I 5
II 17
III 27
IV 39
PART II. MARGARET LELAND. 43
I 45
II 51
III 55
IV 60
V 67
VI 70
VII 72
VIII 75
IX 77
PART III. JOHN SHERMAN REVISITS BALLAH. 83
I 85
II 88
III 91
PART IV. THE REV. WILLIAM HOWARD. 101
I 103
II 111
III 114
IV 125
V 134
VI 138
PART V. JOHN SHERMAN RETURNS TO BALLAH. 143
I 145
II 149
III 154
IV 165
DHOYA. 171
I 173
II 182
III 190
GANCONAGH
JOHN SHERMAN
AND
DHOYA
_SECOND EDITION_
LONDON
T. FISHER UNWIN
PATERNOSTER SQUARE
M DCCC XCI
_PSEUDONYM LIBRARY_
THE PSEUDONYM LIBRARY.
_Paper_, 1/6; _cloth_, 2/-.
1. MLLE. IXE. By LANOE FALCONER. 7th ed.
2. STORY OF ELEANOR LAMBERT. By MAGDALEN BROOKE. 2nd ed.
3. MYSTERY OF THE CAMPAGNA. By VON DEGEN. 3rd ed.
4. THE SCHOOL OF ART. By ISABEL SNOW. 2nd ed.
5. AMARYLLIS. By ΓΕΩΡΓΙΟΣ ΔΡΟΣΙΝΗΣ. 2nd ed.
6. THE HÔTEL D’ANGLETERRE, and Other Stories. By LANOE
FALCONER, 2nd ed.
7. A RUSSIAN PRIEST. By Н. ПОТАПЕНКО. 2nd ed.
8. SOME EMOTIONS AND A MORAL. By JOHN OLIVER HOBBES.
9. EUROPEAN RELATIONS: A Tirolese Sketch. By TALMAGE DALIN.
10. JOHN SHERMAN, and DHOYA. By GANCONAGH.
GANCONAGH’S APOLOGY.
The maker of these stories has been told that he must not bring them to
you himself. He has asked me to pretend that I am the author. I am an
old little Irish spirit, and I sit in the hedges and watch the world
go by. I see the boys going to market driving donkeys with creels of
turf, and the girls carrying baskets of apples. Sometimes I call to
some pretty face, and we chat a little in the shadow, the apple basket
before us, for, as my faithful historian O’Kearney has put it in his
now yellow manuscript, I care for nothing in the world but love and
idleness. Will not you, too, sit down under the shade of the bushes
while I read you the stories? The first I do not care for because it
deals with dull persons and the world’s affairs, but the second has to
do with my own people. If my voice at whiles grows distant and dreamy
when I talk of the world’s affairs, remember that I have seen all from
my hole in the hedge. I hear continually the songs of my own people who
dance upon the hill-side, and am content. I have never carried apples
or driven turf myself, or if I did it was only in a dream. Nor do my
kind use any of man’s belongings except the little black pipes which
the farmers find now and then when they are turning the sods over with
a plough.
GANCONAGH.
PART I.
_JOHN SHERMAN LEAVES BALLAH._
I.
In the west of Ireland, on the 9th of December, in the town of Ballah,
in the Imperial Hotel there was a single guest, clerical and youthful.
With the exception of a stray commercial traveller, who stopped once
for a night, there had been nobody for a whole month but this guest,
and now he was thinking of going away. The town, full enough in summer
of trout and salmon fishers, slept all winter like the bears.
On the evening of the 9th of December, in the coffee-room of the
Imperial Hotel, there was nobody but this guest. The guest was
irritated. It had rained all day, and now that it was clearing up
night had almost fallen. He had packed his portmanteau: his stockings,
his clothes-brush, his razor, his dress shoes were each in their
corner, and now he had nothing to do. He had tried the paper that was
lying on the table. He did not agree with its politics.
The waiter was playing an accordion in a little room over the stairs.
The guest’s irritation increased, for the more he thought about it
the more he perceived that the accordion was badly played. There was
a piano in the coffee-room; he sat down at it and played the tune
correctly, as loudly as possible. The waiter took no notice. He did not
know that he was being played for. He was wholly absorbed in his own
playing, and besides he was old, obstinate, and deaf. The guest could
stand it no longer. He rang for the waiter, and then, remembering that
he did not need anything, went out before he came.
He went through Martin’s Street, and Peter’s Lane, and turned down
by the burnt house at the corner of the fish-market, picking his way
towards the bridge. The town was dripping, but the rain was almost
over. The large drops fell seldomer and seldomer into the puddles. It
was the hour of ducks. Three or four had squeezed themselves under a
gate, and were now splashing about in the gutter of the main street.
There was scarcely any one abroad. Once or twice a countryman went by
in yellow gaiters covered with mud and looked at the guest. Once an old
woman with a basket of clothes, recognizing the Protestant curate’s
_locum tenens_, made a low curtsey.
The clouds gradually drifted away, the twilight deepened and the stars
came out. The guest, having bought some cigarettes, had spread his
waterproof on the parapet of the bridge and was now leaning his elbows
upon it, looking at the river and feeling at last quite tranquil.
His meditations, he repeated, to himself, were plated with silver by
the stars. The water slid noiselessly, and one or two of the larger
stars made little roadways of fire into the darkness. The light from a
distant casement made also its roadway. Once or twice a fish leaped.
Along the banks were the vague shadows of houses, seeming like phantoms
gathering to drink.
Yes; he felt now quite contented with the world. Amidst his enjoyment
of the shadows and the river—a veritable festival of silence—was
mixed pleasantly the knowledge that, as he leant there with the light
of a neighbouring gas-jet, flickering faintly on his refined form and
nervous face and glancing from the little medal of some Anglican order
that hung upon his watch-guard, he must have seemed—if there had been
any to witness—a being of a different kind to the inhabitants—at
once rough and conventional—of this half-deserted town. Between these
two feelings the unworldly and the worldly tossed a leaping wave of
perfect enjoyment. How pleasantly conscious of his own identity it made
him when he thought how he and not those whose birthright it was, felt
most the beauty of these shadows and this river? To him who had read
much, seen operas and plays, known religious experiences, and written
verse to a waterfall in Switzerland, and not to those who dwelt upon
its borders for their whole lives, did this river raise a tumult of
images and wonders. What meaning it had for them he could not imagine.
Some meaning surely it must have!
As he gazed out into the darkness, spinning a web of thoughts from
himself to the river, from the river to himself, he saw, with a corner
of his eye, a spot of red light moving in the air at the other end
of the bridge. He turned towards it. It came closer and closer, there
appearing behind it the while a man and a cigar. The man carried in one
hand a mass of fishing-line covered with hooks, and in the other a tin
porringer full of bait.
“Good evening, Howard.”
“Good evening,” answered the guest, taking his elbows off the parapet
and looking in a preoccupied way at the man with the hooks. It was only
gradually he remembered that he was in Ballah among the barbarians, for
his mind had strayed from the last evening gnats, making circles on
the water beneath, to the devil’s song against “the little spirits” in
“Mefistofele.” Looking down at the stone parapet he considered a moment
and then burst out—
“Sherman, how do you stand this place—you who have thoughts above mere
eating and sleeping and are not always grinding at the stubble mill?
Here everybody lives in the eighteenth century—the squalid century.
Well, I am going to-morrow, you know. Thank Heaven, I am done with your
grey streets and grey minds! The curate must come home, sick or well.
I have a religious essay to write, and besides I should die. Think of
that old fellow at the corner there, our most important parishioner.
There are no more hairs on his head than thoughts in his skull. To
merely look at him is to rob life of its dignity. Then there is nothing
in the shops but school-books and Sunday-school prizes. Excellent, no
doubt, for any one who has not had to read as many as I have. Such a
choir! such rain!”
“You need some occupation peculiar to the place,” said the other,
baiting his hooks with worms out of the little porringer. “I catch
eels. You should set some night-lines too. You bait them with worms in
this way, and put them among the weeds at the edge of the river. In the
morning you find an eel or two, if you have good fortune, turning round
and round and making the weeds sway. I shall catch a great many after
this rain.”
“What a suggestion! Do you mean to stay here,” said Howard, “till your
mind rots like our most important parishioner’s?”
“No, no! To be quite frank with you,” replied the other, “I have some
good looks and shall try to turn them to account by going away from
here pretty soon and trying to persuade some girl with money to fall in
love with me. I shall not be altogether a bad match, you see, because
after she has made me a little prosperous my uncle will die and make
me much more so. I wish to be able always to remain a lounger. Yes, I
shall marry money. My mother has set her heart on it, and I am not,
you see, the kind of person who falls in love inconveniently. For the
present——”
“You are vegetating,” interrupted the other.
“No, I am seeing the world. In your big towns a man finds his minority
and knows nothing outside its border. He knows only the people like
himself. But here one chats with the whole world in a day’s walk, for
every man one meets is a class. The knowledge I am picking up may be
useful to me when I enter the great cities and their ignorance. But I
have lines to set. Come with me. I would ask you home, but you and my
mother, you know, do not get on well.”
“I could not live with any one I did not believe in,” said Howard; “you
are so different from me. You can live with mere facts, and that is
why, I suppose, your schemes are so mercenary. Before this beautiful
river, these stars, these great purple shadows, do you not feel like
an insect in a flower? As for me, I also have planned my future.
Not too near or too far from a great city I see myself in a cottage
with diamond panes, sitting by the fire. There are books everywhere
and etchings on the wall; on the table is a manuscript essay on some
religious matter. Perhaps I shall marry some day. Probably not, for I
shall ask so much. Certainly I shall not marry for money, for I hold
the directness and sincerity of the nature to be its compass. If we
once break it the world grows trackless.”
“Good-bye,” said Sherman, briskly; “I have baited the last hook. Your
schemes suit you, but a sluggish fellow like me, poor devil, who wishes
to lounge through the world, would find them expensive.”
They parted; Sherman to set his lines and Howard to his hotel in high
spirits, for it seemed to him he had been eloquent. The billiard-room,
which opened on the street, was lighted up. A few young men came round
to play sometimes. He went in, for among these provincial youths he
felt _recherché_; besides, he was a really good player. As he came
in one of the players missed and swore. Howard reproved him with a
look. He joined the play for a time, and then catching sight through a
distant door of the hotel-keeper’s wife putting a kettle on the hob he
hurried off, and, drawing a chair to the fire, began one of those long
gossips about everybody’s affairs peculiar to the cloth.
As Sherman, having set his lines, returned home, he passed a
tobacconist’s—a sweet-shop and tobacconist’s in one—the only shop
in town, except public-houses, that remained open. The tobacconist
was standing in his door, and, recognizing one who dealt consistently
with a rival at the other end of the town, muttered: “There goes that
_gluggerabunthaun_ and Jack o’ Dreams; been fishing most likely.
Ugh!” Sherman paused for a moment as he repassed the bridge and looked
at the water, on which now a new-risen and crescent moon was shining
dimly. How full of memories it was to him! what playmates and boyish
adventures did it not bring to mind! To him it seemed to say, “Stay
near to me,” as to Howard it had said, “Go yonder, to those other joys
and other sceneries I have told you of.” It bade him who loved stay
still and dream, and gave flying feet to him who imagined.
II.
The house where Sherman and his mother lived was one of those bare
houses so common in country towns. Their dashed fronts mounting above
empty pavements have a kind of dignity in their utilitarianism. They
seem to say, “Fashion has not made us, nor ever do its caprices pass
our sand-cleaned doorsteps.” On every basement window is the same dingy
wire blind; on every door the same brass knocker. Custom everywhere!
“So much the longer,” the blinds seem to say, “have eyes glanced
through us”; and the knockers to murmur, “And fingers lifted us.”
No. 15, Stephens’ Row, was in no manner peculiar among its twenty
fellows. The chairs in the drawing-room facing the street were of heavy
mahogany with horsehair cushions worn at the corners. On the round
table was somebody’s commentary on the New Testament laid like the
spokes of a wheel on a table-cover of American oilcloth with stamped
Japanese figures half worn away. The room was seldom used, for Mrs.
Sherman was solitary because silent. In this room the dressmaker sat
twice a year, and here the rector’s wife used every month or so to
drink a cup of tea. It was quite clean. There was not a fly-mark on the
mirror, and all summer the fern in the grate was constantly changed.
Behind this room and overlooking the garden was the parlour, where
cane-bottomed chairs took the place of mahogany. Sherman had lived here
with his mother all his life, and their old servant hardly remembered
having lived anywhere else; and soon she would absolutely cease to
remember the world she knew before she saw the four walls of this
house, for every day she forgot something fresh. The son was almost
thirty, the mother fifty, and the servant near seventy. Every year they
had two hundred pounds among them, and once a year the son got a new
suit of clothes and went into the drawing-room to look at himself in
the mirror.
On the morning of the 20th of December Mrs. Sherman was down before her
son. A spare, delicate-featured woman, with somewhat thin lips tightly
closed as with silent people, and eyes at once gentle and distrustful,
tempering the hardness of the lips. She helped the servant to set the
table, and then, for her old-fashioned ideas would not allow her to
rest, began to knit, often interrupting her knitting to go into the
kitchen or to listen at the foot of the stairs. At last, hearing a
sound upstairs, she put the eggs down to boil, muttering the while,
and began again to knit. When her son appeared she received him with a
smile.
“Late again, mother,” he said.
“The young should sleep,” she answered, for to her he seemed still a
boy.
She had finished her breakfast some time before the young man, and
because it would have appeared very wrong to her to leave the table,
she sat on knitting behind the tea-urn: an industry the benefit of
which was felt by many poor children—almost the only neighbours she
had a good word for.
“Mother,” said the young man, presently, “your friend the _locum
tenens_ is off to-morrow.”
“A good riddance.”
“Why are you so hard on him? He talked intelligently when here, I
thought,” answered her son.
“I do not like his theology,” she replied, “nor his way of running
about and flirting with this body and that body, nor his way of
chattering while he buttons and unbuttons his gloves.”
“You forget he is a man of the great world, and has about him a manner
that must seem strange to us.”
“Oh, he might do very well,” she answered, “for one of those Carton
girls at the rectory.”
“That eldest girl is a good girl,” replied her son.
“She looks down on us all, and thinks herself intellectual,” she
went on. “I remember when girls were content with their Catechism
and their Bibles and a little practice at the piano, maybe, for an
accomplishment. What does any one want more? It is all pride.”
“You used to like her as a child,” said the young man.
“I like all children.”
Sherman having finished his breakfast, took a book of travels in one
hand and a trowel in the other and went out into the garden. Having
looked under the parlour window for the first tulip shoots, he went
down to the further end and began covering some sea-kale for forcing.
He had not been long at work when the servant brought him a letter.
There was a stone roller at one side of the grass plot. He sat down
upon it, and taking the letter between his finger and thumb began
looking at it with an air that said: “Well! I know what you mean.” He
remained long thus without opening it, the book lying beside him on the
roller.
The garden—the letter—the book! You have there the three symbols of
his life. Every morning he worked in that garden among the sights and
sounds of nature. Month by month he planted and hoed and dug there. In
the middle he had set a hedge that divided the garden in two. Above the
hedge were flowers; below it, vegetables. At the furthest end from
the house, lapping broken masonry full of wallflowers, the river said,
month after month to all upon its banks, “Hush!” He dined at two with
perfect regularity, and in the afternoon went out to shoot or walk. At
twilight he set night-lines. Later on he read. He had not many books—a
Shakespeare, Mungo Park’s travels, a few two-shilling novels, “Percy’s
Reliques,” and a volume on etiquette. He seldom varied his occupations.
He had no profession. The town talked of it. They said: “He lives upon
his mother,” and were very angry. They never let him see this, however,
for it was generally understood he would be a dangerous fellow to
rouse; but there was an uncle from whom Sherman had expectations who
sometimes wrote remonstrating. Mrs. Sherman resented these letters,
for she was afraid of her son going away to seek his fortune—perhaps
even in America. Now this matter preyed somewhat on Sherman. For three
years or so he had been trying to make his mind up and come to some
decision. Sometimes when reading he would start and press his lips
together and knit his brows for a moment.
It will now be seen why the garden, the book, and the letter were
the three symbols of his life, summing up as they did his love of
out-of-door doings, his meditations, his anxieties. His life in the
garden had granted serenity to his forehead, the reading of his few
books had filled his eyes with reverie, and the feeling that he was not
quite a good citizen had given a slight and occasional trembling to his
lips.
He opened the letter. Its contents were what he had long expected.
His uncle offered to take him into his office. He laid it spread out
before him—a foot on each margin, right and left—and looked at it,
turning the matter over and over in his mind. Would he go? would
he stay? He did not like the idea much. The lounger in him did not
enjoy the thought of London. Gradually his mind wandered away into
scheming—infinite scheming—what he would do if he went, what he would
do if he did not go.
A beetle, attracted by the faint sunlight, had crawled out of his hole.
It saw the paper and crept on to it, the better to catch the sunlight.
Sherman saw the beetle but his mind was not occupied with it. “Shall I
tell Mary Carton?” he was thinking. Mary had long been his adviser and
friend. She was, indeed, everybody’s adviser. Yes, he would ask her
what to do. Then again he thought—no, he would decide for himself. The
beetle began to move. “If it goes off the paper by the top I will ask
her—if by the bottom I will not.”
The beetle went off by the top. He got up with an air of decision
and went into the tool-house and began sorting seeds and picking out
the light ones, sometimes stopping to watch a spider; for he knew he
must wait till the afternoon to see Mary Carton. The tool-house was a
favourite place with him. He often read there and watched the spiders
in the corners.
At dinner he was preoccupied.
“Mother,” he said, “would you much mind if we went away from this?”
“I have often told you,” she answered, “I do not like one place better
than another. I like them all equally little.”
After dinner he went again into the tool-house. This time he did not
sort seeds—only watched the spiders.
III.
Towards evening he went out. The pale sunshine of winter flickered
on his path. The wind blew the straws about. He grew more and more
melancholy. A dog of his acquaintance was chasing rabbits in a field.
He had never been known to catch one, and since his youth had never
seen one for he was almost wholly blind. They were his form of the
eternal chimera. The dog left the field and followed with a friendly
sniff.
They came together to the rectory. Mary Carton was not in. There was a
children’s practice in the school-house. They went thither.
A child of four or five with a swelling on its face was sitting
under a wall opposite the school door, waiting to make faces at the
Protestant children as they came out. Catching sight of the dog she
seemed to debate in her mind whether to throw a stone at it or call
it to her. She threw the stone and made it run. In after times he
remembered all these things as though they were of importance.
He opened the latched green door and went in. About twenty children
were singing in shrill voices standing in a row at the further end. At
the harmonium he recognized Mary Carton, who nodded to him and went
on with her playing. The white-washed walls were covered with glazed
prints of animals; at the further end was a large map of Europe; by a
fire at the near end was a table with the remains of tea. This tea was
an idea of Mary’s. They had tea and cake first, afterwards the singing.
The floor was covered with crumbs. The fire was burning brightly.
Sherman sat down beside it. A child with a great deal of oil in her
hair was sitting on the end of a form at the other side.
“Look,” she whispered, “I have been sent away. At any rate they are
further from the fire. They have to be near the harmonium. I would not
sing. Do you like hymns? I don’t. Will you have a cup of tea? I can
make it quite well. See, I did not spill a drop. Have you enough milk?”
It was a cup full of milk—children’s tea. “Look, there is a mouse
carrying away a crumb. Hush!”
They sat there, the child watching the mouse, Sherman pondering on his
letter, until the music ceased and the children came tramping down the
room. The mouse having fled, Sherman’s self-appointed hostess got up
with a sigh and went out with the others.
Mary Carton closed the harmonium and came towards Sherman. Her face
and all her movements showed a gentle decision of character. Her glance
was serene, her features regular, her figure at the same time ample and
beautifully moulded; her dress plain yet not without a certain air of
distinction. In a different society she would have had many suitors.
But she was of a type that in country towns does not get married
at all. Its beauty is too lacking in pink and white, its nature in
that small assertiveness admired for character by the uninstructed.
Elsewhere she would have known her own beauty—as it is right that all
the beautiful should—and have learnt how to display it, to add gesture
to her calm and more of mirth and smiles to her grave cheerfulness. As
it was, her manner was much older than herself.
She sat down by Sherman with the air of an old friend. They had long
been accustomed to consult together on every matter. They were such
good friends they had never fallen in love with each other. Perfect
love and perfect friendship are indeed incompatible; for the one is a
battlefield where shadows war beside the combatants, and the other a
placid country where Consultation has her dwelling.
These two were such good friends that the most gossiping townspeople
had given them up with a sigh. The doctor’s wife, a faded beauty and
devoted romance reader, said one day, as they passed, “They are such
cold creatures.” The old maid who kept the Berlin-wool shop remarked,
“They are not of the marrying sort,” and now their comings and goings
were no longer noticed. Nothing had ever come to break in on their
quiet companionship and give obscurity as a dwelling-place for the
needed illusions. Had one been weak and the other strong, one plain and
the other handsome, one guide and the other guided, one wise and the
other foolish, love might have found them out in a moment, for love is
based on inequality as friendship is on equality.
“John,” said Mary Carton, warming her hands at the fire, “I have had a
troublesome day. Did you come to help me teach the children to sing? It
was good of you: you were just too late.”
“No,” he answered, “I have come to be your pupil. I am always your
pupil.”
“Yes, and a most disobedient one.”
“Well, advise me this time at any rate. My uncle has written, offering
me £100 a year to begin with in his London office. Am I to go?”
“You know quite well my answer,” she said.
“Indeed I do not. Why should I go? I am contented here. I am now making
my garden ready for spring. Later on there will be trout fishing and
saunters by the edge of the river in the evening when the bats are
flickering about. In July there will be races. I enjoy the bustle. I
enjoy life here. When anything annoys me I keep away from it, that is
all. You know I am always busy. I have occupation and friends and am
quite contented.”
“It is a great loss to many of us, but you must go, John,” she said.
“For you know you will be old some day, and perhaps when the vitality
of youth is gone you will feel that your life is empty and find that
you are too old to change it; and you will give up, perhaps, trying
to be happy and likeable and become as the rest are. I think I can
see you,” she said, with a laugh, “a hypochondriac, like Gorman, the
retired excise officer, or with a red nose like Dr. Stephens, or
growing like Peters, the elderly cattle merchant, who starves his
horse.”
“They were bad material to begin with,” he answered, “and besides, I
cannot take my mother away with me at her age, and I cannot leave her
alone.”
“What annoyance it may be,” she answered, “will soon be forgotten. You
will be able to give her many more comforts. We women—we all like to
be dressed well and have pleasant rooms to sit in, and a young man at
your age should not be idle. You must go away from this little backward
place. We shall miss you, but you are clever and must go and work with
other men and have your talents admitted.”
“How emulous you would have me. Perhaps I shall be well-to-do some day;
meanwhile I only wish to stay here with my friends.”
She went over to the window and looked out with her face turned from
him. The evening light cast a long shadow behind her on the floor.
After some moments, she said, “I see people ploughing on the slope of
the hill. There are people working on a house to the right. Everywhere
there are people busy,” and, with a slight tremble in her voice, she
added, “and, John, nowhere are there any doing what they wish. One has
to think of so many things—of duty and God.”
“Mary, I didn’t know you were so religious.”
Coming towards him with a smile, she said, “No more did I, perhaps.
But sometimes the self in one is very strong. One has to think a great
deal and reason with it. Yet I try hard to lose myself in things about
me. These children now—I often lie awake thinking about them. That
child who was talking to you is often on my mind. I do not know what
will happen to her. She makes me unhappy. I am afraid she is not a good
child at all. I am afraid she is not taught well at home. I try hard to
be gentle and patient with her. I am a little displeased with myself
to-day; so I have lectured you. There! I have made my confession. But,”
she added, taking one of his hands in both hers and reddening, “you
must go away. You must not be idle. You will gain everything.”
As she stood there with bright eyes, the light of evening about her,
Sherman for perhaps the first time saw how beautiful she was, and was
flattered by her interest. For the first time also her presence did not
make him at peace with the world.
“Will you be an obedient pupil?”
“You know so much more than I do,” he answered, “and are so much wiser.
I will write to my uncle and agree to his offer.”
“Now you must go home,” she said. “You must not keep your mother
waiting for her tea. There! I have raked the fire out. We must not
forget to lock the door behind us.”
As they stood on the doorstep the wind blew a whirl of dead leaves
about them.
“They are my old thoughts,” he said; “see, they are all withered.”
They walked together silently. At the vicarage he left her and went
homeward.
The deserted flour store at the corner of two roads, the house that
had been burnt hollow ten years before and still lifted its blackened
beams, the straggling and leafless fruit-trees rising above garden
walls, the church where he was christened—these foster-mothers of his
infancy seemed to nod and shake their heads over him.
“Mother,” he said, hurriedly entering the room, “we are going to
London.”
“As you wish. I always knew you would be a rolling stone,” she
answered, and went out to tell the servant that as soon as she had
finished the week’s washing they must pack up everything, for they
were going to London.
“Yes, we must pack up,” said the old peasant; she did not stop peeling
the onion in her hand—she had not comprehended. In the middle of the
night she suddenly started up in bed with a pale face and a prayer to
the Virgin whose image hung over her head—she had now comprehended.
IV.
On January the 5th about two in the afternoon, Sherman sat on the
deck of the steamer _Lavinia_ enjoying a period of sunshine between
two showers. The steamer _Lavinia_ was a cattle boat. It had been his
wish to travel by some more expensive route, but his mother, with
her old-fashioned ideas of duty, would not hear of it, and now, as
he foresaw, was extremely uncomfortable below, while he, who was a
good sailor, was pretty happy on deck, and would have been quite so
if the pigs would only tire of their continual squealing. With the
exception of a very dirty old woman sitting by a crate of geese, all
the passengers but himself were below. This old woman made the journey
monthly with geese for the Liverpool market.
Sherman was dreaming. He began to feel very desolate, and commenced
a letter to Mary Carton in his notebook to state this fact. He was
a laborious and unpractised writer, and found it helped him to make
a pencil copy. Sometimes he stopped and watched the puffin sleeping
on the waves. Each one of them had its head tucked in in a somewhat
different way.
“That is because their characters are different,” he thought.
Gradually he began to notice a great many corks floating by, one after
the other. The old woman saw them too, and said, waking out of a half
sleep—
“Misther John Sherman, we will be in the Mersey before evening. Why are
ye goin’ among them savages in London, Misther John? Why don’t ye stay
among your own people—for what have we in this life but a mouthful of
air?”