Bloodstock and Other Stories

by Margaret Irwin

  He hurriedly pulled on his clothes, hoping she would not speak, but he heard it coming, the gasp, the furious, frightened whisper, for Baby was already falling asleep again—“You’re not going with them, Jim!”

  “Fine sort of a doctor I’d be if I didn’t!”

  “You, you can’t cross this sea in a curragh, and at night.”

  “They’ve done it. And it’s getting lighter every minute.”

  She tried being reasonable.

  “Jim, why should you go? The nurse is there, she’s been in this place fifteen years, long before they ever had a doctor at all—and I wish to God they’d never begun to have one!” She broke out in a cry at the monstrous trick fate had played them. “In another fortnight you’ll be gone, you’ll be taking up your job at Mullingar, doing far more useful and important work in just a fortnight from now. Think, Jim—there’s your invention—”

  “That may be,” interrupted O’Reilly hastily, “but it’s not a fortnight from now, and I’m still here and not at Mullingar.”

  The obtuse male logic seemed to have missed the whole point.

  “In another fortnight you’d be safe,” she screamed under her breath, still in a whisper because of Baby, striking her clenched knuckles together.

  “Ah, Nancy my jewel, you can’t tell! We might all get smashed up in the car going to Mullingar,” he consoled her tenderly.

  Clearly she’d better get back to reasonable argument.

  “You said Nurse was far more use as a midwife than you’d ever be.”

  “They don’t think so, or they wouldn’t have come for me. They’re afraid, don’t you see? If a doctor can’t do anything else, his coming helps to give confidence.”

  Distracted at being unable to find his oilskins in the cupboard (“Doesn’t he know they always stay downstairs? but I’ll not be the means of his finding them!” thought Nancy angrily), he repeated solemnly an axiom from his medical student days in Dublin, “The doctor’s first duty is to allay fear.”

  “Ah, quit your copy-books! What of my fear? If you are lost in the storm, what of me and Baby? Isn’t your first duty to us?” Her face was pinched grey by terror, unrecognizable, an agonized shrew. “If—you—go—” she said, still in that shrill unearthly whisper, “I shall hate you for ever.”

  He took her face between his hands and looked down at it. “You lie, my darling,” he told her steadily. “If I don’t go, you’ll despise me for ever.”

  She crumpled up, stumbled down to her knees, clinging to him desperately, her face pressed against him, a shaking heap of sobbing. “Oh, Jim, I love you, I love you, I shall die if I lose you.”

  Then she struggled up again, sniffing and blowing her nose. “Your oilskins are downstairs,” she said in her most practical voice. “I’ll get them out while you put your bag together.”

  She carried the candle downstairs before him and got the oilskins while he went into the tiny dispensary room for his bag, and waited an eternity till he came out again into the passage. He looked very responsible and serious, thinking only of what he had to do, and somehow very young and very like his infant son upstairs.

  As he opened the door she ran after him and clung to his arm. “You were right,” she sobbed, “I love you for going.”

  He kissed her and went.

  As he met the whipping wind and a gust of rain and the two men waiting for him outside, he felt exhaustion and great relief. Whatever danger he went through tonight, he had escaped the worst. He was striding down to the sea by the side of those two, and there was no going back.

  “Have you any sort of hurricane lamp in the curragh?” he asked.

  “We had, in the bottom of the boat, but a sea we shipped put it out.”

  “I’ve got an electric torch that won’t get wet,” said the Doctor. He proudly produced the Woolworth treasure from Dublin, and as they rounded the bluff of the hill he flashed it on for a second. The patch of light chiefly showed the darkness beyond, an immensity of space out of which the wind and rain and the roaring sea were driving straight at the three men.

  “That’s a great contraption!” said Sweeney’s brother. It was the first utterance he had made, startled out of him by his awe at the marvel of science. O’Reilly saw that the Woolworth miracle had already helped his reputation as a medicine-man. If he ever got to the island to use it!

  “How did you miss the rocks in the dark?” he asked.

  “Sure, we know them, sir,” said Sweeney.

  They had to shout, for they were already meeting the full blast of the wind that swept down the channel between the mainland and the islands; the sea on this piece of the north-western coast of Ireland had eaten in and out of all that wild shore, separating long strips of low green rocky grass-land and sheer rocks that shot up out of the sea, towering to a steeple-sharp summit five hundred feet high.

  The men fought their way down to the little harbour and the stone slip, slimy and treacherous with seaweed, misted with falling spray, that sheltered the curragh. It was bobbing up and down on the waves as light as a cork, a long black canoe built of tarred canvas stretched over a hollow frame of wickerwork, and the whole so light that one man could carry it easily on his back. Sweeney had made this one with his hands, as his forebears had made them. The Doctor stood looking down at the flimsy thing, like a long black slug, and beyond it that restless roaring sea, streaked and sprayed with foam in the unearthly glimmering of light that comes just before dawn.

  Death and life were astir at this turn of the night, waiting there in the changing darkness, a life beginning and perhaps a life ending, perhaps more than one life ending.

  Well, he had chosen it, he was here, and the two brothers were getting into the curragh. It rocked like a cockle-shell, the spray beating up in their faces till they worked its stern in to the side of the slip, steadying it for the Doctor, who dropped in very gingerly and sat down in the stern, nursing his bag between his knees.

  He, too, had rowed in curraghs in his holidays on the west coast since he was a boy, but that did not lessen the outrage to his feelings at this moment, that all the treasures of modern science now encased in himself should have to be entrusted to this barbarically fragile little anachronism. For more than two thousand years these curraghs had been used along this coast and not an inch of their pattern altered.

  They rounded the slip and jerked forward under the shelter of the jagged mainland and the near-lying islands. In these comparatively quiet waters there was nothing for O’Reilly to do but sit as still as he could in this jolting, staggering shell of a boat with the rain slapping his face, trickling down the upturned collar of his oilskin, hissing on the water all round him. He stared in front of him at the islands that rose up over the boat one after the other like vast sleeping whales, the edge of their base outlined in stormy white from the waves that broke all along their coasts.

  Some of them were inhabited only by sheep and only for a few summer months; some of them had two or three fishermen’s huts on them; and on one or two were majestic-looking stone ruins, but quite modern, of curing-houses that had been built at the end of the nineteenth century when the herring fishery had been at its height and millions of fish had been cured and salted here every summer on the spot. But incalculable are the caprices of the herring in May, and of small avail is it to build stone walls for its housing; of late years, those profitable summer visitors had decided to give the north-west coasts of Ireland a miss and roamed elsewhere, no one knew where, and so the curing-stations had fallen into ruin, and their roofless walls now jutted up into the wan grey of this stormy dawn, more tragically forsaken than the ruin of any Norman castle.

  But now there rose a worse portent for the Doctor than those relics of a vanished trade. Just ahead of them the bow of a wrecked Greek merchant ship, like the head of an immense sea monster with portholes for eyes, stuck out of the sea, conveniently, for it showed where the hidden rocks were that she had foundered on nearly ten years ago. What a Greek trader had been d
oing up this remote and dangerous channel no one had known; along the coast they said she had done it on purpose for the insurance money, for “there was no loss of life, and I never like the look of that,” a boatman had once observed to O’Reilly.

  The other wrecks hereabouts had been honest enough, God knows—a big ship dashed to pieces on the terrible cliffs on the north side of Arranmore, the largest island, just after the lighthouse there had been put out of action by a wave that had climbed the rock, six hundred feet high, and smashed the inches-thick glass of the lantern. That showed what the sea could do to you here.

  But it was of no such winter storm that O’Reilly was now thinking as they rounded that skeleton ship where the waves were breaking and pouring in rivers through the hollow sockets of its portholes—nor even of the summer storm that raged tonight—but of what the sea had done here, just at this point of the motor boat’s regular passage between Arranmore and the mainland, when it was as still and calm as a lough in the hollow of the hills.

  For the disaster that had made the deepest impression on the minds of the countryside, and indeed of the whole country and of foreign parts as far away as London, had been the wreck of the motor boat last November when it had crossed to Arranmore in a thick evening fog, taking over three families of men and boys and one or two girls who had been working away in Scotland through the summer, and with them a few of the women of the families who had crossed to the mainland to welcome them home.

  Great rejoicing there had been over the good wages earned that would keep them all safely through the barren winter; they were in a hurry to get to their homes, and what did it matter that the boat was over-crowded since the sea was so still, and what did a bit of fog matter when Dan the boatman knew the passage from the mainland like the back of his hand?

  They were all singing when they went on board, and singing they disappeared into the night. Only one small boy among them all was ever seen alive again; he was still clinging to the capsized boat next morning, and all he could tell afterwards was that the fog had been so black that none of them could see each other’s faces, but that there had been no thought of danger, they were all still singing when the boat had lurched on to a rock and rolled over. The body of a girl of fifteen had been washed up, with the setting-pins still in her hair to keep in the waves that a hairdresser had put in for her in Scotland, and all over the little close-waved head were myriads of tiny bright shells.

  The Doctor found himself thinking of that now, perhaps because of his last sight of Nancy with the setting-pins all over her fair, back-flung head as she had looked up at him in that furious entreaty.

  He did not want to think of Nancy; they were coming out from the shelter of the islands, meeting the heavier waves from the open sea, and there was nothing he could do but sit still and think, think, while the slow dead chill of the water that had found its way down through his oilskin began to creep along his warm skin. There was nothing he could do while the two men before him bent their labouring backs over the oars, digging with a quick short stroke into that turbid water.

  It made him feel guilty to think of Nancy, and that made him angry, divided in his mind, longing to feel free and fearless to seek adventure as when he had been a boy, to enjoy the danger of this moment shared with these two men.

  The waves were coming huger and blacker now, each one rearing into a wall of water above the tiny boat, looking as though it must submerge them. But the men threw a wary glance over their shoulders to keep the bows up into the wind on the crest of the wave, and the curragh went wriggling up it like a spider, up into the teeth of the wind again, then dropped terrifyingly down on the other side with a spatter and hiss of spray, down into that strange shelter of the hollow trough between the waves.

  Once let them break on the boat and the three of them were done for, but each time as by a miracle the two men, one behind the other, each plying his heavy single oar, with never a word from either, managed to climb to the top in time, and ship no more than a slat of spray.

  The Doctor was kept busy bailing, and glad of it, for his angry thoughts were running round like caged rats. They had veered now like a broken compass, and he saw that Nancy had been right. What did this woman’s life on her desolate island matter, compared with what his life was going to be? Ten to one she would die now in any case, and what help that her man should go down the same night in the sea, and the child, if it survived, be born to no parents?

  But it was he himself that mattered. Why should he be involved in their disaster? Nancy had been right. He was going to his new job in a fortnight, his work there would help many lives, but that would only be a beginning.

  He knew now that he had it in him to be a great doctor, as many Irishmen have it in them to be, ever since they were great priests in the palmy days of priesthood, a kindred art.

  He had begun at the lowest rung of the ladder as a dispensary doctor in this utterly out-of-the-way spot, but he believed he was on the track of a cure for cancer; it would need years of working out, but soon he would have his own laboratory, he would give every inch of himself towards this discovery. To lift the load of terror from the minds of millions who suffer under that shadow, though often for no reason (and this seemed to him the darkest part of the shadow), to have each one of them able to say with certainty, “Cancer can now be cured’—this would lift a greater load from mankind than even the fear of war. It was characteristic of O’Reilly that he thought even more of removing the fear than the cause of it.

  And here he was in this shuddering insect of a boat, throwing his precious secret to the yawning waves, to say nothing of his body to the crabs—and all for the bare chance of bringing another unwanted brat into a starved life that it would have to exert every muscle to keep.

  Nancy had indeed been right when she had cried out to him to think of his research; that was why he had interrupted her so quickly, for if he had thought of it he might never have gone.

  Well, he had gone, and now, too late, he was thinking of it.

  But just as he was certain it was too late, the waves grew less, he could see the blown guttering light of a lamp ahead of them and the long dark bulk of the land which had begun to shelter their passage. It shaped itself into a dim grey line of cottages close down by the water’s edge, and he knew they had reached Inishkerra.

  A lamp, flickering feebly, had been hung on the edge of the harbour, but the grey light that had crept up under the skin of the dark was showing everything more clearly now; he could even see the cage-like wicker frames of the lobster pots, drawn up above high water and scattered all over the beach, that was Inishkeera’s sole occupation now that the herrings had deserted them and half their fields had been washed away in last winter’s storms. Still, the lobster trade was a good one, a man got as much as nine-pence on the mainland for a large lobster, and there were plenty to be had as a rule.

  So the little row of white-faced houses still clung to Inishkeera, perilously near it seemed to the edge of the sea, to snatch a living from its jaws whenever they did not open too wide.

  It was an easy matter now in these quieter waters for the men to pull the curragh in under the lee of the stone slip where the lamp threw its yellow flicker against those cold creeping fingers of white light now showing through the clouds. O’Reilly was astonished to notice how little the light had changed; it could not have been more than half an hour since they had left the mainland.

  The wind was much quieter on this side.

  They picked their way through seaweed and lobster pots to one of the cottages that stood a little back from the others. It had smoke coming out of a square wooden box that had been stuck into the roof by way of a chimney, much as a child might finish a toy house (“Here’s a box, that will do for the chimney’).

  The Sweeneys opened the door and O’Reilly followed them in. The first thing he saw was the face of the district nurse like a startled full moon.

  “Praise God you’re here, Doctor!” she exclaimed, in a shocke
d voice. “We’ll pull her through now surely, Sweeney. But it was a terrible risk you took, Doctor. I’d never have let them, if I’d known. Give him a sup of hot tea, mother, before he does a thing else.”

  “Ah, what risk?” said Sweeney’s brother, offended for their seamanship. “And if it were, what odds but that we’d be in heaven the sooner?”

  The Doctor put down his bag and peeled off his wet oilskins, blinking against the glare of the oil lamp on the table and the sudden suffocating heat after the wind and rain outside, and the smoke from the turf fire that coiled about the blackened pointed rafters.

  Through it he saw a drawn grey face in a bed built like a box into the wall, a face that seemed made up only of lines of pain, “a spider-web,” was what he said to himself, too dazed to know what he was thinking in this first moment of standing still and steady in a world that no longer rose and roared and hurled itself upon him dizzily.

  Rafters without a ceiling, a fire without a fireplace—from the sods of turf burning on the stone flags in the corner under that wooden box stuck in the roof, an old woman fished up an enormous teapot, blackened with long standing by the fire, and poured him out a cup of tea as red as jam, as thick as soup, as strong as poison (“which it is, and haven’t I worn my tongue out telling them so!’) and as sweet as seven or eight lumps of dull beet sugar could make it, dropped in by the crone’s gnarled black fingers before he could stop her.

  He had to taste the stew out of politeness, thanking her, and was startled by the look that met his as he did so. Such deep ferocity of purpose burned in those tiny sunken eyes as they fastened on him that his numbed sense of safety vanished, and he suddenly felt himself in greater danger than he had done this evening—greater danger than he had withstood during that nightmare passage in the frail curragh across the turbulent sea.