In winter all things die. So roared the sea around the shores of Inverara. To the west beyond Rooruck it was black with dim fountains of white foam rising here and there as a wave formed and came towering to the beach. To the north, between Inverara and the mainland, it was white, like the waters of a mountain torrent, white with wide strips of green as if it had got sick and vomited. To the south it was black with a belt of white along the shore beneath the cliffs, where the breakers lashed the rocks. To the east beyond Kilmillick, where the north and south met in the narrow channel athwart the Head of Crom, it was a seething cauldron, hissing like a wounded snake. And around Rooruck it roared in mad delight.
Winter had come. The sea was wrecking all that had generated in spring, flowered in summer and borne fruit in autumn. It tore huge rocks from its bosom and sent them rumbling through the deep. It hurled weeds shorewards in a tumbling mass. They lined the beaches in mounds mixed with sand and the carcases of dogfish. It struck the cliffs monstrous blows that shook them and sent the rockbirds screaming from their clefts. They soared wildly out, their eyes searching the foam for fish.
In winter all things die. So shrieked the wind coming over the sea from the west. It rose from the sea and whirled upwards over the land. It mounted the wall of boulders that protected Rooruck on the west. It skirted the Hill of Fate that guarded Rooruck on the south. It swept eastwards, flying straight in its fury between earth and sky, blasting the earth. The grass was plucked up by the roots. Sheep fled bleating, seeking shelter among the crags. Horses neighed and ran in terror, their nostrils red. The goats wandering on the cliffs snorted and ran eastwards to the hollow beyond Coillnamhan. The fowls in the crops cackled and hid their heads among their feathers. Dogs howled. Pigs grunted and then huddled close together in their straw, whining. Old men sitting by the fires in their cabins shivered and felt that their death was near.
In winter all things die. The rain carried on the wind fell in great black drops that pattered on the crags and rose again in a blue mist. It came from the darkened sky sparse and scattered as if the clouds had been disembowelled in mid-air and only fragments of them had reached the earth terrified. There was no moon. It was hidden by the torn clouds. And the stars shone dimly in twos and threes, scattered over the firmament.
Between two hills, sheltered from the wind and from the sea, lay the seventeen cabins of Rooruck. Their thatched roofs, bound with thick ropes and laden with rocks, shivered but remained intact. The whitewash on their stone walls was blackened. Their doors were buttressed with stones and strips of sacking. Boards nailed into the wooden frames covered the windows. Here and there men stood at their gables leaning against the wind, their legs wide apart, their red lips opened outwards, their yellow teeth bared, their oilskin hats bound around their heads with strings. They shouted to one another from long distances, talking of the storm. Then they would shrug their shoulders, look at their thatch, and go indoors to their fires. Women with their red petticoats thrown over their heads hurried to the well for water. They stopped for a moment with their arms akimbo and their heads bent sideways close together, like birds, talking in awe of the storm and praising God who had not already destroyed them. Then night advanced and the hamlet was still, but for the barking of the frightened dogs.
At the most western point of the hamlet, nearest the shore and the sea, Red John’s cabin lay huddled against the bluff of the hill. Around it the wind only sighed and moaned, for none but stray blasts reached it, blasts that had wandered from the storm, fallen in weariness from the whirling coils that rushed eastwards without pausing for breath. But the sea-spray sometimes struck the door, with a slow falling swish, as of a mountain of loose silk being crushed. The cries of the sea-birds that whirled about it sounded dismally. It was as if the lid were wrenched from the mouth of hell and the wailing of the damned came floating up from the distant caverns. But within there was warmth and peace, heightened by the storm without. In the kitchen a paraffin lamp burned dimly on the wall, its flame smoked with the draught that struck it from the chimney, discolouring the whitewashed wall behind it. On the open hearth a great turf fire burned, fanned by the draught. Its blaze was brighter than the lamp. Sometimes a blue snaky column shot up to lick the soot, that withered before it. The delf on the dresser gleamed in the half-light. Among the sooty rafters, where the earthen covering beneath the thatch hung down in dried lumps, there was darkness. And in the corners shadows seemed to lurk.
Red John sat on a three-legged stool in a corner to the left of the hearth, lighting his clay pipe with a coal that he had taken from the fire in a tongs. His red sunburned cheeks, seen through his red beard, were puffing in and out like a bellows as he sucked at the pipe. Then he dropped the coal into the fire and hit the dog that lay beside him on the hearth with the tongs. The dog whined and looked at him. But presently he sidled up again and stuck his nose in the yellow ashes. He sighed, and the outrush of his breath blew the ashes up on the legs of Red John’s trousers. Red John cursed and struck the dog on the side with his rawhide shoe. The dog yelped and went to the dresser in two bounds. There he curled up and dug his snout into the spot where he had been kicked as if he had a flea, while his little eyes looked at Red John viciously.
Red John’s wife sitting in the opposite corner looked at her husband and curled up her lips. Then she turned to the dog, cracked her fingers and said ‘Poor doggie.’ She did not feel compassion for the cur which she often beat herself, for it was a mangy mongrel. But she favoured it because her husband had kicked it. The cur rose and crept over to her almost on his belly, looking sideways at Red John. He lay by her lap wagging his tail and whining.
‘Huh!’ said Red John as he struck the turf fire with his shoe. His lips opened again to speak, and the tendons of his fingers rose in ridges on the back of his hands as if he were about to strangle his wife, but he neither spoke nor moved. He was afraid to strangle her, afraid even to speak to her. They hardly ever spoke during the five years they were married. And when they spoke, they spoke in hissing monosyllables. Sometimes they sat a whole winter’s evening in silence, peering into the blaze. They hated one another. Red John, crabbit, weak-featured and bandy-legged, hated and feared Little Mary his wife; and Little Mary (so called because she was the tallest woman in Inverara) hated her husband and despised him.
Little Mary looked at her husband again, curled up her lips and opened wide her nostrils.
‘Fcha,’ she hissed, her hate boiling within her. She hit the dog and sent him away from her to the dresser, and gathering her black cotton shawl around her well-moulded breasts she looked into the fire, thinking.
‘What is she thinking of now, the sorceress?’ muttered Red John to himself. She was always thinking that way, sometimes showing her white teeth in a smile. That is why he feared her so. One could never know what was passing behind her high forehead. Red John huddled himself down to his knees and brooded on his folly in marrying her. Was she not the illegitimate daughter of Sir Henry Blake’s housekeeper, of Blake Castle on the mainland? And the housekeeper herself was the illegitimate daughter of a Breton smuggler. The peasants knew it too, and often twitted him with taking a bastard woman to wife, one, too, with Blake blood in her. Often, when he was drinking in Mulligan’s shebeen in Kilmurrage, a man would whisper in his ear, ‘Is it true that woman of yours has dirty Blake blood in her, Red John?’ Then Red John would pull off his blue woollen shirt and dance around the tavern floor, offering to fight the whole of Inverara, spitting on his hands between oaths. But he was so weak and inconsequent that everybody laughed at him. Even the small boys, when he passed them on his shaggy red mountain pony, shouted after him ‘Empty Breeks,’ the deadliest insult to a man in Inverara, where to be childless was to be impotent.
He peered across over his red beard at his wife’s bosom. The right side of his face distorted, and his right hand shot into the pocket of his waistcoat for his knife. He longed to drive a knife down to the hilt in that breast. He often pictured to himself that thrust and the upward gush of red blood. He would lick his lips as if he were drinking it. But he was afraid. He was afraid. He, deformed himself, was afraid of touching such a beautiful thing, such well-moulded breasts, and red cheeks, and a neck like clear foam, and grey eyes that were always looking long distances, and black hair, straight black, rolled in a huge pile on her head. She was so different from any other woman in Inverara. ‘Curse the night I went to Ballycalla,’ he muttered. He had gone to the fair at Ballycalla on the mainland with his uncle, Sean Mor of Coillnamhan, and Michael the Drake of Kilmillick. Little Mary’s mother was then living among the peasants after Sir Henry’s death in France and the sale of his property, and they persuaded Red John to ask her for her daughter’s hand in marriage. ‘Curse the lips that said “yes,” ‘he muttered; ‘don’t make your house on a hill; don’t marry a beautiful woman; don’t … don’t … don’t … may the devil mince her bones.’ He was thinking of the wedding night. All the guests had departed drunk and singing, and he had tried to embrace her, but she hit him on the forehead a blow that sent him reeling against the kitchen wall. Then she went to bed alone, forcing him to sleep on a pallet in a corner of the room. And in all the five years he had never possessed her.
‘Huh,’ he cried, gathering fury, as he recalled the whole weight of his contumely. ‘What are you sitting there for like a dead one? Why can’t you speak to a man?’
Little Mary smiled scornfully without replying. Then she raised the hem of her red petticoat to allow the flames to warm her shins, or perhaps with feminine spite to madden her husband’s lust with the sight of her well-shaped calves.
‘You’re not a man,’ she said carelessly with a contemptuous shrug of her shoulders.
Red John fumed and chattered impotently.
She bared her white teeth, threw back her head slightly, nearly closed her eyes until the tips of the long lashes almost touched her cheekbones.
‘Um-m-m-m,’ she said.
Thousands of little snakes chased up and down her full white throat. Then her lips closed over her teeth and, opening wide her eyes, she looked again into the fire, thinking.
Men, men, men. How she wanted men, never having had any but this miserable lout of a husband, already beyond his youth when he married her, and never shapely. The blood of her father, Blake, the aristocratic gallant, and of her adventurous, fierce grandfather, Le Cachet, made it impossible for her to love a peasant like her husband, or any of the peasants she saw around her in Inverara. They were too coarse. They drank whisky to arouse their passion, and then mated like pigs in their drunkenness. And the longing for love burned as fiercely within her during those five years that it broke through everything, shame, fear, modesty. So when a painter had come from the mainland to paint the breakers beneath the Hill of Fate, she had smiled at him. She was gathering seaweed on the shore with her husband when she saw him sitting on a rock with his easel. She went up to him silently and looked over his shoulder. Then she laughed. ‘Paint me too,’ she cried, ‘I am more beautiful than the sea!’ But he was a stupid Catholic and fled from her. And then, unable to find love, she longed for a son. She would sit by the fire and imagine that a son was drinking at her breast. It soothed the aching within her. She actually felt the impress of his toothless gums on her nipples. And the blood would course madly up her neck, swelling the veins as she shivered with passion. Often she rushed from the cabin on a summer evening, her bodice open at the neck, her light shawl across her shoulders, seeking love, but the young men who smiled at her when they met her repelled her. They were yokels like her husband. There was a salt smell from their bodies and their breath was fetid. Even Father S –, who tried to touch her shoulder once in the confessional, with the queer light in his eyes that all men had when they looked at her, repelled her. He was not a yokel, but … Ah! she wanted a fierce man and …
A great wave rolled to the beach at the rear. Its wash sent a shower of water flying against the cabin. It fell with a great noise against the door, and the cabin shook slightly. Then a great falling sound came like thunder, followed by a tinkling reverberation like silver coin dancing on a plate: another rock had been torn by the sea from the Hill of Fate. Red John started and rose to his feet.
‘The cabin will be swept away before morning,’ he said.
Little Mary shrugged her shoulders. She did not care. Then Red John went to the door and opened it, and she saw the pitch darkness all around. A blast of wind rushed in with a querulous shriek, spilt a jug of milk on the dresser, and then died with a gasp as the door shut. She started and, bending her neck backwards, listened to the steady roar outside, the sea, the wind, the dogs, the birds, the falling walls, the driven rain.
Red John was bolting the door. ‘He is out in that storm,’ thought Little Mary. Then she peered at the chimney, her eyes gleaming, the tip of her tongue licking her lower lip. Her bosom and neck heaved as if somebody were trying to choke her. The hardness left her face, as if she were eager to be choked. She was thinking now of the man who had been in the cabin for the last seven days. That night week he had come with her husband from Kilmurrage. ‘I want to be left alone,’ he said, as he threw two suitcases on the kitchen floor. Great God, what a man he was! They said that the doctors had told him to come to Inverara as a cure for his nerves. He had been in the wars. At least so the people said. He had never spoken to her yet, or even looked at her except as an automaton who served his meals and made his bed. Everybody called him the ‘Stranger,’ but Seameen Derrane’s daughter, who worked in Shaughnessy’s hotel in Kilmurrage, where he had stayed the first three days after his arrival in Inverara, said that his name was Fergus O’Connor, and that he belonged to Ashcragh on the mainland, the little town south of the Head of Crom. They said too that he was mad, and had no religion. But she did not care what they said. He was the kind of man she wanted. His great black eyes pierced her like a wolfhound’s, when he bent his forehead into furrows and his eyebrows contracted. And what a mouth he had! O God of the thousand battles, it was the kind of mouth she had kissed in her dreams, kissed until her lips were bruised. Long straight quivering lips! Of course he was thin and haggard, but all men were thin and haggard who lived hard. Why should men not live hard? Her own people had always lived hard. Her father had lived hard. Was not her grandfather, Le Cachet the Breton, shot during a drunken orgy in a brothel in the South of France? All real men lived hard, not slothfully, like pigs, as her husband lived, but wildly, like the storm that has no morals and recognizes no laws, but ruthlessly rushes forward and yet is beautiful in its ferocity.
Once she had touched his right hand below the wrist while handing him a cup of tea, and … Virgin Mary, what a sensation! She had to turn away her head to hide her blushes. Would he never notice her? Perhaps he despised her as a peasant. Of course he was different. His hands were smooth and refined, and his face, in spite of the brown beard he was growing, was like her father’s face. It had that peculiar expression in it that peasants did not have, as if it were concealing something. ‘I will make him look at me,’ she panted. ‘There will be wreckage to-night,’ said Red John, jumping to his feet. ‘Get me my things ready. Sean Mor said he would come for me to go to the shore. Get my things, I say, woman,’ he shouted, stamping on the floor.
She rose without speaking. It was as well to obey him. In Inverara all women obeyed their husbands, even though they hated and despised them. It was a custom, and customs are stronger than desires. She took a pair of old patched frieze trousers from a nail on the back door and threw them in the centre of the floor. On top of them she threw a heavy blue frieze shirt, an oilskin hat, a pair of raw-hide shoes, a waistcoat, a pair of woollen socks and a red muffler. She put half an oaten loaf in a handkerchief. She made tea and put it in a tin can. She tied a flannel cloth around the can to keep it warm. Then she sat again by the fire.
Red John took the clothes and went into the room on the right to dress himself. Little Mary was listening now for the sounds of footsteps. She was expecting the Stranger to come in any moment. How delicious it was to be expecting him. And she would be alone with him to-night while her husband was away. She started as a loud knock came to the door. She jumped up eagerly and unbarred it. But it was only Sean Mor, her husband’s uncle. The great bulk of the fisherman stalked into the middle of the kitchen, shaking the rain from his clothes and stamping on the floor, crying that it was the worst night for forty years. He shuffled to a stool by the fire, leaving wet footprints on the earthen floor. Then he began to talk in a loud voice to his nephew who was still in the room.
Little Mary sat by the fire again. She knew Sean Mor was looking at her with his mind as he talked with his lips, leering with those small eyes of his. He was fifty, but strong and hardy, living on the sea, and his wife was a thin consumptive woman. Once he had tried to seize Little Mary, crying with a coarse guffaw, ‘Now, if it were I who were living with you, there would be little voices in the house.’ How hateful he was, with the tobacco stains on his beard and the black dirt beneath his gnarled nails.
‘Well,’ said Red John, coming from the room and taking his can of tea, ‘in the Name of God, let us go.’ They sprinkled holy water on themselves and said ‘In the Name of the Father’ as they crossed their breasts. The rain swept sideways into the kitchen as they went. Then the door banged, the lamp flickered, and there was silence. The dog smelt the door and then curled up by the fire on Red John’s stool.
Little Mary was excited now. She was constantly shivering. Her passion surged up into her throat. She tripped around tidying the kitchen, her hips swaying like a dancer’s. She combed her long black hair and put a ribbon in it. She turned around and around in front of the mirror by the lamp. She fidgeted, standing in front of the fire. She blushed as she toyed with the breast of her bodice. Then she gasped and put her hands to her heart as she heard footsteps coming around the gable-end. She had opened the door before the knock came.
As the Stranger entered, he stumbled against her, buffeted by the storm. ‘I beg your pardon,’ he said gently, and half-turned to her before he stopped short as if he remembered that he had committed an indecency, and his face set again in a scowl. Little Mary curtsied and smiled.
The Stranger went to the centre of the room and commenced to take off his dripping oilskin coat. Little Mary paused, half-ashamed to help him until he called sharply, ‘Come, give me a hand, please.’ As his face turned to her in the half-light, she could see that he was intoxicated, but she was not afraid of that. It seemed to her to be natural that her man should drink. Drink made men wild, and wildness was of the sea and of all things that were passionate and strong and beautiful. She took the coat gently from his shoulders and hung it on a nail. The Stranger, muttering something, kicked a stool to the front of the fire, sat down with a thud and spread his hands to the blaze.
‘Will you have your supper now?’ she asked.
He looked around at her contemptuously. ‘Supper?’ he said. ‘Oh yes. Why not? I’m not hungry. Yes, of course I will.’
As she passed him going to and from the fire preparing supper, she kept looking at him, eager to speak and unable to begin. She was hoping that he would begin. After that it would be easy. But the Stranger kept silent. He had drunk several glasses of whisky in Derrane’s shebeen, and the whisky had made him gloomy and depressed, as it always does with men whose souls are troubled. He kept looking into the fire, furrowing his forehead, twitching his nostrils and cracking the fingers of his right hand restlessly. His face, lit up by the firelight, was as pale as the face of a corpse, and the high cheekbones seemed to be straining against the skin like the ribs of an old cab-horse. His spine was distinct through the back of his coat as he sat leaning forward from the hips. But his eyes were wild and fierce. They would have kept a strong man away in fear from the wrecked body that encompassed them. They stared intently, and the lashes never blinked over them. But the brows kept contracting.
He sat trying to think, but the whisky made thought incoherent and illusory. The whining of the wind seemed to enter his brain.
‘Are there eggs for me, Mary?’ he said with a start, eager to busy himself with the world about him to prevent the mad rush of past memories that he felt were coming. They always came when he sat thinking.
‘Yes, there are.’
‘Oh, well, I don’t want them.’
‘But you must eat,’ said Little Mary. ‘A person must eat to live in this weather.’
He looked at her, about to argue with her, but he remembered that she was a peasant. She would not understand. He laughed and looked at the fire again. ‘All right, Mary, I’ll eat them.’ Of course it would be ridiculous to talk to her. What in the name of the devil did she know about life? And why should he want to talk to people about important things, about life? He had come to Inverara to get rid of important things, of life. But was life important?
He clenched his hands and gritted his teeth to kill those hateful thoughts that began to rush into his mind like a shower of bullets fired in rapid succession. He moved his stool back from the fire with a nervous gesture, but the draught between the chimney and the door caught him, and he moved up again with a muttered oath. He began to tremble with rage. A dog began to bark in a cabin to the right. The roar of the sea became distinct and separate from the other sounds. He gasped and let his body go lax. He couldn’t resist his thoughts. He couldn’t govern them. With his lips wide open and a kind of wondering expression in his eyes he stared into the fire. Immediately something began to throb in his brain, like a motor, jumping back into the past. Then a door seemed to open – the door of his memory. It opened with a snap. As a whirlwind catches up suddenly a heap of snow, just around the bend of a mountain road, and lashes the countless flakes round and round in the air, the bulk remaining together in a winding column that rises higher and higher, while stray flakes drop from the white cloud, stand still for a moment and then fall into the valley beneath, so visions of his thirty years of life whirled round and round in the cell of his memory. One of them would break loose, pause for a moment at the door and then vanish. They did not come in the order of time or importance. They did not even seem to bear any relation to himself. In fact, he could see himself as if he were a stranger.
First he saw himself, a boy of twelve years, sitting in a brake with a score of other boys, some older than himself, some the same age. He was dressed in a knickerbocker suit with a belt down the back of the jacket, a school cap on his head, a cutaway starched collar over his jacket. Beside him sat a rosy-cheeked priest, with huge red hands, and his clerical waistcoat stained with snuff. The brake was approaching a large dome-shaped marble gate, with a large bronze cross over it. All the boys were silent, some smoking cigarettes. ‘Ha, ha!’ laughed the priest, ‘this is the Pearly Gate, my boys. No smoking allowed in Heaven.’ And as the brake scratched its way over the granite dust in through the school-gate, the boys with a sigh threw their cigarettes on the huge pile of other cigarettes that lay to the left of the gate, under the niche that held a statue of the Blessed Virgin.
That picture vanished. There was a hum in his ears, and another picture stood out like a little red star. He saw himself as an infant, sprawling naked in his mother’s lap. Black clouds were forming far away from his eyes, and then they approached nearer and nearer until they became little red spots. He was crying from fear. He was afraid of his mother. He could see a queer look in her eyes above him as he lay on his back. She was fondling his naked toes, but she was laughing boisterously at the same time and talking shortly to an old woman who was mixing punch at the table. Then that picture merged into another, in which he himself did not figure. It was his home, a square grey building, with a garden in front, white blinds drawn on the upper windows, and the yellow chimney-pots discoloured with black soot. Voices were coming from the dining-room. His mother was shrieking, ‘Oh then, oh then, oh then! Are you going to murder me, John? Can’t I take a drop of brandy for my rheumatism? Oh then, oh then, oh then!’ Then his father came out and banged the door behind him. He walked down the gravel path to the gate, his left hand in his pocket, his right hand stroking his brown beard, his grey cloth hat pulled down over his eyes, a melancholy expression in his face, his full red lips twitching. Next came a vision of himself, at seventeen, standing over his mother’s corpse. His father’s hand was on his shoulder, the fingers clasping the shoulder-blade spasmodically. ‘Fergus,’ said his father, ‘promise me now that you will never forget how …’ And then the voice faded as he heard the parish priest denounce his father from the altar as an atheist, ordering his parishioners under pain of excommunication to keep their children from Mr. O’Connor’s school.
‘I should love to see that priest dying of cancer,’ the Stranger muttered aloud.
Then came his father’s death. It was a back room, in one of those drab streets off the South Circular Road in Dublin. He himself, then an enthusiastic youth of twenty, a brilliant student at the University, chaste, studious, supporting his father by clerical work in the evening in a newspaper office, while he maintained himself at college with scholarships, was holding his father’s hand, comforting him, telling him he would be happy and prosperous yet. And the old man shook his head and said, ‘I wonder, Fergus, is their hell as cruel as life?’
‘Oh, damn it!’ cried the Stranger, striking his forehead with his clenched fist.
Little Mary started and looked at him tenderly.
‘Keep away from the fire,’ she said, ‘until you have eaten your supper. Food will settle your stomach. The heat goes badly with whisky.’
Ha! Now the visions became more comfortable. He could recognize himself as he was now. He was alone in the world, scoffing at the world. There was his first night at a music-hall. What a strange effect that had on him! When he saw the women, half-naked, displaying their plump limbs sensuously as they glided up and down the stage, he almost went mad with suppressed passion. He was then twenty-one and had never touched drink or knew women. That night after the theatre he tasted both.
‘Of course. Why not?’ he said aloud.
‘What’s that?’ said Little Mary, as she laid a cup and saucer on the table.
‘Oh, nothing,’ grumbled the Stranger.
Little Mary shuddered and thought that it might have been the wind she heard. It sometimes seemed to talk with a human voice when it whistled around the western gable of the cabin, where the thatch rubbed between the two round stones that held the manilla ropes to the roof. Or it might have been the Wave of Destiny that roared distantly off the Fountain Hole. People said there was an underground palace there, submerged for thousands of years. Dead warriors feasted there in winter, and the sound of their banquet music was carried by the wind over the sea, to drive lonely women crazy with longing for love. She sighed and brushed the Stranger’s elbow as she passed him to the fire.
The Stranger shivered inwardly as he felt her body touch his. He turned his head slowly to look at her. As she bent over the fire, with the fire-glow on her cheeks, she looked beautiful to him. But she did not arouse his passion. For him it was like looking at a statue.
‘Women are a curse,’ he muttered. ‘No, no. Not a curse, but the playthings of folly, disused. ....’
With a snap the motor in his brain began to purr again. Again a picture eddied out of the mass of memories and stood still. It was the picture of the night with his first woman. She became distinct for a moment, beautiful eyes burning like coals in the wreck of a beautiful face, a loose soiled dressing-gown with a fleshless collar-bone showing at the open neck. Then the woman vanished as she held out her thin hands and said, ‘Are you leaving me so soon, dearie?’ He himself became distinct, wandering through back streets, tearing his hair, cursing himself, feeling his body unclean, begging the earth to open up and devour him. Then a whole series of pictures came with a rush, crowding one over the other. That was his year of debauch before he joined the army. At last the pictures joined together and formed into one. He saw himself standing outside a recruiting office, down at heel, in a tattered coat, with sunken cheeks. Then a monstrous picture came, distorted like a madman’s fancy. It was a vast plain without a tree or a blade of grass, pock-marked with shell holes, covered with rotting corpses. He could see the vermin crawling on the dead lips. And he smiled. That picture did not accuse himself. It accused the world that he hated. ‘Just think of it,’ he muttered, ‘I spent three years in that hell. Great God!’
He smiled as he saw himself wandering around the world for two years after the war, trying to find somewhere to rest – Canada, the Argentine, South Africa. ‘What a blasted fool I was! As if there were any rest for a man in this world!’ And then, worse still he saw himself back again in Dublin, burrowing in the bowels of philosophy, trying to find consolation one day in religion, next day in anarchism, next day in Communism, and rejecting everything as empty, false and valueless. And at last, despairing of life, flying from it as from an ogre that was torturing him, he had come to Inverara.
He jumped to his feet, and with his hands behind his back he began to stalk up and down the floor, muttering disjointedly:
‘Honour, civilization … eh … all rot … culture be damned … all the culture in the world … prostitution and hypocrisy … only thing is to live like a beast without thought … not to give a damn …’
‘Your supper is ready,’ said Little Mary.
He had forgotten his supper, and he felt no desire to eat. Still, he had no energy to refuse it. What did it matter, anyway, he thought, whether he ate or did not eat? ‘In the world men make revolutions in order to eat. How ridiculous!’ He took a seat at the deal table. He broke an egg and tasted it.
‘Drink the tea first,’ said Little Mary. ‘It will do you good.’
‘Oh, for God’s sake, woman, let me alone. How do you know what’s good or bad?’
Mary almost dropped the kettle she was taking from the hearth. She whirled around like a tigress. Her eyes blazed. He had sworn at her. Her lips went white. Her husband had often sworn at her. The men around Rooruck always swore at their women and often beat them. But she had expected that this man would have been refined. He had insulted her! She forgot that she was a peasant. Her father’s blood boiled in her. The hand holding the kettle shivered. Then her anger fled in a flash. Instead she felt a throbbing of her breast. It hurt her, as fire hurts a numbed hand. The Stranger had looked at her fiercely, and before his stare her anger had changed into the hunger of love. She felt a physical pain as if he had beaten her with a stick. It was more cruel than that. He had burnt her with his tongue and his eyes had drawn the sting from her body, leaving it numb. She sighed. Her breast heaved and her eyes dimmed with sadness looking into his. They said, ‘Come, you may kill me. I am yours.’
He looked at her through the mist that the whisky raised before his eyes, and thought that she was a cocotte ogling him. He could see her only at a far distance. Between his eyes and hers there were a host of visions – his mother, his father, his youth that was pure, his debauched manhood, and the horrors of war. All these visions told him that she was a cocotte, ‘like all women,’ that she would look at all men as she looked at him. Beyond these visions was the beauty of her sad eyes and her swelling white throat. That beauty attracted him. But his soul, enraged with his sordid past, hissed at the beauty and scowled, persuading itself that the woman was repulsive, ‘like all women.’
‘I won’t let the slut drag me back to life,’ he muttered, savagely eating his griddle cake.
And Little Mary moved about the kitchen excitedly, watching him without looking at him.
‘He has trouble on his mind,’ she thought. ‘I will wait. Wait, wait, wait for ever.’
The Stranger finished his meal and sat again in front of the fire. Little Mary cleared the table and sat in the corner beside him looking into the fire. And then he began to feel her presence drawing him towards her again. His mind was bored. It was his body that was excited. It was an ugly excitement that filled his mind with repulsion. He struggled against it, but it remained. Then he looked at her with the look in his eyes that all men had when they looked at her. She shuddered. The accumulated passion of years was burning in her and she was eager for his love. And yet she began to feel afraid. She did not see the light of love in his eyes. She wanted him for ever. And that hot passion in his face was like what she saw in all men’s faces. It was lust. He had arisen from his stool and was moving slowly towards her, his hands shaking.
‘No, no,’ she cried with her lips, as her body moved towards his. ‘No, no. I … I … don’t.’
He swore as he grasped her shoulders, and then there was a loud roar that sent them both to their feet gasping.
The cabin shook. Thunder crashed across the heavens. The slits between the boards on the windows were bright with the forked lightning. The sound came rumbling from east to west louder and louder, as if each peal gave birth in its passage to a peal louder than itself. Through the sound of the thunder came the screech of the wind. And the sea roared monotonously like a hungry lion. The air was full of sound.
The Stranger stood transfixed by the fire. Little Mary stood beside him looking up at him, careless of the storm. Then she threw her arms around his neck and pressed close to him feigning fear.
‘Protect me,’ she murmured.
He thrust her gently from him and went to the centre of the floor, trembling. He felt that the thunder had clapped as a warning to him. It warned him against falling a victim to passion. So God might have warned a hermit monk of old. He became full of self-pity. He told himself that the whole world was in arms against him, dragging him back again into the torture from which he had fled. Even here, to the desolate bleak fastness of Rooruck, the wickedness of the world had pursued him. These passions and desires of the flesh were ugly and futile. Passion belonged to young men, full of the enthusiasm of youth. It belonged to the chattering mob. He was dead to it. He had heaped huge rocks on its grave.
‘Ye-ah,’ he said, baring his teeth. A demoniac look came into his eyes. Then his stomach turned. He went stumbling to the door and out into the night.
Little Mary dropped into her seat by the fire. Her bosom heaved with sobs. She bit her finger, trying to think what was the matter with her. Her body felt as if pins were being stuck through every pore of her skin. The soles of her feet itched. ‘Virgin Mary,’ she kept saying, ‘what is coming over me? I love him, I love him.’
She could not look at him when he came in. She wanted to be alone with this wonderful thing that had seized her body. She wanted to master it.
He stood at the door dripping with rain, his black hair in a matted mass about his face. Nothing of his face was visible but his bloodshot black eyes staring wildly. His bosom heaved as he hiccupped. Then he stumbled to his room, tore off his clothes, and fell on the bed. In a moment he was fast asleep. His passion died and left him as helpless as death, for in winter all things die that live in summer.
But even in winter, morning brings life and motion. It is a glorious motion to the strong, that winter movement of life in Inverara. It makes the body feel clean and the mind strong, as if it were bound with laths of steel. But for the weak, of body or of mind, it is a torture. The sun rose in the east, dim and sour, with a veil over its face. It sank again in the west without warming the earth. The birds were silent, hiding in their holes, or fled to the mainland over the sea, sitting on the masts of ships, searching the south and the sun. The sea moved mightily. At times it rested, green and bilious, between two battles. And the wind whined when the sea was resting. Everywhere in Inverara there was death on the ground and above it. The people went about clad in their heavy frieze, talking in low voices. At night they sat in the shebeens and around their own hearths telling stories of wrecks and drowning and death. Even sin had fled, for sin is born of the languorous passion of summer, and of the cold gritty breezes of spring.
Little Mary, her soul strong like the fierce soul of winter, was happy. She had found a man to love. He had spurned her. What of it? So did the sea spurn in winter and caress in spring and love in summer. What of it? She sang as she milked her cow in the morning. She sang as she went to the village well for water. The peasant women noticed her joy and began to whisper among themselves and point fingers at her. ‘O wife of Red John,’ they would say to her, with mock anxiety and a vicious gleam in their eyes, ‘what kind of man is he who is lodging in your house?’ ‘They say he is mad from the wars; beware of him,’ whispered another. ‘How handsome he is! Does he talk to you nicely?’ whispered another. And they would all laugh. And Little Mary, careless of their chatter, would throw back her head and laugh, her throat swelling like the throat of a singing thrush. Her husband began to look fearfully at her and say to himself, ‘What has come to the woman? Eh, Red John, what has come to her?’
To the Stranger those days were a torture. Afterwards they remained only as a blur on his memory, the blur that rises before the mind when the fumes of chloroform are sucked up the nostrils as if mountains were crowding up to crush one’s life, with loud awe-inspiring sounds. In the morning he would walk up and down the crag overlooking the Hill of Fate. His figure stooped. His head was thrust forward between his shoulders. His lips were compressed. There was a scowl on his face that terrified people who saw him. Often the small boys of the village peeped at him through the holes in the stone fence that runs parallel to the cliff. But their mothers would drive them away saying, ‘Lord have mercy on us. It’s a curse is on his soul. Father Shannon, may God be good to the poor man, was the same way after they unfrocked him.’
Then another terrific night of storm came. A Norwegian barque was wrecked off the Head of Crom and all her crew were drowned. Sheep and goats were killed on the crags by the storm. The bleak morning saw the peasants of Rooruck quarrelling on the shore, up to their necks in the huge breakers, grabbing at the planks and spars of the wrecked ship. The Stranger watched them, horrified, watching the living looting the house of the dead. Then he strode eastward to the cliffs. The storm of the night still raged. The salt spray whirled past him, climbing the two hundred feet from the sea in one light leap. The thundering waves rolled beneath madly. They rolled gaily, advancing, retreating, rising and falling with the rhythm of an orchestra. He was seized with their madness. He walked up and down the cliff revelling in it. The sea and the wind were mad, and he felt that he too was mad with them. They were committing suicide in their madness. So would he. But as soon as the thought came it terrified him. When he looked down through the spray at the white foam on the dark heaving bellies of the sea, he thought they were grinning at him. And he fled back to the cabin.
He locked himself in his room all the day, lying on the bed on his back looking at the ceiling. Little Mary called him to his midday meal, but he growled at her to leave him alone. Then when darkness began to fall he left the house and went into Derrane’s shebeen at the eastern end of the village. Derrane’s kitchen was empty that night. All the people were at the shore salving the wreck of the Norwegian ship. He sat in a corner by the fire drinking glass after glass of potheen. Derrane’s wife, an inquisitive, loose-tongued woman, tried to draw him into conversation, asking him what did he think of the women of Rooruck. He did not reply, but she kept on talking after the manner of women.
At last she was saying, ‘And sure it’s the hand of God …’ when the Stranger flung his glass into the fire and jumped to his feet.
‘May the devil devour both you and God,’ he yelled, frothing with rage. The woman screamed, and he danced around the room shouting, ‘Yes, to hell with God. To hell with Him, I say. What do you know about the fool?’ Then he rushed out of the house and staggered up the boreen to Red John’s, shouting. Little Mary came running down to meet him and dragged him indoors.
A group of women gathered outside the gate of Red John’s yard listening to the sounds of quarrelling that came from the house.
‘Lord save us, it’s murder,’ said one.
‘Let somebody go to the shore for the men,’ said another.
Then Red John came rushing from the cabin, his forehead bleeding from a long cut that reached from the right eye to the right temple. The women shrieked and crowded about him.
‘What has come to you?’ they gasped.
Red John stood for a few moments spluttering and waving his hands in the air.
‘Police, police,’ he yelled. ‘The son of misfortune came in blaspheming and I tried to send him from the house and the loose woman on whom I put a ring gave me this. Police, police.’ And he rushed away for his pony. He rode madly into Kilmurrage for the police, but passing the schoolmaster’s house he got afraid. He dismounted from his pony and let it wander home alone. Then he went across the crags to Branigan’s shebeen in Kilmillick. He spent the night there drinking. The first streaks of the grey dawn were beginning to light the crags about Rooruck when he crept into his cabin and sat by his bed, shivering. He could hear his wife crooning in the Stranger’s room, as if she were rocking a child.
‘Ho-wa, ho-wa my pulse, white love of my heart. Ho-wa, ho-wa, brilliant gem of gladness. Ho-wa.’
He listened with open mouth.
‘Ha,’ he said fearfully, his hand on the white bandage that covered his wound, ‘he has put a spell on her. So he has.’ Hurriedly he put an oaten loaf in a cloth and left the cabin to look for wreckage.
The Stranger slept through the day. It was his first refreshing sleep since he had come to Inverara. Little Mary moved noiselessly about the cabin. Now and again she stood at her cabin door and looked longingly out towards the mainland. She could see it distantly when the mist broke, scattered by the breezes that blew intermittently over the green sea. She would go into the darkened room where he lay and look at his face, gentle and childish in sleep. Once she bent down and caressed his hair and his forehead with her lips.
The Stranger, sleeping, dreamt that a fairy had touched him. He kept dreaming a long time of beautiful women, with roses entwined in their black hair, kissing his lips. Then he awoke and saw only a peasant woman standing by his bed. The consciousness of his degradation swept back to him. He swallowed a cup of hot tea, dressed and went out. Night was falling in a thick mist that coloured everything pale blue. He felt a dryness in his throat.
‘Hell,’ he said, ‘I must get somebody to talk to. It’s awful being alone like this among yokels who only stare with open mouths when a man talks to them. I wish I hadn’t come here.’ But trudging along the wet road, the ends of his oilskin coat swishing damply against his legs, he shuddered as he thought of staying in Dublin ‘among so many people that don’t seem to care a damn.’ He could see that evening he went to Dr. McCarthy and said that he couldn’t sleep. ‘Hey, my boy, can’t sleep, eh?’ cried McCarthy, his fat stomach puffing in and out as he paced up and down the hearthrug. ‘You say you are working in the library. Like the work?’ ‘I hate it.’ ‘Any money left?’ ‘About two hundred.’ ‘Well, get to blazes out of Dublin then. Go out to the west and catch fish. Do you more good than cataloguing books. Out with ye, as quick as lightning.’ The tramcars sounded in his ears that evening as he rushed away from the doctor’s as loud as an artillery barrage. He hardly breathed peacefully until he left the Broadstone Station next morning. And now …
‘Damned if I’m going back again,’ he muttered. ‘Some day I’m going to throw myself down from that cliff and be done with it. By all the gods, I will. You see if I don’t.’
Then he heard the sounds of music as he was approaching John Carmody’s public-house at the cross-roads above the beach at Coillnamhan. He stopped dead in the road and listened.
Night had fallen. It was bitterly cold, but there was no wind. The wind was drowned by the wet fog, that came like a great blight from the mountains on the mainland to the north. He could dimly see the lights of the publichouse, a squat one-storied concrete building on a slope a little back from the road. John Carmody had built it the year before. It looked as incongruous in the surroundings as the electric railways at Niagara Falls. And the sounds of wild music came through its windows. The music had a peculiar effect on the Stranger. Music of any kind always maddened him with a sad happy madness. It affected him in the bowels. He often cried with the sadness of the thoughts that it inspired within him. At other times it made him want to kill. Now as he listened to the rough twanging of the accordion he was wrapped in an ecstasy of sadness.
He walked up a bypath to the house over trodden grass, avoiding the road, lest he should lose the sound of the music. He tripped over an empty barrel and fell against the door. The music stopped suddenly. Somebody jumped to his feet within and shouted, ‘God with you.’ Then the door opened and he entered the kitchen.
The kitchen covered half the floor space of the house. To the right was a counter cut into the partition, and behind the partition was a room lined with shelves of black-brown bottles and green bottles. Several barrels were pushed back, their round heads over the counter. On the counter John Carmody was leaning smoking a pipe, while his wife wiped a pint mug behind him. Around the fire on the hearth and on wooden forms by the wall a number of peasants sat drinking and smoking. Two of them had been dancing when the Stranger entered. Another group had been listening to John Carmody discussing politics. For the good man, even though he was now nearing middle-age and had become, as he himself said, a ‘bourgeois’ (a word the peasants understood to mean ‘an enemy of God’), he still liked to preach Socialism when he was in a good humour and slightly intoxicated.
‘I’ll make you fellahs drink out of a trough,’ he would say, ‘if you don’t get busy and organize to socialize the land and industry, and do away with the priests.’
And the people just thought that he was a harmless poor man and well-meaning.
There was silence when the Stranger entered.
‘Who is that fellah?’ said John Carmody to a man who stood beside him.
The man bent his mouth close to Carmody’s ear and whispered:
‘That’s Red John’s lodger. They say he’s gone in the head. We call him the Stranger.’
‘Go away, you galoot,’ said Carmody. ‘I heard about him. If you fellahs were as cracked as he is you wouldn’t be the bloody fools you are.’
He coughed loudly, stepped into the kitchen, and advanced to the Stranger who was sitting on a form by the back door.
‘Say,’ he cried in a loud hearty voice, ‘I’m tickled to death to see a live man come into my house. Shake! Stranger. You must have a drink with me.’
As soon as the peasants saw Carmody welcoming the Stranger, they looked at one another and whispered: ‘He must be all right after all.’
For Mrs. Derrane had broadcasted the story of the night before, and with the quickness of peasants to believe harm of everybody, no matter how ridiculous the story might be, they all thought the Stranger possessed of a devil. The music started once more and a ragged fisherman with a dirty black beard got up to dance a hornpipe. He did a few whirls clumsily, but he was so drunk that he stumbled straight backwards trying to clap his hands under the crook of his left knee, and fell on his buttocks in a pot at the back door.
‘Oh, you God of all evil!’ he cried mournfully, amid a roar of laughter.
The Stranger, sitting beside Carmody on the form, laughed as loudly as the rest. He felt a strange joy in the association of these people. They appeared to him to be real. He felt the joy that the bad young man feels when he returns to the tavern after spending an evening with genteel and boring society in the respectability of his home. And he felt drawn towards Carmody in particular. He drank the bad brandy that was offered to him, and somehow it tasted better than anything he had ever drunk. Carmody began to talk at a great pace about the United States, where he had spent ten years of his youth.
‘A great country. None o’yer goddam superstitions there.’
The Stranger felt a sense of freedom creeping over him. The outspoken wanderer, Carmody was, he felt, an outcast from society like himself, at war with the world. He was a kindred spirit. ‘Ha, ha,’ he thought, it would be a great life to lounge around in Inverara, drinking and talking to Carmody, enjoying himself, abandoning himself, without any thought of the world outside, just living like a pig. It would be a revenge on the world. It would be far better than to kill himself. If he were dead he could not feel anything, whereas alive, his life would be a constant insult to civilization. Civilization? That cursed quagmire that sucked everything good into its bosom! That mirage that lures youth with promises that are never fulfilled! Sure. This was the ideal thing. To meet a few fellows like Carmody and drink with them and scoff at the world with them, laughing loudly to cheat the blackness in his soul. He would wear his body away until the damn thing fell to pieces. He would use up every ounce of it in wild debauch.
He felt himself getting drunk, and was glad. It was the first time he felt the exhilaration of drunkenness since he had come to Inverara. The whisky he had drunk in the shebeen only stupefied him. The company prevented him from getting drunk. Talking to a man like Carmody he could get drunk. He seized Carmody’s hand. Carmody turned his long bronzed muscular face towards him.
‘I’m glad I met you,’ he said, ‘I’ve been dying for somebody to whom I could talk.’
Carmody was about to reply when somebody stumbled against the barrel outside the door. There was a loud string of curses.
‘Another man fallen,’ shouted a peasant.
‘Blast ye, Michaeleen Grealish,’ shouted Carmody, ‘didn’t I tell ye to take away that - - - - barrel?’
‘Hey there, hey there,’ came the voice, ‘open the door. I can’t see my hand.’
Somebody raised the latch and a man flopped into the kitchen with his left hand held out in front of him. He began to talk as soon as he was within the house and he kept talking. His voice rang out loud and clear. He kept gesticulating with both hands and throwing his head back with a twist, like a dog shaking a rat. He had taken his hat from his head and his bald forehead shone in the light. The lumps on the white skin around the temples stood out distinctly. His grey bushy eyebrows twitched. His cheeks were blood red, with narrow blue veins showing through them. His nose was long and straight. Its ridge was as sharp as a lean horse’s spine. He wore a bushy grey beard, shaven on both lips. His chin showed red through the beard, and it had a dimple in the centre. His blue eyes gleamed like the bright blue dust that shines in granite. His grey trousers hung close to his thin legs, showing the outward bend in the left leg below the knee. His black coat hung loose about his body.
‘Somebody wants to kill me,’ he cried, his blue eyes glaring all around him fiercely. Yet everybody laughed. Then the man opened his mouth too and laughed. He had only five teeth in his upper jaw, scattered at irregular intervals.
‘Say, you must excuse me, Mr. O’Daly,’ said Carmody, coming up to him. ‘I told that fool Michaeleen –’
‘That’s all right, my good man, that’s all right. Good evening,’ he said, seeing the Stranger, ‘I heard you were staying at Red John’s. I meant to go and see you. Come on, look alive there, Carmody, and bring a bottle into the parlour. Bring a glass for yourself.’
‘A bottle of that best brandy, Mary,’ shouted Carmody to his wife as he respectfully went in front to open the parlour door. He placed chairs in front of the parlour fire and asked his guests to seat themselves, hitching his American trousers about his waist and spitting on his hands like a waiter in a New York bowery lunch room. His huge stature loomed over the two middle-sized men like the figure of a Praetorian guardsman protecting a Caesar.
‘Let me introduce you–’ he began.
‘I always introduce myself,’ interrupted O’Daly, leaning back with his two feet crossed on the mantelpiece until his chair stood on its hind legs. ‘My name is Matthew O’Daly of Lisamuc, Co. Sligo.’
He threw out his chest as he spoke and his eyes flashed. He made a gesture with his left hand in front of his face and then rubbed it along his left shin as he turned to the Stranger, his eyes gleaming aggressively as if he were challenging the Stranger to doubt his identity. The wrist above his hand seemed to be made solely of a square flat bone, covered with white hairy skin. In fact, all his body seemed to be made of one flexible bone like a steel sword.
The Stranger winced, and blinked his eyes under the unexpected stare. It was some time before he could get himself to give his own name. Suddenly it occurred to him that he was ashamed of his name, of his ancestry, that his father was an obscure schoolmaster, that he himself was a failure in life and a coward.
‘My name is Fergus O’Connor of Ashcragh,’ he said with an affected drawl.
‘Heh,’ said O’Daly. Then he made a noise at the back of his palate like a man urging on a horse.
‘I declare to Christ but you must be the son of John O’Connor the schoolmaster. Hell to my soul, that dog of a priest treated him badly. Shake hands.’
Carmody’s face beamed at hearing O’Daly abuse a priest, and he hit himself a great blow in the chest and laughed until his teeth seemed about to fall out. He hated priests as enemies of ‘all people who can think intelligent.’
‘Drink up,’ he said, handing them glasses from the tray that had been brought in. ‘You two will drink on me to-night. It’s seldom that three men –’
But O’Daly interrupted him again, and began to talk at a tremendous rate, denouncing the parish priest, the doctor, the district inspector of police, and all the people of note in Inverara, as scoundrels of the worst kind, inhuman rascals, low fellows, and men whose parentage was in doubt.
‘Since this new Government came into power, Carmody,’ he cried, ‘the country is gone to the dogs.’
The Stranger drank his brandy and felt the blood rushing to his head. Suddenly he began to lose his grip of everything. He became defiant and aggressive. He joined in the conversation and began to boast on his own account, boasting of his past life, of which he had been mortally ashamed an hour ago. Carmody began to boast, but O’Daly boasted loudest of them all. None of the three would listen to the others. Only snatches of their conversation rose above the volume of sound, amid the clinking of glasses and the gurgling of the brandy from the bottle. It seemed that the three of them had spent all their lives fighting, drinking, and breaking women’s hearts. O’Daly spent more nights of his sixty years of life in his boots than out of them. He had drunk more whisky ‘than they make now in the distilleries.’ He had broken a man’s hand in two places with a simple twist of his wrist. He had been all over Ireland, and knew every bishop, politician, racehorse-owner and athlete. In other words, he knew every body whom anybody cares to be known to know in Ireland. Carmody was not behindhand. In fact, he had once stood, it seems, as a candidate for the American Congress in the Socialist interest. He was known all over the American continent as a crack shot, and he had more love affairs than he could count. The Stranger had been one of the most gifted and promising geniuses in Europe before the war, drink and women laid him low.
Then they became slightly maudlin. The Stranger felt that he was enjoying himself as he had never done before. He kept laughing boisterously for no reason in the world. He felt sure that he would live happily for ever in Inverara in this society. Suddenly death appeared to him to be a menace that he must avoid.
‘Hey,’ he hiccupped, leaning over to O’Daly, ‘what do you think of the next world?’
O’Daly made a noise again like a man urging on a horse.
‘Look here,’ he said, ‘it’s only the young that can afford to waste their time thinking of the next world. As far as I know, this world is too short and it’s seldom Carmody offers us free brandy. Drink to life and damn the next world. Let’s have a song before we go.’
Hot and foolish with drink they began to sing some ridiculous thing out of tune. Before the first verse was finished, each was singing a different song. Then Carmody suddenly dropped his head on the table and fell asleep. O’Daly shook him and tried to wake him. Carmody raised his head and stuttered:
‘Come in here every evening … talk about Karl Marx.’ Then he dropped asleep again.
‘Hell to my soul,’ said O’Daly, ‘who is this fellow Marx he’s always talking about? Must owe him some money. Tight-fisted fellows, these publicans, between the two of us. Come on up to my house and let him sleep.’
The two of them got into O’Daly’s jaunting car that was waiting in the yard. The hardy mountain pony, careless of the freezing mist, had been contentedly chewing bad hay there for two or three hours. They drove up through the village at a walking pace. O’Daly explained that he had been into Kilmurrage to attend a meeting of the local court.
‘This new Government made me a magistrate,’ he shouted. Then he began again to denounce everybody, and the cruelty of bad fortune that had pursued him and his family for generations. He lashed the mare furiously as he spoke, but the mare’s hide was obviously as tough as his own, and she never changed her gait. ‘I have to live up here in a little cottage with my daughter and an old woman who looks after the place. She’s even too old to sleep with. And my daughter has to teach these brats in the school for a living. Everybody has to work for a living nowadays. The world is changed. So it is. I remember in my time … Begob, my daughter is a poor specimen of a woman compared to her mother. In my time they were as wild as the men, strong, hefty women. Ah well’ … And he went on to tell stories of his youth, and of the glory of his ancestors, stories which were for the most part lies, for the days when the O’Dalys of Lisamuc were people of importance were too distant to be remembered by anybody.
The cold mist was scattering the exhilarating effect of the brandy from the Stranger’s mind. He began to be melancholic and dissatisfied again. He grew jealous of O’Daly’s strength, of his coolness and strong nerves.
‘Ah,’ he said to himself, ‘he has no intellect. That’s what it is.’ And he cursed God for having given himself a strong intellect until he remembered that there was no God and became still more depressed because he had nobody to blame for his sorrow. Then, in order to ease the pent-up volume of his sadness, he began to tell O’Daly his troubles, but O’Daly paid no attention to him. He continually interrupted with his own reminiscences.
‘You’re a young man,’ he would say, ‘and you don’t understand the world. Now, in my time, the young men feared nothing. Not even the devil in hell. Is it that measly war you’re talking about? Sure that was only a cockfight compared to what I’ve seen in my young days.’
They reached O’Daly’s cottage. The Stranger, irritated because O’Daly would not pity him, wanted to go home immediately, but O’Daly would have none of it. He stood in the middle of the road, one hand holding the reins, the other hand grasping the Stranger’s shoulder.
‘See that house of mine,’ he shouted at the top of his voice. ‘There’s a hovel for an O’Daly to live in! Hell to my soul, but the world is gone to the dogs. Listen to me’ – he panted loudly and wheezed –‘listen to me. The O’Malleys used to live here in the old days. And now where are they? Gone to hell. Gone and forgotten. There isn’t a trace of them. The last of them, devil take him, he had queer notions in his head, I hear; ran away to America with a slip of a flighty woman. And there you are. Wait there till I put the mare in the stable.’
The Stranger stood leaning against the gate leading up to the cottage. He became ashamed of having been fond of life an hour before. He felt as a monk might feel after being seduced by a woman. Blackness gathered again around his soul. ‘I made a fool of myself,’ he muttered.
The mist seemed to stick like icicles to his cheekbones. He wanted to run away, but he hadn’t the energy to make up his mind to do anything. His stomach became as hard as a ball. It robbed him of all energy. Weakness crept through the extremities of his hands and feet. Then O’Daly came along breathing loudly. The Stranger felt that he could kill the man for his very power to breathe so loudly.
‘Come on in,’ said O’Daly gruffly. ‘Make as little noise as ye can,’ he added. ‘I don’t want to wake Kathleen. The poor girl has to go to that damn school in the morning. The shame and disgrace of it is killing me.’
They crept on tiptoe up the path and into the kitchen by the back door. O’Daly was staggering a little. He lit a candle and placed it on a table in the centre of the room. Then he got a bottle from somewhere and two empty cups without handles. They set to drinking again. O’Daly became maudlin, crying about the fallen fortunes of his family. The Stranger suddenly became afraid, afraid of O’Daly, afraid of the dark kitchen with the dim flickering candle standing in the centre of it like a warning of death, afraid of the dark silent night outside, with the sound of the sea coming from a distance. He drank hurriedly, but the drink seemed to evaporate impotently in his throat. It tasted like water. Strange shadows began to gather before his eyes. He started at every sound. He couldn’t see O’Daly, but he could hear his quavering voice. The sea rolling on to the beach at Coillnamhan reminded him of the ‘keene’ women at wakes over dead bodies. It was as if one heard a pot boiling a million miles away. And to the south against the cliffs it sounded like a great weight falling swiftly into a deep cavern. Then he jumped to his feet as he heard O’Daly snore.
He listened for a full minute, breathing gently, perfectly motionless. In that minute he felt that he was a pure soul being judged by wicked demons. Then his mouth gaped as the picture of the night he was buried by a shell in France flashed before his mind. A cormorant called dismally passing over the house. He listened to the swishing wings. Then his right knee began to tremble. His left foot began to tap the ground. He bent down carefully to hold it steady.
‘Hold on there,’ he muttered, trying to laugh.
Then his whole body trembled. Beads of cold sweat poured out through his forehead and neck. With an oath he shot out his hands and made for the door. He felt sure that he would be dead before he reached the open air. The round ball in his stomach was stifling him.
The night air revived him. He laughed at his fears. He straightened himself when he got into the road and said, ‘Pooh, I’m all right.’ But at that moment the wind rose suddenly. A squall came from the south over the crags. It came with a swoop. He gasped and his eyeballs started. As he ran headlong forward, fantastic visions crowded into his mind. He saw millions of dying men, worlds falling to pieces, continents being hurled into the air, while he himself wandered among the chaos, the only living atom in the wrecked universe. He ran faster, trying to escape the vision, but they pursued him, crowding on one another, cries of the wounded, shrieks of the damned, corpses piled mountain-high, races wandering across deserts, chasms opening everywhere, devils grinning, wild animals with gory jaws rushing hither and thither in dark forests, myriads of men talking in strange languages, gesticulating, shouting furiously, the wails of women, the bodies of children transfixed on spears. Over all came the noise of the guns, millions of guns, rising and falling and intermingling. Their sound was like a millrace. It made beautiful music that enthralled him and made him want to kill. Then the music died and dread spectres returned. They were bare grinning skulls now and fetid smells. His body was rising into space and flying away, headed for the moon. But there was a great weight tied to the stomach that held it back. His brain began to expand. It covered the earth and then the universe, and then it burst, hurting his forehead.
He had fallen against the door of Red John’s cabin. He was unconscious when Little Mary threw herself on his neck. Folly, folly, folly, what is folly?
At Rooruck winter sleeps in its depths. But it’s a troubled sleep, sad, weary, and full of nightmares. It is the sleep of a wanton who is hiding from the wreckage she has caused.
After a month of storm and fury, the sea lay frothing about the Hill of Fate, licking its grey base as a lion licks his wounds. It stretched out for leagues white with foam, coloured here and there with wreckage and masses of straying seaweed, with planks, weeds, and dead bodies of birds. Strewn amid the rocks to the north, along the shore at Rooruck, where the cliff fell away into a long uneven battlement of huge boulders, there was more wreckage. It was said that three mangled corpses were seen tangled among the rocks at Firbolg’s Point. Sean Mor, who saw them, fled in fear, and when the villagers came they were washed away again by the tide. Farther north again, just south of the point where the waters of the north and south joined to travel eastwards, where the swift current seemed to suck the waves downwards to some cavern in the depths, three horses lay on a rock, lying on their sides, their stiff legs extended hairlessly, their bellies expanded, their nostrils full of sand.
The people feared the resting bilious sea as a soldier fears the silence of the guns in an interval between two engagements. When it raged, churned by the wind, it showed its might, but now the huge claws of its breakers were hidden in its frothing back. And they might shoot forth any moment. The sea might rise suddenly far away to the west and come towering in, each forked wave-crest a magnet that drew the sea before it into its hollow breast, until the Giants’ Reef lay bared for a mile and the slimy insects clinging to its back stared gasping at the awe-inspiring sky, before the retreating sea again enveloped them in accustomed darkness. For the battle is not as fearsome as the waiting for it, nor is the sword as terrible as the fire in the eye that guides it. So the peasants feared the sea, and fearing it blessed it as their generous mother, who wrecked ships afar off to give them planks and barrels of oil and manila ropes and bales of cotton. They prowled about the shores and among the boulders beneath the Hill of Fate looking for wreckage.
By day the sun shone fitfully on Rooruck, coming laggardly over the high cliff of Coillnamhan Fort. Its shadows glistened through the mist and through the clouds that pursued it. By night the hoar-frost covered the earth, eating into the gashes that the wind had made. Wild starry nights were those nights in Inverara. Boys sat by their windows, shivering in their shirts, afraid to sleep because of the strange noises of falling seas that came from the Fountain Hole, where the mermaids were said to weep for lost lovers as they combed their long golden hair, dipping the combs in the black brine that dripped from the roof of their cave into the Purple Pool beneath. Wild starry nights, when men dream of death and stillness, as they watch the shivering moon fleeing through the scratched sky. Death, death, death, and drear winds blowing around frozen dead hearts, that once throbbed with love. Inverara in winter is the island of death, the island of defeated peoples, come thither through the ages over the sea pursued by their enemies. Their children sit on the cliffs dreaming of the past of their fathers, dreaming of the sea, the wind, the moon, the stars, the scattered remnants of an army, the remains of a feast eaten by dogs, the shattering of a maniac’s ambition.
The Stranger, lying on his bed in Red John’s cabin, was near to death. He had fallen into Little Mary’s arms when she opened the door, roused by the noise of his fall against it.
‘Ah, Mother of Christ,’ she gasped once, seeing his white face with the hair streaming over it, soddened by the rain, as if he were dead. She thought he was dead. She raised him in her strong arms like a child and ran with him to his room, panting. Throwing him on the bed she ran her hands wildly over his body, searching for life in him. And then when she felt his heart beating she raised her hands to heaven and thanked God and wept with joy. She put him to bed and chafed his limbs with turpentine. Then she rolled the blankets about him and sat with her arm under his head, watching until he should regain consciousness.
Dawn had just broken. Red John got up and came into the kitchen in his bare feet.
‘Where is that – ‘ he began when he saw his wife through the open door of the Stranger’s room, her arms around the Stranger’s neck, her cheek to his lips. His small eyes narrowed and he clenched his hands. He moved stealthily to the door and looking in grinned viciously. ‘Ha, now I have you, adulteress,’ he hissed. But when she looked up at him he crept back terrified. There was no fear or shame or anger in her look. There was a sadness in her eyes, a distant look of sadness, as if she were no longer conscious of her relationship with him as a wife, as if his memory had died and been forgotten in her fear for her lover who was ill.
Red John shut the door and held on to the latch with his two hands to keep away from the look in her eyes. His superstitious mind thought she had gone mad or had been ‘taken by the fairies,’ just as Sarah Halloran had some years before. A sea-serpent had leered at her as she was washing bags in a pool beneath the Hill of Fate, and ever afterwards she sat there all day watching the spot where the serpent disappeared, until one day, tearing her hair, she threw herself headlong from the cliff. So they believed in Rooruck, for who could not believe in magic by that drear sea in winter, listening to its moaning at night?
Red John ran to the hearth as he heard his wife come to the door.
‘Get the doctor, Red John,’ she said.
Her voice was as gentle as the voice of a mother talking to her first-born. It was the first time he had heard her speak gently to him since they were married. Then she went back again to the Stranger without waiting for his reply. She felt a power within her that would make an army obey her command.
Red John stood by the hearth in his shirt, barefooted, scratching his thigh. He was struggling with two impulses, fear and jealousy: fear of the look he had seen in her eyes, and mad jealousy of her sitting with her arms around the Stranger’s neck and her cheek to his lips.
‘Let the bastard die,’ he mumbled.
But again the memory of Sarah Halloran came to his mind and the ghost he himself had seen at the Monks’ Well coming one night from Kilmurrage. He sat by the fire hugging his armpits, and became so much afraid of his wife being enchanted that he was unable to do anything. He didn’t even hear her come rushing at him from the room until her hand was entwined in his hair and she hissed in his ear:
‘Get the doctor quickly, or I will brain you.’
‘Don’t strike, woman,’ he whined. ‘I’m going.’
She watched while he dressed and left the cabin to get his pony. Soon he was riding down the rocky boreen through the village on to the road to Kilmurrage, waving the ends of the halter around his head and yelling to the mare like a madman. Little Mary stood at the door listening to the dying rattle of the horse’s hoofs and she shuddered.
‘Oh, cruel God, don’t take him from me,’ she cried, clasping her throat.
The sound of racing hoofs suggested to her her lover’s death. That sound is the harbinger of death in Inverara in winter, heard at dawn or in the dead of night, when the sea is always devouring some one or shattering their limbs, and horses gallop in haste into Kilmurrage with froth on their flanks, hurrying for the doctor and the priest. Women rush to their windows in their shifts and whisper, ‘Lord between us and all harm, who is it has been drowned or who is hurt?’
Then she shut the door and went on tiptoe to the Stranger’s bed, looking about her as if she were going to commit a shameful crime. She took a charm from her breast. Her mother had given it to her on her marriage day. It had been in her mother’s family for countless generations. Her ancestry on the mother’s side had all given their love freely and were superstitious, like all women who ask nothing of the world and are scorned for so doing. She laid the charm on the bed. She filled a cup with water and laid it on a chair beside the bed. Then she pressed the charm to her heart and kissed it. It was a square flat piece of yellowish stone covered with inscriptions, supposed to be written in Ogham Craombh, the old Druidic writing. Her mother had told her that the charm itself had originally been given to a Firbolg princess as the price of her love by a Tuatha De Danaan warrior, and that it had power to save its owner’s lover from death or the designs of the devil. And who knows? One thing is as certain as another and nothing is reasonable. All men and women fashion their own gods, and they are all omnipotent.
Three times she dipped the stone in the water and three times she pressed it to the Stranger’s lips, praying to Crom. And strangely enough, after the third pressure he stirred, then turned on his side and opened his eyes. She hastily hid the stone in the little embroidered packet that hung between her breasts, suspended by a silk string. As she buttoned her bodice she turned to him and smiled. He smiled too, fleetingly, as if he had been dreaming. Then the smile died quickly, like a gleam of sunshine followed by rain on a wet day in spring. He started. His limbs quivered, and he clutched at the clothes.
‘What noise is that I hear?’ he cried with a wild look in his eyes.
‘It is nothing,’ said Little Mary, ‘but the high tide beating on the Jagged Rock. Perhaps it is the noises of your dreams you hear.’
‘The noises of my dreams? What do you mean? What happened to me?’
She began to tell him. Her voice had a ringing sweet sound totally different to her usual voice when talking to Red John. The resonance of each word seemed to stand in the air for a moment after she had spoken the word. So it seemed to the Stranger. He listened to that after-sound without hearing the words she was uttering. His imagination, strained by the fit that was upon him, thought that she was a spirit.
‘Ha,’ he said to himself, ‘I don’t believe in spirits.’
Then suddenly he felt a queer sensation in his head, as if something were going to snap within the roof of his skull, just inside. He sat up in bed and strained out his hands to the full extent of his arms. He was afraid something was going to happen. He did not know what. Death? The thought came suddenly and he screamed with fright.
‘What is it?’ cried Little Mary, her face white with fear.
She rushed to his side, clutched him about the waist, and put her face up to his. He clutched her in turn, but his eyes wandered over her body without seeing her. The vision of death was before his eyes. He could see his own corpse lying stiff and naked. He was waiting for that thing to snap within his skull. Where would he go then? What was there beyond? He had mocked death. He had told himself that he was eager to end the misery of existence. Death, death, yes death, but not like this. Like what then? With his boots on? In battle? But his memory, clear and scornful in that dread moment of waiting, taunted him with the fact that he had feared it just as much in battle. He had trembled with fear when the shells burst near him, and at night when he heard the dull sound of tunnelling under his feet. Christ! where was his philosophy?
‘Little Mary,’ he moaned, ‘I don’t want to die.’
As he uttered the words ‘to die’ his voice rose almost to a shriek, as if he were afraid even to hear himself talk of death.
‘You will not die,’ she said calmly. But she clung to him more closely, for she too was afraid. She was not afraid of death, but of life without her lover. Her strong healthy body could not imagine death.
‘No, I will not die,’ he said, but even as he said it, he felt more afraid. The fright spread all over his limbs as if he had conscious nerve-centres everywhere. The soles of his feet itched. His feet and shins felt as if needles were being thrust rapidly into them. He thought his heart was going to burst. Then his lungs were expanding. Then his throat swelled. Then his eyes commenced to move straight forward from his head. Then there was a complete stoppage of all his organs. His body went rigid. There was a tense moment of waiting, wondering when it would happen, his death. But just when he reached that point his reason began to work again. It began to work like a clock that stops mysteriously for a moment in the stillness of the night and begins to work again of its own accord. Thought flashed across his mind, cool and cunning. It mocked his fear. ‘Bah,’ he said with a laugh, ‘what was I talking about? Get me a drink!’
While she was away for the drink, he lay on his back thinking. His reason kept tormenting him. ‘There you are,’ it said. ‘You wanted to die, but now that death threatens you, you are afraid to die.’ He tried to deny that. His vanity said that he did not fear death itself, but the uncertainty of what came after it, that he hated to die because he had not done any of the things he might have done. ‘With my ability I could have done … oh damn it.’ Again he began to reason out what would happen to him if that thing did snap in his brain and he died. By the time Little Mary came back with the drink he had forgotten about himself altogether and was debating whether the Monistic conception of the Universe were the correct one. He had just decided that ‘that idea,’ he did not know very clearly what it was, was far more terrible than complete annihilation, when Little Mary put her hand under his head and held a drink to his lips.
‘Drink this,’ she said.
He gulped down the hot milk and then suddenly he felt grateful to her. He became clearly conscious of her presence beside him and it gave him a peculiar sense of cleanliness. It was the first awakening of his clean youth in him, of the Fergus O’Connor who lived a clean life before his father’s death turned him towards cynicism and debauchery. He had always been that way, a prey to impulses. He could contemplate with equanimity the destruction of a race, and yet he would remember the generosity of a tramp and to hurt a fly caused him physical pain.
He looked up at her and touched her hand. He tried to say something, but he couldn’t. His throat went dry and he flushed. He saw her beauty as a pure thing, too, for the first time. It made him feel ashamed of himself, her beauty. He let go her hand hurriedly.
While he held her hand Little Mary blushed deeply. Until then she had been as cool and collected as a hospital nurse. But the pressure of his hand sent a warm thrill through her body. She wanted to lie down and close her eyes. The fierceness of passion that filled her while he was unconscious of her presence left her. As soon as he noticed her with even a glance of the eye and a pressure of the hand her womanly instincts forced her to shrink from him, blushing. She retired to the chair at the head of the bed and sat down; her hands trembled as she fastened the neck of her bodice she had left undone when she hurriedly put back the charm. Her face shivered spasmodically as if she were swallowing something indescribably sweet.
They waited in silence until the doctor came. Shy even to think of him now, she listened in rapt attention to the noise of the water dripping into the barrel placed at the gable, to catch the water that dripped from the roof. He lay thinking of many things. His weary brain stared at this new sensation, so different to any he had felt before, this sensation of being purified by the presence of a beautiful woman, of being cared for, of being protected spiritually. Like wild nature outside, lying bare in its winter sleep, his soul rested. So they waited, resting, he, she and nature, as if they were waiting in silence together for the beginning of life.
The noise of horse’s hoofs came to them from the lane. The sounds were uneven as of a horse ridden by an unskilled rider. Then loud shouting was heard and Little Mary ran out. The pony was standing at the door. He was champing at the bit and kicking his belly with his right hind leg, for never in his life before had a saddle touched his back or a bit been in his mouth. In Inverara it was considered unmanly to use anything on a horse but a rope halter, and a rough blanket to protect the crutch from the horse’s spine. The new doctor sat on the pony’s back, Dr. Cassidy’s successor (Dr. Cassidy had been forced to retire in his eightieth year because of a petition being lodged with the County Council by the islanders). The new doctor was from Dublin. He considered himself an important person and therefore always insisted on riding a saddled horse to visit a patient. Being too mean to buy a horse and feed it, he bought a cheap saddle and reins instead and compelled the islanders to bring him their horses for his use. He sat on the pony’s back, a white muffler wound many times around his neck, in brand-new russet riding-breeches and gaiters like an English sportsman in a film picture. He wore a hard bowler hat perched on his square head. The trimmest of clipped moustaches covered his upper lip. He cracked his whip timorously, taking care not to touch the mare with it. He sat there waiting, either because he was unable to dismount without assistance or because he considered it proper for a gentleman to wait until somebody held the stirrup. They called him Dr. Aloysius Rogan at the post office and on Government papers, but the peasants called him ‘the Son of the Potman,’ because they said his father kept a public-house in the Dublin slums.
Little Mary helped him to dismount. He leaned against her more heavily than was necessary. In his own estimation he was ‘a devil among the girls,’ and he had ‘his eye on Little Mary’ for a long time. A group of peasants that had rushed out of their cabins as soon as the arrival of the doctor was reported by a dirty boy who had been digging for a rat in the fence beside the road, gathered around Red John’s Gate, spitting from their throats needlessly and rubbing the backs of their hands across their mouths. The doctor paused a moment to inquire the name of the village, although he knew it quite well, and then entered the cabin. The peasants leaned over the fence and passed disparaging remarks on the doctor, the saddle, and on Red John for not tightening his mare’s hind shoes.
‘Does he think a horse is a donkey, the son of a lame monk?’ said one.
‘Who the devil is sick, God forgive us?’ said another.
‘It’s the Stranger, and no wonder God would stiffen his blasphemous tongue,’ said another.
‘No, no, curly Stephen,’ said another, ‘sure it’s the war has stricken the poor man. He bought me a drink the other night. He is good-natured and God-fearing.’
‘Begob,’ said a large-eared man with a coarse laugh, ‘I thought it was how Red John had brought his boat into port at last,’ meaning that he thought Red John was about to become the father of a family. They all laughed.
The doctor stood for fully a minute in the kitchen taking off his gloves. He smelt the walls all round like an excise officer smelling for illicit whisky. He handed his gloves to Little Mary and looked at her deeply as she took them. Then the Stranger’s voice came from the room harshly.
‘Who the devil is that, Little Mary?’ he cried.
The doctor arched his eyebrows and shrugged his shoulders. He went to the door of the Stranger’s room and thrust in his head and right foot like a man going to visit a prize sow in a pigsty. He saw the Stranger lying on the bed, the long pale hands lying over the coverlet, the black eyes gleaming, looking fiercely at him, the brown beard giving the face the expression of a beachcomber. He shrugged his shoulders again and advanced into the room. His face was set in an expression that he had studied in the Dublin hospitals when he realized that his abilities would never allow him to aim any higher than a practice among peasants or in the slums. It was a disdainful, condescending expression.
‘Well, my man,’ he said, ‘how do you feel?’ Then without waiting for an answer he turned to Little Mary and said, ‘Does the sea ever come down as far as this from the beach? What did you say the village was called? Ro-ro-rooy, oh! Funny name.’ Then immediately he forgot Little Mary and his question, began to whistle ‘Over the waves,’ took from his shoulders the shooting-bag that held his instruments and began to open it on the table. Little Mary stared at him with a brooding expression in her eyes, as if he were a dangerous animal. The Stranger turned on his side and glared at him. He was fuming inwardly against ‘this impertinent fellow,’ but he was afraid to say anything. He was more afraid of death than he was insulted by the attitude of the doctor. Would the doctor be able to assist him? Would he be able to cure that catching in the chest, when the heart beat too quickly? Would he be able to stop the trembling of the limbs when fear struck him? Would he be able to dispel the visions from the brain? He was ashamed too of the position in which the doctor found him, lying in the cabin of a peasant. He struggled between shame and fear and hope and anger on the bed, until at last the doctor approached him with a stethoscope. Then he felt a desire to jump up and strangle the doctor, in order to rid himself of this complex tangle of emotions by some sudden physical act. But that impulse vanished immediately. He felt a kind of careless resignation, much the same as the soldier feels when he is being court-martialled and he knows that no effort of will or of body or no strength of evidence will have any effect on the stupidity of his judges or on the mighty machine that they control.
The doctor sounded his chest and back. He tapped his knees. He put his hand before his eyes, ordering him to look at a point on the wall in a voice one would use talking to a stone man. He looked at his tongue and put a lens down his jaws and peered at it. He tapped the teeth casually with the lens. He pressed his finger against the cheekbones and watched the blood crawling back over the whitened space. He felt the pulse and whistled like an engine thudding and tapped his foot in time with the tune as he took the count. He felt his loins and asked him did he ever have venereal disease. Then he threw the clothes back over the body with a sigh, went to the table and laid down his instruments. The Stranger lay trembling, resignedly accepting all this contumely in his fear of death. He stopped breathing, waiting for the doctor’s verdict.
‘Nothing the matter with you that I can see,’ said the doctor, lighting a cigarette. ‘Been drinking too much and you are suffering from acute indigestion. Just come back from the United States? A relative of these people?’ He waved the match in Little Mary’s direction.
The Stranger, having discovered that there was no danger of immediate death and that his fears were all fantasies, now boiled with rage against ‘this lout of a fellow.’ He grew choleric. His lips twitched and his nostrils curved upwards like a dog going to snarl. But he could say nothing. Still the doctor was absolutely unmoved.
‘Sorry, my man,’ he said. ‘One gets irritable in a place like this. That sea must be lonely at nights. Dreadful place. Wonder the Government doesn’t … Ah yes, this will be … yes, h’m … Let’s say ten shillings. I’ll send you a bottle. A spoonful three times a day. The – er – your husband, I believe, my good woman, will – er – take it over to you. And by crikey, I’d advise you to stop drinking.’
‘Get me my purse,’ said the Stranger to Little Mary. ‘You’ll find it in the portmanteau there. There, there, that black one. Quick.’ He snapped his fingers, eager to pay the doctor and get him out of the room before he should lose control of himself and strangle him. ‘The ass,’ he muttered to himself, sitting up in bed, twitching his toes and gripping the blanket with his hands, waiting for his purse. ‘To think that I must be insulted by a fellow like that. Great Scott, is this the way they treat everybody? Great Christ, if I could only beat his face into a pulp.’ He took a ten-shilling note from his purse with trembling hands and threw it to the doctor without speaking. The doctor caught it deftly between his fingers as it fluttered to the floor. He carelessly packed his bag, slung it on his shoulder, said ‘Good morning, you’ll be all right in a few days,’ and left the room, followed by Little Mary.
The Stranger lay on the bed without moving, with the notecase in his hands. He suddenly took out the notes and counted them. As he was not going to die, he had an interest in his material wealth, and he put his hand to his chin.
‘Wait now,’ he mused; ‘I have paid for a year’s board and lodging to Red John. Good job I did that. I’m safe for a year. And let me see: twenty, twenty-five, thirty, forty, forty-five, fifty, fifty-three pounds … ten and there are a few shillings in my trousers pockets.’ He put the notes back and gripped the purse between his fingers. He must look after that money. Life was sweet after all. It would be all right living in Rooruck … away from the world. Just living without any effort. God knows what he might not discover about life sitting up there on the Hill of Fate. ‘Say, supposing I was sent here by fate to discover something wonderful!’ He became enthusiastic.
Then Little Mary came in and he handed her the purse. She was smiling, glad that he was not seriously ill. The white streaks in her grey eyes were shining brightly as she smiled.
‘Thank God, you’ll be all right,’ she said. ‘He told me to get you a drop of brandy for the pain in your stomach. He said it was wind. I’ll run down to Derrane’s and see have they got any.’
‘Don’t be long away, Mary,’ he called after her as she went. He was afraid of being alone. As soon as she had left the house he became worried again. His enthusiasm vanished. He suspected that the doctor had told him a lie. What did the doctor care? He recalled stories he had heard of doctors letting people die without making the least effort to save them. He felt that he was deserted by the world, that nobody cared whether he lived or died, that he was unable to help himself, that there was nobody bound to him by ties of blood. He heard the sea rumble. He felt a morose satisfaction in the thought that it was licking its jaws, preparing to devour him. Then the thought came to him that he would die at night, alone in his room. The wind would sing a cunning hissing song, trying to calm his fears so that the sea would crawl up unawares and devour him. Then all those black cormorants that he had seen on the jagged Reef would strain out their twisted long necks and tear pieces from his carcass. They would swallow the pieces without chewing them and tear again. Then he discovered himself counting the number of cormorants that were tearing at his body and he tried to shout. But he was too agitated to shout. He crept down under the blankets and commenced to cry. He felt sorry that he couldn’t pray to God without losing his self-respect. It would be such a comfort to throw himself on the mercy of some Being that was stronger than nature. There was no use appealing to nature. Nature was too strong and just to be influenced by prayer. Then he remembered Little Mary. ‘Great God,’ he murmured, ‘that woman is good to me.’ Then to hide from himself the fact that he wanted her near him because he was ill and helpless, he told himself that he was very fond of her and he became jealous of her husband.
When she brought him the brandy he thanked her with tears in his eyes. She wanted to put her arms about him and embrace him, but instead she drew away to the window and pulled the curtain over it.
‘Go to sleep now,’ she whispered. She tiptoed to the door. She was closing the door when he asked her to leave it open. He wanted to hear her moving in the kitchen. He was afraid of being alone. He watched her move around the kitchen for a time and then he became sleepy as the brandy warmed his stomach. He lay prone and closed his eyes. He heard Red John coming into the kitchen, shuffling and grumbling.
‘Hey then, woman, there’s a journey for you, and the son of a loose woman never gave me a drink. Hey then, there’s a doctor for you.’
‘Be quiet there, you pest,’ said Little Mary.
‘Hey then, whose house is this, cracked woman?’
Then he heard Red John talking in a loud voice outside the door to somebody about the weather. ‘I would say in spite of the four Gospels if they were laid on my palm that the wind has veered southward a point,’ Red John was saying.
The Stranger wondered for a few moments where Red John had heard of the four Gospels, or if he knew what they were about, and if he did read them, would he think them credible? He decided that Red John would spit and say ‘Huh’ when he had finished reading the Gospels. Then he fell asleep.
He awoke at intervals during the day. The kitchen was full of peasants, men and women, every time he awoke. The peasants of Rooruck, like all peasants and rustics and small townspeople, loved the sensation of somebody in their village being dead or sick or murdered or accused of murder or gone mad. They did not read newspapers, so the pleasure of talking scandal and trying to foist crimes and immoral habits on each other was their only harmless pleasure. But they were willing to pay for their pleasure. They brought Little Mary jugs of milk, round ‘hillocks’ of butter, and dried fish as gifts for the ‘sick man.’ The men sat near the door on a wooden bench, with their elbows on their knees, spitting everywhere. The women huddled themselves like Turks on the floor, with their hands clasped in front of their shins. They would sit in silence for a long time, pitching from side to side uneasily, like sheep being eaten by maggots. They rolled their eyes around vigorously to examine everything. Then they went away and gathered in groups around the village. They talked for hours with their heads close together, hugging their elbows like wicked Chinamen in a film tragedy.
‘Lord save us, the way Little Mary looks at one.’
‘Did you notice anything, O wife of Lame Peter?’
‘I did, but I wouldn’t like to mention it.’
‘Ye needn’t be afraid. I noticed the same thing myself.’
‘You mean to say that –’
‘Yes, that’s the very thing I said to myself as soon as I entered the house.’
‘It should be stopped.’
‘A fine-built woman like that not to have a child. It’s the curse of God that struck her barren.’
It was about midnight when the Stranger awoke. He felt refreshed. When his consciousness fully awakened and he remembered the events of the day before, he felt a strange happiness. It appeared to him that he had escaped a great catastrophe. He sat up in bed with his hands about his knees, contemplating himself.
Nature was still, except for the distant quarrelling of the sea, as if the waves were complaining at being forced to keep vigil over sleeping nature. It was so still that he thought the world was dead. ‘This is the turning-point in my life,’ he said, nodding his head and frowning as if he were stating an irrefutable fact. Then he began to think with remarkable clarity. He fancied that he could see his brain thinking. It appeared to him to be like a crystal with amorphous ideas glinting within it. He wanted to poke his fingers into its sides like a boy watching goldfish in a glass. Then he lay back from the contemplation of his brain and became aware of the power and vastness of nature. ‘I am a part of nature.’ Before, he had considered himself superior to nature. Now it struck him that he was merely a component part of the universe, just an atom, with less power than the smallest fleck of foam that was snatched by the wind from the nostrils of an advancing wave. Ha! Then he belonged to something. There was a mother too between whose breasts he could hide his head, a mother more powerful than a thousand gods. Just fancy. He could surrender himself to nature without fear. He smiled, confident that he had solved the puzzle of life. Now death could hold no terror for him, since after death he would return to nature and nature was immortal. It always moved, and motion was life. He listened to the voice of the sea eagerly, as to the voice of a father. He pictured it tumbling in among the rocks, beds of seaweed swimming in the white surf. He heard its crash as it struck the base of the cliffs. He saw the fountain of surf rising, hissing as it rose to a slender curving point. He saw it fall backwards into the retreating wave that scurried in and out among the long-toothed rocks as if it had been blinded and had lost its way. He saw it drivelling into pools and then rush with a subdued roar into the body of the ocean, to join another wave that towered higher and higher as it advanced, green and menacing. Ha! It moved without purpose. That was life, motion without purpose.
He jumped up in bed and cried in an awed whisper, ‘By God, I’ve found it!’ He judged the world in the light of his discovery, that life was motion without purpose. His brain had a weird faculty for presenting things to him vividly, as clearly as if they were filmed. He watched the tens of millions of people in cities striving for wealth, power and fame, sacrificing everything to gain honour and property. He laughed outright, heartily. It was the most ridiculous farce he had ever looked at. He held his sides laughing. He began to imitate them. He saw a fat-bellied man rising at a Business Dinner. ‘Gentlemen!’ he said, ‘I can confidently assert that James Buchanan is a man who will leave his mark on the pages of the world’s history. His self-sacrifice, his indomitable courage, his business acumen, his untiring energy, his …’ ‘Oh hell,’ gurgled the Stranger, ‘now I understand Rabelais!’ He saw others, lean-faced men, with anger in their eyes and hunger in their stomachs, shouting at the fat-bellied men, agitating for revolution and liberty, shouting about ideals and principles, honour, self-sacrifice, brotherly love! They were still more ridiculous. Did the sea have principles? Did the wind rise and tear down houses inspired by ideas? Did the rain flood towns, inspired by the spirit of self-sacrifice? Did the waves consider themselves in honour bound to wreck ships? ‘Pish! It’s motion without purpose,’ he said, turning on his side to have a better view of the idiots. He nestled his hands between his thighs. And now the world presented the appearance of a lunatic asylum. Demented people were running about, grinning like apes, shouting at one another, puffing out their chests, turning somersaults like small boys from school on a holiday. One man came running with a manuscript in his hand. ‘I am a genius,’ he cried. ‘See this book I have written!’ The manuscript rolled page after page before the Stranger’s eyes. He read every word in a trice. He saw vermin crawling on the beautiful heroine’s corpse even before she had fallen into her lover’s arms in the last paragraph. Then another man appeared, with something in a little glass tube. ‘Hey! you people,’ he cried, ‘hey you, look at me. I’m the devil of a scientist! I have discovered a cure for all diseases. Man will soon be immortal.’ And he had scarcely finished speaking when he got run over by a motor-car and got killed. A fat general with bandy legs, a fierce moustache and a sloping forehead came along. He stood squat and roared like a bull until his lungs almost burst and his face was red and choleric. ‘This is General Dictator speaking,’ he shouted. ‘I have killed a million of the enemy. Now let liberty reign and peace.’ The millions flung their hats in the air, when a huge wave rose playfully and enveloped all the millions! Then the whole world froze up and skidded off through space. Another planet had collided with it.
The Stranger was laughing at his vision when he suddenly became vexed with the folly of the world. ‘What a scoundrelly farce!’ he muttered. ‘And look at all the good men it deceives!’ There was no end, no goal, no certainty, except in living aimlessly. Nothing was assured but the air, the earth and the sea. He fancied that he could see the cormorants sitting stupidly on the jagged Rock, bobbing their heads lazily. ‘We have lived here five hundreds of years,’ they croaked sardonically. ‘And we have heard it all, all before now! but tell us what does it end in? In ashes and oblivion?’
Then having torn the veil of sanity from the face of the mad world he turned on himself. He had been just as insane as the others whom he despised, trying to create a purpose in life. He had considered himself a genius and was enraged with his fellows for ignoring him. ‘Fancy being vexed with people whom you despise!’ Ha, he could laugh at them all now!
Then, having satisfied his vanity, he stopped thinking. He listened for sounds in the house. He felt a slight thirst and thought he would call out for some brandy. But he immediately found that he did not feel thirsty but hungry. He was so glad at feeling hungry that he flopped down flat in the bed, snored and fell asleep immediately.
Little Mary, sitting by the kitchen fire, keeping vigil over him, heard the creaking of the bed and tiptoed to the room door.
‘Do you want anything?’ she whispered.
Hearing no reply she moved softly to the bed and heard him sleeping calmly. She brushed her hand lightly over his hair and went back to the fire again. She sat half-sleeping, half-dreaming of love, arranging the minutest detail of her future life with her lover. Her dreams all began with the day they would fly from Inverara together. Before that day there was a vast wilderness in which she could see nothing.
When the Stranger awoke next morning he felt better. There was nothing but a slight twitching at the knees when, in spite of himself, his mind scurried into the past for a fleeting moment. He ate ravenously. Little Mary stood beside him while he ate, hoping that he would give her a glance of recognition. But he had forgotten all about her as soon as his fit had vanished. She was again to him but a peasant woman who was handing him his food. Her eyelashes drooped. Her lips quivered. She was debating in her mind whether she hated or loved him. She wanted to hate him, but she couldn’t. But she made an irritated gesture as she swept away the remains of his breakfast. He did not notice it. He noticed nothing but himself. He lay back and smoked a pipe.
‘I am a new man,’ he thought. ‘I’m finished with the past. I think I will get up and walk around the shore. I will look at the sea.’ He put on his clothes and walked into the kitchen. But then he got dizzy and Little Mary had to help him to a seat.
Little Mary was arranging a couch for him by the fire when Red John came in.
‘How does the sea look to-day?’ asked the Stranger.
Red John growled, ‘It looks very well,’ and spat into the fire. He sat in the opposite corner with his head between his hands. Since he had seen his wife by the Stranger’s bedside with the bewitched look in her eyes, his mind was troubled with queer and terrible thoughts. He wanted to kill his wife, but he was afraid to do so. The good God forbade it. And in what other way could he get rid of her? What were the neighbours saying about him? Great Virgin of the Valiant Deeds! how they’d laugh at him if they found his wife was in love with the Stranger! As he sat by the fire he thought of the fat widow in Kilmillick who had fifteen acres of land, whom he knew was willing to marry him. Had she not whispered to him one night in Kilmurrage that it was lonely sleeping alone in winter. And Kilmillick was a better village in every way than Rooruck. He had heard Sean Mor prove it one night in Mulligan’s publichouse. But how was he to get rid of his wife? Eh? He looked at the Stranger furtively over his beard and then jumped to his feet and muttered as he went out of the door, ‘To the devil with it for a story.’
‘What is that he said, Little Mary?’ said the Stranger.
‘Oh, don’t mind him,’ she said, fussing anxiously about the room. She swore to herself that she would thrash her husband at the first opportunity.
But the Stranger felt uneasy. He realized that Red John was jealous of him. He thought that he was making a fool of himself with Little Mary. ‘But good God! I have done nothing,’ he told himself. It was ridiculous to think that he would have ‘an affair’ with her. ‘She is good to me and that is all,’ he thought. But even as he thought that his passion became slightly aroused. But it died again immediately. His body was very weak. He laughed lowly and thought, ‘What a fool I am!’ Little Mary looked at him and he said to her with a laugh, ‘Oh well, of course I know he didn’t mean anything.’ But they both blushed as they looked at one another, as if they were conscious of having something to hide from Red John.
He passed the day quietly thinking by the fire, flying from one field of thought to another sleepily. At one moment he felt happy and certain of everything; at another moment he felt gloomy and in doubt. He reacted to every sound that he heard from outside. At one moment it was a boy riding a donkey down the lane; the wild yells of the boy rose triumphantly after each hissing lash of a dried sea rod across the donkey’s flank. And the donkey’s hoofs tipped the ground slowly in jingling succession as if he were not being hit. A flock of seagulls whirled screaming over the village. A peasant woman called out ‘Ho-e-e-e-e White Anthony, what news have you got?’ Then all sounds would die, except the sounds of the sea, thr-r-up, flup, hsssss. Then a cock would crow sadly. And he wove trains of thought about all these sounds. Night brought him sound sleep. His mind was shrouded by a kind of birth bag that shut out the world. The past was becoming unreal and distant. The sea was singing a crooning song in his ears that lulled him to sleep. It was a sad song, like the songs that mothers sing to their babes in Inverara, where all joy is the depth of sadness in winter. It was the joyous sadness of those who grow to despise joy in their sorrow. There was a half-smile on his lips as he was falling asleep. The wind coming down the slope of Coillnamhan Fort from the east was the last sound he heard. It played somnolent music on the grey smooth crags, epics of races dead a million years, a moment in its ageless life. It sang them with a jeer at the end of each blast, jeering at effort and ambition. He stretched out his legs, crossed his feet and slept.
Next morning he sat once more by the fire. He had no energy. He wanted to sit quietly and listen to life moving about him. He shuddered when he saw Red John come in after a night hunting for wreckage, drenched to the skin by the ice-cold sea-water. He had been fighting the other peasants for two barrels of paraffin oil that had been washed ashore and he had got nothing. Red John walked up and down by the door stamping his wet feet and saying ‘huh’ now and again viciously. He began to curse the other peasants, gesticulating.
‘That son of a wanton, Patch the son of Bartly, prevented me from getting the second barrel,’ he cried, spitting out of the door. He crouched around the floor describing the struggle for the barrel. He had gone out to his waist to meet a huge wave. He had his hand on the barrel as it was carried past him. Then the wave swept the barrel and himself fifty feet along the weed-covered rocks. He was knocked into a pool. The barrel was sweeping back again towards him on the backwash of the wave, when Patch the son of Bartly, his eyes starting from his head with greed, rushed in front of him. Clinging with one hand to a ledge of rock Red John was about to grasp the barrel with the other hand when Patch threw himself upon it with a yell, shouting, ‘Let go, let go, it’s mine!’ And then they both struggled and the barrel was carried out along the rocks until Michael the son of Littie Michael grappled it with a hook. ‘I’ll have his life yet, the son of a wanton,’ cried Red John furiously. Then without changing his clothes he took a pitchfork and went out to gather seaweed on the pebbly beach that stretched along the north of Rooruck towards Coillnamhan.
Little Mary was at the well beetling clothes, and the Stranger sat by the fire shivering, glad that he did not have to go out to fight for barrels. It made him afraid of life, that fierce struggle on the wild beach.
‘I wish Little Mary would come,’ he muttered. He felt lonely. He listened to the splashing sound of her beetle falling on the clothes and counted the strokes, wondering when she would have finished and come back to him. ‘Why do I want her?’ he cried angrily. ‘I’m all right, eh? I don’t want anybody.’ He began to excuse himself for wanting her near him. Yes, it was nothing more than her company. Nothing more. It would be utterly disgraceful falling in love with her. ‘Love?’ he cried aloud. Then he laughed harshly. ‘Go on, O’Connor! You are a fool. An utter idiot. I just want to talk to the woman. I must talk to somebody.’ He waited until she came back. ‘Sit down, Little Mary,’ he said, ‘I want to talk to you.’ Little Mary took her knitting and sat near him quietly. Her face bore the expression of a man preparing for confession.
He began to talk, listening to his own voice excitedly. He debated abstruse problems. He asked himself questions as he talked. He threw out theories as his own and began to refute them as if they were set up by an enemy. Now and again he asked Little Mary, ‘Do you understand that?’ She nodded her head in silence and looked at him with a smile from under her lashes. But she never understood a word of what he was saying. She was watching the play of his lips as he spoke, feeling that she wanted to kiss them. She was debating with herself what would put ‘some flesh on his body.’ She was wondering how he would make love to her if she could only arouse his passion. She smiled instinctively in the right place or nodded her head or shrugged her shoulders, in order that he might think she was listening to him and be pleased with her. Then the Stranger disarranged the pillows under his back in the heat of an argument with himself and she jumped up to settle them comfortably. The Stranger paused suddenly with open mouth. He had reached what he thought was a marvellous climax to a chain of reasoning. He was denouncing the cupidity of an American millionaire who had rushed from success to success, until at last the dreary accumulation of his satisfied mercenary desires drove him to … And just then when he expected Little Mary to be waiting eagerly for the climax she jumped up to arrange his pillows. ‘Bah!’ he thought, ‘she is a stupid peasant. She doesn’t understand me. I must go and have a talk to O’Daly. I can talk to him. He is a man of the world.’ But he sat moodily by the fire for another hour, unable to rouse his energy.
Then the wind began to sigh more loudly. Cows lowed. The sea crashed heavily against the southern cliffs. The dim shadows of day crept up closer to the door of the cabin. Night was falling. He jumped to his feet. ‘Get me an oilskin coat, Mary,’ he said, ‘I want to go to Coillnamhan.’
She started, afraid that he was going to Carmody’s public-house.
‘Oh, don’t go drinking again,’ she said beseechingly, standing near him.
‘Go on, get me the coat,’ he said angrily.
She forgot her shyness of him and caught him by the breast. She pressed close to him and looked fondly into his eyes. He felt her hot sweet breath on his face. Unconsciously he put his arms about her and kissed her red lips. But even as his lips touched hers, his mind was far away contemplating a million men kissing a million women aimlessly. The soft suction of her lips burying themselves in his repelled him. He put her from him and stroked her hair. She stood motionless. Then he snatched his coat from its peg and went out. And as he strode away down the lane he felt proud of his conquest of her, and he smiled. But coming out on the highroad he halted and bit his lip. His conscience pricked him for having kissed her. He cracked his fingers and frowned. ‘She’s an excellent woman to me, I must look after her,’ he said, and walked on, as if he were an omnipotent God who could perform a miracle or blast a kingdom with the snapping of a finger.
But still the kiss pursued him. He kept wiping his lips with his handkerchief as if it were a physical injury. He had kissed a hundred women, in cabarets, in cafés, even in brothels. He had made love sometimes with passion, sometimes boredly, always carelessly, forgetting the women nonchalantly after he had left them. Yet he now felt conscience-stricken after kissing this peasant woman. ‘It’s this damn island,’ he growled. ‘It’s enchanted. Ugh!’ Nature seemed to be leering at him viciously. He thought spirits were watching him among the black crags that loomed sombrely out of the darkness on either side of the white road, warning him against violating the mating law of nature. The sea was running sibilantly in and out on the sandy beach at Coillnamhan. It was cutting narrow deep gashes in the sand. He felt it was showing him how sharp its claws were. The wind came in little fawning rushes about his ears, like a cat tapping a mouse with furred claws before it suddenly drives its sharp teeth through the neck and growls as it hears the bones crunch. He said ‘Phew’ and walked faster. Then he cried aloud querulously, ‘But, Great Scott, it was she herself … but oh to hell with it, I’m going crazy. Ha, ha, ha!’ Then he forgot about her and began to array in his mind the pet subjects that he wanted to discuss with O’Daly.
He heard sounds of music coming from O’Daly’s cottage as he approached. He stood in wonder listening, drinking in the delicious sound that always intoxicated him. He realized this was classic music and he wondered who was playing. ‘It’s a violin,’ he said. He became jealous of O’Daly for being able to play so well, for he himself could not play and he hated anybody being able to do anything which he himself could not do. He swore and knocked at the door. He waited for two minutes, but no answer came. The music still continued. Then a woman’s voice began to accompany it. ‘Ha, that’s his daughter,’ he said, and his heart began to throb. Her voice was sad and sweet. It seemed to mingle with the sounds of the wind and the sea. It would go forward for a space softly, sibilantly. Then it gathered strength and rose in a thickening wild cascade of sound, like a wave ridden by the wind breaking against a cliff. Then another clear note joined it at the height, a note of fierce unconquerable pride, that wound whirling steel bands about it. And immediately it fell, lower and lower, laughing, tingling, as if it were shivering in an ecstasy of ferocious joy, like the voice of a mad woman laughing over the dead body of her lover. A frenzy of passion rose within him as he listened. He longed to grasp a sword, to smite mountains, to heave huge weights, in order to exhaust the energy born in him by the music. He ran down the path away from the house. But as soon as he was out of reach of the music he stopped, snorting. He leaned over the gate, his perspiring body chilled. He looked back at the house as if it concealed enemies. He trembled with fear, thinking it was enchanted. The moon and myriads of stars made the night bright. The thatched cottage stood out clearly against the face of the low hill behind it, where the crag ended in a glen. The glen was covered with a shadowy mist, the gaunt bare trees standing about in it. He could hear the dull rumble of the spring water dripping from the base of the ivy-covered rock to the left. The roof of the cottage hung low, as if it staggered under its thatch. The rain had stained the yellow paint on the walls. Withered rose bushes lined each side of the little portico. ‘Hell, I’m silly!’ he said. ‘I’ve seen hundreds of cottages like that. I’ll go in.’
He walked steadily up to the door again and knocked. The music stopped. He heard a chair upset and then the door opened. O’Daly’s daughter faced him in the hall. A lamp swinging over her enveloped her head in a bright light. Stray tresses of auburn hair rose quivering in the wind from the huge coil that lay banked about her forehead. They glistened as if sparks of fire had fallen from the lamp on them. Her eyes were just like her father’s, blue, gleaming, fierce, cold eyes. Her face was like her father’s. The lips were thin and compressed. The nose was straight and the nostrils were slightly distended. The rest of her body was slight. In her right hand she held the violin she had been playing.
‘You are heartily welcome,’ she said, bowing slightly. Her voice was cold, almost sharp, totally unlike the voice he had heard singing a minute before.
He said ‘Thank you’ and followed her into the sitting-room on the right.
The sitting-room was low-roofed and large. A turf fire burned brightly in a large black grate. A French window, with sloping bays, almost covered one side. A reading-lamp rested on a round mahogany table in the centre. The remaining walls were lined with books. The picture of a fierce-looking man, wearing sidewhiskers, hung over the fireplace. Evidently an O’Daly, and an ancient one, for he wore ruffles. O’Daly’s head appeared over the back of a leather-covered armchair that was drawn up in front of the fire. The toes of his right foot, covered with a grey sock, also appeared over the back of the chair. It was resting on the low mantelpiece. O’Daly did not rise, but he wheezed and groaned, as he apologized for not rising. ‘Rheumatism … Meet my daughter Kathleen … nearing my last … heard you had the doctor … sorry to hear it … an awful scoundrel … take your chair to the fire … get that bottle of brandy, Kathleen.’
The Stranger sat opposite O’Daly. He cast a hesitating look after Kathleen as she walked slowly to the door, strumming her fingers along the table as she passed. He noticed she was wearing a knitted saffron dress, with a deep black band around the waist. Her slim body was as lithe as the body of a wild animal. The length of the fingers that strummed along the table made him stare after her, as she disappeared through the door. There was a deep hollow in the back of her neck beneath her piled-up hair and the hair grew thickly each side of the hollow. As he looked towards O’Daly from her he blushed. She was the first educated woman with whom he had come in contact for a long time. In fact he had never known the companionship of educated women. The kind who gave their love easily attracted him more. ‘They were less waste of time,’ he used to say. Now he felt embarrassed and attracted. He also felt ashamed of himself. He was looking at O’Daly for several seconds before he could see the man. O’Daly was making peculiar grimaces, jerking his face upwards slightly with his upper lip curled. Then he leaned over and whispered, grasping the Stranger’s right knee, ‘Be careful what you say. She is very religious. Gives me dog’s abuse for swearing. I declare to Christ the women nowadays … whist! here she comes.’
Kathleen entered the room with a tray, carrying a bottle and two glasses. As she filled the glasses in silence, she made grimaces as if the smell of the brandy were stifling her. She handed a glass to each of them and then sat by the table holding her handkerchief to her mouth.
O’Daly, with his glass half-raised to his lips, looked at her half-mournfully, half-fiercely, like an old dog after being beaten by a young master, and then he said, ‘Phew. Here’s a good health, Mr. O’Connor.’ He drank. ‘My daughter is a temperance woman,’ he added. Kathleen shrugged her shoulders with a sigh, and they both looked at her. But nobody spoke. O’Daly swallowed the contents of his glass, but the Stranger put down his glass almost full. He knew Kathleen was watching him and he became oppressedly conscious of the dilapidated state of his clothes, his worn features, and … though he hated to admit it … of his sinful past. Then he began to talk to her; casually at first, while O’Daly glared furiously at each of them, cracked his fingers, made a noise like a man urging a horse, and swore under his breath, trying to find a more comfortable place in his chair. He was like a fish out of water in the presence of his religious, cultured and highly civilized daughter. But the Stranger, as soon as she began to talk to him, felt a stiffening that drove out his embarrassment. There was an aggressive yet pitying tone in her voice that maddened him. ‘You’ve been to the University,’ she said, rubbing the fingers of her right hand slowly along the back of the left.
He felt she was patronizing him.
‘Yes,’ he said curtly, ‘I spent a few years in that den of superstition before I had sense enough to begin my education properly.’
O’Daly laughed loudly and then swore as he stubbed his toes trying to sit upright.
‘Damn right,’ he yelled, waving his beard in an ecstasy of self-enjoyment, ‘the only place to learn is …’ And then he stopped dead, meeting the cold stare of his daughter. He dropped down into his chair until only his arms protruded.
Kathleen looked at the Stranger with a half pitiful, half-contemptuous look. She looked from under her eyelashes and seemed to shiver inwardly in horror of such a statement.
‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I see.’
The Stranger fumed. He understood quite well that she said several things after the manner women have of saying a thousand bitter things in a silent glance. She said, ‘You have been in the British army and therefore you are an enemy of your country,’ since she, like all cultured young Irish women, was a Nationalist for the same reason that similar types in other countries are suffragettes or followers of nature-cults or social reformers, to express their newly discovered sex freedom. She said, ‘You are a pariah since you have lost your religion,’ for as a cultured young Irish woman, the Christian religion was to her an emblem of purity, sex freedom, and a bulwark against everything gross and foreign. And the Stranger, even though his reason despised both Nationalism and Christianity as relics of the childhood of human thought, felt himself in the position of a man accused by his own family of heinous crimes against the family honour.
He began furiously to denounce everything – religion, Nationalism, civilization.
‘Civilization,’ he said, ‘is only a plaster to hide sores. Priests are hirelings of the patriotic vampires who suck the blood of the people.’
He became eloquent, as Kathleen tried to refute his arguments. In Irish fashion they gesticulated, they struck the table, they said things they didn’t mean to say, and they finally ended by forgetting what they began to discuss and lapsed into a heated silence.
O’Daly, who had stared open-mouthed at them during the argument, then jumped to his feet and laughed.
‘Yah, he said, ‘you two are young and foolish. Sure you know nothing about life. Said the man, “Eat, drink and be merry, for to-morrow we die.” Come on, we’ll go down to Carmody’s.’
‘No, I must go home,’ said the Stranger, also rising. ‘I don’t feel very well.’ He was very pale and weak and he trembled slightly, overwrought by his recent illness and his excitement.
‘Damn my soul,’ cried O’Daly tenderly, catching him by the shoulder, ‘I didn’t know you were seedy. Drink that brandy. There now. Kathleen, ye’re the devil for talk. You … fooh!’ He glared at his daughter.
‘I’m so sorry,’ said Kathleen. ‘Of course I didn’t mean to irritate you. Please forgive me.’
The Stranger took her hand and laughed.
‘Oh, that’s all right,’ he said. ‘I’m quite all right, quite. It’s only nervousness. I’m frightfully sorry.’ But he had seen the softness in Kathleen’s eyes and the blush that suffused her neck as she spoke, and it maddened him still more inwardly. He felt that she was superior to him, had more command over herself, was purer. ‘I must go now,’ he said. ‘No, no, don’t move, Mr. O’Daly. Good night.’
Kathleen began to apologize to him again at the door, but he laughed and bid her good night hurriedly. She watched him going down the path and then called out, ‘Be sure to come again soon.’
‘All right,’ he called, ‘thanks.’ And then, walking hurriedly down the road, he said, ‘Never. Never again. I’m lost. I’m not fit to associate with her. I’m accursed. What a wreck I have made of my life!’