V
They went up the path between the berry bushes, but I stayed where I was, my hand on the wooden gate. After a time I closed it from the outside, and moved down the wall to where a wide plank made a bench across two cut stones. There I sat down and looked into the valley of the Ullachowen, faintly pearl in the summer night, with the moon making silver gleams on the long runs between the pools; and all the great hills stood up black and stark below the moon. The dance music coming from the house only touched the surface of the quiet, and a land-rail craking in the meadow was part of it.
This episode was over now. Snapped clean across, not to be resumed in this world or the next. I would not see Margaid MacDonald again. Better so. Her coming and her staying and her going were only small incidents in the terrible Black-and-Tan war—and that war was only an incident in itself, and now done with. In a year, or ten years, or twenty years, life, damn it—life would go on as usual. That was life’s way . . . I would go back to New Mexico—I would take Big Paudh Moran along—and there I would ride a horse, and mend broken collarbones, and go deer-shooting with Sandy Maclaren and Mose Lynn, and fishing with Art O’Connor, but—but I would never rear sons to carry on . . . And even of that I could not be sure . . . And at the end no trumpets would sound for me at the other side.
A shadow on the ground roused me out of that deep muse. Margaid MacDonald stood looking down at me. I rose slowly to my feet, and was sorry that she had come.
“Hugh Forbes sent me out to say good-by,” she said in her low voice.
“Good-by, Miss MacDonald.” My hand dare not move to her. “I am sorry I insulted you.”
She was close to me, looking up into my eyes, and did not say a word for a long time; and in the wan light of the moon her face was heart-stabbingly fragile, delicate—lovely.
“Why did you hold me—kiss me—like that?”
A question put simply, and simply answered. But why? What was the use in baring me? Anger leaped in me again.
“No!” I stressed. “I am not sorry. I’m damned if I am! I would do it again—this minute. Woman! can’t you see—can you not see what you have done to me?”
She turned away from me and sat on the bench—quickly, just as if her knees had suddenly weakened. I glowered down at her.
“Sit down here,” she said gently, and touched the bench at her side.
Again, what was the use? She was kind, kind of heart behind all, and would seek to lighten my offense at this end. Well! we might as well get it over. I sat down glumly. And she sat very still, gazing out across the valley and the hills and the whole small wide world, her head up—poised in a pride greater than the pride of kings.
“I should have known back there.” There was no sympathy for my hurt in her voice, that carried pride too. “When you warned me—with that man. And you know, though I was cursing like a trooper under my breath, it was rather pleasant to be carried in a man’s arms. Awful, wasn’t it?”
“Hellish!” said I.
“I wonder! Do you care very much?”
“Not so much,” said I angrily. “I’ll get over it in a day or two—or twenty years.”
“Was that why you were like a bear with a sore head for a whole month?”
“You bit off a few noses yourself.”
“Queer, wasn’t it? And you couldn’t reason from cause to effect?”
Paddy Bawn’s voice lifted from the kitchen door. “Miss MacDonald—Miss MacDonald!”
“In a minute, Paddy Bawn,” she called back.
“The pony trap is waiting to take you to Castletown,” I reminded her.
“The trap is down,” she said calmly, “and you and I are inside. I am not going.”
“No?”
“No. Listen, you poor stubborn simpleton.” She laid her two fine hands on my shoulders and drew my head closer. “Let me whisper in your ear.”
That whisper is a secret of my own.
In about a minute Hugh Forbes came out and found us sitting there.
“My poor craythurs!” said he pityingly.
“Thank you, Hugh,” said Margaid.
“Thanks, say you? And botheration, I says! I waited five minutes in there, all on tenterhooks; I waited ten and up and had a drink to myself; I waited twenty and then cursed the pair of you high up and low down—and I off and sent Paddy Bawn into Castletown to tell Archie you were safe here. And is it thanking me you were? And look at me with the stony wet road to Scotland still in front o’ me, and, maybe, no red-haired woman at the end of it.”
“You’ll find her,” promised Margaid.
“You can’t be lucky always,” said I.
“He is just hungry for his supper, Hugh,” said Margaid.
And that is my story.
PART TWO
Over the Border
“Over the Border, might he ride there tomorrow,
Over the Border, for surcease of sorrow,
Yet hides he here grim within his own Border,
With drink to woo sleep and drown Love’s disorder.”
Chapter I
I
IT might be that I would not have visited Sean Glynn at all but for the east wind that buffeted me day after day down the length of Edinburgh’s Princes Street. My Highland blood had been thinned by three years in the tropics, and that keen breeze off the German ocean kept searching me through and through until, Christmas still a week ahead, I decided I had had enough of it and to spare.
Moreover, I was lonely in Edinburgh. My only sister, Margaid, was married to Doctor Owen Jordan, at a place called Alamagordo in New Mexico, I don’t know how many thousand miles away; and the salmon angling season would not start for another six weeks. I had had a letter from Margaid that week. After four pages detailing the activities of a two-year-old son with the appalling name of Patrick Archibald Jordan, and the ignominious failure of her husband and Big Paudh Moran to hit a sitting deer—“Jasus, ma’am! he was like the side of a house an’ horns on him like a holly bush”—she finished as follows:
“Do you never hear from Sean Glynn of Leaccabuie—you haven’t mentioned him in your letters for ages? Owen is a bit anxious about him. Hugh Forbes in a noncommittal way merely writes that ‘the lad is sound in health and making money by the farm’—as if that was all that mattered—and Mickeen Oge Flynn hasn’t written since he escaped from the internment camp. Has Sean married that lovely girl Joan Hyland, or did that bad Kierley business come between them? Don’t forget to answer all my questions. You generally do forget, and you generally will until you get a wife to do your letter writing for you—as I do Owen’s. What about it? You know, Owen has written his account of the way I came to take pity on him. I shall send you a copy as soon as I get round to type it. Such vanity! . . . By the way, Art O’Connor, Owen’s partner, is visiting the old country next year, and you may run across him—he is a fisherman too, and that peculiar type, the Americanized Irishman, who makes fun of the Celtic twilight—and needs a lesson. . . .”
A wife! To the devil with a wife! Why must women be always at the marrying? But presently I found myself thinking that southern Ireland was not such a bad place in winter—good cock and snipe shooting—salubrious—palms down to the sea and all that! Mightn’t be such a bad idea, after all; and I could be back in time to try the Red Craig pool on the Findhorn.
So I wired Sean Glynn after the manner of the very close friendship that existed—or had existed between us:
WOULD LIKE TO SPEND XMAS IN MUNSTER. GET
SOME ONE TO ASK ME.
ARCHIBALD MAC DONALD.
And his laconic reply:
YOU ARE ASKED TO LEACCABUIE. COME RIGHT
OVER.
SEAN GLYNN.
I did not like that laconic wire. For the Sean that I had known so well would have spread himself even on a telegraph form. Damned me for an Albannach, deplored the shortage of turkeys and good malt whisky, warned me to bring my own cartridges—number eight for cock; advised me how to cheat the Customs—and decid
ed to meet me in Dublin for a night’s jollification.
Still, I went right over, and I know now that it was not a bad thing that I did. But I might have hesitated had I been aware of the weariness of the train journey that lay between me and Leaccabuie. True, I had been over that road once before, but that was in a troop train during the Black-and-Tan war, and there had then been enough risk to keep me interested. Accustomed to the sea, I thought little of the run from Glasgow to Dublin; merely went to bed after striking the swell of the Clyde estuary and woke up next morning in a kicking sea off the Bailly lighthouse outside Dublin Bay. Nor was the rail journey from Dublin to Ballagh Junction particularly wearisome; the train was steam-heated, a Pullman car attached, and there were not more than three stops. But after changing to the local line at Ballagh the journey seemed without purpose or end.
Outside the windows there was nothing in the winter landscape to hold the eye across the gray-green fields that curved and folded to a dim and rainy horizon; and the short winter day was already falling into night before the hills of the southwest began to roll in on either hand. All that I could see was that there was more than a sprinkling of snow on the bald heads of them. There was a station every three or four miles—and the miles strung themselves out to nearly three figures—and at every station the train halted and dallied and did a little clamorous shunting. As far as I cared to notice, scarcely a passenger got on or alighted, yet the train was met at every station by quite a number of people: young men slouching under the dim oil lamps, pairs and trios of girls strolling waist-clasped up the line of carriages and looking in—not peeping—with level and appraising glances. Very cool and calm, and pretty girls, most of them were, smiling rarely; and the slouching young men under the lamps took absolutely no notice of them.
I was not aware of much salubrity within the first-class carriage supposed to be heated by a flat lukewarm foot warmer, but luckily I had a whole compartment to myself, a furlined coat and a couple of rugs, so that I was able to recline at full length, smoke strong tobacco, and take speculative stock of things. And I thought mostly of Sean Glynn, for, let the truth be told, I was disturbed in my mind about him, and I knew that, sooner or later, I was bound to seek him out and see for myself.
II
Sean Glynn was the best friend I ever had—and is, though I have many splendid friends—yet I had not had a line from him for something like two years. Sean had spent his youth in Scotland, and he and I had gone through Dollar and Edinburgh Varsity together; we had camped and fished and shot—with a little poaching on the side—all over the wide province of Moray; and both being of Gaelic stock we came to know the contour of each other’s mind. Then I had taken up soldiering as a profession and gone to war; and Sean, on the death of his father, had given up free lance journalism and returned to his native Ireland, and to farming on a fairly extensive scale. And then he, too, had gone out to fight for an ideal of freedom: not for Britain, but against all that England stood for in Ireland.
After the Great War my regiment had been sent to Munster to help the Black-and-Tan police subdue the Sinn Fein I.R.A.—a wholly-rotten job, rottenly planned, rottenly conducted and rotten in ideal, and every honest soldier felt rotten about it. By a coincidence, not too strange, my company of Seaforth Highlanders had been sent into Sean Glynn’s territory, and there we had resumed the old acquaintanceship. Outwardly a peaceful farmer with business in every market town, he was at that time one of the principal intelligence officers of the I.R.A. in the south, but I was not supposed to know that. I had no evidence, of course, but, knowing Sean Glynn, I knew that he would be in the thick of things. . . . I will say nothing here of how my devotion to angling led to my capture by the great Hugh Forbes’s Flying Column, and the lively two months that ensued for Margaid and me before the truce set us free—she to marry Owen Jordan, I to go to India with my regiment.
The last time I had seen Sean Glynn was at Castletown railway station, where he had come to say good-by. There was a gloom on him that day, there had been a gloom on him for many days, and, by way of lightening the atmosphere, I leaned from the carriage window and said:
“You’ll be a staid old Benedict next time I come over—what?”
“Oh! to hell with women!” He laughed sourly.
And I had agreed with him most heartily, though I was surprised at his explosion, for he was as good as engaged to marry Joan Hyland, a pretty neighbor of his.
And then had come the brief inquiry into the particularly bad Kierley scandal. There were horses and wine and song and women, and apparently a good deal of tainted British cash in that affair, for the Irish make a thorough job of scandal and treachery when they take a hand in these things. Sean Glynn was in it and deeply in. There was evidence that Nuala Kierley and he had stayed in the Rowton Hotel in Dublin one night, and next day had gone down to Sean’s farm at Leaccabuie, where the woman had stayed a week—I saw her myself at Lough Aonach Hotel by the half-light of a peat fire, and my blood had stirred in me. And at the end of that week her husband, Martin Kierley, was found drowned in the Red Girl’s pool at Lough Aonach. The subsequent inquiry emphasized the scandal rather than anything else, for neither the English nor the Irish authorities wanted to show their hands in the affair. Anyhow, the inquiry had been stopped short, and no action taken.
I had been at our depot at Fort George at the time, preparing for India, and I wrote Sean a note of congratulation or commiseration; and after a longer time than usual had a brief acknowledgment:
Thanks for your congratulations. They are not quite deserved—and you seem to know that, you old bloodhound. You are right, my son! I am done with women—every last one of them. The Glynn is a dying breed, anyhow. I had five uncles, yet I am the last of the Glynns. But I will take my own way of dying—God and the devil willing—a long time hence, and I will not let any woman kill me either, by God!
And that was the letter of the man who had been engaged to marry young Joan Hyland when Ireland’s fight had been won.
It was the last letter I had received from him. I had gone out to India, and, though I had written him at least three times, I had never drawn a word in reply.
And, now, I was coming to Leaccabuie to see with my own eyes what was wrong, and that something was wrong I was certain. I had only two facts to work on—the Kierley affair and Sean’s break with Joan Hyland, and these might be inextricably mixed together—but, whatever the facts, something had befallen him that changed his humorously sane outlook on life, made him cast aside love, ignore every friendship, set his feet on a new strange and dangerous road. If necessary I would walk with him on that road, for a man has to do anything he can to help a friend . . . and if I could do no good I hoped to do no harm. . . .
So I mused as the jolting little train moved staccato-wise into the heart of the high hills.
III
The guard popped his head in at the door.
“Leacca, the station after this, sir.”
“Thank the Lord!”
“To be sure—to be sure,” he agreed pleasantly, and banged the door as if in desperate hurry to start his train. And then I heard his voice addressing the station-master. “An’ what he’ll find at Leacca to thank himself for bates me.” The two receded, chuckling, and in another five minutes we resumed our journey.
Sean Glynn was not at Leacca station to meet me, though I had wired my train from Dublin; and that small neglect hurt in spite of all my reasonings on the way. I stepped out on the dimly lit flagged platform, and peered up and down, and as far as I could judge there was no one there to meet me. I felt a twinge of forlornness then. For that small dimly lit station was no more than a halting-place in the wilderness, and in the darkness all round was no sign or loom of habitation. Yet out of that darkness folks had come like moths to the light. Three or four men slouched carelessly about the arched station entrance below an oil lamp, and two girls, arm-fasted, walked by and examined me with cool remoteness.
I tucked my rugs under an
arm and walked back towards the guard’s van, and the men at the entrance watched me as I approached. Perhaps it was some kinship of race that made an inner sense aware that they did not regard me as a mere chance traveler, that they were interested in me, that they were aware of my identity and destination. But I was not perturbed, for I had been long enough in the south to know the breed. And, somehow, that sense of awareness lifted me out of the little slough of forlornness.
As I came abreast of the group a man pushed his way unceremoniously through and lifted hand in a half military salute—a middle-sized man in riding-breeches and leggings, with good shoulders under rough tweed.
“Major MacDonald?”
“Yes.” I halted, facing him.
“I have the car outside, Major. Sean Glynn sent me in to meet you.”
“Why, you are Paddy Bawn Enright?”
“I am, sir.”
We shook hands warmly.
I knew him at once—his deep-set blue eyes under heavy brows, and the set, queerly immobile face of the fighting man. He had been one of Hugh Forbes’s Flying Column, and one of the best; and his friends used to call him, half derisively, half affectionately, “the quiet man”: because, after a dozen hectic years as a prize-fighter in the States, he had returned home to look for a quiet place to settle down in—and had not found it. Had he found it yet?
“And how is Sean?” I did not emphasize the inquiry.
“Good, sir! Fine—just fine! One minute, if you please, and I’ll get the baggage.”
He turned and went off quickly, a wiry, active man with one shoulder hunching a little. And while I waited I smiled to myself. Oh, yes! I knew the breed. Paddy Bawn, sent to meet me, had stood behind the group at the entrance and watched me walk down the platform, reestablishing the mind-picture he had of me, finding out for himself if the years had changed me. Perhaps the years had. And another thing, when he informed me that Sean Glynn was good and fine, he also told me, by some subtlety of mind acting on speech, that my friend was neither one nor the other.
The Quiet Man and Other Stories Page 8