In truth Patsy Mac Cann was a very able person.
For forty-two years he had existed on the edges of a society which did
not recognise him in any way, and, as he might himself have put it, he
had not done so very badly at all.
He lived as a bird lives, or a fish, or a wolf. Laws were for other
people, but they were not for him; he crawled under or vaulted across
these ethical barriers, and they troubled him no more than as he had to
bend or climb a little to avoid them--he discerned laws as something to
be avoided, and it was thus he saw most things.
Religion and morality, although he paid these an extraordinary
reverence, were not for him either; he beheld them from afar, and,
however they might seem beautiful or foolish, he left them behind as
readily as he did his debts, if so weighty a description may be given to
his volatile engagements. He did not discharge these engagements; he
elongated himself from them; between himself and a query he interposed
distance, and at once that became foreign to him, for half a mile about
himself was his frontier, and beyond that, wherever he was, the enemy
lay.
He stood outside of every social relation, and within an organised
humanity he might almost have been reckoned as a different species. He
was very mobile, but all his freedom lay in one direction, and outside
of that pasturage he could never go. For the average man there are two
dimensions of space wherein he moves with a certain limited freedom; it
is for him a horizontal and a perpendicular world; he goes up the social
scale and down it, and in both these atmospheres there is a level
wherein he can exercise himself to and fro, his journeyings being
strictly limited by his business and his family. Between the place where
he works and the place where he lives lies all the freedom he can hope
for; within that range he must seek such adventures as he craves, and
the sole expansion to which he can attain is upwards towards another
social life if he be ambitious, or downward to the underworlds if he is
bored. For Mac Cann there was no upward and no downward movements, he
had plumbed to the very rocks of life, but his horizontal movements were
bounded only by the oceans around his country, and in this gigantic
underworld he moved with almost absolute freedom, and a knowledge which
might properly be termed scientific.
In despite of his apparent outlawry he was singularly secure; ambition
waved no littlest lamp at him; the one ill which could overtake him was
death, which catches on every man; no enmity could pursue him to any
wall, for he was sunken a whole sphere beneath malice as beneath
benevolence. Physical ill-treatment might come upon him, but in that
case it was his manhood and his muscle against another manhood and
another muscle--the simplest best would win, but there was no glory for
the conqueror nor any loot to be carried from the battle.
Casual warfares, such as these, had been frequent enough in his career,
for he had fought stubbornly with every kind of man, and had afterwards
medicined his wounds with the only unguents cheap enough for his
usage--the healing balsams of time and patience. He had but one
occupation, and it was an engrossing one--he hunted for food, and for it
he hunted with the skill and pertinacity of a wolf or a vulture.
With what skill he did hunt! He would pick crumbs from the lank chaps of
famine; he gathered nourishment from the empty air; he lifted it from
wells and watercourses; he picked it off clothes lines and hedges; he
stole so cleverly from the bees that they never felt his hand in their
pocket; he would lift the eggs from beneath a bird, and she would think
that his finger was a chicken; he would clutch a hen from the roost, and
the housewife would think he was the yard dog, and the yard dog would
think he was its brother.
He had a culture too, and if it was not wide it was profound; he knew
wind and weather as few astronomers know it; he knew the habit of the
trees and the earth; how the seasons moved, not as seasons, but as days
and hours; he had gathered all the sweets of summer, and the last rigour
of winter was no secret to him; he had fought with the winter every year
of his life as one fights with a mad beast, he had held off that
grizzliest of muzzles and escaped scatheless.
He knew men and women, and he knew them from an angle at which they
seldom caught themselves or each other; he knew them as prey to be
bitten and escaped from quickly. At them, charged with a thousand
preoccupations, he looked with an eye in which there was a single
surmise, and he divined them in a flash. In this quick vision he saw
man, one expression, one attitude for all; never did he see a man or
woman in their fullness, his microscopic vision caught only what it
looked for, but he saw that with the instant clarity of the microscope.
There were no complexities for him in humanity; there were those who
gave and those who did not give; there were those who might be cajoled,
and those who might be frightened. If there was goodness in a man he
glimpsed it from afar as a hawk sees a mouse in the clover, and he
swooped on that virtue and was away with booty. If there was evil in a
man he passed it serenely as a sheep passes by a butcher, for evil did
not affect him. Evil could never put a hand on him, and he was not evil
himself.
If the denominations of virtue or vice must be affixed to his innocent
existence, then these terms would have to be re-defined, for they had no
meaning in his case; he stood outside these as he did outside of the
social structure. But, indeed, he was not outside of the social
structure at all; he was so far inside of it that he could never get
out; he was at the very heart of it; he was held in it like a deer in an
ornamental park, or a cork that bobs peacefully in a bucket, and in the
immense, neglected pastures of civilisation he found his own quietude
and his own wisdom.
All of the things he knew and all of the things that he had done were
most competently understood by his daughter.