“Nothing then—nothing at all,” I agreed.
I felt her shoulder shaking, and, for a time I took no supporting.
“A man,” I mused sententiously, “is often at the mercy of a woman, and that is contrary to the accepted belief. A woman never loses her soul, and a man does; and a woman sometimes—very rarely—saves a man’s soul, and always helps him to lose it.”
“I did not help—”
“No!” I stopped her sharply. “Would you help him to save it?”
“Oh!”
We went on silently, the quiet moors about us.
“Sean never explained anything to you?” I put to her at last.
“No. I never asked him.”
“Fine—and very right!” I commended her. “You were not as young as you thought. You are very old now, of course.”
I heard her sad little chuckle. “I suppose I am still young.”
“But wiser—ever so much wiser—and a wise woman knows a thing or two. Men are queer brutes, and the wise woman knows that if they are worth anything—and generally they are not—they must be fought for all the time. Not once—all the time. We don’t know what Sean Glynn did, we don’t know what he was driven to do, but—”
“Please!” she whispered. “Don’t say anything more now—I cannot bear it.”
“Not another word except this,” I said. “Sean Glynn is worth saving if he is worth loving—and you’ll know that.”
Again I felt her arm quiver. I decided then that I had said enough.
I, at any rate, did not find that walk too long. Before I was well aware of it we were out on the highroad, and there were the gates of Leaccabuie in front. They were wide open for us, and I thought I heard a shod foot move and fade out up the rough avenue.
Joan Hyland stopped in the middle of the road. “But where is Paddy Bawn?”
“Must have missed us. Down at the house probably.”
“I couldn’t,” she whispered in reply to my unspoken thought. “I dare not go up there—the candles were quenched.”
I still held her arm. “I assure you, Miss Hyland, that no one—no one—will know. I could quietly get Paddy Bawn out to tackle the pony and—I can’t leave you here alone, can I?”
“Very well,” she agreed resignedly, giving in because she had to.
We went up the lifting road, dark between its bushes, and I felt her arm—a warm and strong arm—tremble. Almost, I thought, I felt her heart beat against my sleeve. We flanked the walnut tree, went through the big gate, round the blank gable end, and there was the door of the house facing us. We halted then. The door was closed, but, further along the wall, the unblinded dining-room window sent out a broad ray of light across the cobbles. This was unusual, for that window used to be carefully blinded with the lighting of the lamp.
“Just a moment,” I whispered; and, slipping along the front of the house, I looked in through the lighted window. The lower sash was lifted six inches, and the curtains inside swayed gently apart in a light draft of air. I looked, and then I went back to where Joan Hyland waited for me.
“Let me show you something!” I whispered. “There is no fear.” I had hold of her arm. “Come!”
My will dominated hers; rather was in tune with hers. She allowed herself to be led to that lighted window.
“Look!” said I. “That is what you have done to Sean Glynn.”
V
Sean, as was his custom, sat at the end of his own table. But, as was not usual, he was now fallen forward, his head resting on one arm on the white cloth, and the other hand, at full stretch, holding the stem of a tall glass. The decanter was in front of him.
“Oh, Sean—Sean!” Joan Hyland whispered desperately.
“Can you save him now,” I said bitterly, “or are you still young enough to be a damn fool?”
And then she surprised me. She threw my arm from her with a gesture almost angry, stepped forward, ran up the heavy sash with the full vigor of her young strength, and was through the window with one swift movement. She took one stride into the room and stopped.
“Sean!”
The noise, the voice—in ear and heart—roused Sean. His hand jerked and the tall glass fell over on the cloth. He lifted his head, and his gaze widened, narrowed, widened on Joan Hyland; then he ran a hand across his eyes and again looked, and slowly came to his feet, no longer drunk.
“Good-evening, ghost,” he saluted her sadly. “Has it come to this at last? I was always afraid that it would.”
He turned to the table with a steady slowness, and lifted the decanter with a steady hand; and I very nearly leaped into the room. But his voice held me, and it held Joan Hyland.
He looked through the amber liquor. “So you have failed me at the bitter end, and I have nothing now to hold me in time or place. Very well.”
He laid the decanter gently down and pushed it away across the cloth. It was an act of final abnegation.
He turned to Joan and smiled sadly, his dark eyes gleaming, and his voice a slow monotone.
“You are still there? I used see you in dreams, but this is more beautiful than any dream.” He sat down. “You are stronger than wine. You know, my friends knew better than I did. They thought I was a little touched, because of a small, small shadow that was at the back of my mind, but I knew—I knew I was sound enough—except—sometimes—in the lamplight, out of the corner of an eye, over there in the shadow—I used [to] see the face of a woman accusing me. Not you, girl. A woman I broke in my two hands, for the cause, my eyes open . . . But I will not see her any more now; I will see you—and keep the secret to myself—till we are alone—” He went on muttering, and then suddenly he heaved to his feet and shouted.
“Archie—Archie! Where are you?”
“Sean! Look at me!” Her low voice was firm, and she walked slowly—very slowly—across the room.
Sean’s shoulders flinched, and he swayed on his feet.
“Oh, God!”
Her hand touched his breast. “Sit down, Sean!” And he sank into his chair, his eyes staring up at her.
“It is all right, Sean,” her voice crooned over him. “It is all right, Seaneen. I will not leave you any more.” She drew his head against her breast and her strong hand went through his hair soothingly. “There! We were very foolish and unhappy, but we will never hurt each other again.”
His voice was muffled deep against her breast. I did not hear what he said.
• • • • • • •
Paddy Bawn’s arm was behind my shoulder and was needed there.
“We’ll be going now, Highlandman. I knew always you were sent.” He drew me away by the wall.
“I have the deil’s own head, Paddy Bawn,” I told him. “The gun burst and nearly killed me.”
“Was that it? Sure, nothing could kill you in the four glens—and we’ll give you your own choice of heads. Man alive! didn’t things work out like—like day after dark—an’ me opening the window when I found him asleep. Everything will be all right now—and my own little quiet place waiting for me up on Knockanore Hill.”
But a strange thought still obsessed me. Suddenly I felt extraordinarily bitter.
“They are all right in there,” I said, “and you are all right too, Paddy Bawn, but what about Nuala Kierley? The broken one! Who thinks of her?”
“You do,” said Paddy Bawn.
“Because I am sorry for her.”
“God help her—and you too!” He pressed my arm. He was not worrying about any woman yet. “Whisper!” he said. “I got the fright of my life this night. You saw the Lua-Bawn-Shee going off on three legs and him full of shot?”
“On three legs—yes!”
“Listen! I put him up again before the door of the bothan back there, and he went off—whisper! he went off on four sound legs. Four sound legs, I’m sayin’—and the dogs never looked at him under their noses.”
“Could you see in the dark?”
“Right forninst the door and the light on h
im. It was God sent him—and you too—and tomorrow I’ll prove it to you.”
But tomorrow is another day.
PART THREE
The Quiet Man
“The Quiet Man he sate him down, and to himself did say,
‘I’ll sit and look at Shannon’s Mouth until my dying day;
For Shannon Mouth and Ocean-blue are pleasant things to see,’
But Woman’s mouth and sky-blue eye! ‘To hell with them!’ said he.”
The Quiet Man
I
PADDY BAWN ENRIGHT, a blithe young lad of seventeen, went to the States to seek his fortune—like so many of his race. And fifteen years thereafter returned to his native Kerry, his blitheness sobered and his youth dried to the core; and whether he had found his fortune, or whether he had not, no one could be knowing. For he was a quiet man, not given much to talking about himself and the things he had done.
A quiet man, slightly under middle height, with good shoulders and deep-set steadfast blue eyes below brows darker than his dark hair—that was Paddy Bawn Enright. Paddy Bawn means White Patrick, and he got that ironic nickname because there was not a white hair on him. One shoulder had a trick of hunching slightly higher than the other, and some folks said that that came from a habit acquired in shielding his eyes in the glare of an open hearth steel furnace in a place called Pittsburgh, while others said it was a way he had learned of guarding his chin that time he was some sort of sparring-partner punch-bag at a boxing camp in New York State.
He came home at the age of thirty-two—young enough still for romance or for war—and found that he was the last of his line of Enrights, and that the farm of his forefathers had added its few acres to the ranch of Red Will O’Danaher of Moyvalla. Red Will—there was a tradition of redness in the Danaher men, hair and disposition—had got hold of the Enright holding meanly; and the neighbors waited, with a lively curiosity, to see what Paddy Bawn would do about it; for no one, in living memory, remembered an Irishman who had taken the loss of his land quietly—not since the Fenian times, at any rate. But that is exactly what Paddy Bawn did. He took no action whatever. Whereupon folks nodded their heads and said contemptuous things, often enough where they might be relayed back to Paddy Bawn.
“Maybe the little fellow is right, too!” “For all the boxing tricks he is supposed to have picked up in New York, what chance would he have against Red Will?” “That tarnation fellow would break him in three halves with his bare hands.”
But Paddy Bawn only smiled in his own quiet way. The truth was that he had had enough of fighting. All he wanted now was peace—“a quiet small little place on a hillside,” as he said himself; and he quietly went about amongst the old and kindly friends and looked about him for the place and the peace he wanted. And, when the place offered, the wherewithal to acquire it was not wanting.
It was a neat handy small croft on the first warm shelf of Knockanore Hill below the rolling curves of heather. Not a big place at all, but in sound heart, and it got all the sun that was going; and, best of all, it suited Paddy Bawn to the tiptop notch of contentment, for it held the peace that tuned to his quietness, and it commanded the widest view in all Kerry—vale and running water, and the tall ramparts of distant mountains, and the lifting green plain of the Atlantic sea out between the black portals of Shannon Mouth.
And yet, for the best part of five years Paddy Bawn Enright did not enjoy one quiet day in that quiet place.
The horror and the doul of the Black-and-Tan war settled down on Ireland, and Paddy Bawn, driven by an ideal bred closer in the bone of an Irishman than all desire, went out to fight against the terrible thing that England stood for in Ireland—the subjugation of the soul. He joined an I.R.A. Flying Column, a column great amongst all the fighting columns of the south, commanded by Hugh Forbes, with Mickeen Oge Flynn second in command; and with that column he fought and marched until the truce came. And even thereafter the peace of Knockanore Hill was denied him.
For he was a loyal man, and his leaders, Hugh Forbes and Mickeen Oge Flynn, placed a fresh burden on him. They took him aside and talked to him at Sean Glynn’s farmhouse of Leaccabuie above the Ullachowen Valley.
“Paddy Bawn, achara,” said Hugh in that booming voice that no man could resist, “our friend Sean is in a bad way—with a shadow on him.”
“I know it,” said Paddy Bawn.
“And you know that he is a man that we cannot forsake, as he has not forsaken us to the brink of darkness?”
“What do ye want me to do?”
“You will take a job as his land-steward, and you will stand by him till the shadow lifts.”
“It will not be long, with God’s help,” said Mickeen Oge.
“Long or short,” said Paddy Bawn, “I will stand by him, for sure my own little place will not run away, with Matt Tobin to keep an eye on it—and it will be all the better at the end.”
And, as has been told, he stood by Sean Glynn till the shadow lifted, and Sean became a douce married man.
Then at last, and for all time—as he told himself—he turned his steadfast face to Knockanore Hill.
II
There, in a four-roomed, lime-white, thatched cottage, Paddy Bawn settled smoothly into the life that he meant to live till days were done and eternal night quiet about him. Not once did he think of bringing a wife into the place, though, often enough, his friends, half in fun, half in earnest, hinted his needs and obligations. But though the thought had neither web nor woof, Fate had the loom set for the weaving of it.
Paddy Bawn was no drudge toiler. He knew all about drudgery and the way it wears out a man’s soul. He hired a man when he wanted one; he plowed a little and sowed what was needed; and at the end of a furrow he would lean on the handles of the cultivator, wipe his brow, if it needed wiping, and lose himself for whole minutes in the great green curve of the sea out there beyond the high black portals of Shannon Mouth. And sometimes, of an evening, he would see, under the orange glory of the sky, the faint smoke smudge of an American liner. Then he would smile to himself—a pitying smile—thinking of all the poor young lads, with dreams of fortune luring them, going out to sweat in Ironville, or to bootleg bad whisky down the hidden way, or to stand in a bread-line in the gut of skyscrapers. All these things were behind Paddy Bawn forever.
He was fond of horses, and he bought an old brood mare of hunter blood, hoping to breed a good-class jumper; he had a black hound dog—out of Master Ross—with a turn of speed, and there were mountain hares to test it; and he had a double-barrel shotgun presented him by Sean Glynn, and Knockanore heather reared two or three brood of grouse every season; and on Summer Sundays he used go across to Galey River and catch a mess of trout. What more in all the world could a man want?
Market days he would go down and across to Listowel town, seven miles, to do his bartering, and if he met a friend he would have two drinks and no more. And sometimes, in the long evenings slipping slowly into the endless summer gloaming, or on Sundays after Mass, his friends would come across the vale and up the long winding path to see him. Only the real friends came that long road, and they were welcome. Mostly fighting men who had been out in the Tan war: Matt Tobin, the thresher, who had worked a Thompson gun with him in many an ambush; Sean Glynn of Leaccabuie, boasting of his first son; Mickeen Oge Flynn all the way from Lough Aonach; Hugh Forbes, the Small Dark Man, making the rafters ring: men like that. And once Mickeen Oge Flynn brought Major Archibald MacDonald across from Lough Aonach where he was fishing, and that sound man was satisfied that Paddy Bawn had found his quiet place at last.
Then, a stone jar of malt whisky would appear on the table for those who wanted a drink, and there would be a haze of smoke and a maze of friendly warm disagreements.
“Paddy Bawn, old son,” one of them might hint, “aren’t you sometimes terrible lonesome?”
“Like hell I am! Why?”
“Nothing but the daylight and the wind, and the sun setting like the wrath o’ God!”
“But after the stirring times out about—and beyond in the States.”
“The stirring times wore us to the bone, and tell me, fine man, did you ever see a furnace in full blast?”
“Worth seeing, I’m told.”
“Worth seeing, surely. But if I could jump you into an iron foundry this minute you would think that God had judged you faithfully into the hot hob of hell. Have sense, man!”
And then they would laugh and, maybe, have another small one from the stone jar. . . .
On Sundays Paddy Bawn used go to church, three miles down to the gray chapel above the black cliffs of Don Bay. There Fate, with a cunning leisureliness, laid her lure and drew her web about him. Listen now!
Sitting quietly on his wooden bench or kneeling on the dusty footboard, he would fix his steadfast deep-set eyes on the vestmented celebrant and say over his beads slowly, or go into that strange trance, beyond dreams or visions, where the soul is almost at one with the unknowable.
And then, after a time, Paddy Bawn’s eyes no longer fixed themselves on the celebrant. They went no farther than two seats ahead. A girl sat there, her back to him. Sunday after Sunday she sat there. Paddy Bawn did not know how her presence grew about him. He just liked to see her sit there. At first his eyes hardly noted her, and then noted her with a casual admiration; and slowly, slowly that first casual admiration took on body and warmth. She was a bit of the surroundings, she was part of the ceremony, she was secret partner to himself. And she never even looked his way.
On the first Sunday of the month when she went to early Mass and communion, Paddy Bawn used to miss her strangely, and his prayers suffered. And gradually he got into the habit of being a monthly communicant himself. Holiness is induced by many roads, but seldom by an inclination that way.
The Quiet Man and Other Stories Page 13