Short Fiction of Flann O'Brien (Irish Literature) (12 page)

And now Tim Hartigan was scanning the letter. If it was curt, it was the curtness of affection.

Dear Tim—By the time you get this you will probably have a visitor, Crawford MacPherson, a dear friend of mine. Take away all the dust-sheets, protective stoves, and rat poisons from my own quarters and make my place available and comfortable for Crawford. If you receive orders, obey them as coming from me.

The Lord be praised, these oil-wells of mine are making so much money that I’ve lost count. There are 315 derricks standing just now, and I have formed the Hoolihan Petroleum Corporation (“H.P.”). Naturally the politicians are moving in but I think I have their measure. Give my regards to Sarsfield Slattery, to the doctor and other neighbours. I enclose extra money.

—Ned Hoolihan

Well, well. Tim sat back and thoughtfully filled his pipe. Would this damn Scotchman wear kilts, maybe play the bagpipes and demand his own sort of whisky? But that was bogus, music-hall stuff, like Americans calling an Irishman a boiled dinner and having him wear his pipe in the ribbon of his hat. Very likely this Scot was just another globe-trotter, very well off, in search of snipe or grouse or some other stuff . . . salmon, perhaps. And Sarsfield Slattery? Tim would have to show that letter to Sarsfield, a friend who occupied a position strangely very similar to his own at neighbouring Sarawad Castle where the wealthy owner, Doctor the Hon. Eustace Baggeley, was in permanent residence. It would be true to add, though, that the Doctor was often away in the sense that he was in the habit of taking strange drugs prescribed by himself. Morphine, heroin, and mescaline had been mentioned but Sarsfield believed that the injections were a mixture of the three, plus something else. Like Ned Hoolihan, the Doctor was also a pioneer of a kind. And, again like Ned Hoolihan, he had adopted Sarsfield, another orphan and born in Chicago, when he was attending a medical conference in that city on the extraction by cattle of a toxic hypnotic drug from hay imported from Mexico.

After Tim had cleared away his breakfast things and washed the dishes, he went up the stone stairs, accompanied by Corny, to refurbish the Boss’s quarters, array the great four-poster bed in clean linen, sweep floors, dust the handsome sittingroom, light fires and pull the chain in the lavatory. In the bathroom he thoughtfully laid out some spare shaving gear of Ned’s, and even put a fishing rod and unloaded shotgun leaning in a corner of the sittingroom. Orders were orders, and Crawford MacPherson would not only be welcome but would be made feel he was genuinely welcome. It was time, Tim said to himself, that he did a little real work for a change—for he was a conscientious young man. And taking counsel with Sarsfield would have to wait for a little bit.

The forenoon passed quickly and it was about two o’clock in the early autumn day when Tim sat down to his heaped dinner of cabbage, bacon, pulverised sausage, and sound boiled potatoes of the breed of Earthquake Wonder—with
Jude the Obscure
by Thomas Hardy propped up against the milk jug. Corny dined noisily on a large ham-bone which originally bore rags of meat. Some people, Tim reflected as he finished his food, thought Hardy a rather repressed and dismal writer, more taken with groans than lightness of the heart. Well, he was long-winded all right but the problems he faced were serious, they were human questions, deep and difficult, and the great Wessex novelist had brought to them wisdom, solace, illumination, a reconciliation with God’s great design. And he had re-peopled the English countryside. The volume itself was the property of Mr. Hoolihan.

A grinding metallic noise came from the courtyard and, looking through the thick distorting glass of the narrow window, Tim saw the leading part of the bonnet of a large motor car. He knew a good deal about cars, and had driven and looked after a Lancia when Ned Hoolihan was in residence.

“Humph,” he muttered. “A Packard. Ex-inventory for years. Drive a Packard and proclaim yourself an old man.”

But he sat there, unmoved. Could this be the Scotchman? Or maybe a manure vendor? Corny growled softly. Whoever it was, he could knock, no matter if the door was only the tradesman’s entrance. Even if it was Jude the Obscure he could knock.

But there was no knock.

The door was noisily flung inward and framed in the entrance was an elderly woman clad in shapeless, hairy tweeds, small red-rimmed eyes glistening in a brownish lumpy face that looked to Tim like the crust of an apple-pie. The voice that came was harsh, and bedaubed with that rumbling colour which comes from Scotland only.

“My name is Crawford MacPherson,” she burred rudely, “and am I to understand that you are Tom Hartigan?”

“Tim.”

“Tom?”

“Tim!”

“Whatever your name is, tell that crossbred whelp to stop showing his teeth at me.”

“My name is Tim Hartigan, the dog’s is Corny, ma’am, and both of us are harmless.”

She moved forward a few steps.

“Don’t you dare to call me ma’am. You may call me MacPherson. Have the manners to offer me a chair. Have you no respect for weemen or are you drunk?”

As Tim Hartigan rose,
Jude the Obscure
fell from his fingers to the floor.

2

Perhaps it was a result of Tim Hartigan’s alacrity and good humour, but Crawford MacPherson’s mood softened somewhat to one which, though still formidable, was not ferocious. From her big handbag she took a flat silver flask and from it poured yellowish liquid into an empty glass on Tim’s table. Corny affected a watchful sleep and Tim, busy loading his pipe, had taken a seat on a chair near the window. MacPherson was looking round what once upon a time had been a considerable kitchen, and grimacing as she sampled her drink.

“How are things going on here?” she asked at last.

“Well, ma’am . . . MacPherson, I mean . . . going on pretty all right. They are nearly ready for harvest, we have three heifers—two of them milkers—ten bullocks, fifty-five sheep, a saddle horse, three tractors, about twenty-five tons of turf and timber, a few good farm workers, and there is a shop about a mile away for groceries, newspapers, fags and that sort of thing. . . . And there’s a telephone here but it’s usually out of order.”

“I suppose you think that’s very satisfactory?”

“Well . . . I suppose things could be worse. The owner, Mr. Hoolihan, has made no complaints.”

“Oh, is that so? Do you tell me that?”

Here Crawford MacPherson seemed to frown balefully at the floor.

“I think that’s the truth,” Tim replied rather lamely, “but it’s only rarely that I get a letter from him.”

MacPherson put her glass down noisily.

“Let me tell you something about Mr. Edward Hoolihan, Hartigan,” she said sternly. “I’m his wife.”

“Good Lord!” cried Tim, colouring.

“Yes,” she continued, “and don’t you dare call me Mrs. Hoolihan. I am not compelled by civil or Presbyterian canon law to make a laughing-stock of myself with a title the like of that.”

Tim shifted uneasily in his chair, his mind in disarray.

“Aw, well . . . I know,” he began.

“I’m over here to put into effect a scheme of my own which, however, has my husband’s full approval. There is, of course, no limit to the amount of money I can spend. Mr. Hoolihan thinks that nothing can be done about the peasants of this confounded country. Well, about that, we shall see.
We shall see!
”

Tim Hartigan could suspect storm clouds in his future; some thunder. Even lightning, perhaps.

“Mr. Hoolihan,” he said gently, “had some trouble with them himself some years ago. He found them too conservative. He offered them good advice and material help in agriculture but, bedamn it, they wouldn’t take it. You see, they’re stick-in-the-muds, MacPherson.”

“Ah,” she said, taking another sup from her glass, “stick-in-the-muds? Yes, they had no time for Earthquake Wonder, I’m told. I’ll tell you this much. Stick-in-the-muds they may be, but my business here is to make sure that it is in their own mud they will stick. Understand me?
In their own mud!
”

“Yes. They’re unlikely to want to do anything else.”

Crawford MacPherson rose, strode to the range where a fire glowed, and turned her back to it, standing menacingly in her brown brogues.

“What they want or don’t want is not the important thing, Hartigan. It wasn’t, in the past, when a terrible potato famine swept through the country like the judgment of God, about 1846.”

“Ah well,” Tim ventured, “that was in the dim dark days in the long ago, before we had the good fortune to have Earthquake Wonder in the world.”

MacPherson shook her forefinger in anger.

“The people of this country,” she thundered, “live on potatoes, which are 80 per cent water and 20 per cent starch. The potato is the lazybones’ crop and when it fails, people die by the million. They are starving . . . and they try to eat nettles . . . and straw . . . and bits of stick, and they still die. But a more terrible thing than that happened last century. . . .”

“Heavens above,” Tim cried, “what worse calamity than that could occur?”

“The one that
did
occur. They didn’t all die. Over a million of those starving Irish tinkers escaped to my adopted country, the United States.”

“Thank God,” Tim murmured devoutly.

“Yes, you can thank your God. They very nearly ruined America. They bred and multiplied and infested the whole continent, saturating it with crime, drunkenness, illegal corn liquor, bank robbery, murder, prostitution, syphilis, mob rule, crooked politics and Roman Catholic Popery.”

“Well, the Lord be praised,” gasped Tim, staggered by the violence and suddenness of this outburst.

“Adultery, salacious dancing, blackmail, drug peddling, pimping, organising brothels, consorting with niggers and getting absolution for all their crimes from Roman Catholic priests. . . .”

Tim frowned.

“Well, a lot of other foreigners emigrated to the States,” he said. “Germans, Italians, Jewmen . . . even those Dutchmen in baggy trousers.”

“People from the European mainland are princes compared with the dirty Irish.”

“Oh, I say,” Tim cried.

He was angry but his feeling of dismay and being at a loss for a devastating answer was greater. How could he deal with this tartar? Was she off her head?

She unexpectedly returned to the chair at the table and plopped down. She drained the remnant in her glass.

“However,” she said, “I don’t expect you to understand these matters or know how serious they are. You were never in the United States.”

Tim coloured deeply and struck his chair-arm.

“Madam, neither was Saint Patrick.”

She opened her bag, produced American cigarettes and lit one.

“I will give you an outline,” she said, “of the special business that brings me here. The plan will take considerable time to carry out, and I expect your co-operation and assistance. The object is to protect the United States from the Irish menace. The plan will be very costly but I have so much money from Texas oil at my disposal that I fear no difficulty on that score. My first step will be to buy and nominally take over all Irish agricultural land.”

Tim raised his eyebrows, looking sour.

“That would be the highroad to trouble in this country,” he said. “That famine was partly due to rackrenting and absentee landlordism. The people formed an organisation known as the Land League. One man they took action against was Captain Boycott. That’s where the word boycott comes from.”

But MacPherson, unenlightened, pulled at her cigarette thoughtfully.

“Don’t imagine for a moment, Hartigan,” she said in her hard voice, “that I intend to get myself embroiled in Irish politics. If I had any taste in that direction, I would not have to leave America to indulge it. I will buy the land and then let it back to the tenants at a nominal rent. A rent of perhaps a shilling a year.”

“A
shilling
a year an acre?”

“No. A shilling a year for every holding no matter what the size.”

“Well, holy Saint Paul,” Tim muttered in wonder, “that would make you out to be the soul of generosity altogether, an angel in disguise from the Garden of Eden.”

MacPherson gave a bleak smile.

“There will be one condition, a strict condition. They will not be allowed to grow potatoes.”

“But what are the unfortunate people to live on?”

“What they’ve always lived on. Starch.”

Tim puckered his cheeks in a swift inaudible intake of breath. What a strange spectre of a woman this was, to be sure! Where would her equal be found in the broad wideness of the world?

“There is one thing even more productive of starch than the potato,” she went on. “And that is sago.”

“What?
Sago?
”

“Yes—sago. Do you know what sago is, Hartigan?”

Tim frowned, ransacking his untidy mind.

“Well . . . sago . . . is a sort of pudding, full of small little balls . . . like tapioca. I suppose it’s a cereal, the same as rice. And maybe it is subject to its own diseases, like the spud . . . ?”

Again MacPherson’s wintry smile came.

“Sago,” she said with a minute sort of civility, “is not like tapioca, is not a grain, and will stay free of all disease if its growth is watched. Sago comes from a tree, and the sago tree takes between 15 and 20 years to mature before it can yield its copious, nourishing, lovely bounty.”

Tim stared at his boots. The proposition itself was extraordinary, the time complication incredible.

“I see,” he said untruthfully.

“The plan is big,” MacPherson conceded reasonably, “but in essence reasonable and simple.”

“All the same,” Tim ventured, “I think you would have to see the Government about it.”

“Well, you
are
smart,” MacPherson said, almost pleasantly. “That has already been largely taken care of. The American Ambassador in this country has had his instructions. He will shortly inform the Government here that the immigration of Irish nationals to the United States will be prohibited until the cultivation of potatoes in this country is totally banned.”

Tim suspected he could detect faint suffusion of perspiration about his brow. He was upset by the velocity of coming events, unless the lady was trying to be funny.