I
When people go away from Clonmalroan, they go away, as a rule, very
thoroughly. Their absence is an absence more complete than that of
other persons from other places less out of the world and behind the
times. Once any traveller’s departing form has been beheld pass round
the turn in the deep-banked boreen, or watched dwindle into a speck on
the straight road streaking the wide bog-land, the chances are that
little news of him will reach his former neighbours, till some day
that same speck is espied growing into human shape again along that
same road, and acquaintances remark to each other in the course of
conversation: “And so big Pat Byrne”--to put case--“is afther comin’
home wid himself.”
For Clonmalroan is but meagrely provided with the means of
communication, and its inhabitants are mostly ill able to make use
even of those which it possesses. It is as yet untouched by the
wonderful thread of wire, which has put a running-string through
the web of human lives--puckered up in a moment from Hong Kong to
Cambridge--and the shining metals with their rush and roar, still
halting many miles short of it, are lamely prolonged by the wheel
tracks of the jiggeting side-car with a slenderly filled mail-bag on
the well. The letters it brings are commonly brief and obscure, the
difficult product of certainly no excessive ease in composition. They
convey little more than an intimation of continued existence led among
surroundings only mistily imagined by readers whose own journeying has
lain within the radius of a day’s tramp. Beyond that limit everything
is vague and dim, a mysterious region from whence the absentee seems
not so very much more likely to reappear than do those who have been
seen off with a wake and a keen. Not that such returns even as these
are by any means unheard of at Clonmalroan. Would the friends of
Michael Larissy, who duly waked and buried him three years ago, aver
that they have never set eyes on him since? Or ask anybody, almost,
in the parish, why he wouldn’t take half a crown to be crossing after
nightfall that bridge over the Rosbride River near Sallinbeg, where
a poor tinker-woman was swept away and drowned in a flood some few
autumns back. Then, everybody knows that several of the Denny family
have “walked.” Therefore the assertion: “It was himself or his ghost,”
is not regarded as containing a very unequally balanced hypothesis,
especially if “himself” has been supposed away sojourning in those
unknown and imperfectly reported lands.
But there came one autumn when far and far away from Clonmalroan began
to happen events which had such a heart-burning interest for many of
its people that some news of them did penetrate the densest barriers
of ignorant resourcelessness. Mere sparks, perhaps, as it were blown
from some huge conflagration, whose distant flames make only a sullen
glare behind a smothering smoke-fog. Yet a spark may blacken a body’s
home over her head, or sear the sight out of her eyes. A great war
was thundering and lightening across wide seas, under alien skies: a
war which in no way behoved Clonmalroan, and which might have stormed
itself out, little heeded there, had it not been for the circumstance
that Pat and Micky and their brethren are “terrible lads for goin’ an’
listin’,” and that the regiment they had for the most part joined was
understood to be “up at the forefront of everythin’.”
After a while, moreover, it was not those wild, irresponsible boys
alone that this lurid cloud engulfed in threatening glooms. The
reserves were called out, people said, at first without any clear
notion of what the phrase might signify, but soon perceiving too
plainly how it meant that men whose soldiering days were long past and
nearly forgotten, except just the little pension, must now break the
ties they had peaceably formed and once more set forth campaigning.
Murtagh O’Connor, of Naracor, had to leave a wife and five children on
his bit of a holding “in a quare distraction,” his friends reported,
“for when he was killed, what could happen them but the Union?” And
many another household on that countryside had to consider the same
woeful question.
So all round and about Clonmalroan there came to be an intense craving
for the latest war intelligence. Never had newspapers been in such
request. At Donnelly’s bar the _Freeman_ and the _Independent_ were
as badly tattered as strips of ill-preserved papyri by the end of an
evening’s reading. The Widdy Gallaher “would be walkin’ wild about
the country the len’th of the day,” folk said, “for the sight of a
one. Be raison,” they added, “of her two sons.” And another illiterate
and sceptical old Mrs Linders for similar reasons “was tormintin’
everybody to read her out every word there would be on the paper,
even if they tould her ’twas only the market prices.” The elders,
indeed, were often at a disadvantage in this way, owing to the inferior
educational arrangements under which their generation had risen. Big
Brian O’Flaherty, who had an independent and ambitious spirit, demeaned
himself to set about learning the alphabet from that little spalpeen,
Larry M‘Crilly, in hopes of subsequently reading his news “and no
thanks to anybody.” But Larry was impatient and sarcastic, and Big
Brian slow-witted and irascible, so the course of lessons one day
ended abruptly with “a clout on the head” to the taunting teacher.
With more modest aspirations old John Connellan got the schoolmaster
to print for him, “the way it would be on the paper,” the name of
Private Patrick Connellan; and he might be seen on many a cold day
sitting out on the rimy grass bank before his dark door, for the sake
of the light, and comparing with this scrap the unintelligible lines of
the _Independent_. It was very slow, puzzling work, since the columns
were many and lengthy, and his eyes none of the best. Old John seldom
could retain the loan of the wide sheets long enough to assure himself
completely that his grandson’s name was happily absent from them.
For no news was certainly the best that could be looked for from the
papers. What, indeed, was likely to happen a lad save one of those
casualties which were so briefly recorded. “Och, woman dear, they’re
sayin’ at Donnelly’s that there’s a terrible sight of officers kilt on
the _Freeman_ to-day, so there’ll prisently be a cruel big list of the
rank and file. God be good to us all, woman dear--and poor Micky and
the rest. I’m wonderin’ will they be apt to print it to-morra.”
Thus the winter, always at Clonmalroan a season when cares and losses
are rife, was beyond its wont harassed and haunted by fear and sorrow.
The calling away on active service of the Captain from the Big House
was one of its incidents that tended to deepen the general depression.
His stalwart form and sturdy stride and off-hand greeting were missed
going to and fro, and much commiseration was directed to “poor Lady
Winifred, and she not so long married, the crathur, left all alone by
herself up at the Big House.”