“So them half-dozen big giants,” said Felix the Thatcher, “did be
drinkin’ off their cups of tay, as plisant as anythin’, sittin’ over
yonder fornint us, every one of them cocked up on his own bit of
a hill.” Felix pointed across the small round valley to a concave
hill-line, which does show six more or less distinct summits. “And if
they did, some fine evenin’ a one of them took and slung the grounds at
the bottom of his cup slap down there into the middle of the grassland,
and you may see them lyin’ on it to this day.” The end of Felix’s
reaping-hook dropped till it quivered at a black patch that occupied a
large space in the middle of the level green floor below, and spread
with splash-like streaks towards the slopes surrounding. Amongst them
a few white dots were scattered, gleaming clearly, and to these Felix
referred as he continued, in an unmistakable tone of self-quotation:
“Bedad now, I’m thinkin’ he must ha’ chucked out two or three grains of
lump-sugar along wid them. I wonder they’re not melted agin now--unless
it’s breadcrumbs they were.”
“You might wonder anybody wasn’t tired tryin’ to get a livin’ on a
wet bog, and there’d be some sinse in it, begor,” Dinny Colman, who
rented one of the white cabins, interpolated, rather resentfully
matter-of-fact; but Felix finished his conceit perseveringly. “Bad luck
to the big bosthoon. Why couldn’t he have the wit to sling th’ ould tay
leaves over his shoulder into the lough, or into the say beyant, where
they’d make no differ, instead of to be destroyin’ the bit of good land
on us? He’d little to do, let me tell him.”
Felix the Thatcher was also, though not by trade, a _shanachie_, or
story-teller of some renown in his district, and he had now produced
the favourite local legend of the giants’ tea-party, ostensibly for
the information of Larry Dowdall, a new-comer, but principally for the
entertainment of four gossoons, who listened with unjaded interest.
They, with their three elders, were sitting on a furzy bank at the
foot of a very steep oat-field, which the men had been reaping all
the forenoon, while the boys did such odd jobs as their size and wits
permitted. Now, just as Felix had finished accounting for the existence
of the black bog, another object that seemed to demand explanation
presented itself--a figure moving along the lane, which at a lower
level girdles the hillside. It was a tall, elderly man, in a long,
ragged cotamore and battered caubeen, who walked slowly and stoopingly,
with down-bent eyes, apparently talking to himself.
“Here’s Crazy Mick trapesin’ along,” said Patsy Colman, “Himself and
his little brat.”
“If he’s been till now gettin’ here from Foynish, he’s took his time,”
said Patsy’s father, “for I seen him halfways afore breakfast.”
“Sure he does be stoppin’ continual to rest the little _girsheach_,
goodness help him,” said Felix.
“What’s he lookin’ for all the while?” said Larry Dowdall, as they
watched Crazy Mick’s progress, intermittently visible between the high
banks of the winding boreen. “He’s peerin’ down before him as if he had
the notion he was walkin’ after a lost shillin’.”
“Och, that’s not his notion at all,” said Felix, “it’s discoorsin’ he
consaits he is to a little girl he owned one time--she’s dead this
twinty year and more, herself, and the mother, and another child; they
all died on him in the fever widin a couple of days, and he’s wrong
in his head ever since. But his belief is that he’s got Peg along wid
him yet. It’s her he’s havin’ the talk wid there this minyit, you may
dipind--and she in her clay maybe before you were born--and walkin’
slow he does be to humour her, or whiles carryin’ of her about.”
“If you pelt a lump of a stone, or a sod of turf, or anythin’ at him,”
said Art Fitzsimon, the biggest gossoon, “he’ll be grabbin’ her up in
his arms like, and lettin’ on to hide her away under his ould coat, and
bawlin’ and cursin’. It’s as funny as anythin’ you ever seen. When he
comes past here I’ll show you.”
“If you offer to do any such a thing I’ll clout your head,” Dinny
Colman said, and poked him preliminarily with the disapproving toe of
a heavy brogue. Art wriggled out of reach; but after all there was no
opportunity for executing his purpose, as Crazy Mick turned off down a
by-path before he came to where the lane ran beneath the party on that
bank.
Crazy Mick did not go very far, only just out of sight round the spur
of the hill that marks an entrance to another little valley holding
a narrow water, more like a short length of river than a lough. He
knew that countryside well, as he had tramped about it for the last
quarter of a century almost, so that his recurring calls were quite
an institution in the district, and the inhabitants of its scattered
dwellings would have found their situation all the lonelier if “the
crathur” had ceased to look in on them for a bit and sup, or a taste
of the hearth-fire. They had learned to take it as a matter of course
that he should insist upon sharing all these things with an invisible
Peg, and they humoured his fancy as best they could. Experiments
such as that proposed by Art Fitzsimon were strenuously discouraged,
and Mick was seldom molested. He was very harmless, well-meaning,
indeed, though generally self-absorbed, like one in a half-dream.
Danger threatened to Peg alone could stir his wrath. The people, a
diminishing number, who recollected him before his troubles, used to
say that he had been always a trifle soft, but as good-natured a poor
boy as you’d meet between the Seven Seas. Nobody could tell exactly
how his hallucinations had begun. It was only known that for several
days following his wife’s and children’s funeral he had been seen to
sit “quiet and moidhered like” among the tall nettle-clumps in Kilanure
burial-ground by the lough, and then for some weeks had disappeared.
When he returned it soon became evident that he believed himself to
have recovered his three-year-old Peg, and that he was in quest of
Herself and the baby Dan, whom he expected to find in the little house
where, only last spring, he had had all his wealth and pelf gathered in
one glow by the flickering turf-sods, while fate and death had seemed
as remote as the dim mid-day moon.
These two delusions were the source of all his solace and the cause of
all his misery, the first comforting his days, and the second bringing
him bitter disappointment almost every night. For dusk seldom closed
in but a light gleaming from some cottage window filled him with an
idle hope of what was farther beyond his reach than the evening star.
It was at sun-setting that his expectation grew strongest, because
the hour had been wont to bring him home from his work, when work and
home were his. More than once he went back to his old tumble-down
cabin, but seeing it empty of familiar faces, he declared it to be “the
wrong place he was after comin’ to,” and continued his search without
mistrust of ultimate success.
Though he might have had lodging for the asking among his neighbours,
he did not wish to be shut up indoors. Faces and voices that were
strange, or at least _other_ to him, saddened and bewildered him, so
that if possible he would sleep out under ricks and hedges and banks;
he said that Peg liked to be looking up at the stars. But in wet and
cold weather he was obliged, on her account, to accept with reluctance
the offer of bed as well as board.
A rain-storm had driven him to do so on the night before this September
afternoon, and the consequence was that his sleep had been broken and
scanty. Therefore now, when he sat down in the shade of a hawthorn bush
on the sloping shore of the lough, a drowsiness crept swiftly over him
and he was soon fast asleep. His slumber lasted for hours, and it was
not far from sunset when something suddenly roused him. It was a voice
and a laugh from a little further up the hill-side, along which the
reapers were going home. “There’s himself and his Peg,” Art Fitzsimon
was saying.
Crazy Mick started up half awake, and walked round the bush into the
brightness of the long sunbeams, which were slanting across the lough.
The sun had dropped low into the gap between two purple pyramids, and
his rays on the smooth water had woven a strip of matting, as if with a
skein of fiery golden thread. It was like a carpet for some wonderful
sort of footpath, he thought, blinking at it with sleepy eyes, and
he said so to Peg. But immediately afterwards he blamed himself for
putting such a notion into her head; it might encourage her to run into
the water some day, which would be a terrible thing entirely. And
then, all in a moment, with the swift shifting of a dream, he began to
see that terrible thing actually come to pass. Peg darted away from him
and raced down to the edge. He made a rush, too late to stop her, and
in an instant was floundering helplessly out of his depth.
Larry Dowdall was just in time to plunge in and rescue him, with no
small peril from the blind “drowning grip”; but then Larry and the two
other men needed all their strength to keep him from struggling back
into the lough, where he averred that his little girl was being drowned
dead.
At nightfall they brought him, exhausted and passive, to the District
Asylum, for which he was clearly a suitable case, as he had been seen
to throw himself into the water, and his looks and words bespoke
unreason. However, he did not rebel against captivity. With Peg had
gone all his business and desire. He did not even wish to meet his
wife and little Dan now. Herself would think too bad, he said, of his
losing Peg. And after moping for a while, one morning he turned his
disconsolate face to the wall and unwittingly went perhaps the very way
he had been in search of so long.