Short Fiction of Flann O'Brien (Irish Literature) (7 page)

“I suppose you use a lot of coal?” Mr. Hodge said.

“About half-a-ton per thirty miles,” said Mr. Duffy slowly, mentally checking the consumption of that morning. “I need scarcely say that frequent stopping and starting at suburban stations takes a lot out of me.”

“I’m sure it does,” said Mr. Hodge, with sympathy.

They talked like that for half an hour until the elderly Mr. Polter arrived and passed gravely into his back office. When that happened, conversation was at an end. Little was heard until lunch-time except the scratch of pens and the fitful clicking of the typewriter.

John Duffy’s brother always left the office at one thirty and went home to his lunch. Consequently he started getting steam up at twelve forty five so that there should be no delay at the hour of departure. When the “Railway Timekeeper” said that it was one thirty, he let out another shrill whistle and steamed slowly out of the office without a word or a look at his colleagues. He arrived home dead on time.

We now approach the really important part of the plot, the incident which gives the whole story its significance. In the middle of his lunch John Duffy’s brother felt something important, something queer, momentous, and magical taking place inside his brain, an immense tension relaxing, clean light flooding a place which had been dark. He dropped his knife and fork and sat there for a time wild-eyed, a filling of potatoes unattended in his mouth. Then he swallowed, rose weakly from the table and walked to the window, wiping away the perspiration which had started out on his brow.

He gazed out into the day, no longer a train, but a badly frightened man. Inch by inch he went back over his morning. So far as he could recall he had killed no one, shouted no bad language, broken no windows. He had only talked to Cranberry and Hodge. Down in the roadway there was no dark van arriving with uniformed men infesting it. He sat down again desolately beside the unfinished meal.

John Duffy’s brother was a man of some courage. When he got back to the office he had some whiskey in his stomach and it was later in the evening than it should be. Hodge and Cranberry seemed preoccupied with their letters. He hung up his hat casually and said:

“I’m afraid the train is a bit late getting back.”

From below his downcast brows he looked very sharply at Cranberry’s face. He thought he saw the shadow of a smile flit absently on the old man’s placid features as they continued poring down on a paper. The smile seemed to mean that a morning’s joke was not good enough for the same evening. Hodge rose suddenly in his corner and passed silently into Mr. Polter’s office with his letters. John Duffy’s brother sighed and sat down wearily at his desk.

When he left the office that night, his heart was lighter and he thought he had a good excuse for buying more liquor. Nobody knew his secret but himself and nobody else would ever know.

It was a complete cure. Never once did the strange malady return. But to this day John Duffy’s brother starts at the rumble of a train in the Liffey tunnel and stands rooted to the road when he comes suddenly on a level-crossing—silent, so to speak, upon a peak in Darien.

When I Met William of Orange (1942)

Footnote to the Battle of the Boyne
by Flann O’Brien

“When I Would Wish to Have Lived, and Why”
No
. 17
of a Series
.

When the Editor asked me to write about the period in Irish history in which I would prefer to have lived, I had many doubts and misgivings. There seemed to be an endless selection of periods from which to choose, each of them offering a better prospect than the dreary and dangerous present. I went to bed with the problem and had a curious dream which I reproduce below. It seems that had I lived in the days of King William and King James, I might at least have made myself useful
.

—Flann O’Brien
¹

“It was a bad business all right,” said William, edging over to me. “By the way, has he got the pipes on again?”

“He has,” I muttered.

“Well now, wouldn’t you think it’s warm enough without the pipes? He’s a terrible man, there’s no doubt about it. Tell me now,” he added confidentially, “how did you get into it at all? Were you walked into it?”

“Not at all. I blame nobody but myself.”

William coughed and tried to wave the swirling black smoke away from his red eyes.

“Those pipes,” he said, “are very bad for anybody with a weak chest. They dry up the air, you know. Where were we? Oh, yes, the Battle of the Boyne. Tell me about it. How did
you
get mixed up in it? You don’t look like a fighting man, if you’ll pardon the remark.”

“Indeed?”

“Of course, an Irish cripple could best ten able-bodied foreigners—I know that,” he said hastily, “or at least so they say in America. But what happened to you?”

“Nothing,” I said sulkily. “I just couldn’t mind my own business.”

“Tell me about it. I like you, you know. I’m sure you have a background.”

“I used to live beside the Boyne . . .” I began.

“A nice river,” he remarked, “and nice country. As nice a piece of landscape as was ever seen in Holland.”

“I used to live beside the Boyne, half naked in a wooden hut. We were real Irish and very poor, you know. The only thing we had was our religion. We were very strict R.Cs. We were more Roman than the Romans themselves.”

“On the lines of
Hiberniores
—”

“We spoke Irish at the time, but my father was a native speaker of English, and at a time, if I may say so, when it was neither popular nor profitable.
Caith uait an Ghaedhilg
, I remember him saying,
tá na bodaigh gallda ag teacht agus ní bheidh aon mheas aca uirthi
.’”
²

“It’s a great thing now in the schools—the Irish,” William remarked.

“One day I was out fishing for the dinner. I don’t know whether you ever tasted a Boyne salmon. . . .”

William made a clicking sound, ran his flat palm in a circle round his stomach and put a look of rapture on his blackened face.

“I remember once in England I lost as nice a piece of tackle as you ever—”

“I kept changing the bait. After a while I began to feel that there was something in the air. Occasionally I heard the gallop of big companies of horsemen in the distance. Now and again I would hear men calling and a noise like the rumble of heavy carts on stony ground. It was all far away but there seemed to be a lot of people moving about the place. I couldn’t understand it. It wasn’t a fair day or anything.”

“I wasn’t very far away from you just then,” William said, smiling.

“Then a couple of guns went off—accidentally, I suppose. The bang gave me a terrible start. I nearly lept into the water. And whether the fish got a fright, too, I don’t know, but a big fellow suddenly swallied hook, sinker, and all. It took me ten minutes to get him out. He weighed twelve pounds and he was that length—look.”

I held out my charred hands.

“Now, now,” said William chidingly.

“On my solemn oath.”

“All right,” said William. “No offence. Go on.”

“With my fish caught and queer noises in the air, I needn’t tell you that I thought that the right place to be was home. And home I went.”

“Fair enough,” said William.

“When I reached the hut I nearly fell out of my standing with surprise. Here at the door by your leave were two foreign-looking blackguards of soldiers with fancy uniforms talking to my poor old mother—or trying to. They hadn’t a word of Irish between the pair of them.”

“I see.”

“What do you think they wanted?”

“Roughly speaking, I could think of about two hundred things that those boys were fond of.”

“Buttermilk!”

“
Buttermilk
?”

“Buttermilk.”

William smiled knowingly and shook his head.

“I’ll tell you something,” he said. “My guess is that they had had a big night the night before. They were a pair of Dutch Blue Guards, if I’m not mistaken. Terrible men, drunk night and morning.”

“They looked pretty bad all right. I got talking to them. They said there was going to be a big war. They mentioned a lot of foreign names I could not take in properly. Then they started shaking hands and looking very friendly. Do you know why?”

“Search me,” William said.

“They saw something in the house that told them we were Catholics.
Be damned but they were Catholics too!
They were. We got very pally, as thick as thieves. They told me about grand big cathedrals across the sea and we drank the Pope’s health in buttermilk. I couldn’t take my eyes off their uniforms. You never seen the like—gold braid and buckles and whistles on fancy cords and muskets with ornamental work on the breech.

“I asked one would I get a uniform, whistle and all, if I joined up. He said certainly. Your other man then piped up about what he called ‘pickings.’ You got the pickings in the pockets of dead soldiers. He said the soldiers that died were always on the other side.

“‘Listen here, Bonaparte,’ says I to myself—by the way, I haven’t seen that fellow knocking around here for a while; maybe your man gave him the oven for some breach of discipline—‘listen here, Bonaparte,’ says I to myself, ‘you’re wasting your time in this hole. Join the army and see the world.’
Why the hell didn’t I mind my own business instead of meddling with foreigners and politics?
Tell me that?”

I turned to William with some heat. He only made a helpless gesture and rolled his red eyes.

“Well, you know the rest. I got not only my fine uniform but the father and the mother of a cannonball in the small of the b——back. I went into action on the Friday. They tell me I looked a fierce sight when I was found on the Saturday. No head.”

William frowned sympathetically, making a tch tch noise.

“And no back or front to speak of either.”

“James was a divil,” William said. “That lad Sarsfield was handy with guns, too. Oh, a bad business.”

“But what makes me laugh is that those priceless Dutch Blue Guards were in the thick of the fight from the first minute and me thinking they were only there for showing off the uniforms. It was the Catholic Blue Guards that won the Battle of the Boyne and not the Protestants.”

William sighed sadly and looked pensive.

“You are quite right. I am the greatest dead authority on the Battle of the Boyne, and I know that next to my own leadership the Dutch Guards was what put the Irish on their backs. Of course James did the dirty on them, but I don’t think any other king could have stood up to the boys in blue. Do you smell something burning?”

“It’s ourselves. And it was only when I was dead that I got the queer land. I had to fill up a form saying which side I was fighting with. When I said proudly the Roman Catholic Blue Guards there was a big laugh. I was told I’d be put with my pals and here I am.”

“I remember the lads well,” William said reminiscently.

“If I had my time again,” I said, “I’d ask for nothing better than to live the time I did live. I’d get the Dutch Guards to fight for James and then things wouldn’t be the way they are in Belfast to-day. I’d explain to them that James was fighting for liberty of conscience, the rights of small nations, truth, honour—”

“
Who’s using bad language here
?” a horrible voice said behind us. It was The Man of the House himself. He had a smoky lantern swinging from one of his horns, casting a red glow on what he called his face. He always spoke in italics. I muttered some excuse.

“
Never let me hear filthy words like those again
,” he barked, “
or you’ll get the oven
.” Then he moved away, leaving a very heavy important silence behind him.

“Yes, that’s what I’d do,” I said after a while. “If I lived again in those days I’d get the man who won the Battle of the Boyne over on the side of the Irish.”

“I think you’re right, lad,” William said. “I wonder did I ever show you this? It’s a little thing I wrote recently myself. Can you think of any way of getting it down to the
Skibbereen Eagle
?”

He took a charred piece of paper out of his gutted suit and handed it to me modestly. It was a little poem.

“Bed to work and work to bed,

That’s what makes my eye-lids red,

I’d rather live in Herbert Park

And count my banknotes after dark,

Or live in Stormont at a pinch

Refusing all who want an inch.”

We both laughed sulphureously.

“
Maith a’ fear
,” I said.
³

Then we parted, probably for another hundred years, for the crowd is big here and the congestion is increasing year by year.

¹
Editors’ Note: This is the headnote to the original story printed in the
Irish Digest
(April 1942), p. 20.

²
“Cast the Gaelic away from you . . . those foreign clowns are coming, and they’ll have no respect for it.” [Trans. Jack Fennell.]

³
Trans. “Good man.”

I’m Telling You No Lie! (1943)

Some leaves from the author’s salad days
by Lir O’Connor

A Character I Could Never Forget
.
No
. 30
of a Series
.

Looking back across the years of a lifetime as colourful as it has been exciting, I think I shall experience little difficulty in the selection of a suitable subject for this feature. For, I ask you, what more memorable, more breath-taking character could I possibly find to write about than my own inimitable self? True, in a volume of this size I can only hope to give the merest outline of a personality so vital that it might well have been the invention of some master of the romantic novel; but then this will be more than compensated for by the fact that my publishers will not be faced with the costs of the customary libel action which nowadays normally follows on every reference in print to any name, proper or otherwise, that is not, strictly speaking, one’s own
.

—Lir O’Connor
¹