1
If he had not put it off for three years John Spillane’s homecoming would have been that of a famous man. Bonfires would have been lighted on the hilltops of Rossamara, and the ships passing by, twenty miles out, would have wondered what they meant.
Three years ago, the Western Star, an Atlantic liner, one night tore her iron plates to pieces against the cliff-like face of an iceberg, and in less than an hour sank in the waters. Of the seven hundred and eighty-nine human souls aboard her one only had been saved, John Spillane, able seaman, of Rossamara in the country of Cork. The name of the little fishing village, his own name, his picture, were in all the papers of the world, it seemed, not only because he alone had escaped, but by reason of the manner of that escape. He had clung to a drift of wreckage, must have lost consciousness for more than a whole day, floated then about on the ocean for a second day, for a second night, and had arrived at the threshold of another dreadful night when he was rescued. A fog was coming down on the waters. It frightened him more than the darkness. He raised a shout. He kept on shouting. When safe in the arms of his rescuers his breathy, almost inaudible voice was still forcing out some cry which they interpreted as Help! Help!
That was what had struck the imagination of men – the half-insane figure sending his cry over the waste of waters, the fog thickening, and the night falling. Although the whole world had read also of the groping rescue ship, of Spillane’s bursts of hysterical laughter, of his inability to tell his story until he had slept eighteen hours on end, what remained in the memory was the lonely figure sending his cry over the sea.
And then, almost before his picture had disappeared from the papers, he had lost himself in the great cities of the States. To Rossamara no word had come from himself, nor for a long time from any acquaintance; but then, when about a year had gone by, his sister or mother as they went up the road to Mass of a Sunday might be stopped and informed in a whispering voice that John had been seen in Chicago, or, it might be, in New York, or Boston, or San Francisco, or indeed anywhere. And from the meagreness of the messages it was known, with only too much certainty, that he had not, in exchanging sea for land, bettered his lot. If once again his people had happened on such empty tidings of him, one knew it by their bowed and stilly attitude in the little church as the light whisper of the Mass rose and fell about them.
When three years had gone by he lifted the latch of his mother’s house one October evening and stood awkwardly in the middle of the floor. It was nightfall and not a soul had seen him break down from the ridge and cross the roadway. He had come secretly from the ends of the earth.
And before he was an hour in their midst he rose up impatiently, timidly, and stole into his bed.
‘I don’t want any light,’ he said, and as his mother left him there in the dark, she heard him yield his whole being to a sigh of thankfulness. Before that he had told them he felt tired, a natural thing, since he had tramped fifteen miles from the railway station in Skibbereen. But day followed day without his showing any desire to rise from the bedclothes and go abroad among the people. He had had enough of the sea, it seemed; enough too of the great cities of the States. He was a pity, the neighbours said; and the few of them who from time to time caught glimpses of him, reported him as not yet having lost the scared look that the ocean had left on him. His hair was grey or nearly grey, they said, and, swept back fiercely from his forehead, a fashion strange to the place, seemed to pull his eyes open, to keep them wide open, as he looked at you. His moustache also was grey, they said, and his cheeks were grey too, sunken and dark with shadows. Yet his mother and sister, the only others in the house, were glad to have him back with them; at any rate, they said, they knew where he was.
They found nothing wrong with him. Of speech neither he nor they ever had had the gift; and as day followed day, and week week, the same few phrases would carry them through the day and into the silence of night. In the beginning they had thought it natural to speak with him about the wreck; soon, however, they came to know that it was a subject for which he had no welcome. In the beginning also, they had thought to rouse him by bringing the neighbour to his bedside, but such visits instead of cheering him only left him sunken in silence, almost in despair. The priest came to see him once in a while, and advise the mother and sister, Mary her name was, to treat him as normally as they could, letting on that his useless presence was no affliction to them nor even a burden. In time John Spillane was accepted by all as one of those unseen ones, or seldom-seen ones, who are to be found in every village in the world – the bedridden, the struck-down, the aged – forgotten of all except the few faithful creatures who bring the cup to the bedside of a morning, and open the curtains to let in the sun.
2
In the nearest house, distant a quarter-mile from them, lived Tom Leane. In the old days before John Spillane went to sea, Tom had been his companion, and now of a night-time he would drop in if he had any story worth telling or if, on the day following, he chanced to be going back to Skibbereen, where he might buy the Spillanes such goods as they needed, or sell a pig for them, slipping it in among his own. He was a quiet creature, married, and struggling to bring up the little family that was thickening about him. In the Spillanes’ he would, dragging at the pipe, sit on the settle, and quietly gossip with the old woman while Mary moved about on the flags putting the household gear tidy for the night. But all three of them, as they kept up the simple talk, were never unaware of the silent listener in the lower room. Of that room the door was kept open; but no lamp was lighted within it; no lamp indeed was needed, for a shaft of light from the kitchen struck into it showing one or two of the religious pictures on the wall and giving sufficient light to move about in. Sometimes the conversation would drift away from the neighbourly doings, for even to Rossamara tidings from the great world abroad would sometimes come; in the middle of such gossip, however, a sudden thought would strike Tom Leane, and, raising his voice, he would blurt out: ‘But sure ’tis foolish for the like of me to be talking about these far-off places, and that man inside after travelling the world, over and thither.’ The man inside, however, would give no sign whatever whether their gossip had been wise or foolish. They might hear the bed creak, as if he had turned with impatience at their mention of his very presence.
There had been a spell of stormy weather, it was now the middle of February, and for the last five days at twilight the gale seemed always to set in for a night of it. Although there was scarcely a house around that part of the southwest Irish coast that had not some one of its members, husband or brother or son, living on the sea, sailoring abroad or fishing the home waters or those of the Isle of Man – in no other house was the strain of a spell of disastrous weather so noticeable in the faces of its inmates. The old woman, withdrawn into herself, would handle her beads all day long, her voice every now and then raising itself, in forgetfulness, to a sort of moan not unlike the wind’s upon which the younger woman would chide her with a ‘Sh! sh!’ and bend vigorously upon her work to keep bitterness from her thoughts. At such a time she might enter her brother’s room and find him raised on his elbow in the bed, listening to the howling winds, scared it seemed, his eyes fixed and wide open. He would drink the warm milk she had brought him, and hand the vessel back without a word. And in the selfsame attitude she would leave him.
The fifth night instead of growing in loudness and fierceness the wind died away somewhat. It became fitful, promising the end of the storm; and before long they could distinguish between the continuous groaning and pounding of the sea and the sudden shout the dying tempest would fling among the tree-tops and the rocks. They were thankful to note such signs of relief; the daughter became more active, and the mother put by her beads. In the midst of a sudden sally of the wind’s the latch was raised, and Tom Leane gave them greeting. His face was rosy and glowing under his sou’wester; his eyes were sparkling from the sting of the salty gusts. To see him, so sane, so healthy, was to them like a blessing. ‘How is it with ye?’ he said, cheerily, closing the door to.
‘Good, then, good, then,’ they answered him, and the mother rose almost as if she would take him by the hand. The reply meant that nothing unforeseen had befallen them. He understood as much. He shook a silent head in the direction of the listener’s room, a look of enquiry in his eyes, and this look Mary answered with a sort of hopeless upswing of her face. Things had not improved in the lower room.
The wind died away, more and more; and after some time streamed by with a shrill steady undersong; all through, however, the crashing of the sea on the jagged rocks beneath kept up an unceasing clamour. Tom had a whole budget of news for them. Finny’s barn had been stripped of its roof; a window in the chapel had been blown in; and Largy’s store of fodder had been shredded in the wind; it littered all the bushes to the east. There were rumours of a wreck somewhere; but it was too soon yet to know what damage the sea had done in its five days’ madness. The news he had brought them did not matter; what mattered was his company, the knitting of their half-distraught household once again to humankind. Even when at last he stood up to go, their spirits did not droop, so great had been the restoration.
‘We’ re finished with it for a while anyhow,’ Tom said, rising for home.
‘We are, we are; and who knows, it mightn’t be after doing all the damage we think.’
He shut the door behind him. The two women had turned towards the fire when they thought they again heard his voice outside. They wondered at the sound; they listened for his footsteps. Still staring at the closed door, once more they heard his voice. This time they were sure. The door reopened, and he backed in, as one does from an unexpected slap of rain in the face. The light struck outwards, and they saw a white face advancing. Some anxiety, some uncertainty, in Tom’s attitude as he backed away from that advancing face, invaded them so that they too became afraid. They saw the stranger also hesitating, looking down his own limbs. His clothes were dripping; they were clung in about him. He was bare headed. When he raised his face again, his look was full of apology. His features were large and flat, and grey as a stone. Every now and then a spasm went through them, and they wondered what it meant. His clab of a mouth hung open; his unshaven chin trembled. Tom spoke to him: ‘You’d better come in; but ’tis many another house would suit you better than this.’
They heard a husky, scarce-audible voice reply: ‘A doghouse would do, or a stable.’ Bravely enough he made an effort to smile.
‘Oh, ’tisn’t that at all. But come in, come in.’ He stepped in slowly and heavily, again glancing down his limbs. The water running from his clothes spread in a black pool on the flags. The young woman began to touch him with her finger tips as with some instinctive sympathy, yet could not think, it seemed, what was best to be done. The mother, however, vigorously set the fire-wheel at work, and Tom built up the fire with bog-timber and turf. The stranger meanwhile stood as if half-dazed. At last, as Mary with a candle in her hand stood pulling out dry clothes from a press, he blurted out in the same husky voice, Welsh in accent: ‘I think I’m the only one!’
They understood the significance of the words, but it seemed wrong to do so.
‘What is it you’re saying?’ Mary said, but one would not have recognised the voice for hers, it was so toneless. He raised a heavy sailor’s hand in an awkward taproom gesture: ‘The others, they’re gone, all of them.’
The spasm again crossed his homely features, and his hand fell. He bowed his head. A coldness went through them. They stared at him. He might have thought them inhuman. But Mary suddenly pulled herself together, leaping at him almost: ‘Sh! Sh!’ she said, ‘speak low, speak low, low,’ and as she spoke, all earnestness, she towed him first in the direction of the fire, and then away from it, haphazardly it seemed. She turned from him and whispered to Tom: ‘Look, take him up into the loft, and he can change his clothes. Take these with you, and the candle, the candle.’ And she reached him the candle eagerly. Tom led the stranger up the stairs, it was more like a ladder, and the two of them disappeared into the loft. The old woman whispered: ‘What was it he said?’
‘ ’Tis how his ship is sunk.’
‘Did he says he was the only one?’
‘He said that.’
‘Did himself hear him?’ She nodded towards her son’s room.
‘No, didn’t you see me pulling him away from it? But he’ll hear him now. Isn’t it a wonder Tom wouldn’t walk easy on the boards!’
No answer from the old woman. She had deliberately seated herself in her accustomed place at the fire, and now moaned out: ‘Aren’t we in a cruel way, not knowing how he’d take a thing!’
‘Am I better tell him there’s a poor seaman after coming in on us?’
‘Do you hear them above! Do you hear them!’
In the loft the men’s feet were loud on the boards. The voice they were half-expecting to hear they then heard break in on the clatter of the boots above: ‘Mother! Mother!’
‘Yes, child, yes.’
‘Who’s aloft? Who’s going around like that, or is it dreaming I am?’
The sounds from above were certainly like what one hears in a ship. They thought of this, but they also felt something terrible in that voice they had been waiting for: they hardly knew it for the voice of the man they had been listening to for five months.
‘Go in and tell him the truth,’ the mother whispered. ‘Who are we to know what’s right to be done? Let God have the doing of it.’ She threw her hands in the air.
Mary went in to her brother, and her limbs were weak and cold. The old woman remained seated at the fire, swung round from it, her eyes towards her son’s room, fixed, as the head itself was fixed, in the tension of anxiety.
After a few minutes Mary emerged with a strange alertness upon her: ‘He’s rising! He’s getting up! ’Tis his place, he says. He’s quite good.’ She meant he seemed bright and well. The mother said: ‘We’ll take no notice of him, only just as if he was always with us.’
‘Yes.’
They were glad then to hear the two men in the loft groping for the stair head. The kettle began to splutter in the boil, and Mary busied herself with the table and tea cups.
The sailor came down, all smiles in his ill-fitting, haphazard clothes. He looked so overjoyed one might think he would presently burst into song.
3
‘The fire is good,’ he said. ‘It puts life in one. And the dry clothes too. My word, I’m thankful to you, good people; I’m thankful to you.’ He shook hands with them all effusively.
‘Sit down now; drink up the tea.’
‘I can’t figure it out; less than two hours ago, out there . . . ’ As he spoke he raised his hand towards the little porthole of a window, looking at them with his eyes staring. ‘Don’t be thinking of anything, but drink up the hot tea,’ Mary said.
He nodded and set to eat with vigour. Yet suddenly he would stop, as if he were ashamed of it, turn half-round and look at them with beaming eyes, look from one to the other and back again; and they affably would nod back at him. ‘Excuse me, people,’ he would say, ‘excuse me.’ He had not the gift of speech, and his too-full heart could not declare itself. To make him feel at his ease, Tom Leane sat down away from him, and the women began to find something to do about the room. Then there were only little sounds in the room: the breaking of the eggs, the turning of the fire-wheel, the wind going by. The door of the lower room opened silently, so silently that none of them heard it, and before they were aware, the son of the house, with his clothes flung on loosely, was standing awkwardly in the middle of the floor, looking down on the back of the sailorman bent above the table. ‘This is my son,’ the mother thought of saying. ‘He was after going to bed when you came in.’
The Welshman leaped to his feet, and impulsively, yet without many words, shook John Spillane by the hand, thanking him and all the household. As he seated himself again at the table John made his way silently towards the settle from which, across the room, he could see the sailor as he bent over his meal.
The stranger put the cup away from him, he could take no more; and Tom Leane and the womenfolk tried to keep him in talk, avoiding, as by some mutual understanding, the mention of what he had come through. The eyes of the son of the house were all the time fiercely buried in him. There came a moment’s silence in the general chatter, a moment it seemed impossible to fill, and the sailorman swung his chair half-round from the table, a spoon held in his hand lightly: ‘I can’t figure it out. I can’t nohow figure it out. Here I am, fed full like a prize beast; and warm – Oh, but I’m thankful – and all my mates,’ with the spoon he was pointing towards the sea – ‘white, and cold like dead fish! I can’t figure it out.’
To their astonishment a voice travelled across the room from the settle.
‘Is it how ye struck?’
‘Struck! Three times we struck! We struck last night, about this time last night. And off we went in a puff! Fine, we said. We struck again. ’Twas just coming light. And off again. But when we struck the third time, ’twas like that!’ He clapped his hands together; ‘She went in matchwood! ’Twas dark. Why, it can’t be two hours since!’
‘She went to pieces?’ the same voice questioned him.
‘The Nan Tidy went to pieces, sir! No one knew what had happened or where she was. ’Twas too sudden. I found myself clung about a snag of rock. I hugged it.’
He stood up, hoisted as from within.
‘Is it you that was on the look-out?’
‘Me! We’d all been on the look-out for three days. My word, yes, three days. We were stupefied with it!’
They were looking at him as he spoke, and they saw the shiver again cross his features; the strength and warmth that the food and comfort had given him fell from him, and he became in an instant the half-drowned man who had stepped in to them that night with the clothes sagging about his limbs, ‘ ’Twas bad, clinging to that rock, with them all gone! ’Twas lonely! Do you know, I was so frightened I couldn’t call out.’ John Spillane stood up, slowly, as if he too were being hoisted from within.
‘Were they looking at you?’
‘Who?’
‘The rest of them. The eyes of them.’
‘No,’ the voice had dropped, ‘no, I didn’t think of that!’ The two of them stared as if fascinated by each other.
‘You didn’t!’ It seemed that John Spillane had lost the purpose of his questioning. His voice was thin and weak; but he was still staring with unmoving, puzzled eyes at the stranger’s face. The abashed creature before him suddenly seemed to gain as much eagerness as he had lost: his words were hot with anxiety to express himself adequately: ‘But now, isn’t it curious, as I sat there, there at that table, I thought somehow they would walk in, that it would be right for them, somehow, to walk in, all of them!’
His words, his eager lowered voice, brought in the darkness outside, its vastness, its terror. They seemed in the midst of an unsubstantial world. They feared that the latch would lift, yet dared not glance at it, lest that should invite the lifting. But it was all one to the son of the house, he appeared to have gone away into some mood of his own; his eyes were glaring, not looking at anything or anyone close at hand. With an instinctive groping for comfort, they all, except him, began to stir, to find some little homely task to do: Mary handled the tea ware, and Tom his pipe, when a rumbling voice, very indistinct, stilled them all again. Words, phrases, began to reach them – that a man’s eyes will close and he on the lookout, close in spite of himself, that it wasn’t fair, it wasn’t fair, it wasn’t fair! And lost in his agony, he began to glide through them, explaining, excusing the terror that was in him: ‘All round. Staring at me. Blaming me. A sea of them. Far, far! Without a word out of them, only their eyes in the darkness, pale like candles!’
Transfixed, they glared at him, at his round-shouldered sailor’s back disappearing again into his den of refuge. They could not hear his voice any more, they were afraid to follow him.