It is to be remarked that the angels were strangely like Patsy Mac Cann. Their ideas of right and wrong almost entirely coincided with his. They had no property and so they had no prejudices, for the person who has nothing may look upon the world as his inheritance, while the person who has something has seldom anything but that.
Civilisation, having built itself at hazard upon the Rights of Property, has sought on many occasions to unbuild itself again in sheer desperation of any advance, but from the great Ethic of Possession there never has been any escape, and there never will be until the solidarity of man has been really created, and until each man ceases to see the wolf in his neighbour.
Is there actually a wolf in our neighbour? We see that which we are, and our eyes projecton every side an image of ourselves; if we look with fear that which we behold is frightful; if we look with love then the colours of heaven are repeated to us from the ditch and the dungeon. We invent eternally upon one another; we scatter our sins broadcast and call them our neighbours; let us scatter our virtues abroad and build us a city to live in.
For Mac Cann and his daughter there was no longer any strangeness in their companions. As day and night succeeded, as conversation and action supplemented each other on their journeys, so each of them began to unfold from the fleshy disguise, and in a short time they could each have spoken of the others to an inquiring stranger, giving, within bounds, reasonably exact information as to habit and mentality.
What conversations they had engaged in! Sitting now by a hedge close to a tiny chaotic village, compact of ugliness and stupidity, now at twilight as they camped in a disused quarry, leaning their shouldersagainst great splintered rocks, and hearing no sound but the magnified, slow trickle of water and the breeze that sung or screamed against a razor edge of rock; or lying on the sheltered side of a pit of potatoes, they stared at the moon as she sailed on her lonely voyages, or watched the stars that glanced and shone from the drifting clouds; and as they lifted their eyes to these sacred voyagers in whose charge is the destiny of man they lifted their minds also and adored mutely that mind of which these are the thoughts made visible.
Sometimes they discussed the problems of man in a thousand superficial relationships. The angels were wise, but in the vocabulary which they had to use wisdom had no terms. Their wisdom referred only to ultimates, and was the unhandiest of tools when dug into some immediate, curious problem. Before wisdom can be audible a new language must be invented, and they also had to unshape their definitions and re-translate these secular findings into termswherein they could see the subject broadly, and they found that what they gained in breadth they lost in outline, and that the last generalisation, however logically it was framed, was seldom more than an intensely interesting lie when it was dissected again. No truth in regard to space and time can retain virtue for longer than the beating of an artery; it too has its succession, its sidereal tide, and while you look upon it, round and hardy as a pebble, behold, it is split and fissured and transformed.
Sometimes when it rained, and it rained often, they would seek refuge in a haystack, if one was handy; or they would creep into a barn and hide behind hills of cabbages or piles of farming tools; or they slid into the sheds among the cattle where they warmed and fed themselves against those peaceful flanks; or, if they were nigh a town and had been lucky that day, they would pay a few coppers to sleep on the well-trodden, earthen floor of a house.
As for the ass, he slept wherever he could.When there was rain he would stand with his tail against the wind sunken in a reverie so profound that he no longer seemed to feel the rain or the wind. From these abysses of thought he would emerge to the realisation that there was a sheltered side to a wall or a clump of heather, and he also would take his timely rest under the stars of God.
What did they say to him? Down the glittering slopes they peer and nod; before his eyes the mighty pageant is unrolled in quiet splendour; for him too the signs are set. Does the Waterman care nothing for his thirst? Does the Ram not bless his increase? Against his enemies also the Archer will bend his azure bow and loose his arrows of burning gold.
On their journeyings they met with many people; not the folk who lived in the houses dotted here and there at great distances from each other on the curving roads, for with these people they had nothing to do, they had scarcely anything tosay, and the housefolk looked on the strollers with a suspicion which was almost a fear. The language of these was seldom gracious, and often, on their approach, the man of the house was sent for and the dog was unchained.
But for the vagabonds these people did not count; Mac Cann and his daughter scarcely looked on them as human beings, and if he had generalised about them at all, he would have said that there was no difference between these folk and the trees that shaded their dwellings in leafy spray, that they were rooted in their houses, and that they had no idea of life other than the trees might have which snuff for ever the same atmosphere and look on the same horizon until they droop again to the clay they lifted from.
It was with quite other people they communed.
The wandering ballad singer with his wallet of songs slung at his ragged haunch; the travelling musician whose blotchy fiddlecould sneeze out the ten strange tunes he had learned from his father and from his father's generations before him; the little band travelling the world carrying saplings and rushes from the stream which they wove cunningly into tables and chairs warranted not to last too long; the folk who sold rootless ferns to people from whose window-ledges they had previously stolen the pots to plant them in; the men who went roaring along the roads driving the cattle before them from fair to market and back again; the hairy tinkers with their clattering metals, who marched in the angriest of battalions and who spoke a language composed entirely of curses.
These, and an hundred varieties of these, they met and camped with and were friendly with, and to the angels these people were humanity, and the others were, they did not know what.
It might be asked why Patsy Mac Cann permitted the strangers to remain with him.
Now that they were dressed like himself he had quite forgotten, or he never thought of their celestial character, and they were undoubtedly a burden upon his ingenuity. They ate as vigorously as he did, and the food which they ate he had to supply.
There were two reasons for this kindliness—He had always wished to be the leader of a troop. In his soul the Ancient Patriarch was alive and ambitious of leadership. Had his wife given him more children he would have formed them and their wives and children into a band, and the affairs of this little world would have been directed by him with pride and pleasure. He would have observed their goings-out and their comings-in; he would have apportionedpraise and reproach to his little clann; he would have instructed them upon a multitude of things, and passed on to them the culture which he had gathered so hardily, and, when they arrived at the age of ingenuity, it would have still been his ambition to dash their arguments with his superior knowledge, or put the happy finish to any plan which they submitted for his approval; he would have taken the road, like a prince of old, with his tail, and he would have undertaken such raids and forays that his name and fame would ring through the underworld like the note of a trumpet.
He could not do this because he only had one child (the others had died wintry deaths) and she was a girl. But now heaven itself had blessed him with a following and he led it with skill and enjoyment. Furthermore, his daughter, of whom he stood in considerable awe, had refused flatly to desert the strangers whom Providence had directed to them.
She had constituted herself in some strange way the mother of the four men. She cooked for them, she washed and mended for them, and, when the necessity arose, she scolded them with the heartiest good-will.
Her childhood had known nothing of dolls, and so her youth made dolls of these men whom she dressed and fed. Sometimes her existence with them was peaceful and happy; at other times she almost went mad with jealous rage. Little by little she began to demand a domestic obedience which they very willingly gave her; so they were her men and no one else's, and the exercise of this power gave her a delight such as she had never known.
She was wise also, for it was only in domestic affairs that she claimed their fealty; with their masculine movements she did not interfere, nor did she interfere with the task and apportioning of the day, although her counsel was willingly listened to in these matters; but when night came, when thecamp was selected, the little cart unloaded, and the brazier lit, then she stepped briskly to her kingdom and ruled like a chieftainess.
With her father she often had trouble: he would capitulate at the end, but not until he had set forth at length his distaste for her suggestions and his assurance that she was a strap. She seldom treated him as a father, for she seldom remembered that relationship; she loved him as one loves a younger brother, and she was angry with him as one can only be angry with a younger brother. Usually she treated him as an infant; she adored him, and, if he had permitted it, she would have beaten him soundly on many an occasion.
For she was a strong girl. She was big in build and bone, and she was beautiful and fearless. Framed in a rusty shawl her face leaped out instant and catching as a torch in darkness; under her clumsy garments one divined a body to be adored as a revelation; she walked carelessly as the wind walks, proudly as a young queen trained ingrandeur. She could leap from where she stood, as a wild-cat that springs terribly from quietude; she could run as a deer runs, and pause at full flight like a carven statue. Each movement of hers was complete and lovely in itself; when she lifted a hand to her hair the free attitude was a marvel of composure; it might never have begun, and might never cease, it was solitary and perfect; when she bent to the brazier she folded to such an economy of content that one might have thought her half her size and yet perfect; she had that beauty which raises the mind of man to an ecstasy which is murderous if it be not artistic; and she was so conscious of her loveliness that she could afford to forget it, and so careless that she had never yet used it as a weapon or a plea.
She could not but be aware of her beauty, for her mirrors had tongues; they were the eyes of those she met and paused with. No man had yet said anything to her, saving in rough jest as to a child, but no woman couldspeak of anything else in her presence, and these exclamations drummed through all their talk.
She had been worshipped by many women, for to physical loveliness in their own sex women are the veriest slaves. They will love a man for his beauty, but a woman they will adore as a singularity, as something almost too good to be true, as something which may vanish even while they gaze at it. Prettiness they understand and like or antagonise, but they have credited beauty as a masculine trait; and as a race long sunken in slavery, and who look almost despairingly for a saviour, so the female consciousness prostrates itself before female beauty as before a messiah who will lead them to the unconscious horrible ambitions which are the goal of femininity. But, and it is humanity's guard against a solitary development, while women worship a beautiful woman the beauty does not care for them; she accepts their homage and flies them as one flies from the deadliest boredom; sheis the widest swing of their pendulum, and must hurry again from the circumference to the centre with the violent speed of an outcast who sees from afar the smoke of his father's house and the sacred roof-tree.
There is a steadying influence; an irreconcilable desire and ambition; the desire of every woman to be the wife of a fool, her ambition to be the mother of a genius; but they postulate genius, it is their outlet and their justification for that leap at a tangent which they have already taken.
Out there they have discovered the Neuter. Is the Genius always to be born from an unfertilised womb, or rather a self-fertilised one? Singular Messiahs! scorners of paternity! claiming no less than the Cosmos for a father; taking from the solitary mother capacity for infinite suffering and infinite love, whence did ye gather the rough masculine intellect, the single eye, all that hardiness of courage and sensibility of self that made of your souls a battlefield, and of your memory a terror todrown love under torrents of horrid red! Deluded so far and mocked! No genius has yet sprung from ye but the Genius of War and Destruction, those frowning captains that have ravaged our vineyards and blackened our generations with the torches of their egotism.
To woman beauty is energy, and they would gladly take from their own sex that which they have so long accepted from man. They are economical; the ants and the bees are not more amazingly parsimonious than they, and, like the ants and the bees, their subsequent extravagance is a thing to marvel at. Food and children they will hoard, and when these are safeguarded their attitude to the life about them is ruinous. They will adorn themselves at the expense of all creation, and in a few years they crush from teeming life a species which nature has toiled through laborious ages to perfect. They adorn themselves, and too often adornment is the chief manifestation of boredom. They are world-weary, sex-weary,and they do not know what they want; but they want power, so that they may rule evolution once more as long ago they ruled it; their blood remembers an ancient greatness; they crave to be the queens again, to hold the sceptre of life in their cruel hands, to break up the mould which has grown too rigid for freedom, to form anew the chaos which is a womb, and which they conceive is their womb, and to create therein beauty and freedom and power. But the king whom they have placed on the throne has grown wise in watching them; he is their bone terribly separated, terribly endowed; he uses their cruelty, their fierceness, as his armies against them—and so the battle is set, and wild deeds may flare from the stars of rebellion and prophecy.
Mary, who could make women do anything for her, was entirely interested in making men bow to her will, and because, almost against her expectation they did bow, she loved them, and could not sacrificeherself too much for their comfort or even their caprice. It was the mother-spirit in her which, observing the obedience of her children, is forced in very gratitude to become their slave; for, beyond all things, a woman desires power, and, beyond all things, she is unable to use it when she gets it. If this power be given to her grudgingly she will exercise it mercilessly; if it is given kindly then she is bound by her nature to renounce authority, and to live happy ever after, but it must be given to her.
It may be surprising to learn that the names of the angels were Irish names, but more than eight hundred years ago a famous Saint informed the world that the language spoken in heaven was Gaelic, and, presumably, he had information on the point. He was not an Irishman, and he had no reason to exalt Fodhla above the other nations of the earth, and, therefore, his statement may be accepted on its merits, the more particularly as no other saint has denied it, and every Irish person is prepared to credit it.
It was also believed in ancient times, and the belief was world-wide, that the entrance to heaven, hell, and purgatory yawned in the Isle of the Saints, and this belief also, although it has never been proved, has never been disproved, and it does assist thetheory that Irish is the celestial language. Furthermore, Gaelic is the most beautiful and expressive fashion of speech in the whole world, and, thus, an artistic and utilitarian reinforcement can be hurried to the support of that theory should it ever be in danger from philologists with foreign axes to grind.
The names of the angels were Finaun and Caeltia and Art.
Finaun was the eldest angel; Caeltia was that one who had a small coal-black beard on his chin, and Art was the youngest of the three, and he was as beautiful as the dawn, than which there is nothing more beautiful.
Finaun was an Archangel when he was in his own place; Caeltia was a Seraph, and Art was a Cherub. An Archangel is a Councillor and a Guardian; a Seraph is one who accumulates knowledge; a Cherub is one who accumulates love. In heaven these were their denominations.
Finaun was wise, childish, and kind, andbetween him and the little ass which drew their cart there was a singular and very pleasant resemblance.
Caeltia was dark and determined, and if he had cropped his beard with a scissors, the way Patsy Mac Cann did, he would have resembled Patsy Mac Cann as closely as one man can resemble another.
Art was dark also, and young and swift and beautiful. Looking carelessly at him one would have said that, barring the colour, he was the brother of Mary Mac Cann, and that the two of them were born at a birth, and a good birth.
Mary extended to Finaun part of the affection which she already had for the ass, and while they were marching the roads these three always went together; the archangel would be on one side of the donkey and Mary would be on the other side, and (one may say so) the three of them never ceased talking for an instant.
The ass, it will be admitted, did not speak, but he listened with such evident intentionthat no one could say he was out of the conversation; his right-hand ear hearkened agilely to Mary; his left-hand ear sprang to attention when Finaun spoke, and when, by a chance, they happened to be silent at the one moment then both his ears drooped forward towards his nose, and so he was silent also. A hand from either side continually touched his muzzle caressingly, and at moments entirely unexpected he would bray affectionately at them in a voice that would have tormented the ears of any but a true friend.
Patsy Mac Cann and the seraph Caeltia used to march exactly at the tail of the cart, and they, also, talked a lot.
At first Patsy talked the most, for he had much information to impart, and the seraph listened with intent humility, but, after a while, Caeltia, having captured knowledge, would dispute and argue with great vivacity. They spoke of many things, but a person who listened closely and recorded these things would have found that they talked oftenerabout strong drinks than about anything else. Mac Cann used to speak longingly about strange waters which he had heard were brewed in foreign lands, potent brewings which had been described to him by emphatic sailormen with tarry thumbs; but at this stage Caeltia only spoke about porter and whisky, and was well contented to talk of these.
The cherub Art was used to promenade alone behind them all, but sometimes he would go in front and listen to the conversation with the ass; sometimes he would join the two behind and force them to consider matters in which they were not interested, and sometimes again he would range the fields on either side, or he would climb a tree, or he would go alone by himself shouting a loud song that he had learned at the fair which they had last journeyed to, or he would prance silently along the road as though his body was full of jumps and he did not know what to do with them, or he would trudge forlornly in a boredom so profoundthat one expected him to drop dead of it in his tracks.
So life fell into a sort of routine.
When they were camped for the night Caeltia and Art would always sit on one side of the brazier with Patsy Mac Cann sitting between them; on the other side of the brazier the archangel and Mary would sit; Finaun always sat very close to her when they had finished eating and were all talking together; he used to take her long plait of hair into his lap, and for a long time he would unplait and plait again the end of that lovely rope.
Mary liked him to do this, and nobody else minded it.
BOOK II
EILEEN NI COOLEY
Early in the morning the sun had been shining gloriously, and there was a thump of a wind blowing across the road that kept everything gay; the trees were in full leaf and every bough went jigging to its neighbour, but on the sky the clouds raced so fast that they were continually catching each other up and getting so mixed that they could not disentangle themselves again, and from their excessive gaiety black misery spread and the sun took a gloomy cast.
Mac Cann screwed an eye upwards like a bird and rubbed at his chin.
"There will be rain soon," said he, "and the country wants it."
"It will be heavy rain," said his daughter.
"It will so," he replied; "let us be getting along now the way we'll be somewhere before the rain comes, for I never didlike getting wetted by rain, and nobody ever did except the people of the County Cork, and they are so used to it that they never know whether it's raining or whether it isn't."
So they encouraged the ass to go quicker and he did that.
As they hastened along the road they saw in front of them two people marching close together, and in a little time they drew close to these people.
"I know the look of that man's back," said Patsy, "but I can't tell you where I saw it. I've a good memory for faces, though, and I'll tell you all about him in a minute."
"Do you know the woman that is with him?" said Caeltia.
"You can't tell a woman by her back," replied Patsy, "and nobody could, for they all have the same back when they have a shawl on."
Mary turned her head to them:
"Every woman's back is different," said she, "whether there's a shawl on it or not,and I know from the way that woman is wearing her shawl that she is Eileen Ni Cooley and no one else."
"If that is so," said her father hastily, "let us be going slower the way we won't catch up on her. Mary, a grah, whisper a word in the ass's ear so that he won't be going so quick, for he is full of fun this day."
"I'll do that," said Mary, and she said "whoa" into the ear of the little ass, and he stopped inside the quarter of a pace.
"Do you not like that woman?" Caeltia enquired.
"She's a bad woman," replied Patsy.
"What sort of a bad woman is she?"
"She's the sort that commits adultery with every kind of man," said he harshly.
Caeltia turned over that accusation for a moment.
"Did she ever commit adultery with yourself?" said he.
"She did not," said Patsy, "and that's why I don't like her."
Caeltia considered that statement also, and found it reasonable:
"I think," said he, "that the reason you don't like that woman is because you like her too much."
"It's so," said Patsy, "but there is no reason for her taking on with every kind of man and not taking on with me at all."
He was silent for a moment.
"I tell you," said he furiously, "that I made love to that woman from the dawn to the dark, and then she walked off with a man that came down a little road."
"That was her right," said Caeltia mildly.
"Maybe it was, but for the weight of a straw I would have killed the pair of them that night in the dark place."
"Why didn't you?"
"She had me weakened. My knees gave under me when she walked away and there wasn't even a curse in my mouth."
Again he was silent, and again he broke into angry speech!
"I don't want to see her at all, for shetorments me, so let the pair of them walk their road until they come to a ditch that is full of thorns and is fit for them to die in."
"I think," said Caeltia, "that the reason you don't want to see her is because you want to see her too much."
"It's so," growled Mac Cann, "and it's so too that you are a prying kind of a man and that your mouth is never at rest, so we'll go on now to the woman yonder, and let you talk to her with your tongue and your nimble questions."
Thereupon he rushed forward and kicked the ass so suddenly in the belly that it leaped straight off the ground and began to run before its legs touched earth again.
When they had taken a few dozen steps Mac Cann began to roar furiously:
"What way are you, Eileen Ni Cooley? What sort of a man is it that's walking beside yourself?"
And he continued roaring questions such as that until they drew on the people.
The folk stopped at his shouts.
The woman was big and thin and she had red hair. Her face was freckled all over so that one could only see her delicate complexion in little spots, and at the first glance the resemblance between herself and Finaun was extraordinary. In the sweep of the brow, the set of the cheek-bones, a regard of the eyes, that resemblance was seen, and then the look vanished in a poise of the head and came again in another one.
At the moment her blue eyes seemed the angriest that ever were in a woman's head. She stood leaning on a thick ash-plant and watched the advancing company, but she did not utter a word to them.
The man by her side was tall also and as thin as a pole; he was ramshackle and slovenly; there was not much pith in his body, for he was weak at the knees and his big feet splayed outwards at a curious angle; but his face was extraordinary intelligent, and when he was younger must have been beautiful. Drink and ill-health haddragged and carved his flesh, and nothing of comeliness remained to him but his eyes, which were timid and tender as those of a fawn, and his hands which had never done anything but fumble with women. He also leaned quietly on a cudgel and watched Patsy Mac Cann.
And it was to him that Patsy came. He did not look once at the woman, though all the time he never ceased shouting salutations and questions at her by her name.
He walked directly to the man, eyeing him intently.
"And how is yourself?" he roared with horrible heartiness. "It's a while since I saw you, and it was the pitch night that time."
"I'm all right," said the man.
"So you are," said Patsy, "and why wouldn't you be? Weren't you born in the wide lap of good luck, and didn't you stay there? Ah, it's the way that the men that come down little, narrow paths do have fortune, and the ones that tramp the wideroads do have nothing but their broken feet. Good luck to you, my soul, and long may you wave—Eh!"
"I didn't say a word," said the man.
"And there's a stick in your hand that would crack the skull of a mountain, let alone a man."
"It's a good stick," said the man.
"Would you be calling it the brother or the husband of the one that the woman has in her happy hands."
"I would be calling it a stick only," replied the man.
"That's the name for it surely," said Patsy, "for a stick hasn't got a soul any more than a woman has, and isn't that a great mercy and a great comfort, for heaven would be full of women and wood, and there would be no room for the men and the drink."
The red-haired woman strode to Patsy and, putting her hand against his breast, she gave him a great push:
"If you're talking," said she, "or ifyou're fighting, turn to myself, for the man doesn't know you."
Patsy did turn to her with a great laugh:
"It's the one pleasure of my life to have your hands on me," he gibed. "Give me another puck now, and a hard one, the way I'll feel you well."
The woman lifted her ash-plant threateningly and crouched towards him, but the look on his face was such that she let her hand fall again.
"You're full of fun," said Patsy, "and you always were, but we're going to be the great friends from now on, yourself and myself and the man with the stick; we'll be going by short cuts everywhere in the world, and having a gay time."
"We're not going with you, Padraig," said the woman, "and whatever road you are taking this day the man and myself will be going another road."
"Whoo!" said Patsy, "there are roads everywhere, so you're all right, and there are men on every one of the roads."
While this conversation had been taking place the others stood in a grave semicircle, and listened intently to their words.
Caeltia, regarding the sky, intervened:
"The rain will be here in a minute, so we had better walk on and look for shelter."
Mac Cann detached his heavy regard from Eileen Ni Cooley, and swept the sky and the horizon.
"That is so," said he. "Let us go ahead now, for we've had our talk, and we are all satisfied."
"There is a broken-down house stuck up a bohereen," he continued. "It's only a few perches up this road, for I remember passing the place the last time I was this way; that place will give us shelter while the rain spills."
He turned his stubborn face to the woman:
"You can come with us if you like, and you can stay where you are if you like, or you can go to the devil," and, saying so, he tramped after his daughter.
The woman had just caught sight of Art the cherub, and was regarding him with her steady eyes.
"Whoo!" said she, "I'm not the one to be frightened and I never was, so let us all go along and talk about our sins in the wet weather."
They started anew on the road, Patsy's company in advance, and behind marched the woman and the man and Art the cherub.
The sun had disappeared; wild clouds were piling themselves in rugged hills along the sky, and the world was growing dull and chill. Against the grey atmosphere Art's face was in profile, an outline sharp and calm and beautiful.
Eileen Ni Cooley was regarding himcuriously as they walked together, and the strange man, with a wry smile on his lips, was regarding her with a like curiosity.
She pointed towards Patsy Mac Cann, who was tramping vigorously a dozen yards ahead.
"Young boy," said she, "where did you pick up with the man yonder, for the pair of you don't look matched?"
Art had his hands in his pockets; he turned and looked at her tranquilly.
"Where did you pick up with that man," he nodded towards her companion, "and where did the man pick up with you, for you don't look matched either?"
"We're not," said the woman quickly; "we're not matched a bit. That man and myself do be quarrelling all day and all night, and threatening to walk away from each other every minute of the time."
The man stared at her.
"Is that how it is with us?" said he.
"It is," said she to Art, "that's the way it is with us, honey. The man and myselfhave no love for each other now, and we never had."
The man halted suddenly; he changed the cudgel to his left hand and thrust out his right hand to her.
"Put your own hand there," said he, "and shake it well, and then be going along your road."
"What are you talking about?" said she.
He replied, frowning sternly from his wild eyes:
"I wouldn't hold the grace of God if I saw it slipping from me, so put your hand into my hand and go along your road."
Eileen Ni Cooley put her hand into his with some awkwardness and turned away her head.
"There it is for you," said she.
Then the man turned about and flapped quickly along the path they had already travelled; his cudgel beat the ground with a sharp noise, and he did not once look back.
Before he had taken an hundred paces the rain came, a fine, noiseless drizzle.
"It will be heavy in a minute," said the woman, "let us run after the cart."
With a quick movement she tucked her shawl about her head and shoulders and started to run, and Art went after her in alternate long hops of each foot.
They had reached a narrow path running diagonally from the main road.
"Up this way," shouted Patsy, and the company trooped after him, leaving the ass and cart to the storm.
Two minutes' distance up the road stood a small, dismantled house. There was a black gape where the window had been, and there were holes in the walls. In these holes grass and weeds were waving, as they were along the window-ledge. The roof was covered with a rusty thatch and there were red poppies growing on that.
Patsy climbed through the low window-space, and the others climbed in after him.
Inside the house was an earthen floor, four walls, and plenty of air. There were breezes blowing in the empty house, for from whatever direction a wind might come it found entrance there. There were stones lying everywhere on the floor; some of them had dropped from the walls, but most had been jerked through the window by passing children. There were spider's webs in that house; the roof was covered with them, and the walls were covered with them too. It was a dusty house, and when it would be wet enough it would be a muddy house, and it was musty with disuse and desolation.
But the company did not care anything about dust or stones or spiders. They kicked the stones aside and sat on the floor in the most sheltered part of the placewhere there had once been a fireplace, and if a spider walked on any of them it was permitted.
Patsy produced a clay pipe and lit it, and Caeltia took a silver-mounted briar from his pocket and he lit that and smoked it.
Outside the rain suddenly began to fall with a low noise and the room grew dark. Within there was a brooding quietness, for none of the people spoke; they were all waiting for each other to speak.
Indeed, they had all been agitated when they came in, for the wrung face of Patsy and the savage eyes of Eileen Ni Cooley had whipped their blood. Tragedy had sounded her warning note on the air, and they were each waiting to see had they a part in the play.
But the sudden change of atmosphere wrought like a foreign chemical in their blood, the sound of the falling rain dulled their spirits, the must of that sleeping house went to their brains like an opiate, and thesilence of the place folded them about, compelling them to a similar quietude.
We are imitative beings; we respond to the tone and colour of our environment almost against ourselves, and still have our links with the chameleon and the moth; the sunset sheds its radiant peace upon us and we are content; the silent mountain-top lays a finger on our lips and we talk in whispers; the clouds lend us of their gaiety and we rejoice. So for a few moments they sat wrestling with the dull ghosts of that broken house, the mournful phantasms that were not dead long enough to be happy, for death is sorrowful at first and for a long time, but afterwards the dead are contented and learn to shape themselves anew.
Patsy, drawing on his pipe, looked around the people.
"Eh!" he exclaimed with heavy joviality, "where has the man got to, the man with the big stick? If he's shy let him come in, and if he's angry let him come in too."
Eileen Ni Cooley was sitting close beside Art. She had let her shawl droop from her head, and her hair was showing through the dusk like a torch.
"The man has gone away, Padraig," said she; "he got tired of the company, and he's gone travelling towards his own friends."
Patsy regarded her with shining eyes. The must of the house was no longer in his nostrils; the silence lifted from him at a bound.
"You are telling me a fine story, Eileen," said he, "tell me this too, did the man go away of his own will, or did you send him away?"
"It was a bit of both, Padraig."
"The time to get good news," said Patsy, "is when it's raining, and that is good news, and it's raining now."
"News need not be good or bad, but only news," she replied, "and we will leave it at that."
Caeltia spoke to her:
"Do you have a good life going by yourselfabout the country and making acquaintances where you please?"
"I have the life I like," she answered, "and whether it's good or bad doesn't matter."
"Tell me the reason you never let himself make love to you when he wants to make it?"
"He is a domineering man," said she, "and I am a proud woman, and we would never give in to each other. When one of us would want to do a thing the other one wouldn't do it, and there would be no living between us. If I said black he would say white, and if he said yes I would say no, and that's how we are."
"He has a great love for you."
"He has a great hate for me. He loves me the way a dog loves bones, and in a little while he'd kill me in a lonely place with his hands to see what I would look like and I dying."
She turned her face to Mac Cann:
"That's the kind of man you are to me,Padraig, although you're different to other people."
"I am not that sort of man, but it's yourself is like that. I tell you that if I took a woman with me I'd be staunch to her the way I was with the mother of the girl there, and if you were to come with me you wouldn't have any complaint from now on."
"I know every thing I'm talking about," she replied sternly, "and I won't go with you, but I'll go with the young man here beside me."
With the words she put her hand on Art's arm and kept it there.
Mary Mac Cann straightened up where she was sitting and became deeply interested.
Art turned and burst into a laugh as he looked critically at Eileen.
"I will not go with you," said he. "I don't care for you a bit."
She gave a hard smile and removed her hand from his arm.
"It's all the worse for me," said she, "and it's small harm to you, young boy."
"That's a new answer for yourself," said Patsy, grinning savagely.
"It is, and it's a new day for me, and a poor day, for it's the first day of my old age."
"You'll die in a ditch," cried Patsy, "you'll die in a ditch like an old mare with a broken leg."
"I will," she snarled, "when the time comes, but you'll never have the killing of me, Padraig."
Finaun was sitting beside Mary with her hand in his, but she snatched her hand away and flared so fiercely upon Eileen that the woman looked up.
"Don't be angry with me, Mary," said she; "I never did you any harm yet and I'll never be able to do it now, for there are years between us, and they're going to break my back."
Finaun was speaking, more, it seemed, to himself than to the company. Hecombed his white beard with his hand as he spoke, and they all looked at him.
"He is talking in his sleep," said Eileen pensively, "and he an old man, and a nice old man."
"My father," said Caeltia, in an apologetic voice; "there is no need to tell about that."
"There is every need, my beloved," replied Finaun with his slow smile.
"I would rather you did not," murmured Caeltia, lifting his hand a little.
"I ask your permission, my son," said Finaun gently.
Caeltia spread out his open palms and dropped them again.
"Whatever you wish to do is good, my father," and, with a slight blush, he slid the pipe into his pocket.
Finaun turned to Eileen Ni Cooley:
"I will tell you a story," said he.
"Sure," said Eileen, "I'd love to hear you, and I could listen to a story for a day and a night."
Mac Cann pulled solemnly at his pipe and regarded Finaun who was looking at him peacefully from a corner.
"You're full of fun," said he to the archangel.
Said Finaun:
"While generation succeeds generation a man has to fight the same fight. At the end he wins, and he never has to fight that battle again, and then he is ready for Paradise.
"Every man from the beginning has one enemy from whom he can never escape, and the story of his lives is the story of his battles with that enemy whom he must draw into his own being before he can himself attain to real being, for an enemy can never be crushed, but every enemy can be won.
"Long before the foundations of this world were laid, when the voice was heard and the army of the voice went through the darkness, two people came into being with the universe that was their shell.They lived through myriad existences knowing star after star grow hot and cold in the broad sky, and they hated each other through the changing of the stars and the ebbing and flooding of their lives.
"At a time this one of them would be a woman and that other would be a man, and again in due period the one that had been a woman would be a man and the other would be a woman, that their battle might be joined in the intimacy which can only come through difference and the distance that is attraction.
"No one can say which of these did most harm to the other; no one can say which was the most ruthless, the most merciless, for they were born, as all enemies are, equal in being and in power.
"Through their lives they had many names and they lived in many lands, but their names in eternity were Finaun Mac Dea and Caeltia Mac Dea, and when the time comes, their name will be Mac Dea and nothing else: then they willbecome one in each other, and one in Infinite Greatness, and one in the unending life of Eternity which is God: but still, in world under world, in star under flaming star, they pursue each other with a hate which is slowly changing into love.
"It was not on earth, nor in any planet, that the beginning of love came to these two, it was in the hell that they had fashioned for themselves in terror and lust and cruelty. For, as they sat among their demons, a seed germinated in the soul of one, the seed of knowledge which is the parent of love and the parent of every terrible and beautiful thing in the worlds and the heavens.
"While that one looked on his companion, writhing like himself in torment, he grew conscious, and although he looked at the other with fury it was with a new fury, for with it came contempt, and they were no longer equal in power or in hate.
"Now, for the first time, that one inwhom knowledge had been born desired to escape from his companion; he wished to get away so that he might never behold that enemy again; suddenly the other appeared to him hideous as a toad that couches in slime and spits his poison at random, but he could not escape, and he could never escape.
"As that one increased in knowledge so he increased in cruelty and power, so his lust became terrible, for now there was fear in his contempt because he could never escape. Many a time they fled from one another, but always, and however they fled, it was towards each other their steps were directed. At the feast, in the camp, and in the wilderness they found themselves and undertook anew the quarrel which was their blood and their being.
"And that other in whom knowledge had not awakened—He raged like a beast; he thought in blood and fever; his brains were his teeth and the nails of his hands. Cunning came creepingly to his aid againstknowledge; he lay in wait for his enemy in gloomy places; he spread snares for him in the darkness and baited traps. He feigned humility to get closer to his vengeance, but he could not combat knowledge.
"Time and again he became the slave of that other, and as slave and master their battle was savagely joined, until at last knowledge stirred also in that mind and he grew conscious.
"Then the age-long enmity drew to its change. For him there was no contempt possible, the other was older than he and wiser, for to be wise is to be old; there was no vantage for contempt, but envy sharpened his sword, it salted his anger, and they fought anew and unceasingly.
"But now their hands were not seeking each other's throats with such frank urgency; they fought subterraneously, with smiles and polite words and decent observances, but they did not cease for an instant to strive and never did they forsakean advantage or lift up the one that had fallen.
"Again the change: and now they battled not in the name of hate but under the holy superscription of love; again and again, life after life, they harried and ruined each other; their desire for one another was a madness, and in that desire they warred more bitterly than before. They blasted each other's lives, they dashed their honour to the mud, they slew one another. Than this none of their battles had been so terrible. Here there was no let, no respite even for an instant. They knew each other with that superficial knowledge which seems so clear although it shows no more than the scum floating upon existence; they knew the scumminess of each other and exhausted to the dregs their abundant evil until of evil they could learn no further, and their lives, alternating in a fierce energy and a miserable weariness, came towards but could not come to stagnation.
"The horizon vanished from them; there were irons on the feet of the winds; the sun peered from a hood through a mask, and life was one room wherein dull voices droned dully, wherein something was for ever uttered and nothing was said, where hands were for ever lifted and nothing was done, where the mind smouldered and flared to lightning and no thought came from the spark.
"They had reached an end, and it was a precipice down which they must spin giddily to the murk, or else shape wings for themselves and soar from that completion, for completion is a consciousness, and once again they were powerfully aware of themselves. They were vice-conscious, and virtue did not abide in their minds than as a dream which was an illusion and a lie.
"Then, and this too was long ago! how long! When the moon was young; when she gathered rosy clouds about her evening and sang at noon from bush and mountain-ledge;when she folded her breasts in dewy darkness and awakened with cries of joy to the sun; then she tended her flowers in the vale; she drove her kine to deep pasture: she sang to her multitudes of increase and happiness while her feet went in the furrow with the plough and her hand guided the sickle and the sheaf. Great love didst thou give when thou wast a mother, O Beautiful! who art now white as silver and hath ice upon thine ancient head.
"Again they lived and were wed.
"Which of them was which in that sad pilgrimage it is not now possible to know. Memory faints at the long tale of it, and they were so intermingled, so alike through all their difference that they were becoming one in the great memory. Again they took up the time-long burden, and again desire drew them wildly to the embrace which was much repugnance and very little love. So, behold these two, a man and a woman, walking through thepleasant light, taking each other's hands in a kindness that had no roots, speaking words of affection that their souls groaned the lie to.
"The woman was fair—she was fair as one star that shines on the void and is not abashed before immensity; she was beautiful as a green tree by a pool that bows peacefully to the sun; she was lovely as a field of mild corn waving to the wind in one slow movement. Together they plumbed their desire and found wickedness glooming at the bottom, and they were conscious of themselves and of all evil.
"There was a demon in the pit that they had digged, and always, when they founded anew their hell, he tormented them; he was the accumulation of their evil; age after age they re-created him until he showed gigantic and terrible as a storm, and as they lusted after each other so he lusted after them.
"On a time that Misery shaped itselfas a man and came privily to the woman while she walked under heavy apple boughs in a garden. Their feet went to and fro closely together in the grass and their voices communed together, until one day the woman cried bitterly that there were no wings, and with the Spectre she leaped forthright to the chasm and went down shrieking a laughter that was woe. There she found herself and her demon and was the concubine of that one; and there, in the gulf and chasm of evil, she conjured virtue to her tortured soul and stole energy from the demon.
"She sat among the rocks of her place.
"Old Misery beside her laughed his laugh, and while she looked at him her eyes went backwards in her head, and when she looked again she saw differently, for in that space knowledge had put forth a bud and a blossom and she looked through knowledge. She saw herself and the demon and the man, and she prayed to the demon. As she prayed she gathered small blueflowers that peered sparsely among the crags, and she made a chaplet of these. She wove them with tears and sighs, and when the chaplet was made she put it to the demon's hand, praying him to bear it to the man.
"He did that for her because he loved to laugh at their trouble, and he divined laughter for his iron chaps.
"So the demon came terribly to the man as he walked under the swaying and lifting of green boughs in the long grass of an orchard, and he put the chaplet in the man's hand, saying:
"'My concubine, your beloved, sends a greeting to you with her love and this garland of blue flowers which she has woven with her two hands in hell.'
"The man, looking on these flowers, felt his heart move within him like water.
"'Bring her to me,' said he to the demon.
"'I will not do so,' replied the Misery.
"And, suddenly, the man leaped on the Spectre. He locked his arms about thatcold neck, and clung furiously with his knees.
"'Then I will go to her with you,' said he.
"And together they went headlong down the pit, and as they fell they battled frightfully in the dark pitch."
Mac Cann was asleep, but when Finaun's voice ceased he awakened and stretched himself with a loud yawn.
"I didn't hear a word of that story," said he.
"I heard it," said Eileen Ni Cooley; "it was a good story."
"What was it about?"
"I don't know," she replied.
"Do you know what it was about, Mary?"
"I do not, for I was thinking about other things at the time."
Finaun took her hand.
"There was no need for any of you to know what that story was about, excepting you only," and he looked very kindly at Eileen Ni Cooley.
"I listened to it," said she; "and it was a good story. I know what it wasabout, but I would not know how to tell what it was about."
"It must have been the queer yarn," said Patsy regretfully; "I wish I hadn't gone to sleep."
"I was awake for you," said Caeltia.
"What's the use of that?" said Patsy testily.
It was still raining.
The day was far advanced and evening was spinning her dull webs athwart the sky. Already in the broken house the light had diminished to a brown gloom, and their faces looked watchful and pale to each other as they crouched on the earthen floor. Silence was again seizing on them, and each person's eyes were focussing on some object or point on the wall or the floor as their thoughts began to hold them.
Mac Cann roused himself.
"We are here for the night; that rain won't stop as long as there's a drop left in its can."
Mary bestirred herself also.
"I'll slip down to the cart and bring back whatever food is in it. I left every thing covered and I don't think they'll be too wet."
"Do that," said her father.
"There's a big bottle rolled up in a sack," he continued; "it's in a bucket at the front of the cart by the right shaft, and there's a little sup of whisky in the big bottle."
"I'll bring that too."
"You're a good girl," said he.
"What will I do with the ass this night?" said Mary.
"Hit him a kick," said her father.