The Quiet Man and Other Stories

by Maurice Walsh

  Kate O’Brien felt as if she had been detected—and ignored, slighted. The quickening increased to a tingle that was warm, almost angry, a shade resentful. And her face darkened over her book. She would get a little back on him presently.

  Big Michael came in with the tray of drinks. The creamy head was rich and thick on the shining tankard he laid on a small table at Art O’Connor’s side.

  “A mouse could trot on it, Mr. O’Connor,” he said.

  “You should provide the mouse, Big Michael,” murmured the Major-General, without lifting his head.

  “He’d be chasing the cat, General,” said Big Michael, and moved lightly towards the door. “Goodnight to ye all—and better luck tomorrow, with God’s help!”

  Art O’Connor sensed the prejudice behind the soldier’s suggestion about the mouse, but he gave no sign. All right, soldier man! Cross swords if you want to.

  They sampled their drinks, each in his or her own way, and Kelly Cuthbert reached for his briar pipe and leather pouch.

  “Care to try mine, sir?” invited the American. “A Virginian Cavendish.”

  “No, thanks. I smoke Empire grown.”

  “I have tried it,” said the American, and the drawl of his voice condemned it as unsmokable filth.

  “Good enough for me,” snapped the old soldier.

  “No doubt,” said Art O’Connor smoothly.

  The other looked at him with a cold yet choleric eye, turned to his whisky, took a quick sip and then a deeper, cleared his throat as if about to retort, and thought better of it.

  Major MacDonald grinned to himself. The General would be drawn like a badger in about two minutes, and deservedly so, but the exhibition would not be a pretty one. He rose to his long length, took hold of his crystal mug, came across to the fireplace, and leaned his shoulders against the high mantelpiece.

  “You fish, Mr.—O’Connor?”

  “Darn you for a wily Scot!” said O’Connor to himself. “I was getting his goat, too.” And aloud he said: “Some. The fishing is pretty slow about here, isn’t it?”

  “Not the best—just now. You fished in the States—California—New Mexico?”

  A bright man this! Was he guessing who Art O’Connor was? Margaid might have written. After that careless question he was drinking pale lager, not greatly interested.

  “Been fishing in Canada for a month,” Art O’Connor replied.

  “Canada?”

  “Yep. This very hour”—he looked at the ormolu clock under its glass dome behind MacDonald’s shoulder—“it will be only six o’clock over there, of course—but about this hour, two of my friends with a net across the Gatineau, and bricks holding it to the current—will be filling a canoe with twenty-pounders—if the game wardens do not catch them, which is part of the game.”

  “Poaching! I see!” remarked the General to no one in particular.

  “As ever was.” The American looked them over with a cool eye and smiled innocently. “I’ve just had a poached trout for supper. Which of you caught it?”

  Kate O’Brien laughed shortly, and it was a catching laugh for one who seemed almost saturnine. Art O’Connor looked at her accusingly interrogative, and she laughed again, shaking her head.

  “I did not do it, but I might,” she answered that look.

  “Why not? I do not blame any one. If life here means killing fish, why not the stick of gelignite or bag of quick-lime?”

  “These have been tried,” said the Major-General under forced calm, “and fish have been caught—and six months in jail as well. You try it, sir,” he urged.

  “I might not catch the reward, if I had a dollar or two handy.”

  The other was at once the Irishman. “Begad, sir! you cannot buy justice here as you can in America.”

  “Possibly not.” He turned to his tankard and took a steady pull. He was getting something in on the fire-eater, and would try a little more. But, when he laid down his tankard, he again found Kate O’Brien’s eye meeting his.

  “You are—Mr. O’Connor, are you not?”

  “Yes, Miss O’Brien.”

  “Home to Ireland?”

  “Hundred percent American, I’m glad to say.”

  “Irish descent?”

  “Probably. One can’t help that, can one?”

  She looked at him steadily. “One does not deserve it sometimes,” she said slowly.

  “I mean,” he explained in his easy drawl, “that Irish blood gets bred out of one in a generation or two—the dreaming stuff, the inhibitions, superstitions—all that Celtic twilight nonsense, you know?”

  “I know—and one becomes a hard-headed, hundred percent American.”

  A sudden unreasoning hostility sprang up between these two. Not a dumb hostility, but one that had to be as vocal as steel blade meeting steel blade in thrust and parry.

  “The dreaming stuff!” murmured Kate O’Brien. “Do Americans never dream?”

  “They wake up.”

  “To say their prayers to the Almighty Dollar, and grind the faces of the poor?”

  “Not to export cattle and wheat—while a million Irish starved.”

  “Touch!” She gave him the fencer’s salute. “You know your Irish history.”

  “My great-grandfather starved in black ’47.”

  “Because he was a dreamer? And the hundred percent American has not forgotten that. The Irish blood has not been quite bred out of you, Mr. O’Connor.”

  And so it went. By some subtle understanding they were no longer strangers to each other. They were frank, they were free, almost intimate, and oh! they were incisive. As Art O’Connor would put it in Americanese, “they got each other’s goat.” And though he had none the worse of it, deep down he was angry with himself for being drawn in drawing this vital dark woman.

  The others looked on and listened. Somehow, they were outside the discussion, outside the ring, not considered at all by these two, whose spirits seemed to wrestle apart with a warmth not entirely engendered by the argument. Archibald MacDonald looked through the amber of his glass and smiled to himself. They were giving each other a lesson—and one deserved it.

  And then the man, as if suddenly realizing the heat in himself, finished the bout suddenly by drinking off his stout, rising to his feet, slouching his horseman’s gait across the floor, and calling a careless goodnight from the door.

  The Major-General kicked a rug with his heel and chuckled. The heat had gone out of him, for some reason.

  “A cool customer, dammit! He gave you hell, Kate.”

  “He did quite well,” she said coolly.

  Her uncle, aware of her political leanings, was sarcastic.

  “Get Mickeen Oge and his Irregulars on to him.”

  “You couldn’t do that, Kate?” said Betty quickly.

  Kate O’Brien laughed. “Of course not. He got a trifle hot under the collar—and so did I. Did you see his Irish blood boiling? And I’ll make it boil some more. A hundred percent American, indeed!”

  “Begad!” cried the Major-General. “This damned hotel will not be fit to live in if you two get going.”

  “But he must have his lesson,” said Archibald MacDonald, “as a man who derides the blood in him. The only danger is that you’ll exasperate him into going so far in self-defense that he’ll attract the notice of your Red Girl. What?”

  Kate O’Brien looked at him quickly and her eyes stayed on his. He smiled.

  “Why not?” he inquired. “If he was even half serious, I never heard a worse renegade. It might be worth while testing his reactions.”

  She shook her head. “No, Major! Who would dare conjure up the dead? He would never go that far.”

  “He might.”

  “If he does—” said Kate O’Brien and stopped.

  Chapter II

  I

  ART O’CONNOR was patiently and methodically working a shrimp, foot by foot, down the length of the run just below the outflow from Lough Aonach.

  Behind him was a
steep short slope of grass with a low drystone wall at the head of it; and before him spread the shining shield of the lough, a league-wide reach into the recesses of Leaccamore Mountain. Below the run he was working was a still, long pool, fringed with white-splashed limestone, and the gray ledges at the bottom showed through the clearness of the water. For ten miles, down to Dunmore Bay, the river went thus—pool and run, pool and run—and to bring grilse and sea-trout up to the lough called for a high spring tide and plenty of rainwater.

  There had been a shower or two in the preceding night, and a spring tide too, and, though the water was not even colored, some game fish might have ventured the runs. And so Art O’Connor was doing all he knew.

  Mickeen Oge Flynn had been fishing too, and had moved down to the next run round a curve of the river. There he had grown tired of experimenting with lures—from prawn to what looked like an illegal stroke-all—and was now sitting on the top of a green bank on the edge of the foot-path below the drystone wall, smoking a contemplative pipe.

  Round the downstream curve came Betty Caverley, neat and slender in a dress of blue linen. Mickeen Oge took his pipe from his teeth, waved her away with it, and made as if to slide down the bank to his fishing-rod.

  “Stay where you are!” she ordered.

  “Very well so, ma’am,” he said meekly.

  She sat on the grass bank near him, her slim ankles down the slope, and fanned herself with a wide-leafed hat.

  “My, but it’s a warm evening! I walked right down to old Castle Aonach.”

  “And back again! Man, young lady, you English are the great people for walking without rhyme or reason!”

  “And you Irish,” she mimicked, “the great people for resting—”

  “With the finest reason handy at our elbow—same as now.”

  “Thank you, sor! Have you e’er a cigarette on you?”

  He held a match for her in his cupped hand, and looked down at the face that was flushed so delicately, so rarely; and her soft hair in the evening glow was a spun halo.

  “This is nice,” she murmured.

  He turned away and relit his pipe with the same match, and teeth and lips were clamped on the pipe-stem.

  Betty Caverley examined his profile. It was aquiline and clean, and chin and jaw were outlined strongly as he drew in the smoke. There was a shading of gray in the black wave of his hair, and over the close-set ear there was more than a shading. Yet he was not old. . . . But of course he had suffered. . . . She knew of his fight in the Black-and-Tan war and the civil war, of his internment, his terrible hunger-strike, his escape, his campaign in the hills. . . . But she could never get him to talk of those experiences. . . . A strange, calm, gentle man . . . in a strange land—and the strangest thing of all was that a man might be working humbly, and yet be one of his land’s chosen men. . . . A man chosen . . . ! And he could be so deeply silent. But she, she herself, could always make him talk and laugh and exhibit a gay spirit deep down.

  “Caught anything?” she inquired at last.

  “Might as well be fishing in Simple Simon’s pail.”

  “Did Art O’Connor?”

  “He will—if there’s a venturesome fish in the river at all. As persistent a man as ever I saw.”

  “He is.” Betty chuckled. “And doesn’t he keep the hotel alive? The night before last the General choked on his whisky when told that England was on her last legs when America intervened in the Great War.”

  “It was true for him,” said Mickeen Oge.

  “And that was not the worst. I was certain the old soldier would have a fit when taunted with Ireland’s lack of enthusiasm in the War. ‘Eighty thousand Irishmen died,’ he roared, ‘and every man a volunteer.’ ‘Better they died for Ireland,’ retorted the American.”

  “Good man!” said Mickeen Oge.

  “That is what Kate O’Brien said, and he bit off her nose. ‘The Irish who stayed at home,’ he told her, ‘weren’t so keen either, I guess. Had you ever ten thousand men under arms?’ ‘We hadn’t the arms,’ said Kate, her eyes flaming—you know how they flame. ‘Nor the heart,’ said he—but heart wasn’t the word he used.”

  “I know the word. Well?”

  “Kate was furious. ‘Perhaps that is why you are a hundred percent American,’ she lashed him. ‘We had Irish-Americans—like Owen Jordan—who were not afraid to fight. Were you?’ And he went white below the tan, and just looked at her.”

  “It was a hard thing to say,” said Mickeen Oge. “Kate shouldn’t have said it.”

  “She knew that, I think, for she went straight off to bed. But they were as bad as ever last night. They seem to lie in wait for each other and monopolize the talk.”

  “It sometimes begins that way,” said Mickeen Oge.

  “What?”

  “What is in your mind.”

  “You mean—love? But it does not always begin that way?”

  “It has always its own foolish way of beginning,” said Mickeen Oge, gravely cynical.

  They were silent for a space, and all round them was silence too. In a little while the thrushes would begin their evening song in the trees across the water, and the rooks go cawing homewards, but this hour, before the sun turned orange, all nature lay hushed, pressed under as by a taut wire. And the sheen on Lough Aonach was the sheen of a silken skin.

  “I suppose it is the loneliness here,” murmured the girl, “that makes one cynical—like—like wearing a mask.”

  “I am never lonely, small lady.”

  “Because you have something to live for?”

  His face hardened. She watched him, and, suddenly leaning to him, touched his arm.

  “I know, Michael—though you never tell me anything.”

  “I would not give you any dangerous secret to keep—dangerous to yourself, Betty girl.”

  “But I would keep it,” she cried.

  “You would.” There was quick warmth in his voice. “Never mind, Betts!” His voice changed and sombered. “It could be that it is all foolishness; it could be that it is only keeping the breath of life in the dying, so that one shall remember, for yet a little while, the days when one was—a man.”

  “It isn’t—it isn’t,” she comforted him, and then with sudden change. “But is there danger, too?”

  “A little—not much yet. A spy or two!” He looked at her with mock ferocity. “Even you—”

  She threw up her flaxen head and laughed. “You know I am not a spy!”

  “Why the questioning then? The greatest spy in the world!”

  “It is my right to question,” she proclaimed calmly. “I know you long enough. Don’t you remember teaching me to cast a line?”

  “The small girl that screeched blue murder when she hooked her first trout?”

  “And you said, ‘Wheesht, colleen! he won’t bite you.’ And he did.”

  “ ’Twas the hook pricked you. My! but you’ve grown a big girl since.”

  “And I’ve been here every summer. It would be nice in winter, too, I think.”

  “You would find it lonely.”

  “No—I love this place.” She looked dreamily across the lough, her hands clasped over her knee and her body bent like a bow. “I could live here all the time,” she said softly. “What do you do in winter, Michael young?”

  “Plenty. There is the shooting—and the farm—and a take-round amongst the friends, Hugh Forbes, and Sean Glynn, and Paddy Bawn—and my books all the time.”

  “Yes, you are a great reader. I have been through your library, you know—travel, literature, sport, chemistry, and a great ugly pile of dry theology.”

  “I am known as a spoilt priest—what the Scots call a ‘Stickit minister.’ ”

  “I know, Michael.”

  “And indeed,” he went on gloomily. “I might join an Order yet—if Big Michael bids me. It is the final refuge.”

  “Ah! you are lonely, then. I knew it.”

  “Not often, girl. But loneliness has its savor too.
It is the source of all fine dreaming.”

  She frowned. “You would join an Order if your uncle bid you?”

  “Why not?”

  “But he wouldn’t?”

  “No.” He glanced at her obliquely. “Just now he is bent on choosing a wife for me.”

  She looked at him wide-eyed. “Oh, Michael! You would never let another man choose a wife for you?”

  “The custom of the country.”

  “And all wrong. But I think you should marry, Michael,” she said seriously.

  “ ‘Down to Gehenna or up to the Throne, he fares the fastest who fares alone.’ ”

  “And Kipling is all wrong, too,” she said defiantly. “If a woman cared for a man—and understood him—she would be a solace and a comfort in any crisis—in all crises.”

  “You’ve been reading my ‘The Iron Heel.’ Very well so! If I change my mind I’ll put it up to Big Michael. At the present moment he has a girl in his eye for me—and she is not a bad girl—as girls go.”

  He got slowly to his feet, but she remained seated, staring across the lough at the blue bulk of Leaccamore. Yes, Big Michael would choose a plump country girl with a dowry—and the dowry would be more important than the girl—and Michael young would not be happy—he couldn’t be—and she herself would not come here any more. . . . She sighed and made to rise, a little listlessly, to her feet.

  And at that moment a great shout echoed down the limestone banks.

  “Saints-in-glory!” cried Mickeen Oge. “He’s into a fish or he’s in himself. Come on, Betts!”

  He ran full speed along by the drystone wall, and, quickly as he ran, the girl came up to his shoulder.