Dermot missed the end of Black Tom. He arrived in time to see the great body lying by the side of the grave into which it was quickly bundled. The great scowling beast looked less terrible in death. His eyes were shut, his mouth open, the white teeth showing in an expression of perplexity—pathetic rather than savage. His death had been savage enough. Mr. Gray had stalked and shot him, from behind a tree, in among the cabbages. The shot was clean and true. Mr. Caggen vowed he saw it hit the ground on the other side. The big brute fought like a tiger, tearing up the soil for a circle of six feet around: but he could neither rise nor run: he could only struggle furiously, blindly, without purpose. It took a second bullet, and a third, to still the body that leaped and pulsed like a mad furry engine.
In some way that he could not explain, Dermot was sorry to see the limp thick form shovelled into its ignominious grave by the dungheap. Soft in death, its teeth showing beneath its twisted lip, it seemed no more than a poor ordinary cat, stricken down suddenly for no cause that it could understand. There was something furtive, almost cowardly in the uneasy haste with which they huddled and stamped it out of sight. Only just in time, too. Grandpapa appeared, his dark blue cloth cap pulled down over his nose, sniffing the air of the garden, as was his wont.
“Th’ould gintleman, sir,” said Mr. Caggen out of the side of his mouth.
With a whistle of surprise and complicity, Mr. Gray put the elder trees between him and the garden’s lawful owner, dodging him round the little greenhouse, and getting his rifle back into the house unseen.
Lord Spencer ranged for several days longer. His death, when he met it, was fierce and splendid, calling for no pity. Lean and raking, a greyhound, a racehorse of a cat, he stalked in aristocratic nonchalance where his colleague crouched and ran. Lord Spencer disdained his enemies. He did not spit and growl, like Black Tom. He looked with haughty hostility out of pale lemon eyes, and passed on his way, barely deigning to hurry. He seemed to know that the threat was angry air, that the flung stone would miss him. His appearances had not the apparent criminal purpose of Black Tom’s. Yet, for all his languor, he was hard to catch. Whether he noticed his rival’s disappearance, or whether his instinct warned him, he was not to be found when Mr. Gray stalked the garden for him. This was the more provoking, as Grandpapa had a way of coming out, just when they thought he was deep into the Irish Times, for all the world as if he suspected something. The rifle had to be concealed in a number of unlikely places.
But the chance came at last. At the end of a glorious, long, hot day, Lord Spencer woke from sleep, which he had discreetly enjoyed, at full stretch, on the roof of a little outhouse by the orchard wall. He had been invisible all day, high above people’s heads, and surrounded by trees. Waking with a vague sense of loss, he found that the wheeling sun had left him. To enjoy its last mellow rays, he must move forward a little, and sit up. This he did, and would still have been invisible, had not Dermot, climbing in a tree some fifty yards away, caught sight of his ginger fur among the leaves.
Quickly Dermot descended. It took five minutes to get his father out, and he dreaded lest the enemy should have taken the alarm and fled. But no, there he was, sitting splendidly upright on the apex of the little roof, blinking sleepily into the sun. On his right, the roof sloped a little way into a sycamore tree, at the top of the orchard. On his left, it was soon lost in a great elderberry, which overhung far out into the garden proper, threatening to push out the loose top of the old crumbling wall. At the foot of the wall, deep under the trees’ branches, stood a vast tub, from which Mr. Caggen filled his cans to water that side of the garden.
The tree in which Dermot had climbed was too distant for a shot, and from the ground Lord Spencer was still invisible. Hastily and stealthily, Dermot’s father brought up a high garden chair, and placed it carefully in a flower bed, about fifteen yards from the wall. Then, moving as slowly as he dared, he mounted it—and found himself face to face with his quarry.
If he saw him, the great cat did not move. The lazy, benign sunshine, the mellow gold of the late afternoon rayed him round ; the sleepy buzz of bees rose from the garden, mingled with the smell of the warm, contented earth, and the fragrance of flowers. It was an evening of such peace that even the wild creature, sitting there on the hot slates, soaked through and through with sun, must have felt too lazy to apprehend a threat. He sat, blinking and smiling, facing his murderer.
Dermot’s father himself felt the power of the scene, and hesitated for a moment to take the sitting shot at his enemy. Then, reproving himself sternly for a sentimentalist, he raised the rifle to his shoulder. There was a long moment of silence. Dermot looked around the garden, screwing up his eyes into the sun. Two butterflies, silhouetted against the dark hedge, danced leisurely over the top of a great puff of lavender. Alight—flit ; alight—flit ; one chasing the other, yet too lazy to catch her. Then there was a sound like a cracked whip, and a terrible commotion broke out on the roof of the outhouse. The great cat, shot squarely through the lung, slid scrabbling down the roof and fell, fighting like a devil, into the elder tree. The tree vibrated and quivered, as the heavy thrashing body tore its way downward through the branches: it seemed impossible that one creature could set up such agitation. Then, as they watched with staring eyes, the lower branches drooped, discharged their lacerating burden, and the frantic body fell with a flash of ginger fur into the water tub !
Dermot and his father rushed up, the latter pausing, with a shout of warning, to reload. But Lord Spencer did not emerge from the tub. They waited for a few seconds, then tiptoed to the edge and looked in. The cat was half sitting, half standing, on his haunches, his eyes tight shut, his fore paws held out stiffly together. With regular efforts, rhythmic as a pulse, he lunged upwards through the water, his face almost reaching the surface at each lunge ; and then sank back. There was something remote about his efforts: they were not like a savage creature’s last fierce struggle for his life. They were vague, unreal: his pale yellow body bloomed languidly up like a flower through the dark, stagnant water. As they watched, his rise and fall grew slower, more dream-like. One last effort brought him floating up into distinctness: his outstretched paws broke the surface, his mouth and nostrils touched it, hesitated, hung a second: then, slowly, he sank for the last time.
An instinct made Dermot avert his eyes from the lank, forlorn, draggled body that was fished out five minutes later. He preferred to remember Lord Spencer as he had been, proud, fierce, and magnificent. It did not do to see cat-marauders when they were dead.
If Grandpapa noted the disappearance of the garden’s two chief enemies, he said nothing about it. An occasional gleam of suspicion and baffled enquiry, from under his grey bristling eyebrows: eyebrows so thick and deep that they almost hid the gleam which was the more disquieting when it pierced through them: that was all. With his sturdy wisdom, his sharp common sense, both trained in the practice of the law, Grandpapa was not going to give himself away, nor distress himself with a catastrophe of which he could so easily stay ignorant.
Chapter XVII
“P-lay up the music ” sang Paddy, “and I will tell yez all, The way we used to sing and dance, Down in Donegal. … ”
He looked up, knitting his brows and baring his teeth at the horizon. “’Way ou’ o’ that-rain! Who toult ye? It’ll be a grand evening.”
“The barometer,” said Dermot uncomfortably. “The weatherglass.”
“Well now, bazometers and weather glasses, or no bazometers and weather glasses ; it’s going to be a fine evenin’.”
“I’m glad,” said Dermot meekly. The lore of home and kindred, quoted against Paddy, and listened to by that gentleman with respectful awe when he did not understand it, collapsed very quickly before his assault as soon as it touched his own province. At first, Dermot argued fiercely: but he was no match for Paddy. Paddy’s technique in such matters was to brush aside all that was argued against him, and shatter his opponent with a series of rhetorical questions, each
one referring to a great and usually an unheard-of authority.
“Bazometers! ” repeated Paddy, scornfully, to the line he was labouring to disentangle. “Would John Rogan ever use a bazometer? Would Mike McGuiness, was the best judge o’ the weather ever sailed a yacht? Would Shaun Rooney? Did yez ever hear tell Dark Jim Magee used a bazometer—him that could sail his little boat from the Coliemore to the Hill o’ Howth in a black fog? Bazometer, me a——.”
Dermot blinked under the rebuke. On this occasion, he felt he had hardly earned it.
“I’ll tell you what it is, Master Dermot.” Paddy paused, and made a perfectly appalling face as he pulled out a knot with teeth and both hands. “To be a good fisher, ye want to learn the way of things for yourself. Ye want to watch the weather, and see the way it will be goin’. Ye want to dig your own bait, and make your own lines. Amn’t I after showing you the way to make lines? Well—and aren’t the’ better than them rotten old things you’ll get ready-made up above in the shops? Aren’t the’? ”
“Yes, Paddy. Lots better.”
“I’m not sayin’ that be way of boastin’ meself,” pursued Paddy earnestly. “Sure, any fella along the shore here could show you the way of a line. I’m only sayin’ it, the way is, ye see——” he hesitated, carried into deeper conversational waters than usual. “You want to rely on yourself, the way, if anything goes wrong, ye can set it right.”
Oh dear, thought Dermot, in a small voice: oh dear. Everyone kept telling him that: Daddy ; Uncle Ben (very kindly, very gently, which made it even worse) ; Eileen: Con: and now Paddy. It was true, of course: but he hated having to be competent and self reliant, and having to do things. He liked, when he first knew Paddy, to fish till the line went tangled, or there were no more fish in that spot, and then to take on again when Paddy had put matters right. But Paddy had not inclined to that view at all. Bit by bit, he obliged his pupil to act on his own. Dermot was intelligent, and Paddy had the tireless patience of the uneducated. It was easy to learn from Paddy. Yet being with Paddy was an asylum, a protection from the hard world. Uncle Ben, Con, and the rest were not content to take him out in the boat, give him the mackerel line, and land an awkward fish for him. After the first time or two, they made him do it all himself. He hated having to do things himself—except the easy things, which he knew he could do. Yet, in his heart, he acknowledged the wisdom of it all. A great many of the things he could now do easily he had been unable to do a little while before. When I’m grown up, he thought, I’ll have people to do everything for me: I won’t ever let myself be left on my own. Even the few things he was able to do gave him no thrill of satisfaction. He would sooner have been spared the necessity of doing them. Not till an achievement had become mechanical could he cease to worry over it.
Once, in the first two or three summers, competence in an emergency gave him a thrill of pride. This was not with Paddy, but with Con. The two were out in the boat, in Dalkey Sound. Con rowed easily, leaning back, looking round upon the reflected hills, and letting his magnificent voice escape him in little spouts and swills of sound, as rich, as deep as the live, glistening pits left swirling in the water where the oars had been. Dermot, in the stern, managed the two mackerel lines, each crooked over a sensitive forefinger. Slim, growing tall, his face in shadow, he sat up, watching his companion: ten years old, perhaps, or eleven, with great promise of good looks, but solemn, attentive, old for his years. The sun beat down around and behind him: it splashed his white sun hat, and his erect, thin shoulders: it made large plaques and pools that sprawled and leaped and grimaced on the dizzy waters. It gleamed in the sweat on Con’s forehead: it flung into relief every feature of his conventionally handsome face. It called all the colour from his pale pink shirt and the little bow at his neck ; it winked from the buckle of his braces, and played gossamer hide-and-seek among the soft golden hairs on his great forearms. It summoned from the old friendly boat every smell she ever had in her: paint, warm varnish, fish, rotten bait that had slipped under the boards, and a sort of composite, companionable air that was none and all of these and something else as well: the smell of boats and harbours on hot August afternoons.
Suddenly looking over the side, as they went vaguely along, Dermot saw with horror the long wicked tongues, the wide flat streamers of the weed, close underneath. Shallow water—the lines—danger! Like a nerve responding, he cried his warning, took in yards of one line frantically, then of the other. The boat bounded forward, making the long lead sinkers rise with the pull: and they were over the danger, in deep water again, spinners and gut intact.
“Bravo, Dermot,” cried Con. “Bravo, boy. You saved that well.”
But would it always be so? Was he really competent, and quick, like other boys? Was this an act of the real Dermot, or an inspired fluke only? He had no confidence. He still preferred to look on.
For the first years with Paddy, and for long intervals in the later years, the Sea Wall satisfied all his desires. He soon outgrew the stingoes: but it boasted other fish. First and foremost, it was rich in “rock brame ” (wrasse) of every possible variety, from the multicoloured, delicate little ones to the bright yellow-bellied brame that lived in the tangle, and their softer, silver-bellied cousins who preferred the patches of white sand. From the biggest of these patches, that in front of Doyle’s Rock, were sometimes to be taken little flatfish—if one had the right bait. Round many of the rocks, at high tide, small pollack swam, in nervous, darting motion. Dermot loved these, with their slim green and silver, the pliant grace of their limp, dead bodies. To handle and look at them was an inexhaustible delight. He even let it outweigh more practical considerations, for, to be nice for table, they had to be gutted at once. That spoiled their symmetry, and he always delayed the operation as long as he could, despite Paddy’s remonstrances. More wonderful than the pollack, sometimes on drowsy, glittering August afternoons the grey mullet would come in on a full tide, swimming gracefully and lazily just below the surface, their back fins and tails rippling the still silk of the water. Those, Paddy said, one shot, or took with the bait of a cabbage: but, as nobody knew when they were coming, the requisite floating tackle was never rigged, and they remained unattainable, symbol of dreamed achievement, fish of the Hesperides.
“And next year, please God, we’ll have a dart at the mullets,” Paddy would say, when that hateful morning in September came round once more, and the pair took their farewell walk on the Sea Wall, from Ballygihen to New Town Smith, back again, and up Burdett Avenue, where Dermot would turn around, to let Paddy clipper-clopper a little way ahead of him, so that he might privily clasp his fingers and pray, “Dear God, bring me back safe to the Sea Wall again, for Jesus Christ’s sake, Amen “: and so that he might whisper, “Dear Sea Wall ; goodbye.” It became a formula, repeated every sad last morning, “Next year, please God, we’ll have a dart at the mullets.” And why not? What might not happen, when the long dark circuit had been once more completed, and they stood at the beginning of their time again, with the days stretching golden all before them? Not, as now, a bare hour that was not an hour, with Dermot in his travelling clothes. More pain than pleasure, that last ceremonial round brought them: but it had to be done. It was the last real time with Paddy. True, he would shuffle down with Dermot to the boat, if they went direct, or to the station, if they went by the South: but that was a short, unhappy walk, charged with a misery which neither tried to hide. Once there, Paddy became a poor, humble, waving figure, well in the background.
But, besides the enchanted “Mullets,” as Paddy called them, there were other accessible creatures. At low tide, Dermot caught little eating crabs, under the loose rocks. With breathless care, his tongue curling out over his lip, he stalked the wary prawns, and caught them, convulsed and clicking, in his net. Cunning, idiotic creatures! their cunning and their idiocy so mixed, their suspicion so inopportune, their serenity so misplaced. Like the wicked, they fled when no man pursued them: and by the time the net was cleverly sunk behind th
em, they were drifting along, in a sort of dark green dream, and fell victims to the most obvious of hostile manoeuvres. Then, in the meshes of the net, how perverse and unavailing their agitation! Dermot would take a whole minute, sometimes, to extricate one without injury. This was not only tenderness for the prawn. It was a profound feeling that to hurry, and break it, was illegitimate and clumsy, like cutting the string from a parcel, or forcing a puzzle. Still, he did not wish the prawns to suffer unnecessary hurt. When, more out of curiosity than cruelty, he took one by the proboscis and dipped its tail into the saucepan, and the creature with an agonised flip sent a splash of boiling water up his sleeve, he accepted the perfect justice of the pain, even while he was still hopping about and holding his wrist in anguish. He had done a cruel thing, and been well served. There was no cause for complaint.
Prawns (Paddy called them “swimps ”) were more profitable than the little eating crabs, not one in ten of which could be eaten. These Dermot hunted for the thrill of finding them, and in the hope that he might one day unearth a really big one.
Another unprofitable captive, prized only for its rarity, was the Horny Cobbler. This creature, shaped like a small fat kite without a tail, had a number of spines, reputed to be full of the direst venom. It had also a vast mouth, and insisted on swallowing hook and half the gut. Paddy was always needed to detach it from the line, with boot, jack-knife, and volleys of theological oaths. On the few occasions when Dermot, fishing by himself, got one on his rod, he was obliged to go home, dangling the unwelcome captive at the end of it. He hated Horny Cobblers: but, there was no denying, they gave an air to one’s fish book, when the catches were added up. An unusual fish always delighted Dermot: the day he first caught a young ling, he was beside himself with joy.
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