Chapter VII: Cork and Thereabouts

There is something of rich and racy association about the very name of Cork--something that suggests joviality, wit, a warm southern temperament. Corkmen only out of all Ireland hold together. The rest of Ireland may be fissiparous, disunited. Corkmen cleave closer than Scotsmen to one another, and to be a Corkman is to another Corkman a cloak that covers a multitude of sins. A Corkman in Dublin will have friends in all sorts of unlikely places. What matter though a man be in a humble rank of life--a cabman, a policeman, a postman, even a scavenger! So he be a Corkman, he has an appeal to the heart of his brother Corkman. It is a Freemasonry. There is nothing else like it in Ireland, nor anywhere else, so far as I know; for the Scotsman coming into England may draw other Scotsmen to follow him, but in the Scotch sticking together there is less real affection than there is in the case of the Corkman. To be able to exchange memories of the Mardyke, of the River Lee, of Shandon and Sunday's Well, is to make Corkmen brothers all the world over. Cork looks on itself as the real capital of Ireland, and has always its eye on a day when Dublin will be dispossessed.

It has a most excellent situation on the River Lee, and is surrounded by all manner of natural beauties. There is plenty of business stirring, and there is a good deal of opulence in Cork, where, Corkmen being men of taste, they display it in their houses, their way of living and on the persons of their beautiful women, with the irresistible Cork brogue to crown all their other charms. Cork is nothing if not artistic. She has produced artists of all descriptions--poets, painters, great newspaper men (was not Delane of the _Times_ a Corkman?), musicians, sculptors, orators, preachers. The words roll off the Cork tongue sweet as honey. There is something extraordinarily rich, gay and alluring about Cork and Cork people. They were always audacious. They set up Perkin Warbeck as a Pretender to the English Crown, clad him in silks and velvets, and demanded his acknowledgment at the hands of the Lord Deputy. I do not know that as a city Cork took a great part in any of the many Irish rebellions. It would make a city of diplomatists because of its honeyed tongue. Queen Elizabeth, they say, was the first one to talk of Blarney, which is a Cork commodity. There was a certain McCarthy, Lord of Blarney, who would not come in and submit to the Queen's forces, though week by week he promised to come and kept the Queen's anger off by cozening words. "It is all Blarney," the Queen came to say of fair words that meant nothing; but that is a derivation I somewhat suspect. I do not know what Cork was doing in the Desmond Rebellion, of the results of which Spenser has left us so harrowing a description. She was perhaps enjoying herself after the fashion of that day. Spenser married a Cork-woman, and has enshrined her in the "Epithalamion," the most beautiful love-poem in the English language. Cork has its links with the Golden Age of England, for Raleigh was at Youghal, and Spenser at Kilcolman close by; and in Raleigh's house at Youghal they show you the oriel in which Spenser sat and read the "Faërie Queene" to his host, the Shepherd of the Ocean. Youghal and all that part of the country round about Cork is steeped in traditions and memories. St. Mary's Collegiate Church at Youghal might be in an English town, and there are malls and promenades in those parts, with high, crumbling houses, which suggest the English civilization of the Middle Ages and not the Irish civilization before the Norman Conquest. The Normans were great church-builders, but of their churches, as in the case of the old Abbey of St. Francis at Youghal, there remain now only ruins--a naked gable standing up amid a wilderness of graves, buried in coarse grasses, which, when I was there, had a greater decency towards the dead than had the living. For it is strange that the Irish, who love the dead, have little piety towards their graves.

From Youghal Sir Walter Raleigh sailed away to Virginia on his last disastrous voyage. Spenser had gone back to London earlier than that, heart-broken by the loss of his little son, who was burnt to death in a fire at Kilcolman Castle. Raleigh and Spenser had received grants of the lands of the attainted Desmonds. Very little profit either had of them, and Raleigh's lands passed to the Earl of Cork, commonly called "the Great," whose flaring chapel destroys the quiet of St. Mary's dim aisles and chancel. Never was there so worldly a monument as this of Robert Boyle, his mother, his two wives, and his nine children, all in hideously painted and decorated Italian marble. The fierce eyes of the great Earl are something to remember with dismay.

I recall the evidence the great Earl adduced to prove that Sir Walter did really hand him over his Irish estates on the eve of that journey to Virginia--for a small consideration of money and plenishing for the expedition. "If you do not take the lands, some Scot will have them," said, or is reported to have said, Sir Walter, which reminds us that Jamie had succeeded Elizabeth, and was already transplanting his Scots--Jamie, who was to keep so brilliant a bird as Sir Walter in so squalid a cage as a prison till he made up his mind to send him to the block. Youghal is haunted by Sir Walter and Spenser. My memories of the place in a windy autumn are brightened by sudden gleams, as of splendid attire and golden olive faces with the Elizabethan ruff and the Elizabethan pointed beard.

The Blackwater, which runs through Youghal, dropping into the sea at that point, had at Rhincrew Point its House of Knights Templars. From Youghal they also sailed away in search of El Dorado, but a heavenly one. May they have found it!

And also there is Templemichael, of the Earls of Desmond, the southern branch of the Fitzgeralds, which Cromwell battered down for "dire insolence." There is a story of a Desmond lord who was buried across the water at Ardmore, the holy place of St. Declan, where there is a pilgrimage and a patronage to this day. But holy as Ardmore was and is, Earl Gerald could not sleep there. He wanted to be back at Templemichael, where his young wife lay in her lonely grave. So that night after night there came a terrible cry, "Garault Arointha! Garault Arointha!"--that is to say: "Give Gerald a ferry!" So at last some of his faithful followers rowed over by night, took up the body of Earl Gerald, and carried it back to Templemichael and to the dead Countess's side. And after that Earl Gerald slept in peace.

My memory of Youghal in that far-away windy autumn is compounded of three or four things. There was purple wistaria hanging in great masses over the walls of the college which was the foundation of one of the Desmonds. There was provision there for so many singing men--twenty, was it?--who were to sing in St. Mary's choir. The great Earl of Cork had a great maw, one that never suffered from indigestion. The revenues of St. Mary's College went the same way as Sir Walter's slice of the Desmond lands. Then, again, in a little shop-window of the town, there was a glorious show of fruit--great scarlet-skinned tomatoes, gorgeous plums and pears and apples, which reminded one that Raleigh had planted orchards at Affane, on the Blackwater. As a rule, fruit is sadly to seek in a small Irish town, although Cork produces some of the finest fruit I have ever seen. Then, again, there was a room in Raleigh's house, Myrtle Grove, unlit save for the flicker of firelight, the darkness all about us, and an old voice bidding us to notice the earthy smell, which was supposed to enter the room from a subterranean passage that led to St. Mary's.

Again, I have another widely different memory. It is of a fine, tall, beautifully-complexioned girl standing behind the counter of a draper's shop, her shining red-golden head showing against a background of little plaid shawls and kerchiefs, while she lamented in her wailing southern brogue the fact that no one could hope to get married in Youghal, unless one had £300 to buy an old "widda-man"; and they were all the men that were going.

I like to get back from Youghal and its ghosts, and Rosanna, who never thought of rebelling against the marriage customs of her forbears, to cheerful Cork of the living and not the dead, with her tramcars, her jingles--the curious covered car which takes the place of the outside car in other Irish towns--her citizens laughing and button-holing each other with a greater gaiety than the Dubliners; her excellent shops, her beautiful girls promenading Patrick Street, her club-houses, her churches, her Queen's College, and all the rest of it, down to her river with its busy steamers. Cork's citizens live outside her gates, at Monkstown, at Blackrock, at Glenbrook; and the busy steamers carry them to and fro by the loveliest of waterways. "Are the steamers punctual?" I asked a Cork friend. "Is it punctual?" repeated he. "They're the most punctual things in Ireland, for they always get in before their time."

Father Mathew is one of Cork's memories; Father Prout is another; Dr. Maginn is another. But the list of Cork's worthies is a long one, and I shall not enter upon it here.

Cork has the most enervating climate for one who comes to it from more northern latitudes. It is always soft and warm, and often wet. "Good heavens!" said John Mitchel, when he came back from twenty years or so of Australia, gliding in by Spike Island in that same silver mist of rain in which he had gone out, "isn't that shower over yet?" The flowers are wonderful in Cork, as well as the fruit. I have seen the suburban gardens of Corkmen a luxuriance of vivid, closely packed, overflowing blossom. Myrtles and fuchsias grow in the open air. There are hedges of fuchsias at Killarney. There are hydrangeas also; but the same is true of Dublin and its precincts. No one coming in from outside has energy to do anything in Cork. But the Corkman lacks nothing of energy, nothing of the joy of life. He is a keen business man, and there is plenty of industrial enterprise. He is interested in the affairs of the world at large and of Cork in particular. He has his enthusiasms. He is a tremendous politician, and does not mind being on the losing side so long as it is the right one. He is a sportsman and a bit of a gambler; he makes love and is a good friend. The place is full of wit and gaiety and humour. His standard of living when he has money, or ought to have it, is an unusually high one for Ireland. Some of those successful merchants live, I am told, like merchant princes. He is lavish and generous, and fond of display--altogether a rich, abundant, highly-coloured character. He lives in an atmosphere of incessant wit and humour. Hardly a man in Cork but has his nickname. "There goes Billy Boulevard," you hear, and you are told that the gentleman so designated desired to embellish Patrick Street with trees. But it was in Dublin that they called one who had made his money in pneumatic tyres, and was exalted above his humbler neighbours, "Lord Tyre and Side-on."