"Now at the outset of life the most serious handicaps of the young are--an entirely lacking sense of proportion and the presence of a conscience. Very few children are born with a sense of humour, and very few are born without a sense of guilt. While age does not invariably develop humour, advancing years may generally be considered to endow the possessor of a conscience with the faculty for keeping that unhappy commodity within better control." (from page 6)

"The days slipped past, bright ships, sailing out far beyond remembrance." (from page 11) "There is a time of life when we do not feel the cold, when adventure is high and purpose dares to win fulfilment." (from page 12)

"The worn iron latch of the garden door was set low, well within Easter's reach. Tall shrubs leant over the archway shading it darkly. The high garden walls were green and dark behind them. The way into the garden was as cold as a deep well. There was a creeping sense of adventure as you lifted and dropped the heavy latch and passed through the last shadows into the glorious garden." (from page 17)

"For the moment they were in harbour and the fruits of their piracy, strawberries, small and honey-hot from the sun, were sweet in their mouths, and the triumph of victory hot and present with them." (from page 21) "A slippery thread of a path spun its way across the field to an unseen gateway, where, under the trees, the air trembled, laden blue in the heat." (from page 23)

"The children loved him. That they were entirely forbidden to play with Patsy Roche lent a charming excitement to hours spent in his society. Whatever he did had about it the authentic stamp of artistry. Whether it was cooking a dinner or working a ferret, killing ducks, or marking out the tennis court, he did it with the soul that was in him, and the children, perceiving here a singleness of spirit that matched well with their own, gave him the strong friendly liking of the young--friendship neither to be dimmed by years nor sated by daily familiarity." (from pages 31-2)

A bed other than your own is delightful. Thoughts of discovery and adventure crowd to the head lying strangely on an unfamiliar pillow." (from page 38)

"The very house looked languorous. It seemed to open the pores of its stones to the day." (from page 45)

"After the hot daylight the drawing-room was still and cold. A faintly musky air hung about it, not an air of disuse, for the drawing-room was much inhabited at Puppetstown, but rather the scent of old things put away. Paper and shells, old pieces of ivory and bits of china, a little broken, hidden and lost forever in among the shelves of lovely shining cupboards and the drawers of the gently bow-fronted tables and bureaus that filled the room with their crowded elegance." (from page 49)

"Yellow roses and white roses climbed with fervour between the stable doors, and a large tabby cat called Portmanteau affected to sleep in the sunlight while she kept one vigilant eye on a couple of half-grown hound puppies who had, if the truth were known, no courage to molest her." (from page 55)

"So over a green hill's breast they trotted solemnly, these two, their straw hats planted, it seemed, upon their shoulders, as intent on the business of the moment as two little dogs off for an independent hunt. The sun went in and a little grey wind blew shrill through a field of tattered yellow ragweed and turned the colour of the oats that grew beyond a low wall of round stones from green to silver and back again." (from page 58)

"Then they turned their minds and their steps from the freedom and the wild to the immediate prospect of probable censure and certainly the abhorred rites of unnecessary cleanliness." (from page 59)

"`What a perfect evening!' Reggie Longworth said. But he did not look out to where the mountains sank themselves against the winey stupor of the sky, he did not hear the peace of the evening lapping Puppetstown quietly about. There were great hanging cushions of purple catmint growing as lavishly as love over the grey stone of the terrace walls, yes, and small Irish roses, each with a voice of its own for whispering spells, and the crafty sweetness of stocks that mounts quicker to the brain than the scent of any other flower." (from page 65)

"As night draws on children and cats (particularly small black cats) become possessed of a very devil of liveliness." (from page 70)

"This is Basil. He is sixteen now--a queer age full of great boastings and great shyness and the discovery that you can sometimes hold a gun straight, but most often don't, and fishing is the sternest art and fox-hunting the greatest of life's importances." (from page 81)

"Out of the schoolroom window at Puppetstown you looked across flat water--where Giles, the swan, sat in immemorial calm and the dogs hunted water rats and moorhens--over the Long Acres, where young blood horses moved in a stately decorum of beauty, away to the chill breasts of the mountains yielding themselves only to the slow rapture of a sunset; thin and stark at any other time and remote as the grey women of the Sidhie that men had seen about their secret lakes. Mandoran, Mooncoin, and the Black Stair were these mountains' lovely names, and whatever was afar and unknown and remote unto themselves in the children, was joined and linked to the dispassionate ecstasy of these mountains." (from page 83)

"Wildly speechless when all she could not say burnt and deafened her whole being; and again times when all the secrets of her days were poured out in easy luxuriant words." (from page 84)

"Curled in that vast bed, Easter would read and read with icy shoulders and a burning mind." (from page 86)

"Jesuit wanted to drink the cold mountainy water. Basil thought not; and it was to Easter that the cry of hounds came, their thin striving, silver cry, from off that wine-dark little hill. Magically followed a tattered note on the horn, doubled raucously sweet against the evening.

Listen!

Easter flung up her head and her hand. The world for an instant was still, as quiet as might be in the hands of evening. And then again the wild notes fluttered from the far, shrill horn and, in the open now, came again the clustered, striving voices of hounds hunting a fox, by distance enchanted, glorious, and romantical . . .
That certain fever which is as a lust and a madness of the body as well as of the mind, savagely alight in them, the children dropped their hands and sent their horses clattering up the rocky gully of the road." (from pages 90-1)

"And the old mare stood with her lean, proud head up, like a faery horse on the edge of the dark glen, while the last light was a slow spear thrust behind Mandoran, Mooncoin and the Black Stair." (from pages 93-4)

"Life was delight, and the stars rang faintly in the skies." (from page 96)

"A fire blazed up the chimney in Easter's room, a leaping, dog-toothed frenzy of rose and blue turf and wood flame, and a faint curtain of its scent hung ravished about the Ming horse. A horse was Easter's song tonight. She swept the lesser gods away from this ancient idol, and a worship for the delight and the frenzy of the chase seized her mind like a prayer in the sacrificial light of the fire burning below the aged strange horse." (from page 99)

"The moment that for four years had been a milestone in the world's mind had come--that mystic moment that should see the accomplishment of all dreams and all resolutions--`after the war.' But so many poor plans were broken in that war, and so little resolve was left towards anything, that the moments and days and months wavered on into uncertainty of time and saw but pitiful accomplishment." (from page 113)

"The sun of April shone, a warm wind charged the air with a smell of earth and gorse and oranges and excited humanity." (from page 115)

"All the servants at Puppetstown looked back on the days of the Major as on a golden age--a splendid time the like of which they were never to see equaled again. They would tell tales of fox-hunting and racing; of days when all the quality would be gathered from the country round to ride schools over the fences at Puppetstown; of the winners the Major had bred and trained and ridden they would tell; of the wine in the cellars, the horses in the stables, the foxes in the coverts, and the notable runs they provided. They had scores of stories wherewith by contrast to darken the leaner years that followed the Major's death and the Great War in Europe and the little bitter, forgotten war in Ireland.

Those were the times when the fastness of Mandoran, Mooncoin, and the Black Stair was secrecy and striving and plottings, and blood was shed there quietly and wickedly, and in one half of the young men of Ireland were held in a pitiless lust of cruelty, and the other half in a wanton spell of fear. Through all the land no man trusted even his brother. All was silence and covert looks. A word spoken and carried again could quite well mean death--a lone and unshriven death of which no man dare bear witness. In those days a little knowledge was indeed a dangerous thing." (from pages 122-3)

"Once there had been excitement and a burning flame of romance in these dark journeyings to the mountains. There were nights when Patsy would slip out of the pantry window (as he had done when Evelyn was a little boy lost in the woods) with his heart on fire for Ireland, when his bicycle beat through the night on wings to set her free, and there was no thought of lesser treachery in this great loyalty of his to Ireland. This was loyalty that would have smote his own mother with a sword if need came for Ireland--a loyalty that was almost as much lust of the flesh as it was an intoxication of the spirit." (from pages 132-3)

"How lovely Aunt Dicksie's garden was. The ordering of her flowers was conceived in genius and by happy accident. Or was it accident? It was instead the essential beauty that was undefiled in her and unused, and by herself unrealised, finding here its right and only medium of expression. Was it February? --that faint, ecstatic month--violets were there to fill the cold, quiet rooms of Puppetstown, set about everywhere in the silver violet bowls and in the children's christening mugs. As fires were rare in those rooms the violets would last for days and days, slowing losing their own sweetness to absorb the faint musk of sandal wood and lacquer and old materials that was laid on Puppetstown like a canopy of sprigged brocade. And later, growing on a bank in the garden, there were irises--irises like droves of doves, so silver-breasted and winged, and purple widowed doves, and Spanish gentlemen--blue Toledo blades. Those were the days when a rich wet yellow, and rich cobalt blue would have painted you a May-day." (from page 178)

"And it was now that Basil wanted to be back in Ireland. Now--now--not when he was old and had given up longing. The wishing of the very young is a hard and a bitter matter." (from page 197)

"They drove through Oxford; past bright shops and past the grey, breathless beauty of colleges, with burning glimpses of gardens seen through their deep, safe gateways and cars full of young men in flannels with sleek, dark heads and astonishing fair heads, and exquisitely dressed, cool girls spun by in the heat." (from pages 199-200)

"The world was spinning on an axis of crowded, trivial miseries--raging cooks, weeping aunts, pierced shrubs, plumbers, painters, and masons--all, all abominable. What, wondered Easter, could one do to disentangle this web of littleness that was life day by day." (from page 273)

"She had found the end of a charm again. She must hold it with careful, infinite gentleness and secrecy; if she told a thing it was lost to her, lost to her." (from page 286)

Related Links
Links last checked 14 Aug 04

Virago's profile of Molly Keane

A different passage from Mad Puppetstown

Bunclody, Ireland (the circus in the novel is held here)

Garden.ie (Irish Garden site)

A Small Irish Garden

Other Books I've Read by M. J. Farrell/Molly Keane

Conversation Piece
This book is more for young people. It's funny, but a lot of the humor involves drinking, smoking, sneaking out, and fooling around.

The Rising Tide
This book is perhaps more realistic than Mad Puppetstown, but I didn't enjoy it as much. It's a much more complex, ambiguous book.

---

Go to Cathy's Bargello Page Go to Cathy's Regency Page Go to Cathy's Regency Fashion Page Go to Cathy's Hypertext Guide to Regency Romances