‘THERE!’ SAID the sergeant’s wife. ‘You would hurry me.’
‘I always like to be in time for a train,’ replied the sergeant with the equability of one who has many times before explained the guiding principle of his existence.
‘I’d have had heaps of time to buy that hat,’ added his wife.
The sergeant sighed and opened his evening paper. His wife looked out on the dark platform, pitted with pale lights under which faces and faces passed, lit up and dimmed again. A uniformed lad strode up and down with a tray of periodicals and chocolates. Farther up the platform a drunken man was being seen off by his friends.
‘I’m very fond of Michael O’Leary,’ he shouted. ‘He is the most sincere man I know.’
‘I have no life,’ sighed the sergeant’s wife. ‘No life at all! There isn’t a soul to speak to, nothing to look at all day but bogs and mountains and rain – always rain! And the people! Well, we’ve had a fine sample of them, haven’t we?’
The sergeant continued to read.
‘Just for the few days it’s been like heaven. Such interesting people! Oh, I thought Mr Boyle had a glorious face! And his voice – it went through me.’
The sergeant lowered his paper, took off his peaked cap, laid it on the seat beside him, and lit his pipe. He lit it in the old-fashioned way, ceremoniously, his eyes blinking pleasurably like a sleepy cat’s in the match-flame. His wife scrutinized each face that passed, and it was plain that for her life meant faces and people and things and nothing more.
‘Oh dear!’ she said again. ‘I simply have no existence. I was educated in a convent and play the piano; my father was literary man, and yet I am compelled to associate with the lowest types of humanity. If it was even a decent town, but a village!’
‘Ah,’ said the sergeant, gapping his reply with anxious puffs, ‘maybe with God’s help we’ll get a shift one of these days.’ But he said it without conviction, and it was also plain that he was well pleased with himself, with the prospect of returning home, with his pipe and with his paper.
‘Here are Magner and the others,’ said his wife as four other policemen passed the barrier. ‘I hope they’ll have sense enough to let us alone … How do you do? How do you do? Had a nice time, boys?’ she called with sudden animation, and her pale, sullen face became warm and vivacious. The policemen smiled and touched their caps but did not halt.
‘They might have stopped to say good evening,’ she added sharply, and her face sank into its old expression of boredom and dissatisfaction. ‘I don’t think I’ll ask Delancey to tea again. The others make an attempt, but really, Delancey is hopeless. When I smile and say “Guard Delancey, wouldn’t you like to use the butter-knife?” he just scowls at me from under his shaggy brows and says without a moment’s hesitation “I would not.” ’
‘Ah, Delancey is a poor slob,’ said the sergeant affectionately.
‘Oh yes, but that’s not enough, Jonathon. Slob or no slob, he should make an attempt. He’s a young man; he should have a dinner-jacket at least. What sort of wife will he get if he won’t even wear a dinner-jacket?’
‘He’s easy, I’d say. He’s after a farm in Waterford!’
‘Oh, a farm! A farm! The wife is only an incidental, I suppose?’
‘Well, now from all I hear she’s a damn nice little incidental.’
‘Yes, I suppose many a nice little incidental came from a farm,’ answered his wife, raising her pale brows. But the irony was lost on him.
‘Indeed, yes; indeed, yes,’ he said fervently.
‘And here,’ she added in biting tones, ‘come our charming neighbours.’
Into the pale lamplight stepped a group of peasants. Not such as one sees in the environs of a capital but in the mountains and along the coasts. Gnarled, wild, with turbulent faces, their ill-cut clothes full of character, the women in pale brown shawls, the men wearing black sombreros and carrying big sticks, they swept in, ill at ease, laughing and shouting defiantly. And, so much part of their natural environment were they, that for a moment they seemed to create about themselves rocks and bushes, tarns, turf-ricks and sea.
With a prim smile the sergeant’s wife bowed to them through the open window.
‘How do you do? How do you do?’ she called. ‘Had a nice time?’
At the same moment the train gave a jolt and there was a rush in which the excited peasants were carried away. Some minutes passed; the influx of passengers almost ceased, and a porter began to slam the doors. The drunken man’s voice rose in a cry of exultation.
‘You can’t possibly beat O’Leary!’ he declared. ‘I’d lay down my life for Michael O’Leary.’
Then, just as the train was about to start, a young woman in a brown shawl rushed through the barrier. The shawl, which came low enough to hide her eyes, she held firmly across her mouth, leaving visible only a long thin nose with a hint of pale flesh at either side. Beneath the shawl she was carrying a large parcel.
She looked hastily around, a porter shouted to her and pushed her towards the nearest compartment which happened to be that occupied by the sergeant and his wife. He had actually seized the handle of the door when the sergeant’s wife sat up and screamed.
‘Quick! Quick!’ she cried. ‘Look who it is! She’s coming in! Jonathon! Jonathon!’
The sergeant rose with a look of alarm on his broad red face. The porter threw open the door, with his free hand grasping the woman’s elbow. But when she laid eyes on the sergeant’s startled countenance, she stepped back, tore herself free, and ran crazily up the platform. The engine shrieked, the porter slammed the door with a curse, somewhere another door opened and shut, and the row of watchers, frozen into effigies of farewell, now dark now bright, began to glide gently past the window, and the stale, smoky air was charged with the breath of open fields.
The four policemen spread themselves out in a separate compartment and lit cigarettes.
‘Ah, poor old Delancey!’ said Magner with his reckless laugh. ‘He’s cracked on her all right.’
‘Cracked on her,’ agreed Fox. ‘Did ye see the eye he gave her?’
Delancey smiled sheepishly. He was a tall, handsome, black-haired young man with the thick eyebrows described by the sergeant’s wife. He was new to the force and suffered from a mixture of natural gentleness and country awkwardness.
‘I am,’ he said in his husky voice, ‘cracked on her. The devil admire me, I never hated anyone yet, but I think I hate the living sight of her.’
‘Oh, now! Oh, now!’ protested Magner.
‘I do. I think the Almighty God must have put that one in the world with the one main object of persecuting me.’
‘Well, indeed,’ said Foley, ‘I don’t know how the sergeant puts up with the same damsel. If any woman up and called me by an outlandish name like Jonathon when all knew my name was plain John, I’d do fourteen days for her – by God, I would, and a calendar month!’
The four men were now launched on a favourite topic that held them for more than an hour. None of them liked the sergeant’s wife, and all had stories to tell against her. From these there emerged the fact that she was an incurable scandal-monger and mischief-maker, who couldn’t keep quiet about her own business, much less that of her neighbours. And while they talked the train dragged across a dark plain, the heart of Ireland, and in the moonless night tiny cottage windows blew past like sparks from a fire, and a pale simulacrum of the lighted carriages leaped and frolicked over hedges and fields. Magner shut the window, and the compartment began to fill with smoke.
‘She’ll never rest till she’s out of Farranchreesht,’ he said.
‘That she mightn’t!’ groaned Delancey.
‘How would you like the city yourself, Dan?’ asked Magner.
‘Man, dear,’ exclaimed Delancey with sudden brightness, ‘I’d like it fine. There’s great life in a city.’
‘You can have it and welcome,’ said Foley, folding his hands across his paunch.
‘Why so?’
‘I’m well content where I am.’
‘But the life!’
‘Ah, life be damned! What sort of life is it when you’re always under someone’s eye? Look at the poor devils in court!’
‘True enough, true enough,’ said Fox.
‘Ah, yes, yes,’ said Delancey, ‘but the adventures they have!’
‘What adventures!’
‘Look now, there was a sergeant in court only yesterday telling me about a miser, an old maid without a soul in the world that died in an ould loft on the quays. Well, this sergeant I’m talking about put a new man on duty outside the door while he went back to report, and all this fellow had to do was to kick the door and frighten off the rats.’
‘That’s enough, that’s enough!’ cried Foley.
‘Yes, yes, but listen now, listen, can’t you? He was there about ten minutes with a bit of candle in his hand and all at once the door at the foot of the stairs began to open. “Who’s there?” says he, giving a start. “Who’s there, I say?” There was no answer and still the door kept opening quietly. Then he gave a laugh. What was it but a cat? “Puss, puss,” says he, “come on up, puss!” Thinking, you know, the ould cat would be company. Up comes the cat, pitter-patter on the stairs, and then whatever look he gave the door the hair stood up on his head. What was coming in but another cat? “Coosh!” says he, stamping his foot and kicking the door to frighten them. “Coosh away to hell out of that!” And then another cat came in and then another, and in his fright he dropped the candle and kicked out right and left. The cats began to hiss and bawl, and that robbed him of the last stitch of sense. He bolted down the stairs, and as he did he trod on one of the brutes, and before he knew where he was he slipped and fell head over heels, and when he put out his hand to grip something ’twas a cat he gripped, and he felt the claws tearing his hands and face. He had strength enough to pull himself up and run, but when he reached the barrack gate down he dropped in a fit. He was a raving lunatic for three weeks after.’
‘And that,’ said Foley, with bitter restraint, ‘is what you call adventure!’
‘Dear knows,’ added Magner, drawing himself up with a shiver, ‘ ’tis a great consolation to be able to put on your cap and go out for a drink any hour of the night you like.’
‘ ’Tis, of course,’ drawled Foley scornfully. ‘And to know the worst case you’ll have in ten years is a bit of a scrap about politics.’
‘I dunno,’ sighed Delancey dreamily. ‘I’m telling you there’s great charm about the Criminal Courts.’
‘Damn the much charm they had for you when you were in the box,’ growled Foley.
‘I know, sure, I know,’ admitted Delancey, crestfallen.
‘Shutting his eyes,’ said Magner with a laugh, ‘like a kid afraid he was going to get a box across the ears.’
‘And still,’ said Delancey, ‘this sergeant fellow I’m talking about, he said, after a while you wouldn’t mind it no more than if ’twas a card party, but talk up to the judge himself.’
‘I suppose you would,’ agreed Magner pensively.
There was silence in the smoky compartment that jolted and rocked on its way across Ireland, and the four occupants, each touched with that morning wit which afflicts no one so much as state witnesses, thought of how they would speak to the judge if only they had him before them now. They looked up to see a fat red face behind the door, and a moment later it was dragged back.
‘Is thish my carriage, gentlemen?’ asked a meek and boozy voice.
‘No, ’tisn’t. Go on with you!’ snapped Magner.
‘I had as nice a carriage as ever was put on a railway thrain,’ said the drunk, leaning in, ‘a handsome carriage, and ’tis losht.’
‘Try farther on,’ suggested Delancey.
‘Excuse me interrupting yeer conversation, gentlemen.’
‘That’s all right, that’s all right.’
‘I’m very melancholic. Me besht friend, I parted him thish very night, and ’tish known to no wan, only the Almighty and Merciful God’ (here the drunk reverently raised his bowler hat and let it slide down the back of his neck to the floor), ‘if I’ll ever lay eyes on him agin in thish world. Good night, gentlemen, and thanks, thanks for all yeer kindness.’
As the drunk slithered away up the corridor Delancey laughed. Fox resumed the conversation where it had left off.
‘I’ll admit,’ he said, ‘Delancey wasn’t the only one.’
‘He was not,’ agreed Foley. ‘Even the sergeant was shook. When he caught up the mug he was trembling all over, and before he could let it down it danced a jig on the table.’
‘Ah, dear God! Dear God!’ sighed Delancey, ‘what killed me most entirely was the bloody ould model of the house. I didn’t mind anything else but the house. There it was, a living likeness, with the bit of grass in front and the shutter hanging loose, and every time I looked down I was in the back lane in Farranchreesht, hooshing the hens and smelling the turf, and then I’d look up and see the lean fellow in the wig pointing his finger at me.’
‘Well, thank God,’ said Foley with simple devotion, ‘this time tomorrow I’ll be sitting in Ned Ivers’ back with a pint in my fist.’
Delancey shook his head, a dreamy smile playing upon his dark face.
‘I dunno,’ he said. ‘ ’Tis a small place, Farranchreesht, a small, mangy ould fothrach of a place with no interest or advancement in it.’
‘There’s something to be said on both sides,’ added Magner judicially. ‘I wouldn’t say you’re wrong, Foley, but I wouldn’t say Delancey was wrong either.’
‘Here’s the sergeant now,’ said Delancey, drawing himself up with a smile of welcome. ‘Ask him.’
‘He wasn’t long getting tired of Julietta,’ whispered Magner maliciously.
The door was pushed back and the sergeant entered, loosening the collar of his tunic. He fell into a corner seat, crossed his legs and accepted the cigarette which Delancey proffered.
‘Well, lads,’ he exclaimed. ‘What about a jorum!’
‘By Gor,’ said Foley, ‘isn’t it remarkable? I was only talking about it!’
‘I have noted before now, Peter,’ said the sergeant, ‘that you and me have what might be called a simultaneous thirst.’
The country folk were silent and exhausted. Kendillon drowsed now and again, but he suffered from blood-pressure, and after a while his breathing grew thicker and stronger until at last it exploded in a snort, and then he started up, broad awake and angry. In the silence rain spluttered and tapped along the roof, and the dark window-panes streamed with shining runnels of water that trickled on to the floor. Moll Mor scowled, her lower lip thrust out. She was a great flop of a woman with a big coarse powerful face. The other two women, who kept their eyes closed, had their brown shawls drawn tight about their heads, but Moll’s was round her shoulders and the gap above her breasts was filled by a blaze of scarlet.
‘Where are we?’ asked Kendillon crossly, starting awake after one of his drowsing fits.
Moll Mor glowered at him.
‘Aren’t we home yet?’ he asked again.
‘No,’ she answered. ‘Nor won’t be. What scour is on you?’
‘Me little house,’ moaned Kendillon.
‘Me little house,’ mimicked Moll. ‘ ’Twasn’t enough for you to board the windows and put barbed wire on the ould bit of a gate!’
‘ ’Tis all dom well for you,’ he snarled, ‘that have someone to mind yours for you.’
One of the women laughed softly and turned a haggard virginal face within the cowl of her shawl.
‘ ’Tis that same have me laughing,’ she explained apologetically. ‘Tim Dwyer this week past at the stirabout pot!’
‘And making the beds!’ chimed in the third woman.
‘And washing the children’s faces! Glory be to God, he’ll blast creation!’
‘Ay,’ snorted Moll, ‘and his chickens running off with Thade Kendillon’s roof.’
‘My roof, is it?’
‘Ay, your roof.’
‘ ’Tis a good roof. ’Tis a better roof than ever was seen over your head since the day you married.’
‘Oh, Mary Mother!’ sighed Moll, ‘ ’tis a great pity of me this three hours and I looking at the likes of you instead of me own fine bouncing man.’
‘ ’Tis a new thing to hear you praising your man, then,’ said a woman.
‘I wronged him,’ said Moll contritely. ‘I did so. I wronged him before the world.’
At this moment the drunken man pulled back the door of the compartment and looked from face to face with an expression of deepening melancholy.
‘She’sh not here,’ he said in disappointment.
‘Who’s not here, mister?’ asked Moll with a wink at the others.
‘I’m looking for me own carriage, ma’am,’ said the drunk with melancholic dignity, ‘and, whatever the bloody hell they done with it, ’tish losht. The railways in thish counthry are gone to hell.’
‘Wisha, if ’tis nothing else is worrying you wouldn’t you sit here with me?’ asked Moll.
‘I would with very great pleasure,’ replied the drunk, ‘but ’tishn’t on’y the carriage, ’tish me thravelling companion … I’m a lonely man, I parted me besht friend this very night, I found wan to console me, and then when I turned me back – God took her!’
And with a dramatic gesture the drunk closed the door and continued on his way. The country folk sat up, blinking. The smoke of the men’s pipes filled the compartment, and the heavy air was laden with the smell of homespun and turf smoke, the sweet pungent odour of which had penetrated every fibre of their garments.
‘Listen to the rain, leave ye!’ said one of the women. ‘We’ll have a wet walk home.’
‘’Twill be midnight before we’re there,’ said another.
‘Ah, sure, the whole country will be up.’
‘ ’Twill be like daylight with collogueing.’
‘There’ll be no sleep in Farranchreesht tonight.’
‘Oh, Farranchreesht! Farranchreesht!’ cried the young woman with the haggard face, the ravished lineaments of which were suddenly transfigured. ‘Farranchreesht and the sky over you, I wouldn’t change places with the Queen of England this night!’
And suddenly Farranchreesht, the bare bog-lands with the hump-backed mountain behind, the little white houses and the dark fortifications of turf that made it seem the flame-blackened ruin of some mighty city, all was lit up within their minds. An old man sitting in a corner, smoking a broken clay pipe, thumped his stick upon the floor.
‘Well, now,’ said Kendillon darkly, ‘wasn’t it great impudence in her to come back?’
‘Wasn’t it now?’ answered a woman.
‘She won’t be there long,’ he added.
‘You’ll give her the hunt, I suppose?’ asked Moll Mor politely, too politely.
‘If no one else do, I’ll give her the hunt myself.’
‘Oh, the hunt, the hunt,’ agreed a woman. ‘No one could ever darken her door again.’
‘And still, Thade Kendillon,’ pursued Moll with her teeth on edge to be at him, ‘you swore black was white to save her neck.’
‘I did of course. What else would I do?’
‘What else? What else, indeed?’ agreed the others.
‘There was never an informer in my family.’
‘I’m surprised to hear it,’ replied Moll vindictively, but the old man thumped his stick three or four times on the floor requesting silence.
‘We told our story, the lot of us,’ he said, ‘and we told it well.’
‘We did, indeed.’
‘And no one told it better than Moll Mor. You’d think to hear her she believed it herself.’
‘God knows,’ answered Moll with a wild laugh, ‘I nearly did.’
‘And still I seen great changes in my time, and maybe the day will come when Moll Mor or her likes will have a different. story.’
A silence followed his words. There was profound respect in all their eyes. The old man coughed and spat.
‘Did any of ye ever think the day would come when a woman in our parish would do the like of that?’
‘Never, never, ambasa!’
‘But she might do it for land?’
‘She might then.’
‘Or for money?’
‘She might so.’
‘She might, indeed. When the hunger is money people kill for money, when the hunger is land people kill for land. There’s a great change coming, a great change. In the ease of the world people are asking more. When I was a growing boy in the barony if you killed a beast you made six pieces of it, one for yourself and the rest for the neighbours. The same if you made a catch of fish, and that’s how it was with us from the beginning of time. And now look at the change! The people aren’t as poor as they were, nor as good as they were, nor as generous as they were, nor as strong as they were.’
‘Nor as wild as they were,’ added Moll Mor with a vicious glare at Kendillon. ‘Oh, glory be to You, God, isn’t the world a wonderful place!’
The door opened and Magner, Delancey and the sergeant entered. Magner was drunk.
‘Moll,’ he said, ‘I was lonely without you. You’re the biggest and brazenest and cleverest liar of the lot and you lost me my sergeant’s stripes, but I’ll forgive you everything if you’ll give us one bar of the “Colleen Dhas Roo”.’
‘I’m a lonely man,’ said the drunk. ‘And now I’m going back to my lonely habitation.
‘Me besht friend,’ he continued, ‘I left behind me – Michael O’Leary. ’Tis a great pity you don’t know Michael, and a great pity Michael don’t know you. But look now at the misfortunate way a thing will happen. I was looking for someone to console me, and the moment I turned me back you were gone.’
Solemnly he placed his hand under the woman’s chin and raised her face to the light. Then with the other hand he stroked her cheeks.
‘You have a beauful face,’ he said, ‘a beauful face. But whass more important, you have a beauful soul. I look into your eyes and I see the beauty of your nature. Allow me wan favour. Only wan favour before we part.’
He bent and kissed her. Then he picked up his bowler which had fallen once more, put it on back to front, took his dispatch case and got out.
The woman sat on alone. Her shawl was thrown open and beneath it she wore a bright blue blouse. The carriage was cold, the night outside black and cheerless, and within her something had begun to contract that threatened to crush the very spark of life. She could no longer fight it off, even when for the hundredth time she went over the scenes of the previous day; the endless hours in the dock; the wearisome speeches and questions she couldn’t understand and the long wait in the cells till the jury returned. She felt it again, the shiver of mortal anguish that went through her when the chief warder beckoned angrily from the stairs, and the wardress, glancing hastily into a hand-mirror, pushed her forward. She saw the jury with their expressionless faces. She was standing there alone, in nervous twitches jerking back the shawl from her face to give herself air. She was trying to say a prayer, but the words were being drowned within her mind by the thunder of nerves, crashing and bursting. She could feel one that had escaped dancing madly at the side of her mouth but she was powerless to recapture it.
‘The verdict of the jury is that Helena Maguire is not guilty.’ Which was it? Death or life? She couldn’t say. ‘Silence! Silence!’ shouted the usher, though no one had tried to say anything. ‘Any other charge?’ asked a weary voice. ‘Release the prisoner.’ ‘Silence!’ shouted the crier again. The chief warder opened the door of the dock and she began to run. When she reached the steps she stopped and looked back to see if she were being followed. A policeman held open a door and she found herself in an ill-lit, draughty, stone corridor. She stood there, the old shawl about her face. The crowd began to emerge. The first was a tall girl with a rapt expression as though she were walking on air. When she saw the woman she halted suddenly, her hands went up in an instinctive gesture, as though she wished to feel her, to caress her. It was that look of hers, that gait as of a sleepwalker that brought the woman to her senses …
But now the memory had no warmth in her mind, and the something within her continued to contract, smothering her with loneliness and shame and fear. She began to mutter crazily to herself. The train, now almost empty, was stopping at every little wayside station. Now and again a blast of wind from the Atlantic pushed at it as though trying to capsize it.
She looked up as the door was slammed open and Moll Mor came in, swinging her shawl behind her.
‘They’re all up the train. Wouldn’t you come?’
‘No, no, no, I couldn’t.’
‘Why couldn’t you? Who are you minding? Is it Thade Kendillon?’
‘No, no, I’ll stop as I am.’
‘Here! Take a sup of this and ’twill put new heart in you.’ Moll fumbled in her shawl and produced a bottle of liquor as pale as water. ‘Wait till I tell you what Magner said! That fellow’s a limb of the divil. “Have you e’er a drop, Moll?” says he. “Maybe I have then,” says I. “What is it?” says he. “What do you think?” says I. “For God’s sake,” says he, “baptize it quick and call it whiskey.” ’
The woman took the bottle and put it to her lips. She shivered as she drank.
‘ ’Tis powerful stuff entirely,’ said Moll with respect.
Next moment there were loud voices in the corridor. Moll grabbed the bottle and hid it under her shawl. The door opened and in strode Magner, and behind him the sergeant and Delancey, looking rather foolish. After them again came the two country women, giggling. Magner held out his hand.
‘Helena,’ he said, ‘accept my congratulations.’
The woman took his hand, smiling awkwardly.
‘We’ll get you the next time, though,’ he added.
‘Musha, what are you saying, mister?’ she asked.
‘Not a word, not a word. You’re a clever woman, a remarkable woman, and I give you full credit for it. You threw dust in all our eyes.’
‘Poison,’ said the sergeant by way of no harm, ‘is hard to come by and easy to trace, but it beat me to trace it.’
‘Well, well, there’s things they’re saying about me!’
The woman laughed nervously, looking first at Moll Mor and then at the sergeant.
‘Oh, you’re safe now,’ said Magner, ‘as safe as the judge on the bench. Last night when the jury came out with the verdict you could have stood there in the dock and said “Ye’re wrong, ye’re wrong, I did it. I got the stuff in such and such a place. I gave it to him because he was old and dirty and cantankerous and a miser. I did it and I’m proud of it!” You could have said every word of that and no one would have dared to lay a finger on you.’
‘Indeed! What a thing I’d say!’
‘Well, you could.’
‘The law is truly a remarkable phenomenon,’ said the sergeant, who was also rather squiffy. ‘Here you are, sitting at your ease at the expense of the State, and for one word, one simple word of a couple of letters, you could be lying in the body of the gaol, waiting for the rope and the morning jaunt.’
The woman shuddered. The young woman with the ravished face looked up.
‘ ’Twas the holy will of God,’ she said simply.
‘ ’Twas all the bloody lies Moll Mor told,’ replied Magner.
‘ ’Twas the will of God,’ she repeated.
‘There was many hanged in the wrong,’ said the sergeant.
‘Even so, even so! ’Twas God’s will.’
‘You have a new blouse,’ said the other woman in an envious tone.
‘I seen it last night in a shop on the quay,’ replied the woman with sudden brightness. ‘A shop on the way down from the court. Is it nice?’
‘How much did it cost you?’
‘Honour of God!’ exclaimed Magner, looking at them in stupefaction. ‘Is that all you were thinking of? You should have been on your bended knees before the altar.’
‘I was too,’ she answered indignantly.
‘Women!’ exclaimed Magner with a gesture of despair. He winked at Moll Mor and the pair of them retired to the next compartment. But the interior was reflected clearly in the corridor window and they could see the pale, quivering image of the policeman lift Moll Mor’s bottle to his lips and blow a long silent blast on it as on a trumpet. Delancey laughed.
‘There’ll be one good day’s work done on the head of the trial,’ said the young woman, laughing.
‘How so?’ asked the sergeant.
‘Dan Canty will make a great brew of poteen while he have yeer backs turned.’
‘I’ll get Dan Canty yet,’ replied the sergeant stiffly.
‘You will, as you got Helena.’
‘I’ll get him yet.’
He consulted his watch.
‘We’ll be in in another quarter of an hour,’ he said. ‘ ’Tis time we were all getting back to our respective compartments.’
Magner entered and the other policemen rose. The sergeant fastened his collar and buckled his belt. Magner swayed, holding the door frame, a mawkish smile on his thin, handsome, dissipated face.
‘Well, good night to you now, ma’am,’ said the sergeant primly. ‘I’m as glad for all our sakes things ended up as they did.’
‘Goodnight, Helena,’ said Magner, bowing low and promptly tottering. ‘There’ll be one happy man in Farranchreesht tonight.’
‘Come! Come, Joe!’ protested the sergeant.
‘One happy man,’ repeated Magner obstinately. ‘ ’Tis his turn now.’
‘Come on back, man,’ said Delancey. ‘You’re drunk.’
‘You wanted him,’ said Magner heavily. ‘Your people wouldn’t let you have him, but you have him at last in spite of them all!’
‘Do you mean Cady Driscoll?’ hissed the woman with sudden anger, leaning towards Magner, the shawl drawn tight about her head.
‘Never mind who I mean. You have him.’
‘He’s no more to me now than the salt sea!’
The policeman went out first, the women followed, Moll Morlaughing boisterously. The woman was left alone. Through the window she could see little cottages stepping down through wet and naked rocks to the water’s edge. The flame of life had narrowed in her to a pin-point, and she could only wonder at the force that had caught her up, mastered her and thrown her aside.
‘No more to me,’ she repeated dully to her own image in the window, ‘no more to me than the salt sea!’