All on the Irish Shore Part 16

"Keep back!" I shouted to her; "keep back, for pity's sake!"

It was too late--the next instant the pony was galloping. The penalty is that you have to pull up, and make the wheels turn in the opposite direction, and I just threw the pony on his haunches. He nearly came back into the cart, but the tremendous jerk gave the backward turn to the wheels and I was off again. Not even that kept the people back. Mrs.

Le Bretton came alongside again to say something else to me, and I suddenly felt half mad from the clatter and the frightful strain of the pony on my arms.

"D----n it all! Le Bretton!" I yelled, as the pony broke for the second time, "can't you keep your wife away!"

They did let me alone after that--turned off the road and took a scoop across the plain, so as to come up with me at the finish--and I pulled myself together to do the last couple of miles. I could see that Cashmere gate and the Delhi walls ahead of me; 'pon my soul I felt as if they were defying me and despising me, just standing waiting there under the blazing sky, and they never seemed to get any nearer. It was like the first night of a fever, the whizzing of the wheels, the ding-dong of the pony's hoofs, the silence all round, the feeling of stress and insane hurrying on, the throbbing of my head, and the scorching heat.

I'll swear no fever I've ever had was worse than that last two miles.

As I reached the Delhi walls I took one look at the clock. There was barely a minute left.

"By Jove!" I gasped, "I'm done!"

I shouted and yelled to the pony like a madman, to keep up what heart was left in the wretched little brute, holding on to him for bare life, with my arms and legs straight out in front of me. The gray wall and the blinding road rushed by me like a river--I scarcely knew what happened--I couldn't think of anything but the ticking of the clock that I was somehow trying to count, till there came the bang of a pistol over my head.

It was the Cashmere gate, and I had thirteen seconds in hand.

There was never anything more heard of the bagman. He can, if he likes, soothe his conscience with the reflection that he was worth a thousand pounds to me.

But Mrs. Le Bretton never quite forgave me.

AN IRISH PROBLEM

Conversation raged on the long flanks of the mail-car.

An elderly priest, with a warm complexion and a controversial under-lip, was expounding his native country to a fellow-traveller, with slight but irrepressible pulpit gestures of the hand. The fellow traveller, albeit lavender-hued from an autumn east wind, was obediently observing the anaemic patches of oats and barley, pale and thin, like the hair of a starving baby, and the huge slants of brown heather and turf bog, and was interjecting "Just so!" at decent intervals. Now and then, as the two tall brown mares slackened for a bout of collar-work at a hill, or squeezed slowly past a cart stacked high with sods of turf, we, sitting in silence, Irish wolves in the clothing of English tourists, could hear across the intervening pile of luggage and bicycles such a storm of conversation as bursts forth at a dinner-party after the champagne has twice gone round.

The brunt of the talk was borne by the old lady in the centre. Her broad back, chequered with red plaid, remained monumental in height and stillness, but there was that in the tremor of the steel spray in her bonnet that told of a high pressure of narrative. The bearded Dublin tourist on her left was but little behind her in the ardour of giving information. His wife, a beautifully dressed lady with cotton-wool in her ears, remained abstracted, whether from toothache, or exclusiveness, or mere wifely boredom, we cannot say. Among the swift shuttles of Irish speech the ponderous questions and p.r.o.nouncements of an English fisherman drove their way. The talk was, we gathered, of sport and game laws and their administration.

"Is it hares?" cried the Dublin tourist, perorating after a flight or two into the subject of poachers; "what d'ye think would happen a hare in Donegal?"

His handsome brown eye swept his audience, even, through the spokes of a bicycle, gathering in our sympathies. It left no doubts as to the tragedy that awaited the hare.

The east wind hunted us along the sh.o.r.e of the wide, bleak bay, rimmed with yellow sea-weed, and black and ruffled like the innumerable lakelets that lay along our route. The tall mountain over it was hooded in cloud. It seemed as threatening and mysterious as Sinai; ready to utter some awful voice of law to the brown solitudes and windy silences.

Far ahead of us a few houses rose suddenly above the low coast line, an ugly family party of squat gables and whitewashed walls, with nothing nearer them to westward than the homesteads of America.

Far and near there was not a tree visible, nor a touch of colour to tell of the saving grace of flowers. The brown mares swung the car along with something resembling enthusiasm; Letterbeg was the end of their stage; it was the end of ours also. Numb with long sitting we dropped c.u.mbrously to earth from the high footboard, and found ourselves face to face with the problem of how to spend the next three hours. It was eleven o'clock in the morning, too early for lunch, though, apparently, quite the fas.h.i.+onable hour in Letterbeg for bottled porter, judging by the squeak of the corkscrew and the clash of gla.s.ses that issued from the dark interior of the house in front of which we had been shed by the mail-car. This was a long cottage with a prosperous slate roof, and a board over its narrow door announcing that one Jas. Heraty was licensed for the retail of spirits and porter.

The mail-car rolled away; as it crawled over the top of a hill and sank out of sight a last wave of the priestly hand seemed to include us.

Doubtless we were being expounded as English tourists, and our great economic value to the country was being expatiated upon. The _role_ is an important one, and has its privileges; yet, to the wolf, there is something stifling in sheep's clothing; certainly, on the occasions when it was discarded by us, a sympathy and understanding with the hotels was quickly established. Possibly they also are wolves.

Undoubtedly the English tourist, with his circular ticket and his coupons, does not invariably get the best of everything. We write surrounded by him and his sufferings. An earlier visit than usual to the hotel sitting-room has revealed him, lying miserably on the sofa, shrouded in a filthy _duvet_, having been flung there at some two in the morning on his arrival, wet through, from heaven knows what tremendous walk. Subsequently we hear him being haled from his lair by the chambermaid, who treats him as the dirt under her feet (or, indeed, if we may judge by our bedroom carpet, with far less consideration).

"Here!" she says, "go in there and wash yerself!"

We hear her slamming him into a room from which two others of his kind have been recently bolted like rabbits, by the boots, to catch the 6 A.M. train. We can just faintly realise its atmosphere.

This, however, is a digression, but remotely connected with Letterbeg and Mr. Heraty's window, to which in our forlorn state we turned for distraction.

It was very small, about two feet square, but it made its appeal to all the needs of humanity from the cradle to the grave. A feeding-bottle, a rosary, a photograph of Mr. Kruger, a peg-top, a case of salmon flies, an artistic letter-weight, consisting of a pigeon's egg carved in Connemara marble, two seductively small bottles of castor-oil--these, mounted on an embankment of packets of corn-flour and rat poison, crowded the four little panes. Inside the shop the a.s.sortment ranged from bundles of reaping-hooks on the earthen floor to bottles of champagne in the murk of the top shelf. A few men leaned against the tin-covered counter, gravely drinking porter. As we stood dubiously at the door there was a padding of bare feet in the roadway, and a very small boy with a red head, dressed in a long flannel frock of a rich madder shade fluttered past us into the shop.

"Me dada says let yees be hurrying!" he gasped, between spasms of what was obviously whooping-cough. "Sweeny's case is comin' on!"

Had the message been delivered by the Sergeant-at-Arms it could not have been received with more respectful attention or been more immediately obeyed. The porter was gulped down, one unfinished gla.s.s being bestowed upon the Sergeant-at-Arms, possibly as a palliative for the whooping-cough, and the party trooped up the road towards a thatched and whitewashed cottage that stood askew at the top of a lane leading to the seash.o.r.e. Two tall constables of the R.I.C. stood at the door of the cottage. It came to us, with a lifting of the heart, that we had chanced upon Petty Sessions day in Letterbeg, and this was the court-house.

It was uncommonly hot in what is called in newspapers "the body of the court". Something of the nature of a rood-screen, boarded solidly up to a height of about four feet, divided the long single room of the cottage; we, with the rest of the public, were penned in the division nearest the door. The cobwebbed boards of the loft overhead almost rested on our hats; the public, not being provided with seats by the Government, shuffled on the earthen floor and unaffectedly rested on us and each other. Within the rood-screen two magistrates sat at a table, with their suite, consisting of a clerk, an interpreter, and a district inspector of police, disposed round them.

"The young fella with the foxy mustash is Docthor Lyden," whispered an informant in response to a question, "and the owld lad that's lookin' at ye now is Heraty, that owns the shop above--"

At this juncture an emissary from the Bench very kindly offered us seats within the rood-screen. We took them, on a high wooden settle, beside the magisterial table, and the business of the court proceeded.

Close to us stood the defendant, Sweeny, a tall elderly man, with a long, composed, shaven face, and an all-observant grey eye: Irish in type, Irish in expression, intensely Irish in the self-possession in which he stood, playing to perfection the part of calm rect.i.tude and una.s.sailable integrity.

Facing him, the plaintiff lounged against the part.i.tion; a man strangely improbable in appearance, with close-cropped grey hair, a young, fresh-coloured face, a bristling orange moustache, and a big, blunt nose. One could have believed him a soldier, a German, anything but what he was, a peasant from the furthest sh.o.r.es of Western Ireland, cut off from what we call civilisation by his ignorance of any language save his own ancient speech, wherein the ideas of to-day stand out in English words like telegraph posts in a Connemara moorland.

Between the two stood the interpreter--small, old, froglike in profile, full of the dignity of the Government official.

"Well, we should be getting on now," remarked the Chairman, Heraty, J.P., after some explanatory politeness to his unexpected visitors.

"William, swear the plaintiff!"

The oath was administered in Irish, and the orange moustache brushed the greasy Testament. The s.p.a.ce above the dado of the part.i.tion became suddenly a tapestry of attentive faces, clear-eyed, all-comprehending.

[Ill.u.s.tration: SWEENY.]

"This case," announced Mr. Heraty judicially yet not without a glance at the visitors, "is a demand for compensation in the matter of a sheep that was drowned. William"--this to the interpreter--"ask Darcy what he has to say for himself?"

Darcy hitched himself round, still with a shoulder propped against the part.i.tion, and uttered, without any enthusiasm, a few nasal and guttural sentences.

"He says, yer wors.h.i.+p," said William, with unctuous propriety, "that Sweeny's gorsoons were ever and always hunting his sheep, and settin' on their dog to hunt her, and that last week they dhrove her into the lake and dhrownded her altogether."

"Now," said Mr. Heraty, in a conversational tone, "William, when ye employ the word 'gorsoon,' do ye mean children of the male or female s.e.x?"

"Well, yer wors.h.i.+p," replied William, who, it may incidentally be mentioned, was himself in need of either an interpreter or of a new and complete set of teeth, "I should considher he meant ayther the one or the other."

"They're usually one or the other," said Doctor Lyden solemnly, and in a stupendous brogue. It was the first time he had spoken; he leaned back, with his hands in his pockets, and surveyed with quiet but very bright eyes the instant grin that illumined the faces of the tapestry.

"Sure William himself is no bad judge of gorsoons," said Mr. Heraty.

"Hadn't he a christening in his own house three weeks ago?"

At this excursion into the family affairs of the interpreter the grin broke into a roar.

"See now, we'll ask Mr. Byrne, the schoolmaster," went on Mr. Heraty with owl-like gravity. "Isn't that Mr. Byrne that I see back there in the coort? Come forward, Mr. Byrne!"