The Best of Frank O'Connor

by Frank O'Connor

  Keown cast an amused glance at his companion out of the corner of his eye, and they trudged on again in silence.

  III

  Five times that day they got the alarm and had to take to their heels. Three times it resulted in desultory fighting. One bout lasted a full three-quarters of an hour; it was hard, slogging, ditch-to-ditch fighting, with one holding back the enemy while the other got into position at the farther end of the field. The last alarm came while they were having tea in a farmer’s house. There was no suspicion of treachery, and the soldiers, as unprepared as they, had walked up the boreen to the house for tea. The two friends left in haste by the back door, Keown hugging to his breast a floury half-cake snatched from the table in his hurry. The cake had cost him dear, because in securing it he had forgotten his hat (the hat which, as he assured Jim Hickey, he had earmarked as a present for one of his wives). They halved the hot cake and devoured it, regretting the fresh tea upon the table, and the mint of butter now being consumed by the soldiers.

  But at last, drawing on to nightfall, they seemed to have left pursuit behind them and took their bearings. Hickey recognized the place. It was close to Mourneabbey and a few miles away lived an old aunt of his. He suggested sleeping there for the night, and Keown jumped at the idea, even consenting to put away his rifle and equipment until morning, lest their appearance should frighten the old woman.

  It was darkening when they reached her house, and having stowed their rifles away in a dry wall, they made their way up the long winding boreen to the top of the hill. A sombre maternal peace enveloped the whole countryside; the fields were a rich green that merged into grey and farther off into a deep, shining purple. A stream flashed like a trail of white fire across the landscape. The beeches along the lane nodded down a withered leaf or two upon their heads, and the glossy trunks glowed a faint silver under the darkness of their boughs. A dog ran to meet them barking noisily.

  The house was a long, low, whitewashed building with a four-sided roof, and outhouses on every side. The two men were greeted by Hickey’s aunt, an old woman, doubled up with rheumatism, who beamed delightedly upon him through a pair of dark spectacles. They sat down to tea in the kitchen, a long whitewashed room with an open hearth, where the kettle swung from a chain over the fire. Everything in the house was simple and old-fashioned, the open hearth, the bellows one blows by turning a wheel, the churn, the two pictures that hung on opposite walls, one of Robert Emmet and the other of Parnell. Old-fashioned, but comfortable, with a peculiar warmth when she drew the shutters to and lit the lamp. And homely, when she pulled her chair up to the table and questioned Hickey about mother and sisters, tush-tushed playfully his being ‘on the run’ (he said nothing of the rifles hidden in the wall or their experience during the day) and joked light-heartedly as old people will to whom realities are no longer such, but shadows that drift daily farther and farther away as their hold upon life slackens.

  Parnell had been her last great love, and for her the hope of Irish independence had died with him. Hickey was moved by this strange isolation of hers, moved since now more than at any other time what had happened in those far-off days of elections, brass bands and cudgels seemed remote and insubstantial. And so they talked, each failing to understand the other.

  Meanwhile, Keown kept one eye upon a young woman who moved silently about the kitchen as he took his meal. She was a country girl who helped the old lady with her housework. Her appearance had a peculiar distinction that was almost beauty. Very straight and slender she was with a broad face that tapered to a point at the chin, a curious unsmiling mouth, large, sensitive nostrils, and wide-set, melancholy eyes. Her hair was dull gold, and was looped up in a great heap at the poll. Her untidy clothes barely concealed a fine figure, and Keown watched with the appreciation of a connoisseur the easy motion of her body, so girlish yet so strong.

  His attention was distracted from her by the appearance of a bottle of whiskey, and, ignoring Hickey’s warning glance, he filled a stiff glass for himself and sipped it with unction. For a week past he had not been allowed to touch drink; this was one thing Hickey insisted on with fanatical zeal – no bad example must be given to the men.

  When the two women had left the room to prepare a bed for their visitors, Keown said, leaning urgently across the table:

  ‘Jim, I give you fair warning that I’m going to fall in love with that girl.’

  ‘You are not.’

  ‘I am, I tell you. And what’s more she’s going to fall in love with me, you old celibate! So I’m staying on. I’ve been virtuous too long. A whole week of it! My God, even the Crusaders—’

  ‘You’re drinking too much of that whiskey. Put it away!’

  ‘Ah, shut up you, Father James! Aren’t we on vacation, anyhow?’

  When Hickey’s aunt came back she led off the conversation again, but Hickey carefully watched his companion make free with the whiskey and cast bolder and bolder eyes at the girl, and, as he leaned across to fill himself a third glass, snatched the bottle away. That was enough, he said, forcing Keown off with one hand and with the other holding the bottle, and he remained deaf to Keown’s assurances that he would take only a glass, a thimbleful, a drop, as he was tired and wanted to go to bed, as well as the old woman’s pleading on his behalf that no doubt the young gentleman had had a tiring day and needed a little glass to cheer him up. Hickey could be obstinate when he chose, and he chose then; so Keown went off to bed, sticking out his tongue at him behind the old woman’s back, and blinking angrily at the sleep that closed his eyelids in his own despite.

  Hickey felt as if he too were more than half asleep, but he remained up until his aunt’s husband returned from Mallow. He heard the pony and trap drive into the cobbled yard, and at last the old man entered, his lean brown face flushed with the cold air. The wind was rising, he said cheerfully, and sure enough it seemed to Hickey that he heard a first feeble rustle of branches about the house. ‘God sends winds to blow away the falling leaves,’ the old man said oracularly. ‘Time little Sheela was in bed,’ said his wife. The girl called Sheela smiled, and in her queer silent way disappeared into a little room off the kitchen. ‘That’s another terrible rebel,’ the old woman went on, ‘though you wouldn’t think it of her and the little she have to say. She was never a prouder girl than when she made the bed for the pair of ye tonight. “You never thought,” says I to her, “I had such a fine handsome soldier nephew?” … Ah, God, ah, God, we weren’t so wild in our young days!’ ‘Happy days!’ said her husband nodding and spitting into the ashes. ‘But not so wild,’ she repeated, ‘not so wild!’ She brewed fresh tea, and then they sat into the fire and talked family history for what seemed to Hickey an intolerably long time. Once or twice he felt his head sag and realized that he had dropped off momentarily to sleep. It was his aunt who did most of the talking. Occasionally the old man collected his wits for some ponderous sentence, and having made the most of it nodded and smiled quietly with intense satisfaction. He had a brown, bony, innocent face and a short grey beard.

  At last he rose and saying solemnly, ‘Even the foolish animal must sleep,’ went off to bed. Hickey followed him, leaving his aunt to quench the light. Even with Keown in it the house seemed spiritually still, abstracted, and lonely, and thinking of the danger of raids and arrests which their presence brought to it, he half-wished he had not come there. For worlds he would not have disturbed that old couple, spending their last days in childless, childish innocence, without much hope or fear.

  He stood at the window of their room before striking a match. The room was a sort of lean- to above the servant’s room downstairs, and smelt queerly of apples and decay. The window was low, very low, and he stood back from it. It gave but a faint light and outside he could distinguish nothing but the shadows of some trees grouped about the gable end. The wind, growing louder, pealed through them, and they creaked faintly, while the slightest of slight sounds, as of distant drumming, seemed to emanate from the boards and windo
w-frame of the little bedroom. As he lit the candle and began to undress Keown stirred in the bed, and, raising his fat, pugnacious face and squint eye out of a tumble of white linen and dark hair, said thickly but with sombre indignation, ‘In spite of you I’ll have that girl. Yes, my f-f-friend, in – spite—of – you—!’

  ‘Ah, go to sleep like a good man!’ said Hickey crossly, and clad only in a light summer singlet, slipped into bed beside him.

  IV

  The wind! That was it, the wind! He could not have slept for long before it woke him. It blew with a sort of clumsy precision, rising slowly in great crescendos that shook the window-panes and seemed to reverberate through the whole ramshackle house. The window was bright so there was no rain. ‘God sends winds to blow away the falling leaves,’ he thought with a smile.

  He lay back and watched the window that seemed to grow brighter as he looked at it, and suddenly it became clear to him that his life was a melancholy, aimless life, and that all this endless struggle and concealment was but so much out of an existence that would mean little anyhow. He had left college two years before when the police first began hunting for him, and he doubted now whether it would ever be in his power to return. He was a different man, and most of the ties he had broken then he would never be able to resume. If they won, of course, the army would be open to him, but the army he knew would not content him long, for soldiering at best was only servitude, and he had lived too desperately to endure the hollow routine of barrack life. Besides, he was a scientist, not a soldier. And if they lost? (He thought bitterly of what Keown had suggested that afternoon and his own reply.) Of course, they mustn’t lose, but suppose they did? What was there for him then? America? That was all – America! And his mother, who had worked so hard to educate him and had hoped so much of him, his mother would die, having seen him accomplish nothing, and he would be somewhere very far away. What use would anything be then? And it was quite clear to him that he had realized all this that very morning – or was it the morning before? Above Glenmanus Wood, just at the moment when the door of that old house opened, and a girl dressed in white appeared, a girl to whom it all meant nothing, nothing but that a column of irregulars was somewhere in the neighbourhood and being chased off by soldiers. At that very moment he had felt something explode within him at the inhumanity, the coldness, of it all. He had wanted to wave to her; what was that but the desire for some human contact? And then the presence of immediate danger and the necessity for flight had driven it out of his mind, but now it returned with all the dark power of nocturnal melancholy surging up beneath it; the feeling of his own loneliness, his own unimportance, his own folly.

  ‘What use is it all?’ he asked himself aloud, and the wind answered with a low, long-ebbing sound, a murmur, hushed and sustained, that seemed to penetrate the old house and become portion of its secret grief.

  He felt his companion stir beside him in the bed. Then Keown sat up. He sat there for a long while silent, and Hickey, fearing the intrusion of his speech lay still and closed his eyes. At last Keown spoke, and his voice startled Hickey by its note of vibrant horror.

  ‘Jim!’

  ‘I mustn’t answer,’ thought Hickey.

  ‘Jim!’ A hand felt about the bed for him and closed on his arm.

  ‘Jim, Jim! Wake up! Listen to me!’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Do you hear it?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Listen!’

  ‘Do you mean the wind?’

  ‘Jim!’

  ‘Oh, do for Heaven’s sake go to sleep!’

  ‘Listen to that, Jim!’

  ‘I’m listening!’

  ‘Oh, my God! There it is again!’

  The wind. It kept up that steady murmur that filled the old house like the bellows filling an organ. Then a clear, startling note rose above the light monotone, and the boards creaked, and the windows strained, and the trees shook with the noise of a breaking wave.

  ‘Jim, I say!’

  ‘Well, what is it?’

  ‘Christ Almighty, man, I can’t stand it!’

  Keown tossed off the bedclothes, fell back upon the pillows and lay naked with his arms covering his eyes. Hickey started up.

  ‘What’s wrong with you?’

  ‘It’s them, Jim! It’s them!’ His voice half-rose into a scream.

  ‘Shut up, do, or you’ll wake the whole house! Is that what we came here for? Come on, out with it! What are you snivelling about?’

  ‘I tell you they’re outside. Don’t you hear them, blast you?’

  Hickey’s hand closed tightly over his mouth.

  ‘Be quiet! Be quiet! There are old people in this house. I won’t have them disturbed I tell you.’

  ‘I won’t be quiet. Listen!’

  The wind was rising again. Once it dropped at all it took a long time to mobilize its scattered fury. Hickey could feel the other man grow rigid with fear under his hands.

  ‘Listen! Oh, Jim, what am I to do?’

  ‘For the last time I warn you. If you don’t keep quiet, so help me, God, I’ll smash you up! You’ve drunk too much, that’s what’s wrong with you.’

  ‘Oh! oh!’

  ‘Careful now!’

  It was coming. The wind rose into a triumphant howl and Keown struggled frantically. He dragged at Hickey’s left hand which tried to silence him, and his mouth had formed a shriek when the other’s fist descended with a blow that turned it suddenly to a gasp of pain.

  ‘Now, will that keep you quiet?’

  Hickey struck again.

  ‘Oh, for Jesus’ sake, Jimmie, don’t beat me! I’m not telling lies, it’s them all right.’

  He was sobbing quietly. The first blow must have cut his lip for Hickey felt the blood trickle across his left hand.

  ‘Will you be quiet then?’

  ‘I’ll be quiet, Jimmie. Only don’t beat me, don’t beat me!’

  ‘I won’t beat you. Are you cut?’

  ‘Jimmie!’

  ‘Are you cut? I said.’

  ‘Hold my hand, Jimmie!’

  Hickey took his hand, and seeing him quieter lay down again beside him. After a few moments Keown’s free hand rose and felt his arm and shoulder, even his face, for company. A queer night’s rest, thought Hickey ruefully.

  For him, at any rate, there was no rest. His companion would lie quiet for a little time, gasping and moaning when the wind blew strongly; but then some more violent blast would come that shook the house, or whirled a loose slate crashing on the cobbles of the yard, and it would begin all over again.

  ‘Jim, they’re after me!’

  ‘Be quiet, man! For the good God’s sake be quiet!’

  ‘I hear them! I hear them talking in the yard. They’re coming for me. Jim, where in Christ’s name is my gun? Quick! Quick!’

  ‘There’s nobody in the yard, I tell you, and it’s nothing but a gale of wind. You and your gun! You’re a nice man to trust with a gun! Bawling your heart out because there’s a bit of a wind blowing!’

  ‘Ah, Jim, Jim, it’s all up with me! All up, all up!’

  It was just upon dawn when, from sheer exhaustion, he fell asleep. Hickey rose quietly for fear of disturbing him, pulled on his riding-breeches and coat, and, having lit a cigarette, sat beside the window and smoked. The wind had died down somewhat, and, with the half-light that struggled through the flying clouds above the tree-tops, its rage seemed to count no longer. A grey mist hugged the yard below, and covered all but the tops of the trees. As it cleared, minute by minute, he perceived all about him broken slates, with straw and withered leaves that rustled when the wind blew them about. The mist cleared farther, and he saw the trees looking much barer than they had looked the day before, with broken branches and the new day showing in great, rugged patches between them. The beeches, silver-bright with their sinewy limbs, seemed to him like athletes stripped for a contest. Light, a cold, wintry, forbidding light suffused the chill air. The birds were singing.

&nb
sp; At last he heard a door open and shut. Then the bolts on the back door were drawn; he heard a heavy step in the yard, and Sheela passed across it in the direction of one of the outhouses, carrying a large bucket. Her feet, in men’s boots twice too big for her, made a metallic clatter upon the cobbles. Her hair hung down her back in one long plait of dull gold, and her body, slender as a hound’s, made a deep furrow for it as she walked.

  He rose silently, pulled on his stockings, and tiptoed down the creaking stairs to the kitchen. It was almost completely dark, but for the mist of weak light that came through the open door. When he heard her step outside he went to meet her and took a bucket of turf from her hand. They scarcely spoke. She asked if he had been disturbed by the wind and he nodded, smiling. Then she knelt beside the fireplace and turned the little wheel of the bellows. The seed of fire upon the hearth took light and scattered red sparks about his stockinged feet where he stood, leaning against the mantelpiece. He watched her bent above it, the long golden plait hanging across her left shoulder, the young pointed face taking light from the new-born flame, and as she rose he took her in his arms and kissed her. She leaned against his shoulder in her queer silent way, with no shyness. And for him in that melancholy kiss an ache of longing was kindled, and he buried his face in the warm flesh of her throat as the kitchen filled with the acrid smell of turf; while the blue smoke drifting through the narrow doorway was caught and whirled headlong through grey fields and dark masses of trees upon which an autumn sun was rising.

  MACHINE-GUN CORPS IN ACTION

  I

  WHEN SEAN NELSON and I were looking for a quiet spot in the hills for the brigade printing press we thought of Kilvara, one of the quietest of all the mountain hamlets we knew. And as we drove down the narrow road into it, we heard the most ferocious devil’s fusilade of machine-gun fire we had heard since the troubles began.

  Nelson slipped the safety-catch of his rifle and I held the car at a crawl. Not that we could see anything or anybody. The firing was as heavy as ever, but no bullet seemed to come near us, and for miles around the vast, bleak, ever-changing screen of hillside with its few specks of cottages was as empty as before.