III
Let it be said now, sadly or in pride, that I am not a drinking man. Yet I did not go to bed sober that night. But I was more sober than Sean Glynn, thanks not to a hard Scots head, but to the fact that Sean had many more drinks than I had. And drunk—plain drunk—as Sean was, he never lost his power of speech and clear thinking. He sat deep in his chair, and his speech came slower and slower—the only sign of effort—and with a marvelous concentration of will he twisted through all subtleties to a reasoned conclusion, and pursued speculation to the brim of fancy; and, as well as I was able, I kept pace with him after the manner of old nights.
Somewhere in the house a deep-lunged clock struck twelve slow strokes, and with the last stroke there came a tap at the door, and Paddy Bawn entered.
Sean turned a slow head. “White Patrick Enright, my black devil! Has the hour struck, achara?”
“Twelve hard wallops.”
“Want a drink?”
“With the Major in the house I’m tempted—what would you say yourself?”
“You’ll not get it.”
“You’re a hard man, Sean Glynn.” He turned to me. “You see, Major, it was one of my small shortcomings across in the States. I was a hard man to train, and rye whisky slowed me down till a lad came along and put the Indian sign on me. So I came home.”
“Two pints of porter at fair or market,” said Sean, “and one bottle of Paddy Flaherty whisky tomorrow for Christmas—and I’ll break every bone in his body if he takes more.”
“I wonder,” I half queried, half hinted, “could I safely break every bone in someone’s body?”
“Maybe you could,” said Sean. “But we’ll have to go to bed now. One of the rules of the house—and Paddy Bawn could lick the two of us.”
“Do you live by rule?” I was sarcastic.
“I do, strangely enough—every anchorite has to.”
He placed his hands on the arms of his chair, but failed to draw himself to his feet. “I can’t do it tonight either,” he said sadly.
Paddy Bawn came to his side, and looked across at me with questioning eyes. In answer to that query I lifted to my feet and held there.
“Oh! you hard-headed Scot!” envied Sean. “You will always make harbor under your own steam.”
Paddy Bawn reached a hand across his master’s shoulder and under an arm, and Sean came to his feet. There he swayed, and his dazed, yet brilliant eyes focused me. “You have done a foolish thing, Archie MacDonald,” he admonished me. “I know your vice, and it has not yet come to you; but if you are wise you will leave this empty, empty house, and not stop running till you have no wind left.”
“I was never good at running,” I replied, “but I will run if you will run with me.”
He made a long ellipse in the air with a heavy hand. “Two hundred fifty-two acres—you know—my border march, and god, dog, or devil—”
“Or woman either?”
“The devil sweep all women!” cursed Paddy Bawn warmly. “Will ye be coming to bed now?”
I followed them out into the kitchen, where the light was turned low and the peat fire smoored and the big clock ticked slowly and desolatingly; and up the old stairs that had creaked under so many feet for a hundred years. And that ancient house was full of loneliness and want. And we went to bed.
Chapter III
I
It was clear dawn when I woke, and before I was right awake I knew I had a head, and when I was full awake I knew I deserved that sort of head. It was Paddy Bawn’s knocking at the door that roused me. He came in bearing a tray.
“Morning, sir! Johanna Dillane thought you might like a mouthful—tea it is.”
“The decent body!” I sat up in bed. “So long as it’s wet.”
The tea was hot and strong and reached the right place. Paddy Bawn crossed to the wide low window, jerked the blind, and flooded the room with the soft winter light of morning.
“ ’Tis goin’ to be a great day. There was a piece of a shower back o’ cockcrow, but the sun has a sound look. I bet you the cock will be among the sallys at Killerseragh.”
I groaned. “Safe enough from me. Tell me, Paddy Bawn, was I drunk last night?”
“Not you, Major—but you had drink taken.”
“Sean Glynn had drink taken too?”
“A lie like that would damn your soul,” said Paddy Bawn.
“Sober, was he?”
“Drunk as a blind fiddler.”
“Ah! I see your nice distinction. Sleeping it off, I suppose?”
“Sleep, says you! He is up this hour, into his cold bath, and out in the bawn—a whole morning’s work behind him already, with the milk measured and the lorry off to the creamery.”
“Jove! A tough fellow!”
“Tough! tough as a woodbine gad!” And then: “But the gad breaks with the dint of time—an’ we haven’t all the time in the world.” He came and took the empty cup from me. “A drop o’ cold water, and you’ll be fit for a mower’s breakfast.”
I did not care to ask directly if drunkenness was Sean Glynn’s nightly state. I put it another way.
“Will I have drink taken tonight, Paddy Bawn?”
“And tomorrow night as well,” he answered my thought. His black brows came down. “Can you refuse?”
I made no boast. I just shook a dull-aching head. “There is something wrong with this house.”
“There is,” he agreed. “Everything is wrong with this house.” He went across to the door and looked at me across his shoulder. “There is a want in this house,” he said, “but the house is not to blame. May the devil sweep all women!”
He cursed with a cold fierceness, and banged the door behind him.
II
I got out of bed and crossed to the window giving on the valley that, last night, had been a purple trough speckled with stars. The builder of Leaccabuie House had had an eye for landscape. It stood on the brink of the valley, and, from the low drystone wall of the kitchen garden, the ground fell away in smooth fields to where wound the strong stream of the Ullachowen, whose wimplings I could see, and the very pool where I landed a twenty-pounder in May of ’21; and beyond the river the valley lifted steeply into the brown stone-ribbed bulk of Leaccamore Mountain, that, high up, carried a lean backbone of snow under the thin sky of winter. Right and left, valley and slope were dotted with lime-washed houses, each in a clump of orchard, and the green round these dark clumps was the green of emerald. And over all shone the clean cold brilliance of the young winter sun.
“This is the place,” I thought, “where swack men should thrive, and broad-breasted wives rear strong children. Oh, this lovely and forsaken house!”
I had a cold plunge, dressed quickly, put on heavy boots, and went downstairs into the hall-kitchen. Johanna Dillane, by the side of the new turf fire, was busy over her black bastable oven, and I thanked her for the morning tea.
“One does be often having a drouth before breakfast, Major,” she said. “Mr. Sean is beyond in the stall—out by the big door there, sir.”
The big door opened directly on an immense square of yard, half cobbled and half concreted. Away at the back was the long line of farmsteadings: byres, stables, barns, all evidently in first-class condition. Two finely-feathered red setters and a lovely fawn greyhound bayed at me from an archway, and came across unhurriedly to investigate. I knew enough about bred dogs to no more than flick finger and thumb, and they at once greeted me as one of the privileged.
Voices came through an open door on my left, and I looked into the flagged living-room of the farmhands. Some six or eight men and maids sat round a deal table and were busy with eggs and bread and butter; and there was the pleasant odor of strong—but boiled—Indian tea.
Paddy Bawn at the head of the table called across: “He’s over in the stall, Major, the door next the arch.”
I stopped his move to rise. “Don’t trouble. I’ll get him.”
Inside the big stall—or byre—the sweet flavo
r of milk and hay and cattle greeted me; the smooth leanish backs of milch cows made an immensely long vista of red and dun, and there was a faint munch and rustle of leisurely cud-chewing. Through an open door leading from the haggard came a great slow blind fork-load of gray-green hay, and gaitered legs moved behind and below it; Sean Glynn’s bare black crown peeped above.
“Mind where you’re going,” I warned as it came down on me.
“Ha, slugabed! Out to earn your breakfast?”
He turned in amongst the cows, spread the hay in the feeding-trough and came back to where I stood, three-pronged fork at the trail.
We examined each other critically.
“You look bad.” He shook his head mockingly. “It’ll take me half an hour to work the dry feeling out of your bones.”
“Pity you don’t look as bad as you feel.”
And, indeed, one would have to look closely to make a near guess that Sean Glynn was after a hard night. His face was neither fish-bellied nor flushed, and his bare neck was smooth and firm with muscle. Only a certain small fading in the blue of the eyes and a faint penciling below the eye-sockets told their story; and the hair above his close-set ears could no longer hide the gray.
We went out into the hayshed, where a three-pronged fork was placed in my hands, and for the next half-hour we were busy at the fine warm work of fresh-foddering the cattle and tidying their beds.
“We’ll let them out for a breath of fresh air after breakfast,” he told me, “and then have a wallop at the woodcock. Paddy Bawn tells me they’re in.”
That half-hour rid me of the morning-after chill, and, when the men slouched across the yard from breakfast, I was glad to lay aside my fork and lead the way to Johanna Dillane’s plentiful table. The dining-room was freshly aired, the heavy mahogany shone, the white damask gleamed under its ware, the peats flamed redly on a clean hearth, and decanters and glasses had disappeared; there was no stale flavor of whisky punch and smoke in the spacious room. A visitor, not knowing, would have thought: This is an orderly comfortable house and the owner of it a sane man.
III
Later that day, Sean and I, with the red setters, went after the woodcock in the sallys a mile behind the house; and, shooting better than we deserved, got ten brace. Sean was the better and steadier shot, and occasionally wiped my eye with his second barrel.
Well into the afternoon we took a circle on the turbary behind the sallys and failed to get within range of a flight of wary gray-lag geese. I remembered this country: the low rolling moors with the gray hill road winding through, not unlike Nairnshire at its best.
I pointed across. “That’s where I spoiled your ambush.”
“And got laid by the heels.”
“You got your grouse over there?”
“Yes. No use for snipe—too dry.”
“Let’s try it—for a spare old cock.”
He hesitated. “No. I never shoot over it now.”
My Scots stickiness would not be denied. “Is it not within your border?”
He frowned at this—my first daylight reference to his obsession—and then he laughed. “It is too near my own border—if you want to know.”
That was a useful hint. It was on the tip of my tongue to ask him who lived on the other side, but I refrained.
“What you want,” I half taunted, “is a high wall.”
“It would serve if it were high enough.”
“You mean to keep trespassers—including myself—outside?”
“No. To keep me inside.” He looked at me. “Don’t worry at it, old chap—but you will,” he said with dry humor.
Night was falling and rain from the Atlantic pelting us before we got home, and I was glad of a change of clothes and one stiff whisky—whisky of a subtle serenity that might draw to itself any lone man with a shadow on his soul. And after dinner we talked and smoked and, with a slow dignified inevitability, Sean Glynn got drunk. But this night I remained wary and resolute, and took no more whisky than a normal man should take, just enough to light up the mind and loosen the trammels.
I merely touched the border of that realm in which Sean Glynn sported: where he attained wisdom without effort, and grasped problems with certainty, and recognized that one thing mattered about as much as another where all things mattered little. And though he did get drunk, he retained his wonderful slow clarity of mind and speech, a marvelous fearsome concentration that was, somehow, admirable and dignified—and to be envied. A temptation to any man.
Midnight struck, and Paddy Bawn, that faithful quiet man, entered with the last stroke. And Paddy Bawn had drink taken. His face was chalk-white, his deep-set eyes shining, his jaw muscles ridged and rippled as if he were grinding his teeth in a temper. But he was in the best of humor.
“Just the half of the bottle, Seaghan Glynn achara—just the dead half and devil the taste more—and the other half tomorrow night, if God spares me. . . . But wasn’t it the great pity I forgot to drink the Major’s health?”
“If that be so, White Patrick Enright—and, though you may not have drunk his health, certain it is that you did not forget—” Sean’s voice was richly slow—“still and all, if healths must be drunk, drunk they will be in three small tumblers of punch.”
“And why would they be small,” Paddy Bawn wanted to know, “and plenty hot water there in the kettle on the greesoch?”
Between them they compounded three glasses of punch, and they were not small. This was the deoch an doruis—the drink at the door—and I made no objection.
Sean, calling on a final reserve of force, lifted to his feet and steadied there. And Paddy Bawn raised his glass; his eyes gleaming, his mouth bitter and strong, holding himself like a steel blade. “To Major MacDonald of Scotland, tested and true,” he toasted. “And here’s to ourselves too—the three of us—three lone men in a lonely house, and may there be a Glynn in it always!”
We drank that toast and laid down our glasses.
“Go to hell, Paddy Bawn!” cursed Sean, and sank into his chair.
“If so ’tis ordained, to hell I will go—but if I were you—” he paused.
“If you were me?”
Paddy Bawn’s mind leaped beyond my reach. “If I were you, Sean Glynn of Leaccabuie, I would go to hell my own way, and it would not be much different from your way.”
Sean Glynn lifted a hand as in salute. “I knew I could hide nothing from you.”
“As a mere Scot,” I said derisively, “to me it seems that your road to perdition is too easy.”
“Maybe it is, Major, maybe it is,” agreed Paddy Bawn, and his eyes were friendly. And then they hardened and locked with mine. “Hold you your ground,” he besought me. “Stick to it, true man!”
He strode across to one of the windows and pulled aside the blind. “Come here now, and see all the candles burnin’.”
All up and down the great valley below us, and all along the slopes of the hills, every window was illuminated. It was a night of velvet blackness under a blackness, and gazing down into that valley gave one a nightmare feeling of gazing down into the bowl of some strange sky.
“There you are now,” said Paddy Bawn, wistfulness in his voice. “Every window shining and every hearth swept clane, sweet bread on the table and new milk on the dresser—the way no woman, an’ she in her need, will suffer as the Mother o’ God suffered.” His voice changed and grew bitter. “And here we are looking down on it all, and all we have within the four walls is a barren woman and three hard men. We’ll be goin’ to bed now.”
But outside in the hall-kitchen two tall waxen candles burned in brass candlesticks before an unblinded window, a new fire flamed on the hearth, and a linen cloth on the black dresser was laid with food and drink.
Sean swayed against Paddy Bawn’s shoulders and came to a halt.
“Will you be for quenching them, man o’ the house?” Paddy Bawn’s voice grated. “Say the word, and in spite of the fires o’ hell I’ll blow breath on them.”
> Sean looked at the pale flames of the candles and shook a heavy head. “No, Paddy Bawn. We’ll not hurt Johanna Dillane. Leave them—leave them. Never will any woman be guided by these candles to this door.”
“God is good!” said Paddy Bawn.
“O obstinate breed! And I wanted them there, Bawn—I wanted them. But am I not telling you that no woman dare ever come to this house in any need? I took a woman for the need of my cause, and, with my eyes open, I broke her—broke her—and where is she now—and what does she sell? And another woman—she was wise. . . . Bah!” He shook himself clear, and with a single sweep of the arm, knocked both candles over; and at once the red flames of the peat took possession of the room and set our shadows posturing grotesquely on the walls.
“Take me to bed, Paddy Bawn.” Sean’s voice was drained of all emotion. Without a word Paddy Bawn’s strong arm went around his master’s shoulder.
IV
Upstairs in my room I snicked up the blind for another look into that illuminated valley. In order to get a clearer view I was about to turn my lamp low when I happened to glance along the widening path the light made across the kitchen garden below the window. Gooseflesh ran up my thighs and over my body.
A woman stood just within the edge of the light at the open handgate in the drystone wall. A tall woman wearing the hooded Irish cloak. She was looking up at my window, and I saw the black wells where her eyes were and the white gleam of her chin; and then she stepped back and aside into the darkness outside the wall, and was gone.
The lift of head, the quick movement, all showed that she was in the vigor of youth. Once before I had seen a woman in a half-light wearing an Irish cloak. That was at Lough Aonach, and the woman was Nuala Kierley, and that time, though I only saw her for a minute, and she never looked at me, something stirred at my roots. I had not that feeling now; after the first eerie little shock I was merely curious as to who this woman might be.
I put my light out and peered across the dark of the kitchen garden. If she appeared in the gateway again I would see her against the light in the valley. Nothing happened.
The Quiet Man and Other Stories Page 10