E-text prepared by Suzanne Lybarger, Brian Janes, Janet Blenkinship, and
the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team
(https://www.pgdp.net)

      See 21999-h.htm or 21999-h.zip:
      (https://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/2/1/9/9/21999/21999-h/21999-h.htm)
      or
      (https://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/2/1/9/9/21999/21999-h.zip)

THE WIND BLOWETH

by

DONN BYRNE

Author of "Messer Marco Polo," etc.

Illustrated by George Bellows

New York
The Century Co.
Copyright, 1922, by
The Century Co.
Printed in U. S. A.

A DEDICATION: A PRAYER

Whilst I was working on the various problems of "The Wind
Bloweth"--problems of wisdom, of color, of phrasing, and trying to
capture the elusive, unbearable ache that is the mainspring of humanity,
and doing this through the medium of a race I knew best, a race that
affirms the divinity of Jesus and yet believes in the little people of
the hills, a race that loves its own land, and yet will wander the wide
world over, a race that loves battle, and yet always falls--whilst doing
this, it seemed to me that I was capturing for an instant a beauty that
was dying slowly, imperceptibly, but would soon be gone.

Perhaps it was the lilt of a Gaelic song in these pages that brought a
sorrow on me. That very sweet language will be gone soon, if not gone
already, and no book learning will revive the suppleness of idiom, that
haunting misty loveliness.... It is a very pathetic thing to see a
literature and a romance die.

But then, what ever dies? There is only change. For people in the coming
times the economist and the expert in politics may have the beauty and
wisdom old men have known in poems and strange tales. A mammoth building
is as romantic to a new age as were the subtle carvings of Phidias to
Greeks of old. For the master of commerce an oil-driven steel ship has
the beauty old folk have seen in cloudy pyramids of sail. What we have
considered beautiful will be quaint. And their tolerant smile will hurt
us under the wind-swept grass.

To whomever this writing of mine may give a moment's thought, a moment's
dreaming, I would ask a privilege, to call out of the romantic sunset
the memories of Irish writers whom it is deep in my heart to praise, not
masters of verse, but those whom in English we call novelists, being too
exact in matters of language to name them poets: the Four Masters of
Donegal who dedicated their tradition _do chum gloire De agus onora na h
Eireann_,--to the glory of God and the honor of Ireland,--so high their
motive was. And Thomas Moore, not as author of Irish ballads or of
"Lalla Rookh," but as writer of "The Epicurean." And Lever and Lover.
And William Carleton from the County of Tyrone. And gentle Gerald
Griffin, dead at his desk. And Michael and John Banim, with their
"O'Hara Tales." And Sheridan Le Fanu, and Fitz-James O'Brien, who fell
fighting for America. And Charles Kickham, who wrote "Knocknagow." And I
was all but forgetting Oliver Goldsmith, Dr. Johnson's friend.

Old fathers, old masters, I will never believe but that you wrote
because it sprang from you as the lark sings in the high air. No little
sum of money, no great man's patronage, no doffed caps of the populace,
could have moved you to strike out or write in one line. Old fathers,
let me say aloud your names; it will give me bravery. And, sirs, take
this book kindly to you. It is written caring nothing for money, nothing
for light acclaim. Its faults are because I cannot write better yet....

DONN BYRNE

CONTENTS

  PART                                              PAGE

  I   DANCING TOWN                                    3

  II  THE WAKE AT ARDEE                              57

  III THE MOUTH OF HONEY                            109

  IV  THE WRESTLER FROM ALEPPO                      169

  V   THE VALLEY OF THE BLACK PIG                   229

  VI  THE BOLD FENIAN MEN                           287

  VII THE KINGDOM AND THE POWER AND THE GLORY       353

PART ONE

DANCING TOWN

§ 1

Because it was his fourteenth birthday they had allowed him a day off
from school, his mother doubtfully, his uncles Alan and Robin with their
understanding grin. And because there was none else for him to play with
at hurling or foot-ball, the other children now droning in class over
Cæsar's Gallic War, he had gone up the big glen. It was a very
adventurous thing to go up the glen while other boys were droning their
Latin like a bagpipe being inflated, while the red-bearded schoolmaster
drowsed like a dog. First you went down the graveled path, past the
greened sun-dial, then through the gate, then a half-mile or so along
the road, green along the edges with the green of spring, and lined with
the May hawthorn, white, clean as air, with a fragrance like sustained
music, a long rill of rolling white cloud. There was nothing in the
world like the hawthorn. First it put out little bluish-green buds firm
as elastic, and then came a myriad of white stars. And then the white
drift turned a delicate red, dropped, and the scarlet haws came out, a
tasteless bread-like fruit you shared with the birds, and the stone of
it you could whip through your lips like a bullet....

He left the main road and turned into a loaning that came down the
mountain-side, a thing that once might have been a road, if there had
been any need for it, or energy to make it. But now it was only a wedge
of common land bounded on both sides by a low stone wall. Inside one
wall was a path, and inside the other a little rill, and betwixt the two
of them were firm moss and stones. And here the moss was yellowish-green
and there red as blood. And the rill was edged with ferns and queer blue
flowers whose names he did not know in English, and now the water just
gurgled over the rounded stones, and now it dropped into a well where it
was colorless and cold and fresh as the air itself, and oftentimes at
the bottom of a pool like that would be a great green frog with eyes
that popped like the schoolmaster's....

And to the left of the loaning as he walked toward the mountain was a
plantation of fir-trees, twenty acres or more, the property of the third
cousin of his mother's brother-in-law, a melancholy, thin-handed man
who lived on the Mediterranean--a Campbell, too, though one would never
take him for an Ulster Scot, with his la-di-da ways and his Spanish
lady. But the queer thing about the plantation was this, that within,
half a mile through the trees, were the ruins of a house, bare walls and
bracken and a wee place where there were five graves, two of them
children's. A strange thing the lonely graves. In summer the sun would
shine through the clearing of the trees, and there was always a bird
singing somewhere near. But it was a gey lonely place for five folk to
lie there, at all times and seasons, and in the moonlight and in the
sunlight, and when the rain dripped from the fir-trees. And all the
company they had was the red fox slipping through the trees or the
rabbit hopping like a child at play or the hare-wide-eyed in the
bracken. They must have been an unsociable folk in life to build a house
in the woods, and they were an unsociable folk in death not to go to the
common graveyard, where the dead folk were together, warm and kindly
lying gently as in their beds....

He turned now from the loaning to the mountain-side, passing through the
heather on a little path the sheep made with their sharp cloven hoofs.
In single file the sheep would go up the mountain-side, obedient as
nuns, following the tinkle of the wether's bell, and they hunting a new
pasture they would crop like rabbits. Now was a stunted ash, now a
rowan-tree with its red berries--_crann caorthainn_ they call it in
Gaidhlig,--and now was a holly bush would have red berries when all the
bitter fruit of the rowan-tree was gone and the rolling sleets of winter
came over Antrim like a shroud. Everywhere about him now was the
heather, the brown, the purple heather with the perfect little flower
that people called bells, all shades of red it was, and not often you
would come across a sprig of white heather, and white heather brought
you luck, just as much luck as a four-leaved shamrock brought, and
fairer, more gallant luck.

A very silent place a mountain was, wee Shane Campbell thought, not a
lonely but a silent place. A lonely place was a place you might be
afraid, as in a wood, but a mountain was only a place apart. Down in the
fields were the big brooks, with the willow branches and great trout in
the streams; and fat cattle would low with a foolish cry like a man
wouldn't be all there, and come home in the evenings to be milked,
satisfied and comfortable as a minister; wee calves shy as babies;
donkeys with the cross of Christ on their back; goats would butt you
and you not looking; hens a-cackle, and cocks strutting like a
militiaman and him back from the camp; quiet horses had the strength of
twenty men, and scampering colts had legs on them like withes. Up here
was nothing, but you never missed them.

The only thing to break the silence up here was the cry of an occasional
bird, the plaintive call of the plover, the barking of an eagle, the
note of the curlew, a whinny as of a horse of Lilliput, the strange
noise a pheasant makes and it rising from the heather: _whir-r-r_, like
a piece of elastic snapping. Barring these you'd hear nothing at all.
And barring a mountainy man or woman, and they cutting turf, you'd meet
nothing unless it were the sheep.

You'd never hear the sheep, and you coming; you'd turn a wee bluff in
the hill, and there they were looking, a long, solemn, grayish-white
line, with aloof, cold eyes. You could never faze them. They'd look at
you cool as anything, and "What license have you to be here?" you'd
think they were saying. Very stupid, but unco dignified, the sheep.

But up to the top of the mountain, where wee Shane was going, you'd find
no sheep; too bare and rocky there. There'd be nothing there but a
passing bird. On the top of the mountain was a little dark lake into
which you couldn't see more than a foot, though they said the depth of
it went down to the sea. There were no fish in it, people said, and that
was a queer thing, water without fish in it, wee Shane thought, like a
country without inhabitants. In the sea were a power of fish, and in the
rivers were salmon, long and thick as a man, and pike with snouts and
ominous teeth, and furry otters, about which there was great discussion
as to whether they were fish or animal ... In the lake in the
lowlands--Lochkewn, the Quiet Lake--were trout with red and gold and
black speckles; and perch with spiked fins; and dark roach were easy to
catch with a worm; and big gray bream were tasty as to bait, needing
paste held by sheep's wool; and big eels would put a catch in your
breath.

But in the lake on the mountain-top were no fish at all, and that was a
strange thing ...

There was another eery thing about the mountain, and a thing wee Shane
was slightly afraid of. Oftentimes you'd be sitting by that lake, and
sunlight all around you, and you'd turn to come down, and there'd be a
cloud beneath you, a cloud that rolled in armfuls of wool that bound the
mountain as by a ring; and the lonely call of a bird ... and you'd feel
shut off from the kindly earth, as if you were on another planet maybe,
or caught up into the air by some flying demon, and you knew the world
was spinning like a ball through the treeless fields of space.

And what could a wee fellow do up there then but sit quiet and cry and
be terribly afraid? And your cry would be heard no more than the
whinnying of the curlew.... Or you might venture down through it, and
that was more terrible still, for the strange host of the air had their
domicile in the clouds, and there they held cruel congress, speaking in
their speechless tongue, and out of the clouds they took shape and
substance ... their cold, malevolent eyes, their smoky antennæ of hands
... and nothing to turn to for company, not even the moody badger or the
unfriendly sheep. There was no going down. You must stay there by the
lake, and even then the cloud might creep upward until it capped
mountain and lake, and enveloped a wee fellow scared out of his wits....

Nevertheless, he was going to the top of that mountain, clouds or no
clouds. For he had heard it said that the mirage of Portcausey was being
seen again--the Devil's Troopers, and the _Oilean-gan-talamh-ar-bith_,
the Isle of No Land At All, and the Swinging City, and they were to be
seen in the blue heat haze over the sea from the Mountain of Fionn....

And wee Shane was going to see it, clouds or no clouds, host or no host
of the air.

§ 2

He had won half-ways up the mountain now, and from the brae of heather
he could see the glen stretch like a furrow to the sea. The Irish
Channel they called it on the maps in school, but _Struth na Maoile_ it
was to every one in the country-side, the waters of Moyle. Very green,
very near, very gentle they seemed to-day, but often they roared like
giants in frenzy, fanned to fury by the winds of the nine glens, as a
bellows livens a fire. But to-day it was like a lake, so gentle.... And
there was purple Scotland, hardly, you'd think, a stone's throw from the
shore--the Mull of Cantyre, a resounding name, like a line in a poem. It
was from Mull that Moyle came, _maol_ in Gaidhlig, bald or bluff ... a
moyley was a cow without horns. The Lowlanders were coming into the Mull
now, and the Highlanders being pushed north to Argyll, and westward to
the islands, like Oran and Islay. He knew the Islay men, great rugged
fishers with immense hands and their feet small as a girl's. They sang
the saddest sea-chanty in the world:

  _'S tric mi sealltuinn o'n chnoc a's airde,
  Dh' fheuch am faic mi fear a'bhata;
  An tig thu'n aniugh, no'n tig thu amaireach,
  'S mur tig thu idir, gur truagh a ta mi._

"From the highest hilltop I watched to see my boatman," went the sense
of it. "Will you come to-day or will you come to-morrow? And if you
never come--O God! help me!"

And there was a chorus to it that was like a keening for the dead:

  _Fhir a' bhata na horo eile! Fhir a' bhata na horo eile!
  Fhir a' bhata na horo eile! Mo shoraidh slan leat, fhir a' bhata!_

My heart's good-by to you, O man of the boat!

But nearer than Islay was their own Raghery--Rathlin Island the maps had
it--he could see it now to the north. A strange little world of its own,
with great caves where the wind howled like a starving wolf, and the
black divers went into the water like a bullet. It was in the caves of
Raghery that the Bruce took refuge, and it was there he saw the spider
of Scots legend.... Rathlin was queer and queer.... There were many
women with the second sight, it was told, and the men were very big,
very shy, very gentle, except when the drink was in them, and then they
would rage like the sea.

A strange, mystical water, the Moyle, to have two isles in it like Islay
of the pipers and Raghery of the black caves. It was over Moyle that
Columkill went in his little coracle to be a hermit in Iona, the
gentlest saint that Ireland ever knew. And it was over the Moyle that
Patrick came, landing whilst the Druids turned their cursing stones and
could not prevail against him. And it was on the Moyle that the Children
of Lir swam and they turned into three white swans, with their great
white wings like sails and their black feet like sweeps.... And in the
night-time they sang a strange, sad music, and the echoes of it were
still in the nine glens....

And northerly again were the pillars of the Giant's Causeway, blue-black
against the sun. They were made so that the Finn MacCool, the champion
of the giants, could take a running jump over to Scotland and he going
deer-hunting in the forests of Argyll. So the country folk said, but wee
Shane thought different, knew different. The Druids had made it for
their own occult designs, the Druids, that terrible, powerful clan with
their magic batons, and their sinister cursing-stones, and their long,
white, benevolent beards....

And there, green and well kept as a duke's garden, was the Royal Links
of Portrush. And the Irish golfers said that it was harder than St.
Andrew's in Scotland and better kept. There King James had played a game
before he went down to the defeat of the Boyne Water.

"And if he golfed as well as he fought," Shane's Uncle Robin used to
laugh, "they s'ould never have let him tee up a ball on the course!"

_Eigh!_ how wonderful it all was! wee Shane felt: Raghery and the waters
of Moyle; Portrush and the Giant's Causeway; the nine glens with the
purple heather, and the streams that sang as they cantered to the sea;
the crowing grouse and the whinnying curlew, and the eagles barking on
the cliffs; the trout that rose in the summer's evening, and the red
berries of the rowan; the cold, clear lakes, and the braes where the
blueberries grow. He could well understand the stories they told of
Napper Tandy, and the great rebel in the gardens of Versailles. Napoleon
had found him weeping amid all that beauty.

"Don't be afraid, Napper Tandy. I shall keep my word and send General
Hoche to Ireland."

"It's not that, sir; it's not that." And Tandy could not keep the tears
back. "Och, County Antrim, it's far I'm from you now!"

§ 3

He had reached the cairn of round stones that marks the town land of
Drimsleive, and was turning the brae when a voice called to him:

"Eh, wee fellow, is it mitching from school you are?"

An old woman in a plaid shawl was coming slowly down the hillside. He
recognized her for Bridget Roe MacFarlane of Cushendhu, a cotter tenant
of his Uncle Alan's.

"No, cummer," he told her; "I'm not mitching. I got the day off."

"For God's sake! if it isn't wee Shane Campbell! And what are doing up
the mountain, wee Shane?"

"Ah, just dandering."

"I was up mysel'," she went on, "to the top of it, because I heard tell
there was a cure for sore eyes in the bit lake on the top. Not that I
put much store in such cures, but there's no use letting anything by. I
got a pair of specs from a peddling man of Ballymena," said she, "but
they don't seem to do me much good. I'm queer and afeared about my
eyes, hinny. It would be a hard thing for me to go blind and none about
the wee bit house but mysel'."

"Ay! I should think it would be a terrible thing to be a dark person,"
wee Shane nodded.

"Och, it wouldn't be so bad if you were born that way, for you'd know no
different. And if you went blind and you young, there's things you could
take up to take the strain from your head like a man takes up piping.
When you're old it's gey hard. If you're an old man itself, it's not so
bad, for there'll always be a soft woman to take care of you. But if
you're an old cummer, without chick or child, it's hard, _agra vig_. My
little love, it's hard."

"Maybe it's in your head, Bridget Roe. My Uncle Robin says there's a lot
of sickness that's just in your head."

"I trust to my God so, and maybe your Uncle Robin's right, for there
does be a lot in my head, and it going around like a spinning-wheel. I'm
a experienced woman, wee Shane, too experienced, and that's the trouble.
You've no' heard because you're too young and you would no' understand.
I was away from here for twenty years," she said, "for more nor twenty.
And I knew a power of men in my time, big men, were needful of me. And
a power of trouble I raised, too, and it does be coming back to me and
me in my old days.... But you'll be wanting to be getting on?"

"Och, no, Bridgeen Roe; there's no hurry."

"It does me good to have a wee crack, the folk I see are so few ... Aye!
There was a power of trouble. There were two men killed themselves and
families broken up all by reason of me. I meant no harm, wee Shane, but
it happened, and it does be troubling me in my old days. And I sit there
afeared by the peat fire, and when I've thought too much on it, I get up
and go to the half-door. And I look out on the Moyle, wee Shane, and I
think: that's been roaring since the first tick of time, and I see the
stars so many of them, and the moon that never changed its shape or
size, and it comes to me that nothing matters in the long run, that the
killed men were no more nor caught trout, and the rent families no more
nor birds' nests fallen from a tree.... None of us are big enough that
anything we do matters.... And then another feeling comes on me, that
God is around, and that He'll be dreadful hard.... And a wee bit of luck
comes my way. The hens, maybe, are laying well, and there's a high price
on the eggs, and I think, sure He's the Kindly Man, after all.... But
if my eyes leave me, Shane Beg, what will I do? Sure, I won't have the
moon or the stars or the waters of Moyle to put things in their place.
And there'll be no luck about me, so as I'll know Himself is the
Unforgiving Man."

"But some one will take care of you, Bridget Roe."

"And who, _agra_? 'Tis not me to go to the poorhouse, and take charity
like a cold potato. And my name is MacFarlane, wee Shane, and they're a
clan that fights till it dies, that never gives in. And it isn't to the
big ones I knew I'd be writing for help.... Sure I see them now, what's
left alive of them, sitting by their firesides, figuring out their life,
and tired with the puzzle of it; and then they'll remember me for an
instant, and a wee joy will come to them in the dim twilight. They'll
remember as you'd remember an old song you hadn't rightly got the air
of. But you knew it was sweet and there was a grand swing to it.... Aye,
they'll remember me, and they looking into the heart of the fire.... And
you wouldn't have me write them now and tell them I'm only an old
_cailleach_ in a cabin on the mountain-side, and my eyes, that they'll
remember, are dull like marbles.... You wouldn't understand, wee
Shane.... But I'm blethering too much about myself. And where is it you
were going, my little jo? Where is it?"

"I heard tell the Dancers were to be seen from the mountain-top over the
sea, and I thought maybe I'd go up and gi'e them a look, cummer ... just
a look."

"So you would, wee Shane, so you would. You wouldn't be your father's
son or your uncles' nephew if you were to let a marvel like that pass
by. It's after adventure you are, and you only four and ten years old.
'T is early you begin, the Campbells of Cosnamara.

"But sure that isn't adventure, cummer, to be seeing the Dancers in the
heat haze of the day. Adventures are robbers and fighting Indians and
things like in Sir Walter Scott."

"Oh, sure everything's adventure, hinny, every time you go looking for
something queer and strange, and something with a fine shape and color
to it. Adventure isn't in the quick fist and the nimble foot; it's in
the hungry heart and the itching mind. Isn't it myself that knows, that
was a wild and wilful girl, and went out into the world for more nor
twenty years, and came back the like of an old bitch fox, harried by
hunting, and looking for and mindful of the burrow where she was
thrown?... As we're made, we're made, wee fellow; you're either a
salmon that hungers for the sea, or a cunning old trout that kens its
own pool and is content.... Adventures! Hech aye!"

"Well, I hope your eyes get better, cummer. I do so."

"I know you mean it, Shaneen Beg, and maybe your wish will help them,
maybe it will."

"Well, I'll be going on my way, Bridget Roe."

"And I'll be finishing mines, wee Shane Campbell. And I hope to my God
you're better off at the end nor me--me that once talked to earls and
barons, and now clucks to a wheen o' hens; me that once had my coach and
pair, and now have only an ass with a creel o' turf; and no care of
money once on me, and now all I have is my spinning-wheel, and the flax
not what it used to be, but getting coarser. And my eyes going out, that
were the delight of many ... I hope you're better off nor me at the end
of the hard and dusty road, wee Shane. I hope to my God so...."

§ 4

He thought hard of what the cummer of Cushendhu had said about his
family, and he on the last leg of the mountain. That he was his
father's son puzzled him more than that he was his uncles' nephew, for
there was little mention of his father in the house. At the dead man's
name his prim Huguenot mother from Nantes pursed her mouth, and in her
presence even his uncles were uncomfortable, those great, gallant men.
All he knew was that his father, Colquitto Campbell, had been a great
Gaelic poet, and that his father and mother had not quite been good
friends. Once his Uncle Robin had stopped before a ballad-singer in
Ballycastle when the man was striking up a tune:

  On the deck of this lonely ship to America bound,
  A husk in my throat and a mist of tears in my eyes--

His Uncle Robin had given the man a guinea.

"Why for did you give the singing man a golden piece, Uncle Robin?"

"For the sake of an old song, laddie, an old and sad song.... A song
your father made.... It was like seeing his ghost...."

"But my father, Uncle Robin--"

"Your father was the heart of corn, wee Shane, for all they say against
him.... I never knew a higher, cleaner heart, but he was easy
discourag't.... Aye, easy thrown down and easy led away.... I was fond
of him.... Am ... always, and no matter.... However ... shall we go and
see the racing boats, wee fellow?"

And that was all he ever got from Uncle Robin. But he knew some of his
father's songs that were sung in the country-side ...

  _Is truagh, a ghradh, gan me agas thu im Bla chliath!
  No air an traigh bhain an ait nach robh duine riamh,
  Seachd oidhche, seachd la, gan tamh, gan chodal, gan bhiadh,
  Ach thusa bhi 'm ghraidh's lamh geal thardam gu fial!_

"O God! my loved one, that you and I were in Dublin town! Or on a white
strand, where no foot ever touched before. Day in, night in, without
food or sleep, what mattered it? But you to be loving me and your white
arm around me so generously!"

He couldn't understand the song, though the lilt of the words captured
him. What should people accept being without food or sleep? And what
good was a white arm generously around one? However, that was love, and
it was a mystery.... But that song could not have been to his mother. He
could not imagine her being generous with even a white arm. And none
would want to be with her on a strand without food or sleep; that he
instinctively felt. She was a high, proud cliff, stern and proud and
beautiful, and that song was a song of May-time and the green
rushes....

And other songs of his father's were sung: "Maidne Fhoghmhair--Autumn
Mornings," and "In Uir-chill an Chreagain--In the Green Graveyard of
Creggan...."

A queer thing that all that should be left of his father was a chill
silence and a song a man might raise at the rising of the moon....

Silent he was in his grave, dumb as a stone, and all his uncles were
silent, too, barring the little smile at the corners of their mouths,
that was but the murmuring of the soul.... There were paintings of them
all and they young in the house, their high heads, their hawks' eyes,
Alan and Robin and Mungo.... And Mungo, too, was dead with Wellington in
the Peninsula. He and three of his men were all left of the Antrim
company. "Christ! have I lost this fight, too?" He laughed and a French
ball took him in the gullet. "Be damned to that!" He coughed. "He might
have got me in a cleaner place!" And that was the end of Mungo....

And Alan had gone with Sir John Franklin to the polar seas, and come
back with the twisted grin. "'T was a grand thing you did, Alan, to live
through and come back from the wasted lands." "'T was a grand thing they
did, to find the channel o' trade. But me, I went to find the north
pole, with the white bear by the side of it, like you see in the
story-books. And I never got within the length of Ireland o' 't! Trade,
aye; but what's trade to me? It's a unco place, the world!"

His father he could imagine: "Poor Colquitto Campbell! He wanted to bark
like an eagle, and he made a wee sweet sound, like a canary-bird! Ah,
well, give the bottle the sunwise turn, man o' the house, and come
closer to me, a _bheilin tana nan bpog_, O slender mouth of the kisses!"
His father, wee Shane thought, must have worn the twisted grin, too.

He knew what the twisted grin meant. It meant defeat. He had seen it on
his Uncle Alan's face when he lost the championship of Ireland on the
golf links of Portrush. And that morning he had been so confident! "'T
is the grand golf I'll play the day, and the life tingling in my
finger-tips!" And great golf he did play, with his ripping passionate
shots, but a thirty-foot putt on the home green beat him. All through
the match his face had been dour, but now came the outstretched hand and
the smile at the corner of the mouth:

"Congratulations, sir! 'T is yourself has the grand eye for the hard
putt on the tricky green!"

The wee grin meant that Alan had been beaten.

And Uncle Robin, too, the wisest and oldest of them all, who had been to
Arabia and had been all through Europe and was Goethe's friend, he had
the twisted grin of the beaten man. Only occasionally you could get past
the grin of Uncle Robin, as he had gotten past it the day Uncle Robin
had spoken of his brother, Shane's father. And sometimes when a great
hush was on the mountains and the Moyle was silent, Uncle Robin would
murmer a verse of his great poet friend's:

  Über allen Gipfeln
  Ist Ruh,
  In allen Wipfeln
  Spürest du
  Kaum einen Hauch;
  Die Vögelein schweigen im Walde.
  Warte nur, balde
  Ruhest du auch.

The sharp u's and heavy gutturals were so like Gaidhlig, it seemed queer
wee Shane could not understand the poem; but Uncle Robin translated it
into Gaidhlig:

  _Os cionn na morbheanna
  Ta sith_--

And the melody of it was like the plucking of a harper's strings. So
much in so little, and every note counted, and the last line like a dim
quaint bar:

_Beidh sith agad fein!_ "You will rest, too!"

A queer thing, the men who were beaten and smiled. A queer thing the men
who, beaten, were more gallant than the winners. A queer thing for the
cummer of Cushendhu to say, she who was so wise after the hot
foolishness of youth, that he was his uncles' nephew and his father's
son. A queer thing that. A queer, dark, and secret thing.

§ 5

The memory of his Uncle Robin stuck in his mind and he going up the
mountain. His Uncle Robin knew all there was to be known in the world,
the immense learned man. When he was spoken to of anything strange, he
had always an explanation for it. When the mirage off Portrush was
mentioned, he could talk at length of strange African mirages that the
travelers see in the desert at the close of day, oases and palm-trees
and minarets, so you would think you were near to a town or a green
pasture and you miles and miles away. And there was a sight to be seen
off Sicily that the ignorant Italian people thought was the work of
Morgan le Fay. And in the Alps was a horror men spoke of and called the
Specter of the Brocken.

All these strange occurrences were as simple as the alphabet to Uncle
Robin. He would explain it as a sight reflected on the cloud and thrown
on a sea of mist or a desert as on a screen, using difficult words, like
"refraction," and words from Euclid, like "angles." But Uncle Alan would
object, Uncle Alan mistrusting difficult words and words from Euclid.
Alan would raise his head from splicing a fishing-rod or cleaning the
lock of a gun or polishing a snaffle:

"You were ay the one for explanations, Robin. Maybe you've got an
explanation for the gift?" By the gift Uncle Alan meant the second
sight.

"Ah, sure; 't is only mind reading and sympathy."

"O my God! Now listen, Robin. You ken when you dragged me from the
horse-show the last time we were in Dublin, to the library of the
What-you-may-call-him--Archæological Society or so'thin'. You ken the
book you showed me about Antrim, and what was seen off the cliffs one
time. There was a great black arm in the air, and a hand to the wrist
of it, and to the shoulder a crosspiece with a ring, like one end of an
anchor. And that disappeared. And then immediately there showed a ship,
with the masts and sails and tackles and men, and it sailed stern
foremost and it sank stern foremost, all in the red sky. And then there
was a fort with a castle on the top of it and there were fire and smoke
coming out of it, as if a grand fight was on. And the fort divided into
two ships, that chased each other, and then sank. Then there was a
chariot with two horses, and chasing that was a strange thing like a
serpent, a snake's head at one end, and a bulk at the other like a
snail's house. And it gained on the chariot and gave it a blow. And out
of the chariot came a bull, and after it came a dog, and the bull and
the dog fought as in a gaming-pit. And then suddenly all was clear, no
cloud or mist or anything in the northern air. Am I right or am n't I?
Wasn't that in the book, Robin More?"

"It was."

"And now, Robin, my man, wasn't that signed by respectable people: Mr.
Allye, a minister, and a Lieutenant Dunsterville and a Lieutenant Dwine
and Mr. Bates and twelve others, all of whom saw it near or around the
time of the Boyne Water? Wasn't it signed by the decent people?"

"It was."

"And what explanation have you got for that, you and your master of arts
of Trinity College!"

"They were daft--gone in the head. Daft or drunk."

"My song! And maybe John was daft when he saw the vision of Patmos!"

"I would no' be surprised."

"Na, Robin More; you would not be surprised if you saw a trout that
cantered or a horse that flew. You'd have an explanation. You're the
queer hard man to live with, Robin, with your explanations."

Willie John Boyd, the servant boy, removed his cutty pipe and hazarded a
suggestion.

"Queer things happened in the auld days."

"If there were queerer things nor you in the auld days," Alan laughed,
"it must have been like a circus."

But mightn't they both be right? wee Shane thought, and he trudging up
the mountain-side. His Uncle Alan knew an awful lot. There was none
could coax a trout from a glass-clear pool with a dry fly like Alan
Campbell. He knew the weather, when it would storm and when it would
clear, and from what point the wind would blow to-morrow. He could nurse
along the difficult flax and knew the lair of the otter and had a great
eye for hunting fox and a better eye for a horse than a Gipsy. Might
there not be things in nature, as he said, that none knew of? And
mightn't there be explanations for them, as Uncle Robin, who had read
every book, claimed there were? Mightn't they both be right, who thought
each other wrong, and they arguing by the red fire, fighting and
snarling like dogs and loving each other with the strange soft love of
lovers when the trees are a-rustle and the moon high?

§ 6

He had thought to come up to the top of the mountain where the cairn
was, and the dark and deepest lake, and to sit down in the heather and
wait half an hour maybe while the curlew called, and then have Dancing
Town take form and color before his eyes, hold it until every detail was
visible, and then fade gently out as twilight fades into night. He had
thought to be prepared and receptive.

But suddenly it was upon him, in the air, over the waters of Moyle....

A sweep of fear ran over him, and he grew cold, so strange it was, so
against nature. Clear and high, as in some old print, and white and
green, the town and shore came to him. The May afternoon was in it, hot
and golden, but the town itself was in morning sunlight. A clutter of
great houses and little houses, all white, a great church, and a squat
dun fort, and about it and in it were green spaces and palm-trees that
swayed to a ghostly breeze. And the green ran down to a white beach, and
on the beach foamy waves curled like a man's beard. And in the air the
town quivered and danced, as imaged trees seem to dance on running
water....

On one side was Ireland, and _on one_ side was Scotland, and high in the
air between them was Dancing Town....

No one was in the streets that wee Shane could see, and yet the town was
lifeful, some tropical city where the green jalousies were closed in the
heat of the midday sun, and where no one was on the streets, barring
some unseen old beggar or peddling woman drowsing in the shade. The town
was sleeping not with the sleep of Scotland, that is the sleep of dead
majestic, melancholy kings, nor with the sleep of Ireland, that is
tired and harassed and old. It was not as lonely as sleeping lakes are
where the bittern booms like a drum.... It slept as a child sleeps, lips
apart and chubby fingers uncurled, and happy.... And all the time it
quivered in the clear air....

In the morning, wee Shane thought, it woke to bright happiness, the
green parrakeets chattered, the monkeys whistled, the lizards basked in
the sun. And the generation of the town came out and gossiped and worked
merrily, until the heat of the sun began to strike with the strokes of a
mallet, and then they went into the cool, dark houses and slept as
children sleep. And then came blue twilight, and lamps were lit in the
green spaces, and into the odorous night would come the golden rounded
women with smiles like honey, and the graceful feline men.... A woman's
laughter, a man's song.... And the moon rising on tropic seas, while a
guitar hummed with a deep vibrant note.... And the perfume of strange
tropic trees....

But meantime the town danced in the clear air.... And--

"It's gone!" said wee Shane.

One moment it was there, and the next there were only Ireland and
Scotland and the waters of Moyle, and a ship going drowsily for the
Clyde.

And for a long time he waited, thinking Dancing Town might come again.
But it did not come. The schooner off the Mull lay over, and the Moyle
awoke. A breeze rambled up the mountain, and the heather tinkled its
strange dry tinkle. And afar off a curlew called, and a grouse crowed in
defiance.

The moment of magic was by, and wee Shane went down the mountain.

§ 7

As he went down the mountain he tried to puzzle out the why and
wherefore of Dancing Town.

Of course there were things you could not explain, like the banshee; or
the Naked Hangman, who strides through the valleys on midsummer's eve
with his gallows under his arm; or the Death Coach, with its headless
horses and its headless driver. There was no use bringing these matters
up to Uncle Robin. Uncle Robin would only laugh and shout: "Havers,
bairn! Wha's been filling your wee head with nonsense?" But you could no
more deny their existence than you could that of Apollyon, whom you read
about in "Pilgrim's Progress," and who wandered up and down the world
and to and fro in it; or of the fairies, whose sweet little piping many
heard at night as they passed the forts of the little people; or of the
tiny cobbling leprechawns, who knew where the Danes had hid their store
of gold in crocks such as hold butter.... Of these there was no
explanation but the Act of God. And Uncle Robin was queer. He put no
store in the Act of God.

Now, if it had been an angel he had seen in the high air, it would have
been the Act--or the banshee, and her crooning and keening by the
riverside, with her white cloak, her red, burnished hair.... But it was
an island he had seen, a dancing town, with his own hard wee Scots-Irish
eyes. And that was not an Act of God; it was a fact, and so outside his
Uncle Alan's bailiwick and within his Uncle Robin's. His Uncle Robin
would say it was the reflected image of some place in the world. Aye,
he'd take his Uncle Robin's word for that. But where was it? Surely, as
yet, it was undiscovered. It had the quiet of a June evening, that land
had, and a grand shimmering beauty.... And if it was known where it was,
wouldn't the mountainy folk be leaving their cabins, and the strong
farmers their plowed lands, and the whining tinkers be hoofing the road
for it? If it was known where that land was....

It occurred to him it must have been that land his father meant and he
writing his poem of the Green Graveyard of Creggan. While he was
sleeping under the weeping yew-trees the young queen had touched the
sleeping poet on the shoulder.

"_A shiolaigh charthannaigh_," she said, "O kindly kinsman, _na
caithtear thusa ins na nealtaibh broin_, let you not be thrown under the
clouds of sorrow! _Acht eirigh in do sheasamh_, but rise in your
standing, _agas gluais liomsa siar' sa' rod_, and travel with me
westward in the road. _Go Tir Dheas na Meala_, to the shimmering land of
honey where the foreigner has not the sway. And you will find pleasantry
in white halls persuading me to the strains of music."

Surely his father, too, had seen Dancing Town!

And it was an old story that Oisin had found it, when he rode with the
princess over the waves on a white horse whose hoofs never touched
water, and he abode with her in _Tir nan Og_, in the Land of Them Who
are Young, for a thousand years or more, until the great homesickness
for Ireland took him, that takes the strongest, and he came for a visit
on the white horse; but the girths of the saddle broke, and he fell to
the ground, and the horse flew away. And he who had been strong and
young and beautiful became old and bald and blind, and Patrick of the
Bells and Crosses took him, and put him with the groaning penitents, who
beat their breasts under the fear of hell. And he, who had known Tir nan
Og and the Silver Woman, was a drooling ancient with a wee lad to lead
him.... But that was just a winter's tale with no sense to it.

But there were other things in books that had the ring of truth to them.
There was the voyage of Maeldun, who had set out in his coracle, and
visited strange islands. The Island of Huge Ants was one, and wee Shane
had seen in his geography book pictures of armadillos, and he shrewdly
surmised that Maeldun had been to South America. And there was the
Island of Red-Hot Animals, but that was a poser. Still and all, the
rhinoceros had armor like an old knight's, and that would surely get
red-hot under the suns of the equator. It would explain, too, why the
rhinoceros favored the water, like a cow in July.... Sure that was it:
Maeldun had been to Africa. And Maeldun, too, had found the Fortunate
Isle. Brendan, too, had known it. Wasn't it in old charts--St. Brendan's
Isle? He said he found it, and surely a saint of God wouldn't lie....

Och, it was there somewhere, but people were different from what they
were in the ancient days. They didn't bother. If they had told his
father about it, sure all Colquitto would have done was to call for pen
and paper.

"_Mo bhron air an fhairrge_," he would have written: "My grief on the
sea--how it comes between me and the land where my mind might be easy--"
And then he'd have lain back and chanted it. "'_Avourneen_, did you ever
in all your life hear a poem as good as my poem? Sure old Homer's
jealous in the black clouds. Was there ever a Greek poet the equal of a
Gaelic one? _Anois, teacht an Earraigh_--now the moment spring comes in,
't is I will hoist sail, _inneosad mo sheol_...."

And Alan Donn might have started to find it, but at the first golf links
he'd stop, "to take the conceit out of the local people, and to give
them something to talk of, and they old men," or to match his coursing
greyhound against any dog in the world for a ten-pound note, or to
deluther some red-cheeked likely woman....

And Uncle Robin might hear of it, and he'd sit down and write a book,
saying where it probably was, and how you might get there, and what the
people were like, and whom they were probably descended from.... And
the book would be in all the libraries of the world, and people would be
writing him telling him what a great head was on him, and he'd mutter:
"Nonsense! Nonsense! All nonsense!" and stroke his great red beard....

But wouldn't it be the funny thing, the queer and funny thing, if he
himself, wee Shane Campbell, were to go out and discover that island,
and to own it, and to have it marked in the maps and charts, "Wee Shane
Campbell's Island," for all to read and see?...

"Decent wee fellow, is it about here somewhere the house of the McFees?"

Shane had turned into the main road that ran along the sea-shore on the
way homeward when the voice hailed him. It was a great black-bearded
man, sitting on the ditch, holding his shoes in his hand. His face was
tanned to mahogany, and in his ears were little gold rings. He wore
clothes that were obviously new, obviously uncomfortable.

"If you keep on the road about a half a mile and then turn to the left,
and keep on there until you come to a loaning near a well with a
hawthorn-bush couching over it, and turn to the left down that loaning,
you'll come to it. It's a wee thatched house, needing a coat of
whitewash. It's got a byre with a slate roof, and a rowan-tree near it.
You canna' miss it."

"Now isn't that the queer thing," the big man said, "me that thought I
knew every art and part of this country, and that could find my way in
the dark from Java Head to Poplar Parish, can't remember the place where
I was born and reared? Forty years of traveling on the main ocean and
thinking long for this place, and now when I come back I know no more
about it than a fish does of dry land." He stood up painfully. "And me
that thought I would come back leaping like a hare am now killed
entirely with the soreness of my feet."

"You're not accustomed to walking, then, honest man?"

"'Deed, and you may say I'm not, decent wee fellow. I'm a sailorman, and
aboard ship there's very little use for the feet. You've got to be quick
as a fish with the hands, and have great strength in the arms of you.
And you must have toes to grip, and thighs to brace you against the
heeling timbers. But to be walking somewhere for long, hitting the road
with your feet like you'd be hitting a wall with your head, it's
unnatural to a sailing man. A half a mile, did you say?"

"Honest man," said wee Shane, troubled, "are you looking for any one in
the house of the McFees?"

"For a woman that bore me and put me to her breast. An old woman now,
decent wee fellow."

"You'll no' find her, honest man."

"She's dead?"

"I saw her with the pennies on her eyes not two months gone."

"So my mother's dead," said the big man. "So my mother's dead. Ah, well,
all her troubles are over. It's forty years since I saw her, and she the
strapping woman. And in forty years she must have had a power of
trouble."

"She looked unco peaceful, honest man."

"The dead are always peaceful, decent wee fellow. So my mother's dead.
Well, that alters things."

"You'll be staying at home then, honest man?"

"I'll be going back to sea, decent wee fellow. I had intended to stay at
home and be with the old woman in her last days, the like of a pilot
that brings a ship in, as you might say. But it would have been queer
and hard. Herself, now, had no word of English?"

"Old Annapla McFee spoke only the Gaidhlig."

"And the Gaidhlig is gone from me, as the flower goes from the
fruit-tree. And there could have been little conversation betwixt us,
she remembering fairs and dances and patterns in the Gaidhlig, and me
thinking of strange foreign ports in the English tongue. Poor company
I'd have been for an old woman and she making her last mooring. I'd have
been little assistance. Forty years between us--strange ports and deep
soundings. Oh, we'd have been making strange."

"Ah, maybe not, honest man."

"How could it have been any other way, decent wee lad? She'd have been
the strange, pitiful old cummer to me, who minded her the strapping
woman, and I'd have been a queer bearded man to her, who minded me only
as a wee fellow, the terror of the glen. People change every day, and
there's a lot of change in forty years.

"And, besides, it would have been gey hard on me, wee lad. The grape and
spade would be clumsy to my hands, there being no life to them after the
swinging spars. And my fingers, used to splicing rope, would not have
the touch for milking a cow. And I'd feel lost, wee fellow, some day and
me plowing a field, to see a fine ship on the waters, out of Glasgow
port for the Plate maybe, and to think of it off the Brazils, and the
pampero coming quick as a thrown knife, and me not aboard to help
shorten sail or take a trick at the wheel. And it might have made me
ugly toward the old woman. And I wouldn't have had that at all, at
all.... But she's finished the voyage, poor cummer.... And it's a high
ship and a capstan shanty for me again ... all's well...."

"It's a wonder, honest man, you wouldn't stay on land at peace and you
forty years at sea."

"Well, it's a queer thing, decent wee fellow, but once you get the salt
water in your blood you're gone. A queer itching is in your veins. It's
like a disease. It is so. It spoils you for the fire on winter nights
and for the hay-fields in the month o' June. And it puts a great bar
between you and the folk o' dry land, such as there is between a
fighting man and a cowardly fellow. It's the salt in the blood, I think;
but you'd have to ask a doctor about that.

"I'm not saying it's a good life. It's a dog's life. It is so. And when
you're at sea you say: 'Wasn't I the fool to ever leave dry land; and if
I get back and get a job,' says you, 'you'll never see me leave it
again. It's a wee farm for me,' you'll say. And then somehow you'll find
yourself back aboard ship. And you'll be off the Horn, up aloft,
fighting a sail like you'd fight a man for your life, or you'll be in
the horse latitudes, as they call them, and no breeze stirring, and not
a damned thing to do but holystone decks, the like of an old pauper that
does be scrubbing a poorhouse floor. And you say: 'Sure I'd rather be a
tinker traveling the roads, with his ass and cart and dog and woman, nor
a galley-slave to this bastard of a mate that has no more feeling for a
poor sailorman nor a hound has for a rabbit. It's a dog's life,' you
say, 'and when we make port I'm finished.'

"But you make port and you stay awhile, and you find that the woman
you've been thinking of as Queen of Sheba is no more nor a common drab.
And the publican you thought of as the grand generous fellow has no more
use for you and your bit silver gone. It's a queer thing, but they on
land think of nothing but money. And one day you think, and the woman
beside you is pastier nor dough, and the man of the public house is no
more nor a cheap trickster, and you're listening to the conversation of
the timid urban people, and the house you're in is filthier nor a pig's
sty. And you say: 'Is this me that minds the golden women of the
islands, and they with red flowers in their hair? Is this me that fought
side by side with good shipmates in Callao? Am I listening to the
chatter of these mild people, me that's heard grand stories in the
forecastle of how this man was marooned in the Bahamas, and that man was
married to a Maori queen, by God? Me, the hero that dowsed skysails, and
they cracking like guns. Is this lousy room a place for me that's used
to a ship as clean as a cat from stem to stern?' And you stand up
bravely, and you look the man of the public house square in the shifty
eyes, and you say: 'Listen, bastard! Do you ken e'er a master wants a
sailing man? A sailor as knows his trade, crafty in trouble, and a
wildcat in danger, and as peaceful as a hare in the long grass?' And
you're off again on the old trade and the old road, where the next port
is the best port, and the morrow is a braver day.... So it's so long,
decent wee fellow! I'm off on it again. It's a dog's life, that's what
it is, the life of a sailing man. But you couldn't change. I suppose
it's the salt in the blood."

"You're off, honest man?"

"Aye, I'm off, wee fellow. And thank you kindly for what you told me,
and for telling me especially the old woman looked so peaceful and her
with the pennies on her eyes."

"But aren't you going up to see the house?"

"I don't think I will, wee lad. I've had a picture in my mind for forty
years of the big house was in it, and the coolth of the well. And maybe
it isn't so at all. I'd rather not know the difference. I'll keep my
picture."

"But the house is yours," wee Shane urged him. "You're not going to
leave it as it is. Aren't you going to sell it and take the money?"

"Och, to hell with that! I've no time," said the sailing man, and he
limped painfully back down the road.

§ 8

His Uncle Robin had gone off to discuss with some Belfast crony the
strange things he used to discuss, like the origin of the Round Tower of
Ireland or the cryptic dialect of the Gaelic masons or whether the Scots
came to Scotland from Ireland or to Ireland from Scotland, all very
important for a member of the Royal Irish Academy. And his mother had
gone off shopping to buy linen for the house at Cushendhu, poplin for
dresses, delft from Holland for the kitchen and glass from Waterford for
the sideboard in the dining-room. And because he was to go to the
boarding-school that night and thereafter would be harsh discipline,
and because his Uncle Robin had known he was on the point of crying, he
had been allowed to wander around Belfast by himself for a few hours
with a silver shilling in his pocket. And wee Shane had made for the
quays....

The four of them had sat in a cold, precise room that morning, his Uncle
Robin, his mother, wee Shane, and the principal, a fat, gray-eyed,
insincere Southerner, with a belly like a Chinese god's, dewlaps like a
hunting hound's, cold, stubby, and very clean hands, and a gown that
gave him a grotesque dignity. And he had eyed wee Shane unctuously. And
wee Shane did not like fat, unctuous men. He liked them lean and active,
as glensmen are.

And the principal had spoken in stilted French to his mother, who had
responded in French that cracked like a whip. And the principal had
licked the ground before Uncle Robin. It was "Yes, Dr. Campbell!" And,
"No, Dr. Campbell!" where the meanest glensman would have said "Aye,
maybe you're right, Robin More," or, "Na, na, you're out there, Robin
Campbell."

"The old hypocrite!" It was the only word wee Shane could describe the
master by, a favorite word of his Uncle Alan's.

And in the corridors he had met some of the scholars, white-faced
fellows; and the masters--they had mean eyes, like the eyes of badgers.

"I dinna want to go!" He blurted out on the quays of Belfast.

"Where dinna you want to go, wee laddie?" A black, curly-headed man with
gray eyes and a laugh like a girl's stopped short. He had blue clothes
and brass buttons and stepped lightly as a cat.

"I dinna want to go to school."

"Sure, all wee caddies go to school."

"I ken that. But I don't want to go to school with a bunch of whey-faced
gets, and masters lean and mean as rats, and a principal puffed out like
a setting hen."

"Oh, for God's sake! is that the way you feel about it? Laddie, you
don't talk like a townsman. Where are you from?"

"I'm from the Glens of Antrim. From Cushendhu."

"I'm a Raghery man myself. _Tha an Gaidhlig agad?_

"_Tha, go direach!_"

"So you've got the Gaidhlig too? Who are your people, wee laddie?"

"I'm a Campbell of Cushendhu."

"For God's sake! you're no' a relation of Alan Campbell's, wha sailed
with Sir John Franklin for the pole?"

"I'm his nephew."

"I've sailed under your Uncle Alan. He's the heart o' corn. And so
they're going to make a scholar out of you, like your Uncle Robin. Oh,
well, oh, well. Would you like to come around with me and see the
ships?"

"I'd like fine to see the ships."

"You'll see all manner of ships here. Square-riggers, fore-and-afters,
hermaphrodites. You'll see Indiamen and packets from Boston. You'll see
ships that do be going to Germany, and some for the Mediterranean ports.
You'll see a whaler that's put in for repairs. You'll see fighting
ships. You'll see fishers of the Dogger Banks, and boats that go to
Newfoundland, where the cod do feed. All manner of sloops and schooners,
barkantines and brigs, but the bonniest of them all lies off
Carrickfergus."

"And who's she, Raghery man?"

"The _Antrim Maid_ is her nomination."

"And do you sail her?"

"I sail in her, laddie. Sail and sail in her. Mine from truck to keelson
she is, and I'm master of her. Father and mother and brother to her, and
husband, too. I'm proud of her." The Rathliner laughed. "You may
notice."

"And why for shouldn't you be? She must be the grand boat surely, man
who sailed with my Uncle Alan."

§ 9

"Raghery man, you who've sailed the high seas and the low seas, did you
ever put into an island that has great coolth to it and great sunshine,
a town quiet as a mouse, a strip of sand like silver, the waves turning
with a curl and chime?"

"Where did you hear tell of that island, wee laddie? Was it in the books
you do be reading at school?"

"I saw it, and it dancing in the sun. From Slievenambanderg I saw it,
and it over the waters of Moyle."

The Rathliner sat on a mooring bitt on the quay and filled his pipe.

"I ken that island," he said. "I ken it well."

"And what name is on it, Raghery man?"

"The name that's on it is Fiddlers' Green."

"Were you ever there, Raghery man?" There was a sinking in wee Shane's
heart.

"I was never there, laddie, never there. Oftentimes I thought I'd
raised it, but it was never there, wee laddie, never there. There's men
as says they've been there, but I could hardly believe them, though
there's queer things past belief on the sea. There's a sea called
Sargasso, and if I told you half the things about it, you'd think me
daft. And there's the ghost of ships at sea, and that's past thinking.
And there's the great serpent, that I've seen with my own eyes....

"Aye, Fiddlers' Green! Where is it, and how do you get there? The
sailormen would give all their years to know."

"Why for do they call it Fiddlers' Green?"

"It's Fiddlers' Green, laddie, because it's the place you come to at the
cool of the day, when the bats are out, and the cummers put by their
spinning. And there's nou't there but sport and music. A lawn like a
golf green, drink that is not ugly, women would wander with you on to
the heather when the moon's rising, and never a thought in their mind of
the money in your pocket, but their eyes melting at you, and they
thinking you're the champion hero of the world.... And all the fiddlers
fiddling the finest of dance music: hornpipes like 'The Birds among the
Trees' and 'The Green Fields of America'; reels like 'The Swallow-tail
Coat' and 'The Wind that Shakes the Barley'; slip-jigs would make a
cripple agile as a hare.... And you go asleep with no mate to wake you
in a blow, but the sound of an old piper crooning to you as a cummer
croons. And the birds will wake you with their douce singing.... Aye,
Fiddlers' Green...."

And they were silent for a minute in the soft Ulster sunshine.

"Would you have any use for a lad like myself aboard your ship, Raghery
man?"

"Och, sure, what would you do with the sea, wee fellow?"

"I ken it well already, Raghery man. And I'm no clumsy in a boat. I can
sail a sloop with any man. On a reach or full and by, I'll keep her
there. With the breeze biting her weather bow, I'll hold her snout into
it. Or with the wind behind me, I'll ride her like you'd canter a
horse."

"I might take you to learn you seamanship and navigation, but you'd be
no use as a sailor, wee laddie, and it's not for a Campbell to be a
cabin-boy."

"Take me to learn the trade, then. Take me now."

"I'd like fine, wee fellow, but I couldn't do it. You might be cut out
for a scholar for all you think you're not. Or it might be a soldier
you're meant for. I couldn't interfere with your life. It's an unco
responsibility, interfering with a destiny, a terrible thing."

"Will you talk to my Uncle Robin? Will you?"

"Och, now, how could I talk to your Uncle Robin, him that's written
books, and is counted one of the seven learned men of Ireland? Sure, I
wouldn't understand what he'd be saying, and he'd have no ear for a
common sailing man. If it was your Uncle Alan, now--"

"There's not a person in the world but has the ear of my Uncle Robin.
And there's none easier to talk to, not even the apple woman at the
corner of the quay. Will you come with me and talk to him?"

"I couldn't, laddie. Your Uncle Alan, now--"

"I'll do the talking, then; but will you come?"

"Och, wee fellow, it would be foolish."

"You wouldn't have me think hard of a man of Raghery?"

"No, I wouldn't have any one think hard of the folk of Raghery, so I
suppose I'll have to come. I don't know what your Uncle Robin will say
to me for putting notions in your head. It's awful foolish. But I'll
come."

§ 10

"So there'd never be the making of a scholar in me, Uncle Robin. A ship
on the sea or a new strange person would be always more to me nor a
book. I can read and write and figure; what more do I want? And, och,
sir, the school would be a prison to me, the scholars droning and ink on
their fingers, and the hard-faced masters at the desk. I'd be woe for
the outside, for the sunshine and the water and the bellying winds--"

His Uncle Robin tapped the window-pane of the club and thought hard. The
Rathlin sailor stood by, puzzled.

"But, childeen asthore, sure you don't know now what you want. Your
career, laddie! Think a bit! The church, for instance--"

"Och, Uncle Robin, is it me in the church that must say my prayers by my
lee lone, so loath am I to let the people see what's in me? I'd be the
queer minister, dumb as a fish--"

"You once had a notion for the army, laddie."

"So I had, sir, and fine I'd like the uniforms and the swords and the
horses, but I wouldn't have the heart to kill a man, and me never
seeing him before. If a man did me a wrong, I'd kill him quick as I'd
wash my hands, but never seeing him before, I could na, I just could
na--"

"It's a clean thing, the sea," the Raghery man ventured.

"He's so very young," objected Uncle Robin.

"There's nothing but that or the books for me, Uncle Robin. A sailor or
a scholar--and I don't think I'd make out well with the books."

"The books aren't all they're cracked up to be, wee Shane. I've written
books myself, and who reads them but a wheen of graybeards, and they
drowsing by the fire? Knowledge, laddie, I have that.... And it isn't
even wisdom. Knowledge is like dry twigs you collect with care to make a
bit fire you can warm your shins at, and wisdom is the gift of God
that's like the blossom on the gorse. I've searched books and taken out
the marrow of dead men's brains, and after all, even all my knowledge
may be wrong.... Your father's name will be remembered as long as the
Gaidhlig lasts, for songs that came to him as easily as a woman's kiss.
And your Uncle Alan's footprints are near the pole. And Mungo is
remembered forever because he died with a laugh. Not that I'm saying
anything against them, wee Shane; better men will never be seen. But
Daniel Donelly's name is remembered because he beat Cooper in a fight,
and songs were made about it. And I'll be remembered only when some old
librarian dusts a forgotten book. And I was supposed to be the wise pup
o' the litter, with my books and my study. And all I have now is a
troubled mind in my latter days. Aye, the books!..."

"Shall I go to sea, sir?"

"Is it up to me? And how about your mother, laddie?"

"Oh, there's little warmth within her for me, sir. She's a bitter woman.
She does na like my father's breed."

"Are you your father's breed through, wee caddie? Are you Campbell all?
Here, gi' us a look at your face. Aye, the eyes, the nose, the proud
throw to the head of you. I'm afeared there's little of your mother in
you, laddie; afeared there's none at all."

"I'm no' ashamed o' my kind, sir."

"And you're set on going to sea?"

"I'd like it fine, sir."

"And if it does na turn out the way you thought it would, you're not
going to cry or turn sour?"

"I thought you knew me better nor that, Uncle Robin."

"I do." The big man laid his hand on the boy's shoulder and smiled at
the shipmaster. "Take him, Raghery man!"

§ 11

Though all was wonder to wee Shane, there was so much of it that it
flicked through his head like a dream: the hazy September afternoon; the
long, lean vessel like a greyhound; the sails white as a swan's wing;
the cordage that rattled like wood; the bare-footed, bearded sailors;
the town of Carrickfergus in the offing; the _lap-lap-lap_ of water; the
silent man at the wheel; the sudden transition of the friendly Raghery
man into a firm, authoritative figure, quick as a cat, rapping out
commands like a sergeant-major.

The town of Carrickfergus began to slip by as if drawn by horses. The
mate ran up the ladder of the poop.

"Topsails, McCafferty!" the Raghery man ordered.

"Topsails, sir."

A minute later there came the mate's voice from amidships:

"Sheet home the topsails--and put your backs into it!"

Patter of feet. An accordion began to whine like a tinker. Creak and
strain. Faster lapping of water. A song raised in chorus:

  As I came a-tacking down Paradise Street--
    Yo-ho! Blow the man down!
  As I came a-tacking down Paradise Street--
    Give us some time till we blow the man down!

  A trim little bumboat I chanced for to meet!
    Blow, bullies, blow the man down!
  A trim little bumboat I chanced for to meet!
    Give us some time till we blow the man down!

  She was round in the counter and bluff in the bows!
    Yo-ho! Blow the man down!
  She was round in the counter and bluff in the bows!
    Give us some time till we blow the man down.
    Blow the man down!
    Blow, bullies! Blow the man down!

PART TWO

THE WAKE AT ARDEE

§ 1

The feeling that was uppermost in him as he sat outside the thatched
cottage in the moonlight, while the wake was within, was not grief at
his wife's death; not a shattered mind that his life, so carefully laid
out not twelve months before, was disoriented; not any self-pity; not
any grievance against God, such as little men might have: but a strange
dumb wonder. There she lay within, in her habit of a Dominican lay
sister, her hands waxy, her face waxy, her eyelids closed. And six
guttering candles were about her, and women droned their prayers with a
droning as of bees. There she lay with her hands clasped on a wooden
crucifix. And no more would the robins wake her, and they fussing in the
great hawthorn-tree over the coming of dawn. No longer would she rake
the ash from the peat and blow the red of it to a little blaze. No
longer would she beat his dog out of the house with the handle of the
broom. No longer would she forgather with the neighbors over a pot of
tea for a pleasant vindictive chat. No longer would she look out to sea
for him with her half-loving, half-inimical eyes. No longer in her
sharpish voice would she recite her rosary and go to bed.

And to-morrow they would bury her--there would be rain to-morrow: the
wind was sou'east,--they would lower her, gently as though she were
alive, into a rectangular slot in the ground, mutter alien prayers in an
alien tongue with business of white magic, pat the mound over as a child
pats his castle of sand on the sea-shore, and leave her there in the
rain.

A month from now they would say a mass for her, a year from now another,
but to-morrow, to-day, yesterday even, she was finished with all of
life: with the fussy, excited robins of dawn; with the old dog that
wanted to drowse by the fire; with the young husband who was either too
much or too little of a man for her; with the clicking beads she would
tell in her sharpish voice; with each thing; with everything.

And here was the wonder of it, the strange dumb wonder, that the
snapping of her life meant less in reality to him than the snapping of a
stay aboard ship. The day after to-morrow he would mount the deck of
Patrick Russell's boat, and after a few crisp orders would set out on
the eternal sea, as though she were still alive in her cottage, as
though indeed she had never even lived, and northward he would go past
the purple Mull of Cantyre; past the Clyde, where the Ayrshire sloops
danced like bobbins on the water; past the isles, where overhead drove
the wedges of the wild swans, trumpeting as on a battle-field; past the
Hebrides, where strange arctic birds whined like hurt dogs; northward
still to where the northern lights sprang like dancers in the black
winter nights; eastward and southward to where the swell of the Dogger
Bank rose, where the fish grazed like kine. Over the great sea he would
go as though nothing had happened, not even the snapping of a stay--down
to the sea, where the crisp winds of dawn were, and the playful, stupid,
short-sighted porpoises; the treacherous sliding icebergs; and the gulls
that cried with the sea's immense melancholy; and the great plum-colored
whales....

§ 2

To his nostrils, sterilized as they were by the salt air of the sea, the
rich scents of Louth came in a rushing profusion. The wild roses of
June were like the high notes of a violin, and there was clover, and
mown hay. In the southeast the clouds were banking, but still the moon
rose high, and the cottage was clear as in daylight, clearer even in the
mind's eye--the whitewashed walls, the thatch like silver, the swallows'
nests beneath the eaves. The hard round sea-cobbles beneath his feet
were clear and individual, and to where he sat in the haggard came a
girl's song from down the road:

  "Oh, Holland is a wondrous place and in it grows much green.
  It's a wild inhabitation for my young love to be in.
  There the sugar-cane grows plentiful, and leaves on every tree,
  But the low, lowlands of Holland are between my love and me."

He listened with a cocked ear, and smiled as he thought how easy it
would be to stroll down the road to where the singing girl was, and
accost her pleasantly: "So he's in Holland, is he? That's the queer and
foolish place for him to be, and I here!" There would be banter, quick
and smart as a whip, a scuffle, a clumsily placed kiss, laughter,
another scuffle, and a kiss that found its mark somehow, then a saunter
together down the scented loaning while the June moon rode high and the
crickets sang.

O my God! here he was thinking about love, and his wife lay inside and
she dead!

And a new light wonder sprang up and whirled within the big dumb wonder
that was on him: that here was he, a lad not yet twenty-two, with a dead
wife on his hands, while his shipmates were off with the laughter of
young women in their ears after the silent and tense watches of the sea.
His captain had gone home to Newry to where his wife awaited him, the
tall, graceful woman with the hair like black silk and the black eyes
and the black ear-rings and the slim, white, enigmatic hands. And the
first mate had gone to Rostrevor with a blond, giggling girl, and the
crew were at Sally Bishop's in Dundalk, draining the pints of frothy
porter and making crude material love to Sally Bishop's blowsy brown
girls, some chucking their silver out with a laugh--the laugh of men who
had fought hurricanes, and some bargaining shrewdly.... But here he was,
home, with his wife, and her dead. And if she hadn't been dead, she
would have been half loving, half inimical toward him, her arms and
bosom open, but a great stranger.... He couldn't understand. Well, she
was dead, and ... he didn't know....

A bent, fattish figure in a shawl came toward him through the haggard,
his wife's mother. There was the sweetish, acrid odor of whisky.

"Shane _avick_, are you there all alone, mourning for the pleasant,
beautiful one who's gone?"

"I was just sitting down."

"You wouldn't like a wee drop of consolation?"

"Whisky? No, thanks."

"Just the least taste?"

"No, thanks."

"And I after bringing it out to you in a naggin bottle. Just the wetting
of your lips, _agra_, would cheer you up, and you down to the ground."

"No!"

The old woman sat on the stone ditch beside him and began swaying
backward and forward, and the keening note came into her voice:

"Is it gone? Is it gone you are, Moyra _a sthore_? Sure, 't was the
kindly daughter you were to me, and me old and not worth my salt, a
broken _cailleach_ hobbling on a stick. Never did you refuse me the cup
o' tea so strong a mouse could walk on it. And the butcher's meat o'
Christmas, sure your old ma must have a taste, too. And many's the brown
egg you let me have, and they bringing a high price on the Wednesday
market. And the ha'porth o' snuff--sure you never came home without it,
and you at Dundalk fair. Kindly you were as the rains of April, and my
heart is ashes now you're gone...."

Shane paced off through the haggard. There was the _glug-glug_ of a
bottle, and again the sweetish, acrid odor of whisky. He turned back.

"Only to one were you kinder nor to myself and that was to the lad here,
whose heart is broken for you. Dumb with grief he is, now you're gone.
And all you did for him! You might have married a strong farmer would
have a dozen cows, horses would pull a cart or plow, hens by the dozen,
and flitches of bacon hanging in the kitchen. Or you might have married
a man had a shop and sat at your ease in the back room, like a lady
born. Or you might have married a gager and gone to Dublin and mixed
with the grand quality. And your mother would have a black silk dress,
and shoes with buttons on them. But you married this young fellow goes
to sea, so much was the great love on you for him. Love came to you like
a thunder-storm, and left you trembling like a leaf, and now you're
dead--ochanee! ochanee! ochanee o!"

Her voice changed from the shrill keen to a shrewd whine:

"You'll be leaving me something to remember her by, Shane Oge, and her a
fathom deep beneath me in the cold ground. And a trinket or two, or a
dress, maybe, or a bangle would keep my heart warm?"

"You can have them all."

"All is it? Ah, sure, it's the grand big heart is in you, lad o' the
North. And are they all to be mine, the silver brooch you bought her
from the Dutch city, and the ring with the pearl in it, and the dresses
of silk from France, and the shoes that have buckles? Are they for me,
hinny?"

"Yes, yes. Take them."

"And the wee furnishings of the house, the feather-bed is soft to lie
on, and the dresser with the delft, and the creepy stool beside the
fire, the noble chairs? You wouldn't be selling them to the stranger,
Shane Oge?"

"No, you can have those, too."

"And the house, too? Young noble fellow, where is your wife's mother to
lay her gray hairs? Couldn't you fix the house, too?"

"The house is not mine, and I can't afford to buy it."

"But 't is you you are the rich Protestant family. Your uncles and your
mother, hinny. Rotten with gold they are, and me just a poor old
_cailleach_ that gave you the white lamb o' the flock."

"We'll look after you. My uncle Alan Campbell will be here in a day or
so and fix everything. But I'm afraid the house is out of the question."

"Oh, sure it would be a noble thing to have the house, and they around
me dying with envy of my state and grandeur. At fair or at wake great
respect they would pay me, and the priests of God would be always
calling. The house, fine lad, give me the house!"

"You'll have to speak to my Uncle Alan."

"Alan Campbell is a hard Northern man."

"Nevertheless, you'll have to speak to him."

"_A mhic mheirdrighe!_" Her mouth hissed. "O son of a harlot!"

Shane wheeled like a sloop coming about.

"You forget I've got the Gaelic myself, old woman."

"Oh, sure, what did I say, fine lad, but _avick machree_, son of my
heart? _Avick machree_, I said. O son of my heart, that's what you are.
You wouldn't take wrong meaning from what an old woman said, and her
with her teeth gone, and under the black clouds of sorrow!"

A glint in the moonlight caught Shane's eyes. He gripped her right hand.

"Is that Moyra's wedding-ring you have on? Did you--did you--take
it--from her hand?"

"Oh, sure, what use would she have for it, and she in the sods of
Ballymaroo? And the grand Australian gold is in it, worth a mint of
money. And what use would you have for it, and you in strange parts,
where a passionate foreign woman would be giving you love, maybe? The
fine lad you are, will draw the heart of many. But it's drawing back
coldly they'd be, and they seeing that on your finger, or on a ribbon
around your neck. Drawing back they'd be, and giving the love was yours
to another fellow. A sin to waste the fine Australian gold it is. And
you wouldn't begrudge me the price of a couple o' heifers would grow
into grand cows? You wouldn't, fine lad--"

He flung her hand from him so savagely that she fell, and he went
swiftly toward the house where the dead woman was. Back of him in the
haggard came the _glug-glug_ of the naggin bottle, and from down the
loaning came the rich, untrained contralto of the singing girl:

  "Nor shoe nor stocking will I put on, nor comb go in my hair.
  And neither coal nor candle-light shine in my chamber fair.
  Nor will I wed with any young man until the day I die,
  Since the low lowlands of Holland are between my love and me."

§ 3

As he paused at the half-door, the laughter and the chatter in the
kitchen ceased, and he was aware of the blur of faces around the room,
white faces of men and women and alien eyes. Over the peat fire--there
was a fire even in June--the great black kettle sang on the crane, to
make tea for the mourners. Here and there were bunches of new clay pipes
scattered, and long rolls of twisted tobacco, for the men to smoke, and
saucers full of snuff for both men and women. A great paraffin lamp
threw broad, opaque shadows, making the whole a strange blur in the
kitchen, while in the bedroom opening off it, where the tense, dead
woman lay, was a glare of candles as from footlights, and there gathered
the old women of the neighborhood, discussing everything in hushed,
vindictive whispers--the price of cows, morbid diseases, the new wife
some man had, and whether such a girl was with child.... And the dead
woman, who had loved talk such as this, as a drunkard loves the glass,
gave no heed.... Strange!... And every hour or so they would flash to
their knees, like some quick instinctive movement of birds, and now
carelessly, now over-solemnly they would say a rosary for the dead
woman's soul:

"_Ar n-Athair, ta ar neamh_--" they would gabble. "Our Father, Who art
in Heaven--" and then a long suspiration: "'_Se do bheatha, 'Mhuire_!"
"Hail, Mary! Full of grace!"

But in the kitchen they would be laughing, chatting, playing crude
forfeits, telling grotesque stories, giving riddles, and now, to the
muted sound of a melodeon, a man would dance a hornpipe.... And men
would sneak out to the byre in twos and threes for a surreptitious glass
of whisky.... And suddenly they would rush in and join in the rosary:

"_Ar n-Athair, ta ar neamh_.... _Se do bheatha, 'Mhuire!_ ..."

It was all so grotesque, so empty, so play-actor-like--so inharmonious
with Death! Death was very terrible or very peaceful, thought Shane
Campbell of the sea and the Antrim Glens. "Down from your horse when
Death or the King goes by," went the Antrim old word. But here the house
of death was a booth of Punchinello.

More aware even than of the indignity of it all was he of the hatred
about him. They hated him for his alien race, his alien faith. Not
one of the men but would have killed him had they had courage,
because his head was high, his step firm. The women hated him because he
had chosen one from among them and given her honor and gifts. And his
wife's mother hated him with the venomous, nauseous hatred that old
women bear. And yet they'd have loved him if he'd given way to
hysterical, unprofound grief, or become ... drunk! They'd have
understood him. But all they had for him was hatred now. Even the dead
woman on the bed hated him.... Ah, well, only a day or so more, and he'd
come about. A leg to leeward, and he'd shake them off as a great ship
leaves behind it the troublesome traders' bumboats.

There came to him the shrill keening of the old woman as some one
brought her toward the house:

"Ochanee! Ochanee! Ochanee o! the Shepherd's lamb! She's gone from us!
The high branch on the pleasant little tree! And what's to become of me
in my latter days! Me that thought I'd have the beautiful house to live
in, and a horse and cart, and a wake would be the envy of many, and not
the curate, but the parish priest himself, to be at the head of the
funeral. And now I'm to be thrown against the great cruelty of the harsh
Northern men! Nine black curses against them and theirs, and on my bare
knees I say it. Och, white gull o' the harbor, why did you die? Ochanee!
Ochanee!"

The gabbled rosary, the low laughter in the kitchen, the clink of
glasses, the howling of the _cailleach_--all these noises repulsed him
like a forefront of battle. So he did not go into the house, but took
his hand from the half-door and returned to the haggard, to the grave,
understanding silence of the moon.

§ 4

Because he was so young, and thought he knew so much when in reality he
knew so little, young Shane had thought, when he met Moyra Dolan, that
he had discovered the morning star. Five and a half years at sea, as
apprentice and navigator, had shown his eyes much and his heart little.
He knew Bermuda and the harbor of Kingston. He had beaten up the China
Seas. He had seen the clouds over Table Mountain. He knew Baltimore. He
had seen the bowsprits of the great Indiamen thrust over the quays of
Poplar parish like muskets leveled over a barricade. And to him it was
just a wonder, a strange spectacle. The streets were strange as in a
dream, and the folk were strange as in a play. One wandered down an
avenue, seeing the queer commodities in the shops and booths. One
wandered to the right. One wandered to the left. And there was great
delight to finding a street one had seen before, maybe only five minutes
ago, and one felt one was getting somewhere, was understanding the new
country.

But one never did understand the new country. All the people were
strange. One could not imagine them about the daily business of life,
waking, eating, buying, and selling. Black men and ocher-colored folk.
There seemed to be a mystery somewhere. One imagined them gathering at
night in secret to begin their real un-understood life. At times it
seemed impossible that it was the same world. Surely the sun that struck
like a hammer in Jamaica could not be the gracious warm planet that
gilded the gorse of the Antrim glens. And up the Baltic in mid-winter it
was bleak as a candle, and even then in Antrim it had a great
kindliness. Nor were the winds the same. The hot puffs of the Indian
Ocean, the drunken, lurching flaws of Biscay Bay, the trades that worked
steadily as ants, had not the human quality of the winds of the Nine
Glens, that were now angry as an angry man, now gentle as a gentle
woman.

Only one thing was constant, and that was the women whom sailors know in
ports. And they wore masks. The same easily forced laughter, the same
crude flattery, the complacent arms, the eternal eager hand....

And then one day the new port palled, like a book one has read too
often, or a picture one has looked at over-long. And it was sheet home
the royals and off to a new port, where there were new strange people,
and streets laid another way, and other things in the merchants' booths,
and a new language to pick up a phrase or two of.

But in the end all palled for a time, the aphrodisiac tropic smell; the
coral waters, clear as well water at home; the white houses with the
green jalousies; the lush, coarse green. And the melancholic drums of
the East palled. And palled the grimness of the North. And the unceasing
processional of strange secret faces wearied the eye and the mind. And
the angular spiritual edges of shipmates wore toward one through the
uniform of flesh, became annoying, sometimes unbearable.

And then an immense yearning would come over young Shane for the beloved
faces in the lamplight, for the white road over the purple heather, for
the garden where the greened sun-dial was, with its long motto in the
Irish letter:

  _Is mairg a baidhtear in am an anaithe
  Na tig an ghrian in dhiaidh na fearthainne_--

as if anybody didn't know that, that it was a pity to be drowned in time
of storm, for the sun shines brightly when the rain goes!

But the sun-dial was mirrored in his heart, and the purple mountain and
the great dun house. The winds he sniffed as a hunting dog does, and
each tack to port or starboard either thrilled or cast him down.... When
would he get there? Would it be cool of the evening, when the bats were
out? Or would it be in the sunshine of the morning, when a great smell
was from the heather? And who would hear the wicket-gate click as the
latch was lifted, and put a welcome before him with a great shout,
uncles Alan or Robin, or a servant girl or boy, or the bent old gardener
who kept the lawn true as a bowling-green?... Or would it be his mother?

§ 5

Aboard ship the young apprentices had their problems, problems of
conduct, or of girls at home, or of money in port, but for young Shane
there was always the problem of his mother.

At home he had regarded as a matter of fact that she should come and go
in her hard, efficient French way. It had not seemed strange to him that
her mouth was tight, her eyes hard as diamonds. It was to him one with
his Uncle Robin's solemnity and Alan Donn's gruff sportsmanship. But
away from home he thought of it, brooded over it. Her letters to him
were so curt, so cut and dried! She wrote of the birth of another child
to young Queen Victoria,--as if that mattered a tinker's curse!--or how
her Holland bulbs, which she had bought at Belfast, had withered and
died. She directed him "to pray God to keep him pure in mind and body,
your affectionate mother, Louise de Daméry Campbell." Alan Donn's
letters had the grand smell of harness about them. "You'll mind the
brown gelding we bought at Ballymena. He disgraced us at Dublin in the
jumping competitions. You know he can jump his own height, but he got
the gate after three tries. I could have graet like a bairn. Well, this
will be all from your loving Uncle Alan. P.S. I caught the white trout
in Johnson's Brae burn. I was after him, and he was dodging me for six
years. Your loving Uncle Alan, P.P.S. The championship is at Newcastle
this year, and I think I've a grand chance. If you're home, you can
caddy for me. Your loving Uncle Alan."

Uncle Robin's letters had vast wisdom. "Ay be reading the books, laddie.
An ill-educated man feels always at a disadvantage among folk of talent.
Aboard ship you can read and think more than at a university. I've got a
parcel for you to take when you go again. Hakluyt's Voyages and a good
Marco Polo. And the new book of Mr. Dickens, 'The Haunted Man.' And
there's a great new writer you'll not want to miss, by name of
Thackeray." And there'd be the Bank of England note, "for fear you might
be needing it on a special occasion, and not having it, and feeling
bad." Dear Uncle Robin! And then the flash of tenderness, like a
rainbow: "God bless you and keep you, my brother's son!"

His Uncle Robin's letters he would greet with a smile, and perhaps a bit
moistness in the eye; Alan Donn's with a grin, as an elder brother's.
But his mother's letters he would approach with a coldness akin to fear.
He hated to open them. It was like an unpleasant duty.

The realization of her was always a chilling disappointment, but the
dream of her was a great hope. And in the black waters of the China
Seas, or in the night watches off the Azores, where the porpoises played
in the phosphorescence, there would come a sea-change over the knowledge
he had of her. All the spiritual, all the mental angles of her faded
into gracious line, and on the tight French lips of her a smile would
play as a flower opens, and her eyes, hard as diamonds, would open and
become kindly as a lighted house. And the strange things of the heart
would come out, like little shy rabbits, or like the young tortoises,
and bask in that kindly picture. And the things that were between them,
that could not be said, but just sensed, as the primroses of spring are
sensed, not seen, not felt, hardly smelt even, but sensed.... The
hesitant deep things he would say and the dignified, smiling answer, or
the pressure of the hand even, and the inclination of the shoulder....

And the people he would meet who would ask him about his mother, and he
could answer nothing, so that they thought him stupid and unthoughtful.
But really what was there to say?... And once when he sprang into Biscay
Bay after a cabin-boy who had fallen over the taffrail, and the lad's
mother had thanked him in Plymouth for saving the child's life: "Your
mother will be very proud of you," the old woman said. But the reality
of the harsh Frenchwoman came to him like a slap in the face. "Christ,
if she only were!" his heart cried. But the clipped little Scots-Irish
voice replied, "Aye, I suppose she will."

And again the soft mood would come, and then he would have a letter from
her, ending with that harsh command, that was a gust of some bleak
tempest of her own life, where his father had perished: "Pray God to
keep you pure in mind and body!"

And homeward bound again, in the soft murmur of the wind among the
shrouds, and the little laughter of the water at the bows, there would
abide with him again the dream mother of the night watches, until he
said to himself that surely the reality was false, and at the
garden-gate she would be waiting for him with a great depth of kindness
in her eyes, and arms warm as sunshine, and a bosom where a boy might
rest his head for a moment after the great harshness of the strange
places.

But the kindliness came not from her. It came from Robin More, who ran
down the garden faster than his dignity should have allowed him. "Are
you all right, wee Shane? Is everything all right with you? You're
looking fine, but you haven't been sick, wee fellow? Tell me, you
haven't been sick?" Or from Alan Donn, with his great snort of
laughter: "Christ! are you home again? And all the good men that's been
lost at sea! Well, the devil's childer have the devil's luck. Eigh,
laddie, gie's a feel o' ye. _A Righ_--O King of Graces, but you're the
lean pup! Morag, Nellie, Cassie, some tea! and be damned quick about
it!"

And then his mother would come into the room, like a cold wind or a thin
ghost, and there would be a kiss on the cheek, a cold, precise peck,
like a bird's. And, "Did you have a good voyage?" just as if she said,
"Do you think we'll have rain?"

Oh, well, to hell with it! as Alan Donn said when he flubbed his
approach to the last green for some championship or other. "What you
never had, you never lost!"

Aye, true indeed. What you never had you couldn't very well lose. Aye,
there was a lot in that. Just so; but--

Boys do be thinking long....

§ 6

Because his Uncle Alan was in Scotland somewhere shooting deer and would
not be home for several days, and because Uncle Robin was in Paris, and
because the _Goban Saor_ put into Dundalk to take a cargo of unbleached
linen, young Shane decided to stay there for a few days before
proceeding northward to the Antrim Glens. He felt he couldn't face the
house at Cushendu with his cold, precise mother alone there, so he
accepted the hospitality of an apprentice friend.

It was at a country barn dance during these few days that he met Moyra
Dolan.

A tallish, tawny-haired woman with the dead-white skin that goes with
reddish hair, with steel for eyes, there was a grace and carriage to her
that put her aside from the other peasant girls as a queen may
masquerade as a slave and yet betray herself as a queen. Other girls
there were as pretty, with their hair like flax and their eyes like blue
water; with hair like a dim blue cloud and eyes like a smudge of
charcoal. But none had her teeth, her small ankles, her long, sensitive
hands. Some strain of the Stuart cavaliers had crept into that hardy
peasant stock on the way to the defeat of the Boyne Water.... She might
have seemed nothing but a pretty lady's maid in London or Dublin but in
North Louth she was like a queen....

Her looks were her tragedy, for she held herself too good for a
laboring man to marry, and, having no dower, no farmer would have her.
Among the peasantry romance does not count, but land. And if the Queen
of Sheba, and she having nothing but her shift, were to offer herself in
marriage to a strong farmer, he would refuse her for the cross-eyed
woman in the next townland who had twenty acres and five good milch
cows.... Only for the very rich or the very poor is romance!

Her only chance for marriage was a matter of luck. She would have to
meet some government official, or some medical student home on his
holidays, or some small merchant whom her beauty would unbalance, as
drink would unbalance him. And she must dazzle, and her old mother play
and catch him, as a jack pike is dazzled by a spoon bait, hooked, and
brought ashore. She might marry or might miss, or grow into an acidulous
red-headed woman. It was a matter of luck. And her luck was in. She met
young Shane Campbell.

They danced together. They wandered in the moonlight. They met in the
country lanes. And they were very silent, she because she played a game,
and a counter is better than a lead, and he because he was in love with
her. Had it been only a matter of sweethearting, he would have been
merry as a singing bird, full of chatter, roughing it with her for a
kiss. But it was love with him, and a thing for life, and life was long
and more serious than death.... So he was silent.

He was silent when he went home for a week, silent with uncles Robin and
Alan, who sensed he was going through one of the crises of adolescence,
and knew the best thing to do was to leave him alone. He was silent with
his mother, who saw nothing, cared nothing, so intent was she on
revolving within herself as inexorably as the planets revolve in space.
He decided to spend the last days of his leave in Dundalk. And at the
railroad station in Ballymena he hazarded a look at Alan Donn.

"Uncle Alan--" and he stopped.

"What is it, laddie? Is it a girl troubling you? Take my advice and look
her in the eyes and, 'You can love me or leave me, and to hell with
you!' tell her. 'Do you see this right foot of mine?' says you. 'Well,
it's pointed to the next townland, where there's just as pretty a one as
you.' And you'll find her come around; maybe there'll be a bit of an
argument, but she'll come around. And if she doesn't, there'd have been
no hope for you, anyway. A touch o' the spur for the lazy mare and a bit
sugar for the jumper! And when you've done loving her, gie her a chuck
in the chin: 'Good-by! Good luck! What you keep to yoursel' 'll worry
nobody,' says you. And to hell with her!"

"Alan Donn!"

"Oh, it's that way, is it, Shaneen? If you're in deep water, there's
none but yourself can help you, laddie. I thought it was just maybe a
case o' laugh and kiss me. But it's different, is it? There's no use
giving advice. What's in you will out. But remember this: when it's
over, for good or bad, your Uncle Alan's here, to laugh with you or
greet with you or help you out of a hole. So--

"Good-by, laddie. _Beannacht leat!_ My blessing with you!"

§ 7

"Young lad, what is this you have done to my fine young daughter?"

"I have done nothing, Bhean 'i Dolain," young Shane flared up, "save in
honor, and the man or woman who says other lies."

"Agra, I know that. I know there's no harm in you from head to foot. And
the trouble you've put on her is in her heart. All day long she sighs,
and is listless as a shaded plant that does be needing the sun. All
night long she keeps awake, and the wee silent tears come down her face.
And before my eyes she's failing, and her step that was once light now
drags the like of a cripple's. Young lad of the North, you've put love
in the heart of her and sorrow in the mind."

"I'm not so sprightly in the mind myself, woman Dolan."

"I know, avick. I know. Isn't it myself that's suffered the seven pangs
of love and I a young girl? But it's easy on a man, avick. He can go
into the foreign countries, and put it out of his mind, or take to the
drink and numb the great pain. But for a woman it's different. It's the
like of a disfiguration that all can see. And when you're gone away,
sure all will remember, for men do be minding long. The marrying time
will come, and they'll look at my grand young daughter: strong farmer,
and merchant of the shop, and drover does be going to England for the
cattle-fairs, and they'll say: 'Isn't that the red girl gave love to the
sailing fellow, and burnt her heart out so that there's no sap in it for
me?' And they'll pass her by, my grand young daughter, that's the equal
of any."

"And what would you have me do, woman of the house?"

"What would any decent man do but marry her?"

"Aye!... Aye! I thought of marrying her, if she'd have me.... But we
hardly know each other yet ... and maybe I'm too young...."

"If you're able to handle a ship, you're able to handle a woman, young
lad. And what time is better for marriage nor the first flush of youth?
Sure you grow together like the leaves upon the tree. Let you not be
putting it off now, but spring like a hero."

"But isn't the matter of her faith between us, woman of the house?"

"And sure that can be fixed later. Will the priest mind, do you think,
so long as she does her duty? And a sixpence in the plate on Sunday is
better nor a brown ha'penny, and a half-sovereign at Easter will soothe
black anger like healing grass. Very open in thought I am, and I knowing
the seven pangs of love. Let you go to your own clergyman, and she'll go
with you, I'll warrant, so eaten is she by love."

"My people, woman o' the house--"

"Your people, is it? Sure it isn't your people is marrying my grand
young daughter, but you yourself. The old are crabbit, and they do be
thinking more of draining a field, or of the price of flax, nor of the
pain and delights of love. And it's always objections. But there can be
no objecting when the job's finished."

She looked at him shrewdly.

"A grand influence, a grand steadying influence is marriage on a sailing
man. It keeps you from spending your money in foreign ports, where you
only buy trickery for your silver. And when you have a wife at home,
you'll have little truck with fancy women, who have husbands behind the
screen, sometimes, and them with knives.... So I've heard tell.... Or
maybe get an evil sickness. Listen to an old woman has wisdom, bold
lad."

"When I come from my voyage...."

"Dark lad, if anything happens to you, and you drowning in the black
water, the great regret that will be on you and the water gurgling into
your lungs, and, 'Wasn't I the fool of the world,' you'll say, 'that
might have heard the crickets singing in the night-time and my white
love by my side? And might have had power of kissing and lovemaking, but
was young and foolish, and lay be my lee lone....'"

But this was the wrong tack, the old woman noticed, and came about.

"And all the time you're away, my daughter will be pining for you,
drooping and pining, my grand young daughter, and the spring will go out
of her step and the light from her eyes and the luster from the hair
that's a wonder to all.... Oh, isn't it the cruel thing?"

"My ship sails the day after to-morrow."

She saw surrender in his face, rose quickly, and went to the door.

"Come inside, Moyra, Moyreen! And be putting your cloak on, with the
ribbons that tie beneath your chin. And your dress of muslin that the
lady in Newry gave you. And stockings. And your shoes of leather. And
I'll be putting on my Paisley shawl. And this young boy will be getting
Michael Doyle's horse and trap. Come in, Moyreen, come in and put haste
on you, for it's going to Dundalk we are, this day, this hour, this
minute even!"

§ 8

It occurred to him as he sat in the haggard under the riding moon, not a
pitch shot from the house where his wife was being waked, that nothing
was disturbed because she was dead. It was not strange that the stars
kept on their courses, for the death of neither king nor cardinal nor
the wreck of the greatest ship that ever sailed the seas would not move
them from their accustomed orbit. But not a robin in the hedge was
disturbed, not a rabbit in the field, not a weasel in the lane. Nature
never put off her impenetrable mask. Or did she really not care? And was
a human soul less to her than a worm in the soil?

There was a stir in the house. They would be making tea now for the men
and women who said they were mourners.... The querulous voice of his
wife's mother came to him as some one led her from the heated house into
the coolth of the June night.

"Great sacrifices we made for him, myself and the white love that's
stretched beyond in the room. All we had we gave him, and all she found
was barren death, and I the barren charity of Northern men...."

"Oh, sure, 'tis the pity of the world you are, Pegeen," a neighbor
comforted her.

"On his bended knees he came to her, asking for love," the _cailleach_
went on. "On his bare and bended knees. And her heart melted toward him
as the snow melts on the hills. 'And hadn't you better wait,' said I,
'Moyreen Roe? With the great looks and the grand carriage of you, 'tis
a great match you can make surely. A gentleman from England, maybe,
would have a castle and fine lands, or the pick of the dealing men, and
they going from Belfast to Drogheda and stopping overnight at Ardee. Or
wouldn't it be better for you to marry one of your own kind, would go to
church with you in a kindly way?'

"'But if I don't marry this lad, he'll kill himself,' she says to me.

"'But your faith,' says I, ''avourneen, your holy faith, surely you will
not be forsaking that for this boy!'"

"And what did she say to that, Pegeen?" the neighbor asked.

"'Sure it's promised to turn he has,' she answered. 'And do everything
is right by me, so much I love him!'"

"The treacherous Ulster hound!" The neighbor inveighed.

"Treacherous by race and treacherous by nature. Sure, can't you see it,
the way he treats me? Sorrow word he has for me, that bore the wife of
his bosom, barring, 'Alan Donn Campbell will see you and fix up
everything.' And haven't I met Alan Campbell once before, and it's the
cold eye he has and the hard heart. And this is all the return I get for
bearing the white darling would be fit mate for a king. There was a
publican of Dundalk had an eye on her, a big red-faced, hearty man. And
she might have married him but this lad came and spoiled everything. And
if she'd married him, I'd have been sitting in the parlor of the public
house, in a seemly black dress and a brooch in the bosom of it, taking
my pinch of snuff and my strong cup of tea with a drop of Hollands in it
would warm the cockles of your heart, and listening to the conversation
of the fine customers and them loosening up with the drink. And the ould
grannies would have courtesied to me and hate in their hearts. But now a
leaf on the wind am I, a broken twig on the stream. And the black men of
Ulster have me for a plaything, the men that have a hatred for me and my
kind, so that it's a knife they'd put in you, or poison in your tea--"

"Let you be coming in now, Pegeen. Let you be coming in now. And take a
cup of tea would put heart in you, or something strong, maybe. And then
we'll be saying a prayer for her who's gone--"

"Dead she is, the poor heart, dead she is, and better off nor I am--"

Her high querulousness died away as she went into the house, and again
was the silence of the riding moon. All her grief, all her lies, all
her bitterness had not stirred a leaf upon the bough. Not a robin in
the hedge was disturbed by her calamity, not a rabbit in the field, not
a weasel in the lane....

§ 9

He thought to himself: had they rushed him into this marriage? And he
answered himself truthfully, they had not. He could have said no, and
stood by his no, young as he was, against every old woman and every
young woman in the world. No, fast as they had worked, they hadn't
worked faster than his thought had.

And did he marry because he was in love with Moyra Dolan? He was in love
with her, he conceded that. For what the term was accepted at, he was in
love with her. Women he had met in his twenty years, great ladies of the
Ulster clans; shy, starched misses from the Friends' School; moody
peasant girls; merry women of the foreign ports, and to none of them had
he felt that strange yearning he had felt toward Moyra Dolan, the
strange pull that sends the twig in the diviner's hands down toward the
hidden water. Yes, he was in love with her, but was it because of that
he had married her? And he truthfully answered, no.

He remembered, the mood coming back to him as concretely as an action,
what he had thought while the old woman had wheedled him with her voice
like butter. All he had thought in his prentice days at sea, all he had
thought of in the night watches, all he had thought of in the loneliness
of his mother's house, had gathered like great cloud-banks at night, and
had suddenly taken form and color and purpose in that one moment, as a
cloud-bank at the coming of the sun.... Life had appeared to him in one
brief moment, and he had tried to grasp it.

It had seemed to him right that he would go down to the sea in ships all
his days, and trade in foreign ports, and work, transmuting effort into
gain, and should come home to rest.

And for whom was the gain? And where was home? Surely not for himself
was the gain, and home was not his cold mother's house? And now that he
had come to manhood as boys come at sea, braving danger and thinking
mightily, it was for him to decide.

A mirage, a seeming, a thing to look at, to go get bravely had come into
his mind in little pictures, like prints in a book. A thing of
simplicity, simple as the sea, and as colorful and as wholesome and as
beautiful. He thought of a little thatched and whitewashed house with a
cobbled yard clean as a ship's decks, and a garden where the bluish
green stalks and absurdly pretty flowers of potatoes would come in
spring, and one side would be the red and white of the clover, and on
the other would be the minute blue flower of the flax; and an old dog
drowsing on the threshold.... And this would be in his mind as he
wandered the hot foreign streets.... And there would be the droning of
the bees in the clover, and the swish of the swallows darting to and
from the eaves, and in the evening would be the singing of the
crickets.... And these he would hear over the capstan's clank.... When
he tumbled into his cabin after his watch, into the heeling room where
the lamp swung overhead like a crazy thing, and all was a litter of
oilskins and sea-boots, and a great dampness everywhere, he would know
there was a swept cottage in Louth where the delft shone on the dresser
in the kindly light of the turf, and there would be a spinning-wheel in
the corner, and big rush-bottomed chairs, and the kettle singing on the
hob.... And when his comrades would leave the ship in port of nights to
go to the houses where music and dancing were, and crazy drinking, and
where the adroit foreign women held out their arms of mystery and
mercenary romance, he would lean over the taffrail and laugh and shake
his head:

"No, I think I'll stay on board." "Come on, young Shane. There's a woman
down at Mother Parkinson's and they say she's an Austrian archduchess
who has run away with a man, and got left. Come on." Or, "There's a big
dance over on the beach to-night, and a keg of rum, and the native
women. Jump in." "No, I think I'll stay on board and read." "Come on.
Don't be a fool." "No, go ahead and enjoy yourselves. I'll stay on
board." And there would be the plash of oars as they rowed shoreward,
and maybe a song raised.... And he would make himself comfortable under
the awning of the after deck, and read the bundles of newspapers from
home, of how Thomas Chalmers, the great Scottish preacher, was dead, or
how a new great singer had been heard in London, a Swedish girl, her
name was Jenny Lind, or how Shakspere's house had been bought and a
great price paid for it, three thousand pounds.... Or he would read one
of the new books that were coming out in a flood, a new one by Mr.
Dickens, the bite of the new writer, Mr. Thackeray with his "Vanity
Fair," or that strange book written by a woman, "Wuthering Heights"....
But in a little minute the volume would fall to his knees, and the
people of the book would leave the platform of his mind, and a real,
warmer presence come to it.... He could see the gracious, kindly
womanhood now move through the house, now come to the door to watch the
far horizon.... Of evenings she would stand dreaming at the lintel while
he was leaning dreaming over the taffrail, and though there were ten
thousand miles between them their hearts would be intimate as
pigeons.... And he would think of coming home to the peaceful cottage
and the wife with the grave eyes and kindly smile, and if he were a day
ahead of time, she would forget her reserve in great joy, and low,
pleased laughter would jet from her throat.... And if he were on time,
there would be the quiet grave confidence: "I knew your step!" ... And
if he were late, there would be the passing of the cloud from the brows:
"Thank God! I--I was--just a trifle worried!" ... And the greetings
over, she would look at him with a smile and a little lift of the
eyebrows, and he would give her what he had brought from the voyage: a
ring from Amsterdam, maybe, where the great jewelers are, or heavy
silken stockings of France; or had he gone to the West Indies, a great
necklet of red coral; or some fancy in humming-birds' feathers from the
Brazils; lace from Porto Rico, that the colored women make with their
slim brown fingers; things of hammered brass from India; and were he to
China in the tea-trade, a coat such as a mandarin's lady would wear....
And with each gift there would be gasp of incredulous surprise, and "O
Shaneen, you shouldn't have!" ... And then the evening would come, and
they would stand on the threshold, and he would listen to the sounds the
seamen never hear: the swish and ripple of the wind among the trees, the
birds settling themselves to sleep amid the boughs, the bittern that
boomed like a horn, and the barking of a distant dog, and the crickets
that do be singing when the evening falls.... And he would turn from
that to find her arms out and her lips apart, who could wait no longer,
and together they would go into their house, where the red turf had
turned yellow--together, over their own threshold, into their own
house.... And when the time came for him to go to sea again, she would
be grave with unshed tears and a brave smile.... And one day after a
long voyage, when she had greeted him, she would say, "Some one has come
to our house!" and he wouldn't understand, and be annoyed, until she
showed him the little warm head in the cradle, and he would drop on his
knees reverentially, and there would be great silent tears from him,
and all her heart would show in her quiet smile....

And never an old woman on Naples quay would ask him for an alms but
would get it, he thinking all the time of the old woman with the
tow-like hair who abode in his house, his wife's mother. And she would
be comfortable there in her old days, with always a fire to warm her,
and always a cup of tea to cheer her up, and a kindly ear for her
stories of ancient days, and a thanks for the alien rosaries she would
say, praying for his safe return from the almighty waters.... And never
a dog on his travels but would get a pat and a whistle, and he thinking
of the grizzled terrier in Louth that guarded the threshold of quiet
beauty....

And so he would have been content to live all his days, so he thought he
would live, going down to the dangers of the sea, trading in strange
ports, and transmuting hard, untiring effort into gain for her at home
and her children, and he would grow old and grizzled, until he could no
longer brace to a heeling plank or stand the responsibility of a ship's
mastery, and then they would buy a little house on some harbor, while
their sons went rolling down to Rio or fought the typhoon in the China
Seas, and he could sit there with his telescope, watching the ships go
by, or come in and out hauling up mainsail or making their mooring, and
grumbling pleasantly at how good seamanship fades and dies....

All this he had thought out in the loneliness of foreign ports, in the
night watches aboard ship, in the inhospitality of his mother's house,
and on the jaunting-car to Dundalk. All this he had thought out, and on
its basis gone into marriage. And it would just have been as well for
him, better perhaps, had he thrown a coin into the air to find out
whether he should marry or no.

And that was what human thought was worth--a brown penny thrown into the
empty air!

"_Gloir do'n Athair, agas do'n Mhac, agas do'n Spiorad Naomh_," went the
drone of the rosary within. "Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and
to the Holy Ghost, Amen!"

§ 10

And the house that he had known in a dream was no more in reality than a
cold strange dwelling; all was there, the whitewash, the thatch, the
delft on the dresser, but as a home it was stillborn. The turf did not
burn well and the swallows shunned the eaves, feeling, in nature's
occult way, that the essential rhythm was wanting. Nor would bees be
happy in the skips, but must swarm otherward. One would have said the
house was built on some tragic rock....

Only the old dog was faithful, and stayed where his master put him.

And the face he had dreamed would not look toward him over the
illimitable ocean. Seek as he would, it was never there, with warm
gravity. His eyes might strive, but all they would see was the oily
swell of the Dogger Bank, and the great plowed field of Biscay Bay, and
the smash of foam against the Hebrides. Never would a space in the
watery horizon open and show him a threshold of beauty with quiet,
brooding face.... And when he came home, either late or early, or on
time to the moment, it was, "Och, is it yourself?" And the only
interruption to the house was the little more trouble he caused. And his
gifts were treated tepidly, though with cupidinous eyes. In the evening,
if he stood on the threshold, it was: "Wisha, is it going out you are?
And isn't it enough of the fresh air you have, and you on the salt
water?" And her embraces were half chastity, half sin, tepidly
passionate, unintimate ... so that shame was on him, and no pride or
joyousness.... Cold! cold! cold!... A cold house, a cold woman.... No
light or warmth or graciousness....

And the old woman whom he had thought of as warm and peaceful by the
fire was a hag with a peasant's cupidity: "And isn't it a little more
you can be leaving us, darling lad, what with the high price that does
be on things in this place and you not spending a brown ha'penny aboard
ship?... And herself might be taken sick now, and wouldn't it be a grand
thing, a wee store of money in the house? Or the wars might come, find
you far on the sea! An extra sovereign now, brave fellow, a
half-sovereign itself!"

And when he left it was of less import than the cow going dry. Only one
mourned him, the old dog. Only one remembered him, the half-blind badger
hound, that dreamed of ancient hunting days....

And he would go down to his ship, heartbroken, when none was looking a
mist of tears in his eyes,--he was not yet twenty-one,--but in a day or
so that would pass, and the sea that was so strong would give him of its
strength and heal him, so that after a few days he could stand up and
say: "Well.... Huuh.... Well...."

A trick had been played him, like some tricks the sea and sun play. Afar
off he had seen an island like an appointed dancing place, like the
Green of Fiddlers, and he had asked to be put ashore there, to live and
be a permanent citizen. And when he was landed, he found that his
dancing place was only a barren rock where the seagulls mourned. Past
the glamour of the sun and sea mists, there were only cold, searching
winds and dank stone....

But he came of a race that are born men, breed men, and kill men. Crying
never patched a hole in a brogue, and a man who's been fooled is no
admirable figure, at least to Antrim men. So shut your mouth! When a
master loses a ship he gets no other. That is the inexorable rule of the
sea. So when a man wrecks his life....

What he had decided was this: go ahead. He had been fooled; pay the
forfeit. Retreat into his own heart, and go ahead. Thirty, forty
years.... He had himself to blame. And it wasn't as if he had to live in
the house all the time; he had only to come back there. All that was
killed was his heart. His frame was still stolid, his eye clear....
There would be little oases here and there, some great record of a
voyage broken, friends bravely made, a kiss now and then, freely,
gallantly given.... But ... go ahead!

And then suddenly death had come, and the scheme of life was broken,
like a piece from the end of a stick. Death he had seen before, but
never so close to him. A good man had died and he had said: "God!
there's a pity!" though why he didn't know. And a young girl might die,
and it would seem like a tragedy in a play. And a child would die, and
he would feel hurt and say, "Yon's cruelty, yon!" And death had seemed
to be an ultimate word.

But never before now had he seen the ramifications of death. Life had
seemed to him to be a straight line, and suddenly he was inspired to the
knowledge that it was a design, a pattern, a scheme.... And now he felt
it was only a tool, like a knife, or scissors, in the hands of what?...
What? Destiny?... or what?...

§ 11

"_A chraoibhin aoibhinn!_ O pleasant little branch, is there regard in
you for the last words of the dead woman?" The old _cailleach_ had come
again to ruffle the grave silence about young Shane in the haggard.

"Was it--was it anything for me?"

"And whom would it be for, _acushla veg?_ Sure the love of her heart
you were, the white love of her heart. You and me she was thinking of,
her old mother that saw a power of trouble. Ill-treated I was by
Sergeant Dolan, who fought old Bonaparte in the foreign wars, and took
to drinking in the dreadful days of peace. Harsh my life was, and
peaceful should my end be, the like of a day that does be rainy, and
turns fine at evening-time. And that was what she wanted, _a charaid
bhig_, little friend o' me."

"What now?"

"She said to me, and she dying in my arms and the blue spirit coming out
of the red lips of her--och! achanee!--'Sure it's not in that grand
Northern lad to see you despised in your old age, and the grannies of
the neighborhood laughing at you who boasted often. The wee house he'll
give you--the wee house is comfortable for an old woman--'"

"But the house isn't mine. It's Alan Donn Campbell's. It isn't mine to
give, and I haven't the money to buy it. All the money I have is my pay
and what my uncles give me--and they won't see you want."

"But isn't it the grand rich Northern family you are? And won't there be
money coming to you when your uncles and mother die?"

"I suppose so."

"Well now, agra, a few of us have been thinking. And Manus McGinty, the
priest's brother, is willing to advance you the money at interest, to be
paid him when your people die. And you can buy the house, and a slip of
a pig I can be fattening against the Christmas market."

"No!"

"Och, agra," she whined, "you wouldn't go back on the words of the poor
girl, and her dying in my arms? And she was thinking of you when she
should have been thinking of her God! And the grand subtle things she
said of you, that only a woman can understand! Sure it was of love for
you she died, you being away so long from her on the salt and bitter
sea--"

"Listen, woman Dolan. I heard how Moyra died as I came through the
village. She died as she was beating my poor old hound. She dropped dead
from the passion in her, like a shot man. So where's all your love and
your long dying wishes as she lay in your arms?"

He arose and walked away from her, through the haggard, under the sky,
where the southeast cloud-banks rolled steadily toward the placid moon.
And there was silence for an instant, so speechless he left her. And
then suddenly her ancient shrill voice cut the air like a drover's
whip:

"You Orange bastard!"

§ 12

The feeling that was uppermost in him as he sat outside the thatched
cottage in the moonlight while the wake was within was not grief at his
wife's death; not a shattered mind that his life so carefully laid out
not twelve months before was disoriented; not any self-pity; not any
grievance against God such as little men might have. But a strange dumb
wonder.... There she lay within, in her habit of a Dominican lay sister,
her hands waxy, her face waxy, her eyelids closed. And six guttering
candles were about her, and woman droned their prayers with a droning as
of bees. There she lay with her hands clasped on a wooden crucifix. And
no more would the robins wake her, and they fussing in the great
hawthorn-tree over the coming of dawn. No longer would she rake the ash
from the peat and blow the red of it to a little blaze. No longer would
she beat his dog out of the house with the handle of the broom. No
longer would she forgather with the neighbors over a pot of tea for a
pleasant vindictive chat. No longer would she look out to sea for him
with her half-loving, half-inimical eyes. No longer in her sharpish
voice would she recite her rosary and go to bed.

And to-morrow they would bury her--there would be rain to-morrow: the
wind was sou'east,--they would lower her, gently as though she were
alive, into a rectangular slot in the ground, mutter alien prayers in an
alien tongue with business of white magic, pat the mound over as a child
pats his castle of sand on the sea-shore--and leave her there in the
rain.

A month from now they would say a mass for her, a year from now another,
but to-morrow, to-day, yesterday even, she was finished with all of
life--with the fussy excited robins of dawn; with the old dog that
wanted to drowse by the fire; with the young husband who was either too
much or too little of a man for her; with the clicking beads she would
tell in her sharpish voice; with each thing; with everything....

And here was the wonder of it, the strange dumb wonder, that the
snapping of her life meant less in reality to him than the snapping of a
stay aboard ship. The day after to-morrow he would mount the deck of
Patrick Russell's boat, and after a few crisp orders would set out on
the eternal sea, as though she were still alive in her cottage, as
though, indeed, she had never even lived, and northward he would go past
the purple Mull of Cantyre; past the Clyde, where the Ayrshire sloops
danced like bobbins on the water; past the isles, where overhead drove
the wedges of the wild swans, trumpeting as on a battle-field; past the
Hebrides, where strange arctic birds whined like hurt dogs; northward
still to where the northern lights sprang like dancers in the black
winter nights; eastward and southward to where the swell of the Dogger
Bank rose, where the fish grazed like kine.... Over the great sea he
would go, as though nothing had happened, not even the snapping of a
stay--down to the sea, where the crisp winds of dawn were, and the
playful, stupid, short-sighted porpoises; the treacherous, sliding
icebergs; and the gulls that cried with the sea's immense melancholy;
and the great plum-colored whales....

PART THREE

THE MOUTH OF HONEY

§ 1

It was all like a picture some painter of an old and obvious school
might have done. First, there was the port, with the white ships riding
at their moorings in the blue sea. Then grayish white Marseilles, with
its two immense ribbons, the Cannebière running northward, and the Rue
de Rome and the Prado intersecting it. The great wooded amphitheater
rising like a wave and little Notre Dame de la Garde peeking like a
sentry out to sea. And eastward from the quays were the little jagged
islands the Phenicians knew, If, and Rion, Jaros, strange un-French
names ... the sunshine yellow as a lamp, and the sea blue as flax, and
the green woods, and the ancient grayish white city--all a picture some
unimaginative painter would have loved. Next to Belfast, Marseilles was
to Shane Campbell a second home. There it was, like your own house!

Obvious and drowsy it might seem, but once he went ashore, the swarming,
teeming life of it struck Shane like a current of air. Along the quays,
along the Cannebière, was a riot of color and nationality unbelievable
from on board ship. Here were Turks dignified and shy. Here were Greeks,
wary, furtive. Here were Italians, Genoese, Neapolitans, Livonians,
droll, vivacious, vindictive. Here were Moors, here were Algerians,
black African folk, sneering, inimical. Here were Spaniards, with their
walk like a horse's lope. Here were French business men, very important.
Here were Provençals, cheery, short, tubby, excitable, olive-colored,
black-bearded, calling to one another in the _langue d'oc_ of the
troubadours, _"Té, mon bon! Commoun as? Quézaco?"_

And the bustle of the shops and the bustle of cafés, until Shane was
forced to go out to the olive-lined roads to the rocky summit of La
Garde, and once there, as if drawn by a magnet, Shane would enter the
chapel in the fort, where the most renowned Notre Dame of the
Mediterranean smiles mawkishly in white olive-wood. After the blinding
sun of the Midi, the cool dark chapel was like a dungeon to him, so
little could he see anything; but in a while the strange furniture of
the place would take form before his eyes: the white statue of the
Virgin, the silver tunny-fish, the daubs of sea hazards whence the
Virgin had rescued grateful mariners, the rope-ends, the crutches....
And though none might be in the chapel, yet it was full of life, so much
did the pathetic ex-votos tell.... And he would come out of the chapel,
and again the Midi sun would flash in a shower of gold, and he could see
the blue Mediterranean, pricked with minute lateen-sails, and the
grayish town beneath him, so old and yet so vital, and the calm harbor,
with the forest of spars, and Monte Cristo, white as an egg....

A queer town that, as familiar as a channel marking, teeming as an
ant-hill, and when darkness came over it, and he viewed it from the
after deck, mystery came, too.... For a while there was a hush, and
around the hills gigantic ghosts walked.... One thought of the Phocæans
who had founded it, and to whom the Cannebière was a rope-walk, where
they made the sheets for their ships.... And one thought of Lazarus, who
had been raised from among the silent dead and who had come there, so
legend read, a gray figure in ceramic garments, standing in the prow of
a boat....

One thing Robin More had told him remained in his mind and captured his
fancy, and that was that Pontius Pilate had been governor of Marseilles
after his office in Judea. And of him Shane would think when the
mysterious dusk came on the Midi hills ... Pilate, who had smiled, "What
is truth?" and who had turned Christ over to the mob.... A big man, he
imagined the Roman to have been, with clever eyes, and a great black
beard covering a weak chin.... A man who knew all the subtleties of
mind, and had no backbone.... And he could see the Roman, sitting on his
villa porch in the dusk with tortured eyes, and fingering his beard with
fingers that shook.... Paul was going through Greece and Rome like a