“Goodness,” he said, “what a gentleman I see here, mmm? Who are you, sir, and how do you do?”
He impressed me as delightful.
“Sir, I fear that I am Charles O'Brien. Himself. In the flesh, as it were.”
“Charles O'Brien?” It became plain that he did not know the name, for he said next, “And—why do you ‘fear’ that you are Charles O'Brien, mmm? Is it such a terrible thing to be Charles O'Brien?”
On some days I believe a dullness slows my intellect; on others I have a certain sharpness—which now I found.
“Oh, sir,” I said. “To fear that one is oneself is such a great terror that one needs no other fears—and so are burdens lifted.”
Mr. Burke laughed. “And a wit. Come in, Charles O'Brien.”
He led me into his inner rooms, through a most pleasant house, full of comfort and warmth. I felt some surprise; perhaps my sharp encounters with his daughter had led me to expect a colder home.
We sat and Mr. Burke offered me tea, which I declined, and a drink, which I also declined (I needed my wits about me). He settled in his chair.
“Now, Mr. Charles O'Brien, I have the pleasure of a visit from a fine man on a fine summer afternoon; what may I return to him?”
I said, “Sir, this concerns your daughter.”
He laughed. “Do you know April?”
I said, “Yes, sir. I do. I was with Mr. Wilde in Paris.”
“Ohhhhh,” he said, changing to a grave mood. “What a great loss he is to us all! April was most upset and still mourns him. Which is not usual in a young person.”
“Sir,” I blurted, “I fell in love with your daughter in Paris and I wish to press my case forward with her and with you.”
He laughed again. “Well, you can try to be lucky! Have you seen how direct she can be?”
I winced. “Has she told you of me?”
“No. April tells me nothing of her suitors—except that she has none and entertains none.”
“Sir.” Fear seized me, in case I had already established false pretenses. “I must tell you the whole story. Your daughter has already rejected me.”
He waved a hand. “Pish! A thing of nothing, as Shakespeare said. It's what a girl feels she must do to a suitor. But tell me anyway.”
About myself, I have many doubts, but I do not doubt that I tell a good tale. For the next twenty minutes, Mr. Terence Burke sat transfixed as I told him of my life as a healer, of Lady Mollie Carew, of my journey to Paris, of my failure to help Mr. Wilde. Then I told him of April's arrival with Dr. Tucker, and of the great tale that Mr. Wilde told, of my pursuit of April, of her blunt rejection and my subsequent despondency.
When telling a story, it is important to observe the face of the listener. From the many aspects that passed across Mr. Terence Burke's face I was reminded of clouds passing over a mountain on a sunny day: first there is light, then there is shadow, then there is light again. Soon, I knew that he had not previously heard anything of this tale, not even the part concerning his own birth.
As I finished, he gazed into the fireplace, now filled with pine cones as a summer decoration. He said nothing; then he looked at me and made a gesture with his hand that said “Stay” and he rose and left the room. I heard his footsteps on the stairs; I heard him cross a floor over my head, retrace his steps, and return down the staircase.
He stood by my chair and handed me a small rectangle of stiff paper.
“I am one, mmm, of the few gentlemen in England,” he said, “with a very small birthright—this is it; this drawing.”
Naturally I recognized it at once—a perspective of Tipperary Castle from the side on which stands the theater.
“How have you come by this?”
He said, “I was told that my mother died in my childbirth and that she died in the West Indies, that she came of a Northumbrian family who lived in this castle”—he tapped the rectangle of paper—“but that the ancestral home has been long ruined.”
“Who told you this?”
He said, “The people whom I have always called ‘family’—my guardian, as I understood her to be.” He sat down. “Here we have a mystery.”
“Does your daughter know of this?”
“I must say that I do not know. She expresses no affection for Ireland and the Irish. None at all.”
Raised in Somerset, he had been given to understand that his father, a soldier, had died in the South Seas a month before his infant son was due to be born. Then his mother, overcome with grief, fell dangerously ill in the last month of her confinement and died. He was saved, and his aunt adopted him. Of the story he told me, only two facts had a ring of truth: his father had indeed been named Terence Burke; and his mother had indeed been an actress—“But a most respectable actress,”he hastened to say.
I had not, as yet, asked the question that burned me: Where was April? Was she still in Paris? Or had she, as I feared in my general anxiety, gone farther afield? At least I had ascertained that she had no suitor and no consort and, I gathered—or made bold to assume—no intention of having such.
“How are we to get to the bottom of all this?” he said. He stood; he sat; he stood again; he sat again; he rose and paced; he sat again—all in silence, his knuckles to his mouth.
When I saw a moment of composure, I asked, “Where is your daughter these times, sir? Is she still with Dr. Tucker?”
“Oh, no,” he said. “She works here in London now—she has been given an excellent post in the government, in the Ministry that deals with France; she's one of the few ladies at work there. But she lives here; she will be home this evening.” He sat. “Now, Charles O'Brien—what is to be done?”
I said, “Sir, this may be your estate. It has, I believe, four thousand acres of prime Tipperary land. It lies in the Golden Vale, one of the richest seams of earth in the west of Europe. It is your birthright, and you must prove your title and assert your claim.”
“But how can I do that?”
“In truth, sir, I do not know. But my father will know—he knows many lawyers. And I will assist in every way that may be useful.”
“A true gentleman,” he said quietly. “A true gentleman.”
The clock on Terence Burke's mantel told me that it was past four. He saw me glance at it and said, “My daughter comes home at twenty-five minutes before seven every evening.”
“Sir, if I may—let us have you tell your daughter of my visit. I shall return tomorrow and you shall report to me.”
I learned that his daughter took luncheon at home on most days; we arranged that I should arrive next day before she did, and we parted most warmly. My efforts had exhausted me, I had much to think about, and so I hailed a cab to my hotel. I dined alone with no liquor, retired early, and slept not at all, because my mind raced across the words of the day. How should we establish that Mr. Burke had been lied to about his origins— which was my first suspicion? Then I supposed: What if he had not been told lies? What if the house and estate belonged to another family? My father had told me when I returned from Paris that, yes, the family name of Tipperary Castle had, to his memory, been Burke, and this seemed to confirm the story that Mr. Wilde had told.
Yet my hopes of capturing April Burke—and I believed that the regaining of her ancestral home must aid me in this—still rested principally on a tale told by a playwright, therefore a maker of fictions. As these uncertainties made me unable to sleep, I rose and sat by the window, ceaselessly shuffling a deck of cards.
Next morning, I walked along Bond Street, took coffee at Mr. Fortnum's, and purchased some candied peel for my mother, some crystal ginger for Father, some “furnace-hot” peppermint for Euclid, and a bottle of Tuscan wine for my noonday host, which would be delivered with my compliments in advance of my arrival.
Mr. Burke greeted me with a long face.
“I fear I have to disappoint you.”
Already I knew, and indeed had half-expected what he would say.
“My daughter will
not join us. She has declined on account of—” He halted and held out his hands. “I do not know. But your excellent wine has come.”
I said, “Let us employ our time usefully over lunch to see how we may further your birthright claim.”
We had a most agreeable luncheon. Although my heart continued to beat fast at what had evidently amounted to another rejection, I continued to enjoy Mr. Burke's company. We straightaway got to the business at hand—namely, how to establish who he was, and whence came his family. I asked of him that he tell me all he knew about his childhood and growing up, and who might still be living in Somerset with knowledge of his past.
Our plan came together smoothly. As he, being retired from his place of business, had time on his hands, and as I had come over from Ireland to spend as many days on this matter as would be necessary, we would journey to Somerset the very next day.
Then I said, “Sir, are you acquainted with Mr. George Bernard Shaw, the renowned critic of the drama?”
He said, “I have never met him, although I know who he is.”
I said, “Mr. Shaw is known to love actresses, and I feel that this inquiry will intrigue him. The span of time is not long—he may know someone who can shed light on the life of your dear mother.”
I had heard that Mr. Shaw was among the easiest men in London to find, and we did not experience much difficulty. The critic and playwright was known to hold forth in a Covent Garden dining-hall before he went to the theater or the opera. We saw him straightaway and walked to his table.
His beard wagged as he spoke and he breathed the most oppressive breath; he was much given to the eating of fruits, vegetables, and nuts. But Mr. Shaw had the cleverest eyes, and the quickest, merriest smile.
Sadly, he helped not at all. He greeted us very cordially, and pressed upon us some pamphlet that he had been writing about the Solomon Islanders and his desire to bring them an education. Not renowned as a listener, he nevertheless gave us his attention as Mr. Burke bade me tell the story. I saw Mr. Shaw begin to remember my name, and when I had finished he chuckled and said to me, “Ah, yes, I have you now—you're Mr. Parnell's old friend.”
I said that indeed I had known Mr. Parnell, and Mr. Shaw said no more on the subject. He told us then that he had not known an actress by the name of April Burke and had never heard of her; “Or Mrs. Terence Burke, or Mrs. Alphonsus Burke, or Mrs. Edmund Burke, or Mrs. Aloysius Alhambra Burke.”
When we left Mr. Shaw's company we were no wiser than before, but we had enjoyed meeting him and we laughed much at his various passions and schemes.
“He talks a great deal,” said Mr. Terence Burke, who dined with me at my hotel.
Shaw was four years older than Charles O'Brien. He had known a great deal less privilege, but had accomplished much more. With a fearlessness that Mr. O'Brien had not found in himself, Shaw struck out for unpopular causes. He also supported the works—and made the names—of emerging playwrights. And he was one of the champions of Oscar Wilde, by whom he was much impressed.
His presence in London typified a kind of long-standing phenomenon. The Irish in England have achieved roles that were never reciprocated. Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Edmund Burke, Oliver Goldsmith, Shaw, Yeats, and Wilde—no Englishmen got comparable status in Ireland.
For obvious reasons. Whereas the sound of an English accent in an Irish ear long spoke of brutal colonization, the presence of a cultivated Irishman in London salved the conscience to some degree, as if to say, “Look, we've been educating these savages.” Or, if entertaining, supported a stereotype: “Oh, such charming rogues.”
Shaw, more than any of his fellow countrymen, understood these mindsets. He came from poor Protestant Dublin stock, therefore from an unfamiliar, disconcerting mold—he could not be pigeonholed. And he was self-educated, self-made, relentlessly clever, and prepared to take on anything.
If he found himself in the wrong upon a question, he publicly allowed himself to think his way to a different point of view—and then announced that he had changed his mind. When he did so, he changed many other minds.
He knew how to attack with humor; he ridiculed England's stereotypical thinking just as satirically as Jonathan Swift had done a century and more earlier. And Shaw did so just as viciously, if in a little more nuanced way: “An Englishman thinks he is moral when he is only uncomfortable,” he wrote.
By the time Mr. O'Brien and Mr. Burke met him, he had created a formidable presence as a columnist and pamphleteer. A music and drama critic too, whose playwriting career had just begun to flourish, he was also an activist whose principal desire was to make the general mass of the English population more political.
Shaw's great ego opened many doors. Although Charles O'Brien, through Mr. Burke's presence, was guaranteed a safe passage about London as an obviously civilized Irishman, Shaw could have introduced him to a whole new swath of people.
And Mr. O'Brien would have been a hit. His “mixed” background would have confounded all sides. Shaw knew that Mr. O'Brien's class status wasn't traceable by accent. “It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth, without making some other Englishman despise him,” he once uttered.
If, through Shaw, Charles had met the Anglo-Irish landlords or the British establishment in their London drawing rooms, he could have exchanged news about upper-class friends in common, such as Lady Mollie Carew. And if Shaw had taken him to meet his socialist fellow travelers, Mr. O'Brien could have spoken to them at length about his travels through Ireland. They would have been more than interested in his assessments of the country's mood in the middle of the “Irish Question.”
Regrettably, however, Shaw did not take Mr. O'Brien on a tour of inquiry among the era's actresses. Shaw knew them all, and had many famous dalliances and friendships—always assumed to be platonic—with leading ladies of the day, such as Mrs. Patrick Campbell. Had he known April Burke, he would almost certainly have fallen for the woman described by Oscar Wilde.
The farmhouses in England's West Country seemed appealing and secure. Across undulating land, we glimpsed distant church spires, on a day of great sunshine and a clear blue sky. After a train luncheon of less than moderately good food (it stuck to the roof of the mouth), we alighted at the town of Yeovil.
His childhood home, Mr. Burke told me, lay between Yeovil and Bath, near the village of Doulting. A hackney car took us there, and we found an excellent inn where we guaranteed rooms for the night. I longed to ask him whether he had told his daughter of our excursion, but I decided to wait until dinner and a glass of Madeira.
The Brook House lay in a small valley, where the summer seemed more intense than anywhere else. A long building, it had a stone doorway to the street, and a lengthy blank facade with two windows—sparse appointments in such a building.
“The house's greater life faces the garden,” Mr. Burke told me.
We opened the latch on a green wooden door under the arches of branches, and there, some ninety feet long, stretched a beautiful terrace of paving-stones. As we entered, the garden came in view to our right— sloping lawns filled with yellow and white blossoming trees, and deep, wide beds of flowers in their glorious summer colors.
“I have not been here since I was twenty,” Mr. Burke said, but when we knocked at the door, he immediately recognized the old lady who answered. She knew him too, and professed herself delighted—but with my experience of calling upon people in their homes, I thought her wary. We did not enter; she led us to a bower with garden seats and an air of peace and pleasantness, and she rang a bell that hung from a branch. A gentleman appeared, a truculent man; “Harris!” cried Mr. Burke.
“Oh? Hullo,” said the worthy, and never uttered another word. He brought us lemonade and sat with Miss Gambon, for that was her name. And she, as I soon found, had been the person who raised Mr. Burke!
After much talk of neighbors and memories, of childhood escapades and great feats of the weather, Mr. Burke, in his charming way, declared, “Now, Mater, we a
re here on a mission. Tell me, do you know anything of a Great House in Ireland? Of which you gave me a drawing when I was very young?”—and he pulled it from the leather attaché case he had carried with him. I had set myself to watch rather than speak, and I know that Miss Gambon recoiled and looked at him with some malice. She concealed it cleverly—but she knew that I saw it. Then she answered:
“I don't know. Somewhere in the past, I feel, we did have an Irish relation.”
Mr. Burke pressed on: “I have never visited my mother's grave.” Had I not had such a good impression of him, I might have believed that he was taunting her.
“Oh, but do you not recall? She was buried at sea, on her return from Spain.”
“What?” he said. “Was I born at sea?”
She had the air of someone grasping at a straw of hope—and she had been bewildered by this thunderbolt into her life from such a clear blue sky.
“Oh, yes, at sea, yes.”
“But is not my birth registered here at Bristol?”
“That is where the law required,” she said. “It had to do with the place in which the infant would reside. And—” Here she stuttered a little. “Also. The ship—it had sailed out of Bristol port.” (I was mindful of Mother's remark that “a lie needs two legs.”)
Mr. Burke believed her, but I did not. I studied her—and she saw that I studied her. Although she wore excellent fabrics, she had nothing of Mr. Burke's looks; indeed, she seemed coarse to have reared such an elegant man, and I came to the conclusion that nothing in this story might be what it seemed. I also concluded that we should not get at much truth in this garden at this moment.
In a short time, she terminated the encounter, saying, “You must forgive me. I tire easily these days; I never leave the house anymore.”
Mr. Burke and I took our leave of her. In the lane outside the house, he said that he wanted to show me his “haunts,” and we walked up to a hill from which we could look out over a wide swath of the countryside.
“The locals told me that on a clear day I should glimpse the sea from here,” he said, “but on a clear day, we always seem to have a haze that obscures our chance. I find that to resemble Life itself.”