Distant Music: "O, I am thinking about that song, The Lass of Aughrim..."
"The Lass of Aughrim." Lunchtime recitals by John Feeley and Fran O'Rourke with Joyce's recently restored guitar. Newman House, 86 St Stephen's Green:
from James Joyce, "The Dead," from Dubliners (1917)
Gabriel had not gone to the door with the others. He was in a dark part of the hall gazing up the staircase. A woman was standing near the top of the first flight, in the shadow also. He could not see her face but he could see the terracotta and salmon-pink panels of her skirt which the shadow made appear black and white. It was his wife. She was leaning on the banisters, listening to something. Gabriel was surprised at her stillness and strained his ear to listen also. But he could hear little save the noise of laughter and dispute on the front steps, a few chords struck on the piano and a few notes of a man's voice singing.
He stood still in the gloom of the hall, trying to catch the air that the voice was singing and gazing up at his wife. There was grace and mystery in her attitude as if she were a symbol of something. He asked himself what is a woman standing on the stairs in the shadow, listening to distant music, a symbol of. If he were a painter he would paint her in that attitude. Her blue felt hat would show off the bronze of her hair against the darkness and the dark panels of her skirt would show off the light ones. Distant Music he would call the picture if he were a painter.
[...]
She paused for a moment to get her voice under control, and then went on:
"Then the night before I left, I was in my grandmother's house in Nuns' Island, packing up,
and I heard gravel thrown up against the window. The window was so wet I
couldn't see, so I ran downstairs as I was and slipped out the back
into the garden and there was the poor fellow at the end of the garden,
shivering."
"And did you not tell him to go back?" asked Gabriel.
"I implored of him to go home at once and told him he would get
his death in the rain. But he said he did not want to live. I can see
his eyes as well as well! He was standing at the end of the wall where
there was a tree."
"And did he go home?" asked Gabriel.
"Yes, he went home. And when I was only a week in the convent he
died and he was buried in Oughterard, where his people came from. O, the
day I heard that, that he was dead!"
She stopped, choking with sobs, and, overcome by emotion, flung
herself face downward on the bed, sobbing in the quilt. Gabriel held her
hand for a moment longer, irresolutely, and then, shy of intruding on
her grief, let it fall gently and walked quietly to the window.
She was fast asleep.
