Irish Stories and Folklore

by Stephen Brennan

  Mr Casey opened his eyes, sighed and went on:

  —It was down in Arklow one day. We were down there at a meeting and after the meeting was over we had to make our way to the railway station through the crowd. Such booing and baaing, man, you never heard. They called us all the names in the world. Well there was one old lady, and a drunken old harridan she was surely, that paid all her attention to me. She kept dancing along beside me in the mud bawling and screaming into my face: Priest-hunter! The Paris funds! Mr Fox! Kitty O’Shea!

  —And what did you do, John? asked Mr Dedalus.

  —I let her bawl away, said Mr Casey. It was a cold day and to keep up my heart I had (saving your presence, ma’am) a quid of Tullamore in my mouth and sure I couldn’t say a word in any case because my mouth was full of tobacco juice.

  —Well, John?

  —Well. I let her bawl away, to her heart’s content, Kitty O’Shea and the rest of it till at last she called that lady a name that I won’t sully this Christmas board nor your ears, ma’am, nor my own lips by repeating.

  He paused. Mr Dedalus, lifting his head from the bone, asked:

  —And what did you do, John?

  —Do! said Mr Casey. She stuck her ugly old face up at me when she said it and I had my mouth full of tobacco juice. I bent down to her and Phth! says I to her like that.

  He turned aside and made the act of spitting.

  —Phth! says I to her like that, right into her eye.

  He clapped his hand to his eye and gave a hoarse scream of pain.

  —O Jesus, Mary and Joseph! says she. I’m blinded! I’m blinded and drownded!

  He stopped in a fit of coughing and laughter, repeating:

  —I’m blinded entirely.

  Mr Dedalus laughed loudly and lay back in his chair while uncle Charles swayed his head to and fro.

  Dante looked terribly angry and repeated while they laughed:

  —Very nice! Ha! Very nice!

  It was not nice about the spit in the woman’s eye.

  But what was the name the woman had called Kitty O’Shea that Mr Casey would not repeat? He thought of Mr Casey walking through the crowds of people and making speeches from a wagonette. That was what he had been in prison for and he remembered that one night Sergeant O’Neill had come to the house and had stood in the hall, talking in a low voice with his father and chewing nervously at the chinstrap of his cap. And that night Mr Casey had not gone to Dublin by train but a car had come to the door and he had heard his father say something about the Cabinteely road.

  He was for Ireland and Parnell and so was his father: and so was Dante too for one night at the band on the esplanade she had hit a gentleman on the head with her umbrella because he had taken off his hat when the band played God Save the Queen at the end.

  Mr Dedalus gave a snort of contempt.

  —Ah, John, he said. It is true for them. We are an unfortunate priest-ridden race and always were and always will be till the end of the chapter.

  Uncle Charles shook his head, saying:

  —A bad business! A bad business!

  Mr Dedalus repeated:

  —A priest-ridden Godforsaken race!

  He pointed to the portrait of his grandfather on the wall to his right.

  —Do you see that old chap up there, John? he said. He was a good Irishman when there was no money in the job. He was condemned to death as a whiteboy. But he had a saying about our clerical friends, that he would never let one of them put his two feet under his mahogany.

  Dante broke in angrily:

  —If we are a priest-ridden race we ought to be proud of it! They are the apple of God’s eye. Touch them not, says Christ, for they are the apple of My eye.

  —And can we not love our country then? asked Mr Casey. Are we not to follow the man that was born to lead us?

  —A traitor to his country! replied Dante. A traitor, an adulterer! The priests were right to abandon him. The priests were always the true friends of Ireland.

  —Were they, faith? said Mr Casey.

  He threw his fist on the table and, frowning angrily, protruded one finger after another.

  —Didn’t the bishops of Ireland betray us in the time of the union when Bishop Lanigan presented an address of loyalty to the Marquess Cornwallis? Didn’t the bishops and priests sell the aspirations of their country in 1829 in return for catholic emancipation? Didn’t they denounce the fenian movement from the pulpit and in the confession box? And didn’t they dishonour the ashes of Terence Bellew MacManus?

  His face was glowing with anger and Stephen felt the glow rise to his own cheek as the spoken words thrilled him. Mr Dedalus uttered a guffaw of coarse scorn.

  —O, by God, he cried, I forgot little old Paul Cullen! Another apple of God’s eye!

  Dante bent across the table and cried to Mr Casey:

  —Right! Right! They were always right! God and morality and religion come first.

  Mrs Dedalus, seeing her excitement, said to her:

  —Mrs Riordan, don’t excite yourself answering them.

  —God and religion before everything! Dante cried. God and religion before the world.

  Mr Casey raised his clenched fist and brought it down on the table with a crash.

  —Very well then, he shouted hoarsely, if it comes to that, no God for Ireland!

  —John! John! cried Mr Dedalus, seizing his guest by the coat sleeve.

  Dante stared across the table, her cheeks shaking. Mr Casey struggled up from his chair and bent across the table towards her, scraping the air from before his eyes with one hand as though he were tearing aside a cobweb.

  —No God for Ireland! he cried. We have had too much God In Ireland. Away with God!

  —Blasphemer! Devil! screamed Dante, starting to her feet and almost spitting in his face.

  Uncle Charles and Mr Dedalus pulled Mr Casey back into his chair again, talking to him from both sides reasonably. He stared before him out of his dark flaming eyes, repeating:

  —Away with God, I say!

  Dante shoved her chair violently aside and left the table, upsetting her napkin-ring which rolled slowly along the carpet and came to rest against the foot of an easy-chair. Mrs Dedalus rose quickly and followed her towards the door. At the door Dante turned round violently and shouted down the room, her cheeks flushed and quivering with rage:

  —Devil out of hell! We won! We crushed him to death! Fiend!

  The door slammed behind her.

  Mr Casey, freeing his arms from his holders, suddenly bowed his head on his hands with a sob of pain.

  —Poor Parnell! he cried loudly. My dead king!

  He sobbed loudly and bitterly.

  Stephen, raising his terror-stricken face, saw that his father’s eyes were full of tears.

  THE TINKER’S DOG

  BY EDITH SOMERVILLE AND MARTIN ROSS

  “Can’t you head ’em off, Patsey? Run, you fool! run, can’t you?”

  Sounds followed that suggested the intemperate use of Mr. Freddy Alexander’s pocket-handkerchief, but that were, in effect, produced by his struggle with a brand new hunting-horn. To this demonstration about as much attention was paid by the nine couple of buccaneers whom he was now exercising for the first time as might have been expected, and it was brought to abrupt conclusion by the sudden charge of two of them from the rear. Being coupled, they mowed his legs from under him as irresistibly as chain shot and being puppies, and of an imbecile friendliness they remained to lick his face and generally make merry over him as he struggled to his feet.

  By this time the leaders of the pack were well away up a ploughed field, over a fence and into a furze brake, from which their rejoicing yelps streamed back on the damp breeze. The Master of the Craffroe Hounds picked himself up, and sprinted up the hill after the Whip and Kennel Huntsman—a composite official recently promoted from the stable yard—in a way that showed that his failure in horn-blowing was not the fault of his lungs. His feet were held by the heavy soil, he tripped in t
he muddy ridges; none the less he and Patsey plunged together over the stony rampart of the field in time to see Negress and Lily springing through the furze in kangaroo leaps, while they uttered long squeals of ecstasy. The rest of the pack, with a confidence gained in many a successful riot, got to them as promptly as if six Whips were behind them, and the whole faction plunged into a little wood on the top of what was evidently a burning scent.

  “Was it a fox, Patsey?” said the Master excitedly.

  “I dunno, Master Freddy: it might be ’twas a hare,” returned Patsey, taking in a hurried reef in the strap that was responsible for the support of his trousers.

  Freddy was small and light, and four short years before had been a renowned hare in his school paper-chases: he went through the wood at a pace that gave Patsey and the puppies all they could do to keep with him, and dropped into a road just in time to see the pack streaming up a narrow lane near the end of the wood. At this point they were reinforced by a yellow dachshund who, with wildly flapping ears, and at that caricature of a gallop peculiar to his kind, joined himself to the hunters.

  “Glory be to Mercy!” exclaimed Patsey, “the misthress’s dog!”

  Almost simultaneously the pack precipitated themselves into a ruined cabin at the end of the lane; instantly from within arose an uproar of sounds—crashes of an ironmongery sort, yells of dogs, raucous human curses; then the ruin exuded hounds, hens and turkeys at every one of the gaps in its walls, and there issued from what had been the doorway a tall man with a red beard, armed with a large frying-pan, with which he rained blows on the fleeing Craffroe Pack. It must be admitted that the speed with which these abandoned their prey, whatever it was, suggested a very intimate acquaintance with the wrath of cooks and the perils of resistance.

  Before their lawful custodians had recovered from this spectacle, a tall lady in black was suddenly merged in the mêlée, alternately calling loudly and incongruously for “Bismarck,” and blowing shrill blasts on a whistle.

  “If the tinker laves a sthroke of the pan on the misthress’s dog, the Lord help him!” said Patsey, starting in pursuit of Lily, who, with tail tucked in and a wounded hind leg buckled up, was removing herself swiftly from the scene of action.

  Mrs. Alexander shoved her way into the cabin, through a filthy group of gabbling male and female tinkers, and found herself involved in a wreck of branches and ragged tarpaulin that had once formed a kind of tent, but was now strewn on the floor by the incursion and excursion of the chase. Earthquake throes were convulsing the tarpaulin; a tinker woman, full of zeal, dashed at it and flung it back, revealing, amongst other débris, an old wooden bedstead heaped with rags. On either side of one of its legs protruded the passion-fraught faces of the coupled hound-puppies, who, still linked together, had passed through the period of unavailing struggle into a state of paralyzed insanity of terror. Muffled squeals and tinny crashes told that conflict was still raging beneath the bed; the tinker women screamed abuse and complaint; and suddenly the dachshund’s long yellow nose, streaming with blood, worked its way out of the folds. His mistress snatched at his collar and dragged him forth, and at his heels followed an infuriated tom cat, which, with its tail as thick as a muff, went like a streak through the confusion, and was lost in the dark ruin of the chimney.

  Mrs. Alexander stayed for no explanations: she extricated herself from the tinker party, and, filled with a righteous wrath, went forth to look for her son. From a plantation three fields away came the asphyxiated bleats of the horn and the desolate bawls of Patsey Crimmeen. Mrs. Alexander decided that it was better for the present to leave the personnel of the Craffroe Hunt to their own devices.

  It was but three days before these occurrences that Mr. Freddy Alexander had stood on the platform of the Craffroe Station, with a throbbing heart, and a very dirty paper in his hand containing a list of eighteen names, that ranged alphabetically from “Batchellor” to “Warior.” At his elbow stood a small man with a large moustache, and the thinnest legs that were ever buttoned into gaiters, who was assuring him that to no other man in Ireland would he have sold those hounds at such a price; a statement that was probably unimpeachable.

  “The only reason I’m parting them is I’m giving up me drag, and selling me stock, and going into partnership with a veterinary surgeon in Rugby. You’ve some of the best blood in Ireland in those hounds.”

  “Is it blood?” chimed in an old man who was standing, slightly drunk, at Mr. Alexander’s other elbow. “The most of them hounds is by the Kerry Rapparee, and he was the last of the old Moynalty Baygles. Black dogs they were, with red eyes! Every one o’ them as big as a yearling calf, and they’d hunt anything that’d roar before them!” He steadied himself on the new Master’s arm. “I have them gethered in the ladies’ waiting-room, sir, the way ye’ll have no throuble. ’Twould be as good for ye to lave the muzzles on them till ye’ll be through the town.”

  Freddy Alexander cannot to this hour decide what was the worst incident of that homeward journey; on the whole, perhaps, the most serious was the escape of Governess, who subsequently ravaged the country for two days, and was at length captured in the act of killing Mrs. Alexander’s white Leghorn cock. For a young gentleman whose experience of hounds consisted in having learned at Cambridge to some slight and painful extent that if he rode too near them he got sworn at, the purchaser of the Kerry Rapparee’s descendants had undertaken no mean task.

  On the morning following on the first run of the Craffroe Hounds, Mrs. Alexander was sitting at her escritoire, making up her weekly accounts and entering in her poultry-book the untimely demise of the Leghorn cock. She was a lady of secret enthusiasms which sheltered themselves behind habits of the most businesslike severity. Her books were models of order, and as she neatly inscribed the Leghorn cock’s epitaph, “Killed by hounds,” she could not repress the compensating thought that she had never seen Freddy’s dark eyes and olive complexion look so well as when he had tried on his new pink coat.

  At this point she heard a step on the gravel outside; Bismarck uttered a bloodhound bay and got under the sofa. It was a sunny morning in late October, and the French window was open; outside it, ragged as a Russian poodle and nearly as black, stood the tinker who had the day before wielded the frying-pan with such effect.

  “Me lady,” began the tinker, “I ax yer ladyship’s pardon, but me little dog is dead.”

  “Well?” said Mrs. Alexander, fixing a gaze of clear grey rectitude upon him.

  “Me lady,” continued the tinker, reverentially but firmly, “’twas afther he was run by thim dogs yestherday, and ’twas your ladyship’s dog that finished him. He tore the throat out of him under the bed!” He pointed an accusing forefinger at Bismarck, whose lambent eyes of terror glowed from beneath the valance of the sofa.

  “Nonsense! I saw your dog; he was twice my dog’s size,” said Bismarck’s mistress decidedly, not, however, without a remembrance of the blood on Bismarck’s nose. She adored courage, and had always cherished a belief that Bismarck’s sharklike jaws implied the possession of latent ferocity.

  “Ah, but he was very wake, ma’am, afther he bein’ hunted,” urged the tinker. “I never slep’ a wink the whole night, but keepin’ sups o’ milk to him and all sorts. Ah, ma’am, ye wouldn’t like to be lookin’ at him!”

  The tinker was a very good-looking young man, almost apostolic in type, with a golden red aureole of hair and beard and candid blue eyes. These latter filled with tears as their owner continued:—

  “He was like a brother for me; sure he follied me from home. ’Twas he was dam wise! Sure at home all me mother’d say to him was, “Where’s the ducks, Captain?” an’ he wouldn’t lave wather nor boghole round the counthry but he’d have them walked and the ducks gethered. The pigs could be in their choice place, wherever they’d be he’d go around them. If ye’d tell him to put back the childhren from the fire, he’d ketch them by the sleeve and dhrag them.”

  The requiem ceased, and the tinker l
ooked grievingly into his hat.

  “What is your name?” asked Mrs. Alexander sternly. “How long is it since you left home?”

  Had the tinker been as well acquainted with her as he was afterwards destined to become, he would have been aware that when she was most judicial she was frequently least certain of what her verdict was going to be.

  “Me name’s Willy Fennessy, me lady,” replied the tinker, “an’ I’m goin’ the roads no more than three months. Indeed, me lady, I think the time too long that I’m with these blagyard thravellers. All the friends I have was poor Captain, and he’s gone from me.”

  “Go round to the kitchen,” said Mrs. Alexander.

  The results of Willy Fennessy’s going round to the kitchen were far-reaching. Its most immediate consequences were that (1) he mended the ventilator of the kitchen range; (2) he skinned a brace of rabbits for Miss Barnet, the cook; (3) he arranged to come next day and repair the clandestine devastations of the maids among the china.

  He was pronounced to be a very agreeable young man.

  Before luncheon (of which meal he partook in the kitchen) he had been consulted by Patsey Crimmeen about the chimney of the kennel boiler, had single-handed reduced it to submission, and had, in addition, boiled the meal for the hounds with a knowledge of proportion and an untiring devotion to the use of the potstick which produced “stirabout” of a smoothness and excellence that Miss Barnet herself might have been proud of.

  “You know, mother,” said Freddy that evening, “you do want another chap in the garden badly.”

  “Well it’s not so much the garden,” said Mrs. Alexander with alacrity, “but I think he might be very useful to you, dear, and it’s such a great matter his being a teetotaler, and he seems so fond of animals. I really feel we ought to try and make up to him somehow for the loss of his dog; though, indeed, a more deplorable object than that poor mangy dog I never saw!”

  “All right: we’ll put him in the back lodge, and we’ll give him Bizzy as a watch dog. Won’t we, Bizzy?” replied Freddy, dragging the somnolent Bismarck from out of the heart of the hearthrug, and accepting without repugnance the comprehensive lick that enveloped his chin.