drooping and pining, my grand young daughter, and the spring will go out
of her step and the light from her eyes and the luster from the hair
that's a wonder to all.... Oh, isn't it the cruel thing?"
"My ship sails the day after to-morrow."
She saw surrender in his face, rose quickly, and went to the door.
"Come inside, Moyra, Moyreen! And be putting your cloak on, with the
ribbons that tie beneath your chin. And your dress of muslin that the
lady in Newry gave you. And stockings. And your shoes of leather. And
I'll be putting on my Paisley shawl. And this young boy will be getting
Michael Doyle's horse and trap. Come in, Moyreen, come in and put haste
on you, for it's going to Dundalk we are, this day, this hour, this
minute even!"
§ 8
It occurred to him as he sat in the haggard under the riding moon, not a
pitch shot from the house where his wife was being waked, that nothing
was disturbed because she was dead. It was not strange that the stars
kept on their courses, for the death of neither king nor cardinal nor
the wreck of the greatest ship that ever sailed the seas would not move
them from their accustomed orbit. But not a robin in the hedge was
disturbed, not a rabbit in the field, not a weasel in the lane. Nature
never put off her impenetrable mask. Or did she really not care? And was
a human soul less to her than a worm in the soil?
There was a stir in the house. They would be making tea now for the men
and women who said they were mourners.... The querulous voice of his
wife's mother came to him as some one led her from the heated house into
the coolth of the June night.
"Great sacrifices we made for him, myself and the white love that's
stretched beyond in the room. All we had we gave him, and all she found
was barren death, and I the barren charity of Northern men...."
"Oh, sure, 'tis the pity of the world you are, Pegeen," a neighbor
comforted her.
"On his bended knees he came to her, asking for love," the _cailleach_
went on. "On his bare and bended knees. And her heart melted toward him
as the snow melts on the hills. 'And hadn't you better wait,' said I,
'Moyreen Roe? With the great looks and the grand carriage of you, 'tis
a great match you can make surely. A gentleman from England, maybe,
would have a castle and fine lands, or the pick of the dealing men, and
they going from Belfast to Drogheda and stopping overnight at Ardee. Or
wouldn't it be better for you to marry one of your own kind, would go to
church with you in a kindly way?'
"'But if I don't marry this lad, he'll kill himself,' she says to me.
"'But your faith,' says I, ''avourneen, your holy faith, surely you will
not be forsaking that for this boy!'"
"And what did she say to that, Pegeen?" the neighbor asked.
"'Sure it's promised to turn he has,' she answered. 'And do everything
is right by me, so much I love him!'"
"The treacherous Ulster hound!" The neighbor inveighed.
"Treacherous by race and treacherous by nature. Sure, can't you see it,
the way he treats me? Sorrow word he has for me, that bore the wife of
his bosom, barring, 'Alan Donn Campbell will see you and fix up
everything.' And haven't I met Alan Campbell once before, and it's the
cold eye he has and the hard heart. And this is all the return I get for
bearing the white darling would be fit mate for a king. There was a
publican of Dundalk had an eye on her, a big red-faced, hearty man. And
she might have married him but this lad came and spoiled everything. And
if she'd married him, I'd have been sitting in the parlor of the public
house, in a seemly black dress and a brooch in the bosom of it, taking
my pinch of snuff and my strong cup of tea with a drop of Hollands in it
would warm the cockles of your heart, and listening to the conversation
of the fine customers and them loosening up with the drink. And the ould
grannies would have courtesied to me and hate in their hearts. But now a
leaf on the wind am I, a broken twig on the stream. And the black men of
Ulster have me for a plaything, the men that have a hatred for me and my
kind, so that it's a knife they'd put in you, or poison in your tea--"
"Let you be coming in now, Pegeen. Let you be coming in now. And take a
cup of tea would put heart in you, or something strong, maybe. And then
we'll be saying a prayer for her who's gone--"
"Dead she is, the poor heart, dead she is, and better off nor I am--"
Her high querulousness died away as she went into the house, and again
was the silence of the riding moon. All her grief, all her lies, all
her bitterness had not stirred a leaf upon the bough. Not a robin in
the hedge was disturbed by her calamity, not a rabbit in the field, not
a weasel in the lane....
§ 9
He thought to himself: had they rushed him into this marriage? And he
answered himself truthfully, they had not. He could have said no, and
stood by his no, young as he was, against every old woman and every
young woman in the world. No, fast as they had worked, they hadn't
worked faster than his thought had.
And did he marry because he was in love with Moyra Dolan? He was in love
with her, he conceded that. For what the term was accepted at, he was in
love with her. Women he had met in his twenty years, great ladies of the
Ulster clans; shy, starched misses from the Friends' School; moody
peasant girls; merry women of the foreign ports, and to none of them had
he felt that strange yearning he had felt toward Moyra Dolan, the
strange pull that sends the twig in the diviner's hands down toward the
hidden water. Yes, he was in love with her, but was it because of that
he had married her? And he truthfully answered, no.
He remembered, the mood coming back to him as concretely as an action,
what he had thought while the old woman had wheedled him with her voice
like butter. All he had thought in his prentice days at sea, all he had
thought of in the night watches, all he had thought of in the loneliness
of his mother's house, had gathered like great cloud-banks at night, and
had suddenly taken form and color and purpose in that one moment, as a
cloud-bank at the coming of the sun.... Life had appeared to him in one
brief moment, and he had tried to grasp it.
It had seemed to him right that he would go down to the sea in ships all
his days, and trade in foreign ports, and work, transmuting effort into
gain, and should come home to rest.
And for whom was the gain? And where was home? Surely not for himself
was the gain, and home was not his cold mother's house? And now that he
had come to manhood as boys come at sea, braving danger and thinking
mightily, it was for him to decide.
A mirage, a seeming, a thing to look at, to go get bravely had come into
his mind in little pictures, like prints in a book. A thing of
simplicity, simple as the sea, and as colorful and as wholesome and as
beautiful. He thought of a little thatched and whitewashed house with a
cobbled yard clean as a ship's decks, and a garden where the bluish
green stalks and absurdly pretty flowers of potatoes would come in
spring, and one side would be the red and white of the clover, and on
the other would be the minute blue flower of the flax; and an old dog
drowsing on the threshold.... And this would be in his mind as he
wandered the hot foreign streets.... And there would be the droning of
the bees in the clover, and the swish of the swallows darting to and
from the eaves, and in the evening would be the singing of the
crickets.... And these he would hear over the capstan's clank.... When
he tumbled into his cabin after his watch, into the heeling room where
the lamp swung overhead like a crazy thing, and all was a litter of
oilskins and sea-boots, and a great dampness everywhere, he would know
there was a swept cottage in Louth where the delft shone on the dresser
in the kindly light of the turf, and there would be a spinning-wheel in
the corner, and big rush-bottomed chairs, and the kettle singing on the
hob.... And when his comrades would leave the ship in port of nights to
go to the houses where music and dancing were, and crazy drinking, and
where the adroit foreign women held out their arms of mystery and
mercenary romance, he would lean over the taffrail and laugh and shake
his head:
"No, I think I'll stay on board." "Come on, young Shane. There's a woman
down at Mother Parkinson's and they say she's an Austrian archduchess
who has run away with a man, and got left. Come on." Or, "There's a big
dance over on the beach to-night, and a keg of rum, and the native
women. Jump in." "No, I think I'll stay on board and read." "Come on.
Don't be a fool." "No, go ahead and enjoy yourselves. I'll stay on
board." And there would be the plash of oars as they rowed shoreward,
and maybe a song raised.... And he would make himself comfortable under
the awning of the after deck, and read the bundles of newspapers from
home, of how Thomas Chalmers, the great Scottish preacher, was dead, or
how a new great singer had been heard in London, a Swedish girl, her
name was Jenny Lind, or how Shakspere's house had been bought and a
great price paid for it, three thousand pounds.... Or he would read one
of the new books that were coming out in a flood, a new one by Mr.
Dickens, the bite of the new writer, Mr. Thackeray with his "Vanity
Fair," or that strange book written by a woman, "Wuthering Heights"....
But in a little minute the volume would fall to his knees, and the
people of the book would leave the platform of his mind, and a real,
warmer presence come to it.... He could see the gracious, kindly
womanhood now move through the house, now come to the door to watch the
far horizon.... Of evenings she would stand dreaming at the lintel while
he was leaning dreaming over the taffrail, and though there were ten
thousand miles between them their hearts would be intimate as
pigeons.... And he would think of coming home to the peaceful cottage
and the wife with the grave eyes and kindly smile, and if he were a day
ahead of time, she would forget her reserve in great joy, and low,
pleased laughter would jet from her throat.... And if he were on time,
there would be the quiet grave confidence: "I knew your step!" ... And
if he were late, there would be the passing of the cloud from the brows:
"Thank God! I--I was--just a trifle worried!" ... And the greetings
over, she would look at him with a smile and a little lift of the
eyebrows, and he would give her what he had brought from the voyage: a
ring from Amsterdam, maybe, where the great jewelers are, or heavy
silken stockings of France; or had he gone to the West Indies, a great
necklet of red coral; or some fancy in humming-birds' feathers from the
Brazils; lace from Porto Rico, that the colored women make with their
slim brown fingers; things of hammered brass from India; and were he to
China in the tea-trade, a coat such as a mandarin's lady would wear....
And with each gift there would be gasp of incredulous surprise, and "O
Shaneen, you shouldn't have!" ... And then the evening would come, and
they would stand on the threshold, and he would listen to the sounds the
seamen never hear: the swish and ripple of the wind among the trees, the
birds settling themselves to sleep amid the boughs, the bittern that
boomed like a horn, and the barking of a distant dog, and the crickets
that do be singing when the evening falls.... And he would turn from
that to find her arms out and her lips apart, who could wait no longer,
and together they would go into their house, where the red turf had
turned yellow--together, over their own threshold, into their own
house.... And when the time came for him to go to sea again, she would
be grave with unshed tears and a brave smile.... And one day after a
long voyage, when she had greeted him, she would say, "Some one has come
to our house!" and he wouldn't understand, and be annoyed, until she
showed him the little warm head in the cradle, and he would drop on his
knees reverentially, and there would be great silent tears from him,
and all her heart would show in her quiet smile....
And never an old woman on Naples quay would ask him for an alms but
would get it, he thinking all the time of the old woman with the
tow-like hair who abode in his house, his wife's mother. And she would
be comfortable there in her old days, with always a fire to warm her,
and always a cup of tea to cheer her up, and a kindly ear for her
stories of ancient days, and a thanks for the alien rosaries she would
say, praying for his safe return from the almighty waters.... And never
a dog on his travels but would get a pat and a whistle, and he thinking
of the grizzled terrier in Louth that guarded the threshold of quiet
beauty....
And so he would have been content to live all his days, so he thought he
would live, going down to the dangers of the sea, trading in strange
ports, and transmuting hard, untiring effort into gain for her at home
and her children, and he would grow old and grizzled, until he could no
longer brace to a heeling plank or stand the responsibility of a ship's
mastery, and then they would buy a little house on some harbor, while
their sons went rolling down to Rio or fought the typhoon in the China
Seas, and he could sit there with his telescope, watching the ships go
by, or come in and out hauling up mainsail or making their mooring, and
grumbling pleasantly at how good seamanship fades and dies....
All this he had thought out in the loneliness of foreign ports, in the
night watches aboard ship, in the inhospitality of his mother's house,
and on the jaunting-car to Dundalk. All this he had thought out, and on
its basis gone into marriage. And it would just have been as well for
him, better perhaps, had he thrown a coin into the air to find out
whether he should marry or no.
And that was what human thought was worth--a brown penny thrown into the
empty air!
"_Gloir do'n Athair, agas do'n Mhac, agas do'n Spiorad Naomh_," went the
drone of the rosary within. "Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and
to the Holy Ghost, Amen!"
§ 10
And the house that he had known in a dream was no more in reality than a
cold strange dwelling; all was there, the whitewash, the thatch, the
delft on the dresser, but as a home it was stillborn. The turf did not
burn well and the swallows shunned the eaves, feeling, in nature's
occult way, that the essential rhythm was wanting. Nor would bees be
happy in the skips, but must swarm otherward. One would have said the
house was built on some tragic rock....
Only the old dog was faithful, and stayed where his master put him.
And the face he had dreamed would not look toward him over the
illimitable ocean. Seek as he would, it was never there, with warm
gravity. His eyes might strive, but all they would see was the oily
swell of the Dogger Bank, and the great plowed field of Biscay Bay, and
the smash of foam against the Hebrides. Never would a space in the
watery horizon open and show him a threshold of beauty with quiet,
brooding face.... And when he came home, either late or early, or on
time to the moment, it was, "Och, is it yourself?" And the only
interruption to the house was the little more trouble he caused. And his
gifts were treated tepidly, though with cupidinous eyes. In the evening,
if he stood on the threshold, it was: "Wisha, is it going out you are?
And isn't it enough of the fresh air you have, and you on the salt
water?" And her embraces were half chastity, half sin, tepidly
passionate, unintimate ... so that shame was on him, and no pride or
joyousness.... Cold! cold! cold!... A cold house, a cold woman.... No
light or warmth or graciousness....
And the old woman whom he had thought of as warm and peaceful by the
fire was a hag with a peasant's cupidity: "And isn't it a little more
you can be leaving us, darling lad, what with the high price that does
be on things in this place and you not spending a brown ha'penny aboard
ship?... And herself might be taken sick now, and wouldn't it be a grand
thing, a wee store of money in the house? Or the wars might come, find
you far on the sea! An extra sovereign now, brave fellow, a
half-sovereign itself!"
And when he left it was of less import than the cow going dry. Only one
mourned him, the old dog. Only one remembered him, the half-blind badger
hound, that dreamed of ancient hunting days....
And he would go down to his ship, heartbroken, when none was looking a
mist of tears in his eyes,--he was not yet twenty-one,--but in a day or
so that would pass, and the sea that was so strong would give him of its
strength and heal him, so that after a few days he could stand up and
say: "Well.... Huuh.... Well...."
A trick had been played him, like some tricks the sea and sun play. Afar
off he had seen an island like an appointed dancing place, like the
Green of Fiddlers, and he had asked to be put ashore there, to live and
be a permanent citizen. And when he was landed, he found that his
dancing place was only a barren rock where the seagulls mourned. Past
the glamour of the sun and sea mists, there were only cold, searching
winds and dank stone....
But he came of a race that are born men, breed men, and kill men. Crying
never patched a hole in a brogue, and a man who's been fooled is no
admirable figure, at least to Antrim men. So shut your mouth! When a
master loses a ship he gets no other. That is the inexorable rule of the
sea. So when a man wrecks his life....
What he had decided was this: go ahead. He had been fooled; pay the
forfeit. Retreat into his own heart, and go ahead. Thirty, forty
years.... He had himself to blame. And it wasn't as if he had to live in
the house all the time; he had only to come back there. All that was
killed was his heart. His frame was still stolid, his eye clear....
There would be little oases here and there, some great record of a
voyage broken, friends bravely made, a kiss now and then, freely,
gallantly given.... But ... go ahead!
And then suddenly death had come, and the scheme of life was broken,
like a piece from the end of a stick. Death he had seen before, but
never so close to him. A good man had died and he had said: "God!
there's a pity!" though why he didn't know. And a young girl might die,
and it would seem like a tragedy in a play. And a child would die, and
he would feel hurt and say, "Yon's cruelty, yon!" And death had seemed
to be an ultimate word.
But never before now had he seen the ramifications of death. Life had
seemed to him to be a straight line, and suddenly he was inspired to the
knowledge that it was a design, a pattern, a scheme.... And now he felt
it was only a tool, like a knife, or scissors, in the hands of what?...
What? Destiny?... or what?...
§ 11
"_A chraoibhin aoibhinn!_ O pleasant little branch, is there regard in
you for the last words of the dead woman?" The old _cailleach_ had come
again to ruffle the grave silence about young Shane in the haggard.
"Was it--was it anything for me?"
"And whom would it be for, _acushla veg?_ Sure the love of her heart
you were, the white love of her heart. You and me she was thinking of,
her old mother that saw a power of trouble. Ill-treated I was by
Sergeant Dolan, who fought old Bonaparte in the foreign wars, and took
to drinking in the dreadful days of peace. Harsh my life was, and
peaceful should my end be, the like of a day that does be rainy, and
turns fine at evening-time. And that was what she wanted, _a charaid
bhig_, little friend o' me."
"What now?"
"She said to me, and she dying in my arms and the blue spirit coming out
of the red lips of her--och! achanee!--'Sure it's not in that grand
Northern lad to see you despised in your old age, and the grannies of
the neighborhood laughing at you who boasted often. The wee house he'll
give you--the wee house is comfortable for an old woman--'"
"But the house isn't mine. It's Alan Donn Campbell's. It isn't mine to
give, and I haven't the money to buy it. All the money I have is my pay
and what my uncles give me--and they won't see you want."
"But isn't it the grand rich Northern family you are? And won't there be
money coming to you when your uncles and mother die?"
"I suppose so."
"Well now, agra, a few of us have been thinking. And Manus McGinty, the
priest's brother, is willing to advance you the money at interest, to be
paid him when your people die. And you can buy the house, and a slip of
a pig I can be fattening against the Christmas market."
"No!"
"Och, agra," she whined, "you wouldn't go back on the words of the poor
girl, and her dying in my arms? And she was thinking of you when she
should have been thinking of her God! And the grand subtle things she
said of you, that only a woman can understand! Sure it was of love for
you she died, you being away so long from her on the salt and bitter
sea--"
"Listen, woman Dolan. I heard how Moyra died as I came through the
village. She died as she was beating my poor old hound. She dropped dead
from the passion in her, like a shot man. So where's all your love and
your long dying wishes as she lay in your arms?"
He arose and walked away from her, through the haggard, under the sky,
where the southeast cloud-banks rolled steadily toward the placid moon.
And there was silence for an instant, so speechless he left her. And
then suddenly her ancient shrill voice cut the air like a drover's
whip:
"You Orange bastard!"
§ 12
The feeling that was uppermost in him as he sat outside the thatched
cottage in the moonlight while the wake was within was not grief at his
wife's death; not a shattered mind that his life so carefully laid out
not twelve months before was disoriented; not any self-pity; not any
grievance against God such as little men might have. But a strange dumb
wonder.... There she lay within, in her habit of a Dominican lay sister,
her hands waxy, her face waxy, her eyelids closed. And six guttering
candles were about her, and woman droned their prayers with a droning as
of bees. There she lay with her hands clasped on a wooden crucifix. And
no more would the robins wake her, and they fussing in the great
hawthorn-tree over the coming of dawn. No longer would she rake the ash
from the peat and blow the red of it to a little blaze. No longer would
she beat his dog out of the house with the handle of the broom. No
longer would she forgather with the neighbors over a pot of tea for a
pleasant vindictive chat. No longer would she look out to sea for him
with her half-loving, half-inimical eyes. No longer in her sharpish
voice would she recite her rosary and go to bed.
And to-morrow they would bury her--there would be rain to-morrow: the
wind was sou'east,--they would lower her, gently as though she were
alive, into a rectangular slot in the ground, mutter alien prayers in an
alien tongue with business of white magic, pat the mound over as a child
pats his castle of sand on the sea-shore--and leave her there in the
rain.
A month from now they would say a mass for her, a year from now another,
but to-morrow, to-day, yesterday even, she was finished with all of
life--with the fussy excited robins of dawn; with the old dog that
wanted to drowse by the fire; with the young husband who was either too
much or too little of a man for her; with the clicking beads she would
tell in her sharpish voice; with each thing; with everything....
And here was the wonder of it, the strange dumb wonder, that the
snapping of her life meant less in reality to him than the snapping of a
stay aboard ship. The day after to-morrow he would mount the deck of
Patrick Russell's boat, and after a few crisp orders would set out on
the eternal sea, as though she were still alive in her cottage, as
though, indeed, she had never even lived, and northward he would go past
the purple Mull of Cantyre; past the Clyde, where the Ayrshire sloops
danced like bobbins on the water; past the isles, where overhead drove
the wedges of the wild swans, trumpeting as on a battle-field; past the
Hebrides, where strange arctic birds whined like hurt dogs; northward
still to where the northern lights sprang like dancers in the black
winter nights; eastward and southward to where the swell of the Dogger
Bank rose, where the fish grazed like kine.... Over the great sea he
would go, as though nothing had happened, not even the snapping of a
stay--down to the sea, where the crisp winds of dawn were, and the
playful, stupid, short-sighted porpoises; the treacherous, sliding
icebergs; and the gulls that cried with the sea's immense melancholy;
and the great plum-colored whales....
PART THREE
THE MOUTH OF HONEY
§ 1