RTÉ Culture presents a series of five early short stories written by Lady Augusta Gregory (1852-1932) - these tales, Lady Gregory's only known efforts at short fiction, offer a remarkable insight into one of Ireland's most important literary figures.
Below, editor James Pethica introduces Lady Gregory's story Dies Irae, taken from his colllection Lady Gregory's Shorter Writings 1882-1900 (Colin Smythe publications)
Lady Gregory wrote this short story, the last she is known to have completed, in summer 1894. Its Latin title - meaning "Day of Wrath" - refers to the Last Judgement, when the Just will enter Heaven and sinners be consigned to eternal damnation. Its core plot was based on the marital troubles of a neighbouring couple, the Lynches of Barna, County Galway, but it also surely registers some of Gregory’s lingering guilt, and fear of discovery, from her brief affair with Wilfrid Scawen Blunt during the early years of her own marriage. Significantly, however, when the wife in the story is banished by her husband - a man who is cruelly cold in his determination to punish her - she unexpectedly strikes back, condemning him for his lack of humanity. Defiantly asserting that she wishes she had stayed with her lover, she condemns him as the one who deserves contempt and judgement.
Gregory’s readiness to publish a story so near to her own personal fears and concerns surely reflected the new independence of being widowed, and some sense of relief that her own marriage had avoided such a moment of terminal fracture and judgement. The defiance Mary Iron voices at the end of Dies Irae indeed anticipates the forceful turn that ends Gregory’s 1908 play Grania. Its title figure stares down and silences the crowd of men who jeer at her for her having eloped with the young warrior Diarmuid on the eve of her marriage to the aging King Finn. One of the notably strong women to feature in Lady Gregory’s history plays, Grania refuses to accept their assumptions as to how she should feel or behave, asserts her right to make her own choices, and refuses to be judged or cowed.
Before writing the story, Gregory recounted its plot to Henry James, who was briefly enthused, thinking that it might form the basis of a "rather strong short novel"—but he did not follow up on the possibility himself. Dies Irae was published in The Sketch, 25 March 1896, with Gregory identified as author.
DIES ARAE
Dr. Iron sat before his writing-table. It was afternoon, and his patients had one by one departed. The fog, which had hung over Harley Street all the morning, had now closed in more densely. (1) The lamp-posts had become invisible, the area railings were fading into indistinctness, the sound of wheels grew rarer, and of shouts more frequent. The mist had crept into the study and slightly muffled the searching electric-light. (2) The doctor was occupied, not with prescriptions or medical papers, but with bank-books, some circular notes, and a Continental Bradshaw. (3) Presently he leaned back and watched the door, as if expecting someone to enter. Soon it opened gently, and his wife came in, a slight, tall woman, with tightly closed white lips, and a look of apprehension in her dark eyes.
"You sent for me, Luke?" she said with forced calm, while her husband politely stood up and offered her a chair. (4) She continued standing, however, her hand resting on the table, while he, with a word of apology, sat down again, facing her.
"Yes," he replied, looking at her through his steel-rimmed spectacles. "It is a long time since we have had a conversation in this room; the last was—let me see," and he consulted the date marked on a folded document, "on this day, the 24th of January, ten years ago."
His wife's face grew whiter, her eyes larger and more scared, but she compressed her lips and did not answer.
"I am, as usual, anxious to save you trouble," her husband proceeded, in the same polite and measured voice, "and so I have made all arrangements for you. The carriage will be at the door at once, to take you to Charing Cross. (5) As you have never expressed a desire for any particular place of residence, I thought you would perhaps like to give a trial to Brussels. It is cheerful, not expensive, and you will find quite an English colony. I have, therefore, taken a through ticket for you, and have ordered a room at the Hotel du Nord. As to means, there is, first, your own money—"
"Luke!"—the voice sounded hoarse and strained—"you are not really going to send me away?"
The doctor smiled patronisingly. "It is not a question of dismissal," he said; "it is merely the fulfilling of an agreement, and I trust you will carry it out in a business-like manner, and without discussion."
She had let go the table now, and sunk to the floor. "Luke," she cried again, "have pity on me!"
Dr. Iron unfolded the paper he had already consulted.
"Your memory may be a little at fault. Perhaps you would like to look over this. No? Then shall I save you the trouble and read it to you?"
A stifled groan from the woman at his feet was the only answer, and he proceeded: "'I, Margaret Iron, confess that a week ago, on Jan. 16, 1884, I left my home and husband in company with—’" (6)
"Oh, don’t read it! Don’t let me hear it! Don’t think I have forgotten it! I have seen every word before me day and night all these years!" she cried, her face covered with her hands.
"Then I need hardly remind you," continued her husband, in the same cold and measured tone, "that when, I having no desire for your return, you came back to me from your lover, and begged me to take you into my house again, I refused. That at last, at your earnest entreaty and on further consideration, I consented that, for the sake of my children—for I acknowledge them as mine—you should return and take charge of them during their childhood. I calculated that in ten years they would no longer need a nurse or governess— if you classify yourself under either name. As a mother, you were, I need hardly say, already lost to them. I judged, and judged rightly, that you would do your duty to them and to me as my paid assistant. Of course, we could never have met on any other terms. The children are now grown up. Alice is eighteen, and will find a chaperon in her aunt; Hubert is seventeen, and going to Cambridge. The term of our agreement ends to-day, and you are going, for the moment, to Brussels. you will have a sufficient income, and all countries except England will be free to you. It is a matter of business, not of sentiment."
Margaret Iron lifted her head. Her tears had ceased, but her face looked more deadly white than before in the increasing gloom.
"Luke," she said steadily and pleadingly, "it is all true. I confessed it long ago. I was not worthy to come back to you or to my children. I blessed you, and I thank and bless you still, for these years of grace you have given me. But have I earned no forgiveness in all this time? Have I ever deserved a hard word from you? I say nothing of my care of the children—they are my life. But you know that I have taught them to love and reverence you, puzzled as they have been by your coldness
to me. Have I not devoted myself to your interests, worked hard for your comfort, been bright and cordial to your guests and friends, while my heart was breaking? you say I was paid, but you know I never touched your money. It lay as you lodged it year after year; you can take it back to-morrow. you think the children don’t Oh, don’t smile in that bitter way! Is there anything in me now to contaminate them? My sin was great, but I have greatly repented, and the record of these ten years might well cover that one short week."
The doctor had been making a note in the railway-guide before him, and carefully wiped his pen before laying it down.
"My dear Margaret," he said, "I was quite aware, when I drew up and allowed you to sign that agreement, that this scene was already prepared in your mind. You trusted to time, to my weakness, to your superior strength of will, to regain your former place. you thought, as I had yielded once, so I would do again. For that very reason, I will not be moved now. I should not respect myself as a man if I could let a resolve of so many years be set aside by a peal of words or a storm of tears. They do not touch me. I have found your presence in the house a convenience to me. It would continue to be a convenience to me, but it would also be a living sign of my weakness. I should have been vanquished by you; I should dislike you. I do not dislike you now, I am only indifferent to you. Would it not be well to have your things put up, and have you not some orders to give or arrangements to make? The children are out for the day; would it not be well for you to leave before their return?"
The doctor was getting up, but his wife flung herself at his feet, and clasped his knees.
"Oh!" she cried, "will nothing move you? Is there nothing I can say to soften you? Is there no penance you can give me to do, no suffering you can give me to bear, that will make my very presence a sign to you of your power over me? Does the shame and the pain of all these years count for nothing? Do you know what the misery has been when the children clung to me, when your friends made much of me, and I knew that your eye was upon me seeing the stain all the time? Do you know what the terrible loneliness of these years has been? Cut quite away by the consciousness of my sin from fellowship with all good men, and not only from them, but from all the dead I have lost. Their eyes look at me as I lie awake at night, and reproach me with my guilt. There will be no rest in the grave for me; they will be there. (7) God will judge me, and I fear Him less than I do man, and yet his face is hidden from me. I have prayed often, often for my children, because in time of anxiety one must pray or die, but never for myself. Heaven and earth, if I am sent away from my darlings, are alike empty to me!" She was sobbing again, and loosed her husband’s knees. He went over to the bell-knob.
"I am going to ring," he said coldly; "perhaps you had better leave the room before the bell is answered."
She stood up and stopped him now with an imperious gesture. "You have the right to send me from your house," she said, "but I claim the right of leaving it in my own way. Oh! I will go surely and quietly enough, and never to return. I knew this might come, and I have made preparation for it. These last weeks, when pain of body has tortured me as well as pain of mind, I have made a great show of relieving it with morphia. Let me, for this night only, sleep in your house, and I promise you I will never awake in it. Or, if you shrink from death so near, if you are afraid of any suspicion or scandal, let me go away as for a visit, and from that visit there will be no return, and no message from me will trouble you. But, then, my children need never know. They will fret for me for a time, but while they live they will think of me as good and innocent. It is only if they meet me after death that they will see me soiled, as you see me, as I see myself."
Dr. Iron looked, for the first time, a little interested. "It is not a bad idea," he said; "but I wish you had mentioned it sooner. I told the children in full—in fact, I showed them your written confession and agreement, before they went to their party."
His wife, looking down upon him, grasped his shoulder. "You treacherous man!" she cried passionately. "You had not the right to speak to them without my knowledge and without giving me the chance of escape I have asked for. If I had thought you were so cruel and so cowardly as this, I would have killed you. It would have been better for me to have had a second stain on my soul than to leave my darlings in your hands. They must now, poor, innocent children! hold me in horror; but, mark my words, they will hold you in hate. I never made an excuse for myself before. I despise the plea of madness. I was not mad; I think now I was wise. I think now it was what was good in me that shrank from all that was bad in you and made me throw myself on another. I would to God I had stayed with him! I would I had taken my children with me, and gone out in the wide world with him and them. I am glad I gave myself to him; it is the week of my married life that redeems the rest. you need despise me no longer. Take back your contempt! I despise you!"
She flung him from her, and walked out of the room. In the hall were her children; they had just let themselves in, the cold, dark fog entering with them. She shivered and drew back. "Alice," she whispered timidly. But the girl drew back, and the dim lamplight showed the shrinking horror in her merciless young eyes. Her mother laughed bitterly. "Yes, you are right; cast the first stone at me," she said. "No, not the first, your father has done that." (8) At the mention of the father the girl shuddered again, but made no movement. Her mother took a cloak that lay on a chair and wrapped it round her with hurried, trembling hands. "It is enough," she said; "it is all over; I am going." But, as she tried to unfasten the door, her son flung his arms round her, sobbing.
"Mother," he said, "I will go with you. I cannot give you up; I will never leave you."
She unfolded his arms, and kissed him again and again, but then pushed him gently from her, and in a moment had gone out, alone and silently, into the darkness.
NOTES
This was AG's neighbor Marcus Lynch of Barna, Galway. Lynch (b.1836) who had married Blanche Marylski (d.1908), the daughter of a Polish Count, in 1867. They had two sons; and three daughters, who all became nuns.
1. Harley Street was and remains noted as a top location for private medical specialists.
2. Domestic electric lighting was a recent development, with the first homes in Britain being equipped around 1879. Electricity supply to private houses in London began around 1890.
3. Bradshaw’s Continental Railway Guide and General Handbook was the leading publication of the period to offer rail timetables and general travel information.
4. Dr. Iron is aptly named. In Colossians 4.14, the evangelist Luke is referred to as being a physician. His name, in Greek, literally means "one who heals"—a heavy irony for this man of iron coldness and unmoveability.
5. London’s Charing Cross station, the central railway terminus for routes south to Dover and other ports to the continent.
6. AG’s affair with Wilfrid Scawen Blunt had ended in August 1883, slightly more than ten years before she wrote the story. If the story is set contemporary to its composition, it has been some ten years since Margaret Iron entered into the agreement detailed in her confession.
7. AG’s language here closely echoes that of Sonnet V of her sequence "A Woman’s Sonnets" (see Lady Gregory’s Shorter Writings, Volume One, 50).
8. In John 8.7, Jesus tells those accusing a woman of adultery "He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her."
