Collected Stories (56 page)

He was a changed man when he came out of jail, downcast and dark in himself. Everyone was sorry for him, and people who had never spoken to him before spoke to him then. To all of them he said modestly: “I'm very grateful to you, friend, for overlooking my misfortune.” As he wouldn't go to America, the committee made another whip-round and between what they had collected before and what the Cronins had made up to send him to America, he found himself with enough to open a small shop. Then he got a job in the County Council, and an agency for some shipping company, till at last he was able to buy a public-house.

As for Father Crowley, till he was shifted twelve months later, he never did a day's good in the parish. The dues went down and the presents went down, and people with money to spend on Masses took it fifty miles away sooner than leave it to him. They said it broke his heart.

He has left unpleasant memories behind him. Only for him, people say, Michael John would be in America now. Only for him he would never have married a girl with money, or had it to lend to poor people in the hard times, or ever sucked the blood of Christians. For, as an old man said to me of him: “A robber he is and was, and a grabber like his grandfather before him, and an enemy of the people like his uncle, the policeman; and though some say he'll dip his hand where he dipped it before, for myself I have no hope unless the mercy of God would send us another Moses or Brian Boru to cast him down and hammer him in the dust.”

The Majesty of the Law

O
LD
D
AN
B
RIDE
was breaking brosna for the fire when he heard a step on the path. He paused, a bundle of saplings on his knee.

Dan had looked after his mother while the life was in her, and after her death no other woman had crossed his threshold. Signs on it, his house had that look. Almost everything in it he had made with his own hands in his own way. The seats of the chairs were only slices of log, rough and round and thick as the saw had left them, and with the rings still plainly visible through the grime and polish that coarse trouser-bottoms had in the course of long years imparted. Into these Dan had rammed stout knotted ash-boughs that served alike for legs and back. The deal table, bought in a shop, was an inheritance from his mother and a great pride and joy to him though it rocked whenever he touched it. On the wall, unglazed and fly-spotted, hung in mysterious isolation a Marcus Stone print, and beside the door was a calendar with a picture of a racehorse. Over the door hung a gun, old but good, and in excellent condition, and before the fire was stretched an old setter who raised his head expectantly whenever Dan rose or even stirred.

He raised it now as the steps came nearer and when Dan, laying down the bundle of saplings, cleaned his hands thoughtfully on the seat of his trousers, he gave a loud bark, but this expressed no more than a desire to show off his own watchfulness. He was half human and knew people thought he was old and past his prime.

A man's shadow fell across the oblong of dusty light thrown over the half-door before Dan looked round.

“Are you alone, Dan?” asked an apologetic voice.

“Oh, come in, come in, sergeant, come in and welcome,” exclaimed the old man, hurrying on rather uncertain feet to the door which the tall policeman opened and pushed in. He stood there, half in sunlight, half in shadow, and seeing him so, you would have realized how dark the interior of the house really was. One side of his red face was turned so as to catch the light, and behind it an ash tree raised its boughs of airy green against the sky. Green fields, broken here and there by clumps of red-brown rock, flowed downhill, and beyond them, stretched all across the horizon, was the sea, flooded and almost transparent with light. The sergeant's face was fat and fresh, the old man's face, emerging from the twilight of the kitchen, had the color of wind and sun, while the features had been so shaped by the struggle with time and the elements that they might as easily have been found impressed upon the surface of a rock.

“Begor, Dan,” said the sergeant, “'tis younger you're getting.”

“Middling I am, sergeant, middling,” agreed the old man in a voice which seemed to accept the remark as a compliment of which politeness would not allow him to take too much advantage. “No complaints.”

“Begor, 'tis as well because no one would believe them. And the old dog doesn't look a day older.”

The dog gave a low growl as though to show the sergeant that he would remember this unmannerly reference to his age, but indeed he growled every time he was mentioned, under the impression that people had nothing but ill to say of him.

“And how's yourself, sergeant?”

“Well, now, like the most of us, Dan, neither too good nor too bad. We have our own little worries, but, thanks be to God, we have our compensations.”

“And the wife and family?”

“Good, praise be to God, good. They were away from me for a month, the lot of them, at the mother-in-law's place in Clare.”

“In Clare, do you tell me?”

“In Clare. I had a fine quiet time.”

The old man looked about him and then retired to the bedroom, from which he returned a moment later with an old shirt. With this he solemnly wiped the seat and back of the log-chair nearest the fire.

“Sit down now, sergeant. You must be tired after the journey. 'Tis a long old road. How did you come?”

“Teigue Leary gave me the lift. Wisha now, Dan, don't be putting yourself out. I won't be stopping. I promised them I'd be back inside an hour.”

“What hurry is on you?” asked Dan. “Look, your foot was only on the path when I made up the fire.”

“Arrah, Dan, you're not making tea for me?”

“I am not making it for you, indeed; I'm making it for myself, and I'll take it very bad of you if you won't have a cup.”

“Dan, Dan, that I mightn't stir, but 'tisn't an hour since I had it at the barracks!”

“Ah, whisht, now, whisht! Whisht, will you! I have something here to give you an appetite.”

The old man swung the heavy kettle onto the chain over the open fire, and the dog sat up, shaking his ears with an expression of the deepest interest. The policeman unbuttoned his tunic, opened his belt, took a pipe and a plug of tobacco from his breast pocket, and crossing his legs in an easy posture, began to cut the tobacco slowly and carefully with his pocket knife. The old man went to the dresser and took down two handsomely decorated cups, the only cups he had, which, though chipped and handleless, were used at all only on very rare occasions; for himself he preferred his tea from a basin. Happening to glance into them, he noticed that they bore signs of disuse and had collected a lot of the fine white turf-dust that always circulated in the little smoky cottage. Again he thought of the shirt, and, rolling up his sleeves with a stately gesture, he wiped them inside and out till they shone. Then he bent and opened the cupboard. Inside was a quart bottle of pale liquid, obviously untouched. He removed the cork and smelt the contents, pausing for a moment in the act as though to recollect where exactly he had noticed that particular smoky smell before. Then, reassured, he stood up and poured out with a liberal hand.

“Try that now, sergeant,” he said with quiet pride.

The sergeant, concealing whatever qualms he might have felt at the idea of drinking illegal whiskey, looked carefully into the cup, sniffed, and glanced up at old Dan.

“It looks good,” he commented.

“It should be good,” replied Dan with no mock modesty.

“It tastes good too,” said the sergeant.

“Ah, sha,” said Dan, not wishing to praise his own hospitality in his own house, “'tis of no great excellence.”

“You'd be a good judge, I'd say,” said the sergeant without irony.

“Ever since things became what they are,” said Dan, carefully guarding himself against a too-direct reference to the peculiarities of the law administered by his guest, “liquor isn't what it used to be.”

“I've heard that remark made before now, Dan,” said the sergeant thoughtfully. “I've heard it said by men of wide experience that it used to be better in the old days.”

“Liquor,” said the old man, “is a thing that takes time. There was never a good job done in a hurry.”

“'Tis an art in itself.”

“Just so.”

“And an art takes time.”

“And knowledge,” added Dan with emphasis. “Every art has its secrets, and the secrets of distilling are being lost the way the old songs were lost. When I was a boy there wasn't a man in the barony but had a hundred songs in his head, but with people running here, there and everywhere, the songs were lost.… Ever since things became what they are,” he repeated on the same guarded note, “there's so much running about the secrets are lost.”

“There must have been a power of them.”

“There was. Ask any man today that makes whiskey do he know how to make it out of heather.”

“And was it made of heather?” asked the policeman.

“It was.”

“You never drank it yourself?”

“I didn't, but I knew old men that did, and they told me that no whiskey that's made nowadays could compare with it.”

“Musha, Dan, I think sometimes 'twas a great mistake of the law to set its hand against it.”

Dan shook his head. His eyes answered for him, but it was not in nature for a man to criticize the occupation of a guest in his own home.

“Maybe so, maybe not,” he said noncommittally.

“But sure, what else have the poor people?”

“Them that makes the laws have their own good reasons.”

“All the same, Dan, all the same, 'tis a hard law.”

The sergeant would not be outdone in generosity. Politeness required him not to yield to the old man's defense of his superiors and their mysterious ways.

“It is the secrets I'd be sorry for,” said Dan, summing up. “Men die and men are born, and where one man drained another will plow, but a secret lost is lost forever.”

“True,” said the sergeant mournfully. “Lost forever.”

Dan took his cup, rinsed it in a bucket of clear water by the door and cleaned it again with the shirt. Then he placed it carefully at the sergeant's elbow. From the dresser he took a jug of milk and a blue bag containing sugar; this he followed up with a slab of country butter and—a sure sign that he had been expecting a visitor—a round cake of homemade bread, fresh and uncut. The kettle sang and spat and the dog, shaking his ears, barked at it angrily.

“Go away, you brute!” growled Dan, kicking him out of his way.

He made the tea and filled the two cups. The sergeant cut himself a large slice of bread and buttered it thickly.

“It is just like medicines,” said the old man, resuming his theme with the imperturbability of age. “Every secret there was is lost. And leave no one tell me that a doctor is as good a man as one that had the secrets of old times.”

“How could he be?” asked the sergeant with his mouth full.

“The proof of that was seen when there were doctors and wise people there together.”

“It wasn't to the doctors the people went, I'll engage?”

“It was not. And why?” With a sweeping gesture the old man took in the whole world outside his cabin. “Out there on the hillsides is the sure cure for every disease. Because it is written”—he tapped the table with his thumb—“it is written by the poets ‘wherever you find the disease you will find the cure.' But people walk up the hills and down the hills and all they see is flowers. Flowers! As if God Almighty—honor and praise to Him!—had nothing better to do with His time than be making old flowers!”

“Things no doctor could cure the wise people cured,” agreed the sergeant.

“Ah, musha, 'tis I know it,” said Dan bitterly. “I know it, not in my mind but in my own four bones.”

“Have you the rheumatics at you still?” the sergeant asked in a shocked tone.

“I have. Ah, if you were alive, Kitty O'Hara, or you, Nora Malley of the Glen, 'tisn't I'd be dreading the mountain wind or the sea wind; 'tisn't I'd be creeping down with my misfortunate red ticket for the blue and pink and yellow dribble-drabble of their ignorant dispensary.”

“Why then indeed,” said the sergeant, “I'll get you a bottle for that.”

“Ah, there's no bottle ever made will cure it.”

“That's where you're wrong, Dan. Don't talk now till you try it. It cured my own uncle when he was that bad he was shouting for the carpenter to cut the two legs off him with a handsaw.”

“I'd give fifty pounds to get rid of it,” said Dan magniloquently. “I would and five hundred.”

The sergeant finished his tea in a gulp, blessed himself and struck a match which he then allowed to go out as he answered some question of the old man. He did the same with a second and third, as though titillating his appetite with delay. Finally he succeeded in getting his pipe alight and the two men pulled round their chairs, placed their toes side by side in the ashes, and in deep puffs, lively bursts of conversation, and long, long silences, enjoyed their smoke.

“I hope I'm not keeping you?” said the sergeant, as though struck by the length of his visit.

“Ah, what would you keep me from?”

“Tell me if I am. The last thing I'd like to do is waste another man's time.”

“Begor, you wouldn't waste my time if you stopped all night.”

“I like a little chat myself,” confessed the policeman.

And again they became lost in conversation. The light grew thick and colored and, wheeling about the kitchen before it disappeared, became tinged with gold; the kitchen itself sank into cool grayness with cold light on the cups and basins and plates of the dresser. From the ash tree a thrush began to sing. The open hearth gathered brightness till its light was a warm, even splash of crimson in the twilight.