Collected Stories (17 page)

“Indeed I will not,” she cried, starting back with a laugh.

“Very shy you're getting,” said Sean with a good-natured grin.

“'Tisn't that at all but she'd sooner the young man,” said Delia.

“What's strange is wonderful,” said Nora.

Biting her lip with her tiny front teeth, Cait looked angrily at her sisters and Sean, and then began to laugh. She glanced at Ned and smilingly held out her shawl in invitation, though at the same moment angry blushes chased one another across her forehead like squalls across the surface of a lake. The rain was a mild, persistent drizzle and a strong wind was blowing. Everything had darkened and grown lonely and, with his head in the blinding folds of the shawl, which reeked of turf-smoke, Ned felt as if he had dropped out of Time's pocket.

They waited in Caheragh's kitchen. The bearded old man sat in one chimney corner and a little barelegged boy in the other. The dim blue light poured down the wide chimney on their heads in a shower with the delicacy of light on old china, picking out surfaces one rarely saw; and between them the fire burned a bright orange in the great whitewashed hearth with the black, swinging bars and pothook. Outside the rain fell softly, almost soundlessly, beyond the half-door. Delia, her black shawl trailing from her shoulders, leaned over it, acting the part of watcher as in a Greek play. Their father's fifteen minutes had strung themselves out to an hour and two little barefooted boys had already been sent to hunt him down.

“Where are they now, Delia?” one of the O'Donnells would ask.

“Crossing the fields from Patsy Kit's.”

“He wasn't there so.”

“He wouldn't be,” the old man said. “They'll likely go on to Ned Kit's now.”

“That's where they're making for,” said Delia. “Up the hill at the far side of the fort.”

“They'll find him there,” the old man said confidently.

Ned felt as though he were still blanketed by the folds of the turf-reeking shawl. Something seemed to have descended on him that filled him with passion and loneliness. He could scarcely take his eyes off Cait. She and Nora sat on the form against the back wall, a composition in black and white, the black shawl drawn tight under the chin, the cowl of it breaking the curve of her dark hair, her shadow on the gleaming wall behind. She did not speak except to answer some question of Tom's about her brother, but sometimes Ned caught her looking at him with naked eyes. Then she smiled swiftly and secretly and turned her eyes again to the door, sinking back into pensiveness. Pensiveness or vacancy? he wondered. While he gazed at her face with the animal instinctiveness of its overdelicate features it seemed like a mirror in which he saw again the falling rain, the rocks and hills and angry sea.

The first announced by Delia was Red Patrick. After him came the island woman. Each had last seen his father in a different place. Ned chuckled at a sudden vision of his father, eager and impassioned and aflame with drink, stumping with his broken bottom across endless fields through pouring rain with a growing procession behind him. Dempsey was the last to come. He doubted if Tomas would be in a condition to take the boat at all.

“What matter, aru?” said Delia across her shoulder. “We can find room for the young man.”

“And where would we put him?” gaped Nora.

“He can have Cait's bed,” Delia said innocently.

“Oye, and where would Cait sleep?” Nora asked and then skitted and covered her face with her shawl. Delia scoffed. The men laughed and Cait, biting her lip furiously, looked at the floor. Again Ned caught her eyes on him and again she laughed and turned away.

Tomas burst in unexpected on them all like a sea wind that scattered them before him. He wrung Tom's hand and asked him how he was. He did the same to Ned. Ned replied gravely that he was very well.

“In God's holy name,” cried his father, waving his arms like a windmill, “what are ye all waiting for?”

The tide had fallen. Tomas grabbed an oar and pushed the boat on to a rock. Then he raised the sail and collapsed under it and had to be extricated from its drenching folds, glauming and swearing at Cassidy's old boat. A little group stood on a naked rock against a gray background of drifting rain. For a long time Ned continued to wave back to the black shawl that was lifted to him. An extraordinary feeling of exultation and loss enveloped him. Huddled up in his overcoat he sat with Dempsey in the stern, not speaking.

“It was a grand day,” his father declared, swinging himself to and fro, tugging at his Viking mustache, dragging the peak of his cap farther over his ear. His gestures betrayed a certain lack of rhythmical cohesion; they began and ended abruptly. “Dempsey, my darling, wasn't it a grand day?”

“'Twas a grand day for you,” shrieked Dempsey as if his throat would burst.

“'Twas, my treasure, 'twas a beautiful day. I got an honorable reception and my sons got an honorable reception.”

By this time he was flat on his belly, one leg completely over the edge of the boat. He reached back a clammy hand to his sons.

“'Twas the best day I ever had,” he said. “I got porter and I got whiskey and I got poteen. I did so, Tom, my calf. Ned, my brightness, I went to seven houses and in every house I got seven drinks and with every drink I got seven welcomes. And your mother's people are a hand of trumps. It was no slight they put on me at all even if I was nothing but a landless man. No slight, Tom. No slight at all.”

Darkness had fallen, the rain had cleared, the stars came out of a pitch-black sky under which the little tossing, nosing boat seemed lost beyond measure. In all the waste of water nothing could be heard but the splash of the boat's sides and their father's voice raised in tipsy song.

“The evening was fair and the sunlight was yellow,

I halted, beholding a maiden bright

Coming to me by the edge of the mountain,

Her cheeks had a berry-bright rosy light.”

N
ED
was the first to wake. He struck a match and lit the candle. It was time for them to be stirring. It was just after dawn, and at half past nine he must be in his old place in the schoolroom before the rows of pinched little city faces. He lit a cigarette and closed his eyes. The lurch of the boat was still in his blood, the face of Cait Deignan in his mind, and as if from far away he heard a line of the wild love-song his father had been singing: “And we'll drive the geese at the fall of night.”

He heard his brother mumble something and nudged him. Tom looked big and fat and vulnerable with his fair head rolled sideways and his heavy mouth dribbling on to the sleeve of his pajamas. Ned slipped quietly out of bed, put on his trousers, and went to the window. He drew the curtains and let in the thin cold daylight. The bay was just visible and perfectly still. Tom began to mumble again in a frightened voice and Ned shook him. He started out of his sleep with a cry of fear, grabbing at the bedclothes. He looked first at Ned, then at the candle and drowsily rubbed his eyes.

“Did you hear it too?” he asked.

“Did I hear what?” asked Ned with a smile.

“In the room,” said Tom.

“There was nothing in the room,” replied Ned. “You were ramaishing so I woke you up.”

“Was I? What was I saying?”

“You were telling no secrets,” said Ned with a quiet laugh.

“Hell!” Tom said in disgust and stretched out his arm for a cigarette. He lit it at the candle flame, his drowsy red face puckered and distraught. “I slept rotten.”

“Oye!” Ned said quietly, raising his eyebrows. It wasn't often Tom spoke in that tone. He sat on the edge of the bed, joined his hands and leaned forward, looking at Tom with wide gentle eyes.

“Is there anything wrong?” he asked.

“Plenty.”

“You're not in trouble?” Ned asked without raising his voice.

“Not that sort of trouble. The trouble is in myself.”

Ned gave him a look of intense sympathy and understanding. The soft emotional brown eyes were searching him for a judgment. Ned had never felt less like judging him.

“Ay,” he said gently and vaguely, his eyes wandering to the other side of the room while his voice took on its accustomed stammer, “the trouble is always in ourselves. If we were contented in ourselves the other things wouldn't matter. I suppose we must only leave it to time. Time settles everything.”

“Time will settle nothing for me,” Tom said despairingly. “You have something to look forward to. I have nothing. It's the loneliness of my job that kills you. Even to talk about it would be a relief but there's no one you can talk to. People come to you with their troubles but there's no one you can go to with your own.”

Again the challenging glare in the brown eyes and Ned realized with infinite compassion that for years Tom had been living in the same state of suspicion and fear, a man being hunted down by his own nature; and that for years to come he would continue to live in this way, and perhaps never be caught again as he was now.

“A pity you came down here,” stammered Ned flatly. “A pity we went to Carriganassa. 'Twould be better for both of us if we went somewhere else.”

“Why don't you marry her, Ned?” Tom asked earnestly.

“Who?” asked Ned.

“Cait.”

“Yesterday,” said Ned with the shy smile he wore when he confessed something, “I nearly wished I could.”

“But you can, man,” Tom said eagerly, sitting upon his elbow. Like all men with frustration in their hearts he was full of schemes for others. “You could marry her and get a school down here. That's what I'd do if I was in your place.”

“No,” Ned said gravely. “We made our choice a long time ago. We can't go back on it now.”

Then with his hands in his trouser pockets and his head bowed he went out to the kitchen. His mother, the colored shawl about her head, was blowing the fire. The bedroom door was open and he could see his father in shirtsleeves kneeling beside the bed, his face raised reverently towards a holy picture, his braces hanging down behind. He unbolted the half-door, went through the garden and out on to the road. There was a magical light on everything. A boy on a horse rose suddenly against the sky, a startling picture. Through the apple-green light over Carriganassa ran long streaks of crimson, so still they might have been enamelled. Magic, magic, magic! He saw it as in a children's picture-book with all its colors intolerably bright; something he had outgrown and could never return to, while the world he aspired to was as remote and intangible as it had seemed even in the despair of youth.

It seemed as if only now for the first time was he leaving home; for the first time and forever saying good-bye to it all.

The Mad Lomasneys

N
ED
L
OWRY
and Rita Lomasney had, one might say, been lovers from childhood. The first time they had met was when he was fourteen and she a year or two younger. It was on the North Mall on a Saturday afternoon, and she was sitting on a bench under the trees; a tall, bony string of a girl with a long, obstinate jaw. Ned was a studious young fellow in a blue and white college cap, thin, pale, and spectacled. As he passed he looked at her owlishly and she gave him back an impudent stare. This upset him—he had no experience of girls—so he blushed and raised his cap. At that she seemed to relent.

“Hello,” she said experimentally.

“Good afternoon,” he replied with a pale smile.

“Where are you off to?” she asked.

“Oh, just up the dike for a walk.”

“Sit down,” she said in a sharp voice, laying her hand on the bench beside her, and he did as he was told. It was a lovely summer evening, and the white quay walls and tall, crazy, claret-colored tenements under a blue and white sky were reflected in the lazy water, which wrinkled only at the edges and seemed like a painted carpet.

“It's very pleasant here,” he said complacently

“Is it?” she asked with a truculence that startled him. “I don't see anything very pleasant about it.”

“Oh, it's very nice and quiet,” he said in mild surprise as he raised his fair eyebrows and looked up and down the Mall at the old Georgian houses and the nursemaids sitting under the trees. “My name is Lowry,” he added politely.

“Oh, are ye the ones that have the jeweler's shop on the Parade?” she asked.

“That's right,” replied Ned with modest pride.

“We have a clock we got from ye,” she said. “'Tisn't much good of an old clock either,” she added with quiet malice.

“You should bring it back to the shop,” he said in considerable concern. “It probably needs overhauling.”

“I'm going down the river in a boat with a couple of chaps,” she said, going off at a tangent. “Will you come?”

“Couldn't,” he said with a smile.

“Why not?”

“I'm only left go up the dike for a walk,” he said complacently. “On Saturdays I go to Confession at St. Peter and Paul's, then I go up the dike and back the Western Road. Sometimes you see very good cricket matches. Do you like cricket?”

“A lot of old sissies pucking a ball!” she said shortly. “I do not.”

“I like it,” he said firmly. “I go up there every Saturday. Of course, I'm not supposed to talk to anyone,” he added with mild amusement at his own audacity.

“Why not?”

“My mother doesn't want me to.”

“Why doesn't she?”

“She comes of an awfully good family,” he answered mildly, and but for his gentle smile she might have thought he was deliberately insulting her. “You see,” he went on gravely in his thin, pleasant voice, ticking things off on his fingers and then glancing at each finger individually as he ticked it off—a tidy sort of boy—“there are three main branches of the Hourigan family: the Neddy Neds, the Neddy Jerrys, and the Neddy Thomases. The Neddy Neds are the Hayfield Hourigans. They are the oldest branch. My mother is a Hayfield Hourigan, and she'd have been a rich woman only for her father backing a bill for a Neddy Jerry. He defaulted and ran away to Australia,” he concluded with a contemptuous sniff.