E-Book, Englisch, 250 Seiten
Gleeson The Glass Shore
1. Auflage 2020
ISBN: 978-1-84840-558-5
Verlag: New Island
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Short Stories by Women Writers from the North of Ireland
E-Book, Englisch, 250 Seiten
ISBN: 978-1-84840-558-5
Verlag: New Island
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
SINÉAD GLEESON 's essay collection Constellations: Reflections from Life won Non-Fiction Book of the Year at 2019 Irish Book Awards and the Dalkey Literary Award for Emerging Writer. It was shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize, the Michel Déon Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and has been translated into several languages. Her short stories have featured in Being Various: New Irish Short Stories (Faber, 2019) and Repeal the 8th . She has edited several award-winning anthologies including The Long Gaze Back: An Anthology of Irish Women Writers, The Glass Shore , and most recently The Art of the Glimpse . Sinéad is currently collaborating with visual artists Alice Maher and Rachel Fallon, and with Aideen Barry and composer Stephen Shannon. T his Woman's Work: Essays on Music , co-edited with Kim Gordon will be published by White Rabbit in 2022. She is also working on a novel.
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An Idealist
It was morning, and the day promised to be long and beautiful. The air was warm with the moist, misty warmth that relaxes energy, and makes the agriculturist thankful that his heaviest work is over for a season. On the whole landscape there was scarcely a human figure visible, though the shallow cup of the hills was dotted with white farmhouses, and in the distance, Grimpat lay like a jewel within their circle.
‘It is a good place to rest in,’ Willie Durwent said as he sunned himself on a fence with the air of a man who enjoys deserved repose. Obviously he was not a native; he was not clothed like one, he did not even lounge like one, and his eyes had not the indifference with which we contemplate the familiar, or the abstraction indicative of the absentee who finds himself suddenly amid old associations.
The fence was a boundary, dividing rich land from waste. On one side was a meadow filled with half-ripe grass that swayed softly with liquid motions, and a sheen, now silken, now silver.
On the other side was a stretch of unprofitable moor, pompous as an emperor in the purple splendour of heather and the golden glory of furze. Here a grey boulder intruded a subdued tint into the blaze of colour; there a hidden spring formed an obscure and sluggish rivulet amid which patches of rushes grew green as emeralds. Among the heather-bells bees were booming drowsily, and now and then a gay butterfly fluttered over the brilliant surface like an animated flower.
The young man sat sideways towards the moor, but his feet dangled on the side of the meadow. His position and the contrast nature afforded seemed to him allegorical, and he sighed tenderly now and then as he contemplated them. What a pity that all the solid advantages were in the meadow and all the beauty on the moor!
Jeffrey Poole lived three miles away. He was a farmer. His house stood on the top of a hill, and commanded a view of the country below, of the fields heavy with the promise of harvest, and of the roads that twined among them like ribbons.
Jeffrey’s front door commanded a distant view of the wide landscape and a near view of the paved cattle-yard and the adjacent office-houses; the back door opened into an ill-kept garden where boxwood, peonies, and larkspur grew large amid more fragrant blooms. As a rule, horticulture is rather disregarded by farmers, flowers having little market value.
On this occasion, Molly Steele was weeding in the garden; there were so many weeds that her progress was obvious. Now and then she raised herself from her stooping position and looked somewhat absently into the distance. Suddenly, her expression grew alert and her gaze fixed itself sharply on a faraway point, where only country eyes, undimmed by books, could have discerned anything.
Without confiding the reason even to herself, Molly had been wont for several days to look toward that point in the landscape where the roads from the hill farm converged with the roads leading elsewhither.
Today something rewarded her scrutiny; someone had turned up the farm road, a man, a tall man, a young man obviously, as he walked so lightly. Molly stood staring, her lips slightly parted, her hands hanging limply by her sides; then she said, ‘It is!’ and sped indoors as if she had been shot from a bow.
Upstairs, Naomi Steele sat reading; she was Molly’s sister, the elder, the plainer, the less popular. The Steeles were poorish people who had seen better days. Mrs Steele was a widow who would have been in straits but for the kindness of Jeffrey Poole, her brother, who gave her and her children a home.
Mr Steele had been a parson and something of a scholar, and traditions of such eminence cling to families in country places, and make them a little better or a little worse in the eyes of their neighbours. Jeffrey Poole was a bachelor, otherwise, perhaps, the home for the Steeles would not have been so certain.
Naomi was two years older than Molly. In her youth she had been more troublesome; as she grew up she was plainer, and both her mother and uncle observed that she was a little odd. But neither ever breathed this to the other, for, according to primitive ideas, it is destruction for a girl to differ from the orthodox pattern.
Molly was the favourite: she had all the qualities that make for general popularity; she was very pretty; she valued appreciation; was pleased when people thought well of her, said she was amiable and clever, looked after her admiringly. Naomi was indifferent to all of this; she had a world of her own; lived in the ideal; and measured everyone by a standard she had somehow formulated.
It is seldom that books are available in farmhouses, such possessions involving a waste of time and an outlay in money that does not commend itself to the agriculturist. But Mrs Steele possessed all her husband’s books, having declined to part with them at a valuation; and a pedlar appeared now and then at Grimpat with volumes of the Sixpenny Book Shelf among his wares, The Newgate Calendar, The Arabian Nights, The Seven Champions of Christendom and the primers of ancient history and of science. For these Naomi bartered the odds and ends that drop off as waste products from even the most economically managed homes.
The day of the pedlar’s advent was such a red-letter day in Naomi’s calendar that Sarah, the hired girl, suggested that Naomi had fallen in love with the pedlar, and spoiled her pleasure of his visits for ever.
At first Naomi shared her intellectual good things with Molly, but Molly had no memory, and confused St George of Merrie England with the Deerslayer, and Romulus and Remus with Valentine and Orson. That provoked Naomi, who slapped Molly and declined confidential talks with her in the future.
At fifteen Naomi began to grow frightful; it was then she would tell Molly in a low-voiced narrative in the first person, looking straight before her, appalling things she had seen and done, extraordinary persons who had interviewed her, startling and inexplicable confidences they had made to her. Molly often stopped her ears that she might not hear these narratives, but that did not prevent her having a nightmare subsequently.
At seventeen Naomi had realised that she was different from other girls and that divergence is an unhappy thing. She felt she was unpopular, that her uncle was uncomfortable with her, her mother was a little ashamed of her, and when an invitation or a present came it was always for Molly.
No one had suggested to Naomi that she was a genius; had it been suggested she would not have understood. Who has ever discovered genius by their own fireside, or recognised at close quarters the strange, ungainly thing? When the world begins to shout hurrah! It is usually in the home of genius that the sound is heard with most astonishment. That is a genius, the child who had often been so tiresome and so useless!
But Naomi had done nothing noteworthy as of yet, perhaps never would, for she was growing shy and self-conscious, ashamed of the nonsense that used to give Molly bad dreams, and anxious for some common place, some common use, in the big, common world.
Naomi sat upstairs reading by her own room window. The window looked out on a stack of turf, but above the turf was a bit of blue, over which rags of clouds floated lazily, and that sufficed to distract her attention.
Suddenly the door burst open, and Molly entered breathlessly. ‘It is Willie Durwent – coming up the road!’ she gasped. ‘He is coming here – to tea!’
Naomi looked around blankly. ‘Oh, you know,’ Molly said impatiently, as though she had replied. ‘Mrs Dale’s nephew – I met him last summer when I went with her to the seaside. I told you about him – or I meant to, at any rate. He is very nice, has been at the university, and is just finishing for a doctor, and – he is coming up the road.’
‘Yes?’ Naomi said interrogatively.
‘Mother is gone to tea at Mrs Eastnor’s, as you know, and Sarah is away on an errand to Grimpat. Of course I must receive and talk to him, and so I want you to get tea. You will, won’t you, Naomi? A nice tea, like a good girl!’
‘Certainly, certainly,’ Naomi answered heartily.
‘You will get things ready now, won’t you? I will go out to the front door and make believe to be doing something, so that he may not knock, since there is no one to open. When he has been in some time I will ring, and then you will bring in tea, saying that Sarah is out, and we will have a cosy chat together.’
That the visitor would remain a considerable time, and that the visit was intended for her, Molly understood as well if she had been a woman of fashion.
Naomi entered on the enterprise cordially. She was very good-natured, and she felt quite an interest in the young man who had studied and seen life. She went downstairs cheerfully, stirred the fire to a blaze, and proceeded to prepare tea.
Now, the uninitiated are prone to imagine that in farmhouses dainties do abound, that there are always toothsome cakes, and rich creams, and jars of honey and preserves on the pantry shelves, and that high tea is a repast which the farmhouse can produce at a moment’s notice.
In very prosperous farmhouses this may be so, but there were none such at Grimpat. Jeffrey Poole was a working farmer, who needed to exercise great care that the rent might be ready half-yearly, and Mrs Steele, who was very grateful to him for all he had done for her and her children, showed her gratitude by supplementing his economies.
On this occasion there was nothing in the house but a little tea, a little sugar, a great...
