Without My Cloak

Book 298: Virago Modern Classics

by Kate O'Brien

Genres: General Fiction; Classics; Historical Fiction; Literary Fiction; Romance

Synopsis

When Anthony Considine creeps into Mellick town with a stolen horse in 1789, it sets the destiny of his family for decades to come. By the 1850s, through thrift and hard work, his son Honest John has made the Considines a leading Mellick family. With his father's money, John's son Anthony builds a grand country house for his wife and children - but especially for his youngest son Denis, who he adores, little knowing that one day Denis will threaten the toil of generations with his love for a peasant girl . . .

Release date: June 9, 2016

Publisher: Virago

Print pages: 500

Sample

(1897–1974) was born in Limerick, Ireland, the fourth daughter of Catherine Thornhill and Thomas O’Brien. Her mother died when she was five and she was educated at Laurel Hill Convent, Limerick, and at University College, Dublin. Kate O’Brien lived in London for some years where she made her living as a journalist and began to write stories and plays. She also worked in Manchester, on the Guardian, and spent a year as a governess in Spain: a country she was to return to and write about often.

Kate O’Brien originally became known as a playwright, her first plays being Distinguished Villa (1926) and The Bridge (1927). But it was with the publication of her first novel, Without My Cloak (1931), that her work became widely acclaimed. Described by J. B. Priestley as a “particularly beautiful and arresting piece of fiction”, it won the Hawthornden and the James Tait Black Prizes of 1931. This was followed by eight more novels: The Ante-Room (1934), Mary Lavelle (1936), Pray for the Wanderer (1938), The Land of Spices (1942), The Last of Summer (1943), That Lady (1946), The Flower of May (1953) and As Music and Splendour (1958). Two of these novels, Mary Lavelle and The Land of Spices, were censored for their “immorality” by the Irish Censorship Board. Kate O’Brien dramatised three of her novels, That Lady also being made into a film starring Olivia De Havilland; she wrote travel books: Farewell Spain (1937), and My Ireland (1962); an autobiography, Presentation Parlour (1963); English Diaries and Journals (1943) and a monograph on Teresa of Avila (1951). Her works have been translated into French, German, Spanish, Czech and Swedish.

After a brief marriage at the age of twenty-six Kate O’Brien remained single for the rest of her life. In 1947 she was elected a member of the Irish Academy of Letters and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She lived in Roundstone, County Galway until 1961 when she moved to Boughton, near Faversham in Kent, where she died at the age of seventy-six.

Of her work Virago publishes Mary Lavelle, That Lady, Farewell Spain and Without My Cloak. The Ante-Room, The Land of Spices and The Last of Summer will be published in forthcoming years.

It has always seemed to me that there are two languages in Irish literature apart from the obvious ones of Irish and English. The languages of the East and West of Ireland. At the end of “The Dead” by James Joyce, a young bespectacled and intellectual-minded Dublin man, after arriving home from a New Year party, in their bedroom, with the rumoured imminence of a deluge of snow outside, questions his Galway wife about a boy, now dead, with whom she’d been close in Galway, his memory having been conjured by a party lament.

“I suppose you were in love with this Michael Furey, Gretta,” the young man tremorously asks.

“I was great with him at that time”, is his wife’s desultory reply.

Two languages that can never meet. And after putting down Without My Cloak it occurs to me that there are two other languages in Irish literature, that of men and that of women. James Joyce and other male writers were credited with the great weight of Catholic Irish expression but it can now be seen that there are three women who, to use George Moore’s phrase, tilled the field of Irish nationalist, Catholic identity and who summoned up their own field in Irish literature, which in a way they share. They each write of low-lying land bordering on hills or mountains. Mary Lavin of Meath and Athenry. Edna O’Brien of South East Clare. Kate O’Brien of Limerick, bordering on South East Clare. But the troubled and visionary heroine in the pagan, metallic-lighted air of Edna O’Brien’s A Pagan Place would be a stranger to the populace of Kate O’Brien’s novels; she is looking in an opposite direction to them. The populace of Kate O’Brien’s work have their own troubles; upper middle-class Irish people, they came into being on a wave of opportunity open to Catholics after the Penal days. By the Pope’s jubilee in 1877 we are alarmed to find many of their members travelling to Rome “in order to look on the living face of His Holiness and kiss his authentic toe”. This ethos, this code of conduct, has its victims, girls startled out of their virginity in Spain, lapsed and garrulous clerical students in nineteenth-century Rome. They talk a lot. They think a lot. But their troubles and their agonisings are rimmed by a code which would be alien to the spare-boned woman, addled by promiscuous flights of thought, traipsing home to her mother’s funeral in Edna O’Brien’s short story “A Rose in the Heart”; it is a code determined by nuns lost in Belgian convents and fruity-tongued priests always about to don stoles. No matter how far they depart from it, Ana in That Lady and Clare in As Music and Splendour are aware they are departing from a touchstone. Right up to the end, in an extract published in 1972, from a novel Constancy Kate was working on at the time, the heroine is bound by background.

“I’m not a good anything—but I am a Catholic.”

Christina Roche, the bastard servant girl, is the only one who gets away in Without My Cloak. This, Kate’s first novel, published on her thirty-fourth birthday in December 1931, is her most complete statement about family. At one point in the novel it is insinuated that a Considine can only have a life as part of a collective, he or she is always answerable to an amalgam. Caroline and Denis try to forage their paths away. But there is no escape. The result of Caroline’s attempt anticipates that of Denis which is not given. “Love, that Caroline had so long forgone, then found and flung aside and wept for, had now become a thing she hated to consider.” In Kate’s later novels the heroes and heroines would make many forays towards escape, Mary in Mary Lavelle, Clare in As Music and Splendour. In The Land of Spices there is a strange reversal where a woman flees her father’s exultant homosexuality into a convent. But the argument is always there, as for Caroline in Without My Cloak who, having run away to London and on the threshold of adultery, is confronted by a hallucination.

She saw those generations come whirling towards her now as on that river’s flood. All Mellick she seemed to see, men and houses, quick and dead, in an earthquake rush to overtake her. Faces whose names escaped her, clerks of her father’s, old beggar-women, shopgirls, ladies with whom she drank tea, her confessor, Father McEwen, pretty Louise Hennessy, Mrs Kelleher the midwife, and Tom with his stole on, ready to preach, and Molly picking bluebells . . .

At the moment of release, of sublimation, there is the wraithe of “the hideous kitchen cat”.

It was that woman, Elizabeth Bowen, who slipped in and out of Irish literature, who said that Kate O’Brien could be the Balzac of Ireland. Mary Lavelle and That Lady are outsiders to Kate’s gleanings from provincial Irish life; Mary and Ana are versions of the one being, Ana older than Mary; they are women trying to unite their own passionate natures with the fixtures of family, church, God—and land. Without My Cloak, The Ante-Room and The Land of Spices form a trilogy of provincial Irish life in an ascendant order of power. There is a rocky, distanced, Balzacian edge in The Ante-Room which is only elusively present in Without My Cloak. In The Land of Spices language and theme merge to create a Pissarro-type subtlety of landscape, both of exteriors and of the soul. But Without My Cloak has a gaucheness and a charm which the other two novels lack; it has the breadth of extreme and unselfconscious daring; it is very much like Denis Considine, going forth without his cloak, only a dazzle in his eye and a lock on his forehead, with the admonition of Uncle Eddy, echoing Henry James in The Ambassadors, vaguely in his ear—“At your age young man, you should be free and selfish and quite blind. You should be trampling over this and that and everything to reach yourself—you should tolerate no cramping, masterful, enduring love”—and a thousand stories reeling in his head, “stories of Matteo Ricci and Benedict Goez and Father Benoit”. In short it gathers many of Kate’s future virtues and preoccupations into one stable piece. The stability is soon to be broken. Whatever happens to Denis Considine after the novel finishes?, one fearfully asks. But it is a mirror for the Irish middle classes to look at themselves and say “We weren’t that bad”, forgetting that an ancestor of the Considines was a horse-thief and rode out of an amorphous dark to create their lineage; a dark not unlike that in “The Dead” in which Michael Furey lies dead, a threatening, unstable, haunting dot in the consciousness.

“The Dead” is a good point on which to start talking about Without My Cloak. In “The Dead”, in a city edged by poverty, the Misses Morkans’ table is laid out—

A shallow dish full of blocks of blancmange and red jam, a large green leaf-shaped dish with a stalk-shaped handle, on which lay bunches of purple raisins and peeled almonds, a companion dish on which lay a solid rectangle of Smyrna figs, a dish of custard topped with grated nutmeg, a small bowl full of chocolate and sweets wrapped in gold and silver papers and a glass vase in which stood some tall celery stalks. In the centre of the table there stood, as sentries to a fruit-stand which upheld a pyramid of crepes and American apples, two squat old-fashioned decanters of cut glass, one containing port and the other dark sherry

—as often are the tables in Without My Cloak in a land of poverty—

Cold fowl, cold game, cold ham, salmon mayonnaise, lobster salads, cucumber salads, sandwiches, olives, salted almonds, petits fours, éclairs, cherry flans, fruit salads, the famous Considine trifles.

“Quadrilles. Quadrilles”, a rosy-faced woman commands in “The Dead” while at the party before Honest John dies in Without My Cloak Molly says to Caroline “Do you think we could have a quadrille?” In “The Dead” Gabriel Conroy intuits her coming death in the face of Aunt Julia as she pipes “Arrayed for the Bridal”. Death interchanges with merriment in Without My Cloak. There is almost a sacramental, elected rhythm to this interchange. But such rhythms, as in “The Dead”, are governed by the indissoluble, ancestral dark.

Kate’s grandfather only came to Limerick after the 1845–48 Famine, one of the many unlanded peasants heading on the cities, and the rise of the O’Brien horse-breeding business was breathtakingly rapid. Already it was in decline when Kate was a child. Without My Cloak draws on and encapsulates the afterglow in her childhood of this business at its hiatus. The history and lore of the nineteenth century obviously lapped on her childhood mind and created a solidity of texture which she would draw from again in The Ante-Room, The Land of Spices and in As Music and Splendour. As Music and Splendour, her last novel, like her first, is mainly about youth and its contradictions and agonisings, but in her first novel the image of youth is expressed through a young man, Denis Considine. It is Denis’s story which is the crescendo of the book and the goal towards which the book goes. In retrospect he could have been the author of the book. A kind of Roderick Hudson figure, on the threshold of many experiences. “He flung off his nightshirt and raced across the room. He was as beautiful as the morning and as innocently unconscious of his beauty.”

It seems to me that at the point in the novel when Christina Roche finally takes leave of Denis in Gansevoort Street in New York two parts of Denis’s character divide. The part that stays in America through the character of Christina Roche, exposing itself to the vastness and unpredictability of a new continent, is Kate O’Brien, the novelist. The part that returns to Ireland is the conscience which adheres to the mainstay of family and tradition. The American episode in the book is its highpoint, the point which dominates the book, towards which all the action flows. Kate is addressing herself in a simple, intellectually uncontaminated way to an archetypal Irish experience. That of exile and pursuit of the exile. Especially across the divide of the Atlantic. Christina Roche is driven to the perils of the New World because she has transgressed the social code in Ireland. Denis pursues her. In Mary Lavin’s impressive story “The Little Prince” a woman, about to marry, plots to send her embarrassing brother away:

Far away though that new world might be, to be reached only by crossing the vast Atlantic, what other remedy was there for a spendthrift like him: who had no sense of what was due to his family? Many a young man like him went out in disgrace to come home a different man altogether; a well-to-do man with a fur lining in his top-coat, his teeth stopped with gold, and the means to hire motor cars and drive his relatives about the countryside.

The Atlantic is the solution to all problems, a liner on it framed in an advertisement in her father’s shop which, like many Irish country stores of years ago, is also an agency for trans-Atlantic tickets. Forty years after her marriage she and her husband pursue her brother whom she has not heard from in that time and catch up with him as a corpse.

But if it was her brother, something had sundered them, something had severed the bonds of blood, and she knew him not. And if it was I who was lying there, she thought, he would not know me. It signified nothing that they might once have sprung from the same womb. Now they were strangers.

In New York Christina and Denis realise they are two different people from what they were at home. Denis’s embrace is newly negotiated by the New World and falsity is revealed in it. A momentous experience is inaugurated for Christina. Exile and turning her back on all that she was familiar with. Denis patters home. It is a situation, which by order of Irish history, must have been repeated in millions of Irish lives.

And what does Denis return to? The Catholic, upper middle classes of Ireland. That elusive band. In Without My Cloak the Hennessys and the Considines jostle for credentials. The Hennessys can claim ancestors among the Wild Geese, the aristocrats of Ireland who went out on the tide after the Irish defeat of 1690 and 1691; some of the Hennessy numbers tossed around with the armies of Europe as part of the legendary Irish Brigade during the eighteenth century, in Austria, in France; they seem to have returned at the tailend of that century. During the worst of the Penal Laws there was still trading by Catholics. Even wealthy Catholic merchants could be pointed out. Traders with the guile for big business got around the Penal Laws where no one else could. This was especially true in the remote West of Ireland, say, among the O’Connells of Derryvane. During the eighteenth century smuggling was a large part of the relish of business. The same ships that smuggled goods in from and out to Europe brought the Latin and Greek inculcated goslings of the merchants to Europe to be educated. Daniel O’Connell and his brother got out of France on the same ship which brought the news of the guillotining of Louis XVI to England. But the new freedoms of the nineteenth century gave Catholic merchants the room to move more freely; the professions were still mainly with Protestants (Catholics were banned by their church from going to Ireland’s illustrious university, Trinity College, Dublin), but the first half of the nineteenth century saw the dramatic rise of a new, wealthy Catholic merchant class, like the Considines. Oliver Saint John Gogarthy could claim three generations of doctors on his father’s side of the family. That was almost unheard of for a Catholic. But his mother was of a wealthy Galway merchant family. It was she, incidentally, who initially stopped him from attending Trinity College, where his father had graduated. The tradition on his father’s side bathed Gogarthy in a confidence which distinguished him from most Catholics of his time. But by the end of the nineteenth century families like the Considines had accumulated their own kind of confidence and arrogance about their place in Irish society. John Aloysius Hennessy, that old man in Without My Cloak, with Wild Geese and Irish Brigade gurgles in his blood, stands for “the autocracy of wealth and the supremacy of the bourgeoisie”. In The Flower of May, her second last novel, Kate gives a picture, which oddly seems enamoured of them, of the Irish Catholic upper middle classes at the turn of the century. They are the same class which prompts the young hero in Michael Farrell’s Thy Tears Might Cease to write under an inscription of his grandmother’s “To the Glory of God and the Honour of Ireland”. They are the people, along with his own background of genteel, parlour-song piping Catholicism, which Stephen Dedalus turned his heels on at Dublin Bay. It was partly them too that Francis Stuart, married into a wayward version of Catholicism, fled from to Germany in the 1930s. The conglomerate which makes Christina Roche tremble when she contemplates Denis’s marriage proposal to her:

Indeed for one who was a stranger to the proud middle classes, she formed a surprisingly accurate picture of how that class would regard her tentative of entering it. Beyond the first storms and the first piercing humiliations, she saw the long array of years that she would have to live at the centre of that great, possessive horde, unforgiven by them, unaccepted, but forever hemmed in; felt their contemptuous eyes on her as she fumbled to learn their superficial tricks, not for their sakes but for Denis’s, fumbled and failed because of them standing by; saw their resentment if she made Denis happy, their sagacious head-wagging if she didn’t; heard their anxious comments on Denis’s children, tainted with her lowliness; felt her own gnawing terror of them that would never lie easy in her to the end of her days.

They survived, as the possible meat of literature, into the late 1940s, but now they seem to have been absorbed into the ubiquitous nouveau riche of Ireland. But sometimes a house at the end of an Irish street, turned convent, or a mansion become mental hospital, is a monument to them. Without My Cloak, like the stained-glass windows of Evie Hone, is a monument to them; it has a recessive quality; it can be brandished with rugby triumphs of long ago or a photograph of a young scintillating forelocked merchant in a gleaming new white shirt at the turn of the century, a schooner or two outside the background window maybe, as a testimony of something we imagine, like the arbitrator Kate O’Brien was as a child, once existed.

For a real understanding of Kate O’Brien’s work it is essential to read Without My Cloak. Its presence is always there in her other work. In it she swore the affidavits of her fiction. The luminousness and the force of its energy are a surprise set against some of her later work; it is a book written with an Irish accent rather than with the English accent Kate O’Brien actually later adopted in real life. There are minor embarrassments, but the elegant flow of the novel sustains itself against these. It is a book about being young and the effect of first sexual experience on life.

In her last novel she returns again to the theme of youth. The two young Irish opera singers in Italy meet the heights of success in their art. But the quotation from Shelley at the beginning of the book makes it seem that Kate O’Brien distrusts success.

As music and splendour

Survive not the lamp and the lute

The heart’s echoes render

No song when the spirit is mute.

When hearts have once mingled,

Love first leaves the well-built nest.

The weak one is singled

To endure what it once possessed.

Oh love who bewailest

The frailty of all things here,

Why choose you the frailest

For your cradle, your home and your bier?

Shelley got it wrong. Music and splendour do have reverberations. Kate O’Brien’s work is picking itself up again and presenting itself to a new public. The face of Denis Considine merges into that of Kate O’Brien as she accepts the Hawthornden Prize of 1931, an event reported by a number of newspapers of the time. It is on that level we must accept Without My Cloak. As a work of youth. With some of the guilelessness and all the trust of youth. A young woman is giving us a book again much as Denis Considine wanders into parties and gives his love to ephemeral beauties. There is the shock and the immediacy of youth about it. Writing about young people from the vantage point of her later middle years Kate O’Brien injects obvious sadness into the theme; Clare in As Music and Splendour is doomed either to be a loser in love or else to be blanketed in what she considers amorality, a tawdry life of reaching out to her own sex, accruing sins. But neither is Denis Considine safe from a similar fate. We know that the music and splendour of his life at the end of Without My Cloak will fade into acquiescence to the Irish Catholic upper middle classes. The moment of music and splendour, the moment of love, is a barrier against the presentiment of age, the inevitability, intrinsic in the moment, because it has not been insured against by the fibre of the spirit, of the failure of the resources of the imagination and the spirit. Clare in As Music and Splendour stands up and takes her moment of glamour too but her taking it is qualitatively different because there is a creative dignity in her action which will ward off the worst ignominy of loss. The novelist has learnt along the way. The nerves have been racked, the choices made; the rest is the legacy of those choices. But Clare, Ana, and Christina will always have the moral weight over Denis Considine because theirs have been the braver and the more consuming choices. Denis Considine’s choice, then, given to us with Jamesian delicacy, for all its momentary allure, seems to have been a tragic one.

Most of Kate O’Brien’s books end on a note of retreat. At the end of Pray for the Wanderer the hero (a male writer), on the verge of returning to England after a visit home, looks from the family homestead to the “river and the shining water” by a Limerick weir and finds that all, in the late 1930s, is still apparently well with the Catholic upper middle classes and their land. “The harmony within this house, for instance,—is that representative and does it promise anything? The uncrowded landscape, flowing peace.” But Without My Cloak, like Sons and Lovers in a different way, ends on a note of entering, of participating, of making a vulnerable gesture of acceptance.

At the end of Without My Cloak we are told that John Aloysius Hennessy has reckoned with the nineteenth century. We are now in a position to reckon with Irish literature of the first half of the twentieth century. The men have had their say. Stephen Dedalus has reared his head over the horizon of Irish literature. Frank O’Connor and Sean O’Faolain have let loose their often brilliant characters in their parables and their short stories. Francis Stuart, their contemporary, wrote his major and jostling work in the sixties (that is not forgetting his earlier and imaginatively soaring novels Pillar of Cloud and Redemption). But from the 1930s, forties, fifties and early sixties it is the women who now, mainly, seem to have the ascendant voice. That era in Irish history which John McGahern named “the dark”. Mary Lavin’s small-town business people toed and froed on the Atlantic during this “dark”. They seem to have suffered from concussion in regard to lost lovers, memory momentarily and jaggedly revived. Edna O’Brien’s girls were growing up, waiting for moments of sublimation of memory in a foreign city. Kate O’Brien, with her novels, challenged the “dark” and was rapped for it. She returned to live in the “dark” between 1949 and 1961. Her last thirteen years were spent in Boughton, near Faversham, almost forgotten by the world which had earlier dazzled her with recognition, a friend to the local Irish vicar, a luminous visitor to the White Lion pub. Shortly before her death her masterpiece The Land of Spices was reissued by an Anglo-Irish publisher. It was the first hint of an initially slow but now apparently enduring renaissance. Perhaps like Reverend Mother in The Land of Spices we should not judge, but Kate O’Brien’s place in Irish literature now seems fixed for the seriousness, the evenness and yet the witty detours of her voice; she was a Saint Teresa of Avila at a drawing-room party, a meditative for whose rich meditations on their predicaments her race should be grateful, a writer in whose opus Without My Cloak is a delicious and Chopin-ballade lightsome beginning.

Desmond Hogan, London, 1984



PROLOGUE

1789

The Horse-Thief

 

 

THE light of the October day was dropping from afternoon clarity to softness when Anthony Considine led his limping horse round the last curve of the Gap of Storm and halted there to behold the Vale of Honey.

The Vale of Honey is a wide plain of fertile pastures and deep woods, watered by many streams and ringed about by mountains. Westward the Bearnagh hills, through whose Gap of Storm the traveller had just tramped, shelter it from the Atlantic-salted wind, and at the foot of these hills a great river sweeps about the western valley, zigzagging passionately westward and southward and westward again in its search for the sea.

A few miles below him on this river’s banks the traveller saw the grey blur of a town.

“That must be Mellick,” he said to hearten himself and his horse.

In the south two remote green hills had wrapped their heads in cloud; eastward the stonier, bluer peaks wore caps of snow already. To the north the mountains of St. Phelim were bronzed and warmly wooded.

Villages lay untidily about the plain; smoke floated from the chimneys of parked mansions and the broken thatch of cowmen’s huts; green, blue, brown, in all their shades of dark and brightness, lay folded together across the stretching acres in a colour-tranquillity as absolute as sleep, and which neither the breaking glint of lake and stream nor the seasonal flame of woodtops could disquiet. Lark songs, the thin sibilance of dried leaves, and the crying of milk-heavy cows were all the sounds that came up to the man who stood in the Gap of Storm and scanned the drowsed and age-saddened vista out of eyes that were neither drowsed nor sad.

Bright, self-confident eyes they were indeed, deep-set and brilliantly blue, seeming all the bluer because of the too black, too thick bar of eyebrow that brooded quarrelsomely above them. In spite of these savage eyebrows the eyes and face of the man were gay and his whole body had a coarse beauty. He was tall, and black-haired, with white skin, white teeth, ruddy cheeks, and heavy shoulders. His thick hands supported the indication of pugnacity in his brows, but they were nimble too, the hands of a horseman. One of them, playing lightly now on the neck of his strawberry roan mare, seemed to have hypnotised her restive weariness into peace. His hair was wild and his ragged clothes were stained with sweat and dirt. But he wore his rags and the three days’ beard on his chin with as much ease as he carried his strength, all these things being natural to him.

They were a contrast, this horse and man who seemed so much in harmony. His was the beauty of a peasant, something flung up accidentally by life. A root his bodily fineness might be called, but the horse he caressed was a flower. He was nature’s heedless work, but she, taking her inbred and highbred quality from generations of great blood stock, was a work of art. The breeders of Rose Red had brought beauty, through her, to the threshold of degeneracy. She was superb, she was the end of beauty in her kind.

Anthony Considine looked tenderly at her now and dropped his hand from her neck to caress her injured fetlock, laughing contentedly to think of the clever way he had stolen her.

She had a stud-book name, this strawberry roan, a noble name, which revealed her great descent, and was written above her loose box in the aristocratic stable she would never see again. But Anthony Considine, the first time he laid his thief’s hand on her neck, murmured “Rose Red” to her, and named her for himself for ever, as a lover names his mistress.

Now he had ridden her and led her seventy-two hours’ journey and more from her aristocratic stable, and the Bearnagh hills were a shelter at their backs. The tramp and his stolen love were tolerably safe, so long as they did not return to the treeless, lovely west. If they were to stay together they must descend into the Vale of Honey that was strange to them, and see what chances there were of free stable and bed in that grey smudge of a town called Mellick.

The man tossed back his curly, greasy hair.

“The Vale of Honey!” he said softly. “I’ve often heard ’tis a grand, rich, easy-going place. It’s like a saucer, upon my word, the shape of it, or like a dish, the way the little hills come up all round it. Faith, if it’s a dish, I hope it’s got our supper on it, Rose Red!”

He stood up and drew the bridle through his arm.

“Can you do it for me, asthore?” he asked the horse. “Can you limp five or six more miles along with me, God help you?”

Dusk was past and it was already full starlight when the horse-thief led his lovely roan past the crumbling gates of Mellick and along a well-paved and lighted street, which was called ?