In the early twentieth century, old
traditions became a topic of heated
discussion for Irish republicans. To some,
the issue boiled down to a question
of how much of its old culture Ireland
would be willing to cast aside to join the
modern world. This question is central to
much of the work of Charlotte McManus,
who is best known as the author of The
Professor in Erin (1912), set in a parallel
universe where Hugh O’Neill defeated
the English at the Battle of Kinsale (1601).
The following story explores the same
theme on a more intimate scale, with a
sly nod to Yeats’s Cathleen Ni Houlihan
to signal McManus’s intent.
THERE WAS A MAN living in one of the Congested Districts Board’s new houses – those ugly houses with thin cold slate roofs and big windows – who had a charm. No one cared to cross him because of it. He lived there alone with his brother, and Anthony wanted to get a wife. But no girl would marry Anthony because of William’s charm. There were farmers who looked at his land, thirty acres of tillage and pasture, who would have given him their daughters. More than once there had been embassies, and negotiations, and dowry-fixing in the match-room of the town; but everything had fallen through when the girls were told.
These failures troubled Anthony, yet heightened his respect for his brother. Once he had wondered what measure of sorrow he would feel if he were to see William’s coffin carried down the boreen, and a wife come tripping up. Sorrow sank the scale at one moment as he gazed into the airy fields of possibility; then he saw the comely figure of a woman, and he thought of the comforts her presence would bring.
The thought stood waiting for him on the threshold as he entered the house after a girl’s refusal. He took it, and sighed. The silent kitchen had invited the light in through the staring panes of the windows. Its width and length were shamelessly exposed. All that should have been softened or hidden, the light had touched; the disorder, the dust, the unwashed delph on the dresser, the rent in the coarse red quilt that covered the sleeper’s figure. The fire had faded before it. It had thrust itself into the throat of the chimney. It had wiped up the shadows in the sooty corners. The silence, in which sound seemed encamped, the hard unsparing light, gave the man a cheerless feeling, an irritation beyond the comfort of an oath. He filled his pipe, drove the bowl into a coal, gave some angry puffs, and looked towards the bed.
The sleeper’s lips were pressed together. He breathed through a long straight nose without sound, like a child. The face and head of the man belonged to the dolichocephalous type, and a lock of black hair streaked with grey hung over the forehead. His brother’s head was the other type, broad and round.
When Anthony had made up the fire, put on the kettle, and laid the soda-cake on the table, the man on the bed opened his eyes. They were blue, set in deeply wrinkled flesh. He got off the bed, and as he limped across the room, asked if the match were made. It was not, Anthony said; there had been a dispute over the stock. The man took off his hat, blessed himself, and ate in silence. When they had finished the meal, a woman came to the door.
Her face was half hidden in a brown shawl, and she spoke in a nasal drawl.
‘Good evening, sirs,’ she said. ‘Is it here that the gentleman, Mr William Carney, lives?’
Anthony looked at his brother. Many visitors came to William, seeking help through his charm. Some came openly; some went out silent and mysterious from their homes and asked for the cure. The shrouding shawl over the woman’s face suggested mystery, and her voice said she was what Connacht calls ‘a Yank’.
‘Is it me you’re wanting?’ William asked. He sat without moving, looking at the wall in front of him. There was a remoteness in his manner and air.
The woman came in. She pushed the shawl a little from her face. It was thin and colourless. A movement of the hands showed a blue silk blouse and a white neck. She sat down on the chair Anthony placed for her.
‘I’m told you have a charm,’ she said.
‘I have.’
‘I guess it’s good for most things.’
‘Do you want it done over you?’
‘You are real smart, Mr Carney, I do, but I don’t like to speak before the other gentleman.’
Anthony went towards the door. William rose and followed him. ‘This is the wife for you,’ he said when they stood outside.
‘She’s too old,’ Anthony objected.
‘She’s a returned Yank, and has a fortune.’
‘Well, I might.’
‘Say if you will, or you will not, before I do the charm.’
‘Well I might, but I must see the money first – if we can settle the match.’
William called the woman. ‘If you come out, I’ll do the charm,’ he said, and went over to the wall, and sat upon it.
She came from the kitchen with an unhesitating step, her face uncovered. The only beauty left her in her fight with the seasons and hard work was her red-brown hair. But she had the confident air of success; of one whose life has been widened by the knowledge of New York kitchens; by the freedom of her evening; by the money that enabled her to buy finery. The man asked what was wrong with her.
She told him in a clear business-like way. She had returned home from the States three months before, and if her friends there knew she was asking him for a charm they would joke her ’til she died. They didn’t believe in charms; neither did she, but it would be real clever of him if he could make a girl look like herself again.
‘Do you want to be made young?’
‘I guess I am young enough, but I want to look as I did when I went to the States,’ she said.
The man picked three blades of grass, measured them, and got off the wall. ‘In the name of the Holy Trinity, and in the name of the saint of the muscles of the body. Amen,’ he said. ‘Now do you walk three times after me round the little bush over there.’
She obeyed, and they went thrice round the hawthorn, going by the left to the right. Then he got a bowl with clean water, and put the pieces of grass into it, and told her to look into the bowl. The grass floated slowly on the surface. He took a little stick from his pocket and stirred the water, and said the prayer of the saint of the muscles in Irish. ‘Take out the blade that comes nearest to you.’ he said.
She drew out the short blade.
‘As long as you keep that bitteen of grass, you will look young to any man wanting a wife. It will be eighteen you’ll look – a slip of a girl.’ He emptied the bowl, walked back to the house, and slammed the door.
Anthony heard steps drawing near as he sat on a bank. He had discreetly turned his back on the rite, bending his gaze on the ground. The closing door told him that the charm had been done. He sat modestly motionless.
The woman stopped before him, and the scope of his gaze took in a thin white hand with a pound note. ‘Give that to your brother,’ she said.
She was two yards away as he still stared at it, and a mellow, ruminating look settled on his face. When he raised his eyes she was some distance off, and he thought she walked like a young girl.
The woman went on her way. She took a shortcut over the fields to the Big House, the semi-derelict grey limestone building, where with two servants, a young man and a little girl, she had kept house for the Experimenter for a month. He had hired the house half a year before; he was a bald-headed, lively little man who had theories.
He called her from the door of his laboratory as she crossed the hall; she went into the room. Instruments, coils, and jars stood on a table. There was a flow of commingled odours. One coil, attached to a mouthpiece, was fastened to a battery, and a mirror beside it reflected a sunbeam. Not far from the table stood John Naughton and Bridgie, and she was told to join them.
The Experimenter spoke some words to himself. The three had a value as human units with vocal chords and throats and differences of sound, and this was their pre-eminent interest to him. He was engaged on experiments of light, and sound, and electric waves, and psycho-activities, and was just then experimenting on sound in its relation to the rest. He asked Mary Nally to speak into the receiver.
She did so readily, and taking observations, he scarcely noticed the child’s snigger. For the woman had said, ‘I am eighteen and beautiful.’
She spoke the same words three times, and his eyes puckered. It seemed as if something unexpected had happened.
He told the young man and the child to speak into the receiver in turn. Both said that Mary Nally was eighteen and beautiful. The Experimenter waved them back, and seized the tube. But the words he meant to say melted into ‘She’s eighteen and beautiful.’
He examined his instruments; he read the sunbeam on the mirrors; a look of interest showed on his face. He began speaking, to himself more than to the three. Something remarkable had happened. A magnetic field had been created round the receiver, so that they spoke words directed by animal magnetism, or odic force. Miss Nally, he conjectured, had either a powerful magnet about her which prevented the results he had expected from his experiments, or had become a magnet herself, as if she had been subjected to N-rays. These rays exercised a great influence on the nerve centres increasing the activities of muscles and nerves, and were produced by muscular contractions and nervous activity. He would put her to further tests.
But the woman had backed to the door. The cakes were in the oven; it was time to get the tea. There was a dark poppy-tint in each cheek as she went out of the room. It lasted till she reached the great stone-flagged kitchen. Then she went grey-white; she had dropped the charm. She sat down and thought about where it might be. John Naughton’s and Bridgie’s step came on the stair, and she got up and stood by the fire till they had passed through the kitchen. Then she fled upstairs. Standing by his coil, the Experimenter saw the door open, and his abstracted gaze rested on the woman as she came in and bent over the floor. A blade of grass fluttered from the paper she took up. Her hand swept the air like a wing; she bent again and she seized it. The door opened wider, and closed, and she was gone.
Mary’s big brass-bound American trunk stood at the foot of the bed in her room off the kitchen. She put the charm in the trinket case with her eight-carat gold bracelets. She dressed herself in her purple suit and re-did her red-brown hair, her mind prepared for any attack. She had words ready, like splinters of an iceberg. She was composed, cold. There was no one in the kitchen when she went back.
The man seeking a wife coughed outside. He looked though the doorway and came in. The pound note was in his hand. ‘I hope I’m not after giving you a start, Miss Nally,’ he said. ‘I’ve brought the pound back.’
She looked at him and it. ‘Well, I guess, Mr Carney, that’s good money.’
‘The best,’ he said deferentially. ‘But it’s what my brother does take but nine coppers, or nine pieces of silver, or nine pieces of gold.’
‘Is that so? I suppose it’s coppers he mostly gets.’
‘I won’t be denying it. There’s not been anyone but one Yank who could show him nine pieces of gold. And as many come back from the States with the name of a fortune they haven’t got, it’s small wonder.’
‘Then I guess, Mr Carney, I’m to give you nine coppers, and you give me back the pound. I’m real pleased at the charm being so cheap.’
She took the note his fingers seemed reluctant to release, and his eyes lingered on her. ‘Have ye the grass safe?’ he asked.
The answer had jerked from her lips, ‘I threw it away,’ when the Experimenter came down the stairs. His voice went before him; he was calling on his household. Everyone was to come up to the laboratory again. He pattered into the kitchen, threw one glance at the stranger, and swept him into the party.
The little girl was not of it; she had wandered off into the mushroom field, and, eyes earthward, was moving among the red cows.
Mary Nally was the first to speak. Her lower lip drooped, the white edge of a tooth showed as she bent over the mouth-piece. She dealt with the weather. The two men followed; and as each spoke, the Experimenter examined the plates, coils, and instruments, setting something in motion that interrupted by timed intervals the light of the sunbeam on the mirror. He appeared pleased, straightened himself, tapped the table with a finger, and addressed the three as he would have done a row of students. The sounds, he told them, had acted as he had anticipated. The magnetic field, mysteriously created, was no longer present. They had spoken their thoughts under natural conditions. There was no compulsion to follow a set formula of words.
The molecules of the body loosened, as it were, by that unknown magnetic current had produced a hypnotic effect. They had been magnetised in the first experiment by induction – that was magnetised by another body which had been strongly magnetised. A magnetic field was created that held up and deflected the energies and activities of his instruments; and why it had done so (for it had not acted in such a way as the current might be expected to act), and where it had come from, was still a matter of conjecture to him.
The human beings addressed bore varying expressions on their faces. The wife-seeker’s was full of the gravity that a fellow scientist might give. Words stood on his lips. His voice shot into the pause when the Experimenter ceased.
‘There’s not a man in Ireland, north, south, east, or west, that can do a better charm than my brother William,’ he said, and swelled with pride.
The Experimenter’s eyes wandered out of the imaginary classroom, and he had an exact vision of the three. His mind reached for the words that had stopped at his ears. ‘Ah, indeed. What charms?’ he said.
‘I seen him take a bitteen of grass,’ said the wife-seeker, ‘and put it in a bowl of water and say the prayer of the saint of the muscles over it. That would be one charm. Many do be corning to him for it.’
Mary Nally had reached the door. It opened and closed behind her with the speed of a gust of wind. Some minutes later Anthony appeared in the kitchen. He had not put any harm on what he had said, he told her; he had not let on that she had been to William.
She thrust the one pound into his hand as if she were a wild thing about to claw him, and said some words, and he went away. In the field he met the little girl, and he stayed and talked to her. ‘She can’t do you a ha’penny worth of harm,’ he concluded, and walked on.
The child came back to the house with the mushrooms in her blue apron. As her hands rattled the tea-cups in the basin of water, she watched Mary from the corner of her eyes. She watched her, as, dressed for visiting, she crossed the yard. When she was out of sight the child ran swiftly to the bedroom door and as swiftly ran back. Three times she pattered across the flags, and three times returned. And on each excursion to the door she carried a face of resolve, and each time she ran back, the resolution was broken and there was alarm in its place. On the fourth adventure the door fell open before her, and darting into the bedroom, she swooped upon the trunk.
The Experimenter went out the next morning. About eleven, he reached the boreen that led to the slated house. He followed the boreen and saw a man going before him driving a donkey with creels of turf. The man limped. He and the donkey stopped before a half-built rick. The sods were thudding to the ground as the Experimenter reached them. ‘Good morning,’ he said. ‘Are you William Carney?’
The stooping figure straightened up and looked round at the voice. ‘Good morning. That’s my name.’
‘You have a charm, I hear; a magnet. You charge a piece of grass. How do you do it?’
The sods thudded again. The man’s coat spread out like the brown wings of a hen as he stooped over them.
‘I am a scientist, and interested in your magnet. I wish to learn your method.’
The answer was the sound of falling sods.
The Experimenter raised his voice. ‘I ask you to show me how to magnetise a blade of grass so that it will create a wide magnetic field. I will pay you for your secret.’
The hen-like wings swung up. William turned and studied the Experimenter’s face. ‘Do you want it done over yourself?’ he asked.
‘Yes, if that is the only way you can demonstrate.’
‘Are your muscles knotted?’
‘I am not rheumatic.’
‘What’s wrong with ye then?’
‘Nothing. I wish to investigate. I wish to learn if your charm is a real activity, or whether you are a humbug. I see you are lame. Why do you not cure yourself?’
The sods fell again. That was a rhythm in the sway of the man’s arms; in the answering thud. Some minutes passed.
Then he stood up, and his closed lips parted. He drew a deep breath, looked towards the fairy tree, and wiped the brown dust of his hands on has coat. ‘Come back to the house and I’ll make a cure,’ he said.
He led the way, limping. The Experimenter followed with a sprightly step. He watched the rites closely. He took the bowl with the three blades of grass, and went after the man three times round the hawthorn tree. But the circle was made not sun-wise, from left to right, but left-hand wise. The water in the bowl was stirred, and the Experimenter told to take the grass that floated nearest to him.
‘Now carry it in your left hand and the bowl in your right, and walk back to the house.’
The Experimenter did as directed. Suddenly he found that something had happened to his right foot; he was limping.
It was early that morning that Mary Nally began to think of Anthony. She had thought of him before, but that was in a dream at the time that Bridgie met Anthony as he went by with a bullock to the fair. She remembered she had said some insulting things to him. She wondered how she could have thought of marrying a young fellow like John Naughton, instead of a sober, settled prudent man of years. About eleven she went to shake out the folds of her various suits, and take a glance at her bank-receipt. Before she reached the lower layers of her garments she knew that the charm had gone. Dramatically, slowly, she removed everything; then slowly, automatically, refilled the trunk. She sat for a space with tightened lips and eyes of steel. Who was the thief?
The Experimenter! He had seen the grass!
Then she went up the stair, putting her feet down heavily as a woman might who called on all to see her wrong. The laboratory door was locked. She shook it; beat on it, and turned angrily away. Prudence came and sat by her side as she waited in the hall, and laid calming hands upon her. Another thought stole in. She put on her silk suit, her rose-garlanded hat, her eight-carat bracelets, and left the house.
It was noon, and the sun was breaking through the long-drawn white-grey clouds as she reached the boreen. A man was coming along the road. It was Anthony with the price of the bullock in his pocket. He was sober – that is, he had only had enough to show that he had been to a fair, a degree of sobriety that is not classed with ‘a drop taken’ – and the elegant figure by the boreen caught his eye. It was the rich ‘Yank’, the woman with whom he must match.
And to her – Anthony in his good black suit, the green felt hat on his head, with his broad, red, matured face, his eyes just pleasantly brilliant – the man she had pictured in her matrimonial attains. His loud hearty greeting rang before him; they drew together. He swung her hand up and down for a minute. ‘Here’s the pound I borrowed off you!’ he said, ‘and another with it for interest!’
William heard their voices and steps as they came down the boreen some minutes later. He stopped building the rick, and studied them for a few minutes. ‘Is the match made between ye?’ he called.
The wife-seeker shouted it was, the pride of success on his face. The Experimenter sitting on the bank looked at Mary Nally. Her flinty eyes were upon him.
He got off the bank, and standing by it, offered his congratulations. He spoke of happy married lives, of true love, of his pleasure in the happiness of a woman who had every quality to make the man she had chosen blessed. The wedding gift that he wished to give her should be one that she herself should name. It should be beautiful, it should be useful. And the woman with her man won, the new slated house before her, was pacified.
He had a question to ask her, he said; was he lame? He asked it as a scientist. He had another thing to ask – a favour. Would she stand before him, and look straight into his eyes, and say, five times in a loud commanding voice, that he was not lame; that he was to walk without a limp down the lane. He was not joking. It was an experiment.
She laughed gaily; stood before him, and did what he asked. Five times she spoke. He put one step forward, hesitated, moved again, gave one limp, and then walked with a firm and equal step down the boreen.
William’s eyes followed him, wide gaping. He threw the sod in his hand on the ground, and went after the Experimenter. Anthony pulled the woman’s arm. ‘Lookit, lookit!’ he exclaimed, ‘the limp’s gone from William!’
The Experimenter heard the steps and looked back. He walked on with strong strides till the man’s voice called twice. Then he stopped. Bare-headed, his black locks ruffled over his high forehead, William came towards him.
There was deep respect in his tone. ‘Will you wait a minute, sir, I would ask you a question.’
The Experimenter waited.
‘You made her spake five times. It’s nine or seven I’ve seen used. What would be the reason of the five?’
‘What is the secret in the blades of grass? And why have you never cured yourself till now?’
‘I swear by the Gospels that I know no more than that the charm is by the power of the saint of the muscles of the body. And I didn’t cure myself because I’d have to give my lameness to someone.’
‘You didn’t mind giving it to me!’
‘I heard you had gifts yourself, and ye vexed me with the questions ye were putting. I’ll be greatly thankful to you, sir, if you will say why you used the five.’
‘Five had no merit in it. Any other number would have done as well. But I was nervous. I used the power of suggestion. Good day!’