Irish Stories and Folklore

by Stephen Brennan

  From which it may be gathered that Mrs. Alexander and her son had fallen, like their household, under the fatal spell of the fascinating tinker.

  At about the time that this conversation was taking place, Mr. Fennessy, having spent an evening of valedictory carouse with his tribe in the ruined cottage, was walking, somewhat unsteadily, towards the wood, dragging after him by a rope a large dog. He did not notice that he was being followed by a barefooted woman, but the dog did, and, being an intelligent dog, was in some degree reassured. In the wood the tinker spent some time in selecting a tree with a projecting branch suitable to his purpose, and having found one he proceeded to hang the dog. Even in his cups Mr. Fennessy made sentiment subservient to common sense.

  It is hardly too much to say that in a week the tinker had taken up a position in the Craffroe household only comparable to that of Ygdrasil, who in Norse mythology forms the ultimate support of all things. Save for the incessant demands upon his skill in the matter of solder and stitches, his recent tinkerhood was politely ignored, or treated as an escapade excusable in a youth of spirit. Had not his father owned a farm and seven cows in the county Limerick, and had not he himself three times returned the price of his ticket to America to a circle of adoring and wealthy relatives in Boston? His position in the kitchen and yard became speedily assured. Under his régime the hounds were valeted as they had never been before. Lily herself (newly washed, with “blue” in the water) was scarcely more white than the concrete floor of the kennel yard, and the puppies, Ruby and Remus, who had unaccountably developed a virulent form of mange, were immediately taken in hand by the all-accomplished tinker, and anointed with a mixture whose very noisomeness was to Patsey Crimmeen a sufficient guarantee of its efficacy, and was impressive even to the Master, fresh from much anxious study of veterinary lore.

  “He’s the best man we’ve got!” said Freddy proudly to a dubious uncle, “there isn’t a mortal thing he can’t put his hand to.”

  “Or lay his hands on,” suggested the dubious uncle. “May I ask if his colleagues are still within a mile of the place?”

  “Oh, he hates the very sight of ’em!” said Freddy hastily, “cuts ’em dead whenever he sees ’em.”

  “It’s no use your crabbing him, George,” broke in Mrs. Alexander, “we won’t give him up to you! Wait till you see how he has mended the lock of the hall door!”

  “I should recommend you to buy a new one at once,” said Sir George Ker, in a way that was singularly exasperating to the paragon’s proprietors.

  Mrs. Alexander was, or so her friends said, somewhat given to vaunting herself of her paragons, under which heading, it may be admitted, practically all her household were included. She was, indeed, one of those persons who may or may not be heroes to their valets, but whose valets are almost invariably heroes to them. It was, therefore, excessively discomposing to her that, during the following week, in the very height of apparently cloudless domestic tranquility, the housemaid and the parlor-maid should in one black hour successively demand an audience, and successively, in the floods of tears proper to such occasions, give warning. Inquiry as to their reasons was fruitless. They were unhappy: one said she wouldn’t get her appetite, and that her mother was sick; the other said she wouldn’t get her sleep in it, and there was things—sob—going on—sob.

  Mrs. Alexander concluded the interview abruptly, and descended to the kitchen to interview her queen paragon, Barnet, on the crisis.

  Miss Barnet was a stout and comely English lady, of that liberal forty that frankly admits itself in advertisements to be twenty-eight. It was understood that she had only accepted office in Ireland because, in the first place, the butler to whom she had long been affianced had married another, and because, in the second place, she had a brother buried in Belfast. She was, perhaps, the one person in the world whose opinion about poultry Mrs. Alexander ranked higher than her own. She now allowed a restrained acidity to mingle with her dignity of manner, scarcely more than the calculated lemon essence in her faultless castle puddings, but enough to indicate that she, too, had grievances. She didn’t know why they were leaving. She had heard some talk about a fairy or something, but she didn’t hold with such nonsense.

  “Gerrls is very frightful!” broke in an unexpected voice; “owld standards like meself maybe wouldn’t feel it!”

  A large basket of linen had suddenly blocked the scullery door, and from beneath it a little woman, like an Australian aborigine, delivered herself of this dark saying.

  “What are you talking about, Mrs. Griffen?” demanded Mrs. Alexander, turning in vexed bewilderment to her laundress, “what does all this mean?”

  “The Lord save us, ma’am, there’s some says it means a death in the house!” replied Mrs. Griffen with unabated cheerfulness, “an’ indeed ’twas no blame for the little gerrls to be frightened an’ they meetin’ it in the passages—”

  “Meeting what?” interrupted her mistress. Mrs. Griffen was an old and privileged retainer, but there were limits even for Mrs. Griffen.

  “Sure, ma’am, there’s no one knows what was in it,” returned Mrs. Griffen, “but whatever it was they heard it goin’ on before them always in the panthry passage, an’ it walkin’ as sthrong as a man. It whipped away up the stairs, and they seen the big snout snorting out at them through the banisters, and a bare back on it the same as a pig; and the two cheeks on it as white as yer own, and away with it! And with that Mary Anne got a wakeness, and only for Willy Fennessy bein’ in the kitchen an’ ketching a hold of her, she’d have cracked her head on the range, the crayture!”

  Here Barnet smiled with ineffable contempt.

  “What I’m tellin’ them is,” continued Mrs. Griffen, warming with her subject, “maybe that thing was a pairson that’s dead, an’ might be owin’ a pound to another one, or has something that way on his soul, an’ it’s in the want o’ some one that’ll ax it what’s throublin’ it. The like o’ thim couldn’t spake till ye’ll spake to thim first. But, sure, gerrls has no courage—”

  Barnet’s smile was again one of wintry superiority.

  “Willy Fennessy and Patsey Crimmeen was afther seein’ it too last night,” went on Mrs. Griffen, “an’ poor Willy was as much frightened! He said surely ’twas a ghost. On the back avenue it was, an’ one minute ’twas as big as an ass, an’ another minute it’d be no bigger than a bonnive—”

  “Oh, the Lord save us!” wailed the kitchen-maid irrepressibly from the scullery.

  “I shall speak to Fennessy myself about this,” said Mrs. Alexander, making for the door with concentrated purpose, “and in the meantime I wish to hear no more of this rubbish.”

  “I’m sure Fennessy wishes to hear no more of it,” said Barnet acridly to Mrs. Griffen, when Mrs. Alexander had passed swiftly out of hearing, “after the way those girls have been worryin’ on at him about it all the morning. Such a set out!”

  Mrs. Griffen groaned in a polite and general way, and behind Barnet’s back put her tongue out of the corner of her mouth and winked at the kitchen-maid.

  Mrs. Alexander found her conversation with Willy Fennessy less satisfactory than usual. He could not give any definite account of what he and Patsey had seen: maybe they’d seen nothing at all; maybe—as an obvious impromptu—it was the calf of the Kerry cow; whatever was in it, it was little he’d mind it, and, in easy dismissal of the subject, would the misthress be against his building a bit of a coal-shed at the back of the lodge while she was away?

  That evening a new terror was added to the situation. Jimmy the boot-boy, on his return from taking the letters to the evening post, fled in panic into the kitchen, and having complied with the etiquette invariable in such cases by having “a wakeness,” he described to a deeply sympathetic audience how he had seen something that was like a woman in the avenue, and he had called to it and it returned him no answer, and how he had then asked it three times in the name o’ God what was it, and it soaked away into the trees from him, and then there ca
me something rushing in on him and grunting at him to bite him, and he was full sure it was the Fairy Pig from Lough Clure.

  Day by day the legend grew, thickened by tales of lights that had been seen moving mysteriously in the woods of Craffroe. Even the hounds were subpœnaed as witnesses; Patsey Crimmeen’s mother stating that for three nights after Patsey had seen that Thing they were singing and screeching to each other all night.

  Had Mrs. Crimmeen used the verb scratch instead of screech she would have been nearer the mark. The puppies, Ruby and Remus, had, after the manner of the young, human and canine, not failed to distribute their malady among their elders, and the pack, straitly coupled, went for dismal constitutionals, and the kennels reeked to heaven of remedies, and Freddy’s new hunter, Mayboy, from shortness of work, smashed the partition of the loose box and kicked his neighbor, Mrs. Alexander’s cob, in the knee.

  “The worst of it is,” said Freddy confidentially to his ally and adviser, the junior subaltern of the detachment at Enniscar, who had come over to see the hounds, “that I’m afraid Patsey Crimmeen—the boy whom I’m training to whip to me, you know”—(as a matter of fact, the Whip was a year older than the Master)—“is beginning to drink a bit. When I came down here before breakfast this mornin”’—when Freddy was feeling more acutely than usual his position as an M.F.H., he cut his g’s and talked slightly through his nose, even, on occasion, going so far as to omit the aspirate in talking of his hounds—“there wasn’t a sign of him—kennel door not open or anything. I let the poor brutes out into the run. I tell you, what with the paraffin and the carbolic and everything the kennel was pretty high—”

  “It’s pretty thick now,” said his friend, lighting a cigarette.

  “Well, I went into the boiler-house,” continued Freddy impressively, “and there he was, asleep on the floor, with his beastly head on my kennel coat, and one leg in the feeding trough!”

  Mr. Taylour made a suitable ejaculation.

  “I jolly soon kicked him on to his legs,” went on Freddy, “not that they were much use to him—he must have been on the booze all night. After that I went on to the stable yard, and if you’ll believe me, the two chaps there had never turned up at all—at half-past eight, mind you!—and there was Fennessy doing up the horses. He said he believed that there’d been a wake down at Enniscar last night. I thought it was rather decent of him doing their work for them.”

  “You’ll sack ’em, I suppose?” remarked Mr. Taylour, with martial severity.

  “Oh well, I don’t know,” said Mr. Alexander evasively, “I’ll see. Anyhow, don’t say anything to my mother about it; a drunken man is like a red rag to a bull to her.”

  Taking this peculiarity of Mrs. Alexander into consideration, it was perhaps as well that she left Craffroe a few days afterwards to stay with her brother. The evening before she left both the Fairy Pig and the Ghost Woman were seen again on the avenue, this time by the coachman, who came into the kitchen considerably the worse for liquor and announced the fact, and that night the household duties were performed by the maids in pairs, and even, when possible, in trios.

  As Mrs. Alexander said at dinner to Sir George, on the evening of her arrival, she was thankful to have abandoned the office of Ghostly Comforter to her domestics. Only for Barnet she couldn’t have left poor Freddy to the mercy of that pack of fools; in fact, even with Barnet to look after them, it was impossible to tell what imbecility they were not capable of.

  “Well, if you like,” said Sir George, “I might run you over there on the motor car some day to see how they’re all getting on. If Freddy is going to hunt on Friday, we might go on to Craffroe after seeing the fun.”

  The topic of Barnet was here shelved in favor of automobiles. Mrs. Alexander’s brother was also a person of enthusiasms.

  But what were these enthusiasms compared to the deep-seated ecstasy of Freddy Alexander as in his new pink coat he rode down the main street of Enniscar, Patsey in equal splendor bringing up the rear, unspeakably conscious of the jibes of his relatives and friends. There was a select field, consisting of Mr. Taylour, four farmers, some young ladies on bicycles, and about two dozen young men and boys on foot, who, in order to be prepared for all contingencies, had provided themselves with five dogs, two horns, and a ferret. It is, after all, impossible to please everybody, and from the cyclists’ and foot people’s point of view the weather left nothing to be desired. The sun shone like a glistering shield in the light blue November sky, the roads were like iron, the wind, what there was of it, like steel. There was a line of white on the northerly side of the fences, that yielded grudgingly and inch by inch before the march of the pale sunshine: the new pack could hardly have had a more unfavorable day for their début.

  The new Master was, however, wholly undaunted by such crumples in the rose-leaf. He was riding Mayboy, a big trustworthy horse, whose love of jumping had survived a month of incessant and arbitrary schooling, and he left the road as soon as was decently possible, and made a line across country for the covert that involved as much jumping as could reasonably be hoped for in half a mile. At the second fence Patsey Crimmeen’s black mare put her nose in the air and swung round; Patsey’s hands seemed to be at their worst this morning, and what their worst felt like the black mare alone knew. Mr. Taylour, as Deputy Whip, waltzed erratically round the nine couple on a very flippant polo pony; and the four farmers, who had wisely adhered to the road, reached the covert sufficiently in advance of the hunt to frustrate Lily’s project of running sheep in a neighboring field.

  The covert was a large, circular enclosure, crammed to the very top of its girdling bank with furze-bushes, bracken, low hazel, and stunted Scotch firs. Its primary idea was woodcock, its second rabbits; beaters were in the habit of getting through it somehow, but a ride feasible for fox hunters had never so much as occurred to it. Into this, with practical assistance from the country boys, the deeply reluctant hounds were pitched and flogged; Freddy very nervously uplifted his voice in falsetto encouragement, feeling much as if he were starting the solo of an anthem; and Mr. Taylour and Patsey, the latter having made it up with the black mare, galloped away with professional ardor to watch different sides of the covert. This, during the next hour, they had ample opportunities for doing. After the first outburst of joy from the hounds on discovering that there were rabbits in the covert, and after the retirement of the rabbits to their burrows on the companion discovery that there were hounds in it, a silence, broken only by the far-away prattle of the lady bicyclists on the road, fell round Freddy Alexander. He bore it as long as he could, cheering with faltering whoops the invisible and unresponsive pack, and wondering what on earth huntsmen were expected to do on such occasions; then, filled with that horrid conviction which assails the lonely watcher, that the hounds have slipped away at the far side, he put spurs to Mayboy, and cantered down the long flank of the covert to find some one or something. Nothing had happened on the north side, at all events, for there was the faithful Taylour, pirouetting on his hill-top in the eye of the wind. Two fields more (in one of which he caught his first sight of any of the hounds, in the shape of Ruby, carefully rolling on a dead crow), and then, under the lee of a high bank, he came upon Patsey Crimmeen, the farmers, and the country boys, absorbed in the contemplation of a fight between Tiger, the butcher’s brindled cur, and Watty, the kennel terrier.

  The manner in which Mr. Alexander dispersed this entertainment showed that he was already equipped with one important qualification of a Master of Hounds—a temper laid on like gas, ready to blaze at a moment’s notice. He pitched himself off his horse and scrambled over the bank into the covert in search of his hounds. He pushed his way through briars and furze-bushes, and suddenly, near the middle of the wood, he caught sight of them. They were in a small group, they were very quiet and very busy. As a matter of fact they were engaged in eating a dead sheep.

  After this episode, there ensued a long and disconsolate period of wandering from one bleak hillside to
another, at the bidding of various informants, in search of apocryphal foxes, slaughterers of flocks of equally apocryphal geese and turkeys—such a day as is discreetly ignored in all hunting annals, and, like the easterly wind that is its parent, is neither good for man nor beast.

  By half-past three hope had died, even in the sanguine bosoms of the Master and Mr. Taylour. Two of the farmers had disappeared, and the lady bicyclists, with faces lavender blue from waiting at various windy cross roads, had long since fled away to lunch. Two of the hounds were limping; all, judging by their expressions, were on the verge of tears. Patsey’s black mare had lost two shoes; Mr. Taylour’s pony had ceased to pull, and was too dispirited even to try to kick the hounds, and the country boys had dwindled to four. There had come a time when Mr. Taylour had sunk so low as to suggest that a drag should be run with the assistance of the ferret’s bag, a scheme only frustrated by the regrettable fact that the ferret and its owner had gone home.

  “Well we had a nice bit of schooling, anyhow, and, it’s been a real educational day for the hounds,” said Freddy, turning in his saddle to look at the fires of the frosty sunset. “I’m glad they had it. I think we’re in for a go of hard weather. I don’t know what I should have done only for you, old chap. Patsey’s gone all to pieces: it’s my belief he’s been on the drink this whole week, and where he gets it—”

  “Hullo! Hold hard!” interrupted Mr. Taylour. “What’s Governor after?”

  They were riding along a grass-grown farm road outside the Craffroe demesne; the grey wall made a sharp bend to the right, and just at the corner Governor had begun to gallop, with his nose to the ground and his stern up. The rest of the pack joined him in an instant, and all swung round the corner and were lost to sight.

  “It’s a fox!” exclaimed Freddy, snatching up his reins; “they always cross into the demesne just here!”