THE DUKE’S CHILDREN

I could never see precisely what was supposed to be exaggerated in the
plots of novelists like Dickens. To this day I can still read about some
mysterious street-urchin, brought up to poverty and vice by a
rag-picker, who turns out to be the missing heir to an earldom, and see
nothing peculiar about it. To me, it all seems the most natural thing in
the world.

Having always been Mother’s pet, I was comparatively grown-up when the
truth about my own birth broke on me first. In fact, I was already at
work as a messenger boy on the railway. Naturally, I had played with the
idea as I had played with scores of other ideas, but suddenly, almost in
a day, every other possibility disappeared, and I knew I had nothing
whatever in common with the two commonplace creatures with whom my fate
had become so strangely linked.

It wasn’t only their poverty that repelled me, though that was bad
enough, or the tiny terrace house we lived in, with its twelve-foot
square of garden in front, its crumbling stumps of gate-posts and low
wall that had lost its railing. It was their utter commonness, their
squabbles about money, their low friends and fatuous conversations. You
could see that no breath of fineness had ever touched them. They seemed
like people who had been crippled from birth and never known what it was
to walk or run or dance. Though I might be—for the moment, at least—only
a messenger, I had those long spells when by some sort of instinct
I knew who I really was, could stand aside and watch myself come up the
road after my day’s work with relaxed and measured steps, turning my
head slowly to greet some neighbour and raising my cap with a grace and
charm that came of centuries of breeding. Not only could I see myself
like that; there were even times when I could hear an interior voice
that preceded and dictated each movement as though it were a fragment of
a story-book: “He raised his cap gracefully while his face broke into a
thoughtful smile.”

And then, as I turned the corner, I would see Father, at the gate in his
house clothes, a ragged trousers and vest, an old cap that came down
over his eyes, and boots cut into something that resembled sandals and
that he insisted on calling his “slippers.” Father was a creature of
habit. No sooner was he out of his working clothes than he was peppering
for his evening paper, and if the newsboy were five minutes late, Father
muttered: “I don’t know what’s coming over that boy at all!” and drifted
down to the main road to listen for him. When the newsboy did at last
appear, Father would grab the paper from his hand and almost run home,
putting on his spectacles awkwardly as he ran and triumphantly surveying
the promised treat of the headlines.

And suddenly everything would go black on me, and I would take the chair
by the open back door while Father, sitting at the other end, uttered
little exclamations of joy or rage and Mother asked anxiously how I had
got on during the day. Most of the time I could reply only in
monosyllables. How could I tell her that nothing had happened at work
that was not as common as the things that happened at home: nothing but
those moments of blinding illumination when I was alone in the station
yard on a spring morning with sunlight striking the cliffs above the
tunnel, and, picking my way between the rails and the trucks, I realized
that it was not for long, that I was a duke or earl, lost, stolen, or
strayed from my proper home, and that I had only to be discovered for
everything to fall into its place? Illumination came only when I had
escaped; most often when I crossed the yard on my way from work and
dawdled in the passenger station before the bookstall, or watched a
passenger train go out on its way to Queenstown or Dublin and realized
that one day some train like that would take me back to my true home and
patrimony.

These gloomy silences used to make Father mad. He was a talkative man,
and every little incident of his day turned into narrative and drama for
him. He seemed forever to be meeting old comrades of his army days whom
he had not met for fifteen years, and astounding changes had always
taken place in them in the meantime. When one of his old friends called,
or even when some woman from across the square dropped in for a cup of
tea, he would leave everything, even his newspaper, to talk. His corner
by the window permitting him no room for drama, he would stamp about the
tiny kitchen, pausing at the back door to glance up at the sky or by the
other door into the little hallway to see who was passing outside in the
Square. It irritated him when I got up in the middle of all this, took
my cap, and went quietly out. It irritated him even more if I read while
he and the others talked, and, when some question was addressed to me,
put down my book and gazed at him blankly. He was so coarse in grain
that he regarded it as insolence. He had no experience of dukes, and had
never heard that interior voice which dictated my movements and
words. “Slowly the lad lowered the book in which he had been immersed
and gazed wonderingly at the man who called himself his father.”

One evening I was coming home from work when a girl spoke to me. She was
a girl called Nancy Harding whose elder brother I knew slightly. I had
never spoken to her—indeed, there were not many girls I did speak to. I
was too conscious of the fact that, though my jacket was good enough, my
trousers were an old blue pair of Father’s, cut down and with a big
patch in the seat. But Nancy, emerging from a house near the quarry,
hailed me as if we were old friends and walked with me up the road. She
was slim and dark-haired with an eager and inconsequent manner, and her
chatter bewildered and charmed me. My own conversation was of a rather
portentous sort.

“I was down with Madge Regan, getting the answers for my homework,” she
explained. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me, but I can’t do those
blooming old sums. Where were you?”

“Oh, I was at work,” I answered.

“At work?” she exclaimed in astonishment. “Till this hour?”

“I have to work from eight to seven,” I said modestly.

“But, Cripes, aren’t they terrible hours?” she said.

“Ah, I’m only filling in time,” I explained lightly. “I don’t expect to
be there long.”

This was prophetic, because I was sacked a couple of months later, but
at the time I just wanted to make it clear if there was any exploitation
being done it was I and not the railway company that was doing it. We
walked slowly, and she stood under the gas lamp at the end of the Square
with me. Darkness or day, it was funny how people made a rendezvous of
gas lamps. They were our playrooms when we were kids and our clubs as we
became older. And then, for the first time, I heard the words running
through my head as though they were dictating to someone else beside
myself: “Pleased with his quiet conversation and well-bred voice, she
wondered if he could really be the son of the Delaneys at all.” Up to
this, the voice had paid no attention to other people; now that it had
begun to expand its activities it took on a new reality, and I longed to
repeat the experience.

I had several opportunities, because we met like that a couple of times
when I was coming home from work. I was not observant, and it wasn’t
until years after that it struck me that she might have been waiting for
me at the same house at the same time. And one evening, when we were
standing under our old gas lamp, I talked a little too enthusiastically
about some story-book, and Nancy asked for the loan of it. I was pleased
with her attention but alarmed at the thought of her seeing where I
lived.

“I’ll bring it with me tomorrow,” I said.

“Ah, come on and get it for me now,” she said coaxingly, and I glanced
over my shoulder and saw Father at the gate, his head cocked, listening
for the newsboy. I felt suddenly sick. I knew such a nice girl couldn’t
possibly want to meet Father, but I didn’t see how I was to get the book
without introducing them. We went up the little uneven avenue together.

“This is Nancy Harding, Dad,” I said in an off-hand tone. “I just want
to get a book for her.”

“Oh, come in, girl, come in,” he said, smiling amiably. “Sit down, can’t
you, while you’re waiting?” Father’s sociability almost caused him to
forget the newsboy. “Min,” he called to Mother, “you keep an eye on the
paper,” and he set a chair in the middle of the kitchen floor. As I
searched in the front room for the book, which in my desperation I could
not find, I heard Mother go for the paper and Father talking away like
mad to Nancy, and when I went into the kitchen, there he was in his
favourite chair, the paper lying unopened on the table beside him while
he told an endless, pointless story about old times in the
neighbourhood. Father had been born in the neighbourhood, which he
seemed to think a matter for pride, but if there was one of Father’s
favourite subjects I could not stand, it was the still wilder and more
sordid life people had lived there when he was growing up. This story
was about a wake—all his juiciest stories were about wakes—and a tired
woman getting jealous of the corpse in the bed. He was so pleased with
Nancy’s attention that he was dramatizing even more than usual, and I
stood silent in the kitchen door for several minutes with a ducal air of
scorn before he even noticed me. As I saw Nancy to the road I felt
humiliated to the depths of my being. I noticed that the hallway was
streaming with damp, that our gate was only a pair of brick stumps from
which the cement had fallen away, and that the Square, which had never
been adopted by the Council, was full of washing. There were two
washerwomen on the terrace, each with a line of her own.

But that wasn’t the worst. One evening when I came home, Mother said
joyously:

“Oh, your dad ran into that nice little Harding girl on his way home.”

“Oh, did he?” I asked indifferently, though feeling I had been kicked
hard in the stomach.

“Oh, my goodness!” Father exclaimed, letting down his paper for a moment
and crowing. “The way that one talks! Spatter! spatter! spatter! And, by
the way,” he added, looking at me over his glasses, “her aunt Lil used
to be a great friend of your mother’s at one time. Her mother was a
Clancy. I knew there was something familiar about her face.”

“I’d never have recognized it,” Mother said gravely. “Such a quiet
little woman as Miss Clancy used to be.”

“Oh, begor, there’s nothing quiet about that piece,” chortled Father,
but he did not sound disapproving. Father liked young people with
something to say for themselves—not like me.

I was mortified. It was bad enough not seeing Nancy myself, but to have
her meet Father like that, in his working clothes coming from the manure
factory down the Glen, and hear him—as I had no doubt she did hear him
—talk in his ignorant way about me was too much. I could not help
contrasting Father with Mr. Harding, whom I occasionally met coming from
work and whom I looked at with a respect that bordered on reverence. He
was a small man with a face like a clenched fist, always very neatly
dressed, and he usually carried his newspaper rolled up like a baton and
sometimes hit his thigh with it as he strode briskly home.

One evening when I glanced shyly at him, he nodded in his brusque
way. Everything about him was brusque, keen, and soldierly, and when I
saw that he recognized me I swung into step beside him. He was like a
military procession with a brass band, the way he always set the pace
for anyone who accompanied him.

“Where are you working now?” he asked sharply with a side glance at me.

“Oh, on the railway still,” I said. “Just for a few months, anyway.”

“And what are you doing there?”

“Oh, just helping in the office,” I replied lightly. I knew this was not
exactly true, but I hated to tell anybody that I was only a messenger
boy. “Of course, I study in my spare time,” I added hastily. It was
remarkable how the speeding up of my pace seemed to speed up my
romancing as well. There was something breathless about the man that
left me breathless, too. “I thought of taking the Indian Civil Service
exam or something of the sort. There’s no future in railways.”

“Isn’t there?” he asked with some surprise.

“Not really,” I answered indifferently. “Another few years and it will
all be trucks. I really do it only as a stop-gap. I wouldn’t like to
take any permanent job unless I could travel. Outside Ireland, I
mean. You see, languages are my major interest.”

“Are they?” he asked in the same tone. “How many do you know?”

“Oh, only French and German at the moment—I mean, enough to get round
with,” I said. The pace was telling on me. I felt I wasn’t making the
right impression. Maybe to be a proper linguist you needed to know a
dozen languages. I mended my hand as best I could. “I’m going to do
Italian and Spanish this winter if I get time. You can’t get anywhere in
the modern world without Spanish. After English it’s the most spoken of
them all.”

“Go on!” he said.

I wasn’t altogether pleased with the results of this conversation. The
moment I had left him, I slowed down to a gentle stroll, and this made
me realize that the quick march had committed me farther than I liked to
go. All I really knew of foreign languages was a few odd words and
phrases, like echoes of some dream of my lost fatherland, which I
learned and repeated to myself with a strange, dreamy pleasure. It was
not prudent to pretend that I knew the languages thoroughly. After all,
Mr. Harding had three daughters, all well educated. People were always
being asked to his house, and I had even been encouraging myself with
the prospect of being asked as well. But now, if I were invited, it
would be mainly because of my supposed knowledge of foreign languages,
and when Nancy or one of her sisters burst into fluent French or German
my few poetic phrases would not be much help. I needed something more
practical, something to do with railways, for preference. I had an old
French phrase-book, which I had borrowed from somebody, and I determined
to learn as much as I could of this by heart.

I worked hard, spurred on by an unexpected meeting with Nancy’s eldest
sister, Rita, who suddenly stopped and spoke to me on the road, though
to my astonishment and relief she spoke in English.

Then, one evening when I was on my usual walk, which in those days
nearly always brought me somewhere near Nancy’s house, I ran into her
going in, and we stood at the street corner near her home. I was pleased
with this because Rita came out soon afterwards and said in a
conspiratorial tone: “Why don’t ye grab the sofa before Kitty gets it?”
which made Nancy blush, and then her father passed and nodded to us. I
waved back to him, but Nancy had turned her back as he appeared so that
she did not see him. I drew her attention to him striding down the road,
but somehow this only put her in mind of my father.

“I saw him again the other day,” she said with a smile that hurt me.

“Did you?” I asked with a sniff. “What was he talking about? His
soldiering days?”

“No,” she said with interest. “Does he talk about them?”

“Does he ever talk about anything else?” I replied wearily. “I have that
last war off by heart. It seems to have been the only thing that ever
happened him.”

“He knows a terrible lot, though, doesn’t he?” she asked.

“He’s concealed it pretty well,” I replied. “The man is an out-and-out
failure, and he’s managed to turn Mother into one as well. I suppose she
had whatever brains there were between them—which wasn’t much, I’m
afraid.”

“Go on!” said Nancy with a bewildered air. “Then why did she marry him?”

“Echo answers why,’” I said with a laugh at being able to get in a
phrase that had delighted me in some story-book. “Oh, I suppose it was
the usual thing.” And, when I saw her gaping at me in wonderment, I
shrugged my shoulders and added superciliously: “Lust.”

Nancy blushed again and made to leave.

“Well, it’s well to be you,” she said, “knowing what’s wrong with
him. God alone knows what’s wrong with mine.”

I was sorry she had to go in such a hurry, but pleased with the
impression of culture and sophistication I had managed to convey, and I
looked forward to showing off a bit more when I went to one of their
Sunday evening parties. With that, and some really practical French, I
could probably get anywhere.

At the same time it struck me that they were very slow about asking me,
and my evening walks past their house took on a sort of stubborn
defiance. At least, I wouldn’t let them ignore me. It wasn’t until weeks
later that the bitter truth dawned on me—that I was not being invited
because nobody wanted me there. Nancy had seen my home and talked to my
parents; her sisters and father had seen me; and all of them had seen my
cut-down trousers with the patch on the seat. It mattered nothing to
them even if I spoke French and German like an angel, even if I were
liable to be sent off to India in the next few months. They did not
think I was their class.

Those were the bitterest weeks of my life. With a sort of despair I took
my evening walk in the early winter days past their house, but never saw
anybody, and as I turned up the muddy lane behind it and heard the wind
moaning in the branches, and looked down across the sloping field to
their house, nestling in the hollow with the light shining brilliantly
in the kitchen, where the girls did their homework, it seemed to be full
of all the beauty I would never know. Sometimes, when I was leaning over
the lane wall and watching it, it even seemed possible that I was what
they thought, not the son of a duke but the son of a labourer in the
manure factory; but at other times, as I was walking home by myself,
tired and dispirited, the truth blazed up angrily in me again, and I
knew that when it became known, the Hardings would be the first to
regret their blindness. At such times I was always making brilliant
loveless matches and then revealing coldly to Nancy that I had never
cared for anyone but her.

It was at the lowest depth of my misery that I was introduced to a girl
called May Dwyer, and somehow, from the first moment, I found that there
was no need for me to indulge in invention. Invention and May would
never have gone together. She had a directness of approach I had never
met with before in a girl. The very first evening I saw her home she
asked me if I could afford the tram fare. That shocked me, but
afterwards I was grateful. Then she asked me in to see her parents,
which scared me stiff, but I promised to come in another night when it
wasn’t so late, and at once she told me which evenings she was free. It
was not forwardness or lightness in her; it was all part of a directness
that made her immediately both a companion and a sweetheart. I owe her a
lot, for without her I might still be airing my French and German to any
woman who attracted me.

Even when I did go in with her for a cup of tea, I felt at home after
the first few minutes. Of course, May asked me if I wanted to go
upstairs, a thing no woman had ever suggested before to me, and I
blushed, but by this time I was becoming used to her methods. Her father
was a long, sad Civil Servant, and her mother a bright, direct little
woman not unlike May herself, and whatever he said, the pair of them
argued with and jeered him unmercifully. This only made him hang his
head lower, but suddenly, after I had been talking for a while, he began
to argue with me about the state of the country, which seemed to cause
him a lot of concern. In those days I was very optimistic on the
subject, and I put my hands deep in my trousers pockets and answered him
back politely but firmly. Then he caught me out on a matter of fact, and
suddenly he gave a great crow of delight and went out to bring in two
bottles of Guinness. By this time I was so much in my element that I
accepted the Guinness: I always have loved a good argument.

“Cripes!” May said when I was leaving, “do you ever stop once you
start?”

“It’s not so often I meet an intelligent talker,” I said loftily.

“When you’ve heard as much of my old fellow as I have, maybe you won’t
think he’s so intelligent,” she said, but she did not sound indignant,
and I had an impression that she was really quite pleased at having
brought home a young fellow who could entertain her father. It gave her
the feeling that she was really all the time an intellectual, but had
met the wrong sort of boy. In the years I was courting her we quarrelled
like hell, but between her father and me it was a case of love at first
sight. After I was fired from the railway, it was he who got me another
job and insisted on my looking after it. The poor devil had always been
pining for a man in the house.

Then one evening I ran into Nancy Harding, whom I had not seen for
some months. It was an embarrassing moment because I realized at once
that my fantasy had all come true. If I had not actually made a
brilliant match, I had as good as done so, and yet she was my first
and purest love.

“I hear you and May Dwyer are very great these days,” she said, and
something in her tone struck me as peculiar. Afterwards I realized that
it was the tone I was supposed to adopt when I broke the news to her.

“I’ve seen quite a lot of her,” I admitted.

“You weren’t long getting hooked,” she went on with a smile that somehow
did not come off.

“I don’t know about being ‘hooked,’ as you call it,” I said, getting on
my dignity at once. “She asked me to her house and I went, that’s all.”

“Oh, we know all about it,” said Nancy, and this time there was no
mistaking the malice in her tone. “You don’t have to tell me anything.”

“Well, there isn’t so much to tell,” I replied with a bland smile.

“And I suppose she talks French and German like a native?” asked Nancy.

This reference to the falsehoods I had told did hurt me. I had known
they were indiscreet, but it hadn’t occurred to me that they would
become a joke in the Harding family.

“I don’t honestly know what you’re talking about, Nancy,” I said
weakly. “May asked me to her house and I went, just as I’d have gone to
yours if you’d asked me. That’s all there is to it.”

“Oh, is that all?” she asked in her commonest tone, and suddenly, to my
astonishment, I saw tears in her eyes. “And if you had a house like mine
you wouldn’t mind asking people there either, would you? And sisters
like mine! And a father like mine! It’s all very well for you to grouse
about your old fellow, but if you had one like mine you’d have something
to talk about. Blooming old pig, wouldn’t open his mouth to you. ’Tis
easy for you to talk, Larry Delaney! Damn easy!”

And then she shot away from me to conceal her tears, and I was left
standing there on the pavement, stunned. Too stunned really to have done
anything about it. It had all happened too suddenly, and been too great
an intrusion on my fantasy for me to grasp it at all. I was so
astonished and upset that, though I was to have met May that night, I
didn’t go. Instead I went for a lonely walk by myself, over the hills to
the river, to think what I should do about it. In the end, of course, I
did nothing at all; I had no experience to indicate to me what I could
do; and it was not until years later that I even realized that the
reason I had cared so much for Nancy was that she, like myself, was one
of the duke’s children, one of those outcasts of a lost fatherland who
go through life living above and beyond themselves like some image of
man’s original aspiration.