his black-oozing brogues, whilst Bill, case-hardened by much wading,
began to splice his strap, which had nearly marred all with symptoms
of fracture during the last critical tug. He had for the time being
forgotten all about the pint measure. By-and-by, however, Foxy,
flinging away the grass-wisp he had used to wipe off the mud, and
shuffling uncomfortably in his soaked boots, said with a dissatisfied
grunt, “Augh, bad luck to it for a deceptionable ould brash. I may go
now and get another sup of somethin’ or else it’s destroyed I’ll be
wid the could creeps in me bones agin mornin’; wud you take a glass,
man?”
“Sure, no,” said Bill; “I’m shankin’ into town meself as soon as I
can get th’ ould strap mended.”
“That’s not much of a concern you’ve got there,” said Foxy, pointing
to Bill’s old mug as it lay dinted side uppermost on his cockles;
“past mendin’ it is, I should say. Look-a, here’s a somethin’ better
quality you’d be welcome to.” He held out one of his measures
to Bill, who shrank back as if its glittering surface had been
incandescent with white-heat. The consciousness of what was hidden
in the depths of his basket seemed to scorch his face and dazzle his
eyes.
“Och, not at all, thank ’ee,” he said; “sure this I have usin’ does
grand; it’s the handiest one I ever owned. And I have a couple or so
of spare ones lyin’ about at home if I would be wantin’ them. Och,
not at all.”
“It’s a quare fancy you’d be havin’, then, to go about wid the likes
of that,” said Foxy. “Musha, man, how ready you are to make a lie and
tell it. Sure it’s no compliment to be takin’ such a trifle off me,
when I’ve got a basket full of them, and more-be-token I couldn’t
say how many quarts of the bastely black mud I mightn’t be after
swallyin’ down agin now if it wasn’t only for you lendin’ me a hand
out—bejabers it was the sizeablest cockle you ever landed. Bad cess
to the could wather, it’s at the bottom of every manner of mischief.
I’m steppin’ along for a drop of spirits, and I’ll lave the bit of a
mug wid you, whether or no.” He thrust it into Bill’s basket and went
off, followed jealously by Peg.
For a moment Bill stood staring blankly after them, but then an idea
suggested itself, and hoisting his basket on his arm he started in
the opposite direction.
At his goal, which was the tinker’s cabin, he found Mrs Foxy stooping
over her smoky driftwood fire, in a “quare ugly temper,” as her
family could have told him. “Whethen now and is it yourself botherin’
back agin?” she said upon seeing him; “didn’t I tell you a while ago
as plain as I could spake that we weren’t wantin’ cockles to-day?”
“Ah whisht, honey, and don’t be strikin’ up ahead of the fiddler,”
said Bill suavely. “Amn’t I just after meetin’ himself out there, and
he biddin’ me be bringin’ you up three pints for your suppers?”
Mrs Foxy’s countenance cleared up. “Well, tubbe sure,” she said;
“it’s not often the man has the wit or the money left to do anythin’
so raisonable wid this hour of the evenin’. But they’ll come in
oncommon handy, for it’s cleared out we are to-night intirely. What
all I have for the supper wouldn’t pacify a scutty wren.”
The whole Cullen family looked on with a sense of brightened
prospects while Bill dropped the cockles resonantly into a tin
can. It is part of Fate’s irony towards the tinkers that, however
plentiful may be the lack of viands in their larder, they are always
abundantly provided with cooking utensils. He meted out his three
pints with a reckless liberality which convinced Mrs Foxy that her
husband must have ordered, and paid for, a couple of quarts at least.
And when he took his departure, he successfully accomplished the
stratagem, which had been the main object of his visit, by laying
down, unperceived, Foxy’s glowing gift upon a nettle-girt stone just
inside the threshold. This done, he went on his way greatly relieved
and self-conciliated.
But he had not trudged many paces before scurrying feet pursued and
overtook him. Somebody had espied the purposely forgotten measure,
and had remarked: “Och, he’s after lavin’ his mug behind him”; upon
which somebody else rejoined: “’Deed, then, we’ve slathers of them
litterin’ about widout it, so there’s no good keepin’ it on the man.
Skyte after him wid it, Lizzie.” And Lizzie skyted, sped by a desire
to be but briefly absent from the scene of preparations for supper,
so that she tossed the mug into Bill’s basket with scant ceremony,
and was off again ere he well knew what had befallen. When it grew
clear, a leaden conviction dumped down on him that he might give
up setting his wits against Destiny. “Sure it was to be,” he said
to himself drearily, as he resumed his plodding, bent dejectedly
under a heavier weight than his moist basket. He resorted rather
frequently to this obvious truth, whence we may infer that his stock
of consolatory reflections was not extensive.
When he came once more where the road crossed the river, he,
according to custom in warm weather, climbed down the grassy bank for
a drink. On this occasion, however, his first act was to take all
his three pint measures out of the basket and set them in a row—the
one he had been given, and the one he had stolen, and the battered
old one that had, in a manner, caused the whole difficulty. Bill
eyed them gloomily as they glinted in the long rays. “Troth, it’s
themselves are the iligant lookin’ collection,” he said to himself
with some resentment, “and a grand ould slieveen’s trick it was to
be thievin’ a poor man’s bit of property, and he all the time widin
two twos of dhrowndin’ dead, scarce a stone’s-throw away. Ay, bedad,
it was so. But, musha, it was to be.” As he mused mutteringly, he
picked up a mug at random and dipped it carelessly in the stream,
but something surprising followed. For the water it scooped up
straightway plashed out of it again, as if poured through a funnel.
Of course, Bill investigated the reason of this, and the result
was a discovery which lit up his face with a broad grin. Through
some defect in the soldering, the bottom of the vessel had almost
detached itself from the rim, and flapped out like a swing door at
the slightest touch. It could, clearly, hold nothing; and it was the
stolen mug—he recognised it by the handle.
“Bless me ould bones, look at that now,” Bill said gleefully,
“you might all as well be axin’ wather to stop aisy in the holes
of me ould basket here. Sure it wouldn’t hould e’er a hap’orth of
anythin’ wet or dhry”—he dropped a handful of cockles into it, and
triumphantly watched them slip through and fall with tiny thuds on
the grass. “Ay, begorra, it’d ha’ never been a thraneen of use to man
or mortal; ne’er a brass bawbee was it worth all the time, glory be
to God.”
He gloated over its dilapidations for a while longer, and at last
poked it in behind a stone under the arch, where, for aught I know,
it may remain to the present day. Then he gathered up the rest of his
effects, and finally resumed his interrupted journey Dublin-wards,
facing a sky where the sunset grew as golden as the light in a
crocus-cup. But he no longer muttered: “It was to be.” The burden of
his meditations was: “Bedad now, it’s a good job I happened to be
widin hearin’ of their roars, or else they might be lettin’ them yet.
And belike I wouldn’t ha’ been, if it wasn’t only be raison of me
stoppin’ to—to—to look at them pint mugs.”
THE SURREE AT MAHON’S
THE SURREE AT MAHON’S
Few people, I think, can ever have been impressed by the liveliness
of little Killymeen, set in its nook among the lonesome mountain
and moorland, its one humble street forming the nucleus of a sparse
cabin-sprinkling, which strews white flecks on the far sweeping
green folds hardly plentier than hailstones on a grass plot half a
sunny hour after a July thunderstorm. Yet to Bridget Doran, the girl
who had lately taken service with the Caseys up at the Quarry Farm,
it seemed a centre of fashion and gaiety, being, indeed, the most
considerable place she had seen in all her seventeen years. For they
had been spent up at Loughdrumesk, a hamlet fully ten miles deeper
among the wildest townlands, with only a rough cart-track threading
a black bog, and climbing endless shaggy slopes, and dropping over a
purple mountain shoulder to connect it with Killymeen. She had left
behind there, three months ago, her feeble old grandfather and alert
old grandmother, in a tiny, high-perched cabin, which felt a world
too wide for its other indwellers when this third of their lives had
gone. And since then there had been much travelling of thoughts to
and fro between it and the Casey’s prim whitewashed farmhouse at the
foot of Slieve Glasarna. At first Bridget’s had made the journey as
constantly as her grandmother’s, but she was young and busy and in a
new place, and as the weeks went on she became more engrossed with
what lay immediately before her.
The Surree at Mahon’s, fixed for a day in Christmas week, was the
most exciting of the fresh prospects that unfolded themselves, and
was looked forward to with much pleased interest by Killymeen at
large. There had been no Surrees in the neighbourhood during a long
spell of bad times, but this year matters were looking brighter, and
old Barney Mahon, who had a thrifty turn and a commodious kitchen,
was encouraged to make a venture which promised fair profits at a
small risk. For a Surree, which has with quaint effect borrowed its
name from polite French, is a sort of subscription dance, little more
elaborate in its arrangements than are the kaleys, or conversazioni,
that beguile so many wintry hours in Donegal homes, when all the
dark out-of-doors hurtles and splashes with wind and rain, and the
neighbours drift into their places round some appointed hearth as
promiscuously as a wreath of dry leaves swept rustling together
by an aerial eddy. At a Surree each couple pay a shilling, but no
refreshment is expected save frugally-dispensed tea; and the fiddler
is content to scrape for a modest fee and his chances of small
coins from the dancers. Dark Hugh M‘Evoy, being Barney’s cousin,
was willing to supply the music for this occasion on specially
easy terms; and, in short, circumstances conspired to make it seem
desirable that Barney should meet the often-expressed wish of his
younger friends by announcing the first Surree of the season.
It would be Bridget’s first taste of any formal dissipation, and Rose
Casey, her master’s niece, and Kate Duffy, his ploughman’s daughter,
who lived in the yard, set her expectation on tiptoe extremely by
their accounts of like entertainments. Kate and she were to go
together, as it is the custom to attend Surrees in couples. These
often are formed of a colleen with the boy who is “spakin’” to her,
but often also a brother and sister make a pair, or any other two
friends. Rose Casey was to marry Peter O’Donoghue at Shrovetide,
so she would, of course, go with him—a fact of which she made a
little parade to Bridget, who felt, however, perfectly content with
Kate’s escort: a sweetheart of her own would have seemed, indeed, an
alarming possession. Her mistress had advanced her a shilling out of
her quarter’s wages—a whole pound—and she had expended the sixpence
left after securing her admission to the Surree upon a splendid red
glass brooch, which made her think her equipment very complete.
But just when everything seemed gliding most smoothly towards the
delightful goal, an obstacle suddenly cropped up and threatened
to overthrow all her plans with one disastrous jolt. On a certain
frost-spangled morning the postman brought to Bridget a letter,
whose contents agreed with her wishes as ill as a dash of vinegar
would have done with the thick cream which she was churning when the
mail arrived. Her grandmother wrote to say that “she thought bad of
Biddy to be trampin’ the long way her lone from Killymeen to their
place, and that old Bill Molloy was slippin’ over wid his pony and
a gatherin’ of eggs to the Magamore on next Thursday morning, and’d
give her a lift if she’d start along wid him when he would be goin’
back. So Biddy had a right to ax lave of her mistress, and come home
wid ould Bill, who’d turn a bit out of his way to pick her up? and
real glad they’d be to set eyes on her again.” For Mrs Casey had
promised Biddy her choice of three days in Christmas week to spend
at home, dairy work being slack. Bridget had looked forward to the
holiday with a glow of pleasure, and meant to take it on the Friday,
which would be Christmas Eve, and the day after the Surree. But her
grandmother’s injunction was not compatible with this arrangement.
“Sure I’d miss all the fun and everythin’ if I took off and went
wid ould Bill—I wish he and his baste of an ugly skewbald ’d keep
themselves out of botherin’ where they arn’t wanted,” she said,
half-crying, to her friends Rose and Kate, as she showed them the
letter in the kitchen.
“Musha, good gracious,” said Rose, “you wouldn’t ever think of goin’?
Just bid the ould man step along wid himself, and say you’ll come on
Friday.”
“But me grandmother’d be rale vexed if I done that, and he after
goin’ out of his road to call for me,” said Bridget doubtfully.
“Well, then,” said Kate, “you might write and tell her not to send
him. This is only Tuesday; there’s plenty of time yet, and I’ve a
stamp in me box this long while you’re welcome to.”
“Ay, to be sure,” said Rose, “and say me aunt can’t spare you
convanient afore Friday.”
“But,” said Bridget, looking disconcerted, “I’m after sendin’ her
word be Judy Flynn that I’d got lave to come any day at all this
week.”
“Oh, botheration to it,” said Rose. “Then say you’re too bad with
a cowld, and couldn’t be thravellin’ that far. Bedad, I heard you
coughin’ this mornin’ fit to fall in pieces like the head of the
witherdy geranium there. Morebetoken, the red one in the windy
corner’s dhroppin’ itself into the pan of buttermilk where you’ve set
it; you’d better be movin’ it out of that.”
“I have a heavy cowld on me sure enough,” said Bridget, coughing to
convince herself, but her disconcerted expression remained, and she
fidgetted about uneasily. “For the matter of writin’,” she said, “you
see the time I was gettin’ me schoolin’ I did be mostly mindin’ the
sheep, and I can make some sort of an offer at the readin’ if it’s
wrote pretty big, but writin’ oneself is quare nigglety work.”
“Mercy on us, girl alive, if that’s all that ails you, I’ll write
a letter for you meself in a minyit and a half,” said Rose with
alacrity. “Bedad will I. Sure I’ve wrote to Peter times and again
when he was stoppin’ away at Manchester. So don’t bother your head
about it; lave the regulation of it to me. I’ve plenty of paper
meself, and Kate’ll give me her stamp.”
Bridget agreed to this plan, though not without some qualms of
conscience, which made her refrain guiltily from inquiring about
the details of its execution, thereby giving Rose a free hand,
of which she availed herself without much scruple. She had an
imaginative turn of mind, and a taste for fiction, so her story grew
under her scratching pen until in the end she produced a letter
purporting to come not from Bridget, but from herself, and describing
Bridget’s indisposition as not a simple cold, but an attack of
“plussery-newmoney.” This formidable complaint would hinder her
from returning with Bill Molloy. “But she’ll come,” wrote Rose, “as
soon as ever she’s able. And that won’t be before Friday anyway,
if she overs it at all.” The last clause struck her as giving an
effective completeness to the composition, and she read it over with
a complacency which did not take into account how it might be spelled
out in the bleak little hillside cabin off away at Loughdrumesk.
The evening of the Surree arrived in due course, and with it a
flutter of snow, swirling on rough and unruly blasts. Silver-white
threads and stitches had begun to embroider the purple folds of
Slieve Glasarna before the mists descended muffling and blurring;
and the paths crunched crisply under brogues, and made cold clutches
at bare feet by the time that the neighbours were approaching Barney
Mahon’s door. They remarked to one another that it was hardy weather,
and added that they were apt to have it “sevare,” which is some
degree worse than hardy. Few people, however, had been daunted into
staying at home, and there was much shaking of powder flakes out of
shawl-folds and off rough coat-sleeves at the entrance to Barney’s
lustily flickering room.
When Rose and Kate and Bridget got there, which they did as soon as
ever they could finish “readying up” after tea, most of the company
had assembled, and dancing was about to begin. Rose’s temper was
somewhat ruffled because Peter O’Donoghue had not kept his promise
of coming to escort her. But his sisters now hastened to explain how
he had been delayed by the sudden illness of their calf. “Howane’er
the baste was comin’ round finely when they left,” they reported,
and Peter would be after them in no time. So his _fiancée_ was
appeased, and contented herself provisionally with Larry Sullivan for
a partner. “Faix, now, it’s on’y an odd turn the rest of us boys gets
wid you these times,” he said to her gallantly as the fiddler struck
up. “Ne’er a chance we have at all, unless when the luck keeps him
that’s luckier away.”
Do not suppose that the Surree danced jigs. Later on in the
evening a couple might stand up and perform one while the others
were recovering their breath; but at the outset it was a vigorous
round dance that began to gyrate with a step which, though perhaps
not recognised in any academy, kept time to Hugh’s music with much
accuracy, and made light of the difficulties opposed by an uneven mud
floor. The crockery on the dresser jingled merrily to the rhythmical
beat of their feet; and each pair of bobbing heads that passed in
front of it, might be seen to make an abrupt dip down and up again.
This was caused by an unusually deep hollow which occurred in that
part of the floor, and Barney Mahon, looking on with the elders
from their circle round the hearth, observed it and said—“Begob, I
must see to having that houle filled up before next time, or else
somebody’ll be trippin’ up in it, and gettin’ a quare toss.”
The other spectators sat well content with their share of the
entertainment. Pungently-puffing cutty pipes solaced the men, and
the women kept their knitting-needles twinkling; in fact, they
would almost as soon have left off breathing by way of rest and
relaxation. For further amusement they had the affairs of the
countryside to discuss, enlivened by an occasional anecdote or
riddle. Dan Goligher had just propounded one of the latter which
successfully puzzled everybody who had not heard it before—
_A brown lough
Wid a white strand,
Sorra the ship could sail around it,
But I can hould it in my hand_;
and he was triumphantly explaining, “Sure a cup of tea,” when two
people came bolting in at the door, which they forthwith began to
secure behind them, as if they were shutting out some deadly peril.
They said nothing, but their speechless hurry was more suggestive
than words.
“Whethen now, Peter O’Donoghue and Ned Kinsella, what’s took you at
all to be flouncin’ in on the people that a-way?” said Barney Mahon,
somewhat affronted at their unceremonious entrance and dealings
with his fastenings and furniture. “That’s a great ould slammin’ of
the door you have—and what for would you be jammin’ the bench again
it, unless you’re intendin’ the next body that comes thro’ it to be
breakin’ his shins?”
“Troth, I on’y hope it may—and its neck too, between us and harm—if
it’s offering to come in on us—I do so,” said Peter O’Donoghue,
panting. He left his comrade to finish barricading the door, and
pushed himself farther into the room, until several groups interposed
between him and the dangerous point. “After us it may be this minyit
of time,” he said. “Och, but that was the quare fright I got; the
saints look down upon us this night!”
“It’s herself below at th’ ould gate there,” said Ned Kinsella,
who was calmer than Peter, though evidently much alarmed. “And
more-be-token it’s not inside she is this night, but sittin’ crouched
up on the bank be the path, and the grab she made at Peter going by;
’deed, I thought he’d never get his coat-tail wrenched out of her
ould hand.”
“It might as well ha’ been caught in a rat-trap the way she held on,”
said Peter. “I give you me word me hair’s standin’ on end yet, fit to
rise me hat off the roof of me head. What wid that and the onnathural
screeches she let, I won’er you didn’t hear them here. And it’s my
belief she set off leggin’ after us—goodness preserve us—on’y I was
afraid of me life to look round and see.”
These tidings spread general consternation among the company, as
under the circumstances they well might do. For only a few hundred
yards down the loaning lay an ancient burying-ground, with its
ruined chapel and weed-entangled tombstones, a place whose ghostly
reputation had long been established at Killymeen. In particular
the wraith of a little old woman was often to be seen of an evening
peering out through the rusty gate-bars, and sometimes stretching
forth a fearsome hand to pluck at the unwary passer-by. But her
appearance out on the roadside was a new development, and one which
made Peter and Ned’s report unpleasant hearing for people who would
presently be obliged to take that route home. The dance came to a
standstill, and in its stead a series of dismal ghost-stories began
to circle round the room. Perhaps the most gruesome of them was Nick
Carolan’s. He related how he had once lived in a place where there
was in the middle of the yard a deep well, out of which on certain
moon-lit nights a dark figure would emerge and go gliding round and
round it, making a wider and wider circuit, until she reached the
house, at whose door she rapped loudly as she passed by. And whenever
that happened there would be a death in the family before the
twelve-month was out as sure as fate. A general shudder followed this
_dénouement_, and old Mrs Linders made a particular application of it
by remarking gloomily that it was a poor case to have the likes of
such crathurs about; but Mrs Coleman, a comely matron, who continued
to sit by the fire unperturbed, said placidly in a pause, “Sorra a
bit of harm there’s in it this night I’m a-thinkin’. If the lads seen
anythin’, it’s apt to ha’ just been some poor body after missin’ her
way in the snow.”
“Troth and bedad, then it was the quare body altogether,” Peter
asseverated, “and the hair of me head, as I was tellin’ you,
bristlin’ straight wid the dhread of her the first minyit I come nigh
the place.”
“Ah, sure, some people’s as ready at that as a dog at cockin’ his
ears,” said Joey Nolan. “Maybe we’d a right to go look is there e’er
a one in it. Some crathur might be strayin’ about perishin’, and it
snowin’ again as thick as sheep’s wool.”
“Begor you won’t persuade me to go foolin’ along wid you,” said
Peter; “I couldn’t be gettin’ my heels out of it fast enough. May
the saints have me sowl, but I thought I’d lose me life afore ever I
landed inside—and here I’ll stop. Nobody need be axin’ me, for divil
a fut I’ll stir.”
“Good people are scarce,” Joe observed sarcastically; but Peter
went on in a half-complacent tone, “One while it’ll be afore I’m
the better of that frightenin’ I got. Every mortal bit of me’s in a
thrimble wid it yet.”
“Musha, then, you gaby, can’t you whisht about it, instead of to be
tellin’ everybody the sort of ould polthroon you are?” Rose Casey
whispered to him fiercely, ready to cry with mortification as she
saw significant smiles passing round at the expense of her happily
unconscious betrothed.
As she spoke, the door resounded with a heavy thump, which made
those who were standing next it hop back with a scarcely dignified
haste. Some of them tried to carry it off by pretending that they
were merely getting out of one another’s way, while some shrieked
unfeignedly, and above all ejaculations rose Peter O’Donoghue’s
voice, shrill with undissembled terror, saying: “Oh to goodness,
don’t open it for your lives. Run that other form again it, you
that are widin raich. Mercy be among us, she’s apt to have us all
destroyed.”