting with the boy. “What’s your name?” he asked. “Patsy Murphy, sir.” “Well, Patsy, which would you rather, a shilling or a halfpenny?” “A halfpenny, sir,” was the amazing reply. “Now tell me why?” questioned my husband, interested. “Well,” said the kid, “I might get the halfpenny but I’d never get the shilling.” His naïve philosophy got him both on this occasion.
In a speech on Dublin he said: “We cannot ignore the slums, for the slums are Dublin and Dublin is the slums.” On the same occasion he remarked: “Dublin is in one respect like every other city. It is convinced that it possesses the most beautiful women and the worst corporation.”
In a letter written from the boat on his way to France, with already a prophetic sense of death waiting for him on the battlefield, he wrote: “I have never felt my own essay ‘On Saying Good-bye’ more profoundly aux tréfonds de mon cœur.”
I shall quote the conclusion of the essay—
“There is only one journey, as it seems to me ... in which we attain our ideal of going away and going home at the same time. Death, normally encountered, has all the attractions of suicide without any of its horrors. The old woman” (an old woman previously mentioned who complained that “the only bothersome thing about walking was that the miles began at the wrong end“)—”the old woman when she comes to that road will find the miles beginning at the right end. We shall all bid our first real adieu to those brother-jesters of ours. Time and Space: and though the handkerchiefs flutter, no lack of courage will have power to cheat or defeat us. ‘However amusing the comedy may have been,’ wrote Pascal, ‘there is always blood in the fifth act. They scatter a little dust in your face; and then all is over, for ever.’ Blood there may be, but blood does not necessarily mean tragedy. The wisdom of humility bids us pray that in that fifth act we may have good lines and a timely exit; but, fine or feeble, there is comfort in breaking the parting word into its two significant halves, à Dieu. Since life has been a constant slipping from one good-bye to another, why should we fear that sole good-bye which promises to cancel all its forerunners?”
Could one meet death in a nobler way? He had his last lines at Ginchy, and “his fine word and incomparable gesture.” And now Picardy of the waving poplars—Picardy that my student days had garlanded with many memories, that shone in recollection with many friendships, now by the strange way of destiny holds my husband’s grave. But he sleeps well in his beloved France, wearing the green emblem of his Motherland with his fallen comrades of the “Irish Brigade.” As his distant wind-swept grave in the Valley of the Somme rises to vision, some noble words of René Bazin recur to me making a picture: “The loyal land, the honest land, the land of love, now moist, now parched, where one sleeps the last sleep with the lullaby wind in the shade of the Cross.” The many who loved him and now grieve for him will find in his own proud lines on Parnell a fitting message—