Collected Stories (10 page)

But Johnny in some ways was very dense, and he guessed nothing till the night she called him and, going to the foot of the stairs with a candle in his hand, he saw her on the landing in her flour-bag shift, one hand clutching the jamb of the door while the other clawed wildly at her few straggly hairs.

“Johnny!” she screeched down at him, beside herself with excitement. “He was here.”

“Who was there?” he snarled back, still cross with sleep.

“Michael Driscoll, Pat's father.”

“Ah, you were dreaming, woman,” he said in disgust. “Go back to your bed in God's holy name.”

“I was not dreaming,” she cried. “I was lying broad awake, saying my beads, when he come in the door, beckoning me. Go down to Dan Regan's for me, Johnny.”

“I will not, indeed, go down to Dan Regan's for you. Do you know what hour of night it is?”

“'Tis morning.”

“'Tis. Four o'clock! What a thing I'd do!… Is it the way you're feeling bad?” he added with more consideration as he mounted the stairs. “Do you want him to take you to hospital?”

“Oye, I'm going to no hospital,” she replied sullenly, turning her back on him and thumping into the room again. She opened an old chest of drawers and began fumbling in it for her best clothes, her bonnet and cloak.

“Then what the blazes do you want Dan Regan for?” he snarled in exasperation.

“What matter to you what I want him for?” she retorted with senile suspicion. “I have a journey to go, never you mind where.”

“Ach, you old oinseach, your mind is wandering,” he cried. “There's a divil of a wind blowing up the river. The whole house is shaking. That's what you heard. Make your mind easy now and go back to bed.”

“My mind is not wandering,” she shouted. “Thanks be to the Almighty God I have my senses as good as you. My plans are made. I'm going back now where I came from. Back to Ummera.”

“Back to where?” Johnny asked in stupefaction.

“Back to Ummera.”

“You're madder than I thought. And do you think or imagine Dan Regan will drive you?”

“He will drive me then,” she said, shrugging herself as she held an old petticoat to the light. “He's booked for it any hour of the day or night.”

“Then Dan Regan is madder still.”

“Leave me alone now,” she muttered stubbornly, blinking and shrugging. “I'm going back to Ummera and that was why my old comrade came for me. All night and every night I have my beads wore out, praying the Almighty God and His Blessed Mother not to leave me die among strangers. And now I'll leave my old bones on a high hilltop in Ummera.”

Johnny was easily persuaded. It promised to be a fine day's outing and a story that would delight a pub, so he made tea for her and after that went down to Dan Regan's little cottage, and before smoke showed from any chimney on the road they were away. Johnny was hopping about the car in his excitement, leaning out, shouting through the window of the car to Dan and identifying big estates that he hadn't seen for years. When they were well outside the town, himself and Dan went in for a drink, and while they were inside the old woman dozed. Dan Regan roused her to ask if she wouldn't take a drop of something and at first she didn't know who he was and then she asked where they were and peered out at the public-house and the old dog sprawled asleep in the sunlight before the door. But when next they halted she had fallen asleep again, her mouth hanging open and her breath coming in noisy gusts. Dan's face grew gloomier. He looked hard at her and spat. Then he took a few turns about the road, lit his pipe and put on the lid.

“I don't like her looks at all, Johnny,” he said gravely. “I done wrong. I see that now. I done wrong.”

After that, he halted every couple of miles to see how she was and Johnny, threatened with the loss of his treat, shook her and shouted at her. Each time Dan's face grew graver. He walked gloomily about the road, clearing his nose and spitting in the ditch. “God direct me!” he said solemnly. “'Twon't be wishing to me. Her son is a powerful man. He'll break me yet. A man should never interfere between families. Blood is thicker than water. The Regans were always unlucky.”

When they reached the first town he drove straight to the police barrack and told them the story in his own peculiar way.

“Ye can tell the judge I gave ye every assistance,” he said in a reasonable brokenhearted tone. “I was always a friend of the law. I'll keep nothing back—a pound was the price agreed. I suppose if she dies 'twill be manslaughter. I never had hand, act or part in politics. Sergeant Daly at the Cross knows me well.”

When Abby came to herself she was in a bed in the hospital. She began to fumble for her belongings and her shrieks brought a crowd of unfortunate old women about her.

“Whisht, whisht, whisht!” they said. “They're all in safe-keeping. You'll get them back.”

“I want them now,” she shouted, struggling to get out of bed while they held her down. “Leave me go, ye robbers of hell! Ye night-walking rogues, leave me go. Oh, murder, murder! Ye're killing me.”

At last an old Irish-speaking priest came and comforted her. He left her quietly saying her beads, secure in the promise to see that she was buried in Ummera no matter what anyone said. As darkness fell, the beads dropped from her swollen hands and she began to mutter to herself in Irish. Sitting about the fire, the ragged old women whispered and groaned in sympathy. The Angelus rang out from a nearby church. Suddenly Abby's voice rose to a shout and she tried to lift herself on her elbow.

“Ah, Michael Driscoll, my friend, my kind comrade, you didn't forget me after all the long years. I'm a long time away from you but I'm coming at last. They tried to keep me away, to make me stop among foreigners in the town, but where would I be at all without you and all the old friends? Stay for me, my treasure! Stop and show me the way.… Neighbors,” she shouted, pointing into the shadows, “that man there is my own husband, Michael Driscoll. Let ye see he won't leave me to find my way alone. Gather round me with yeer lanterns, neighbors, till I see who I have. I know ye all. 'Tis only the sight that's weak on me. Be easy now, my brightness, my own kind loving comrade. I'm coming. After all the long years I'm on the road to you at last.…”

It was a spring day full of wandering sunlight when they brought her the long road to Ummera, the way she had come from it forty years before. The lake was like a dazzle of midges; the shafts of the sun revolving like a great millwheel poured their cascades of milky sunlight over the hills and the little whitewashed cottages and the little black mountain cattle among the scarecrow fields. The hearse stopped at the foot of the lane that led to the roofless cabin just as she had pictured it to herself in the long nights, and Pat, looking more melancholy than ever, turned to the waiting neighbors and said:

“Neighbors, this is Abby, Batty Heige's daughter, that kept her promise to ye at the end of all.”

The Cheapjack

E
VERYONE
was sorry after Sam Higgins, the headmaster. Sam was a right good skin, one of the decentest men in Ireland, but too honest.

He was a small fat man with a round, rosy, good-natured face, a high bald brow, and specs. He wore a bowler hat and a stiff collar the hottest day God sent, because no matter how sociable he might be, he never entirely forgot his dignity. He lived with his sister, Delia, in a house by the station and suffered a good deal from nerves and dyspepsia. The doctors tried to make out that they were one and the same thing but they weren't; they worked on entirely different circuits. When it was the nerves were bad Sam went on a skite. The skite, of course, was good for the nerves but bad for the dyspepsia, and for months afterwards he'd be on a diet and doing walks in the country. The walks, on the other hand, were good for the dyspepsia but played hell with the nerves, so Sam had to try and take the harm out of them by dropping into Johnny Desmond's on the way home for a pint. Johnny had a sort of respect for him as an educated man, which Johnny wasn't, and a sort of contempt for him as a man who, for all his education, couldn't keep his mind to himself—an art Johnny was past master of.

One day they happened to be discussing the Delea case, which Johnny, a cautious, religious man, affected to find peculiar. There was nothing peculiar about it. Father Ring had landed another big fish; that was all. Old Jeremiah Delea had died and left everything to the Church, nothing to his wife and family. There was to be law about that, according to what Johnny had heard—ah, a sad business, a peculiar business! But Sam, who hated Father Ring with a hate you might describe as truly religious, rejoiced.

“Fifteen thousand, I hear,” he said with an ingenuous smile.

“So I believe,” said Johnny with a scowl. “A man that couldn't write his own name for you! Now what do you say to the education?”

“Oh, what I always said,” replied Sam with his usual straightforwardness. “'Tis nothing only a hindrance.”

“Ah, I wouldn't go so far as that,” said Johnny, who, though he tended to share this view, was too decent to criticize any man's job to his face, and anyway had a secret admiration for the polish which a good education can give. “If he might have held onto the wireless shares he'd be good for another five thousand. I suppose that's where the education comes in.”

Having put in a good word for culture, Johnny now felt it was up to him to say something in the interests of religion. There was talk about Father Ring and Johnny didn't like it. He didn't think it was lucky. Years of observation of anticlericals in his pub had convinced Johnny that none of them ever got anywhere.

“Of course, old Jerry was always a very good-living man,” he added doubtfully.

“He was,” Sam said dryly. “Very fond of the Children of Mary.”

“That so?” said Johnny, as if he didn't know what a Child of Mary would be.

“Young and old,” Sam said enthusiastically. “They were the poor man's great hobbies.”

That was Sam all out; too outspoken, too independent! No one like that ever got anywhere. Johnny went to the shop door and looked after him as he slouched up Main Street with his sailor's roll and his bowler hat and wondered to himself that an educated man wouldn't have more sense.

D
ELIA
and Mrs. MacCann, the new teacher in the girl's school, were sitting on deck chairs in the garden when Sam got back. It did more than the pint to rouse his spirits after that lonesome rural promenade. Mrs. MacCann was small, gay and go-as-you-please. Sam thought her the pleasantest woman he had ever met and would have told her as much only that she was barely out of mourning for her first husband. He felt it was no time to approach any woman with proposals of marriage, which showed how little Sam knew of women.

“How're ye, Nancy?” he cried heartily, holding out a fat paw.

“Grand, Sam,” she replied, sparkling with pleasure. “How's the body?”

“So-so,” said Sam. He took off his coat and squatted to give the lawnmower a drop of oil. “As pleasant a bit of news as I heard this long time I'm after hearing today.”

“What's that, Sam?” Delia asked in her high-pitched, fluting voice.

“Chrissie Delea that's going to law with Ring over the legacy.”

“Ah, you're not serious, Sam?” cried Nancy.

“Oh, begod I am,” growled Sam. “She has Canty the solicitor in Asragh on to it. Now Ring will be having Sister Mary Milkmaid and the rest of them making novenas to soften Chrissie's hard heart. By God I tell you 'twill take more than novenas to do that.”

“But will she get it, Sam?” asked Nancy.

“Why wouldn't she get it?”

“Anyone that got money out of a priest ought to have a statue put up to her.”

“She'll get it all right,” Sam said confidently. “After all the other scandals the bishop will never let it go to court. Sure, old Jerry was off his rocker years before he made that will. I'd give evidence myself that I saw him stopping little girls on their way from school to try and look up their clothes.”

“Oh, God, Sam, the waste of it!” said Nancy with a chuckle. “Anyway, we'll have rare gas with a lawcase and a new teacher.”

“A new what?” asked Sam, stopping dead in his mowing.

“Why? Didn't Ormond tell you he got the shift?” she asked in surprise.

“No, Nancy, he did not,” Sam said gravely.

“But surely, Ormond would never keep a thing like that from you?”

“He wouldn't,” said Sam, “and I'll swear he knows nothing about it. Where did you hear it?”

“Plain Jane told me.” (She meant Miss Daly, the head.)

“And she got it from Ring, I suppose,” Sam said broodingly. “And Ring was in Dublin for the last couple of days. Now we know what he was up for. You didn't hear who was coming in Ormond's place?”

“I didn't pay attention, Sam,” Nancy said with a frown. “But she said he was from Kerry. Isn't that where Father Ring comes from?”

“Oh, a cousin of Ring's for a fortune!” Sam said dolefully, wiping his sweaty brow. He felt suddenly very depressed and very tired. Even the thought of Chrissie Delea's lawcase couldn't cheer him. He felt the threat of Ring now shadowing himself. A bad manager is difficult enough. A bad manager with a spy in the school can destroy a teacher.

He was right about the relationship with Ring. The new teacher arrived in a broken-down two-seater which he seemed to think rather highly of. His name was Carmody. He was tall and thin with a high, bumpy forehead, prominent cheekbones, and a dirty complexion. He held himself stiffly, obviously proud of his figure. He wore a tight-fitting cheap city suit with stripes, and Sam counted two fountain pens and a battery of colored pencils in his breast pocket. He had a little red diary sticking from the top pocket of his waistcoat, and while Sam was talking he made notes—a businesslike young fellow. Then he pushed the pencil behind his ear, stuck his thumbs in the armholes of his vest, and giggled at Sam. Giggled was the only way Sam could describe it. It was almost as though he found Sam funny. Within five minutes he was giving him advice on the way they did things in Kerry. Sam, his hands in his trouser pockets and wearing his most innocent air, looked him up and down and his tone grew dryer.