said one.
"The nails of your boots will be rusty and rotten searching for the
like of that," said one.
"It's two quarts of black milk from a Kerry cow ye want," said one;
"take a sup of that and you'll be young again!"
"Of black milk," said Tom Toole's friend, "where would you get that?"
The person said he would get a pull of it in the Comeragh Mountains,
fifty miles away.
"Tom Toole," said the little old man, "It's what I'll do. I'll walk
on to the Comeragh Mountains to see what I will see, and do you go on
searching here, for to find that young girl would be better than forty
guineas worth of blather. And when I find the cow I'll take my fill of
a cup and bring you to it."
So they agreed upon it and the old man went away saying, "I'll be a
score of days, no more. Good day, Tom Toole, good day!" much as an old
crow might shout it to a sweep.
When he was gone Tom Toole journeyed about the world, and the day after
he went walking to a fair. Along the road the little ass carts were
dribbling into town from Fews and Carrigleena, when he saw a young girl
in a field trying to secure an ass.
"Oi----, Oi----!" the girl was calling out to him, and he went in the
field and helped her with the ass, which was a devil to capture, and it
not wanting. She thanked him; she was a sweet slip of a colleen with a
long fall of hair that the wind was easy with.
"'Tis warm!" she said to Tom Toole. "Begod, ma'am," says he to her
quickly, taking his cue, "it is a hot day."
"Where are ye going, Tom Toole," she asked him, and he said:
"I am seeking a little contrivance, ma'am, that will let me enjoy the
world and live easy in it. That is my aspiration."
"I'll give you what you are seeking," and she gave him a wee bottle
with red juices in it.
"Indeed, ma'am, I'm obliged to ye," and he took her by the hand and
wished her Good day and Good luck, and that he might meet her again.
When he got the elixir of youth he gave over his searching. He hid the
bottle in his breast and went up into the mountains as high as he could
go to bide the coming of the little old man. It is a queer thing but
Tom Toole had never heard the name of him--it would be some place in
the foreign corners of the world like Portugal that he had come from
no doubt. Up he went; first there was rough pasture for bullocks, then
fern and burnt furze, and then little but heather, and great rocks
strewn about like shells, and sour brown streams coming from the bog.
He wandered about for twenty days and the old man did not return, and
for forty days he was still alone.
"The divil receive him, but I'll die against his return!" And Tom Toole
pulled the wee bottle from his breast. He was often minded to lift the
cork and take a sup of the elixir of youth. "But," says he, "it would
be an unfriendly deed. Sure if I got me youth sudden I'd be off to
the wonders of the land and leave that old fool roaming till the day
of Judgment." And he would put the bottle away and wait for scores of
days until he was sick and sorry with grieving. A thousand days he was
on his lonely wanderings, soft days as mellow as cream, and hard days
when it is ribs of iron itself you would want to stiffen you against
the crack of the blast. His skimpy hair grew down to the lappet of his
coat, very ugly he was, but the little stranger sheep of the mountain
were not daunted when he moved by, and even the flibeens had the soft
call for him. A thousand days was in it, and then he said:
"Good evening to my good luck. I've had my enough of this. Sure I'll
despise myself for evermore if I wait the tide of another drifting day.
It's to-night I'll sleep in a neat bed with a quilt of down over me
heart, for I'm going to be young again."
He crept down the mountain to a neat little town and went in a room
in the public to have a cup of porter. A little forlorn old man also
came in from the road and sat down beside, and when they looked at each
other they each let out a groan. "Glory be!" says he. "Glory be," cried
Tom Toole, "its the good little man in the heel of it. Where are ye
from?"
"From the mountains."
"And what fortune is in it, did ye find the farm?"
"Divil a clod."
"Nor the Kerry cow?"
"Divil a horn."
"Nor the good milk?"
"Divil a quart, and I that dry I could be drunk with the smell of it.
Tom Toole, I have traipsed the high and the deep of this realm and
believe you me it is not in it; the long and the wide of this realm
---- not in it." He kept muttering sadly, "Not in it."
"Me good little man," cried Tom Toole, "don't be havering like an old
goat. Here it is! the fortune of the world!"
He took the wee bottle from his breast and shook it before his eyes.
"The drops that 'ull give ye your youth as easy as shifting a shirt.
Come, now, I've waited the long days to share wid ye, for I couldn't
bring myself to desart a comrade who was ranging the wild regions for
the likes of me. Many's the time I've lifted that cork, and thinks I:
he's gone and soon I'll be going, so here goes. Divil a go was in it. I
could not do it, not for silver and not for gold, and not for all the
mad raging mackerel that sleep in the sea."
The little old stranger took the wee bottle in his two hands. He was
but a quavering stick of a man now; half dead he was, and his name it
is Martin O'Moore.
"Is it the rale stuff, Tom Toole?"
"From herself I got it," he said, and he let on to him about that sweet
spoken young girl.
"Did she give you the directions on the head of it?"
"What directions is it?"
"The many drops is a man to drink!"
"No, but a good sup of it will do the little job."
"A good sup of it Tom Toole, a good sup of it, ay?" says he,
unsqueezing the cork. "The elixir of youth, a good sup of it, says you,
a good sup of it, a great good good sup of it!"
And sticking it into his mouth he drained the wee bottle of its every
red drop. He stood there looking like a man in a fit, holding the empty
bottle in his hand until Tom Toole took it from him with reproaches in
his poor old eyes. But in a moment it was his very eyes he thought were
deceiving him; not an inch of his skin but had the dew of fear on it,
for the little old man began to change his appearance quick like the
sand running through a glass or as fast as the country changes down
under a flying swan.
"Mother o' God!" screamed Martin O'Moore, "its too fast backward I'm
growing; dizzy, dizzy I am."
And indeed his bald head suddenly got the fine black hair grown upon
it, the whiskers flew away from him and his face was young. He began to
wear a strange old suit that suddenly got new, and he had grown down
through a handsome pair of trousers and into the little knickerbockers
of a boy before you could count a score. And he had a bit of a cold
just then, though he was out of it in a twink, and he let a sneeze that
burst a button off his breeches, a little tin button, which was all
that ever was found of him. Smaller and smaller he fell away, like the
dust in an hour glass, till he was no bigger than an acorn, and then
devil a bit of him was left there at all.
Tom Toole was frightened at the quiet and the emptiness and he made to
go away, but he turned in the doorway and stretching out his arms to
the empty room he whispered, "The greed, the avarice, may hell pour all
its buckets on your bad little heart! May----" But just then he caught
sight of the cup of porter that Martin O'Moore had forgotten to drink,
so he went back to drink his enough and then went out into the great
roaring world where he walked from here to there until one day he came
right back to his old asylum. He had been away for twenty years, he
was an old man, very old indeed. And there was the man from Kilsheelan
digging potatoes just inside the gates of the sunny garden.
"Tis warm!" said the traveller staring at him through the railings, but
the man from Kilsheelan only said, "Come in, Tom Toole, is it staying
or going ye are?"
FELIX TINCLER
FELIX TINCLER
The child was to have a birthday tomorrow and was therefore not uneasy
about being late home from school this afternoon. He had lost his
pencil case, a hollow long round thing it was, like a rolling-pin, only
it had green and yellow rings painted upon it. He kept his marbles
in it and so he was often in a trouble about his pencils. He had not
tried very much to find the pencil case because the boys 'deludered'
him--that's what his father always said. He had asked Heber Gleed if
he had seen it--he had strange suspicions of that boy--but Heber Gleed
had sworn so earnestly that the greengrocer opposite the school had
picked it up, he had even "saw him do it," that Felix Tincler went into
Mr. Gobbit's shop, and when the greengrocer lady appeared in answer to
the ring of the door bell he enquired politely for his pencil case.
She was tall and terrible with a squint and, what was worse, a large
velvety mole with hairs sprouting from it. She immediately and with
inexplicable fury desired him to flee from her greengrocer shop, with
a threat of alternative castigation in which a flat iron and a red-hot
pick-axe were to figure with unusual and unpleasant prominence. Well,
he had run out of Mr. Gobbit's shop and there was Heber Gleed standing
in the road giggling derisively at him. Felix walked on alone looking
in the gutters and areas for his pencil case until he encountered
another friendly boy who took him to dig in a garden where they grew
castor-oil plants. When he went home it was late; as he ran along under
the high wall of the orphanage that occupied one end of his street its
harsh peevish bell clanged out six notes. He scampered past the great
gateway under the dismal arch that always filled him with uneasiness,
he never passed it without feeling the sad trouble that a prison
might give. He stepped into his own pleasant home, a little mute, and
a little dirty in appearance; but at six years of age in a home so
comfortable and kind the eve of the day that is to turn you into seven
is an occasion great enough to yield an amnesty for peccadilloes. His
father was already in from work, he could hear him singing. He gave
his mother the sprigs he had picked from the castor-oil plant and told
her about the pencil case. The meal was laid upon the table, and while
mother was gone into the kitchen to boil the water for tea he sat down
and tried to smooth out the stiff creases in the white table cloth. His
father was singing gaily in the scullery as he washed and shaved:--
High cockalorum,
Charlie ate the spinach...,
He ceased for a moment to give the razor a vigorous stropping and then
continued:--
High cockalorum,
High cockalee....
Felix knew that was not the conclusion of the song. He listened, but
for some moments all that followed was the loud crepitation of a razor
searching a stubborn beard and the sigh of the kettle. Then a new
vigour seized the singer:--
But mother brought the pandy down
And bate the gree....
Again that rasping of chin briefly intervened, but the conclusion of
the cropping was soon denoted by the strong rallentando of the singer
... dy image,
High cock--alorum,
High cock--a--lee.
Mrs. Tincler brought in the teapot and her husband followed her with
his chin tightly shaven but blue, crying with mock horror:
"Faylix, my son! that is seven years old tomorrow! look at him, Mary,
the face of him and the hands of him! I didn't know there was a bog in
this parish; is it creeping in a bog you have been?"
The boy did not blench at his father's spurious austerity, he knew he
was the soul of kindness and fun.
"Go wash yourself at the sink," interposed his mother. Kevin Tincler,
taking his son by the hand, continued with mocking admonishment: "All
the fine copybooks of the world that you've filled up with that blather
about cleanliness and holiness, the up strokes very thin and the down
strokes very thick! What was it, Mary, he has let it all out of his
mind?"
"Go and wash, Felix, and come quickly and have your tea," laughed Mary
Tincler.
"Ah, but what was it--in that grand book of yours?"
The boy stood, in his short buff tunic, regarding his father with shy
amusement. The small round clear-skinned face was lovely with its
blushes of faint rose; his eyes were big and blue, and his head was
covered with thick curling locks of rich brown hair.
"Cleanliness comes next to godliness," he replied.
"Does it so, indeed?" exclaimed his father. "Then you're putting your
godliness in a pretty low category!"
"What a nonsense," said Mary Tincler as the boy left them.
The Irishman and his dark-eyed Saxon wife sat down at the table waiting
for their son.
"There's a bit of a randy in the Town Gardens tonight, Mary, dancing on
the green, fireworks! When the boy is put to bed we'll walk that way."
Mary expressed her pleasure, but then declared she could not leave the
boy alone in his bed.
"He'll not hurt, Mary, he has no fear in him. Give him the birthday
gift before we go. Whisht, he's coming!"
The child, now clean and handsome, came to his chair and looked up at
his father sitting opposite to him.
"Holy Mother!" exclaimed the admiring parent, "it's the neck of a swan
he has. Faylix Tincler, may you live to be the father of a bishop!"
After tea his father took him up on the downs for an hour. As they left
their doorway a group of the tidy but wretched orphans was marching
back into their seminary, little girls moving in double columns behind
a stiff-faced woman. They were all dressed alike in garments of charity
exact as pilchards. Gray capes, worsted stockings, straw hats with
blue bands round them, and hard boots. The boys were coming in from
a different direction, but all of them, even the minutest, were clad
in corduroy trousers and short jackets high throated like a gaoler's.
This identity of garment was contrary to the will of God, for he had
certainly made their pinched bodies diverse enough. Some were short,
some tall, dark, fair, some ugly, others handsome. The sight of them
made Felix unhappy, he shrank into himself, until he and his father
had slipped through a gap in a hedge and were going up the hill that
stretched smoothly and easily almost from their very door. The top
of the down hereabouts was quiet and lovely, but a great flank of it
two miles away was scattered over with tiny white figures playing
very deliberately at cricket. Pleasant it was up there in the calm
evening, and still bright, but the intervening valley was full of grey
ungracious houses, allotments, railway arches, churches, graveyards,
and schools. Worst of all was the dull forbidding aspect of the
Orphanage down beyond the roof of their own house.
They played with a ball and had some wrestling matches until the
declining day began to grow dim even on the hill and the fat jumbo
clouds over the town were turning pink. If those elephants fell on
him--what would they do? Why they'd mix him up like ice-cream! So said
his father.
"Do things ever fall out of the sky?"
"Rain," said Mr. Tincler.
"Yes, I know."
"Stars--maybe."
"Where do they go?"
"Oh they drop on the hills but ye can never find 'em."
"Don't Heaven ever?"
"What drop down! No," said Mr. Tincler, "it don't. I have not heard of
it doing that, but maybe it all just stoops down sometimes, Faylix,
until it's no higher than the crown of your hat. Let us be going home
now and ye'll see something this night."
"What is it?"
"Wait, Faylix, wait!"
As they crossed from the hill Mary, drawing down the blinds, signalled
to them from the window.
"Come along, Felix," she cried, and the child ran into the darkened
room. Upon the table was set a little church of purest whiteness. Kevin
had bought it from an Italian hawker. It had a wonderful tall steeple
and a cord that came through a hole and pulled a bell inside. And
that was not all; the church was filled with light that was shining
through a number of tiny arched windows, blue, purple, green, violet,
the wonderful windows were everywhere. Felix was silent with wonder;
how could you get a light in a church that hadn't a door! then Mary
lifted the hollow building from the table; it had no floor, and there
was a night-light glowing in one of her patty-pans filled with water.
The church was taken up to bed with him in the small chamber next his
parents' room and set upon a bureau. Kevin and Mary then went off to
the 'bit of devilment' in the town gardens.
Felix kept skipping from his bed, first to gaze at the church, and
then to lean out of the window in his night-shift, looking for the
lamplighter who would come to the street lamp outside. The house
was the very last and the lamp was the very last lamp on one of the
roads that led from the town and went poking out into the steady
furze-covered downs. And as the lamp was the very last to be lit
darkness was always half-fallen by the time the old man arrived at his
journey's end. He carried a pole with a brass tube on its top. There
were holes in the brass tube showing gleams of light. The pole rested
upon his shoulders as he trudged along humming huskily.
"Here he is," cried Felix, leaning from the window and waving a white
arm. The dull road, empty of traffic, dim as his mother's pantry by
day, curved slightly, and away at the other end of the curve a jet
of light had sprung into the gloom like a bright flower bursting its
sheath; a black figure moved along towards him under the Orphanage
wall. Other lamps blossomed with light and the lamplighter, approaching
the Tinclers' lamp, thrust the end of his pole into the lantern, his
head meanwhile craning back like the head of a horse that has been
pulled violently backwards. He deftly turned the tap; with a tiny dull
explosion that sounded like a doormat being beaten against the wall in
the next street the lamp was lit and the face of the old man sprang
into vague brilliance, for it was not yet utterly dark. Vague as the
light was the neighbouring hills at once faded out of recognition and
became black bulks of oblivion.
"Oi ... Oi ..." cried the child, clapping his hands. The old man's
features relaxed, he grunted in relief, the pole slid down in his palm.
As the end of it struck the pavement a sharp knock he drew an old pipe
from his pocket and lit it quite easily, although one of his hands was
deficient of a thumb and some fingers. He was about to travel back into
the sparkling town when Felix called to him:
"Soloman! Soloman!"
"Goo an to yer bed, my little billycock, or you'll ketch a fever."
"No, but what's this?" Felix was pointing to the ground below him. The
old man peered over the iron railings into the front garden that had
just sufficient earth to cherish four deciduous bushes, two plants of
marigold, and some indeterminate herbs. In the dimness of their shadows
a glowworm beamed clearly.
"That?" exclaimed he; "O s'dripped off the moon, yas, right off, moon's
wasting away, you'll see later on if you'm watch out for it, s'dripped
off the moon, right off." Chuckling, he blew out the light at the end
of his pole, and went away, but turned at intervals to wave his hand
towards the sky, crying "Later on, right off!" and cackling genially
until he came to a tavern.
The child stared at the glowworm and then surveyed the sky, but the
tardy moon was deep behind the hills. He left the open window and
climbed into bed again. The house was empty, but he did not mind,
father and mother had gone to buy him another birthday gift. He did
not mind, the church glowed in its corner on the bureau, the street
lamp shined all over the ceiling and a little bit upon the wall where
the splendid picture of Wexford Harbour was hanging. It was not gloomy
at all, although the Orphanage bell once sounded very piercingly.
Sometimes people would stroll by, but not often, and he would hear them
mumbling to each other. He would rather have a Chinese lantern first,
and next to that a little bagpipe, and next to that a cockatoo with
a yellow head, and then a Chinese lantern, and then.... He awoke; he
thought he heard a heavy bang on the door as if somebody had thrown a
big stone. But when he looked out of the window there was nobody to be
seen. The little moon drip was still lying in the dirt, the sky was
softly black, the stars were vivid, only the lamp dazzled his eyes and
he could not see any moon. But as he yawned he saw just over the downs
a rich globe of light moving very gradually towards him, swaying and
falling, falling in the still air. To the child's dazzled eyes the
great globe, dropping towards him as if it would crush the house, was
shaped like an elephant, a fat squat jumbo with a green trunk. Then to
his relief it fell suddenly from the sky right on to the down where he
and father had played. The light was extinguished and black night hid
the fire-balloon.