Galtee Mountains that the young fellow met the lady?”
“In the Galtee Mountains,” said Peter.
“To the Galtee Mountains let us be going, Tom Toole,” cried the little
old man, “Come on now, there’ll be tidings in it!”
So off they drove; and when they had driven a day and slept a couple of
nights they were there, and they came to a place where the rivers do be
rushing and there was a rowan tree but no lady in it.
“What will we do now, Tom Toole?” says the old man.
“We’ll not stint it,” says he, and they searched by night and by day
looking for a person would give them their youth again. They sold the
chaise for some guineas and the pony for a few more, and they were
walking among the hills for a thousand days but never a dust of fortune
did they discover. Whenever they asked a person to guide them they
would be swearing at them or they would jeer.
“Well, may a good saint stretch your silly old skins for ye!” said one.
“Thinking of your graves and travelling to the priest ye should be!”
said another.
“The nails of your boots will be rusty and rotted searching for the
like of that,” said a third.
“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 we 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 foreign
place in the 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 burst 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 me good luck. I’ve had my enough of this. Sure I’ll
despise myself for ever more if I wait the tide of another drifting
day. It’s tonight I’ll sleep in a 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, “it’s the good little man in the heel of it. Where in hell
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 was ranging the back of 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 tale 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, “it’s too fast backward I’m
growing, 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?”
* * * * *
THE CHERRY TREE
* * * * *
THE CHERRY TREE
There was uproar somewhere among the backyards of Australia Street. It
was so alarming that people at their midday meal sat still and stared
at one another. A fortnight before murder had been done in the street,
in broad daylight with a chopper; people were nervous. An upper window
was thrown open and a startled and startling head exposed.
“It’s that young devil, Johnny Flynn, again! Killing rats!” shouted
Mrs. Knatchbole, shaking her fist towards the Flynns’ backyard. Mrs.
Knatchbole was ugly; she had a goitred neck and a sharp skinny nose
with an orb shining at its end, constant as grief.
“You wait, my boy, till your mother comes home, you just wait!” invited
this apparition, but Johnny was gazing sickly at the body of a big rat
slaughtered by the dogs of his friend George. The uproar was caused by
the quarrelling of the dogs, possibly for honours, but more probably,
as is the custom of victors, for loot.
“Bob down!” warned George, but Johnny bobbed up to catch the full anger
of those baleful Knatchbole eyes. The urchin put his fingers promptly
to his nose.
“Look at that for eight years old!” screamed the lady. “Eight years
old ’e is! As true as God’s my maker I’ll....”
The impending vow was stayed and blasted for ever, Mrs. Knatchbole
being taken with a fit of sneezing, whereupon the boys uttered some
derisive “Haw haws!”
So Mrs. Knatchbole met Mrs. Flynn that night as she came from work,
Mrs. Flynn being a widow who toiled daily and dreadfully at a laundry
and perforce left her children, except for their school hours, to their
own devices. The encounter was an emphatic one and the tired widow
promised to admonish her boy.
“But it’s all right, Mrs. Knatchbole, he’s going from me in a week, to
his uncle in London he is going, a person of wealth, and he’ll be no
annoyance to ye then. I’m ashamed that he misbehaves but he’s no bad
boy really.”
At home his mother’s remonstrances reduced Johnny to repentance and
silence; he felt base indeed; he wanted to do something great and
worthy at once to offset it all; he wished he had got some money, he’d
have gone and bought her a bottle of stout--he knew she liked stout.
“Why do ye vex people so, Johnny?” asked Mrs. Flynn wearily. “I work my
fingers to the bone for ye, week in and week out. Why can’t ye behave
like Pomony?”
His sister was a year younger than he; her name was Mona, which
Johnny’s elegant mind had disliked. One day he re-baptized her; Pomona
she became and Pomona she remained. The Flynns sat down to supper.
“Never mind, mum,” said the boy, kissing her as he passed, “talk to
us about the cherry tree!” The cherry tree, luxuriantly blooming, was
the crown of the mother’s memories of her youth and her father’s farm;
around the myth of its wonderful blossoms and fruit she could weave
garlands of romance, and to her own mind as well as to the minds of her
children it became a heavenly symbol of her old lost home, grand with
acres and delightful with orchard and full pantry. What wonder that in
her humorous narration the joys were multiplied and magnified until
even Johnny was obliged to intervene. “Look here, how many horses _did_
your father have, mum ... really, though?” Mrs. Flynn became vague,
cast a furtive glance at this son of hers and then gulped with laughter
until she recovered her ground with “Ah, but there _was_ a cherry
tree!” It was a grand supper--actually a polony and some potatoes.
Johnny knew this was because he was going away. Ever since it was known
that he was to go to London they had been having something special like
this, or sheep’s trotters or a pig’s tail. Mother seemed to grow kinder
and kinder to him. He wished he had some money, he would like to buy
her a bottle of stout--he knew she liked stout.
Well, Johnny went away to live with his uncle, but alas he was only two
months in London before he was returned to his mother and Pomony. Uncle
was an engine-driver who disclosed to his astounded nephew a passion
for gardening. This was incomprehensible to Johnny Flynn. A great
roaring boiling locomotive was the grandest thing in the world. Johnny
had rides on it, so he knew. And it was easy for him to imagine that
every gardener cherished in the darkness of his disappointed soul an
unavailing passion for a steam engine, but how an engine-driver could
immerse himself in the mushiness of gardening was a baffling problem.
However, before he returned home he discovered one important thing from
his uncle’s hobby, and he sent the information to his sister:
_Dear Pomona--_
_Uncle Harry has got a alotment and grow veggutables. He says what
makes the mold is worms. You know we pulled all the worms out off our
garden and chukked them over Miss Natchbols wall. Well you better get
some more quick a lot ask George to help you and I bring som seeds
home when I comes next week by the xcursion on Moms birthday_
_Your sincerely brother
John Flynn_
On mother’s birthday Pomona met him at the station. She kissed him
shyly and explained that mother was going to have a half holiday to
celebrate the double occasion and would be home with them at dinner
time.
“Pomony, did you get them worms?”
Pomona was inclined to evade the topic of worms for the garden, but
fortunately her brother’s enthusiasm for another gardening project
tempered the wind of his indignation. When they reached home he
unwrapped two parcels he had brought with him; he explained his scheme
to his sister; he led her into the garden. The Flynns’ backyard, mostly
paved with bricks, was small and so the enclosing walls, truculently
capped by chips of glass, although too low for privacy were yet too
high for the growth of any cherishable plant. Johnny had certainly
once reared a magnificent exhibit of two cowslips, but these had been
mysteriously destroyed by the Knatchbole cat. The dank little enclosure
was charged with sterility; nothing flourished there except a lot of
beetles and a dauntless evergreen bush, as tall as Johnny, displaying
a profusion of thick shiny leaves that you could split on your tongue
and make squeakers with. Pomona showed him how to do this and they then
busied themselves in the garden until the dinner siren warned them that
Mother would be coming home. They hurried into the kitchen and Pomona
quickly spread the cloth and the plates of food upon the table, while
Johnny placed conspicuously in the centre, after laboriously extracting
the stopper with a fork and a hair-pin, a bottle of stout brought from
London. He had been much impressed by numberless advertisements upon
the hoardings respecting this attractive beverage. The children then
ran off to meet their mother and they all came home together with great
hilarity. Mrs. Flynn’s attention having been immediately drawn to the
sinister decoration of her dining table, Pomona was requested to pour
out a glass of the nectar. Johnny handed this gravely to his parent,
saying:
“Many happy returns of the day, Mrs. Flynn!”
“O, dear, dear!” gasped his mother merrily, “you drink first!”
“Excuse me, no, Mrs. Flynn,” rejoined her son, “many happy returns of
the day!”
When the toast had been honoured Pomona and Johnny looked tremendously
at each other.
“Shall we?” exclaimed Pomona.
“O yes,” decided Johnny; “come on, mum, in the garden, something
marvellous!”
She followed her children into that dull little den, and fortuitously
the sun shone there for the occasion. Behold, the dauntless evergreen
bush had been stripped of its leaves and upon its blossomless twigs the
children had hung numerous couples of ripe cherries, white and red and
black.
“What do you think of it, mum?” cried the children, snatching some of
the fruit and pressing it into her hands, “what do you think of it?”
“Beautiful!” said the poor woman in a tremulous voice. They stared
silently at their mother until she could bear it no longer. She turned
and went sobbing into the kitchen.
* * * * *
CLORINDA WALKS IN HEAVEN
* * * * *
CLORINDA WALKS IN HEAVEN
Miss Smith, Clorinda Smith, desired not to die on a wet day. Her
speculations upon the possibilities of one’s demise were quite
ingenuous and had their mirth, but she shrunk from that figure of her
dim little soul--and it was only dimly that she could figure it at
all--approaching the pathways of the Boundless in a damp, bedraggled
condition.
“But the rain couldn’t harm your spirit,” declared her comforting
friends.
“Why not?” asked Clorinda, “if there is a ghost of me, why not a ghost
of the rain?”
There were other aspects, delectable and illusive, of this imagined
apotheosis, but Clorinda always hoped--against hope be it said--that it
wouldn’t be wet. On three evenings there had been a bow in the sky, and
on the day she died rain poured in fury. With a golden key she unlocked
the life out of her bosom and moved away without fear, as if a great
light had sprung suddenly under her feet in a little dark place, into a
region where things became starkly real and one seemed to live like the
beams rolling on the tasselled corn in windy acres. There was calmness
in those translucent leagues and the undulation amid a vast implacable
light until she drifted, like a feather fallen from an unguessed star,
into a place which was extraordinarily like the noon-day world, so
green and warm was its valley.
A little combe lay between some low hills of turf, and on a green bank
beside a few large rocks was a man mending a ladder of white new-shaven
willow studded with large brass nails, mending it with hard knocks that
sounded clearly. The horizon was terraced only just beyond and above
him, for the hills rolled steeply up. Thin pads of wool hung in the
arch of the ultimate heavens, but towards the end of the valley the
horizon was crowded with clouds torn and disbattled. Two cows, a cow
of white and a cow of tan, squatted where one low hill held up, as it
were, the sunken limits of the sky. There were larks--in such places
the lark sings for ever--and thrushes--the wind vaguely active--seven
white ducks--a farm. Each nook was a flounce of blooms and a bower for
birds. Passing close to the man--he was sad and preoccupied, dressed in
a little blue tunic--she touched his arm as if to enquire a direction,
saying “Jacob!”
She did not know what she would have asked of him, but he gave her no
heed and she again called to him “Jacob!” He did not seem even to see
her, so she went to the large white gates at the end of the valley
and approached a railway crossing. She had to wait a long time for
trains of a vastness and grandeur were passing, passing without sound.
Strange advertisements on the hoardings and curious direction posts
gathered some of her attention. She observed that in every possible
situation, on any available post or stone, people had carved initials,
sometimes a whole name, often with a date, and Clorinda experienced a
doubt of the genuineness of some of these so remote was the antiquity
implied. At last, the trains were all gone by, and as the barriers
swung back she crossed the permanent way.
There was neither ambiguity in her movements nor surprise in her
apprehensions. She just crossed over to a group of twenty or thirty
men who moved to welcome her. They were barelegged, sandal-footed,
lightly clad in beautiful loose tunics of peacock and cinnamon, which
bore not so much the significance of colour as the quality of light;
one of them rushed eagerly forward, crying “Clorinda!” offering to
her a long coloured scarf. Strangely, as he came closer, he grew less
perceivable; Clorinda was aware in a flash that she was viewing him by
some other mechanism than that of her two eyes. In a moment he utterly
disappeared and she felt herself wrapt into his being, caressed with
faint caresses, and troubled with dim faded ecstasies and recognitions
not wholly agreeable. The other men stood grouped around them, glancing
with half-closed cynical eyes. Those who stood farthest away were more
clearly seen: in contiguity a presence could only be divined, resting
only--but how admirably!--in the nurture of one’s mind.
“What is it?” Clorinda asked: and all the voices replied, “Yes, we know
you!”
She felt herself released, and the figure of the man rejoined the
waiting group. “I was your husband Reuben,” said the first man
slowly, and Clorinda, who had been a virgin throughout her short
life, exclaimed “Yes, yes, dear Reuben!” with momentary tremors
and a queer fugitive drift of doubt. She stood there, a spook of
comprehending being, and all the uncharted reefs in the map of her mind
were anxiously engaging her. For a time she was absorbed by this new
knowledge.
Then another voice spoke:
“I was your husband Raphael!”
“I know, I know,” said Clorinda, turning to the speaker, “we lived in
Judea.”
“And we dwelt in the valley of the Nile,” said another, “in the years
that are gone.”
“And I too ... and I too ... and I too,” they all clamoured, turning
angrily upon themselves.
Clorinda pulled the strange scarf from her shoulders where Reuben had
left it, and, handling it so, she became aware of her many fugitive
sojournings upon the earth. It seemed that all of her past had become
knit in the scarf into a compact pattern of beauty and ugliness of
which she was entirely aware; all its multiplexity being immediately
resolved ... the habitations with cave men, and the lesser human unit
of the lesser later day. Patagonian, Indian, Cossack, Polynesian, Jew
... of such stuff the pattern was intimately woven, and there were
little plangent perfect moments of the past that fell into order in
the web. Clorinda watching the great seabird with pink feet louting
above the billows that roared upon Iceland, or Clorinda hanging her
girdle upon the ebony hooks of the image of Tanteelee. She had taken
voyaging drafts upon the whole world, cataract jungle and desert,
ingle and pool and strand, ringing the changes upon a whole gamut of
masculine endeavour ... from a prophet to a haberdasher. She could feel
each little life lying now as in a sarsnet of cameos upon her visible
breasts: thereby for these ... these _men_ ... she was draped in an
eternal wonder. But she could not recall any image of her past life in
_these_ realms, save only that her scarf was given back to her on every
return by a man of these men.
She could remember with humility her transient passions for them all.
None, not one, had ever given her the measure of her own desire, a
strong harsh flame that fashioned and tempered its own body; nothing
but a nebulous glow that was riven into embers before its beam had
sweetened into pride. She had gone from them childless always and much
as a little child.
From the crowd of quarrelling ghosts a new figure detached itself,
and in its approach it subdued that vague vanishing which had been
so perplexing to Clorinda. Out of the crowd it slipped, and loomed
lovingly beside her, took up her thought and the interrogation that
came into her mind.
“No,” it said gravely, “there is none greater than these. The ultimate
reaches of man’s mind produce nothing but images of men.”
“But,” said Clorinda, “do you mean that our ideals, previsions of a
vita-nuova....”
“Just so,” it continued, “a mere intoxication. Even here you cannot
escape the singular dower of dreams ... you can be drunk with dreams
more easily and more permanently than with drugs.”
The group of husbands had ceased their quarrelling to listen; Clorinda
swept them with her glances thoughtfully and doubtfully.
“Could mankind be so poor,” the angel resumed, “as poor as these, if it
housed something greater than itself?”