IT WAS LATE September of the finest autumn that had been known for years. For five crowded days the column had held out, flying from one position to another, beaten about by a dozen companies of regular soldiers. At Glenmanus they had taken shelter among the trees, and fought for a few hours with the river protecting them, but, a second column of soldiers having crossed by a temporary bridge a mile or two up the road, they had found themselves completely outflanked. Then they had fought their way across country; seven men holding one ditch while the other seven retreated to the next. Again they had been headed off and again had changed direction. ‘It was the sort of game a schoolboy would play with a beetle,’ remarked Keown.
This time they had been trapped by a column coming from the direction of Mallow. Finally, in desperation, they had come back by night and along a different route to their old stronghold in Glenmanus, and here they rested while Keown and Hickey, standing apart, held counsel.
Hickey, dressed in a black coat and green riding-breeches, was very tall and slim. He had the reputation of being as conscientious as he was inhuman, and there was a strain of fanaticism in his pale face and in the steely eyes behind their large horn-rimmed spectacles. It was the face of a young scientist or a young priest. He lacked imagination, people said. He also lacked humour. But he was a good soldier and cautious where men’s lives were concerned. His companion was stocky and pugnacious, with a fat, good-humoured face and a left eye that squinted atrociously. He was unscrupulous, good-natured, and unreliable, and had a bad reputation for his ways with women. He even boasted of it, and added, with a wink of his sound eye, that there wasn’t a parish in Munster where he couldn’t find a home and children. He read much more than Hickey, and rarely went anywhere without a book in his pocket. It was most often an indecent French novel, but sometimes he carried about a book of verse which he read aloud to Hickey in his broad, bantering, countryman’s voice. He liked to hear himself speak, and, when his column was in billet, practised elocution before a mirror. The two men now stood on the river bank, Hickey idly disturbing the sluggish water with a switch, and Keown, small and ungainly, with a rifle swung across his right shoulder and a sandwich in his hand, eyeing him in silence.
After about ten minutes they returned. Hickey glanced coldly at the twelve volunteers sitting on the grass, chewing sandwiches and drinking spring water out of a rusty water-bottle. Their rifles lay beside them. Most of them had doffed their hats and caps. An autumn sun shone warmly and brightly overhead, and cast spotlights through the yellowing leaves upon their flushed young faces, upturned to his, and their bare brown throats.
‘We have decided to disband the column, men,’ he said briefly.
‘Disband? Do you mean we are to go home?’ one of them asked with a quick look of dismay.
‘Yes, there’s nothing else for it. It’s disband or go down together; we can’t carry on as we’ve been doing.’
They stared blankly at him.
‘And the rifles, the equipment? What are we to do with them?’
‘Dump them.’
‘Dump them – after five days?’
‘You heard what I said.’
‘We’re genuinely sorry, boys,’ Keown put in kindly. ‘Jim and I appreciate more than we can say the way you’ve stuck by us through it all. Don’t think we’re ungrateful. We aren’t. We’ve made friends amongst you that we’ll always be proud of. But it’s better we should lose you this way than another. We want to live for Ireland, not to die for it, and die we will if we stick together any longer. There’s no use blinking that. The country here is too damn flat, too damn thickly populated, and there are too many roads.’
There was silence for a moment. The men sat looking desperately at one another and at their leaders. Suddenly one of them, a farm labourer with a thick red moustache, who had been tying up a packet of sandwiches tossed it away; it broke through the leaves, and fell with a little splash in the river. He rose and threw aside his cloth bandolier, and then began to unbuckle his khaki belt. His face was pale, and his hands fumbled nervously at the catch. The others rose too, one after another.
‘Faith, it’ll be a comfort to sleep at home after a week of this, neighbours.’
The speaker was a handsome youth, scarcely more than a boy.
‘Ah, my lad,’ said the other man bitterly, ‘you’ll sleep in a different bed, and a harder bed, before this week is out, and serve you right.’
The speech was greeted with a murmur of approval.
‘We must only risk that,’ said Keown hastily. ‘After all you’ve only been away from home for a week; they can’t have spotted you so easily.’
‘Spotted us?’ exclaimed the other angrily, squaring up to him. ‘Who talks about spotting? Or do you know who you’re speaking to? Him and me came up all the way to fight at Passage. We’re out of the one house, and we went off together in the dead of night on our bikes to join the brigade. We followed it to Macroom and we were sent back from that. Just as you’re sending us back now. We’re no seven-day soldiers, but, let me tell you, it’s the last time I’ll make a fool of myself for ye.’
Keown shrugged his shoulders helplessly without replying.
It was the youngster who showed them where the old dump was. It was dug into the low wall that surrounded the wood, and after some difficulty they succeeded in locating it. He and Keown together took out the heavy stones, one by one, and revealed a deep hollow beneath the wall. There was a long box like a coffin in it, and half a dozen sheets of oilcloth, with some old greasy rags and a tin of oil. The rifles were gathered together – there was no time to oil them – and wrapped in the oilcloth. The same was done with bandoliers, belts, and bayonets. Only the two leaders kept their arms and equipment. Hickey did not even pretend to be interested in the funereal ceremony, but walked moodily about under the shadow of the trees, his spectacles glinting in the stray shafts of sunlight.
When the work was finished, the stones replaced, and all traces of fresh earth cleaned away, the twelve men, looking now merely what in ordinary life they were, farmers’ sons or day-labourers, stood awkwardly about, hands behind their backs or buried in their trousers’ pockets.
‘And now, men, it’s time we were going,’ said the youngster in a tone of authority; already he was testing his own leadership of the little group.
Keown grinned and held out his hand to the farm labourer who had spoken so rudely to him. It was taken in silence and held for a moment. The rough unsoldierly faces cleared, and a smile of tenderness, of companionship, crossed them. The youngster strode bravely over to Hickey’s side, and held out his hand with all a boy’s gaucherie.
‘Well, good-bye, Mr Hickey,’ he said jauntily. ‘See you soon again, I hope.’
‘Good-bye, Dermod, boy, and good luck,’ said Hickey, smiling faintly, as the others shambled over to say farewell.
Then with a last chorus of ‘Good luck’ and ‘God be with you!’ the little group dispersed among the trees, going in different directions to their own homes. Their voices grew faint in the distance, and the two friends were left alone upon the river bank.
An hour later as they leaped across the fence above the wood a shot rang out and Keown’s hat sailed along beside him to the ground. Hickey flattened himself against the ditch and raised his rifle, but Keown flung himself distractedly on the grass beside his hat, brushed it and contemplated regretfully the little hole on top.
‘A man who’d do a thing like that,’ he commented with disgust, ‘would snatch a slice of bread out of an orphan’s mouth!
‘But he’s a good shot, Jim,’ he went on. ‘I will say that for him. He’s a great shot. One, two, two and a half inches farther down and he’d have got me just where I wouldn’t have known when. Ah, well!…’ He picked himself up gingerly with head well bent. ‘A miss is as good as a mile, and talking of miles.…’
‘I’ll stay here until you get across the next field.’
‘And where do we go after that, Brother James?’
‘It doesn’t matter. Anywhere out of this; we can take our bearings later on.’
‘At this point in the battle General Hickey gave the order to retreat,’ murmured Keown, and scudded across the field, head low, his rifle trailing along the grass. Hickey looked down towards the road.
He could see nobody. The sun was high up in the centre of the heavens, and a great heat had come into the day. Beneath him was the wood, and the broad shallow river shone like steel through the reddening leaves. Beyond it the main road ran white and clear. Beyond the road another hill, more trees, and a house. The house one did not see from the wood, perched as it was like a bonnet on the brow of the hill, but from where he stood he had a clear view of it, outhouses and all. An old mansion of sorts it was, eighteenth century probably, with a wide carriage-way and steps up to the door. As he looked the door opened and a figure appeared, dressed in white; it was a girl whose attention had been attracted by the shot, perhaps also by the knowledge that a column of irregulars was in the vicinity. It amused him to think that he had only to lift his hat or handkerchief on the barrel of his rifle for her to hear more from the same source. Despite his natural caution, the idea became a temptation; he fingered with the safety-catch of his rifle, and began to calculate how many of the enemy there were. Scarcely more than a dozen, he thought, or they would have shown more daring in their approach to the wood. She shaded her eyes with her hand, searching the whole neighbourhood. To wave to her now would be good fun, but dangerous.
He looked round for Keown and saw him hurrying back. Clearly, there was something wrong. But Keown, seeing his attention attracted, came no farther, and made off in another direction, waving his hand in a way that showed the need for haste. Hickey followed, keeping all the time in shelter of the ditch.
When he reached the gap towards which Keown had run, he found him there, sitting on his hunkers, his tongue licking the corners of his mouth, his hands gripping nervously at his rifle.
‘James,’ he said with affected coolness, ‘we must run for it. My tactics are particularly strong upon that point. Leave it to me, James! In the military college I was considered a dab at retreats.’
He pointed to a field that sloped upward from where they crouched to the brow of the hill.
‘I’m afraid we’ll be exposed crossing the field, but we must only risk it. After that we’ll have cover enough. Ready?’
‘Are there many of them?’ asked Hickey.
‘As thick as snakes in the DTs. Are you ready?’
‘Ready!’ said Hickey.
He closed his eyes and ran. For a full half minute he heard nothing but the beating of his own heart and the soft thud their feet made upon the grass. The sunlight swam in a rosy mist before his darkened eyes, and it seemed as if at any moment the ground might rise out of this nowhere of rosy light and hit him. Suddenly a dozen rifles signalled their appearance with a burst of rapid firing, and immediately on top of this came the unmistakable staccato whirring of a machine-gun. His eyes started open with the shock, and he saw Keown, almost doubled in two, running furiously and well ahead of him. He put on speed. The machine-gun fire grew more intense until it was almost continuous. Then it stopped, and only the rifles kept up their irregular rattle until they too trailed off and were still. It was only then he realized that he was under cover, and that what was driving him forward at such speed was the impetus of his original fear.
Keown waited for him, leaning against an old white-thorn tree, his sides perceptibly widening and narrowing as he breathed. His head seemed to be giddy and shook slightly; his trembling hands mechanically sought in every pocket for cigarettes. A faint smile played about the corners of his mouth, and when he spoke his words came almost in a whisper.
‘Rotten shooting, James, but still a narrow squeak.’
‘A very narrow squeak,’ said Hickey, and said no more, for his own head trembled as if a great hand were holding it in a tight grip and pushing it from side to side at a terrific speed. He stumbled along beside his companion without a word.
About a mile up the glen there was a stream. The two men knelt together beside it and plunged their faces deep into the gleaming, ice-cold water. They rose, half-choking, but dipped into it again, their dripping forelocks blinding their eyes. When the water had cleared a little they sank their hands in, and, still in silence, drank from their cupped palms. Then they dried hands and faces with their handkerchiefs, and each lit a cigarette, taking long pulls of the invigorating smoke.
‘It looks to me,’ said Keown, with a faint gleam of his old cheerfulness, ‘as if this was to be a busy day.’
‘It looks to me as if they wanted to locate the column,’ Hickey added wearily. ‘And now the column is broken up we’d be fools to hang round.’
‘You want to get back west?’
‘I do.’
‘Home to our mountains.’
‘Precisely.’
‘I don’t know how that’s to be managed.’
‘I do. If once we get outside this accursed ring it will be simple enough. Probably it’s closing in already. If we can hold out until nightfall we may be able to slip through; then we have only to cross by Mallow to Donoughmore, and after that everything will be plain sailing.’
‘It sounds good. Do you know the way?’
‘No, but I think we might get a few miles north of this, don’t you?’
‘Out of range, Jim, out of range! That’s the main thing, the first principle of tactics.’
They shouldered their rifles and went on, keeping to the fields, and taking what cover they could. Hickey’s legs were barely able to support him. Keown was in no better condition. Every now and then he sighed, and cast longing glances at the sun which was still upon the peak of heaven and let fall its vertical beams upon the wide expanse of open country, with its green meadowlands and greying stubble, its golden furze, and squat, pink, all-too-neat farmhouses; or looked disconsolately at the chain of mountains that closed the farthest horizon with a delicate, faint line of blue.
‘I know where my mother’s son would like to be now,’ he said with facetious melancholy.
‘So do I,’ said Hickey.
‘In Kilnamartyr?’ asked Keown, thinking still of the mountains. ‘God, Kilnamartyr and wan melodious night in Moran’s!’
‘No. Not in Kilnamartyr. At home – in the city.’
‘Your paradise would never do for me, Jim. There are no women in it.’
‘Aren’t there, now?’
‘There are not, you old Mohammedan!’
‘How do you know, Antichrist?’
‘There aren’t, there aren’t, there aren’t! I’d lay a hundred to one on that.’
‘You’d win.’
‘Of course I’d win! Don’t I know your finicking, Jesuitical soul? You hate and fear women as you hate and fear the devil – and a bit more. It’s a pity, Jim, it’s a real pity, because, God increase you, you’re a terror to fight; but there’s as much poetry in your constitution as there is in a sardine-tin. Will you ever get married, Jim?’
‘Not until we’ve won this war.’
‘And if we don’t win it?’
‘Oh, there’s no if; we must win it!’
Keown cast an amused glance at his companion out of the corner of his eye, and they trudged on again in silence.
Five times that day they got the alarm and had to take to their heels. Three times it resulted in desultory fighting. One bout lasted a full three-quarters of an hour; it was hard, slogging, ditch-to-ditch fighting, with one holding back the enemy while the other got into position at the farther end of the field. The last alarm came while they were having tea in a farmer’s house. There was no suspicion of treachery, and the soldiers, as unprepared as they, had walked up the boreen to the house for tea. The two friends left in haste by the back door, Keown hugging to his breast a floury half-cake snatched from the table in his hurry. The cake had cost him dear, because in securing it he had forgotten his hat (the hat which, as he assured Jim Hickey, he had earmarked as a present for one of his wives). They halved the hot cake and devoured it, regretting the fresh tea upon the table, and the mint of butter now being consumed by the soldiers.
But at last, drawing on to nightfall, they seemed to have left pursuit behind them and took their bearings. Hickey recognized the place. It was close to Mourneabbey and a few miles away lived an old aunt of his. He suggested sleeping there for the night, and Keown jumped at the idea, even consenting to put away his rifle and equipment until morning, lest their appearance should frighten the old woman.
It was darkening when they reached her house, and having stowed their rifles away in a dry wall, they made their way up the long winding boreen to the top of the hill. A sombre maternal peace enveloped the whole countryside; the fields were a rich green that merged into grey and farther off into a deep, shining purple. A stream flashed like a trail of white fire across the landscape. The beeches along the lane nodded down a withered leaf or two upon their heads, and the glossy trunks glowed a faint silver under the darkness of their boughs. A dog ran to meet them barking noisily.
The house was a long, low, whitewashed building with a four-sided roof, and outhouses on every side. The two men were greeted by Hickey’s aunt, an old woman, doubled up with rheumatism, who beamed delightedly upon him through a pair of dark spectacles. They sat down to tea in the kitchen, a long whitewashed room with an open hearth, where the kettle swung from a chain over the fire. Everything in the house was simple and old-fashioned, the open hearth, the bellows one blows by turning a wheel, the churn, the two pictures that hung on opposite walls, one of Robert Emmet and the other of Parnell. Old-fashioned, but comfortable, with a peculiar warmth when she drew the shutters to and lit the lamp. And homely, when she pulled her chair up to the table and questioned Hickey about mother and sisters, tush-tushed playfully his being ‘on the run’ (he said nothing of the rifles hidden in the wall or their experience during the day) and joked light-heartedly as old people will to whom realities are no longer such, but shadows that drift daily farther and farther away as their hold upon life slackens.
Parnell had been her last great love, and for her the hope of Irish independence had died with him. Hickey was moved by this strange isolation of hers, moved since now more than at any other time what had happened in those far-off days of elections, brass bands and cudgels seemed remote and insubstantial. And so they talked, each failing to understand the other.
Meanwhile, Keown kept one eye upon a young woman who moved silently about the kitchen as he took his meal. She was a country girl who helped the old lady with her housework. Her appearance had a peculiar distinction that was almost beauty. Very straight and slender she was with a broad face that tapered to a point at the chin, a curious unsmiling mouth, large, sensitive nostrils, and wide-set, melancholy eyes. Her hair was dull gold, and was looped up in a great heap at the poll. Her untidy clothes barely concealed a fine figure, and Keown watched with the appreciation of a connoisseur the easy motion of her body, so girlish yet so strong.
His attention was distracted from her by the appearance of a bottle of whiskey, and, ignoring Hickey’s warning glance, he filled a stiff glass for himself and sipped it with unction. For a week past he had not been allowed to touch drink; this was one thing Hickey insisted on with fanatical zeal – no bad example must be given to the men.
When the two women had left the room to prepare a bed for their visitors, Keown said, leaning urgently across the table:
‘Jim, I give you fair warning that I’m going to fall in love with that girl.’
‘You are not.’
‘I am, I tell you. And what’s more she’s going to fall in love with me, you old celibate! So I’m staying on. I’ve been virtuous too long. A whole week of it! My God, even the Crusaders—’
‘You’re drinking too much of that whiskey. Put it away!’
‘Ah, shut up you, Father James! Aren’t we on vacation, anyhow?’
When Hickey’s aunt came back she led off the conversation again, but Hickey carefully watched his companion make free with the whiskey and cast bolder and bolder eyes at the girl, and, as he leaned across to fill himself a third glass, snatched the bottle away. That was enough, he said, forcing Keown off with one hand and with the other holding the bottle, and he remained deaf to Keown’s assurances that he would take only a glass, a thimbleful, a drop, as he was tired and wanted to go to bed, as well as the old woman’s pleading on his behalf that no doubt the young gentleman had had a tiring day and needed a little glass to cheer him up. Hickey could be obstinate when he chose, and he chose then; so Keown went off to bed, sticking out his tongue at him behind the old woman’s back, and blinking angrily at the sleep that closed his eyelids in his own despite.
Hickey felt as if he too were more than half asleep, but he remained up until his aunt’s husband returned from Mallow. He heard the pony and trap drive into the cobbled yard, and at last the old man entered, his lean brown face flushed with the cold air. The wind was rising, he said cheerfully, and sure enough it seemed to Hickey that he heard a first feeble rustle of branches about the house. ‘God sends winds to blow away the falling leaves,’ the old man said oracularly. ‘Time little Sheela was in bed,’ said his wife. The girl called Sheela smiled, and in her queer silent way disappeared into a little room off the kitchen. ‘That’s another terrible rebel,’ the old woman went on, ‘though you wouldn’t think it of her and the little she have to say. She was never a prouder girl than when she made the bed for the pair of ye tonight. “You never thought,” says I to her, “I had such a fine handsome soldier nephew?” … Ah, God, ah, God, we weren’t so wild in our young days!’ ‘Happy days!’ said her husband nodding and spitting into the ashes. ‘But not so wild,’ she repeated, ‘not so wild!’ She brewed fresh tea, and then they sat into the fire and talked family history for what seemed to Hickey an intolerably long time. Once or twice he felt his head sag and realized that he had dropped off momentarily to sleep. It was his aunt who did most of the talking. Occasionally the old man collected his wits for some ponderous sentence, and having made the most of it nodded and smiled quietly with intense satisfaction. He had a brown, bony, innocent face and a short grey beard.
At last he rose and saying solemnly, ‘Even the foolish animal must sleep,’ went off to bed. Hickey followed him, leaving his aunt to quench the light. Even with Keown in it the house seemed spiritually still, abstracted, and lonely, and thinking of the danger of raids and arrests which their presence brought to it, he half-wished he had not come there. For worlds he would not have disturbed that old couple, spending their last days in childless, childish innocence, without much hope or fear.
He stood at the window of their room before striking a match. The room was a sort of lean- to above the servant’s room downstairs, and smelt queerly of apples and decay. The window was low, very low, and he stood back from it. It gave but a faint light and outside he could distinguish nothing but the shadows of some trees grouped about the gable end. The wind, growing louder, pealed through them, and they creaked faintly, while the slightest of slight sounds, as of distant drumming, seemed to emanate from the boards and window-frame of the little bedroom. As he lit the candle and began to undress Keown stirred in the bed, and, raising his fat, pugnacious face and squint eye out of a tumble of white linen and dark hair, said thickly but with sombre indignation, ‘In spite of you I’ll have that girl. Yes, my f-f-friend, in – spite—of – you—!’
‘Ah, go to sleep like a good man!’ said Hickey crossly, and clad only in a light summer singlet, slipped into bed beside him.
The wind! That was it, the wind! He could not have slept for long before it woke him. It blew with a sort of clumsy precision, rising slowly in great crescendos that shook the window-panes and seemed to reverberate through the whole ramshackle house. The window was bright so there was no rain. ‘God sends winds to blow away the falling leaves,’ he thought with a smile.
He lay back and watched the window that seemed to grow brighter as he looked at it, and suddenly it became clear to him that his life was a melancholy, aimless life, and that all this endless struggle and concealment was but so much out of an existence that would mean little anyhow. He had left college two years before when the police first began hunting for him, and he doubted now whether it would ever be in his power to return. He was a different man, and most of the ties he had broken then he would never be able to resume. If they won, of course, the army would be open to him, but the army he knew would not content him long, for soldiering at best was only servitude, and he had lived too desperately to endure the hollow routine of barrack life. Besides, he was a scientist, not a soldier. And if they lost? (He thought bitterly of what Keown had suggested that afternoon and his own reply.) Of course, they mustn’t lose, but suppose they did? What was there for him then? America? That was all – America! And his mother, who had worked so hard to educate him and had hoped so much of him, his mother would die, having seen him accomplish nothing, and he would be somewhere very far away. What use would anything be then? And it was quite clear to him that he had realized all this that very morning – or was it the morning before? Above Glenmanus Wood, just at the moment when the door of that old house opened, and a girl dressed in white appeared, a girl to whom it all meant nothing, nothing but that a column of irregulars was somewhere in the neighbourhood and being chased off by soldiers. At that very moment he had felt something explode within him at the inhumanity, the coldness, of it all. He had wanted to wave to her; what was that but the desire for some human contact? And then the presence of immediate danger and the necessity for flight had driven it out of his mind, but now it returned with all the dark power of nocturnal melancholy surging up beneath it; the feeling of his own loneliness, his own unimportance, his own folly.
‘What use is it all?’ he asked himself aloud, and the wind answered with a low, long-ebbing sound, a murmur, hushed and sustained, that seemed to penetrate the old house and become portion of its secret grief.
He felt his companion stir beside him in the bed. Then Keown sat up. He sat there for a long while silent, and Hickey, fearing the intrusion of his speech lay still and closed his eyes. At last Keown spoke, and his voice startled Hickey by its note of vibrant horror.
‘Jim!’
‘I mustn’t answer,’ thought Hickey.
‘Jim!’ A hand felt about the bed for him and closed on his arm.
‘Jim, Jim! Wake up! Listen to me!’
‘Well?’
‘Do you hear it?’
‘What?’
‘Listen!’
‘Do you mean the wind?’
‘Jim!’
‘Oh, do for Heaven’s sake go to sleep!’
‘Listen to that, Jim!’
‘I’m listening!’
‘Oh, my God! There it is again!’
The wind. It kept up that steady murmur that filled the old house like the bellows filling an organ. Then a clear, startling note rose above the light monotone, and the boards creaked, and the windows strained, and the trees shook with the noise of a breaking wave.
‘Jim, I say!’
‘Well, what is it?’
‘Christ Almighty, man, I can’t stand it!’
Keown tossed off the bedclothes, fell back upon the pillows and lay naked with his arms covering his eyes. Hickey started up.
‘What’s wrong with you?’
‘It’s them, Jim! It’s them!’ His voice half-rose into a scream.
‘Shut up, do, or you’ll wake the whole house! Is that what we came here for? Come on, out with it! What are you snivelling about?’
‘I tell you they’re outside. Don’t you hear them, blast you?’
Hickey’s hand closed tightly over his mouth.
‘Be quiet! Be quiet! There are old people in this house. I won’t have them disturbed I tell you.’
‘I won’t be quiet. Listen!’
The wind was rising again. Once it dropped at all it took a long time to mobilize its scattered fury. Hickey could feel the other man grow rigid with fear under his hands.
‘Listen! Oh, Jim, what am I to do?’
‘For the last time I warn you. If you don’t keep quiet, so help me, God, I’ll smash you up! You’ve drunk too much, that’s what’s wrong with you.’
‘Oh! oh!’
‘Careful now!’
It was coming. The wind rose into a triumphant howl and Keown struggled frantically. He dragged at Hickey’s left hand which tried to silence him, and his mouth had formed a shriek when the other’s fist descended with a blow that turned it suddenly to a gasp of pain.
‘Now, will that keep you quiet?’
Hickey struck again.
‘Oh, for Jesus’ sake, Jimmie, don’t beat me! I’m not telling lies, it’s them all right.’
He was sobbing quietly. The first blow must have cut his lip for Hickey felt the blood trickle across his left hand.
‘Will you be quiet then?’
‘I’ll be quiet, Jimmie. Only don’t beat me, don’t beat me!’
‘I won’t beat you. Are you cut?’
‘Jimmie!’
‘Are you cut? I said.’
‘Hold my hand, Jimmie!’
Hickey took his hand, and seeing him quieter lay down again beside him. After a few moments Keown’s free hand rose and felt his arm and shoulder, even his face, for company. A queer night’s rest, thought Hickey ruefully.
For him, at any rate, there was no rest. His companion would lie quiet for a little time, gasping and moaning when the wind blew strongly; but then some more violent blast would come that shook the house, or whirled a loose slate crashing on the cobbles of the yard, and it would begin all over again.
‘Jim, they’re after me!’
‘Be quiet, man! For the good God’s sake be quiet!’
‘I hear them! I hear them talking in the yard. They’re coming for me. Jim, where in Christ’s name is my gun? Quick! Quick!’
‘There’s nobody in the yard, I tell you, and it’s nothing but a gale of wind. You and your gun! You’re a nice man to trust with a gun! Bawling your heart out because there’s a bit of a wind blowing!’
‘Ah, Jim, Jim, it’s all up with me! All up, all up!’
It was just upon dawn when, from sheer exhaustion, he fell asleep. Hickey rose quietly for fear of disturbing him, pulled on his riding-breeches and coat, and, having lit a cigarette, sat beside the window and smoked. The wind had died down somewhat, and, with the half-light that struggled through the flying clouds above the tree-tops, its rage seemed to count no longer. A grey mist hugged the yard below, and covered all but the tops of the trees. As it cleared, minute by minute, he perceived all about him broken slates, with straw and withered leaves that rustled when the wind blew them about. The mist cleared farther, and he saw the trees looking much barer than they had looked the day before, with broken branches and the new day showing in great, rugged patches between them. The beeches, silver-bright with their sinewy limbs, seemed to him like athletes stripped for a contest. Light, a cold, wintry, forbidding light suffused the chill air. The birds were singing.
At last he heard a door open and shut. Then the bolts on the back door were drawn; he heard a heavy step in the yard, and Sheela passed across it in the direction of one of the outhouses, carrying a large bucket. Her feet, in men’s boots twice too big for her, made a metallic clatter upon the cobbles. Her hair hung down her back in one long plait of dull gold, and her body, slender as a hound’s, made a deep furrow for it as she walked.
He rose silently, pulled on his stockings, and tiptoed down the creaking stairs to the kitchen. It was almost completely dark, but for the mist of weak light that came through the open door. When he heard her step outside he went to meet her and took a bucket of turf from her hand. They scarcely spoke. She asked if he had been disturbed by the wind and he nodded, smiling. Then she knelt beside the fireplace and turned the little wheel of the bellows. The seed of fire upon the hearth took light and scattered red sparks about his stockinged feet where he stood, leaning against the mantelpiece. He watched her bent above it, the long golden plait hanging across her left shoulder, the young pointed face taking light from the new-born flame, and as she rose he took her in his arms and kissed her. She leaned against his shoulder in her queer silent way, with no shyness. And for him in that melancholy kiss an ache of longing was kindled, and he buried his face in the warm flesh of her throat as the kitchen filled with the acrid smell of turf; while the blue smoke drifting through the narrow doorway was caught and whirled headlong through grey fields and dark masses of trees upon which an autumn sun was rising.