Passport to Peril

Seven

Tralee was half a delight and half a nightmare and all quite different from what she had expected. Folk festivals in the main were relatively tame affairs, with the attention focused on a few hours of singing and dancing. But the Festival of Kerry turned out to be a good deal more than this. It was built around a three-day race meeting, and the men and women who had come to watch the horses would have crowded the town by themselves. Besides this there was an outdoor circus, sheep-dog trials, terrier and donkey derbies, swimming and athletic competitions, street dances, marching bands parading through the little city, and a general mood of hilarity that summoned up images of New Orleans at Mardi Gras time. The folk singing was just a small portion of the total pageantry that filled Tralee to overflowing.

Rooms were not to be found. She had arrived without a reservation, and after she had wasted some time making the rounds of the hotels and rooming houses, a student from Edinburgh suggested she try the Festival Accommodations Committee. She went to their office, and a kindly woman arranged accommodations for her in a private home not far from the center of town. She was to pay five pounds for her room for the whole of the festival and would take breakfast with the family.

The price was reasonable enough, but later she thought that she might almost have done without a room altogether, for all the time she spent in it. The city bustled endlessly. The streets were thronged with tens of thousands of visitors, and the town park had the air of a three-ring circus, with several events going on at a time from morning until late at night. Students from all parts of the British Isles had turned out in full force, many of them with knapsacks on their backs. They had reached Tralee by hitchhiking, and now they slept in the park or in fields on the edge of town, cutting their expenses to the bone and hurling themselves into the festival activity with a vengeance.

Ellen was on the go for three days. Each night she crept back to her room in the small hours of the morning, careful not to wake the family with whom she was staying, and each day she left the house just after breakfast for another furious round of festival activity. The guitar, always close at hand, kept making new acquaintances for her. It stamped her as a singer, and other singers sought her out, and she spent hours in feverish conversation, swapping songs, exchanging gossip of the world of professional folk music, and making the sort of easy friendships that emerge from such hectic meetings.

She filled all the rolls of tape she had bought in Cork, and mailed them all back to herself in New York. She sang songs around campfires on the edge of town, at a party in a house that three boys from London had leased for the season, and at the base of the 1798 monument in Denny Street near the Mall. She sang and listened and ate and drank and smoked and talked and kept going as long as the festival itself kept going, waiting with throngs in the park while the Rose of Tralee was chosen and crowned, running through the streets with the mob, caught up in a frenzy of unmotivated enthusiasm, and returning, at last, the festival over for another year, to her little room in Edward Street.

She missed breakfast the next morning. She was exhausted and could barely drag herself out of bed. It was time to go to Dingle, she thought, and she wasn’t sure that she wanted to go. Maybe she had had enough of folk music and festivals for the time being. Maybe she could go directly to Shannon and spend a few days in one of the lush American-style hotels near the international airport. She could well afford it, she knew; the trip so far had cost her far less than she had anticipated, and she could easily afford the luxury of a few days of lolling in an air-conditioned room and taking long baths and sleeping the day away.

“There won’t be many of us going on to Dingle,” a Dublin singer named Rory had told her the day before. “They don’t get a tenth the crowd that Tralee does. It’s a tiny town, you know, and couldn’t take a crowd if it got one. They’ll have some singing and dancing, but I’ve had my fill of that for the time being.”

She, too, had had her fill of it. Most of the singing in Dingle, she had heard, would be in Gaelic, which made it unlikely that she would be able to learn any new material. She would have been delighted to tape some Gaelic songs, but that seemed impossible now, since her tape was all gone and there did not seem to be any for sale in Tralee.

No, she decided, she wouldn’t go. She was already exhausted, and the festival in Berlin would certainly be taxing. Between now and then she could use all the rest she could get. Dingle had sounded like fun when she had first planned it, but after all, it was only another little Irish town, and she had already been to a great many Irish towns, small and large, and...

“Will you be going on to Dingle?”

“I don’t know, Mrs. Sheehy,” she told her landlady. “I was thinking I might go straight to Shannon and—”

“Ah, and I wish I had the time to go myself this year! We went last year, Dan and I.” The woman smiled at the memory. “The first night’s the most beautiful. All of us gathered at the harbor, the whole town and all of us who’d come down for the celebration. And the Rose of Tralee, she sailed up Dingle Harbor on a barge, and they touched off fireworks to greet her. Big pretty things that lighted up the whole sky. Ah, it was a beautiful thing, I tell you, and something you’ll never see elsewhere. I wish it was me that was going again.”

Ellen walked to the bus station, carrying guitar and suitcase and the now useless tape recorder. Fireworks and a brass band, she thought; nothing that you couldn’t find in Keokuk, Iowa, on the Fourth of July. But she couldn’t brush aside the enthusiasm in Mrs. Sheehy’s voice. It gave a special glow to the description of the little town.

Don’t be ridiculous, she told herself. You don’t have to go. There’s no point to it.

But she knew it was a lost cause. And at the little Tralee bus station she gave up the fight in good grace and bought a ticket to Dingle. If nothing else, she thought, a little seaside village might be restful. She could take her ease there as well as she could in Shannon, and no doubt at much less expense.

And there was no getting around it — she was too responsive a traveler to force herself to take it easy. She grinned gamely as the tall, red-haired bus driver helped her up the steps of the bus and placed her luggage in the rack overhead. Already, she admitted, she was looking forward to Dingle. Already the thought of doing nothing for a few days had lost its charm. The luxury hotels of Shannon would be wasted on her, so she prepared to enjoy whatever was in store for her.

The thirty-mile trip from Tralee to Dingle led through some of the most beautiful scenery in Ireland. The bus moved at a deliberate pace, stopping three times along the way at the little towns of Blennerville, Camp, and Aunascaul. On the first leg of the journey she had her choice between two equally splendid views. To her left were the Slieve Mish Mountains, their rough peaks shimmering in the sunlight. On the right Tralee Bay lay before her, soft and gloriously blue, with the “lonely Banna Strand,” celebrated in so many songs, stretching out beyond the scope of her vision. Sir Roger Casement had been captured there in April 1916, taken prisoner after an attempt to persuade the Germans to provide guns and troops for an Irish rising, then spirited off to England, tried, and hanged as a traitor to the Crown.

The bus swung to the south at Camp, and before long she could see the waters of Dingle Bay on the left. The roads were circuitous now, steep and winding, with other cars appearing magically as they came around turns, and with an astonishing quantity of all sorts of animals turning up in the middle of the road. Sheep, pigs, even a pair of tethered goats, their presence giving the lie to the theory that goats would not cooperate long enough to clear a fence together. The bus moved onward, slowly but surely, somehow avoiding an accident with any of the odd creatures that cropped up in its path.

The roads were thronged, too, by another breed entirely, pilgrims bound for Dingle town. She looked out the window to see college students with packs on their backs, some walking with determination, others standing at the side of the road, their thumbs out in the universal gesture of the hitchhiker. Even if only a small percentage of the crowd from Tralee found its way to Dingle, the little village would be hard put to house the crowd. It was still early in the day, and every time the bus passed hikers and hitchhikers she had the selfish thought that she would at least beat these people in the search for a room.

“Dingle town,” called the driver. She looked out the front window and saw nothing resembling a town. Then the bus curved around yet another turn in the road, and she saw the little village laid out before her at the base of the hill.

Her worries about finding a room turned out to be groundless. The first bed-and-breakfast house she tried was full, but the gentle-voiced proprietress recommended the house two doors further down on Strand Street, the main commercial street of Dingle. There Ellen found several rooms available and took a large one on the second floor just down the hall from the bathroom. She signed the register, then went to her room to unpack. On her way out of the house an older woman smiled to her and asked her if she was a folk singer.

“Why, yes, I am,” she said, surprised. “How did you know?”

“Not much in the way of detective work, I’m afraid.” The woman spoke in an accent Ellen had trouble placing — not Irish, certainly, but quite unlike the English and Scottish speech she had heard. “I’m staying here myself, and I was upstairs when you checked in. Saw you had a guitar, and it seemed an odd thing to carry for decoration, so I had to assume you played it. Will you be engaging in the competition?”

“No, I haven’t registered.”

“The actual competition’s all in Irish, I understand, though I trust there will be some songs in English. I certainly hope there will. I don’t understand Irish, do you?”

“No.”

“Though the sound of it is not unfamiliar. They still speak Cornish in my part of the world, and it’s another of the old Celtic tongues. I wonder if the Irish speakers can understand Cornish. Probably not, I suppose; the way these languages form dialects of their own over the centuries, you know. Oh, I’m sorry, I haven’t introduced myself yet, have I? I’m Sara Trevelyan, from Cornwall. The usual British schoolteacher on vacation, I’m afraid. Retired and husbandless and unutterably dull. And don’t rush to tell me that I can’t possibly be dull.”

“I’m Ellen Cameron.”

“Yes, I know.” Sara Trevelyan smiled. “And from New York, aren’t you? Again, no great shakes as a detective. I looked in the guest register. There’s a countryman of yours who signed in just after you, incidentally. Has a German name, if I remember correctly. Now what was it?” She wrinkled her brow in thought. “Koenig,” she said. “Doctor Robert Koenig, I think it was, and he’s from Philadelphia, which makes you almost neighbors, doesn’t it? Has a wife and two children with him. Not the most adorable children in the world, I wouldn’t say, but then perhaps I’m biased against children. Taught too many of them over the years and had none of my own, and that can rather set one against children. Not that I don’t admit the necessity of children, of course. You can’t produce people without having children as the first stage of the game.”

Ellen laughed.

“Well, it’s true, isn’t it? Just as you need caterpillars in order to have butterflies. Sometimes I think the parallel is a very close one at that. Horrid crawling things those caterpillars are, and look at the lovely, fragile creatures they become. And when I think of some of the dreary lads and lasses I taught over the years, and of their metamorphosis into rather worthwhile gentlemen and ladies, it’s hard to believe they’re all of the same species.” The Cornish woman sighed. “But I do run off at the mouth, don’t I? Perhaps I’m a little grateful to have someone to talk with. Are you anxious to get free of me? Or would you take lunch with an old woman if she promises not to talk too much?”

“I’d be delighted.”

“I’ve been here since last night. Came straight from Killarney. I suppose you were in Tralee?”

“Yes.”

“Crowded, was it?”

“Very much so. And very active.”

“Then I’m just as glad I missed it. I’m not that strong for crowds and fast-paced holidays. I’ll be glad for a chance to hear the singing, but I can hear it as well without all that hullabaloo going on. That’s what you call it in America, isn’t it? Hullabaloo?”

“That’s right.”

“But you’re smiling, so I suppose I misused the colloquialism slightly, as one is apt to do. Hmmm. I was here last night, as I said. There’s a restaurant just a block from here, not fancy but rather pleasant. They do grilled meats well enough. Would you like to go there? And then I’ll promise to leave you alone for the rest of the afternoon.”

“But I’m enjoying this very much!”

“Are you? I know that I am. I find children charmless, but I do enjoy young people. I hope you like the restaurant.”

She did like the restaurant, a narrow café where a pert and pretty young waitress brought them small filet steaks and chips. And she did enjoy the company of the older woman. Cornwall, that little peninsula at the southwest corner of England, was another of the places she had long wanted to visit. She tried to remember if anyone had ever recorded an album of Cornish songs. She couldn’t think of any, although it was certain that the Cornishmen would have folk music of their own, just as every little pocket of culture throughout the world did. Later, perhaps, she might ask Miss Trevelyan if she knew any of the old songs. A shame she was out of tape, but perhaps she could learn a song or two.

After lunch they parted company. The retired schoolteacher planned a hike along the beach in search of shells and a taste of salt air. She walked back to the B-and-B with Ellen and got her walking stick from her room. It was a knobby blackthorn stick, and she showed it to Ellen.

“Quite the thing, isn’t it? Do you think it goes well with the tweed suit? And does it make me look properly Irish?”

“Oh, very Irish.”

“I suspect it stamps me as a tourist, actually. In a week I haven’t seen a single Irishman carrying one of these silly things. A great knobby stick, isn’t it? I’m sure they’d never make them at all but to sell them to the English and Americans, and fools we are to buy them. Would you believe I paid four pounds for this one? And it’s only a silly piece of wood.”

“It’s attractive, though.”

“Perhaps. I do know it’s a great help in walking. Well, thank you again for lunching with me. I hope we’ll see each other again. You’ll be in Dingle a few days?”

“Yes.”

“Then I’ll see you at the breakfast table, and perhaps around the town as well.”

She spent the afternoon wandering around the town but not making as strenuous a project of it as the elderly Cornish lady. She windowshopped at the little stores on Strand Street, wandered through the side streets among the little rows of neat well-scrubbed cottages. She stopped in a Catholic church, covering her head with a handkerchief and walking slowly through the aisles, studying the stained-glass windows and sitting for a moment before the altar. A person could find a special sort of contentment in any house of worship, a nonverbal sense of the presence of some greater force. Sitting there, in a small church in a small town deep in the southwest corner of Ireland, she thought for a moment that she would like to pray, to give thanks for the pure delight of the trip. But she had never found prayer natural, and after a few moments she got to her feet and left.

In the corridor outside her own room, she saw a round-faced, balding man shepherding a woman and two children into another room, then turning and heading for the staircase. The doctor from Philadelphia, she thought at once, and there was something strikingly familiar about him, though she could not say what it was.

“Dr. Koenig?”

He spun around, genuinely startled, when she spoke his name.

“Yes?”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I just ...we haven’t met, but I can’t help feeling that I’ve seen you before.”

“It is possible,” he said stiffly. His voice had a slight trace of a German accent.

“Were you in Tralee?”

“No. No, we came direct from Dublin.”

“Perhaps I saw you there.”

“Perhaps,” he said. “Although this is a common phenomenon, you know. The recognition of strangers. In my business, I am a psychiatrist, we have observed—”

“I hope you don’t mean that I’m unbalanced?”

“Not at all.” She had meant to make light of it, but the psychiatrist seemed to be a totally humorless man. “And it is possible that we have seen each other after all. I am from Philadelphia. Is that by any chance your own hometown?”

“No, but I have been there. I’m from New York.”

“And I have often been to New York. Perhaps we have met on the underground. The subway, that is. One sees so many people. It is possible.”

“Yes, but I just—”

“You must excuse me,” he said. “My wife has found an errand for me. I hope you enjoy Dingle, Miss Cameron.”

It never occurred to her to wonder how he had known her name.

Shortly before dinner, the rains came. It was an on-again, off-again sort of rain, a drizzling mist that let up intermittently, only to resume again before very long. It was, in short, a typically Irish sort of rain, and she knew better than to resent it. The Tralee festival had been mercifully short of rain, with the skies surprisingly clear for long stretches at a time. Now Dingle was due for a downpour, and she could hardly object to it.

“Horrid weather,” Sara Trevelyan said. They sat together in the parlor downstairs, waiting for the rain to let up so that they could go around the corner for dinner. “It’s a pity, really. If they could only do something about the cursed rain this area would be a veritable paradise. The summers never get too hot and the winters rarely get very cold. But it rains all the time.”

“Did you get caught in it this afternoon?”

“I just got back in time.”

“Did you have much luck finding shells?”

“I got a bag of them, but I’m afraid I can’t tell you what they are. I’m not one of these passionate shellers who go into spasms over a one-eyed limpet or a double-breasted cowrie, I’m afraid. Never can tell one shell from the next. I just pick the pretty ones and set them out around my house. Very much the amateur, I fear.”

“You probably have more fun that way.”

“Perhaps.”

She went to the door. “It seems to have let up a little,” she said. “Shall we risk it?”

“I think not, for my part. I catch colds rather easily, and my doctor is convinced that I’ll catch one and die of it if I’m not careful. I offered to bet that he’d die before me, but he pointed out it would be a difficult wager to collect, no matter who won it. An unanswerable argument. You go ahead and have your dinner, Ellen. I’ll lie down for a few minutes.”

“Shall I bring you back something?”

“Oh, don’t bother. I’m not that hungry, actually. I’ll go out later.”

It was still raining after dinner, coming down a bit harder than before. She hurried from the café to the doorway of her rooming house and huddled there, out of the rain, while the town of Dingle prepared for the opening ceremonies of the festival. It was quietly comic, with everyone evidently determined not to let the rain spoil things, and with the rain equally determined to come down as hard and fast as it possibly could.

A little band, formed of young boys and old men, their overcoats wrapped about them and their cloth caps pulled down over their foreheads, made several spirited passes up and down Strand Street. The band was not musically balanced, running to bugles and tin whistles and drums, but the old men and the youngsters made up in enthusiasm what they lacked in musical ability. They marched to and fro, playing with spirit and coming close to the desired tunes, and then the rain would pour down more furiously than before and would scatter their ranks, with the band’s members scurrying or hobbling, depending upon their age, to take cover in doorways and pubs.

“And isn’t it a horrid thing, to have rain on a night like this?” a woman demanded. “Eight o’clock it is, and in thirty minutes’ time the Rose herself will sail across the harbor, and we should all of us be there to welcome her. But who’ll be turning out on a night like this? And it’s sad it’ll be for Dingle if there’s a bad showing at the pier.”

The populace had no intention of making a bad showing. Rain or no rain, Ellen saw, the local people were determined to give the Rose of Tralee a fine and proper welcome. By eight-thirty men and women and children were filtering down to the foot of Strand Street to stand exposed to the elements in the little harbor. In spite of herself she was drawn along in their wake. She bundled up warmly — the rain was chilling, and there was a strong wind behind it — and followed the crowd. Her feet were cold and wet, and drops of rain lashed at her face and trickled down over her wet skin. It seemed a great deal to endure for the dubious thrill of a fireworks display and a glimpse of the Rose of Tralee. She had seen the girl — a beautiful girl, admittedly; a Belfast colleen whose father had gone north from Kenmare some years before she was born — had seen her crowned in Tralee to the joyous shouts of the assembled multitude. A beautiful girl, to be sure, but surely one glimpse of the Rose of Tralee was enough, wasn’t it?

They had played the song incessantly at Tralee, with every band piping it interminably through the streets of the town. And now the Dingle band, tuneless but inspired, was giving the familiar melody yet another run-through. She winced at the missed notes and tortured rhythm.

To her left, a freckled little girl was talking earnestly with her mother. “Now we’d better be getting home,” the woman said. “The rain coming down so hard, and you just over a cold.”

“But mother,” the child said, “I want to see the Rose.”

“It’s only a pretty lady, Bridie.”

“Oh, no,” the girl insisted. “It’s a rose, a beautiful rose—”

A buzz went through the crowd. Someone had sighted the royal barge on the horizon. The welcoming committee was in place upon the wooden dock, and the first of the skyrockets was ignited and launched heavenward. It burst in a splash of fiery red, and a great cheer went up from the viewers.

“It’s bad weather, but we’ll give her a good welcome!”

“And why not? This is a day the lass will remember all her life, and the town of Dingle, too.”

“If there’d only be an end to the bloody rain...”

Another skyrocket was touched off, and again the crowd burst into applause. Now, for the first time, Ellen could see the barge that bore the Rose of Tralee. She wondered how the girl must feel, sailing so slowly across Dingle Bay and into the harbor. The runners-up would be present, too — Miss Boston and Miss New York and Miss Dublin and Miss Liverpool, Irish beauties from throughout the world.

“Sure, and if it isn’t Ellen Cameron, turned out in the rain to welcome the Rose!”

She spun at the thick brogue, at the mention of her name. And stood, open-mouthed, to stare into a familiar face.

It was David Clare.