Paddy Bawn Enright did not look at any one. He stood easily in their midst, his hands deep in his pockets, one shoulder hunched forward, his eyes on the ground, and his face strangely unconcerned. He seemed the least perturbed man there. Perhaps he was remembering the many times he had sat in his corner and waited for the bell. Matt Tobin whispered in Ellen’s ear: “God is good, I tell you.” But Ellen’s eyes, looking and looking at her husband, saw their own god.
Red Will was back in two minutes, and strode straight down on Paddy Bawn.
“Look, Patcheen!” In his raised hand was a crumpled bundle of greasy banknotes. “Here is your money! Take it—and what’s coming to you! Take it!” He thrust it into Paddy Bawn’s hand. “Count it. Make sure you have it all—and then get kicked out of my haggard. And look!” He thrust forward that great hairy hand. “If ever I see your face again I will drive that through it. Count it, you spawn!”
Paddy Bawn did not count it. Instead, he crumpled it into a ball in his strong fingers. Then he turned on his heel and walked with cool slowness to the face of the engine. He gestured with one hand to Matt Tobin, but it was Ellen Roe, quick as a flash, who obeyed the gesture. Though the hot bar scorched her hand, she jerked open the door of the fire-box, and the leaping peat flames whispered out at her. And, forthwith, Paddy Bawn, with one easy sweep of the arm, threw the crumpled ball of banknotes into the heart of the flames. The whisper lifted one tone, and a scrap of charred paper floated out of the funnel top. That was all the fuss the fire made of its work.
There was fuss enough outside.
Red Will gave one mighty shout. No! It was more an anguished yell than an honest shout.
“My money—my good money!”
He sprang into the air, came down in his tracks, made two furious bounds forward, and his great arms came flinging to crush and kill. Berserk at last!
But those flinging fists never touched the small man.
“You dumb ox!” said Paddy Bawn between his teeth, and seemed to glide below the flinging arms.
That strong hunched shoulder moved a little, but no one there could follow the terrific drive of that hooked right arm. The smash of bone on bone was sharp as whip-crack, and Red Will, two hundred pounds of him, stopped dead, went back on his heels, swayed a moment and staggered three paces.
“Now and forever, man of the Enrights!” roared Matt Tobin, ramming his bowler hat over his head and levering it loose again.
But Red Will O’Danaher was a mighty man. That blow should have laid him on his back—blows like it had tied men to the floor for the full count. Red Will only shook his head, grunted like a boar, and threw all his weight at the smaller man. Now would the Danaher men see an Enright torn apart!
But the little man, instead of circling away, drove in at the big fellow, compact of power, every hackle lifted, explosive as dynamite. Tiger Enright was in action.
The men of the Danahers saw then an exhibition that they had not knowledge enough to appreciate fully, but that they would not forget all their days. Multitudes had paid as much as ten dollars a head to see Tiger Enright in action: his foot work, his timing, his hitting from all angles, the sheer explosive ferocity of the man. But never was his action more devastating than now. He was a thunderbolt on two feet. All the stored dislike of years was in his two terrible hands.
And the big man was a glutton. He took all that was coming, and came for more. He never once touched his opponent with clenched fist. He did not know how. The small man was not there when the great fist came hurtling, yet the small man was the aggressor from first to last. His very speed made him that. Actually forty pounds lighter, he drove Red Will by sheer hitting back and fore across the yard. Men, for the first time, saw a two-hundred-pound man knocked clean off his feet by a body blow.
Five minutes. In five packed minutes, Paddy Bawn Enright demolished his enemy. Four—six—eight times he sent the big man neck-and-crop to the ground, and each time the big man scrambled furiously to his feet, staggering, bleeding, slavering, raving, vainly trying to rend and kill. But at last he stood swaying, mouth open, and hands clawing futilely; and Paddy Bawn finished the fight with his dreaded double hit, left below the breast-bone and right under the jaw.
Red Will lifted on his toes, swayed, and fell flat on his back. He did not even kick as he lay.
Paddy Bawn did not waste a glance on the fallen giant. He swung full circle on the Danaher men; he touched his breast with middle finger, his voice of iron challenged them.
“I am Patrick Enright of Knockanore Hill. Is there a Danaher amongst you thinks himself a better man? Come, then.”
His face was like a hard stone, his great chest lifted, the air whistled in his nostrils; his deep-set flashing eyes dared and daunted them.
“Come, Danaher men!”
No man came.
“Mo yerm thu, a Phadraig Bawn! My choice thou, white Patrick!” That was Matt Tobin’s exultant bugle.
Paddy Bawn walked straight across to his wife and halted before her. His face was still cold as stone, but his voice, quiet as it was, had in it some dramatic quality full of life and the eagerness of life.
“Mother of my son, will you come home with me?”
She lifted to the appeal of voice and eye.
“Is it so you ask me?”
“As my wife only, Ellen Roe Enright.”
“Very well, heart’s treasure.” She caught his arm in both her hands. “Let us be going. Come, friends!”
“God is good, surely,” said Paddy Bawn.
And she went with him, proud as the morning, out of that place. But, a woman, she would have the last word.
“Mother o’ God!” she cried. “The trouble I had to make a man of him!”
“God Almighty did that for him before you were born,” said Mickeen Oge sternly.
PART FOUR
The Red Girl
“The Red Girl, who now sings her,
Dead two hundred years?
The lost one! No word of praise,
No prayer, not even tears
Shall call to mind the Faith she held and died for:
Thou shalt not love a traitor,
Yield mercy to a spy,
Who sell what men will fight for,
Strive for, dream for, die:
The Love of Land, the Faith of Men, and Honor.”
Chapter I
I
THE hotel lounge was Big Michael Flynn’s best room: wide and low, with a beamed ceiling, open hearth, comfortable chairs, and many windows looking down on Lough Aonach a quarter-mile below; and it was strictly reserved for the anglers—and the ladies who owned the anglers. There were five people in it now: Major-General Kelly Cuthbert and his niece, Kate O’Brien; Marcus Caverley and his daughter, Betty; and Major Archibald MacDonald. And, curiously enough, they were talking of the tragic legend of the Red Girl.
The Major-General, softly drawing on his after-dinner cigar, stood looking down on the four grouped round a card table near the french window; and Archibald MacDonald, lean and serious, leisurely dealt the cards, and murmured, as if to himself, speculatively but skeptically:
“I wonder! Was there ever a Red Girl—in fact?”
“In fact—beyond doubt,” said Kate O’Brien; and added, “Her name was my name.”
“Of your blood?”
“Of my race—and yours perhaps.”
She picked up her cards and slowly sorted four high spades in a strong hand. The spades were no darker than her hair, and the white ground of the cards was lifeless compared with the clean pallor of her face. A fine, sorrowful timbre came into her voice:
“More than two hundred years ago, in Stuart times, when the fate of Europe was played out on Irish ground, and Irish ground was wet with Irish blood, she lived and loved—and died—oh! so young. A renegade Irishman betrayed her lover to the Sassenach, and her lover died—and the traitor died—and the Red Girl died, too. But, it is said, her unquiet spirit moves still a
bout Castle Aonach; and it is said, too, that she is only seen when a renegade Irishman has to die.”
“Do you believe that nonsense, Miss O’Brien?” inquired the hard-headed Marcus Caverley. “You sound like it.”
“Perhaps I only believe that an Irish renegade should not be in life.”
“When was she last seen?” Major MacDonald looked interrogatively at the dark girl, his brows down, and she nodded.
“Yes, you might remember—you were a prisoner here about that time. The Black-and-Tan war. She was seen, and a man was found drowned in Poul Cailin Rua, the Red Girl’s Pool.” Her voice was lowered. “He was an Irishman, but those who know will not say that he was a traitor.”
“Martin Kierley?”
She nodded.
“Probably executed by Mickeen Oge Flynn and his I.R.A. gunmen!” put in the soldier warmly.
“But not by guns, Uncle—drowned.”
MacDonald was looking at his cards, his face queerly saturnine.
“He had a wife—this Kierley?” he half queried.
“Nuala Kierley—and no traitor. She did not fail.”
“What happened her?”
“I wish we knew. She disappeared—absolutely.”
“Better she suffered the fate of the Red Girl.” And then he murmured to himself an old and remembered scrap of talk: “Where is she now, how does she live, what does she sell?”
Betty Caverley stirred restlessly in her chair. She was a slender girl, flaxen-haired, with soft gray eyes and delicate coloring, but any discerning eye must see that she was of the blood and bone of the hale and ruddy Englishman, her father. Now she spoke gently but definitely.
“Young Michael Flynn would not do anything—dishonorable. I am certain of that.”
The Major-General agreed promptly. “So am I, Miss Caverley, but a soldier has sometimes to do terrible things, and—probably—Mickeen Oge considered himself a soldier.”
“And a mighty good one—as I know,” put in Major MacDonald. “No bid, partner.”
“Considers himself a soldier yet, doesn’t he?” said Marcus Caverley. “Keeping his Irregulars alive and all that—dumps of arms—”
“Under our feet, for all we know,” said the Major-General, his voice suddenly quiet.
His dark-haired niece twitched her shoulders in some irritation.
“Take your rank cigar out of here, Uncle!” she urged. “We want to get on with this rubber.” She looked up at him under curving eyebrows. “And do not forget that you are an Irishman yourself, and not a very good one, some say.”
“I’m not ashamed of my Irish blood—and the Empire.” He turned and stumped straight-backed through the french window.
Kate O’Brien called after him, “You should never fish Poul Cailin Rua unless Mickeen Oge is with you—and you never do. I am going three spades.”
Major-General Kelly Cuthbert stumped across to the veranda rail, and the smoke spurted furiously through the white brush of his mustache. But he was not a particularly choleric man, and the serene, silken-velvet, sunset sheen of Lough Aonach, shining down below between the scattered trees, soon soothed him. Tomorrow, at last, might be a grand fishing day—with an occasional sunny shower—and a venturesome grilse or two up from Dunmore Bay in the lower river pools. His inner eye saw the two-piece greenheart curving to a lively five-pounder below the rocks at Poul Cailin Rua—and Mickeen Oge, poised on a rock, cursing his own bad luck. It was a grand world, and the retired soldier had his foot on its neck.
He was roused from his pleasant vision by the rattle of the hotel car coming round from the garage at the back. It slithered on the gravel below the veranda, and Big Michael Flynn, the hotelkeeper, an immensely corpulent man, came nimbly down the steps from the porch to say a word to the driver. The driver was the Mickeen Oge Flynn [small young Michael] of the Major-General’s thoughts, and he was neither small, nor yet youthful; his Gaelic by-name was merely used to distinguish him from his uncle, Big Michael, in a territory where Flynns and Michaels were as common as blackthorn bushes.
The Major-General took his cigar from his lips. “Where are you off to, young fellow?” He liked Mickeen Oge in spite of his hellish brand of politics.
“Castletown Junction, General.”
“Damn! Who’s coming?”
Mickeen Oge’s face in repose had the quiet gravity of one of the great masks, but, when his mouth twitched out of its firm line, the antic mind peeped into the light of day. He jerked a thumb towards his uncle.
“The old thief there, General—ask him.”
The General looked down at Big Michael, undefined suspicion alive in his eye, and Big Michael looked up, frank guilelessness in his.
“A commercial traveler?” queried the soldier. He did not object greatly to commercial travelers. They stayed only one night, did not interfere in any way with the fishing, and, after the retiral of the ladies, brought forth a brand of anecdote astonishingly salacious and not without humor.
“A Mr. O’Connor it is,” said Big Michael, not very informatively.
“An angler?”
“A Yankee,” said Mickeen Oge.
“An Irish-American! Hell’s blazes!”
The french window was ajar behind him, and a brown lean face appeared in the slit. “Try the soft pedal, Munster Fusilier,” advised the quiet Highland drawl. “The ladies don’t mind, but I was brought up in a Calvinist battalion.”
The soldier strode to the window, shut it smartly, and stamped back to the rail. The moment his back was turned the window reopened noiselessly.
“What’s this bloody fellow coming for?”
“To tell us how America won the war,” suggested Mickeen Oge.
“Sure, maybe, he won’t be staying long,” said Big Michael hopefully.
“That’s torn it.” The soldier knew his Big Michael. “He’ll be here all summer. Why did you let the fat old donkey do it, Mickeen Oge? That damned Yankee will have four steamer trunks, each as big as a hearse, plastered all over with hotel labels—from Trondhjeim to Stamboul—collected in the ten days he has taken to telescope Europe. And he’ll fish, too—with those silly steel-core contraptions that never played a fish honestly. Oh, hell! I never met a Yankee who could work in low water, and he’ll frighten every dam’ fish from here to Dounbeg—”
Neither war, pestilence nor skin-flaying vituperation had any power to perturb Big Michael Flynn.
“I’ll lave ye at it,” he said, laughed pleasantly, and bounded up the porch steps lively as a rubber ball. “You’ll be fine and late for the train, Michaeleen,” he called and disappeared.
The engine roared, and the old flivver bucketed and scuttered down the short curve of drive to the main road that margined the long sweep of the shore.
“We’ve heard you do better, soldier man,” said the quiet voice from the french window.
And the sunset peace of Lough Aonach had to do its work over again on the irate soldier.
II
Mickeen Oge Flynn, as his uncle had told him, was fine and late for the train—all of fifteen minutes, which is considered commendably punctual in everyday Irish affairs, but not for train schedules. Hurrying through the narrow-arched entrance to the platform at Castletown Junction, he found it deserted, except for a solitary porter, who sat on a couple of oldish leather suitcases, and fingered a pair of canvas-covered fishing-rods secured inside the straps.
“ ’Tis a greenheart, Mickeen Oge, but that one by the feel of it is a split cane.”
“Whose, Jureen?”
“A Mr. O’Connor.” The porter bent to the direction tag. “Mr. Art O’Connor, passenger from Cobh to Castletown Junction for Lough Aonach—your man.”
“Where are the steamer trunks?” He looked round the packed gravel spread.
“Divil the scrap more—”
“A new type of Yankee! Where is he?”
“Yankee! Man, he spoke as quiet as yourself.” The porter gestured with a thumb. “Above at John Molouney’s. He travel
ed up in the one carriage with Kelty Murphy and John Tom Kissane—free an’ aisy as you like, and Kelty Buie tellin’ them murderin’ stories of his—you know? I was to follow them across when you turned up, an’ me sayin’ you wouldn’t be much more than an hour late whatever.”
“Never told the truth in your life, Jureen.”
“Sure, what harm—an’ what hurry? I was sittin’ here, Mickeen Oge, waitin’, an’ thinkin’ to myself that when the hurry was on us it was always Mickeen Oge Flynn was first in the gap—and his the gap at hinder end. Them was the days.”
“Shut up, you dreamer, and bring along that baggage!”
And, looking at the gray-blue eyes grown suddenly bleak, Jureen the porter shook his head and manhandled the bags.
They found the three men grouped round a corner of the high zinc-covered counter of John Molouney’s bar, and one was unmistakably the visitor. He was drinking brown stout out of a pewter tankard and listening to a short, flexible-mouthed man, who was holding forth in a marvelously rich and resonant voice.
“. . . Shawn the Skillet, we used call him back of Leacca, and coming on winter he used be making a drop of poteen—moonshine ye call it beyant in the States, and a grand name, to be sure!——Wait a minute, Mickeen Oge, till I finish this one for Mr. O’Connor; you’ll be havin’ a glass of stout—and a pint for Jureen, John——Well and fine, sir! at a certain season of the year, when the corn was all done and a man couldn’t get a bag o’ malt for love or money, Shawn the Skillet used to be thinking to himself that it was time to be making his peace with God and going to his Easter duty—” He looked interrogatively at his visitor.
“I know.” He nodded. “Making his annual confession.”
“To be sure—you’ll be a Catholic yourself, sir. Telling the parish priest, old Father MacOwen, with the grating of the confession-box between himself and the holy man, that at odd times, and the Devil tempting him, he would be running a drop of poteen unbeknownst, God forgive us all! And sorry for it he would be and promising God and Father Mac never again to build a turf fire under a still—barrin’ the temptation was too strong and the price right. For ten, or it could be fifteen years he told the same tale, and devil the tale else, and for the same length of time Father Mac put the same penance on him: five pounds to the Vincent de Paul Society and a decket of the rosary once a day for a week. He told me so himself. Faith, it was a poor day for the Vincent de Pauls when the police nabbed Shawn’s still at the long last. They didn’t nab Shawn, though.
The Quiet Man and Other Stories Page 16