When John regained the house he saw that his father's boots had
disappeared from their accustomed place beside the fire. No doubt he
had gone away in them to Garradrimna. He had not met him on the road,
but there was a short way across the fields and through the woods, a
backward approach to three of the seven publichouses along which Ned
Brennan, some rusty plumber's tool in his hand and his head downcast,
might be seen passing on any day.
He did not go straight into the sewing-room, for the door was closed
and he could hear the low murmur of talk within. It must be some
customer come to his mother, he thought, or else some one who had
called in off the road to talk about the concert. Immediately he
realized that he was wrong in both surmises, for it was the voice
of Marse Prendergast raised in one of its renowned outbursts of
supplication.
"Now I suppose it's what you think that you're the quare, clever woman,
Nan Byrne, with your refusing me continually of me little needs; but
you'd never know what I'd be telling on you some day, and mebbe to your
grand son John."
"Sssh--sssh--sure I'll get it for you when he goes from the kitchen."
This last was in a low tone and spoken by his mother.
"Mebbe it's what you're ashamed to let him see you giving to me.
That's a grand thing now, and I knowing what I know!"
"Can't you be easy now and maybe 'tis a whole shilling I'll be giving
you in a few minutes."
This was altogether too generous of his mother. It gave scope to Marse
Prendergast to exercise her tyranny. Her threat was part of the begging
convention she had framed for herself, and so it did not move him
towards speculation or suspicion. His mind drifted on to the enjoyment
of other thoughts, the girl he had just walked with down the valley,
the remembered freshness of the morning road. He came out to the door.
The little kitchen garden stretched away from his feet. An abandoned
spade stood up lonely and erect in the middle of the cabbage-plot.
Around it were a few square feet of freshly-turned earth. It was the
solitary trace of his existence that his father had left behind.... As
the mind of John Brennan came to dwell upon the lonely spectacle of the
spade the need for physical exertion grew upon him.
He went out into the little garden and lifted the rude implement of
cultivation in his hand. He had not driven it many times into the soft
clay of the cabbage-bed when a touch of peace seemed to fall upon him.
The heavy burden that had occupied his mind was falling into the little
trench that was being made by the spade.
He had become so interested in his task that he had not heard his
mother go upstairs nor seen Marse Prendergast emerge from the house
some moments later.
The old shuiler called out to him in her high, shrill voice:
"That's right, John! That's right! 'Tis glad myself is to see you doing
something useful at last. Digging the cabbage-plot, me sweet gosoon,
and your father in Garradrimna be this time with his pint in his hand!"
Mrs. Brennan had followed her to the door, and her cruelty was stirred
to give the sore cut by reviving the old dread.
"That's the lad! That's the lad! But mind you don't dig too far, for
you could never tell what you'd find. And indeed it would be the quare
find you might say!"
He laughed as she said this, for he remembered that, as a child she
had entertained him with the strangest stories of leprecauns and their
crocks of gold, which were hidden in every field. The old woman passed
out on the road, and his mother came over to him with a pitiful look of
sadness in her eyes.
"Now, John, I'm surprised at you to have a spade in your hand before
Marse Prendergast and all. That's your father's work and not yours, and
you with your grand education."
The speech struck him as being rather painful to hear, and he felt as
if he should like to say: "Well, what is good enough for my father
ought to be good enough for me!" But this, to his mother, might have
looked like a back-answer, a piece of impertinence, so he merely
stammered in confusion: "Oh, sure I was only exercising and amusing
myself. When this little bit is finished I'm going down to have a read
by the lake."
"That's right, John!" she said in a flat, sad voice, and turned back to
her endless labor.
He stopped, his hands folded on the handle-end of the spade, and fell
into a condition of dulness which even the slightest labor of the body
brings to those unaccustomed to it. All things grew so still of a
sudden. There seemed to come a perfect lull in the throbbing, nervous
realization of his brain from moment to moment.... He felt himself
listening for the hum of his mother's machine, but it was another
sound that came to him--the desolating sound of her lonely sobbing.
She was crying to herself there now in the sewing-room and mourning
forever as if for some lost thing.... There were her regular sobs,
heavy with an eternal sadness as he listened to them. Into such acute
self-consciousness had his mood now moved that he could not imagine
her crying as being connected with anything beyond himself. He was
the perpetual cause of all her pain.... If only she would allow him,
for short spaces, to go out of her mind they might both come into the
enjoyment of a certain freedom, but sometimes the most trivial incident
seemed to put her out so. This morning she had been in such heart and
humor, and last night so interested in the concert, and here now she
was in tears. It could not have been the visit of Marse Prendergast
or her talk, for there was nobody so foolish, he thought, as to take
any notice of either. It must have been the digging and the fact that
people passing the road might see him. Now was not that foolish of her,
for did not Father O'Keeffe himself dig in his own garden with his own
two blessed hands ...? But he must bend in obedience to her desire, and
go walking like a leisured gentleman through the valley. He was looking
forward to this with dread, for, inevitably, it must throw him back
upon his own thoughts.
As he came down past the school he could hear a dull drone from among
the trees. The school had not yet settled down to the business of the
day, and the scholars were busy with the preparation of their lessons.
John stopped by the low wall, which separated its poor playground from
the road, to gaze across at the hive of intellect. Curious that his
mother should now possess a high contempt for this rude academy where
he had been introduced to learning. But he had not yet parted company
with his boyhood. He was remembering the companions of his schooldays
and how this morning preparation had been such a torture. Still moving
about the yard before his formal entrance to the school, was Master
Donnellan. As John Brennan saw him now he appeared as one misunderstood
by the people of the valley, and yet as one in whom the lamp of the
intellect was set bright and high. But beyond this immediate thought
of him he appeared as a man with overthrown ambitions and shattered
dreams, whose occasional outbursts of temper for these reasons had
often the effect of putting him at enmity with the parents of the
children.
Master Donnellan was a very slave of the ferrule. He had spent his
brains in vain attempts to impart some knowledge to successive
generations of dunces of the fields. It had been his ambition to be
the means of producing some great man whose achievements in the world
might be his monument of pride. But no pupil of his in the valley
school had ever arisen as a great man. Many a time, in the long summer
evenings, when the day would find it hard to disappear from Ireland,
he would come quietly to the old school with a step of reverence,
and going into the moldy closet, where all the old roll-books and
register-books were kept, take them down one by one and go searching
through the lists of names. His mind would be filled with the ringing
achievements of men who had become notable in the world.... Not a
trace of any of those famous names could he find here, however far he
might search in all the musty books until the day had faded.... Then
he would rely upon his memory in a further aspect of his search. He
had not even produced a local great man. In his time no priests had
come out of the valley. There was a strange thing now--no priests, and
it was a thing that was always said by angry mothers and fathers when
they called at the valley school to attack him for his conduct towards
their children--"And you never to have made a priest or a ha'porth!"
It was not the unreasonableness of their words that annoyed him, but
rather the sense of impotence with which they filled him.... If only it
would happen that he could say he had produced one famous man. A priest
would be sufficiently fine to justify him in the eyes of the valley. It
was so strange that, although he had seen many young men move towards
high attainment, some fatality had always happened to avert his poor
triumph. He thought of young Brennan as his present hope and pride.
John went on towards the lake. When he came to the water's edge he
was filled with a sense of peace. He sat down beneath one of the fir
trees and, in the idleness of his mood, began to pick up some of the
old dried fir-cones which were fallen beneath. They appeared to him
as things peculiarly bereft of any sap or life. He gathered until he
had a handful and then cast them from him one by one on the surface of
the water. It seemed a surprising thing that the small eddies which
the light splashes of them made rolled distantly to the shores of the
little lake. He began to wonder would his life come to be like that--a
small thing to be flung by the Hand of Fate and creating its little
ripple to eddy to the far shores of Time.
"Me sound man, John!"
It was the voice of Shamesy Golliher coming from behind a screen of
reeds where he had been fishing.
"'Tis a warm day," he said, pushing back his faded straw hat from his
brow, "Glory be to the Son of God!"
This was a pious exclamation, but the manner of its intonation seemed
to make it comical for John Brennan laughed and Shamesy Golliher
laughed.
"Now isn't them the clever, infernal little gets of fishes? The divil
a one can I catch only the size of pinkeens, and I wanting to go to
Garradrimna with a hell of a thirst!"
"And is that all you have troubling you?" said John.
"Is that all? Begad if it isn't enough after last night. If the priests
knew all the drink that bees drunk at concerts in aid of Temperance
Halls you wouldn't see a building of that kind in the country.
"Now down with me last night to the concert with me two lovely
half-pints of malt. Well, to make a long story short, I finished one
of them before I went in. I wasn't long inside, and I think it was
while Harry Holton was singing, when who should give me a nudge only
Hubert Manning: 'Are ye coming out, Shamesy?' says he. He had two
bottles of stout and a naggin, and we had them finished before Harry
Holton had done his first song. I was striving for to crush back into
me place when who should I knock against only Farrell McGuinness?
He had a lot of bottles in his pocket. He seemed to have about four
dozen of stout on his person, according to the noise he made: 'For the
honor of Jases,' says he, 'will you not spill me porter?' But then
when he saw it was me he had in it: 'Come to hell oura this,' says he,
'into the night air.' I was so glad to see that he hadn't broken his
bottles, I introduced th'other half pint. Sure he nearly swallowed
it, bottle and all. Then we fell to at the porter, and such a bloody
piece of drinking never was seen. And it wasn't that we had plenty of
drink of our own, but strange people were coming running through the
wood putting half-pints and naggins into our mouths just as if we were
little sucking childer. I fell a corpse under a tree about eleven. I
don't know how long I was insensible, but when I came to I had a quare
feeling that I was in Hell or some place. I wasn't able to move an
inch, I was that stiff and sick.... Somewhere near me I could hear two
whispering and hugging in the darkness. They were as close as ever they
could be. I couldn't stir to get a better look for fear they'd hear me.
But there was quare goings on I can tell you, things I wouldn't like to
mention or describe. Whisper, I'm near sure it was Ulick Shannon and
the schoolmistress, Miss Kerr, or whatever the hell her name is----."
Shamesy's sickening realism was brought to an abrupt end by the ducking
of his cork, which had been floating upon the surface of the water.
There was a short moment of joyous excitement and then a dying perch
lay on the grass by the side of John Brennan.
He viewed with sorrow that clean, shining thing wriggling there beneath
the high heavens. Its end had come through the same pitiful certainty
as that of the rabbits which had aforetime contributed to the thirst of
Shamesy, who presently said with delight:
"Now I have the correct number. I can sell them for sixpence in 'The
World's End,' and you'd never know the amount of good drink that
sixpence might bring."
He prepared to take his departure, but ere he went across the hill he
turned to John and said:
"That was the fine walk you were doing with Ulick Shannon's girl this
morning! She was in great form after last night."
He said it with such a leer of suggestion as cast John, still blushing,
back into his gloom.