Waysiders Part 6

The Friar spoke to me in an undertone, and we crossed to the open door of the house.

The door led directly into the kitchen. Two women were standing well back from the door, something respectful, a little mysterious and a little fearful in their att.i.tude. Their eyes were upon the Friar, and from their expressions they might have expected some sort of apparition to cross the threshold. They made a curtesy to him, dipping their bodies in a little sudden jerk. n.o.body else was in the kitchen, and, despite the almost oppressive formality of their att.i.tude, they somehow conveyed a sense of the power of women in the household in time of crisis. They were in supreme command, the men all outside, when a life had to be battled for. The elder of the women came forward and spoke to the priest, bidding him welcome. The reception looked as if it had been rehea.r.s.ed, both women painfully anxious to do what was right.

There appeared some little misunderstanding, and I was too dazed with the cold--which I had only fully felt when I got off the car and found my legs cramped--to come to the rescue as interpreter. The Spanish Friar was accustomed to these little embarra.s.sments, and he had a manner of meeting them with a smile. The misunderstanding and the embarra.s.sment seemed to thaw the formality of the reception. The women looked relieved. They were obviously not expected to say anything, and they had no fear now that they would be put to the ordeal of meeting a possibly superior person, one who might patronise them, make a flutter in their home, appal them by expecting a great deal of attention, in short, be "very Englified." The Spanish Friar had very quick intuitions and some subtle way of his own for conveying his emotions and his requirements.

He was in spirit nearer to the peasantry than many of the Friars who themselves came from the flesh of the peasantry. And these two peasant women, very quick in both their intuitions and their intelligence, seemed at the very moment of the breakdown of the first attempt at conversation to understand him and he to understand them. The elder of the women led the priest into a room off the kitchen where I knew Kevin Hooban lay ill.

The younger woman put a chair before the fire and invited me to sit there. While I sat before the fire I could hear the quick but quiet step of her feet about the kitchen, the little swish of her garments.

Presently she drew near to the fire and held out a gla.s.s. It contained what looked like discoloured water, very like the water in the shallow river with the s.h.i.+ngly bottom. I must have expressed some little surprise, even doubt, in my face, for she held the gla.s.s closer, as if rea.s.suring me. There was something that inspired confidence in her manner. I took the gla.s.s and sipped the liquid. It left a half-burned, peaty taste in the mouth, and somehow smacked very native in its flavour. I thought of the hills, the lonely bushes, the slow movement of the chocolate-coloured river, the men with the primitive dark faces under the broad-brimmed hats, their mysterious, even dramatic way of grouping themselves around the lighted house. The peaty liquid seemed a brew out of the same atmosphere. I knew it was poteen. And in a moment I felt it coursing through my body, warming my blood. The young woman stood by the fire, half in shadow, half in the yellow flame of the turf fire, her att.i.tude quiet but tense, very alert for any movement in the sick room.

The door of the room stood slightly open, and the low murmur of the Friar's voice reciting a prayer in Latin could be heard. The young woman sighed, her bosom rising and falling in a quick breath of pain. Then she made the sign of the Cross.

"My brother is very low," she said, sitting down by the fire after a time. Her eyes were upon the fire. Her face was less hard than the faces I had seen on the hills. She looked good-natured.

"Is he long ill?"

"This long while. But to look at him you would conceit he was as sound as a trout. First he was moody, moping about the place, and no way wishful for company. Hours he would spend below at the b.u.t.t of the meadow, nearby the water, sitting under the thorn bush and he playing upon the fideog. Then he began to lose the use of his limbs, and crying he used to be within in the room. Some of the people who have knowledge say he is lying under a certain influence. He cannot speak now. The holy Friar will know what is best to be done."

When the Friar came out of the room he was divesting himself of the embroidered stole he had put over his shoulders.

The white-capped old woman had excitement in her face as she followed him.

"Kevin spoke," she said to the other. "He looked up at the blessed man and he made an offer to cross himself. I could not hear the words he was speaking, that soft they come from his lips."

"Kevin will live," said the younger woman, catching some of the excitement of her mother. She stood tensely, drawn up near the fire, gazing vacantly but intently across the kitchen, as if she would will it so pa.s.sionately that Kevin should live that he would live. She moved suddenly, swiftly, noiselessly across the floor and disappeared into the room.

The priest sat by the fire for some time, the old woman standing by, respectful, but her eyes riveted upon him as if she would pluck from him all the secrets of existence. The priest was conscious, a little uneasy, and a little amused, at this abnormal scrutiny. Some shuffling sounded outside the house as if a drove of shy animals had come down from the mountain and approached the dwelling. Presently the door creaked. I looked at it uneasily. The atmosphere of the place, the fumes of the poteen in my head, the heat of the fire, had given me a more powerful impression of the mysterious, the weird. Nothing showed at the door for some time, but I kept my eye upon it. I was rewarded. A cl.u.s.ter of heads and shoulders of men, swarthy, gloomy, some awful foreboding in the expression of their faces, hung round the door and peered silently down at the Friar seated at the fire. Again I had the sense that they would not be surprised to see any sort of apparition. The heads disappeared, and there was more shuffling outside the windows as if shy animals were hovering around the house. The door creaked again, and another bunch of heads and shoulders made a cl.u.s.ter about it. They looked, as far as I could see them, the same group of heads, but I had the feeling that they were fresh spectators. They were taking their view in turn.

The priest ventured some conversation with the woman of the house.

"Do you think will Kevin live, Father?"

"He should have more courage," the Friar said.

"We will all have more courage now that you have read over him."

"Keep the faith. It is all in the hands of G.o.d. It is only what is pleasing to Him that will come to pa.s.s."

"Blessed be His Holy Name." The woman inclined her head as she spoke the words. The priest rose to go.

The young girl came out of the room. "Kevin will live," she said. "He spoke to me." Her eyes were s.h.i.+ning as she gazed at her mother.

"Could you tell what words he spoke?"

"I could. He said, 'In the month of April, when the water runs clear in the river, I will be playing the fideog.' That is what Kevin said."

"When the river is clear--playing the fideog," the elder woman repeated, some look of trouble, almost terror, in her face. "The cross of Christ between him and that fideog!"

The priest was moving to the door and I followed. As I did so I got a glimpse, through the partly open room door, of the invalid. I saw the long, pallid, nervous-looking face of a young man on the pillow. A light fell on his brow, and I thought it had the height, and the arch, the good shape sloping backward to the long head, of a musician. The eyes were s.h.i.+ning with an unnatural brightness. It was the face of an artist, an idealist, intensified, idealised, by illness, by suffering, by excitement, and I wondered if the vision which Kevin Hooban had of playing the fideog by the river, when it ran clear in April, were a vision of his heaven or his earth.

We left the house. Patch Keetly was taking the loop from a trace as he harnessed the mare in the yellow light of a stable lantern. We mounted the car. The groups of men drew about us, their movements again sounding like the shuffling of shy animals on the sod, and they broke silence for the first time.

There was more said about Kevin Hooban. From various allusions, vague and unsubstantial, little touches in the kind, musical voices, I gathered that they believed him to be under the influence of the Good People. The sense of mystery and ill-omen came back to me, and I carried away a memory of the dark figures of the people grouped about the lonely lighted house, standing there in sorrow for the flute-player, the gra.s.s at their feet sparkling with frost.

THE SHOEMAKER

Obeying a domestic mandate, Padna wrapped a pair of boots in paper and took them to the shoemaker, who operated behind a window in a quiet street.

The shoemaker seemed to Padna a melancholy man. He wore great spectacles, had a white patch of forehead, and two great b.u.mps upon it.

Padna concluded that the b.u.mps had been encouraged by the professional necessity of constantly hanging his head over his knees.

The shoemaker invited Padna to sit down in his workshop, which he did.

Padna thought it must be very dreary to sit there all day among old and new boots, pieces of leather, boxes of bra.s.s eyelets, awls, knives, and punchers. No wonder the shoemaker was a melancholy-looking man.

Padna maintained a discreet silence while the shoemaker turned his critical gla.s.ses upon the boots he had brought him for repair. Suddenly the great gla.s.ses were turned upon Padna himself, and the shoemaker addressed him in a voice of amazing pleasantness.

"When did you hear the cuckoo?" he asked.

Padna, at first startled, pulled himself together. "Yesterday," he replied.

"Did you look at the sole of your boot when you heard him?" the shoemaker asked.

"No," said Padna.

"Well," said the shoemaker, "whenever you hear the cuckoo for the first time in the spring always look at the sole of your right boot. There you will find a hair. And that hair will tell you the kind of a wife you will get."

The shoemaker picked a long hair from the sole of Padna's boot and held it up in the light of the window.

"You'll be married to a brown-haired woman," he said. Padna looked at the hair without fear, favour, or affection, and said nothing.

The shoemaker took his place on his bench, selected a half-made shoe, got it between his knees, and began to st.i.tch with great gusto. Padna admired the skilful manner in which he made the holes with his awl and drew the wax-end with rapid strokes. Padna abandoned the impression that the shoemaker was a melancholy man. He thought he never sat near a man so optimistic, so mentally emanc.i.p.ated, so detached from the indignity of his occupation.

"These are very small shoes you are st.i.tching," said Padna, making himself agreeable.

"They are," said the shoemaker. "But do you know who makes the smallest shoes in the world? You don't? Well, well!... The smallest shoes in the world are made by the clurichaun, a cousin of the leprechaun. If you creep up on the west side of a fairy fort after the sun has set and put your ear to the gra.s.s you'll hear the tapping of his hammer. And do you know who the clurichaun makes shoes for? You don't? Well, well!... He makes shoes for the swallows. Oh, indeed they do, swallows wear shoes.

Twice a year swallows wear shoes. They wear them in the spring, and again at the fall of the year. They wear them when they fly from one world to another. And they cross the Dead Sea. Did you ever hear tell of the Dead Sea? You did. Well, well!... No bird ever yet flew across the Dead Sea. Any of them that tried it dropped and sank like a stone. So the swallows, when they come to the Dead Sea, get down on the bank, and there the clurichauns have millions of shoes waiting for them. The swallows put on their shoes and walk across the Dead Sea, stepping on bright yellow and black stepping-stones that s.h.i.+ne across the water like a lovely carpet. And do you know what the stepping-stones across the Dead Sea are? They are the backs of sleeping frogs. And when the swallows are all safe across the frogs waken up and begin to sing, for then it is known the summer will come. Did you never hear that before?

No? Well, well!"

A cat, friendly as the shoemaker himself, leapt on to Padna's lap. The shoemaker s.h.i.+fted the shoe he was st.i.tching between his knees, putting the heel where the toe had been.

"Do you know where they first discovered electricity?" he asked.

"In America," Padna ventured.

"No. In the back of a cat. He was a big buck Chinese cat. Every hair on him was seven inches long, in colour gold, and thick as copper wire. He was the only cat who ever looked on the face of the Empress of China without blinking, and when the Emperor saw that he called him over and stroked him on the back. No sooner did the Emperor of China stroke the buck cat than back he fell on his plush throne, as dead as his ancestors. So they called in seven wise doctors from the seven wise countries of the East to find out what it was killed the Emperor. And after seven years they discovered electricity in the backbone of the cat, and signed a proclamation that it was from the shock of it the Emperor had died. When the Americans read the proclamation they decided to do whatever killing had to be done as the cat had killed the Emperor of China. The Americans are like that--all for imitating royal families."