CON THE QUARE ONE
Among the unfamiliar faces that show themselves now and then at
Lisconnel, some make no second appearance, never coming our way again,
but passing out of our ken as utterly as if their route lay along a
tangent, or the branch of an hyperbola, or other such unreverting line.
We seldom, it is true, get proof positive, as in the case of the
Dermodys, father and son, that they will no more return. Generally their
doing so any day may be supposed possible as long as anybody remembers
to suppose it. But some come back at more or less regular intervals,
like periodic comets, so that if a certain time elapses without bringing
one of them, the neighbours say they wonder what's took him at all,
while some reappear erratically enough to preclude any calculations upon
the subject. Of this latter class was Con the Quare One, who, after his
first arrival, on a summer's evening, now more than a quarter of a
century since, became a rather frequent visitor, usually stopping for a
few days at least, before he resumed his travels. It was conjectured
that these were very extensive, though perhaps less so than Mad Bell's.
But it was even more difficult to obtain a satisfactory report of them
from him than from her. Mrs. M'Gurk said he was "so took up with his own
notions, that he mostly knew no better where he'd been, or what he'd
been doin', than a baste drivin' home from a fair; you might as soon be
axin' questions of one as the other; though when Con chose to give his
mind to it, he knew what he was about as well as anybody else. Sure if
you wanted to know which way he was after comin', as likely as not he'd
talk about nothin' on'y the sorts of clouds he'd been watchin' goin' by
over his head; and 'twould take a cliver body to tell from that what
road he might ha' had under his feet." This incommunicativeness made him
a disappointing guest sometimes by the firesides, where he was finding a
night's lodging; though he might eke out his conversation with a little
twangling on his fiddle, in which the melody would be quite as vague as
his narratives. As for his own earlier history, he never gave any clear
account of it, probably having none to give, and the neighbours'
speculations upon this point were somewhat wide of the mark, which was
not surprising, as what stray hints he did let fall could be very
deviously construed. The opinion most commonly received held that he had
"took and run off from home, and he but a gossoon, be raison of doin'
some quare bit of mischief, and had a mind yet to be keepin' out of his
people's way; though, like enough, they weren't throublin' their heads
about him be now;" a theory which was not entirely in accordance with
facts.
Con was not, I believe, an especially quare one at his first start in
life, begun under the thatch of a little whitewashed cottage, dotted
down among grass-fields beside a clear, brown river, which kept his
mother busy exhorting him and his half-dozen brethren to not be falling
in and drowning themselves on her. Her days were haunted by
apprehensions of that catastrophe, which, however, was not included in
the plot of her life's drama. Con's chosen bugbear was the bridge which
bestrode the river close by, and beneath the arch of which he had once
happened to be while a cart passed overhead. For the lumbering rumble
had been an appalling experience, which he shuddered to repeat. Yet he
lacked the moral courage to rouse his elders' derision by an avowal, so
he followed, and did not let on, whenever their wading and dabbling
brought them into the hollow-sounding shade. Despite this daily anxiety,
Con spent his earliest years light-heartedly enough, with no stinting of
pitaties--none at least that reached the childer--and ample scope for
sports and pastimes. But when he was still very small, his grandmother,
lately widowed and on her way to a new abode, stopped a night with her
married daughter, and begged that she might bring home one of the
grandchildren with her, "just to take the could edge off her
lonesomeness," a request which could not well be refused. And Con seemed
the appropriate person to go, as the old woman considered that "the dark
head of hair he had on him was the moral of his poor grandfather's afore
it turned white." Therefore the swiftly running mysteriously murmuring
river flowed away out of his life, and with it vanished all the faces
and voices and comradeship that had made up his world.
At first he fretted for them rather persistently, but after a time
adapted himself to circumstances, and contented himself with the
grass-bordered, hedge-muffled lane, which had become the scene of his
adventures, fraternizing with the reserved fawn-coloured goat and
demonstrative terrier, who alone took an intelligent interest in them.
For his grandmother was satisfied with the sense of having him "playin'
around handy," and could not be counted company.
But after nearly a twelvemonth had passed, Con seemed one day to be
seized with a fresh fit of homesickness. It was a brilliant late summer
morning, yet to old Mrs. Quin's perplexity, he continued to sit on his
little stool, with his slice of griddle-cake half-crumbled in his lap,
and answered her suggestions that he should finish his breakfast, and
run out to play, by irrelevant requests for his own ould mammy. He
wanted her cruel bad, he said, and there was nothin' ailed him, and he
wouldn't like to look for blackberries along the hedge--or to throw
stones for Bran--or even to be given a whole ha'penny to go buy himself
a grand sugarstick down at the shop--he only wanted his mammy. Such was
his attitude and refrain all that day and the next. After which his
grandmother said to her neighbour, Judy Ahern, that she couldn't tell
what had come over the child, and he had her fairly distracted
listening to him.
And Mrs. Ahern said: "Maybe he might be gettin' somethin'; there's a
terrible dale of sickness about. But he doesn't look very bad to say.
Arrah now, Con avic, why wouldn't you run out and play a bit this lovely
mornin'? Wantin' your mammy? Sure that's foolish talk, and she nobody
can tell how far away this minyit. It's just a notion you have....
'Deed, ma'am, I dunno, but maybe you'd a right to let him home to her,
or else he might get frettin' and mopin' himself into the fever. He's a
poor little crathur; the face of him this instant isn't the width of a
ha'penny herrin'."
"And he so continted," said Mrs. Quin, "until he took his fantigue. Rael
quare it is."
"Most things do be quare and ugly these times," said Mrs. Ahern,
"Goodness help us all. There's poor Mrs. Duff thravellin' off to-morra,
to go stay wid her brother at Gortnakil. Very belike she'd take him
along; and he'd be aisy landed home, once he'd got that far."
And on the morrow Con did actually set off with Mrs. Duff, feeling half
appeased and half compunctious, as people do when they get what they
have clamoured for; sorry a little to lose sight of Bran, staring
open-mouthed after him down the lane; and relieved through all by a
vague sense that he was going whither his heart-strings pulled. If he
had been a more experienced traveller, he might have noticed some signs
that things were, as Judy Ahern had said, out of joint. It was
harvest-time, and the weather was not wet, though dull and chilly, but
nobody was working in the fields. Nothing seemed to move in them, as
they lay deserted, except trails of a white mist that drifted low among
the furrows, where the potato-haulms looked strangely discoloured,
speckled and blackened, as if a shrivelling flame had run through them
all, charring and strewing pale ashes. The air was full of a peculiar
odour, heavy and acrid, the very life-breath of decay. The roads were
deserted too. For miles nobody would be met, and then a small stationary
crowd of people would appear, collected it would seem without any more
purpose than cattle huddled together in a storm, and as dumb as they,
not giving so much as a "fine mornin'" to the passer-by. Other crowds
they fell in with now and again, pacing slowly along, and these always
had a heavy burden carried among them, and sometimes women keening.
Once the car-horse shied violently at some dark, long thing, that was
stretched out by the footpath, and Mrs. Duff crossed herself and said,
"God be good to us," and the driver said without looking off his reins:
"He's lyin' there since yisterday, and I seen another above about the
four-roads, and I comin' past this mornin'."
Con did not give much heed to these incidents; but one scene in his
journey impressed him strongly. It was at the small town where they
slept the night, and it happened while they waited in the broad main
street next morning for their car to pick them up, as Mrs. Duff
travelled by a rather disjointed system of lifts in vehicles that were
going her road. There were few people about, and Con was intensely
admiring a gaudy tea-chest in the window of the shop before which they
stood, when a great roar began to swell up round the corner, with a
lumbering of wheels heard fitfully through it. Presently a large crowd
came struggling into sight; a street full of men, women, and children,
surrounding a blue, red-wheeled cart, piled high with dusty-looking
white sacks. Half-a-dozen dark-uniformed policemen were trying to haul
on the horse, and keep between the cart and the crowd, whose shout
generally sounded like: "Divil a fut its to quit--divil a fut." It was a
crowd that looked as if it had somehow got more than its due share of
glittering eyes--in mistake, apparently, for other things.
As the cart came crawling past where Mrs. Duff and Con stood, a furious
rush so tilted it over that the horse fell, breaking a shaft, and some
of the topmost sacks tumbled off, dropping with dull thuds, like dead
bodies, upon the damp cobblestone pavement. Con saw a little cloud of
white dust rise up over each as it dumped down, and melt away on the
air, making him wonder to himself: "Is it smokin' hot they are?" But in
another moment they were hidden for a while by a wild wave of the crowd,
which threw itself tumultuously upon them. One of the sacks burst,
spilling the soft flour in flakes, and round it the jostling and
writhing grew fiercest. The faces that got nearest to it looked hardly
the whiter for their smears and powdering.
A young woman, all black eyes and elf locks, with a baby wrapped in her
shawl, crouching low and making a desperate long arm, grasped a covetous
handful, which spirted away wastefully between her clenched fingers. She
moistened some of this in a puddle as she knelt, and held the paste to
her baby's mouth. But its head was drooping wearily aside, and its lips
did not move when she touched them. "Ait it up, me heart's jewel," she
said; "ait it up, mother's little bird. 'Deed, then, but you're the
conthráry little toad. It's breakin' me heart you'll be roarin' when
I've ne'er a bit to give you, and sleepin' dead, when I've the chance to
feed you." She was beginning to shake it, but a young man who stood
behind her put his hand on her shoulder, saying: "Whisht, whisht, you
crathur, for God's sake. It's done wid wantin' and cryin', and a good
job for it too, the Lord knows." Then the girl shrieked again and again,
and the people about her said from one to the other: "It's her child's
starved on her." And an old man caught up the little body, and held it
high over his head, shouting, "Boys, boys--look yous at that. There's
the way Henderson's cartin' off the childer's bit of food to make his
fine fortin in England." And the crowd shouted back through a surge of
curses: "Divil a fut will he this day."
A very little old woman seized hold of an outlying sack and tried to
lift it, a ludicrously impossible feat, at witnessing which a cripple
leaner than his crutches laughed boisterously, saying, "Och, good luck
to you, granny. You're makin' a great offer at it entirely. Is it often
you do be liftin' up the Hill of Howth? More power to your elbow." And
the crowd yelled with laughter too.
At this moment there was a prodigious clatter of hoofs on the stones,
and round the corner whirled a squadron of hussars, all in their blue
and yellow like a flight of macaws, coming to the rescue of Mr.
Henderson's sacks. But Con saw scarcely more than the first confused
onset, for somebody snatched him up and hurried him into a dark passage.
The last sight he had of the fray was of a glossy black horse plunging
frantically back from a cloud of the flour flung into his face, and
rearing higher and higher, until he fell over with a terrific scrambling
crash. Con particularly noticed the white gloves of the rider, and
thought to himself, "He's been grabbin' the flour too." And the women
about him said, "Och, murdher, the baste--the man's apt to be kilt!"
When Mrs. Duff and Con emerged again all was quiet in the street--two or
three women had even stolen back, and were scraping up the white
patches--and he was driven away on a car for what seemed to him a vast
length of time. But at last, as he peered listlessly out on glimpses of
the dreary, strange road caught between the shawled heads of two other
passengers, his eyes suddenly fell on something delightfully familiar.
It was a grey ruined mill which stood by the river, not many hundred
yards from his home. All at once he seemed to be set down in the middle
of his old life as if he had never left it, only with a charming
freshness superadded. A delicious feeling came over him as he watched
the clear, sky-glinting loops unwind themselves in the grass while the
car jogged along. There were the big stones over the edges of which the
brown water broke into dancing crests of crystal bubbles when the river
was full, and the deep pools under the hollow banks where they had seen
the trout that was the size of a young whale, and the twisted wild
cherry tree from beneath which the eddies sometimes twirled away bearing
fleets of frail, snowy petals. And Johnny and Katty and the rest might
all come into view paddling round any corner. When the car stopped at
the gap through which you got into the field just behind his cottage, he
was almost beside himself with joy, as his fellow-travellers, who were
less elated, lifted him down and handed him his bundle, and bade him
run straight in to his mother like an iligant child.
He did run down the steep little footpath at the top of his speed, and
round the corner of the house, and in through the open door. The room
looked very dusk to him coming in from the mellow afternoon sunshine,
and the first thing he noticed was that the fire had gone out. The
hearth was a blackness sprinkled with white ashes, which made him think
of the flour spilt on the dark ground. Next he saw his mother sitting on
a stool by the hearth with her head leaned against the wall, and his
father's old caubeen hanging on its nail above, a very unusual sight at
that hour. Con rushed at her head-foremost, saying, "Och, mammy darlint,
I'm come home this long way, and they was fightin' wid all the soldiers
and spillin' the flour, and his horse rared up on his hind legs till he
fell off his feet. And where's daddy if he isn't workin'? And musha what
for is Nannie and Johnny in bed?" He pulled her shawl because she did
not look round at him, and immediately she dropped down prone on the
floor as heavily and helplessly as he had seen the white sacks fall. She
had in truth been dead for hours, but Con ran out screaming that he was
after killing his mammy, and nothing would persuade him otherwise.
Vainly the neighbours averred that "the crathur was starvin' herself
this great while to keep a bit for the childer, let alone her heart
bein' broke frettin' after her poor husband and little Pat, who were
took from her wid the fever, both of them the one day." Con's mind was
shut fast into the dreadful moment when he had pulled her shawl and she
had fallen down, and therein it abode, sorely afflicted, until a spell
of brain fever intervening let it loose into a region of vaguer and more
varied dreams.
And when he had struggled through this illness, nobody well knew how or
why, he woke up to find his world swept very bare. Father, mother, and
all his brethren, except little Katty, were vanished out of it, and as
it came looming back to him thus depeopled, its aspect was immeasurably
desolate. Nor did his loss end here, for from this time dated the
springing up among his neighbours of a suspicion that he was not all
there, a suspicion which developed into an accepted article of belief,
the more readily, perhaps, because nobody remained for whom such a fact
would have had a personal bitterness, the old grandmother having slipped
away out of her lonesomeness before his recovery. It would not be easy
to explain how it was that Con grew up into that privileged and
disfranchised person who is spoken of as "a crathur," and whose
proceedings are more or less exempt from criticism. People often said of
him that he had plenty of sense _of his own_, and the remark was to some
extent explanatory, as a certain singularity in his way of viewing
things even more than an occasional inconsequence and flightiness in his
sayings and doings tended to establish the reputation for eccentricity
which followed him closely as a shadow, and set an impalpable barrier
between himself and his kind. As he advanced in life this was
strengthened by his increasing fondness for his own society, but he did
not take to his solitary wanderings until after his sister Katty married
young Peter Meehan and emigrated to New York. It was suggested to him
that he should accompany them, but he sat looking meditative for a
while, and then said, "How far might it be from this to the States?"
"I dunno rightly," said his informant, "but a goodish step it's apt to
be, for people's better than a couple of weeks sailin' there, I'm
tould."
Con meditated a little more before he put another question. "Would you
be widin hearin' out there of the folk talkin' foolish?" he inquired.
"Why, tub-be sure, man, what 'ud hinder you that you wouldn't hear them
talkin' same as anywheres else?"
"Bedad, then," said Con, "it seems a long way to be thravellin' to a
counthry as close as that. Sure, if you take out for a stravade over the
bog here, you'll be throubled wid nothin' the len'th of the day on'y the
curlew, or maybe a couple of saygulls skirlin'--raisonable enough. I'll
be apt to stay where I am."
Con, who was a person of many moods, happened to be in an unusually
cynical one just then; however, he adhered to his resolution, and when
his sister had gone he adopted a life of long tramps. Somebody had given
him an old fiddle, and this he carried with him, though chiefly as a
sort of badge, as his performances were but feeble, and he could turn
his hand to many other things when he found it necessary to do so. His
rovings had gone on for several years before they led him to Lisconnel.
In those days he was a strange, small figure, who wore a coat too large
for him, and a hat set so far back on his head that its brim made a sort
of halo to frame his face, which had a curious way of looking fitfully
young and old, with a shining of violet blue eyes and a puckering of
fine-drawn wrinkles. A small boy and a little old ancient man would seem
to change places half a dozen times in the course of a single
conversation. Even his hair was a puzzle, regarded as an indication of
age, because its black had become streaked with white in such a fashion
that its apparent hue varied according to what came uppermost in
accidents of ruffling and smoothing. A neighbour once said of him that
he was the living moral of a little ould lepreehawn that they were after
making a couple of sizes too big by mistake; and my own impression is
that further opportunities for observing specimens of the race would be
likely to bear out this statement.
The summer evening on which he was first seen at Lisconnel had followed
a very fine day. In the heart of its golden afternoon Mrs. O'Driscoll
trusted her youngest son Terence out on the bog with his brothers and
sisters and some other children, the eldest of whom, Johanna Harvey, the
Ryans' orphan niece, was credited with wit enough to keep the party out
of the holes. They wandered off rather more widely than usual, along the
foot of the hill, lured on by a sprinkling of dainty white mushrooms,
which they found, generally with yells, studded here and there. At last
they sat down on a bank to peel their delicate, pink-quilted buttons,
all of them except Terence, who was not yet of an age to have acquired a
taste for mushrooms. He had been carried most of the way, still he had
toddled further than he was accustomed to do, and his unwonted exertions
led him to curl himself up behind a sun-smitten rock and fall asleep
with a quietness which presently brought upon him the fate of out of
sight out of mind. After a while, however, Johanna did bethink herself
of him, and was just on the point of wondering aloud where little
Terence had gone to, when her cousin Thady turned her thoughts into a
different channel by suddenly saying, "What was there in it before the
beginnin' of everythin'?"
Thady was a small, anxious-looking child, whose pale and peaky face his
mother often likened regretfully to a hap'orth of soap after a week's
washing. He had spent a surprisingly considerable part of his six years
in metaphysical speculations, and was always disposed to make a personal
grievance of the difficulties in which they constantly landed him. His
tone was now rather peremptory as he repeated, "What was there in it
before the beginnin' of everythin'?"
"Sure, nothin' at all," said his elder brother Peter, to whom the answer
seemed quite simple and satisfactory. But Johanna looked as if she had
caught sight of some distant object which provoked hard staring.
"Then what was there before the beginnin' of nothin'?" pursued Thady.
"Dunno," said Peter, indifferently, "unless it was more nothin'."
"Sure not at all; that wouldn't be the way of it," Johanna said,
dreamily, yet with decision. "If there was nothin' but nothin' in it,
there'd ha' been apt to not be e'er an anythin' ever. Where'd it ha'
come from? Don't be tellin' the child lies, Peter. Why, for one thing,"
she said, her tone sharpening polemically and taking a touch of triumph,
"there was always God Almighty in it, and the Divil. Maybe that's what
you call nothin'."
Peter evaded this point, saying, "Well, anyway, those times, if there
was just the two of them in it, and no harm to be doin', let alone any
good people to know the differ, it's on'y a quare sort of Divil he'd
get the chance of bein'. I wouldn't call him anythin' _much_."
"He wouldn't be so very long, you may depind," Johanna pronounced.
"Musha, sure the Divil couldn't stay contint anywhile at all till he'd
take to some manner of ould mischief 'ud soon show you the sort of
crathur he was--it's his nathur. I should suppose the first thing he'd
go do 'ud be makin' all the sorts of hijjis roarin' great bastes and
snakes and riptiles that he could think of, and the disolit black wet
bogs wid the could win' over them fit to cut you in two when you're
sleepin' out at night," said Johanna, whose ten years of life had
brought her into some rough places before her adoption by her Aunt
Lizzie Ryan, "and the workhouses--bad luck to the whole of them--where
there's rats in the cocoa, and mad people frightenin' you, and the cross
matrons, and the pólis, and the say to dhrownd the fishin'-boats in, and
dirty ould naygurs that put dacint people out of their little
places----"
"If it had been me," said Peter, "I'd ha' been very apt to just hit him
a crack on the head when I noticed what he was at, and bid him lave thim
sort of consthructions alone."
"I dunno the rights of it entirely," Johanna admitted, "but it's a
cruel pity he ever got the chance to be carryin' on the way he's done."
"Ah, sure it can't be helped now at all events," said Peter, who was for
the time being not inclined to quarrel seriously with the scheme of
things, as he basked on the warm grassy bank, where the wild bees were
humming in the thyme, happily remote from the grim House and the hungry
sea.
"Belike it can't," said Johanna; "but 'twould be real grand if it could.
Suppose I was out on the hill there some fine evenin', and I not
thinkin' of anythin' in partic'lar, and all of a suddint I'd see a
great, big, ugly, black-lookin' baste of a feller, the size of forty,
skytin' away wid himself along the light of the sky over yonder, where
the sun was about goin' down, and his shadder the len'th of an awful
tall tree slippin' streelin' after him, till it was off over the edge of
the world like, and that same 'ud be just the Divil, that they were
after bundlin' out of it body and bones, the way he wouldn't get
meddlin' and makin' and annoyin' people any more. So wid that I'd take a
race home and be tellin' you all the iligant thing was after happenin'.
And in the middle of it who'd come landin' in but me father and mother,
and little Dan. And then, if it isn't the grand cup of tay I'd be
makin' her, ay begorra would I, and a sugarstick to stir it wid."
Johanna's vision of the millennium was broken in upon querulously by
Thady. "Sure I know all about God Almighty and the Divil," he said
comprehensively, "I was on'y axin' what was in it before the beginnin'
of everythin', and you're not tellin' me that."
"There's a dale of things little spalpeens like you wouldn't be tould
the rights of at all," said Peter, loftily, being rather annoyed at the
interruption. He would have liked to hear some further details about the
felicity to be inaugurated by that exquisite cup of tea. "Go on
romancin', Han."
But Johanna, who felt that this assumption of superior knowledge was an
uncandid subterfuge, and yet had not magnanimity enough to disclaim it
on her own part, remained uneasily silent for a moment, and then only
said: "Sure it's time we was gettin' home." This they accordingly
proceeded to do, and had gone most of the distance before it occurred to
anybody that little Terence O'Driscoll was not with them. Then, after a
superficial and unproductive search among the scattered stones and
bushes, they thought it expedient to run back in a fright, and report
that the child had gone and got lost, unless by any odd chance he'd come
home along wid himself.
Thus it was that when Terence wakened from his nap, he found himself
deserted, and thrown completely upon his own resources. As he had not
been quite three years in amassing these, they were on the whole but
scanty. In fact, he was helplessly unable to realise a world with
nothing in it except endlessly swelling up slopes of furzy grass, no
Molly nor Micky for him to trot after, and to carry him wherever they
were going, whenever he intimated the desirability of that step by
abruptly plumping down on the way. So he set off in a great hurry to
escape from such a wilderness. He still walked with a wobbling stagger,
and his long frock of whity-brown homespun kept on tripping him up,
which retarded his progress. But he was not at all long in mentally
reaching the precincts of a wild panic which rose up and seized him in a
grip never to be quite forgotten, though only a few desperate minutes
ensued before he stumped blindly against Con's legs. It was so
unutterable a relief to have come on somebody who could hear him roar,
that Terence ceased roaring immediately, and let Con pick him up
without demur. The appearance of Molly or Micky would, no doubt, have
been more satisfactory, but this stranger man might serve well enough at
a pinch to carry him home, which it was inconceivable that anybody of
such a size could be unable or unwilling to do. As for Con, the
inference he drew from Terence's dimensions was that his family and
friends were probably not far to seek; and he recognised the shrewdness
of the conjecture when he presently espied a shawled figure coming
swiftly towards him over the edge of a slope, with the amber of the
sunset glowing behind her, and her long shadow sliding on far below her,
as if it were in an even greater hurry than herself.
Mrs. O'Driscoll's head was among the golden sunbeams, but her heart had
gone down to the very bottom of the blackest and deepest hole in the
bog. For towards that dreadful goal she had seen a small form toddling
ever since the other children came home alarmingly late with the news
that Terence had got lost on them, and they couldn't find a bit of him,
high ways or low ways. She was so overjoyed at her rescue that her
delighted gratitude cast a sort of glamour around Con, which never
wholly faded away. Ever after the appearance of his queer figure called
up in her mind a dim reminiscence of the moment when she had seen it for
the first time come into view, laden with what she well knew was Terence
sitting bolt upright in a manner that betokened him to have experienced
neither drowning nor any other disaster.
As Con put the child into her arms, where it seemed to fit into a niche
specially designed for it, he said: "Sure now, ma'am, when I seen him
stumpin' along his lone, and he about the heighth of a sizable boholawn
(ragweed), sez I to meself there was apt to be somebody lookin' after
him. For bedad it seems to me mostwhiles the littler a thing is the more
people there'll be consaitin' they can't get on widout it; and that's
lucky, belike, or else it might aisy get lost entirely, like a
threepenny bit rowled away into a crack. But if you come to considher,"
Con said, hurrying on lest his allusion to the coin should be construed
as a hint that he thought of payment for his services, "most people's
lookin' out for somebody, or else somebody's lookin' out for them. It's
on'y a few odd ones like meself that makes no differ here or there. I
won'er now is the raison that it's after losin' ourselves we are in a
manner--I've I've me notions about that. For first I think I dunno if
anythin's rightly lost that nobody's lookin' to find, and then I think I
dunno but you might as well say you couldn't find anythin' you weren't
after losin' and lookin' for, and that's not the truth be no manner of
manes."
"And you after findin' the child," said Mrs. O'Driscoll.
"Sure not at all, ma'am," said Con, modestly, deprecating not the
statement but the implied praise. "Small thanks to me for that, when the
woful bawls of it you might have heard a mile o' ground. You could as
aisy ha' missed a little clap of thunder, if a one was be chance comin'
tatterin' along between the furzes, wid the head of it bobbin' up now
and agin, and makin' all the noise it could conthrive. Troth it's the
quare bawls _I_ might be lettin' these times afore the rest of them 'ud
hear me, for if it's lost I am, I'm strayin' a terrible long while;
they're apt to disremimber they ever owned me. I do be thinkin', ma'am,
that if you forgit what you've lost, 'tis maybe all the one thing as if
you'd found it; and after that agin I do be thinkin' maybe 'twould be
liker losin' it twyste over. It's quare the diff'rint notions there is
about most things. And a good job too, or else what would you be
considherin' in your mind, when you was thrampin' around? 'Deed now if
you couldn't be supposin' they were this way and that way, and argufyin'
over them wid yourself in your own mind, 'twould be like as if you took
and swallied down a lump of 'baccy instead of chewin' it, and what sort
of benefit or plisure 'ud you git out of that?"
This was Con's first bit of philosophising at Lisconnel, and it was not
his last by many, as the place became one of his favourite resorts. His
liking for it was perhaps partly due to the fact that its inhabitants
received him on more equal terms than were generally accorded to him
elsewhere; and this again may be largely attributed to the influence of
Mrs. O'Driscoll. For her grateful feelings towards the restorer of
Terence made her loth to recognise any deficiencies in him, and her
neighbours, soon perceiving that she seemed vexed if Con was spoken of
as cracked or crazy or "wantin' a corner," were ready enough to modify
their language, and even their judgment, in accordance with her view.
Still it was convenient to distinguish him from another resident Con,
about whom there were no very striking features. Therefore her little
Rose having been heard to say that she was "after seein' Con, not Con
Ryan, but the quare one," they caught up and applied the epithet, which
in Lisconnel is regarded as a safely colourless term, not likely to hurt
the most sensitive feelings.
Con, on his part, formed the highest opinion of Mrs. O'Driscoll, and
often took counsel with her about perplexing points which had presented
themselves to him in the course of his meditations. In one practical
matter, however, he showed an obstinacy that did not further her in her
wish to uphold him on a footing with quite sensible people. This was his
fancy for adorning the band of his broad-brimmed caubeen with a garnish
of feathers and flowers. Mrs. O'Driscoll disapproved of the freak,
rightly judging that it often created irrevocable first impressions, and
fixed his standing at a glance. In this age and clime the Seven Sages
could hardly maintain among them a reverend aspect, under the frivolity
of a single flaunting blossom, much less the gaudy bunches and fantastic
plumes upon which Con recklessly ventured. So at last, having hinted and
remonstrated ineffectually, she contrived somehow to find time and stuff
among her laborious days and scanty stores, and fashioned for him a
round cloth cap of a severely plain design, which she thought would
give no scope for any unseemly appendages. Upon being presented with
this headgear, Con dutifully assumed it, and went about wearing it for a
day or two in a depressed frame of mind. Then he appeared in the morning
at the O'Driscolls', cheered, and crested with a remarkably long
gannet's feather stuck upright in the crown of his cap, through which he
had bored a hole to admit of the insertion. He was resolved to brazen
out the matter, so he presently took off his cap, and twirling it round
with an unconcerned air as he leaned against the door, said to Herself:
"Well, ma'am, what do you think of that?"
"To tell you just the truth, Con," said Herself, whose countenance had
fallen as she saw the failure of her little plot, "I was thinkin' it
looked a dale better before you cocked that ould gazabo on top of it.
'Deed now it gives you the apparance of a head of cabbage that's
sproutin' up and goin' to seed. Sure you niver see the other lads
trapesin' about wid the like on them."
Con, who seemed rather cast down by this criticism, was about to reply,
when young Ned Keogh took the cap out of his hand and affected to
examine it closely, saying: "Glory be to goodness, what sort of thing
is it at all at all? Bedad it's the won'erful conthrivance--ah, tub-be
sure; _I_ see what it is. He's about growin' a pair of wings for his wit
to fly away wid. But musha good gracious, he needn't ha' throubled
himself to be gettin' them that sizable. Somethin' the bigness of a
hedge-sparrer's, or maybe a weeny white butterfly's, 'ud ha' plinty
stren'th enough for the job, if that was all they had to do." Ned meant
no harm, but his witticisms did not fall in with Con's humour, so he
snatched back the cap and went off affronted, nor did he call at the
O'Driscolls' again for some weeks.
The next time he came, however, Herself had espied him a bit down the
road, and was standing at the door to receive him with his discarded
caubeen in her hand. "You'd be better wearin' it, Con, after all," she
said, "for the eyes are scorched out of your head under the sun widout
e'er a scrap of brim." And as Con took it, he observed with glee that
she had fastened into the band a dove-coloured kittiwake's wing-feather,
a somewhat cherished possession of her own, which she used to keep over
her best picture on the wall. Thus did she seek to make amends for the
speech about the sprouting cabbage-head, which had been weighing
heavily upon her conscience.
The kittiwake's feather had to weather rain and sunshine for many a year
in Con the Quare One's old caubeen; but it is now on a room-wall again,
the Kilfoyles' this time. Con brought it to Mrs. Kilfoyle one autumn
evening in the year Mrs. O'Driscoll died. It was much longer than usual
since he had wandered into Lisconnel, illness and one thing and another
having detained him in the North for the last twelvemonth and more--all
her blackest days of childless widowhood--so that this was his first
visit since the departure of his earliest friend.
"Could you be keepin' it somewheres safe for me, ma'am?" he said,
showing the soft grey feather to Mrs. Kilfoyle, who was sitting by the
fire with her sons and her future daughter-in-law, and Ody Rafferty's
aunt, and the Widow M'Gurk. "I'll be wearin' it no more. 'Twas she
herself stuck it in for me, but sure I knew well enough all the while
she'd liefer I wouldn't be goin' about wid such things on me head, and
sorra a bit of me will agin."
"Whethen now but yourself's the quare man, Con," said Ody Rafferty's
aunt, "to be takin' up wid that notion these times, when ne'er a differ
it'ill make to her. There might ha' been some sinse in it, if you'd done
it to plase her, but now you're more than a trifle too late wid that. A
day after the fair you are. Sure she'll never set eyes on you or your
old caubeen agin," she said, as if announcing some unthought-of
discovery of her own, "no matter what ould thrash you might take and
stick in it. You might be wearin' a young haystack on your head for
anythin' she could tell."
"That may be or mayn't be," said Con. "But at all evints the next body
that goes there out of this countryside 'ill be very apt to bring her
word. Discoorsin' together they'll be of all the news, and as like as
not he--or it might be she--'ill say to her--'I seen Con the Quare One
goin' the road a while back, and he wid ne'er a thraneen of anythin' in
his hat, good or bad; the same way the other boys are; lookin' rael
dacint and sinsible.' Belike she might be axin' after me herself, and
that 'ud put it in the other body's head. Yourself it may be, Moggy.
Faix now, I wouldn't won'er a bit if it was, for there must be a
terrible great age on you these times. Sure you looked to be an ould,
ould woman the first day I ever beheld you, and that's better than a
dozen year ago."
"Troth then there's plinty of oulder ould people than me, let me tell
you," protested Moggy, who was about ninety, "that you need be settlin'
I'm goin' anywheres next. Musha cock you up. And your own hair turned as
white as sheep's wool on a blackthorn bush."
She seemed so much put out by Con's statement and inference that young
Thady Kilfoyle, always a good-natured lad, sought to soothe her.
"Sure there's no settlin' any such a thing, and for the matter of goin',
the young people often enough get their turn as fast as anybody else.
It's meself," he said, "might be sooner than you bringin' news of yous
all, and Con's ould caubeen, and everythin' else to Heaven the way he
sez."
"I dunno if you've any call to be talkin' that fashion," said the Widdy
M'Gurk, disapprovingly, "as if you could be walkin' permisc-yis into
Heaven widout wid your lave or by your lave. Maybe it isn't there any of
us'ill be bringin' our news."
"Might you know of e'er a better place then, ma'am?" said Con.
"Heard you ever the like of that?" said Ody Rafferty's aunt, not
unwillingly scandalised, "I should suppose nobody, unless it was a born
haythen, 'ud know of any place better than Heaven."
"That's where she is then," said Con, stroking his feather. "For the
best place ever was is none too good for her, God knows well."
"And thrue for you, man," said the Widdy M'Gurk. "But she's one thing,
and we're another. It's not settin' ourselves up we should be to have
the same chances."
"Ah, well, sure maybe we're none of us too outrageous altogether," said
Mrs. Kilfoyle, looking hopefully round at her company. "And if they can
put up wid us at all at all, they will. We'll get there yet, plase God.
And anyway I'll be takin' good care of your feather, Con. Ay will I so;
same as if it was dropped out of an angel's wing."
"So good-night to you kindly, ma'am," said he. "I'll be steppin' back to
Laraghmena. I on'y looked in on you to bring you that, and give you news
of Theresa. And I question will I ever set fut agin in Lisconnel."
He did not, however, leave it quite immediately. A little later, when
Brian Kilfoyle was escorting Norah Finnegan home, they saw him sitting
on the bank near the O'Driscolls' roofless cabin. Its mud walls were
fast crumbling into ruin. Already the little window-square had lost its
straight outline, and would soon be as shapeless as any hole burrowed in
a bank. Con sat with his back turned to it until the dusk had muffled up
everything in dimness, and then he stole an armful of turf-sods from the
nearest stack, and groped his way in through the deserted door. The
shadows within were folded so heavily that he could scarcely more than
guess where the hearth had been. One of Con's peculiarities was a
strange horror of a fireless hearth. At the sight of its hoarily
sprinkled blackness he always felt as if he were standing on the verge
of some frightful revelation; a vague reminiscence, no doubt, from the
scene of his life's tragedy, all distinct memory of which had been
blurred away by his illness. Now he piled and crumbled his sods with
practised skill, and set them alight in well-chosen places. But he
stayed only for a minute or so, till the little fluttering flames had
fairly taken a hold, and were sending golden threads running along the
netted fibres. Then he groped his way out again, and returned to his
seat on the bank. Presently, as he watched, he saw a red light
beginning to flicker through window and door, and growing steadier and
stronger. When it was at its brightest, he got up and turned away.
"That's the very way it would be shinin'," he said, "and I comin' along
the road to see Herself and Himself and the childer--God be good to them
all, wherever they may be. And that's the notion of it I'll keep in me
mind."
And Con the Quare One came no more to Lisconnel.