Part 12
Bill Duffy was, as things go, at least indifferent honest; yet his integrity made but a brief stand against the assault thus suddenly sprung upon it. He cast a furtive glance around, and then, with a rapid dive, clutched a measure, and thrust it over his shoulder down deep among his cockles, which rattled clatteringly together to hide the stealth. The next moment he started violently, and felt certain that he was caught. For at no great distance there rose up a skirl of shrieking shriller than had ever issued from sea-fowl’s throat, and looking in the direction of the sound, he saw a small and gaudy figure running towards him. It advanced in short rushes, now and then stopping to dance up and down as if in an ecstasy of rage or terror, but it screamed unintermittently, so that Bill could not be sure whether or no he did hear basser shouts the while proceeding from a point somewhat farther off. Presently, however, the note of terror grew predominant enough to change his opinion about the cause of the outcry, and set him off trotting to meet it. This red-frocked screeching child turned out to be Peg Cullen, and the burden of her lamentations was something unintelligible concerning “Daddy,” whose bawls in the background here became, fortunately for him, so distinct as to furnish an explanatory note. Foxy had evidently blundered into a mud-hole, which was now, in conformity with its agreeable custom, taking prompt steps to secure and secrete him. Bill rapidly grasped the situation, and unhitching his heavy basket he detached its long strap, and sped to the rescue, which, as Foxy was not yet very deeply engaged, he found himself able to effect. A few frantic plunges and desperate hauls set Foxy on firm ground, exceedingly miry and alarmed, and quite sober; Peg left off screaming and dancing, and they all returned to the road, stepping gingerly while they were on the mud, but stamping boldly once they felt the dry sod under their feet.
When they came where the tinker’s basket was, Foxy fell to emptying his black-oozing brogues, whilst Bill, case-hardened by much wading, began to splice his strap, which had nearly marred all with symptoms of fracture during the last critical tug. He had for the time being forgotten all about the pint measure. By-and-by, however, Foxy, flinging away the grass-wisp he had used to wipe off the mud, and shuffling uncomfortably in his soaked boots, said with a dissatisfied grunt, “Augh, bad luck to it for a deceptionable ould brash. I may go now and get another sup of somethin’ or else it’s destroyed I’ll be wid the could creeps in me bones agin mornin’; wud you take a glass, man?”
“Sure, no,” said Bill; “I’m shankin’ into town meself as soon as I can get th’ ould strap mended.”
“That’s not much of a concern you’ve got there,” said Foxy, pointing to Bill’s old mug as it lay dinted side uppermost on his cockles; “past mendin’ it is, I should say. Look-a, here’s a somethin’ better quality you’d be welcome to.” He held out one of his measures to Bill, who shrank back as if its glittering surface had been incandescent with white-heat. The consciousness of what was hidden in the depths of his basket seemed to scorch his face and dazzle his eyes.
“Och, not at all, thank ’ee,” he said; “sure this I have usin’ does grand; it’s the handiest one I ever owned. And I have a couple or so of spare ones lyin’ about at home if I would be wantin’ them. Och, not at all.”
“It’s a quare fancy you’d be havin’, then, to go about wid the likes of that,” said Foxy. “Musha, man, how ready you are to make a lie and tell it. Sure it’s no compliment to be takin’ such a trifle off me, when I’ve got a basket full of them, and more-be-token I couldn’t say how many quarts of the bastely black mud I mightn’t be after swallyin’ down agin now if it wasn’t only for you lendin’ me a hand out—bejabers it was the sizeablest cockle you ever landed. Bad cess to the could wather, it’s at the bottom of every manner of mischief. I’m steppin’ along for a drop of spirits, and I’ll lave the bit of a mug wid you, whether or no.” He thrust it into Bill’s basket and went off, followed jealously by Peg.
For a moment Bill stood staring blankly after them, but then an idea suggested itself, and hoisting his basket on his arm he started in the opposite direction.
At his goal, which was the tinker’s cabin, he found Mrs Foxy stooping over her smoky driftwood fire, in a “quare ugly temper,” as her family could have told him. “Whethen now and is it yourself botherin’ back agin?” she said upon seeing him; “didn’t I tell you a while ago as plain as I could spake that we weren’t wantin’ cockles to-day?”
“Ah whisht, honey, and don’t be strikin’ up ahead of the fiddler,” said Bill suavely. “Amn’t I just after meetin’ himself out there, and he biddin’ me be bringin’ you up three pints for your suppers?”
Mrs Foxy’s countenance cleared up. “Well, tubbe sure,” she said; “it’s not often the man has the wit or the money left to do anythin’ so raisonable wid this hour of the evenin’. But they’ll come in oncommon handy, for it’s cleared out we are to-night intirely. What all I have for the supper wouldn’t pacify a scutty wren.”
The whole Cullen family looked on with a sense of brightened prospects while Bill dropped the cockles resonantly into a tin can. It is part of Fate’s irony towards the tinkers that, however plentiful may be the lack of viands in their larder, they are always abundantly provided with cooking utensils. He meted out his three pints with a reckless liberality which convinced Mrs Foxy that her husband must have ordered, and paid for, a couple of quarts at least. And when he took his departure, he successfully accomplished the stratagem, which had been the main object of his visit, by laying down, unperceived, Foxy’s glowing gift upon a nettle-girt stone just inside the threshold. This done, he went on his way greatly relieved and self-conciliated.
But he had not trudged many paces before scurrying feet pursued and overtook him. Somebody had espied the purposely forgotten measure, and had remarked: “Och, he’s after lavin’ his mug behind him”; upon which somebody else rejoined: “’Deed, then, we’ve slathers of them litterin’ about widout it, so there’s no good keepin’ it on the man. Skyte after him wid it, Lizzie.” And Lizzie skyted, sped by a desire to be but briefly absent from the scene of preparations for supper, so that she tossed the mug into Bill’s basket with scant ceremony, and was off again ere he well knew what had befallen. When it grew clear, a leaden conviction dumped down on him that he might give up setting his wits against Destiny. “Sure it was to be,” he said to himself drearily, as he resumed his plodding, bent dejectedly under a heavier weight than his moist basket. He resorted rather frequently to this obvious truth, whence we may infer that his stock of consolatory reflections was not extensive.
When he came once more where the road crossed the river, he, according to custom in warm weather, climbed down the grassy bank for a drink. On this occasion, however, his first act was to take all his three pint measures out of the basket and set them in a row—the one he had been given, and the one he had stolen, and the battered old one that had, in a manner, caused the whole difficulty. Bill eyed them gloomily as they glinted in the long rays. “Troth, it’s themselves are the iligant lookin’ collection,” he said to himself with some resentment, “and a grand ould slieveen’s trick it was to be thievin’ a poor man’s bit of property, and he all the time widin two twos of dhrowndin’ dead, scarce a stone’s-throw away. Ay, bedad, it was so. But, musha, it was to be.” As he mused mutteringly, he picked up a mug at random and dipped it carelessly in the stream, but something surprising followed. For the water it scooped up straightway plashed out of it again, as if poured through a funnel. Of course, Bill investigated the reason of this, and the result was a discovery which lit up his face with a broad grin. Through some defect in the soldering, the bottom of the vessel had almost detached itself from the rim, and flapped out like a swing door at the slightest touch. It could, clearly, hold nothing; and it was the stolen mug—he recognised it by the handle.
“Bless me ould bones, look at that now,” Bill said gleefully, “you might all as well be axin’ wather to stop aisy in the holes of me ould basket here. Sure it wouldn’t hould e’er a hap’orth of anythin’ wet or dhry”—he dropped a handful of cockles into it, and triumphantly watched them slip through and fall with tiny thuds on the grass. “Ay, begorra, it’d ha’ never been a thraneen of use to man or mortal; ne’er a brass bawbee was it worth all the time, glory be to God.”
He gloated over its dilapidations for a while longer, and at last poked it in behind a stone under the arch, where, for aught I know, it may remain to the present day. Then he gathered up the rest of his effects, and finally resumed his interrupted journey Dublin-wards, facing a sky where the sunset grew as golden as the light in a crocus-cup. But he no longer muttered: “It was to be.” The burden of his meditations was: “Bedad now, it’s a good job I happened to be widin hearin’ of their roars, or else they might be lettin’ them yet. And belike I wouldn’t ha’ been, if it wasn’t only be raison of me stoppin’ to—to—to look at them pint mugs.”
THE SURREE AT MAHON’S
THE SURREE AT MAHON’S
Few people, I think, can ever have been impressed by the liveliness of little Killymeen, set in its nook among the lonesome mountain and moorland, its one humble street forming the nucleus of a sparse cabin-sprinkling, which strews white flecks on the far sweeping green folds hardly plentier than hailstones on a grass plot half a sunny hour after a July thunderstorm. Yet to Bridget Doran, the girl who had lately taken service with the Caseys up at the Quarry Farm, it seemed a centre of fashion and gaiety, being, indeed, the most considerable place she had seen in all her seventeen years. For they had been spent up at Loughdrumesk, a hamlet fully ten miles deeper among the wildest townlands, with only a rough cart-track threading a black bog, and climbing endless shaggy slopes, and dropping over a purple mountain shoulder to connect it with Killymeen. She had left behind there, three months ago, her feeble old grandfather and alert old grandmother, in a tiny, high-perched cabin, which felt a world too wide for its other indwellers when this third of their lives had gone. And since then there had been much travelling of thoughts to and fro between it and the Casey’s prim whitewashed farmhouse at the foot of Slieve Glasarna. At first Bridget’s had made the journey as constantly as her grandmother’s, but she was young and busy and in a new place, and as the weeks went on she became more engrossed with what lay immediately before her.
The Surree at Mahon’s, fixed for a day in Christmas week, was the most exciting of the fresh prospects that unfolded themselves, and was looked forward to with much pleased interest by Killymeen at large. There had been no Surrees in the neighbourhood during a long spell of bad times, but this year matters were looking brighter, and old Barney Mahon, who had a thrifty turn and a commodious kitchen, was encouraged to make a venture which promised fair profits at a small risk. For a Surree, which has with quaint effect borrowed its name from polite French, is a sort of subscription dance, little more elaborate in its arrangements than are the kaleys, or conversazioni, that beguile so many wintry hours in Donegal homes, when all the dark out-of-doors hurtles and splashes with wind and rain, and the neighbours drift into their places round some appointed hearth as promiscuously as a wreath of dry leaves swept rustling together by an aerial eddy. At a Surree each couple pay a shilling, but no refreshment is expected save frugally-dispensed tea; and the fiddler is content to scrape for a modest fee and his chances of small coins from the dancers. Dark Hugh M‘Evoy, being Barney’s cousin, was willing to supply the music for this occasion on specially easy terms; and, in short, circumstances conspired to make it seem desirable that Barney should meet the often-expressed wish of his younger friends by announcing the first Surree of the season.
It would be Bridget’s first taste of any formal dissipation, and Rose Casey, her master’s niece, and Kate Duffy, his ploughman’s daughter, who lived in the yard, set her expectation on tiptoe extremely by their accounts of like entertainments. Kate and she were to go together, as it is the custom to attend Surrees in couples. These often are formed of a colleen with the boy who is “spakin’” to her, but often also a brother and sister make a pair, or any other two friends. Rose Casey was to marry Peter O’Donoghue at Shrovetide, so she would, of course, go with him—a fact of which she made a little parade to Bridget, who felt, however, perfectly content with Kate’s escort: a sweetheart of her own would have seemed, indeed, an alarming possession. Her mistress had advanced her a shilling out of her quarter’s wages—a whole pound—and she had expended the sixpence left after securing her admission to the Surree upon a splendid red glass brooch, which made her think her equipment very complete.
But just when everything seemed gliding most smoothly towards the delightful goal, an obstacle suddenly cropped up and threatened to overthrow all her plans with one disastrous jolt. On a certain frost-spangled morning the postman brought to Bridget a letter, whose contents agreed with her wishes as ill as a dash of vinegar would have done with the thick cream which she was churning when the mail arrived. Her grandmother wrote to say that “she thought bad of Biddy to be trampin’ the long way her lone from Killymeen to their place, and that old Bill Molloy was slippin’ over wid his pony and a gatherin’ of eggs to the Magamore on next Thursday morning, and’d give her a lift if she’d start along wid him when he would be goin’ back. So Biddy had a right to ax lave of her mistress, and come home wid ould Bill, who’d turn a bit out of his way to pick her up? and real glad they’d be to set eyes on her again.” For Mrs Casey had promised Biddy her choice of three days in Christmas week to spend at home, dairy work being slack. Bridget had looked forward to the holiday with a glow of pleasure, and meant to take it on the Friday, which would be Christmas Eve, and the day after the Surree. But her grandmother’s injunction was not compatible with this arrangement.
“Sure I’d miss all the fun and everythin’ if I took off and went wid ould Bill—I wish he and his baste of an ugly skewbald ’d keep themselves out of botherin’ where they arn’t wanted,” she said, half-crying, to her friends Rose and Kate, as she showed them the letter in the kitchen.
“Musha, good gracious,” said Rose, “you wouldn’t ever think of goin’? Just bid the ould man step along wid himself, and say you’ll come on Friday.”
“But me grandmother’d be rale vexed if I done that, and he after goin’ out of his road to call for me,” said Bridget doubtfully.
“Well, then,” said Kate, “you might write and tell her not to send him. This is only Tuesday; there’s plenty of time yet, and I’ve a stamp in me box this long while you’re welcome to.”
“Ay, to be sure,” said Rose, “and say me aunt can’t spare you convanient afore Friday.”
“But,” said Bridget, looking disconcerted, “I’m after sendin’ her word be Judy Flynn that I’d got lave to come any day at all this week.”
“Oh, botheration to it,” said Rose. “Then say you’re too bad with a cowld, and couldn’t be thravellin’ that far. Bedad, I heard you coughin’ this mornin’ fit to fall in pieces like the head of the witherdy geranium there. Morebetoken, the red one in the windy corner’s dhroppin’ itself into the pan of buttermilk where you’ve set it; you’d better be movin’ it out of that.”
“I have a heavy cowld on me sure enough,” said Bridget, coughing to convince herself, but her disconcerted expression remained, and she fidgetted about uneasily. “For the matter of writin’,” she said, “you see the time I was gettin’ me schoolin’ I did be mostly mindin’ the sheep, and I can make some sort of an offer at the readin’ if it’s wrote pretty big, but writin’ oneself is quare nigglety work.”
“Mercy on us, girl alive, if that’s all that ails you, I’ll write a letter for you meself in a minyit and a half,” said Rose with alacrity. “Bedad will I. Sure I’ve wrote to Peter times and again when he was stoppin’ away at Manchester. So don’t bother your head about it; lave the regulation of it to me. I’ve plenty of paper meself, and Kate’ll give me her stamp.”
Bridget agreed to this plan, though not without some qualms of conscience, which made her refrain guiltily from inquiring about the details of its execution, thereby giving Rose a free hand, of which she availed herself without much scruple. She had an imaginative turn of mind, and a taste for fiction, so her story grew under her scratching pen until in the end she produced a letter purporting to come not from Bridget, but from herself, and describing Bridget’s indisposition as not a simple cold, but an attack of “plussery-newmoney.” This formidable complaint would hinder her from returning with Bill Molloy. “But she’ll come,” wrote Rose, “as soon as ever she’s able. And that won’t be before Friday anyway, if she overs it at all.” The last clause struck her as giving an effective completeness to the composition, and she read it over with a complacency which did not take into account how it might be spelled out in the bleak little hillside cabin off away at Loughdrumesk.
The evening of the Surree arrived in due course, and with it a flutter of snow, swirling on rough and unruly blasts. Silver-white threads and stitches had begun to embroider the purple folds of Slieve Glasarna before the mists descended muffling and blurring; and the paths crunched crisply under brogues, and made cold clutches at bare feet by the time that the neighbours were approaching Barney Mahon’s door. They remarked to one another that it was hardy weather, and added that they were apt to have it “sevare,” which is some degree worse than hardy. Few people, however, had been daunted into staying at home, and there was much shaking of powder flakes out of shawl-folds and off rough coat-sleeves at the entrance to Barney’s lustily flickering room.
When Rose and Kate and Bridget got there, which they did as soon as ever they could finish “readying up” after tea, most of the company had assembled, and dancing was about to begin. Rose’s temper was somewhat ruffled because Peter O’Donoghue had not kept his promise of coming to escort her. But his sisters now hastened to explain how he had been delayed by the sudden illness of their calf. “Howane’er the baste was comin’ round finely when they left,” they reported, and Peter would be after them in no time. So his _fiancée_ was appeased, and contented herself provisionally with Larry Sullivan for a partner. “Faix, now, it’s on’y an odd turn the rest of us boys gets wid you these times,” he said to her gallantly as the fiddler struck up. “Ne’er a chance we have at all, unless when the luck keeps him that’s luckier away.”
Do not suppose that the Surree danced jigs. Later on in the evening a couple might stand up and perform one while the others were recovering their breath; but at the outset it was a vigorous round dance that began to gyrate with a step which, though perhaps not recognised in any academy, kept time to Hugh’s music with much accuracy, and made light of the difficulties opposed by an uneven mud floor. The crockery on the dresser jingled merrily to the rhythmical beat of their feet; and each pair of bobbing heads that passed in front of it, might be seen to make an abrupt dip down and up again. This was caused by an unusually deep hollow which occurred in that part of the floor, and Barney Mahon, looking on with the elders from their circle round the hearth, observed it and said—“Begob, I must see to having that houle filled up before next time, or else somebody’ll be trippin’ up in it, and gettin’ a quare toss.”
The other spectators sat well content with their share of the entertainment. Pungently-puffing cutty pipes solaced the men, and the women kept their knitting-needles twinkling; in fact, they would almost as soon have left off breathing by way of rest and relaxation. For further amusement they had the affairs of the countryside to discuss, enlivened by an occasional anecdote or riddle. Dan Goligher had just propounded one of the latter which successfully puzzled everybody who had not heard it before—
_A brown lough Wid a white strand, Sorra the ship could sail around it, But I can hould it in my hand_;
and he was triumphantly explaining, “Sure a cup of tea,” when two people came bolting in at the door, which they forthwith began to secure behind them, as if they were shutting out some deadly peril. They said nothing, but their speechless hurry was more suggestive than words.
“Whethen now, Peter O’Donoghue and Ned Kinsella, what’s took you at all to be flouncin’ in on the people that a-way?” said Barney Mahon, somewhat affronted at their unceremonious entrance and dealings with his fastenings and furniture. “That’s a great ould slammin’ of the door you have—and what for would you be jammin’ the bench again it, unless you’re intendin’ the next body that comes thro’ it to be breakin’ his shins?”
“Troth, I on’y hope it may—and its neck too, between us and harm—if it’s offering to come in on us—I do so,” said Peter O’Donoghue, panting. He left his comrade to finish barricading the door, and pushed himself farther into the room, until several groups interposed between him and the dangerous point. “After us it may be this minyit of time,” he said. “Och, but that was the quare fright I got; the saints look down upon us this night!”
“It’s herself below at th’ ould gate there,” said Ned Kinsella, who was calmer than Peter, though evidently much alarmed. “And more-be-token it’s not inside she is this night, but sittin’ crouched up on the bank be the path, and the grab she made at Peter going by; ’deed, I thought he’d never get his coat-tail wrenched out of her ould hand.”