A POTENTIAL POET
The stable of an Irish country house has always, or nearly always, a
certain number of volunteer and unpaid on-hangers. At any hour of the
day you might have seen in the stable-yard of Glen Druid Billy the Buck
chewing a straw, Shan Finucane with his hands in his pockets, and his
back against the harness room door, Moriarty, the rat-catcher from
Castle Connell, colloguing, rat cage in hand, with the scullery-maid, or
Micky Mooney sitting on a corn-bin, whistling and kicking his heels.
Micky was “soft.” He lived with his mother in the village of Castle
Knock; and every morning early she would turn him out of her cabin, just
as a person turns a donkey out to graze.
He was almost entirely self-supporting. In summer he would disappear for
days amidst the hills, communing with nature and existing on roots and
whortle berries and wild strawberries. If Micky sat down in a field full
of rabbits, the rabbits would play about him within arm’s reach; birds
knew him for their friend, cows let him milk them into his hat without
protest or lamentation, and hens gave up their eggs without complaint,
when raised from their nests by his deft fingers.
He was of all mad creatures the most harmless and the most natural—a
really beautiful character; one of that rare type wherein lunacy is the
outcome of innocence carried to an extreme. Farmers threatened to shoot
him, it is true, and he had actually been fired at, and peppered with
small shot when engaged in stealing eggs, but this was not done from any
particular ill-will. The farmer had acted just as he acted towards the
thrushes and blackbirds that pilfered his crops.
Micky was, in fact, regarded by the general public as being on a level
with the birds and the rabbits, and, though no one would have hurt him
for any consideration, still, had some outraged farmer shot him with a
bullet in earnest, I doubt if there would have been much of an inquest.
This personage who had hunted the moon on many a summer’s night, had
amongst other attributes the power of seeing fairies; nor was he in the
least afraid of them. You would see him lifting up dock-leaves, and
conversing with the people who lived below. He could tell half-connected
tales of his doings with these folk, talking with his face half turned
from you, and tracing with his thumb nail the extent of a crack in the
fence he was leaning against, or the pattern of the door panel he was
near; and he would tell you this and that, and the other thing, till all
of a sudden his imagination would become too much for him, and with a
whoop! off he would go vaulting the fence, and away across country like
an india-rubber ball or a bounding kangaroo, to tell the rest of his
tale to the rabbits.
Just a grain more phosphorous, just a grain more ballast, and Micky
Mooney might have been a poet of the Celtic school, and led a revival
and written books.
As it was, he had some of the poetic influence that makes for better
things; in his company men tended to forget horses, dogs, rat-catching,
whisky and girls, and turn their conversation to banshees, cluricaunes,
cats with horns on their heads, and other topics of a similar nature.
When Mr Fanshawe had parted from Patsy at the front door, the latter,
turning his steps to the stable-yard, had found Micky Mooney seated on
the bottom of a bucket, listening with open mouth to Moriarty, the
rat-catcher, who was discoursing on psychical subjects, whilst Larry
Lyburn stood by the harness room door cleaning a stirrup, listening
also, or seeming to listen.
All the time Moriarty had been talking, Micky Mooney had been working
himself up, clapping the palms of his hands on his knees, twisting his
mouth about and flinging his head from side to side. No sooner had
Moriarty finished than he burst forth.
“I know a lady aal dressed in white—I know a lady aal dressed in white,”
began Micky, rocking himself on the bucket and staring with his big eyes
through Patsy and a hundred miles beyond—“aal dressed in white, wid a
crown of gowld; and it’s ‘Micky, come afther me,’ she says, whin I meets
her in the woods, ‘and it’s crocks and crates of gowld I’ll be showin’
you,’ she says. And it’s to-night I’m to meet her down in the woods be
the Druids’ althar—aal dressed in white, wid a——”
“Arra! shut your head and get off the bucket,” said Mr Lyburn, who had
finished cleaning the stirrup, and was now proceeding to water the
horses, punctuating his remark with the toe of his boot on that part of
Micky’s anatomy that was closest to the bucket.
Mr Lyburn was not a poet.
“Micky,” said Patsy, into whose arms the moon-struck one had been shot,
“stop your nise and hould your bellowin’, and come afther me, for I’ve
got a job for you.”
He led the seer of visions by the left hand (the right was applied to
the punctuation mark) round the angle of the stable wall to a quiet spot
near the potato room window.
“Hould your nise,” said Patsy, “and be listenin’ to me; I’ve got a job
for you.”
“Is it a saft job?” blubbered Micky, who with a grain more brass and a
grain more ballast in his composition would have shone perhaps as a
Labour Member or a Labour Leader.
“Saft as a feather-bed,” replied Patsy.
Then the two began to converse together in a low tone.
Now Patsy’s hatred of Mr Boxall had roots far beyond the present, roots
from the time when some men played on harps and other men painted
themselves with woad.
The spirit of Puck that dwelt in the breast of Patsy had been brooding
on the form of Micky Mooney all the time that Moriarty had been telling
of the cluricaune. Micky’s statement about the lady in white had given
the tricky spirit an idea.
Patsy did not require Mr Fanshawe’s word to know that Mr Boxall was
“gone” on Miss Lestrange, and this knowledge was part parent of the
idea.
“And what will you be givin’ me if I be afther doin’ as you tells me?”
queried Micky, plucking at the moss in the cracks of the wall.
“I’ll give you the first silver sixpence with a hole in it I finds on a
Tuesday.”
“Which Cheusday?” asked Micky cautiously, with a side look at his
employer.
“I’ll be tellin’ you that to-morra. Will you be doin’ what I say?”
“I will,” said Micky.
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