This story is extracted from A Life Before, my current novel-in-progress, but is also a standalone story in itself. It tells of W.B.Yeats's first meeting, in 1883, with Laura Armstrong, his cousin, first love and first muse, whom his father described as 'a most fascinating little vixen.'
A Life Before is a novel based on Maud Gonne and W.B. Yeats's coming-of-age stories. And this is:
The Holy Church of Romance: A Short Story
No plan for the afternoon. Only to be out with the sea and the wind, walking sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly, and sometimes stopping altogether to look at a seagull flying over his head. It takes him two hours to complete the loop around the peninsula, past the cliffs and the lighthouse, the sheer drops and the hidden coves.
All he carries with him is the old fancy that always accompanies him on a walk around the height of Howth Head: that Ireland’s Eye--that long, low, lid of rock out to sea--is not an island, but an actual organ of sight, gazing back at shore, watching him in particular. He has never confessed the thought to anyone. In his eighteen years he's learned that for him real life spins a thinner thread than for others, and it's best to keep his fancies to himself.
Now he is back on the road, heading homewards, his mind freed by the walk, no thought now landing on anything, until he hears the creak of cartwheels behind him. He steps aside by habit, expecting one of Judge Wright’s servants or a farmer’s wife to rumble by. Instead, a small pony‑carriage comes abreast and halts.
On the high board seat, without bonnet on her head or chaperone by her side, sits a girl. Next thing, a great nod of red curls is leaning down to him from her unlicensed height and she is thrusting out a hand. An ungloved hand, blue‑white, dusted with little freckles, as if someone spilled a constellation of tiny suns across her skin.
'I am Laura Armstrong,' she is saying. 'How do you do?'
He tries, in the moment available to him, to imagine himself gallant, cavalier. A medieval minstrel, bowing over her hand, touching her actual skin with his actual lips. But he can feel how, from one ear to the other, from crown to clavicle, his face is flaming.
She takes his hand in her own, gives it a vigorous jiggle. 'You are one of the Yeats family, are you not? Residing at Island View? I'm told we have friends in common. In fact, I'm reliably informed that you are my cousin.” She pats the plank beside her. ‘Hop up, and I’ll explain.’
A small panic clutches his throat. ‘I have to be home for tea.’
It wasn’t true. His sisters would leave his measly collation under a cloth in the pantry, and his father would just say, 'You are very late again.' Nothing there was worth a rush back.
‘Oh don't worry,' she says, amused. 'We’ll get you home for tea.’
He climbs in, as bid, keeping his head down to conceal another blush at the scent of sweet violets that's invaded his nostrils. He has the feeling it's to no avail, that even the backs of his ears are red. His hand glows with having being held in hers.
She flicks the reins and the pony starts again. 'So you must be William.'
'Yes. I am William Butler Yeats.'
'That’s a mouthful. What do your sisters call you?'
‘Willie.’ No sooner said than regretted. He has already declared to his sisters and his father that he wants to be known henceforth as W.B. Willie is a name that belongs in the nursery. 'But I prefer W.B.'
‘And are you still at school, cousin Willie?’
‘No,' he says, offended. 'I am at the Art College.’
‘So you are to follow in your father’s footsteps?’
‘I had thought to be scientist.’
She gave him a look that said what she thought of that.
‘Really? But I’ve heard you write poetry?’
'Yes.' Who has been discussing him with her. He is afraid to ask but she tells him anyway. She is lodging for the summer at Kid Rock House — does he know it?
Of course he knows it, the small mansion overlooking the cliffs, but he shakes his head. It belongs to Judge Wright, his own family’s landlord at Island View, and his father owes money on the rent. Has her informant discussed that with her too? He lets the pony’s hooves keep the beat of that worry.
‘I think it must be rather marvellous to be a writer and have an artist for a father. I should love to be an actress, but all my father thinks of is money and getting on. Laura!’ she booms, in imitation of her father’s voice. ‘You have but one job. To find a well-heeled husband before you are one-and-twenty.’
W.B. laughs, as he is supposed to.
‘Then I say: “But what of love, Papa?”’
‘Ah love,’ says W.B., surprising himself, but liking the worldly way the words fell from him.
‘Ah yes. Love indeed.’ She clicks her tongue to the pony. ‘My father has already made me promise myself to Mr Henry Morgan Byrne, solicitor. Do you know him?’
He does not.
‘He is endlessly, savagely cruel,’ she says, alarming him. A phrase out of Hafiz rings in his mind I made a bargain with that brown hair before the beginning of time, and it shall not be broken. His cousin’s hair is auburn, pure gold where the autumn light was catching it now, even more deserving of such a pledge.
She is detailing her beau's offences. He laughed at her wish to act, saying no wife of his would make a courtesan of herself. He slammed shut her beloved volume of Tennyson and called poetry a waste of time. At a picnic he spent far too much time talking to her friend Bertha while ignoring her. None of it sounds particularly savage to W.B. but the hurt in her eyes, and the blaze beneath, seem real.
He is quickened by the notion of being needed, buoyed by adoration, seized by heroic thought. Let this Henry person keep his ledgers and his apologies. W.B. would strike a bargain of a different kind.
‘I ask you, cousin Willie,’ she says, pulling the cart to halt on a rise of road where the gorse falls away and their view of the sea widens. The pony snorts and tosses its head. Below, the rocks burn gold, and Ireland's Eye gazes back at them from its solitary post. She draws a folded letter from her reticule. ‘Listen to this, and tell me if you think he deserves me.’
She reads out the choicest passages of the letter, seemingly an apology for whatever the sender might have done, even though he is not aware of having done anything. ‘Well? What do you think?’
Much of it makes no sense to him, beyond the plea that the writer had only her best interests at heart.
‘Should I yield, do you think? Does he deserve the forgiveness he pleads for?’
His tongue is dry. ‘He… he writes well,’ he said at last, ‘and he sounds… sorry.’
With a sigh, she sets the pony moving again. ‘My heart is too full of wanderlust, Cousin Willie, that's the problem. I yearn to explore this wide world of ours, to soak in all its splendour and mystery. I feel sure you understand me?
She points seaward and WB's gaze follows her finger. Ireland’s Eye lies on the water, dark and attentive against the restless sea ‘Do you ever feel the island is looking at us?’ she asks and he is startled. It seems to him a sign, reinforcing the covenant he's been making.
W.B. has overdone his intake of courtly love poetry and its impossible creed that a poet must vow service to a lady far above his touch. The island—dark, watchful, and patient as a carved god—seems to nod its heavy head in agreement. Binding yourself to her shall turn ache into purpose, yearning into craft. Serve her with your words, since you’ve no other coin. ‘I always have,’ he blurts, and before he can shrink from saying more, he tells her everything. ‘Once, my friend Charles Johnston and I rowed over to it and found a low passage that opened into a cave with an ancient pool in the rock and queer marks on the walls. We knew we'd found an ancient place where the old druids did their work.’
‘How delicious,’ she says, shivering
The meeting of minds now loosens his tongue completely and soon he's telling of how he and Charley stayed too long and the tide ran off, marooning their skiff. ‘We had to wait without food or topcoats, until long past midnight before Pap—' He is trying to train his tongue off saying Papa. ’Before Father arrived to rescue us.’
‘Is this belief in an otherworldly eye not unusual for a scientist? Science seems to me like a metallic sleep when placed beside poetry.'
Science had only increased his wonder but he saw the truth in what she said.
Mabinogion,
Morte de'Arthur, the poetry of Shelley, the novels of Sir Walter Scott were part of the holy church of romance that should be to him all that religion was to others. HIs imagination had found all it desired in those books, with their delight in armour, and in raiment, and in the giants and wizards and grotesques remembered by woods and wild waters. Why seek answers elsewhere, especially among those too sceptical, or too sectarian, to understand magic and its mysticism?
His father, he had come to see, was among the unbelievers, He had never read
Mabinogion and, though he had given him
Morte de'Arthur, and spoken to him of the importance of the picturesqueness, the bodily energy, and the sudden transformations such ideas had brought to the Middle Ages, and told him about the poets and painters like William Morris who had made them almost as important in his time, still he wanted only as much romance as his scepticism would allow.
For him, the discoveries of Darwin brought joy and liberty and he spoke of the fading of religion and the supernatural in one breath. But W.B.'s nerves were stirred by the emotions of a new generation. He thought not at all of devils or angels, bishops or saints, but of Merlin and the stone and the holy grail, and the extravagant, magnificent sense of mystery in the tales.
Once, the world had been all the heart desired but it had changed, nobody could tell why. His cousin--if such she was--was wakening him from...how had she described it...the metallic sleep of science.
'You are right,' he says.
'I'm so glad you agree. I don’t want you, Willie, to think of me as a
first cousin. Think of me as your fifteenth cousin, twenty times removed. I know you have a soul like mine. You want to voyage the vast seas, climb rugged mountainsides, trek through jungles, and unearth hidden treasures in far-off lands, do you not?’
He realised, with a small internal start, that he did not. What he wanted to voyage was the seas and lands of
her. To climb the veiled hills of her moods. To trek through the jungles of devotion and unearth what lived within.
‘I want to write a play for you,’ he heard himself say.
It was already forming in his mind, intact and complete. A play of magic flowers and elvish wisdom like Shakespeare’s midsummer dream, with her as an enchantress and old Father Time as the only one who can defeat her. In the jolt of the cart and the salt of Howth sea air, he envisages it all: first the drawing-room performance, then the stage boards lit. Gas flares hissing, audiences in their Sunday best, applause and acclamation.
He sets his faith in her there, on Howth Head. She would be the condition of his courage, summoning him to his desk. He would give her parts worthy of her. Dublin would learn her name by heart, and thereby his. Obscurity will lose its footing in his bargain with her auburn hair.
Laura Armstrong slows the cart again and turns her bright eyes on him. ‘A play for me, cousin Willie? Truly? Oh, how completely marvellous! Oh just wait until I tell Henry.’
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