“I’m going to marry a prince when I get very old, mother,” said Norah, interrupting the story-teller. “Prince Charming, for that’s what the girl did in the fairy stories when she grew up and got old at twenty or twenty-one. She was very poor at first and did nothing grand, but stopped at home, sweeping the floor and washing dishes. Then one night an old woman came down the chimney and told the girl to go to a dance, and the girl didn’t leave the dance in time and she lost one of her slippers and—Oh! it was a great story, mother. I read it in a book that Fergus had.”
“You were reading those books, too!”
“Just only that one, mother, and Fergus didn’t like it at all. He said it was very silly!”
“So it was, alannah, when it put thoughts like that into your head. Marry Prince Charming, and you going to be a holy nun! Nuns never marry like that.”
“Don’t they? Well, I’ll not marry a Prince Charming. I’ll marry one of the White Horsemen who are under the mountain of Aileach.”
“But nuns never marry anybody.”
“They don’t?” exclaimed Norah in a puzzled voice. Then with childish irrelevance: “But tell me the story about the White Horsemen of Aileach, mother. That’s the best story of all.”
“Long, long ago, when the red-haired strangers came to Ireland, they put nearly everybody to the sword; the old and young, the fit and feeble, and mind you, Ireland was in worse than a bad way,” the mother began, drifting easily into her narrative. “Ireland was a great place in those days with castles and kings. Kings, Norah! There were five of them; now there isn’t even one in the four corners of the country. But the red-haired strangers came like a storm from the sea and there was no standing before them. Red were their swords, red as their hair, but not with rust but with the blood of men, women, and children. And the chieftains of Ireland and the men of Ireland could make no stand against the enemy atall. ‘What am I to do?’ cried the Ardrigh, the top king of the whole country, speaking from the door of his own castle. ‘There will soon be no Ireland belonging to me, it will all go to the red-haired strangers.’ Then up spoke an old withered stick of a man, that nobody knew, and who had been listening to the words of the King.
“ ‘Have you asked the Chieftain of the White Horsemen for help?’
“ ‘I never met him, decent stranger,’ answered the King. ‘I know him not.’
“ ‘Go to the sea when it strikes in storm on the coast of Tir Conail,’ said the old man to the King, ‘and call out to Maanan MacLir for aid and he’ll send to your help his ten score and ten white horsemen. You’ll see the white horses far out, rearing on the top of the waves, every steed pawing the ocean and all mad for the fight before them.’
“Well, to cut a long story short, the King did as he was told and called to the White Horsemen to come and help him, and they came, ten score of them and ten, with their shields shining like polished silver and lances bright as frosty stars. Down from the North they rode, driving the foe on in front of them, and never was seen such a rout, neither in the days that went before nor the days that came after. The White Horsemen cut their way right through mountains in their haste to get to the other side; for nothing could stand against their lances. Nobody could go as quickly as them, not even the red-haired strangers who were in such a hurry to get out of their way.
“And when victory was theirs, the White Horsemen came back here to Tir Conail again and stood on the verge of the ocean while Maanan MacLir headed his horse out on the waves. But lo, and behold! the steed could no longer gallop across the water. The poor animal sank into the sea and the chieftain was nearly drowned. At that moment a voice, nobody knew where it came from, called to Maanan MacLir:
“ ‘Long enough has the sea called for the rest and quiet that was not given to it by the white horses of MacLir. Never more will the sea bend under them; now it will break apart and let them through!’
“When they heard these words the White Horsementurned away from the sea and went galloping to the foot of the Mountain of Aileach. When they arrived there the mountain raised itself upon one side just like the lid of a kettle and Maanan MacLir and his White Horsemen disappeared under it. Since that day they have never been seen again.”
“But the mountain didn’t close on top of them, did it?” asked Norah.
“Of course it did. Isn’t it closed to this very day?”
“And will it be a true story?”
“True, child!” exclaimed the mother. “Sure the mountain is there to this very hour. And besides, Saint Columbkille talks about it in his prophecies.”
“Then the White Horsemen will come out again?”
“They’ll come out when the great war comes,” said the mother. “And that will be when there are roads round every mountain like the frills round the cap of an old woman. It will start, the great war, when the nights lengthen and the year grows brown, between the seasons of scythe and sickle; murder and slaughter, madder than cattle in the heat of summer, will run through the land, and the young men will be killed and the middle-aged men and the old. The very crutches of the cripples will be taken out to arm the fighters, and the bed-ridden will be turned three times three in their beds to see if they are fit to go into the field of battle. Death will take them all, for that is how it is to be; that way and no other. And when they’re all gone it will be the turn of the White Horsemen, who have been waiting for the great war ever since they chased the red-haired strangers from the country. They’ll come out from under Aileach when the day arrives, ten score and ten of them with silver shields and spears, bright as stars on a frosty night. They’ll fight the foe and win and victory will come toIreland. These are the words of the great saint, Columbkille.”
“Are the White Horsemen very tall, mother?” asked Norah, her eyes alight with enthusiastic interest.
“Tall is not the word!”
“High as a hill?”
“Higher!”
“As Sliab a Tuagh?”
“It’s as nothing compared to one of the men of Maanan MacLir.”
“Then I’ll marry one of the White Horsemen,” said Norah, decision in her clear voice. “I’ll live in a castle, polish his lance and shield, and—Who will that be at the door?”
NORAHpaused. Someone was moving outside as if fumbling for the latch; then a tall, heavily-bearded man pushed the door of the cabin inwards and entered, bringing with him a terrific gust of wind that almost shook the house to its foundations. On his face was a scared look, and his clothes were dripping wet, although it was not raining.
“Was it himself?” cried the old woman, alluding to her husband and speaking to the man who entered. It was evident from the tone in which she spoke that she anticipated something terrible.
“It was himself,” said the man in a low, hoarse voice. “He’s coming on the flat of two oars. God bless us! But it is a black heart that the sea has.”
With these words the visitor went out again, and the excited voices of men could be heard floating on the wind.
“It’s your father, Norah,” said the old woman. “Hewent down with the curragh, I’m thinking; down through the black water. Mother of God! but it’s the sea that has the black heart! There they are coming with him. Open the door wider, Norah!”
The girl, who had risen from her seat, pulled the door inwards and placed a stone against the sill to keep it open. She felt as if a thousand pins were pricking her legs; her head was heavy, her fingers felt enormous and when they pressed against the door it seemed to Norah as if they did not belong to her at all. Outside it was very dark, the heavens held no stars and it looked as if the howling gale had whirled them away. In the darkness a torch swayed in the wind, and behind the torch black forms of men and white, pallid faces could be discerned. Norah’s mind turned to the stories which her mother had been telling her. She knew it was wrong to think of them at that moment but she felt an inordinate desire to laugh at something; what she wanted to laugh at she did not know; why she wanted to laugh she could not fathom.
“Are they coming, Norah?” asked the old woman, rising from her seat and hobbling with difficulty towards the door. “Mother of Christ! but the hand of God is heavy on me this night of nights! Children of my own and man of my own, all, all going away from me! I’ll see the last of them go down into the grave before me, for with my hard cough and the long sickness I’ll outlive them all: that is the will of God. Ten sons and daughters of my body; every one of them gone, and one away in black foreign parts.... Are they coming, Norah?”
The woman reached the door and leant against the jamb for support. The torch was flaring outside and very near.
“Watch that you don’t set the thatch on fire!” a voice cried.
Two men entered the house, the water streaming fromtheir clothes and each holding a burdened oar in his hands. Across the oars a sail was bound tightly, and cold in death on the sail lay James Ryan, his grey beard sticking out stiffly, his eyes open, his head shaking from side to side, his bare feet blue with the cold. The oars, which brushed sharply against the old woman in passing, were laid on the floor and the dead man was placed on the bed.
“I’m sweatin’ like a pig!” said one of the bearers, and he rubbed his wrinkled brow violently with the back of his hand.
“Watch the thatch!” someone outside shouted. The torch was extinguished and a crowd of men entered the cabin. An old red-haired fisherman lifted the oars; the sail was rolled into a bundle and carried out again. Pools of water formed on the floor and tracks of wet feet showed all over it. The old woman hobbled back to her bed and gazed long and earnestly at her husband; some of the men took off their hats; one was smoking, another dressed a bleeding foot and told how he hit it against a sharp rock when carrying the dead man up from the sea; several of the neighbouring women were already in the house. Maire a Crick was on her knees by the bedside.
“I am used to it now,” said the old woman, as she sorted the blankets on the bed with her withered hands. “Ten sons and daughters, and another away and maybe never hearing from him again.... Himself said when he was going out that the morrow never comes.”
She sat down on the edge of the bed, ran her fingers over the wet clothes of her husband, opened his vest, put her hand on his heart, shook her head sadly and buttoned the coat again.
“Just when he was putting out the wind caught him, and he dropped like a stone over the side of the curragh,” the red-haired fisherman was saying. “But theboat was no good anyway. It is one of the Congested Districts Board’s boats that he should have.”
“Where would he get the money to buy one?” asked Maire a Crick, turning round from the prayer which she was saying for the dead man.
“The money can be paid in instalments,” answered the red fisherman. He spoke the Gaelic, as nearly everybody in Frosses did, but the words “instalments” and “Congested Districts Board” were said in English. “Ten pounds the new boats cost, and there is five years allowed for paying the money.”
“The Congested Districts Board is going to be a great help,” someone remarked.
“Is the curragh safe?” asked Mary Ryan, turning round. She was still sitting beside the bed, turning over the clothes with lean, shaky fingers.
“It is at the bottom,” said a neighbour, Eamon Doherty by name. “It was rotten anyhow, and it hadn’t been in wet water for close on two years.... Now, I wonder what made Shemus go out on it?”
“Nothing atall, atall left,” said the old woman in a feeble voice. “If I only had the curragh even.... And himself dead after all the times that the sea has bent under him! Never to see him again, never! Isn’t it hard to think that a thing like that could be?”
Whereupon, saying this she began to cry, at first quietly, but afterwards, as if getting warmed to the task, more loudly, until her sobs could be heard a hundred yards away from the house.
“If I only had the curragh left!” she repeated time and again.
Norah approached the bed timidly. She had been weeping silently by the door ever since the corpse had been carried in. Death was here in the house; it had already taken possession of her father. And it was withher also. Not to-night nor to-morrow, but at the end of forty years or of fifty, and was it not all the same? And what was this death? She did not know; she only thought it cruel and strange. Her own helplessness in face of such a crisis almost overpowered her. For death there was no help, from it there was no escape. It was all powerful and terrible. To-morrow and to-morrow might come and go, but her father would lie still and unheeding. He would not return, he could not return. This fact hammered at her mind, and the cruelty of her own thoughts tortured her. She tried to think of something apart from the tragedy, but ever her mind reverted to the one and same dreadful subject. Of a great fact she was certain; one that would never be contradicted. Her father was dead; thousands of years might pass and one truth would still remain unquestioned. Her father was dead. “To think of it!” she said in a low voice. “Dead for ever!”
She went down on her knees by the bedside but could not pray. God was cruel; He had no mercy. She sobbed no longer, but with wide, tearless eyes she gazed at the face of her father. It had now become yellow, the lips blue, the nose was pinched and the eyes sunken. The water from his clothes was dripping underneath the bed, and she could hear the drip-drip of it falling on the floor.
Everything in the house had suddenly taken on a different aspect. The bed appeared strange to her; so did the fire, the low droning voices of the neighbours, and the play of light and shadow on the walls. The old cat sitting on top of the dresser, gazing down at her, had a curious look in its wide-open eyes; the animal seemed to have changed in some queer way. Outside the wind was beating against the house and wailing over the chimney. Never in her life before had she heard such a melancholy sob in the wind.
SEVERALmore neighbours, men, women, and children, were now coming in. With eyes fixed straight ahead they approached the corpse, went down on their knees on the wet floor by the bedside and said their prayers, crossing themselves many times. Those who carried the dead body up from the sea drew near to the fire and dried their sodden garments in the midst of a cloud of vapour that almost hid them from view. Eamon Doherty remarked that Ireland would have Home Rule presently, and a loud discussion mingled with many jokes was soon in progress.
“The Irish will never agree,” said old Oiney Dinchy, a one-eyed ancient who had just risen from his knees by the bedside. “That is the worst of the Irish; they never agree. Look at them now in the House of Commons; one member is always fighting against another member, and it was ever the same, for contrairiness is in their blood to the very last drop of it.”
“There is always bound to be two parties,” said Master Diver with dogmatic assurance. “In England and America there are always two parties, sometimes more.”
“They’ll never get on, then,” said Eamon Doherty. “There are no two parties in the holy Church, and that’s why it gets on so well.”
The door opened and Sheila Carrol, the beansho, entered, her child, now a chubby little boy of three, toddling at her heels. Without looking round she went down on her knees by the bedside, and a couple of women who were praying crossed themselves and rose hurriedly. A few of the younger men winked knowingly and turned their thumbs towards the new-comer. Old Mary Ryan muttered something under her breath and turned a look of severe disapproval on the kneeling woman, then on the little boy who had run forward to the fire, where he was holding out his hands to the blaze.
“Who’ll be the ones that will go to Greenanore and get tea, bread, snuff, and tobacco for the wake?” asked Mary Ryan.
“I’ll go if Eamon Doherty comes along with me,” said old Oiney Dinchy, getting to his feet and putting a live peat to the bowl of his pipe.
“The two of you always get drunk if you go to Greenanore together,” said the old woman. “I’d as soon send the——” she pointed with her thumb over her shoulder at the beansho but did not mention her name, “to Greenanore, as send you two.”
“It is not everyone that would be treated that way if they offered to help a person,” Eamon Doherty remarked in a loud voice to Oiney Dinchy.
“I’ll go if Willie the Duck comes with me,” said a long, lank, shaggy youth, rising from one corner of the room and stretching his arms.
“You’re the man for the job, Micky’s Jim,” answered Mary Ryan, coming from the bedside and tottering through the press of neighbours to the dresser where the Delft tea-pot stood. She raised the lid, dipped her hand into the tea-pot and drew out a fistful of money.
“Four shillings for tea,” she began to calculate; “eight-pence for sugar; five shillings for loaves of bread; fourshillings and sixpence for tobacco, and sixpence for snuff, and—How much potheen did you get for your father’s wake, Eamon Doherty?”
“Four gallons and no less,” Eamon answered in a surly tone of voice.
“Two gallons of potheen, Micky’s Jim, and get it as cheap as you can,” said the old woman, turning to the long-limbed youth. “From what I hear Martin Eveleen sells good potheen. Get it from him, for it was Martin, I wish him luck! that helped Norah when she took the fargortha on the road to Greenanore three winters agone.”
The money was handed to Micky’s Jim, and he left the house followed by Willie the Duck, a small man, dark and swarthy, with a hump on his left shoulder, and a voice, when he spoke, that reminded one of the quacking of ducks.
“Thirty-four shillings in all,” mumbled Mary Ryan as she took her way back to the fireside. “It costs a lot to bury a body, and there will never be left one at all to bury me, never a one at all. If only the curragh was left me it would be something.”
Meanwhile Norah had slipped out, and went from house to house borrowing candlesticks (Meenalicknalore townland consisted of thirty families and there were only two candlesticks amongst them), baskets of peat, holy water, a lamp, extra chairs, stools, and many other things required for the wake.
ATmidnight the cabin was cleared of everybody but the washers of the dead, Eamon Doherty and Master Diver. Oiney Dinchy was very angry because MaryRyan did not ask him to give a hand at the washing of her husband.
“It wasn’t as if Shemus and me weren’t good friends,” said Oiney. “And besides, I have washed more dead men in a year of my life than all washed by Eamon and Master Diver put together.... And to think that I wasn’t allowed to help at the washin’ to-night!”
The men and women who had left the cabin went down on their knees at the doorstep and recited the Rosary. The night being very dark the young men drew near the girls and tickled them on the bare feet while they prayed. When admittance was again possible the dead man lay in the bed, his body covered with a white sheet and a large black crucifix resting on his breast. His clothes were already burned in the fire, it being a common custom in Frosses to consign the clothes of the dead to the flames on the first night of the wake.
About two o’clock in the morning provisions came from Greenanore. The house was now crowded, and several games such as “The Priest of the Parish,” “Catch the Ten,” and “Put your fingers in the Crow’s Nest” were in progress. An old man who sat in the corner was telling a story of the famine, and a few mischievous boys were amusing themselves by throwing pieces of peat at his hat.
While tea was being made, the rosary was again started. Micky’s Jim, a trifle the worse for liquor, went down on his knees on a chair and gave out the prayers. The mischievous boys turned their attentions from the old man to Jim, who was presently bombarded by a fire of turf. One went past his ears; one hit him on the back, another on the head, a third on the brow. Jim got angry.
“Pray away yourselves and be damned to you!” he roared at the kneeling house and, jumping off the chair, he sat down in a corner from which he had a view of thewhole party. Prayers came to an abrupt conclusion; the chair was taken by the beansho, who placed her child between its legs, and the little boy, who had shown a wonderful propensity for running to the bedside and pulling the corpse by the beard, was held a fast prisoner. Four or five women moved about hurriedly preparing tea; whisky was served without skimp or stint, but pipes were found to be scarce; one had to do for three persons, each pulling at it in turn.
The old man in the corner took up the famine story at a point where the prayers had interrupted the recital. It told of a corpse that rose from the bed of death, sat down at the table, lifted a bowl of tea, drank it and went back to bed again. “And the man was dead all the time,” said the story-teller.
Willie the Duck, speaking in a quavering voice, began to ask riddles: “What bears but never blossoms?” he enquired.
“The hangman’s rope,” was the answer.
“What tree never comes to fruit?” he asked.
“The gallows-tree,” was the answer.
“This is the best guess of the night,” said Willie, taking a pinch of snuff and sneezing violently. “No one will be able to answer it.... In the morning four legs; at noon two legs; in the evening three legs and at night four legs; and what would that be?”
“It’s a man,” said Eamon Doherty, looking round with a triumphant glance. “In his young days a man walks on his hands and knees, when he grows up he walks on two legs; when he gets older he walks on three legs, two and a stick; and if he lives long enough he’ll walk on crutches, God be good to us! and that’s four legs!”
“You’re a man with a head, Eamon,” said Willie the Duck. “And how did you guess it atall?”
“I heard the same guess often and I knew the answerevery time,” Eamon replied, and a smile of satisfaction lit up his face.
About four o’clock in the morning most of the men and a few of the ancient females were drunk. Mary Ryan had fallen asleep by the fire, her head touching the white ashes of her husband’s clothes. Norah placed a pillow under her mother’s head and took up a seat near her, gazing in turn at the silent figure which lay in the bed and the blue flames chasing one another up the black chimney.
Two lamps, one at each end of the house, spluttered dismally; the wind outside battered loudly against the door and wailed over the chimney. Oiney Dinchy was asleep and snoring loudly, and two youngsters blackened his face with soot. The beansho slept, and her child, long since released from the prison of the chair, was blubbering fitfully. On the damp earth of the mid-floor a well-made young woman slumbered, the naked calves of her finely formed legs showing. Micky’s Jim slapped the legs with his hand; the girl awoke, put down her dress until it covered her toes, made a face at the tormentor and went to sleep again. Beside Norah, old Master Diver, now remarkably rotund, was asleep, his bald head hanging to one side and a spittle slobbering from his lips.
Norah looked round at the sleepers, saw the stiff legs stretched on the floor, the long, awkward arms hanging loosely over the backs of the chairs, the bowls and the upturned whisky glasses on the table; heard the loud snoring, the rustle of petticoats as a woman changed her position on a stool, the crackle of falling peat on the hearth, the whimpering of the beansho’s child, and the sound made by the lips of a sucking babe pulling at its mother’s breast.
The strange fear, that which had taken possession ofher three years before on the rocks of Dooey, seized her again. To her all things seemed to lack finish as they lacked design. A vague sense of repulsion overcame the girl as she gazed at the sleepers huddled on form and floor. She shuddered as if in a fever and approached the bed; there the awful stillness of the dead fascinated her. She was looking at the dead, but somehow Death had now lost its terror: it was the living who caused her fear. She knelt down and prayed.
FORtwo days and nights the neighbours came in, prayed by the bedside, drank bowls of tea, smoked long white clay pipes and departed, only to return later and renew the same performance. A coffin and coffin-bearer, the latter shaped like a ladder, the sides of which were cushioned to ease the shoulders of the men who carried it, were procured. On the rungs of the coffin-bearer a number of notches, three hundred and fifty-two in all, told of the bodies carried on it to the grave. The bearer had been in service for many years and had been used by most of the families in Frosses. The man who made it was long dead; number seventy-seven represented his notch on the rungs.
On the morning of the third day Oiney Dinchy and Micky’s Jim lifted the dead man from the bed and placed him in the coffin. Before the lid was screwed down, Mary Ryan knelt over the coffin, gripping the side near her with thin, long fingers, which showed white at the joints, and kissing her husband she burst into a loud outcry of grief. Norah, more reserved in her sorrow, knelt on the floor, said a short prayer and then kissed the face of the corpse as her mother had done.
The lid was fastened, but here an interruption occurred. The wife wanted to look at her husband for “just one other minute.” With a gesture of impatienceold Oiney Dinchy, who was discussing the best means of catching flukes and tying the coffin, lifted the lid again and stood silently by, his hat drawn down well over his eyes. Mary Ryan gave vent to another outburst of grief; the coffin was again closed and lifted on the wooden bearer. An idle child was busily engaged in counting the notches.
“Seventy-seven; that’s for the man who made it,” someone was saying.
“Listen, Micky’s Jim,” whispered Mary Ryan as the youth passed her, going towards the door with a basket of pipes and tobacco.
“Well, Mary, what is it?” Jim asked.
“Was this a good year beyond the water?”
Jim went yearly to the potato-digging in Scotland, taking with him a squad of men and women from his own country, and over these he was master while they were at work.
“It was not so very bad,” said Jim cautiously. He was afraid that the old woman might ask the loan of money from him.
“Next year I have a mind to send Norah.”
“And not to make a nun of her, after all?”
Norah was piling peat on the fire, lifting them from the floor and dropping them into the flames. As she bent down Jim noticed every movement of her body and paid very little attention to the words of the old woman. Norah, having finished her task, stood upright; Jim waited eagerly for a repetition of her former movement, but seeing that she was weeping he turned his attention to the task of getting the coffin through the doorway.
Norah would be a light girl for heavy work on the Scottish farms, Jim thought, as he stooped down and lifted a rung of the bearer. Could he take her with him? That was a ticklish question. She was clever with theneedles, he knew, but she had not done any heavy manual work for the last two years. Learning lessons was to Jim an idle task. But the movement of her body, and especially of her legs when bending over the fire, appealed to Jim. The grace of her carriage, the poise of her head, the soft hair that fell over her shoulders, all these found favour in the eyes of the healthy young man.
“My cripes, I’ll take her with me next year!” he said under his breath. He spoke in English and had learned many strange oaths abroad.
OUTSIDEa large crowd of people were waiting; the women dressed in red flannel petticoats and woollen shawls, the men in white wrappers and corduroy trousers. The coffin bearer was raised on high; four men placed their shoulders under it; a bottle of holy water was sprinkled over bearers and burden indiscriminately; the men and women crossed themselves many times, and the mournful procession started.
Mary Ryan stood at the door and watched it wending its way across the dreary, uneven fields, past the Three Rocks, now getting lost in some hollow, again rising to the shoulders of a hillock, the coffin swaying unevenly on the shoulders of the bearers, the red petticoats of the women in the rear shaking in the breeze. The widow, almost too weak to move, was with difficulty restrained from going to the churchyard. Norah, having arranged the hassock in the corner for her mother, had followed the procession, and now the old woman thought that she could detect her child a quarter of a mile away, following in the rear of the party. Micky’s Jim, who had not gone away yet, was engaged in sorting a rope on thethatch which had been blown askew by the wind of the previous nights.
“I’ll overtake the funeral, Mary,” he said when he completed the work. “I was just making the thatch strong against the breeze and I have tied a broken rope.”
“Mother of God be good to you, Jim, but it is yourself that has the kindly heart!” said Mary in a tremulous whisper. “Could you take Norah with you beyond the water next year?”
Jim called to mind the movements of the girl’s body when she stooped to lift peat for the fire, and the remembrance filled him with pleasure. “When next summer comes round, I’ll see, Mary Ryan,” he answered. “If there is a place to spare in the squad I’ll let you know and your Norah will have the very first chance of it.”
“Mother of God bless you, Jim, for the kindness is in you!” said the old woman. “It is me that is the lone body this very minute, with never a penny in my house and not even the old curragh left to me to make a penny by.”
“Well, I’m off, Mary,” said Jim. “The coffin is going out of sight and they’ll be needing new blood under it.” He hurried across the fields, his long legs covering an enormous spread of earth at every stride. Over the brae he hurried, and at the turn of the road halted for a moment and looked back at Mary Ryan’s cabin. The woman still stood at the door, one hand shading her eyes, looking towards the Frosses churchyard, which lay more than three miles away. “Thinkin’ that she could get anything for an old curragh!” he muttered contemptuously, as he resumed his stride. “She’s an old fool; but Norah! Ah! she’s a soncy lass, and she was good to look at when making that fire!”
THEgraveyard, surrounded by a stone wall, broken down in several places, served as a grazing plot for bullocks, donkeys, and sheep, as well as for the burial place of the dead. A long walk, lined with stunted hazel bushes, ran half-way through the yard, and at the end a low stone vault, hardly higher than a man’s head, stood under the shadow of an overhanging sycamore.
The funeral procession was delayed on the journey, and Father Devaney, round-faced and red-cheeked, stamped up and down while waiting its arrival. He had come all the way from Greenanore and was in a hurry to get back again. The morning was cold and caused him to shiver a little, and when he shivered he clapped his hands vigorously, the palm of one against the back of the other.
His large mansion, complete now and habitable, had not been fully paid for yet, and most of his parishioners were a pound or two in arrears; when this money came to hand matters would be much better. Old Devaney had developed a particularly fine taste in wine and cigars and found these very expensive; and at present he called to mind how James Ryan was two pounds in arrears with the mansion tax. The old priest knew that this money would never come to hand; the widow was ill, no word had been heard of Fergus for years, and Norah Ryan was a light slip of a girl who would probably never earn a penny. Devaney knew all the affairs of his flock, and he stamped up and down the graveyard, a little angry with the dead man who, being so long in coming to his last home, had kept him waiting for thirty minutes.
The funeral came in sight, creeping up over the brow of the hill that rose near at hand, the bearers strainingunder their burden as they hurried across the uneven ground, with the coffin rising and falling on their shoulders like a bark in a storm at sea. The gate of the graveyard was already open; the procession filed through, Father Devaney stepping out in front, his surplice streaming in the wind. The good man thought of the warm dinner waiting for him at home, and being in a hurry to get done with the burial service he walked so quickly that the bearers could hardly keep up with him. On the floor of the little vault in the centre of the graveyard the coffin was set down and the basket of snuff, pipes, and tobacco was handed round. All the men took pipes, filled them with rank plug and lit them; the older women lit pipes also, and everybody, with the exception of the priest and Norah Ryan, took snuff.
“Hurry up!” said Father Devaney. “Ye can smoke after ye do yer duty. It would be well if ye were puttin’ yer hands in yer pockets now and gettin’ yer offerin’s ready.”
Immediately a stream of silver descended on the coffin. All the mourners paid rapidly, but in turn, and the priest called out their names as they paid. A sum of ten pounds seventeen shillings was collected, and this the priest carefully wrapped up in a woollen muffler and put into his pocket.
“Now hurry up, boys, and get a move on ye; and open the grave!” he shouted, making no effort to hide his impatience now that the money was safely in his keeping. He felt full of the importance of a man who knows that everybody around him trembles under his eyes. Three or four young fellows were digging the grave and joking loudly as they worked; a crowd of men stood round them, puffing white clouds of smoke up into the air. Many of the women were kneeling beside graves that held all that remained of one or another near and dear to them.Norah Ryan stood alone with the priest, her dark shawl drawn over her white forehead, and a few stray tresses, that had fallen over her face, shaking in the breeze.
“It is a black day this for you, Norah, a black day,” said the priest, speaking in Gaelic. Two tears coursed down the girl’s cheeks, and she fixed a pair of sorrowful grey eyes on the man when he spoke.
“Don’t cry, girsha beag (little girl),” said the priest. “It is all for the best, all for the best, because it is the will of God.”
He looked sharply at the girl, who, feeling uncomfortable in his presence, longed to be away from the man’s side. She wondered why she had not gone off to the other end of the graveyard with Sheila Carrol, whom she could now see kneeling before a black wooden cross that was fast falling into decay. But it would be wrong to go away from the side of her father’s coffin, she thought.
“Any word from Fergus of late?” the priest was asking.
“No; not the smallest word.”
That Mary Ryan owed him two pounds, and that there was very little possibility of ever receiving the money, forcibly occurred to the priest at that moment. “Ye’ll not be in a good way at home now?” he said aloud.
“There’s hardly a white shilling in the house,” answered the girl.
“Is that the way of it?” exclaimed the priest, then seemed on the point of giving expression to something more forcible, but with an effort he restrained himself. “Well, it cannot be helped, I suppose, but there are two pounds owing for the building of my new house.”
“THEgrave is ready,” said Micky’s Jim, approaching the priest and saluting. The youth was perspiring profusely; his shirt open at the neck exposed his hairy chest, on which beads of sweat were glistening brightly.
“In with the coffin then,” said the priest, taking a book from his pocket and approaching the open grave. A pile of red earth, out of which several white bones protruded, lay on the brink, and long earthworms crawled across it. The coffin was lowered into the grave with a rope. Norah wept loudly; old Oiney Dinchy remarked that the bones belonged to her grandparents whom she did not remember.
“Remember man that thou art dust and unto dust thou shalt return,” the priest chanted in a loud, droning voice. Norah, kneeling on the wet ground, her head bent down over her bosom, so that her hair hung over her shoulders, saw nothing but the black coffin which was speedily disappearing under the red clay, and heard nothing but the thud of the earth as it struck the coffin.
The priest took his departure; the grave was filled up and the crowd began to disperse.
“Come away home now,” said Sheila Carrol to Norah, who was still kneeling on the wet ground. The girl rose without a word, brushed her dress with a woollen handkerchief and accompanied the beansho from the churchyard.
“Don’t cry, Norah,” said Sheila, observing that tears were still falling down the cheeks of her companion. “Everyone must die and go away just the same as if they had never been at all, for that is the will of God. How is yer mother this morning?”
“Much the same as she was always,” said Norah. “Shecannot get rid of her cough, and she has shiverin’ fits of late.... Hasn’t the sea the black heart?”
“Black enough, indeed, my child,” said the beansho. “Your mother will feel it a big lot?”
“Not so much,” said the girl. “She’ll soon be with him, she’s thinkin’.”
“At the wake I heard her say that she would be the last of the family to die. What put that into her head?”
“I don’t know what put it into her head, but if I were to die on the wet road this very minute I wouldn’t care one haet.” On Norah’s face there was a look of infinite sadness, and the pathos of her words cut Sheila to the heart.
“Don’t speak like that, Norah Ryan,” she exclaimed. “Death is black and bitter, but there are things much worse than death, things far, far worse.”
They had now reached a stile, and far in front the soft caishin (path) wound on by rock and rath across the broad expanse of moor. Several people, walking one after another, were in front; the soft ooze was squirting under their feet and splashing against their ankles. In the midst of the heather a young bullock lay chewing the cud, and looked upon the passers-by with that stupid, involved look peculiar to the ox; a moor-cock, agitated and voluble, rose into the air and chattered as it swept across the brown of the moor.
“I’m goin’ to leave Ireland come Candlemas,” said the beansho, pulling her feet wearily out of the mire.
“And where would ye be goin’ to then, Sheila Carrol?”
“Beyont the water.”
“Mercy be on us, and are ye goin’ surely?”
“True as death, I’m goin’,” said Sheila Carrol with rising voice. “I’m sick of this place—not the place itself but the people that’s in it, them with their bitin’ tongues and cuttin’ talk, them that won’t let those that do them noharm a-be. Nothin’ bad enough that they wouldn’t put past me, the same Frosses people. For me it’s always the hard word that they have; even the priest himself when he meets me on the high road crosses himself as if he met the red-hot devil out of hell. But did he refuse my shillin’ to-day?... Even at the wakes the very people point their thumbs at me when I go down on my own two knees to say a prayer for the dead.... But what am I talkin’ about! Why should I be tellin’ my own sorrows to one that has heavy troubles of her own to bear.... I’m goin’ beyont the water come next Candlemas, anyway, Norah Ryan!”
WHENone is leaving home every familiar object seems to take on a different aspect and becomes almost strange and foreign. The streets, houses, and landscape which you have gazed on for years become in some way very remote, like objects seen in a dream, but under this guise every familiar landmark becomes dearer than ever it has been before. So Norah Ryan felt as she was leaving home in the June of 1905 bound for the potato fields of Scotland.
“Is this the road to Greenanore, the road that our feet took when goin’ to the town for the stockin’ yarn?” she asked herself several times. “It is changed somehow; it doesn’t seem to be the same place, but for all that I like it better than ever. Why this is I do not know; I seem to be in a dream of some kind.”
Her thoughts were confused and her mind ran on several things at the same time; her mother’s words at leave-taking, the prayer that the child might do well, the quick words of tearless farewell spoken at the doorstep; and as she thought of these things she wondered why her mother did not weep when her only child was leaving her.
The girl was now walking alone to the village of Greenanore. There she would meet all the members of the party, and every step of the journey brought a thousandbygone memories vividly to her mind. Fergus she thought of, his good-bye at the cross-roads, the dog whining in Ballybonar, the lowing cow, the soft song of the sea. Would she ever see Fergus again? Where had he been all these years? Looking into the distance she could see the mountains that hemmed Glenmornan, and light clouds, white and fleecy as Candlemas sheep, resting on the tops of them. Further down, on the foothills, the smoke of peat-fires rose into the air, telling of the turf-savers who laboured on the brown bogs at the stacks and rikkles. Norah thought of Dermod Flynn; indeed she called him to mind daily when gazing towards the hills of Glenmornan, recollecting with a certain feeling of pride the boy’s demeanour at school and his utter indifference towards personal chastisement. The dreamy eyes of Dermod and his manner of looking through the school window at nothing in particular fascinated her; and the very remembrance of the youth standing beside her facing the map of the world always caused a pleasant thrill to run through her body. Now, as she looked at the hills of Glenmornan, the incidents of the morning on which she went to pull bog-bine there came back to her mind, and she wondered if Dermod Flynn thought the hills so much changed on the day when he was setting out for the rabble of Strabane.
A large iron bridge, lately built by the Congested Districts Board, spanned the bay between Frosses and Dooey. Norah crossed over this to the other side, where the black rocks, sharp and pointed, spread over the white sand. It was here that the women slept out on the mid-winter night many years ago; and now Norah had only a very dim remembrance of the event.
Up to the rise of the hill she hurried, and from the townland of Ballybonar looked back at Frosses: at the little strips of land running down to the sea, at the whitelime-washed cabins dotted all over the parish, at Frosses graveyard and the lone sycamore tree that grew there, showing like a black stain against the sky. Seeing it, she thought of her father and said an “Our Father” and “Hail Mary” for the repose of his soul. Then her eye roved over Frosses again.
“Maybe after this I’ll never set my two eyes on the place,” she said, then added, “just like Fergus!”
The thought that she might never see the place again filled her with a certain feeling of importance which up to now had been altogether foreign to her.
ATthe station she met the other members of the potato squad, fifteen in all. Some were sitting on their boxes, others on the bundles bound in cotton handkerchiefs which contained all their clothes and toilet requisites. The latter consisted of combs and hand-mirrors possessed by the women, and razors, the property of the men. Micky’s Jim was pacing up and down the platform, his hands deep in his trousers’ pockets and a heavy-bowled wooden pipe in his mouth. From time to time he pulled the pipe from between his teeth, accompanying the action with a knowing shrug of his shoulders, and spat into the four-foot way.
“Is this yerself, Norah?” he exclaimed, casting a patronising glance at the girl as she entered the railway station. “Ye are almost late for the train. Did ye walk the whole way?... Ah! here she comes!”
The train came in sight, puffing round the curve; the women rose from their seats, clutched hastily at their bundles and formed into a row on the verge of the platform; the men, most of whom were smoking, took theirpipes from their mouths, hit the bowls sharply against their palms, thus emptying them of white ash; then, with a feigned look of unconcern on their faces, they picked up their belongings with a leisure which implied that they were men well used to such happenings. They were posing a little; knowing that those who came to see them off would tell for days in Frosses how indifferently Mick or Ned took the train leading to the land beyond the water. “Just went on the train with no more concern on their faces than if they were going to a neighbour’s wake!” the Frosses people would say.
The train puffed into the station, the driver descended from his post, yawned, stretched his arms, and surveyed the crowd with a look of superior disdain. The fireman, with an oil-can in his hands, raced along the footplate and disappeared behind the engine, only to come back almost immediately, puffing and wiping the sweat from his face with a piece of torn and dirty rag.
“All aboard!” Micky’s Jim shouted in an excited voice, forgetting pose for a moment. “Hurry up now or the train will be away, leavin’ the biggest half of ye standin’ here. A train isn’t like Oiney Dinchy’s cuddy cart; it hasn’t to stop seven times in order to get right started. Hurry up! Go in sideways, Willie the Duck; ye cannot go through a door frontways carrying a bundle under yer oxter. Yer stupid ways would drive a sensible man to pot! Hurry up and come on now! Get a move on ye, every one of the whole lot of ye!”
Presently all, with the exception of the speaker, were in their compartments and looking for seats. Micky’s Jim remained on the platform, waiting for the train to start, when he could show by boarding it as it steamed out of the station that he had learned a thing or two beyond the water in his time; a thing or two not known to all the Frosses people.
A ticket collector examined the tickets, chatting heartily as he did so. When he found that Norah had not procured hers he ran off and came back with one, smiling happily as if glad to be of assistance to the girl. A lady and gentleman, tourists no doubt, paced up and down the platform, eyeing everybody with the tourists’ rude look of enquiry; a stray dog sniffed at Micky’s Jim’s trousers and got kicked for its curiosity; the engine driver yawned again, made the sign of the cross on his open mouth and mounted to his place; the whistle sounded, and with Micky’s Jim standing on the foot-board the train steamed out of the station.
Norah, who had never been on a train before, took up her seat near the window, and rubbed the pane with her shawl in order to get a better view of the country, which seemed to be flying past with remarkable speed. The telegraph wires were sinking and rising; the poles like big hands gripped them up, dropped them, but only to lift them up again as threads are lifted on the fingers of a knitter.
There were eleven people in the compartment, four women and seven men. One of the latter, Eamon Doherty, was eating a piece of dry bread made from Indian meal; the rest of the men were smoking black clay pipes, so short of shank that the bowls almost touched the noses of the smokers. But Jim’s pipe was different from any of these; it was a wooden one, “real briar root” he said, and was awfully proud of it. It had cost three shillings and sixpence in a town beyond the water, he now told the party, not indeed for the first time; but none of the listeners believed him. Two of the women said their prayers; one wept because she was leaving Ireland, and Norah Ryan spent her time looking out of the window.
“WHO’LLtake a drink?” asked Micky’s Jim, pulling a half-bottle of whisky from his pocket and drawing out the cork with his fingers. “Good stuff this is, and I’m as dry as the rafters of hell.... Will ye have a wee drop, Willie the Duck?”
“No, sure,” answered Willie, who was sitting beside the weeping woman, his one leg across the other, and his hands clasped over his stomach. “I would take it if I hadn’t the pledge against drink, indeed I would. Aye, sure!”
“Aye sure, be hanged!” Jim blurted out. “Ye’ve got to take it, for it’s die-dog-or-eat-the-gallows this time. Are ye goin’ to take it?”
“No, sure——”
“Why d’ye always say ‘Aye, sure’ and ‘No, sure’ when talking to a person?” asked Jim, replacing the cork in the bottle, which he now tried to balance on the point of his finger. “Is it a habit that ye’ve got into, Willie the Duck?”
“Aye, sure,” answered Willie, edging away from Micky’s Jim, who was balancing the bottle successfully within an inch of the roof. “Ye’ll let that bottle fall on me head.”
“Aye, sure,” shouted Micky’s Jim and shook the bottle with perilous carelessness, holding out the free hand in case it should fall. “It wouldn’t crack a wooden head anyhow.”
“That’s Brockagh station that we’re comin’ into now, as the man said,” remarked one of the women who had been praying. The woman was Maire a Glan, who had been going beyond the water to work for the last four or five years. Things were not going well at home; herhusband lay ill with paralysis, the children from a monetary point of view were useless as yet—the oldest boy, thin and weakly, a cripple from birth, went about on crutches, the younger ones were eternally crying for bread. Maire a Glan placed the rosary round her neck and took a piece of oaten bread from the bundle at her feet.
“Will ye have a wee bit to eat, Norah Ryan?” she asked.
“My thanks to ye, Maire a Glan, but I’m not hungry,” answered Norah, rubbing the window where her breath had dimmed it.
“I thought that ye might be, seeing that yer eye is not wet on leavin’ home,” said the woman, breaking bread and putting a bit of it in her mouth. “There, the train is stopping!” she went on, “and I have two sisters married within the stretch of a mile from this place.”
“Aye, sure,” said Willie the Duck with his usual quack. “I know both, and once I had a notion of one of them, meself.”
“Lookin’ for one of God’s stars to light yer pipe with, as the man said,” remarked the woman contemptuously, fixing her eyes on the poor fellow’s hump. “Ye have a burden enough on yer shoulders and not to be thinkin’ at all of a wife.”
“Them that carries the burden should be the first to complain of it,” said Willie the Duck, edging still further away from Micky’s Jim, who was now standing up and balancing the whisky bottle on the point of his nose. The women tittered, the men drew their pipes from their mouths and gave vent to loud guffaws. The train started out from Brockagh station, a porter ran after it, shut a door, and again Norah Ryan watched the fields run past and the telegraph wires rise and fall.
“I’ll bet that not one of ye knows who’s comin’ to joinus at Derry,” said Micky’s Jim, tiring of his play and putting the bottle back in his pocket, after having taken a sup of its contents.
“Who?” asked several voices.
“Dermod Flynn from Glenmornan.”
“I haven’t seen that gasair for the last two years or more,” said Murtagh Gallagher, a young man of twenty-five, who came from the townland of Meenahalla in the parish of Frosses. “If I mind right, he was sort of soft in the head.”
A faint blush rose to Norah Ryan’s cheek, and though she still looked out of the window she now failed to see the objects flying past. The conversation had suddenly become very interesting for her.
“He has been working with a farmer beyont the mountains this long while,” said Micky’s Jim. “But I’m keepin’ a place for him in the squad, and ye’ll see him on the Glasgow boat this very night. Ye have said that he was soft in his head, Murtagh Gallagher. Well, that remark applies to me.”
Jim spat on his hands, rose to his feet, shoved his fist under Murtagh’s nose and cried: “Smell that! There’s the smell of dead men off that fist! Dermod Flynn soft in the head, indeed! I’ll soft ye, ye—ye flat-nosed flea-catcher ye!”
“I was only making fun,” said Murtagh.
“Make it to his face then!”
“D’ye mind how Dermod Flynn knocked Master Diver down with his fist in the very school?” asked Judy Farrel, who was also one of the party.
“Aye, sure,” said Willie the Duck. “But it wasn’t with his fist but with a stick that he struck Master Diver, and mind ye he made the blood to flow!”
“I’llsoon make blood to flow!” said Micky’s Jim, still holding his fist under Murtagh Gallagher’s nose.
“I was only in fun,” Gallagher repeated. “Ye’re as hasty as a briar, Jim, for one cannot open his lips but ye want to blacken his eyes.”
“Now sit down, Micky’s Jim,” said Maire a Glan. “It’s not nice to see two people, both of them from Donegal, fighting when they’re away from home.”
“Fightin’!” exclaimed Jim, dropping into his seat and pulling out his pipe. “I see no fightin’.... I wish to God that someone would fight.... Sort of soft in the head, indeed!... I never could stand a man from Meenahalla, anyway.”
THEtrain sped on. House, field, and roadway whirled by, and Norah, almost bewildered, ceased to wonder where this road ran to, who lived in that house, what was the name of this village and whether that large building with the spire on top of it was a church (Bad luck to it!) or chapel (God bless it!).
“I’ll see him again,” she thought, her mind reverting to Dermod Flynn. “I wonder how he’ll look now; if his hair is still as curly as when he was at Frosses school.... Two years away from his own home and the home of all his people! Such a long while, and now he’ll know everything about the whole world.” Mixed with these lip-spoken words was the remembrance of her mother all alone in the old cabin at Frosses, and a vague feeling of regret filled her mind.
“Are you getting homesick, Norah?” Maire a Glan enquired, speaking in Gaelic, which came more easily than English to her tongue. “It’s not the dry eye that always tells of the lightest heart, I know myself.”
“Old Oiney Dinchy has a fine daughter,” Eamon Doherty was saying.
“She’s as stuck-up as Dooey Head,” piped Judy Farrel in a weak, thin voice.
“Micky’s Jim has a notion of her, I hear,” remarked Willie the Duck. “But what girl hasn’t Jim a notion of?”
Jim cleaned out the bowl of his pipe with a rusty nail and fell asleep while engaged on the task. The conversation went on.
“Old Farley McKeown is goin’ to get married to an English lady.”
“A young soncy wench she is, they say!”
“Think of that, for old Farley! A wrinkled old stick of seventy! Ah! the shameless old thing!”
“It’ll be a cold bed for the girl that is alongside of him. She’ll need a lot of blankets, as the man said.”
“Aye, sure, and she will that.”
“But he’s the man that has the money to pay for them.”
Norah, deep in a dreamy mood, listened idly to snatches of song, the laughter, and the voices that seemed to be speaking at a very remote distance; but after a while, sinking into the quiet isolation of her own thoughts, the outside world became non-existent to the young girl. She was thinking of Dermod; why he persisted in coming up before her mind’s eye she could not explain, but the dream of meeting with him on the streets of Derry exerted a restful influence over her and she fell into a light slumber.
“It’s the soncy girl she looks with the sleep on her.”
Almost imperceptibly Norah opened her eyes. The transition was so quiet that she was hardly aware that she had slept, and those who looked on were hardly aware that she had wakened. It was Maire a Glan who had been speaking. The train now stood at a station and Micky’s Jim was walking up and down the platform, his pipe in his mouth and his hands deep in his trousers’ pockets. Facing the window was a bookstall and a white-facedgirl handing to some man a newspaper and a book with a red cover, Norah recollected that Fergus often read books with red covers just like the one that was handed over the counter of the bookstall. That it was possible to have a shop containing nothing but books and papers came as a surprise to Norah Ryan. Over the bookstall in white letters was the station’s name—Strabane. Of this town Norah had often heard. It was to the hiring market of Strabane that Dermod Flynn had gone two years ago. Other two trains stood at the station, one on each side, and both full of passengers.
“Where are all those people going, Maire a Glan?” asked Norah.
“Everywhere, as the man said,” answered the old woman, who was telling her rosary and taking no notice of anything but the black beads passing through her fingers.
A boy walked up and down in front of the carriage, selling oranges at fourpence a dozen. Micky’s Jim bought sixpence worth and handed them through the window, telling all inside to eat as many as they liked; he would pay. Maire a Glan left her beads aside until the feast was finished. The engine whistled; Micky’s Jim boarded the moving train and again the fields were running past and the telegraph wires rising and falling.
“ ‘Twon’t be long till we are on the streets of Derry now,” said Micky’s Jim, drawing another half-bottle of whisky from his pocket and digging out the cork with a clasp-knife.
“ ‘Twon’t be very long, no, sure,” said Willie the Duck, edging away from Micky’s Jim.
THEYstepped on the dry and dusty Derry streets, the whole fifteen of them, with their bundles over their shoulders or dangling from their arms. Norah Ryan, homesickness heavy on her heart, had eyes for everything; and everything on which she looked was so strange and foreign: the car that came along the streets, moving so quickly and never a horse drawing it; the shops where hair was taken off for a few pence and put on again for a few shillings; shops with watches and gold rings in the windows; shops where they sold nothing but books and papers; and the high clocks, facing four ways at once and looking all over the town and the country beyond.
The long streets, without end almost, the houses without number, the large mills at the water-side, where row after row of windows rose one above another, until it made the eye dim and the head dizzy to look up at them, the noise, the babble of voices, the hurrying of men, the women, their dresses, filled Norah with a weary longing for her own fireside so far away by the shores of the sea that washed round Donegal.
A bell tolled; Micky’s Jim turned round and looked at Norah, who immediately blessed herself and commenced to say the Angelus.“That’s not the bell above the chapel of Greenanore, that’s the town clock,” laughed one of the women.
“There’s no God in this town,” said Micky’s Jim.
“No God!” Norah exclaimed, stopping in the midst of her prayer and half inclined to believe what Micky’s Jim was saying.
“None at all,” said Micky’s Jim. “God’s choice about the company He keeps and never comes near Derry.”
The party went to the Donegal House, a cheap little restaurant near the quay. The place was crowded. In addition to the potato squad there were several harvestmen from various districts in Donegal, and these were going over to Scotland now, intending to earn a few pounds at the turnip-thinning and haymaking before the real harvest came on. Most of the harvesters were intoxicated and raised a terrible hubbub in the restaurant while taking their food.
Micky’s Jim, who was very drunk, sat on one chair in the dingy dining-room, placed his feet on another chair, and with his back pressed against the limewashed wall sank into a deep slumber. The rest of the party sat round a rude table, much hacked with knives, and had tea, bread, and rancid butter for their meal. A slatternly servant, a native of Donegal, served all customers; the mistress of the house, a tall, thin woman, with a long nose sharp as a knife and eyes cruel enough to match the nose, cooked the food. The tea was made in a large pot, continually on the boil. When a bowl of tea (there were no cups) was lifted out a similar amount of water was put in to replace it and a three fingerful of tea was added. The man of the house, a stout little fellow with a red nose, took up his position behind the bar and sold whisky with lightning rapidity. Now and again he gave a glass of whisky free of cost to some of the harvesters who weren’t drinking very heavily. Those who got freedrinks usually bought several glasses of liquor afterwards and became the most drunken men in the house.
After a long sleep Micky’s Jim awoke and called for a bowl of tea. Followed all the way by the shrill voice of her mistress, who was always scolding somebody, the servant girl carried the tea to Jim, and the youth drank a mouthful of it while rubbing one hand vigorously across his eyes in order to drive the sleep away from them.
“This tay is as long drawn as the face of yer mistress,” grumbled Jim, and the servant giggled. “I’m forgettin’ all about Dermod Flynn too,” Jim continued, turning to Norah Ryan, who sat on the chair next him. “I must go out and look for him. He was to meet me at the quay, and I’m sure that he’ll be on the wait for me there now.”
“Poor Dermod!” said Norah in answer to Jim. “Maybe he’ll get lost out on the lone streets, seein’ that he is all be himself.”
“Him to get lost!” exclaimed Jim. “Catch Dermod Flynn doin’ anything as foolish as that! He’s the cute rogue is Dermod!”
The tables and chairs in the eating-room were now cleared away and someone suggested getting up a dance. The harvestmen ceased swearing and began thumping their hobnailed boots on the floor; Willie the Duck played on a fiddle, which he had procured years before for a few shillings in a Glasgow rag-market, and in the space of a minute all the women, including old Maire a Glan, who looked sixty if a day, ranged on the floor preparatory to dancing a six-hand reel. On seeing this, the red-nosed landlord jumped over the counter and commenced to swear at the musician.
“The curse of Moses be on ye!” he roared. “There’ll be no dancin’ here. Thumpin’ on the floor, ye gallivantin’ fools! If ye want dancin’ go out to the quay anddance. Dance into the Foyle or into hell if ye like, but don’t dance here! Come now, stop it at once!”
“It’s such a roarin’ tune,” said Maire a Glan, interrupting him.
“It is that,” answered the man, “but it needs a lighter foot than yours to do it justice, decent woman. There was a time when me meself could caper to that; aye, indeed.... But what am I talkin’ about? There’ll be no dancin’ here.”
“Just one wee short one?” said a girl. Willie the Duck played with redoubled enthusiasm.
“No, nor half a one,” said the proprietor, tapping absently on the floor with his foot. “God’s curse on ye all! D’ye want to bring down the house over me head?... ‘The Movin’ Bogs of Allen’ that’s playin’, isn’t it? A good tune it, surely. But stop it! stop it!” roared the red-nosed man, cutting a caper, half a step and half a kick in front of the fiddler. “I don’t want your damned dancin’, I can’t stand it. God have mercy on me! Sure I’m wantin’ to foot it meself!”