The Demi-Gods, page 7
“What does he be thinking about when he gets into them fits?”
“He does be talking to the hierarchy,” replied Caeltia.
“And who are themselves?”
“They are the people in charge of this world.”
“Is it the kings and the queens and the Holy Pope?”
“No, they are different kinds of people.”
Patsy yawned.
“What does he be talking to them about?”
“Every kind of thing,” replied Caeltia, and yawned also. “They are asking him for advice now.”
“What is he saying?”
“He is talking about love,” said Caeltia.
“He is always talking about that,” said Patsy.
“And,” said Caeltia, “he is talking about knowledge.”
“It’s another word of his.”
“And he is saying that love and knowledge are the same thing.”
“I wouldn’t put it past him,” said Patsy.
* * *
For he was in a bad temper. Either the close confinement, or the dull weather, or the presence of Eileen Ni Cooley, or all of these, had made him savage.
He arose and began striding through the narrow room, kicking stones from one side of the place to the other and glooming fiercely at everybody. Twice he halted before Eileen Ni Cooley, staring at her, and twice, without a word said, he resumed his marching.
Suddenly he leaned his back against the wall facing her, and shouted:
“Well, Eileen a grah, the man went away from you, the man with the big stick and the lengthy feet. Ah! that’s a man you’d be crying out for and you all by yourself in the night.”
“He was a good man,” said Eileen; “there was no harm in that man, Padraig.”
“Maybe he used to be putting his two arms around you now and then beside a hedge and giving you long kisses on the mouth?”
“He used to be doing that.”
“Aye did he, indeed, and he wasn’t the first man to do that, Eileen.”
“Maybe you’re right, Padraig.”
“Nor the twenty-first.”
“You’ve got me here in the house, Padraig, and the people around us are your own friends.”
Caeltia also had arisen to his feet and was staring morosely at Eileen. Suddenly he leaped to her, wrenched the shawl from her head with a wide gesture, and gripped her throat between his hands; as her head touched the ground she gasped, and then, and just as suddenly, he released her. He stood up, looking wildly at Patsy, who stared back at him grinning like a madman, then he stumbled across to Finaun and took his hands between his own.
“You must not hurt me, my dear,” said Finaun, smiling gravely at him.
Mary had leaped to Art, whose arm she took, and they backed to the end of the room.
Eileen stood up; she arranged her dress and wrapped the shawl about her head again; she gazed fearlessly at Mac Cann.
“The house is full of your friends, Padraig, and there’s nobody here with me at all; there’s no man could want better than that for himself.”
Patsy’s voice was hoarse.
“You’re looking for fight?”
“I’m looking for whatever is coming,” she replied steadily.
“I’m coming, then,” he roared, and he strode to her. He lifted his hands above his head, and brought them down so heavily on her shoulders that she staggered.
“Here I am,” said he, staring into her face.
She closed her eyes.
“I knew it wasn’t love you wanted, Padraig; it was murder you wanted, and you have your wish.”
She was swaying under his weight as she spoke; her knees were giving beneath her.
“Eileen,” said Patsy, in a small voice, “I’m going to tumble; I can’t hold myself up, Eileen; my knees are giving way under me, and I’ve only got my arms round your neck.”
She opened her eyes and saw him sagging against her, with his eyes half closed and his face gone white.
“Sure, Padraig!” said she.
She flung her arms about his body and lifted him, but the weight was too much, and he went down.
She crouched by him on the floor, hugging his head against her breast.
“Sure, listen to me, Padraig; I never did like anyone in the world but yourself; there wasn’t a man of them all was more to me than a blast of wind; you were the one I liked always. Listen to me now, Padraig. Don’t I be wanting you day and night, and saying prayers to you in the darkness and crying out in the dawn; my heart is sore for you, so it is: there’s a twist in us, O my dear. Don’t you be minding the men; whatever they did it was nothing, it was nothing more than beasts playing in a field and not caring anything. We are beside one another for a minute now. When I would put my hand on my breast in the middle of a laugh it was you I was touching, and I do never stop thinking of you in any place under the sky.”
They were kissing each other like lost souls; they babbled and clung to each other; they thrust one another’s head back to stare at it, and pursued the head with their violent lips.
* * *
It was a time before they all got to sleep that night, but they did sleep at the end of it.
They stretched in the darkness with their eyes closed, and the night folded them around, separating each one from his fellow, and putting on each the enchantment of silence and blindness. They were no longer together although they were lying but a few inches apart; there was only the darkness that had no inches to it; the darkness that has no beginning and no end; that appears and disappears, calling hush as it comes and goes, and holding peace and terror in either invisible hand; there was no silver moon in the sky and no sparkle of white stars; there was only darkness and silence and the steady hushing of the rain.
* * *
When he awoke in the morning Mac Cann rolled urgently on his elbow and stared to where Eileen Ni Cooley had stretched herself for sleep—but she was not there, she was not anywhere.
He shouted, and the company sprang to their feet.
“She got out through the window,” he roared.
“The devil damn the soul of her,” said he.
Book III
Brien O’Brien
XX
They continued their travels.
It would be more correct to say they continued their search for food, for that in reality was the objective of each day’s journeying.
Moving thus, day by day, taking practically any road that presented itself, they had wandered easily through rugged, beautiful Donegal down into Connaught. They had camped on the slopes of rough mountains, slept peacefully in deep valleys that wound round and round like a corkscrew, traversed for weeks in Connemara by the clamorous sea where they lived sumptuously on fish, and then they struck to the inland plains again, and away by curving paths to the County Kerry.
At times Mac Cann got work to do—to mend a kettle that had a little hole in it, to stick a handle on a pot, to stiffen the last days of a bucket that was already long past its labour, and he did these jobs sitting in the sunlight on dusty roads, and if he did not do them Mary did them for him while he observed her critically and explained both to her and to his company the mystery of the tinker’s craft.
“There’s a great deal,” he would say, “in the twist of the hand.”
And again, but this usually to Art when that cherub tried his skill on a rusty pot:
“You’ll never make a good tinker unless you’ve got a hand on you. Keep your feet in your boots and get to work with your fingers.”
And sometimes he would nod contentedly at Mary and say:
“There’s a girl with real hands on her that aren’t feet.”
Hands represented to him whatever of praiseworthy might be spoken of by a man, but feet were in his opinion rightly covered, and ought not to be discovered except in minatory conversation. One ran on them! Well, it was a dog’s trade, or a donkey’s; but hands! he expanded to that subject, and could loose thereon a gale of praise that would blow all other conversation across the border.
They set their camp among roaring fairs where every kind of wild man and woman yelled salutation at Patsy and his daughter, and howled remembrance of ten and twenty-year old follies, and plunged into drink with the savage alacrity of those to whom despair is a fairer brother than hope, and with some of these people the next day’s journey would be shared, rioting and screaming on the lonely roads, and these people also the angels observed and were friendly with.
One morning they were pacing on their journey. The eyes of the little troop were actively scanning the fields on either hand. They were all hungry, for they had eaten nothing since the previous midday. But these fields were barren of food. Great stretches of grass stretched away to either horizon, and there was nothing here that could be eaten except by the donkey.
As they went they saw a man sitting on a raised bank. His arms were folded; he had a straw in his mouth; there was a broad grin on his red face; a battered hat was thrust far back on his head, and from beneath this a brush of stiff hair poked in any direction like an ill-tied bundle of black wire.
Mac Cann stared at that red joviality.
“There’s a man,” said he to Caeltia, “that hasn’t got a care in the world.”
“It must be very bad for him,” commented Caeltia.
“Holloa, mister,” cried Patsy heartily, “how’s everything?”
“Everything’s fine,” beamed the man, “how’s yourself?”
“We’re holding up, glory be to God!”
“That’s the way.”
He waved his hand against the horizon.
“There’s weather for you,” and he spoke with the proud humility of one who had made that weather, but would not boast. His eye was steady on Mac Cann.
“I’ve got a hunger on me that’s worth feeding, mister.”
“We’ve all got that,” replied Patsy, “and there’s nothing in the cart barring its timbers. I’m keeping an eye out, though, and maybe we’ll trip over a side of bacon in the middle of the road or a neat little patch of potatoes in the next field and it full of the flowery boyoes.”
“There’s a field a mile up this road,” said the man, “and everything you could talk about is in that field.”
“Do you tell me!” said Patsy briskly.
“I do: every kind of thing is in that field, and there’s rabbits at the foot of the hill beyond it.”
“I used to have a good shot with a stone,” said Patsy.
“Mary,” he continued, “when we come to the field let yourself and Art gather up the potatoes while Caeltia and myself take stones in our hands to kill the rabbits.”
“I’m coming along with you,” said the man, “and I’ll get my share.”
“You can do that,” said Patsy.
The man scrambled down the bank. There was something between his knees of which he was very careful.
“What sort of a thing is that?” said Mary.
“It’s a concertina and I do play tunes on it before the houses, and that’s how I make my money.”
“The musicianer will give us a tune after we get a feed,” said Patsy.
“Sure enough,” said the man.
Art stretched out his hand.
“Let me have a look at the musical instrument,” said he.
The man handed it to him and fell into pace beside Patsy and Caeltia. Mary and Finaun were going as usual one on either side of the ass, and the three of them returned to their interrupted conversation. Every dozen paces Finaun would lean to the border of the road and pluck a fistful of prime grass or a thistle or a clutch of chickweed, and he would put these to the ass’s mouth.
Patsy was eyeing the man.
“What’s your name, mister?” said he.
“I was known as Old Carolan, but now the people call me Billy the Music.”
“How is it that I never met you before?”
“I’m from Connemara.”
“I know every cow track and bohereen in Connemara, and I know every road in Donegal and Kerry, and I know everybody that’s on them roads, but I don’t know you, mister.”
The man laughed at him.
“I’m not long on the roads, so how could you know me? What are you called yourself?”
“I’m called Padraig Mac Cann.”
“I know you well, for you stole a hen and a pair of boots off me ten months ago when I lived in a house.”
“Do you tell me?” said Mac Cann.
“I do; and I never grudged them to you, for that was the day that everything happened to me.”
Mac Cann was searching his head to find from whom he had stolen a hen and a pair of boots at the one time.
“Well, glory be to God!” he cried. “Isn’t it the queer world! Are you old Carolan, the miserly man of Temple Cahill?”
The man laughed and nodded.
“I used to be him, but now I’m Billy the Music, and there’s my instrument under the boy’s oxter.”
Patsy stared at him.
“And where’s the house and the cattle, and the hundred acres of grass land and glebe, and the wife that people said you used to starve the stomach out of?”
“Faith, I don’t know where they are, and I don’t care either,” and he shook with the laughter as he said it.
“And your sister that killed herself climbing out of a high window on a windy night to search for food among the neighbours?”
“She’s dead still,” said the man, and he doubled up with glee.
“I declare,” said Patsy, “that it’s the end of the world.”
The man broke on his eloquence with a pointed finger.
“There’s the field I was telling you about and it’s weighty to the ribs with potatoes and turnips.”
Patsy turned to his daughter.
“Gather in the potatoes; don’t take them all from the one place, but take them from here and there the way they won’t be missed, and then go along the road with the cart for twenty minutes and be cooking them. Myself and Caeltia will catch up on you in a little time and we’ll bring good meat with us.”
Caeltia and he moved to the right where a gentle hill rose against the sky. The hill was thickly wooded, massive clumps of trees were dotted every little distance, and through these one could see quiet, green spaces drowsing in the sun.
When they came to the fringing trees Patsy directed his companion to go among them some little distance and then to charge here and there, slashing against the trees and the ground with a stick.
Caeltia did that, and at the end of a quarter of an hour Patsy had three rabbits stretched under his hand.
“That’s good enough,” he called; “we’ll go on now after the people.”
They stowed the rabbits under their coats and took the road.
They soon caught on their companions. The cart was drawn to the side of the road, at a little distance the ass was browsing, and Mary had a fire going in the brazier and the potatoes ready for the pot.
Patsy tossed the rabbits to her.
“There you are, my girl,” said he, and, with Caeltia, he sank down on the grassy margin of the road and drew out his pipe.
The strange man was sitting beside Art, to whom he was explaining the mechanism of a concertina.
“While we are waiting,” said Patsy to him, “you can tell us all the news; tell us what happened to the land and what you’re doing on the road; and there is a bit of twist to put in your pipe so that you’ll talk well.”
Mary broke in:
“Wait a minute now, for I want to hear that story; let yourself help me over with the brazier and we can all sit together.”
There was a handle to the bucket and through this they put a long stick and lifted all bodily to the butt of the hedge.
“Now we can sit together,” said Mary, “and I can be cooking the food and listening to the story at the same time.”
“I’d sooner give you a tune on the concertina,” said Billy the Music.
“You can do that afterwards,” replied Patsy.
XXI
“I’ll tell you the story,” said Billy the Music, “and here it is:
“A year ago I had a farm in the valley. The sun shone into it, and the wind didn’t blow into it for it was well sheltered, and the crops that I used to take off that land would astonish you.
“I had twenty head of cattle eating the grass, and they used to get fat quick and they used to give good milk into the bargain. I had cocks and hens for the eggs and the market, and there was a good many folk would have been glad to get my farm.
“There were ten men always working on the place, but at harvesttime there would be a lot more, and I used to make them work too. Myself and my son and my wife’s brother (a lout, that fellow!) used to run after the men, but it was hard to keep up with them, for they were great schemers. They tried to do as little work as ever they were able, and they tried to get as much money out of me as they could manage. But I was up to them lads, and it’s mighty little they got out of me without giving twice as much for it.
“Bit by bit I weeded out the men until at last I only had the ones I wanted, the tried and trusty men. They were a poor lot, and they didn’t dare to look back at me when I looked at them; but they were able to work, and that is all I wanted them to do, and I saw that they did it.
“As I’m sitting beside you on this bank today I’m wondering why I took all the trouble I did take, and what, in the name of this and that, I expected to get out of it all. I usen’t go to bed until twelve o’clock at night, and I would be up in the dawn before the birds. Five o’clock in the morning never saw me stretching in the warm bed, and every day I would root the men out of their sleep; often enough I had to throw them out of bed, for there wasn’t a man of them but would have slept rings round the clock if he got the chance.
