MARGARET HENAN would have been a striking figure under any circumstances,
but never more so than when I first chanced upon her, a sack of grain of
fully a hundredweight on her shoulder, as she walked with sure though
tottering stride from the cart-tail to the stable, pausing for an instant
to gather strength at the foot of the steep steps that led to the
grain-bin. There were four of these steps, and she went up them, a step
at a time, slowly, unwaveringly, and with so dogged certitude that it
never entered my mind that her strength could fail her and let that
hundred-weight sack fall from the lean and withered frame that wellnigh
doubled under it. For she was patently an old woman, and it was her age
that made me linger by the cart and watch.
Six times she went between the cart and the stable, each time with a full
sack on her back, and beyond passing the time of day with me she took no
notice of my presence. Then, the cart empty, she fumbled for matches and
lighted a short clay pipe, pressing down the burning surface of the
tobacco with a calloused and apparently nerveless thumb. The hands were
noteworthy. They were large-knuckled, sinewy and malformed by labour,
rimed with callouses, the nails blunt and broken, and with here and there
cuts and bruises, healed and healing, such as are common to the hands of
hard-working men. On the back were huge, upstanding veins, eloquent of
age and toil. Looking at them, it was hard to believe that they were the
hands of the woman who had once been the belle of Island McGill. This
last, of course, I learned later. At the time I knew neither her history
nor her identity.
She wore heavy man’s brogans. Her legs were stockingless, and I had
noticed when she walked that her bare feet were thrust into the crinkly,
iron-like shoes that sloshed about her lean ankles at every step. Her
figure, shapeless and waistless, was garbed in a rough man’s shirt and in
a ragged flannel petticoat that had once been red. But it was her face,
wrinkled, withered and weather-beaten, surrounded by an aureole of
unkempt and straggling wisps of greyish hair, that caught and held me.
Neither drifted hair nor serried wrinkles could hide the splendid dome of
a forehead, high and broad without verging in the slightest on the
abnormal.
The sunken cheeks and pinched nose told little of the quality of the life
that flickered behind those clear blue eyes of hers. Despite the minutiæ
of wrinkle-work that somehow failed to weazen them, her eyes were clear
as a girl’s—clear, out-looking, and far-seeing, and with an open and
unblinking steadfastness of gaze that was disconcerting. The remarkable
thing was the distance between them. It is a lucky man or woman who has
the width of an eye between, but with Margaret Henan the width between
her eyes was fully that of an eye and a half. Yet so symmetrically
moulded was her face that this remarkable feature produced no uncanny
effect, and, for that matter, would have escaped the casual observer’s
notice. The mouth, shapeless and toothless, with down-turned corners and
lips dry and parchment-like, nevertheless lacked the muscular slackness
so usual with age. The lips might have been those of a mummy, save for
that impression of rigid firmness they gave. Not that they were
atrophied. On the contrary, they seemed tense and set with a muscular
and spiritual determination. There, and in the eyes, was the secret of
the certitude with which she carried the heavy sacks up the steep steps,
with never a false step or overbalance, and emptied them in the
grain-bin.
“You are an old woman to be working like this,” I ventured.
She looked at me with that strange, unblinking gaze, and she thought and
spoke with the slow deliberateness that characterized everything about
her, as if well aware of an eternity that was hers and in which there was
no need for haste. Again I was impressed by the enormous certitude of
her. In this eternity that seemed so indubitably hers, there was time
and to spare for safe-footing and stable equilibrium—for certitude, in
short. No more in her spiritual life than in carrying the hundredweights
of grain was there a possibility of a misstep or an overbalancing. The
feeling produced in me was uncanny. Here was a human soul that, save for
the most glimmering of contacts, was beyond the humanness of me. And the
more I learned of Margaret Henan in the weeks that followed the more
mysteriously remote she became. She was as alien as a far-journeyer from
some other star, and no hint could she nor all the countryside give me of
what forms of living, what heats of feeling, or rules of philosophic
contemplation actuated her in all that she had been and was.
“I wull be suvunty-two come Guid Friday a fortnight,” she said in reply
to my question.
“But you are an old woman to be doing this man’s work, and a strong man’s
work at that,” I insisted.
Again she seemed to immerse herself in that atmosphere of contemplative
eternity, and so strangely did it affect me that I should not have been
surprised to have awaked a century or so later and found her just
beginning to enunciate her reply—
“The work hoz tull be done, an’ I am beholden tull no one.”
“But have you no children, no family, relations?”
“Oh, aye, a-plenty o’ them, but they no see fut tull be helpun’ me.”
She drew out her pipe for a moment, then added, with a nod of her head
toward the house, “I luv’ wuth meself.”
I glanced at the house, straw-thatched and commodious, at the large
stable, and at the large array of fields I knew must belong with the
place.
“It is a big bit of land for you to farm by yourself.”
“Oh, aye, a bug but, suvunty acres. Ut kept me old mon buzzy, along wuth
a son an’ a hired mon, tull say naught o’ extra honds un the harvest an’
a maid-servant un the house.”
She clambered into the cart, gathered the reins in her hands, and quizzed
me with her keen, shrewd eyes.
“Belike ye hail from over the watter—Ameruky, I’m meanun’?”
“Yes, I’m a Yankee,” I answered.
“Ye wull no be findun’ mony Island McGill folk stoppun’ un Ameruky?”
“No; I don’t remember ever meeting one, in the States.”
She nodded her head.
“They are home-luvun’ bodies, though I wull no be sayin’ they are no
fair-travelled. Yet they come home ot the last, them oz are no lost ot
sea or kult by fevers an’ such-like un foreign parts.”
“Then your sons will have gone to sea and come home again?” I queried.
“Oh, aye, all savun’ Samuel oz was drownded.”
At the mention of Samuel I could have sworn to a strange light in her
eyes, and it seemed to me, as by some telepathic flash, that I divined in
her a tremendous wistfulness, an immense yearning. It seemed to me that
here was the key to her inscrutableness, the clue that if followed
properly would make all her strangeness plain. It came to me that here
was a contact and that for the moment I was glimpsing into the soul of
her. The question was tickling on my tongue, but she forestalled me.
She _tchk’d_ to the horse, and with a “Guid day tull you, sir,” drove
off.
* * * * *
A simple, homely people are the folk of Island McGill, and I doubt if a
more sober, thrifty, and industrious folk is to be found in all the
world. Meeting them abroad—and to meet them abroad one must meet them on
the sea, for a hybrid seafaring and farmer breed are they—one would never
take them to be Irish. Irish they claim to be, speaking of the North of
Ireland with pride and sneering at their Scottish brothers; yet Scotch
they undoubtedly are, transplanted Scotch of long ago, it is true, but
none the less Scotch, with a thousand traits, to say nothing of their
tricks of speech and woolly utterance, which nothing less than their
Scotch clannishness could have preserved to this late day.
A narrow loch, scarcely half a mile wide, separates Island McGill from
the mainland of Ireland; and, once across this loch, one finds himself in
an entirely different country. The Scotch impression is strong, and the
people, to commence with, are Presbyterians. When it is considered that
there is no public-house in all the island and that seven thousand souls
dwell therein, some idea may be gained of the temperateness of the
community. Wedded to old ways, public opinion and the ministers are
powerful influences, while fathers and mothers are revered and obeyed as
in few other places in this modern world. Courting lasts never later
than ten at night, and no girl walks out with her young man without her
parents’ knowledge and consent.
The young men go down to the sea and sow their wild oats in the wicked
ports, returning periodically, between voyages, to live the old intensive
morality, to court till ten o’clock, to sit under the minister each
Sunday, and to listen at home to the same stern precepts that the elders
preached to them from the time they were laddies. Much they learned of
women in the ends of the earth, these seafaring sons, yet a canny wisdom
was theirs and they never brought wives home with them. The one solitary
exception to this had been the schoolmaster, who had been guilty of
bringing a wife from half a mile the other side of the loch. For this he
had never been forgiven, and he rested under a cloud for the remainder of
his days. At his death the wife went back across the loch to her own
people, and the blot on the escutcheon of Island McGill was erased. In
the end the sailor-men married girls of their own homeland and settled
down to become exemplars of all the virtues for which the island was
noted.
Island McGill was without a history. She boasted none of the events that
go to make history. There had never been any wearing of the green, any
Fenian conspiracies, any land disturbances. There had been but one
eviction, and that purely technical—a test case, and on advice of the
tenant’s lawyer. So Island McGill was without annals. History had
passed her by. She paid her taxes, acknowledged her crowned rulers, and
left the world alone; all she asked in return was that the world should
leave her alone. The world was composed of two parts—Island McGill and
the rest of it. And whatever was not Island McGill was outlandish and
barbarian; and well she knew, for did not her seafaring sons bring home
report of that world and its ungodly ways?
* * * * *
It was from the skipper of a Glasgow tramp, as passenger from Colombo to
Rangoon, that I had first learned of the existence of Island McGill; and
it was from him that I had carried the letter that gave me entrance to
the house of Mrs. Ross, widow of a master mariner, with a daughter living
with her and with two sons, master mariners themselves and out upon the
sea. Mrs. Ross did not take in boarders, and it was Captain Ross’s
letter alone that had enabled me to get from her bed and board. In the
evening, after my encounter with Margaret Henan, I questioned Mrs. Ross,
and I knew on the instant that I had in truth stumbled upon mystery.
Like all Island McGill folk, as I was soon to discover, Mrs. Ross was at
first averse to discussing Margaret Henan at all. Yet it was from her I
learned that evening that Margaret Henan had once been one of the island
belles. Herself the daughter of a well-to-do farmer, she had married
Thomas Henan, equally well-to-do. Beyond the usual housewife’s tasks she
had never been accustomed to work. Unlike many of the island women, she
had never lent a hand in the fields.
“But what of her children?” I asked.
“Two o’ the sons, Jamie an’ Timothy uz married an’ be goun’ tull sea.
Thot bug house close tull the post office uz Jamie’s. The daughters thot
ha’ no married be luvun’ wuth them as dud marry. An’ the rest be dead.”
“The Samuels,” Clara interpolated, with what I suspected was a giggle.
She was Mrs. Ross’s daughter, a strapping young woman with handsome
features and remarkably handsome black eyes.
“’Tuz naught to be smuckerun’ ot,” her mother reproved her.
“The Samuels?” I intervened. “I don’t understand.”
“Her four sons thot died.”
“And were they all named Samuel?”
“Aye.”
“Strange,” I commented in the lagging silence.
“Very strange,” Mrs. Ross affirmed, proceeding stolidly with the knitting
of the woollen singlet on her knees—one of the countless under-garments
that she interminably knitted for her skipper sons.
“And it was only the Samuels that died?” I queried, in further attempt.
“The others luved,” was the answer. “A fine fomuly—no finer on the
island. No better lods ever sailed out of Island McGill. The munuster
held them up oz models tull pottern after. Nor was ever a whusper
breathed again’ the girls.”
“But why is she left alone now in her old age?” I persisted. “Why don’t
her own flesh and blood look after her? Why does she live alone? Don’t
they ever go to see her or care for her?”
“Never a one un twenty years an’ more now. She fetched ut on tull
herself. She drove them from the house just oz she drove old Tom Henan,
thot was her husband, tull hus death.”
“Drink?” I ventured.
Mrs. Ross shook her head scornfully, as if drink was a weakness beneath
the weakest of Island McGill.
A long pause followed, during which Mrs. Ross knitted stolidly on, only
nodding permission when Clara’s young man, mate on one of the Shire Line
sailing ships, came to walk out with her. I studied the half-dozen
ostrich eggs, hanging in the corner against the wall like a cluster of
some monstrous fruit. On each shell were painted precipitous and
impossible seas through which full-rigged ships foamed with a lack of
perspective only equalled by their sharp technical perfection. On the
mantelpiece stood two large pearl shells, obviously a pair, intricately
carved by the patient hands of New Caledonian convicts. In the centre of
the mantel was a stuffed bird-of-paradise, while about the room were
scattered gorgeous shells from the southern seas, delicate sprays of
coral sprouting from barnacled _pi-pi_ shells and cased in glass,
assegais from South Africa, stone axes from New Guinea, huge Alaskan
tobacco-pouches beaded with heraldic totem designs, a boomerang from
Australia, divers ships in glass bottles, a cannibal _kai-kai_ bowl from
the Marquesas, and fragile cabinets from China and the Indies and inlaid
with mother-of-pearl and precious woods.
I gazed at this varied trove brought home by sailor sons, and pondered
the mystery of Margaret Henan, who had driven her husband to his death
and been forsaken by all her kin. It was not the drink. Then what was
it?—some shocking cruelty? some amazing infidelity? or some fearful,
old-world peasant-crime?