In Mr. Knox's Country Part 21

"Well, they got him in the bush," proceeded Dr. Hickey, "singing away for himself; but they had some trouble crossing the drains. I'm told the guard said the lady lepped like a horse!"

"You had it right, all to the singing," commented Mrs. M'Evoy, advancing as it were to the footlights. "I have the little bird upstairs this minute, and she never sang a note yet!"

Mrs. M'Evoy here permitted herself to subside into fat and deep-seated chuckles, and Miss M'Evoy, James, and I gave way suitably to our feelings.

"Well, now, I thought it was a nice idea, the canary to be singing,"

said Dr. Hickey, emerging from the situation as from a football scrimmage, in which he had retained possession of the ball. "The next time I tell the story, I'll leave that out, and I can say that the lady that lepped like a horse was Mrs. M'Evoy. They'll believe me then."

"Why wouldn't you say the canary was an eagle?" said Miss M'Evoy.

"There used to be plenty eagles in these mountains back here."

"Well, indeed, I might too," said Dr. Hickey. "I remember it was somewhere in these parts that an uncle of mine was staying one time, and a man came to the hotel with an eagle to sell to the tourists. My uncle was like Mrs. M'Evoy here, he was very fond of birds; and the man said the eagle'd be a lovely pet. Whatever way it was, he bought it."

He paused to light a cigarette, and James pretended to collect the coffee cups.

"He gave the eagle to the Boots to mind for him," resumed the Doctor, "and the Boots put it into an empty bedroom. It wasn't more than seven o'clock next morning when my uncle was wakened up, and the waiter came in. 'There's a man in the kitchen, your honour,' says he, 'and he has a great fighting aigle, and he says he'll fight your honour's aigle in the pa.s.sage.' They had a grand fight between the two o' them in the spare room, and in the end my uncle's eagle went up the chimney, and the man's eagle went out through the gla.s.s in the window. My uncle had a nice bill to pay for all that was broken in the room, and in the end he gave the eagle to the Zoo."

"Faith, he did not!" shouted James suddenly. "He left him stuck in the chimbley! And sure it was I that got him out, and meself that sold him to a gentleman that was going to Ameriky. Sure, I was the waiter!"

Dr. Hickey threw himself back in his rustic chair.

"Holy smoke! This is no place for me," he said; "every story I have is true in spite of me."

Soon afterwards the ladies went to bed, and Dr. Hickey and I smoked on for a time. He explained to me that he was here as "loc.u.m" for a friend of his; it wasn't much of a catch, but he was only just after pa.s.sing for his Medical, and you'd nearly go as loc.u.m for a tinker's dog after you had three years' grinding in Dublin put in. This was a G.o.d-forsaken sort of a hole, not a hound within fifty miles, nor anyone that would know a hound if they saw one, but the fis.h.i.+ng was middling good. From this point the conversation flowed smoothly into channels of sport, and the dual goals of Dr. Hickey's ambition were divulged to me.

"There was a chap I was at school with--Knox his name was--that has a little pack of foxhounds down in the South, and he's as good as promised me I'm to whip in to him if I can get the Skebawn Dispensary that's vacant now, and I might have as good a chance of it as another."

My own ambitions were also, at the moment, dual, being matrimonial, with a Resident Magistracy attached, but I did not feel it necessary to reveal them. I mentioned that I was having a day's fis.h.i.+ng here on my way to Donegal to shoot grouse, but did not add that Philippa, to whom I was newly engaged, was implicated in the grouse party, still less that it was my intention to meet her the next afternoon at Carrow Cross Junction, an hour away, and proceed with her to the home of her uncle, an hour or so further on.

"You might have three hours, or maybe four, to wait at Carrow Cross,"

said Dr. Hickey, as if tracking my thought; "why wouldn't you drive out to the Sports at Carrow Bay? It's only four miles, and there's a Regatta there to-morrow, and when the tide goes out they have races on the sands. I believe there's a trotting-match too, and an exhibition of crochet."

It did not seem to me that I wanted to go to Carrow Bay, but it was not necessary to say so.

Trucks at the station were banging into their neighbours, with much comment from the engine; I thought of Tommeen and his comrades, up since 3 A.M., and still waiting to get home, and it suggested the privileges of those who could go to bed.

It was over a whisky and soda in the heavily reminiscent atmosphere of the smoking-room that Dr. Hickey told me he was going to take the ladies to the Sports, and mentioned that there would be a train at eleven, and a spare seat on the car from Carrow Cross. It required no special effort to see the position that I was to occupy in relation to Mrs. M'Evoy; I followed the diplomatic method of my country; I looked sympathetic, and knew certainly that I should not be there.

I leaned out of my window that night, to look at the river, with the moon on it, hustling over the shallows, and thought of the porpoise, who had been so unchivalrously banished by the whale. I also wondered when the English post got in. I was presently aware of a head projecting from a window just below, and a female voice said, as if in continuance of a conversation:

"We should coax James for the cold duck to take with us."

"That's a good idea," replied the rotund voice of Mrs. M'Evoy; "we'll get nothing out there that a Christian could eat, and there might be that gentleman too." (That gentleman closed one eye.) "Come in now, Ally! There's an east wind coming in that would perish the crows."

The guillotine slam of the sash followed. The river warbled and washed through the stillness; its current was not colder, more clear, than "that gentleman's" resolve that he would not grace the luncheon party at Carrow Bay Sports.

I breakfasted late and in solitude, ministered to by one of the female underlings of James; the voice of James himself, I heard distantly, in war and slaughtering, somewhere behind the scenes. The letter that I wanted had not failed me, and I smoked a very honeyed cigarette over it in the garden afterwards. A glimpse of Dr. Hickey at the hotel door in a palpably new tie, and of Mrs. and Miss M'Evoy in splendour in the hall, broke into my peace. I quietly but unhesitatingly got over the wall of the garden, and withdrew by way of the river bank.

When the 11 o'clock train had left I returned to the halcyon stillness of the hotel; my own train left at 1.30; it was a time favourable, and almost attractive, for letter writing. As I wrote, I heard the voice of James demanding in thunder where was Festus O'Flaherty, and why hadn't he the chickens plucked. A small female voice replied that the Doctor and the ladies had left their lunch after them, and that Festus had run up to the station to try would he overtake them with it, and the thrain was gone.

"And if it was themselves they left after them," retorted James, still in thunder, "what was that to him?"

To this conundrum no answer was attempted; I bestowed upon Mrs. M'Evoy some transient compa.s.sion, and she and her company departed, hull down, below the horizon of my thoughts.

A few hours afterwards, I trod the solitudes of Carrow Cross Junction, and saw the train that had brought me there bend like a caterpillar round a spur of hill, and disappear. When I looked round again the little bookstall was shuttered up, and the bookstall lady was vanis.h.i.+ng down a flight of steps; the porter had entrenched himself in the goods store; the stationmaster was withdrawn from human ken with the completeness only achievable by his kind. I was suspended in s.p.a.ce for three hours, and the indifference of my fellow-creatures was unconcealed. A long walk to nowhere and back again was the obvious resource of the dest.i.tute.

The town of Carrow Cross lay in a hollow below the station, with the blue turf smoke stagnant above its muddle of slate and thatched roofs; I skirted it, and struck out into the country. I did not find it attractive. Potato fields in September are not looking their best; there were no trees, and loose, crooked walls overran the landscape.

The peak of Dreelish mountain was visible, but the dingy green country rose high between me and it, like the cope on the neck of a priest. I walked for an hour; I sat on a wall and read Philippa's letter again, and found, with a shock, that I had only one cigarette left. A fatuous fear of missing the train turned me back in the direction of the station, slightly hungry, and profoundly bored. I came into the town by a convent, and saw the nuns walking flowingly in twos, under chestnut trees; asceticism in its most pictorial aspect, with the orange leaves and the blue September haze, and the black robes and white headgear. I wondered how they managed to go on walking neatly to nowhere and back again with such purpose, and if they felt as jaded as I, and as little enlivened by the environs of Carrow Cross.

The town was an unprepossessing affair of two or three streets, whitewash and thatch squeezed between green and gold pubs, like old country-women among fas.h.i.+onable daughters. Everything was closed; as I looked along the empty street an outside car drawn by a dun pony turned into it at high speed, the pony forging with a double click-clack. As the car swung towards me some one flourished a stick, some one else a red parasol.

"We got a bit tired waiting for the sports," Dr. Hickey said, as he a.s.sisted Mrs. M'Evoy to alight at a house labelled Lynch's Railway Hotel, in royal blue; "it seemed that the tide wasn't going out as fast as the Committee expected. It might be another hour or more before the race-course would be above water, and we thought we might as well come on here and get something to eat at the Hotel."

"It has the appearance of being closed," said Mrs. M'Evoy, in a voice thinned by famine.

"That might be a fas.h.i.+on it has in the afternoon, when themselves does be at their dinner," said the car-driver.

The front door was certainly closed, and there was neither knocker nor bell, nothing but a large well-thumbed keyhole. Dr. Hickey hammered with his stick; nothing happened.

"They're gone to the races so," said the car-driver.

In the silence that followed it seemed that I could hear the flagging beat of Mrs. M'Evoy's heart.

"Wait awhile," said Dr. Hickey; "the window isn't bolted!"

The sill was no more than two feet from the ground, the sash yielded to pressure and went up; Dr. Hickey dived in, and we presently heard him a.s.sail the front door from inside.

It was locked, and its key had apparently gone to the races. I followed Dr. Hickey by way of the window, so did Miss M'Evoy; we pooled our forces, and drew her mamma after us through the opening of two foot by three, steadily, as the great G.o.d Pan drew the pith from the reed.

We found ourselves in a small sitting-room, almost filled by a table; there was a mature smell of cabbage, but there was nothing else to suggest the presence of food. We proceeded to the nether regions, which were like a chapter in a modern realistic novel, and found a sickly kitchen fire, the horrid remains of the Lynch family breakfast, an empty larder, and some of the home attire of the race-goers, lying, as the tree lies, where it fell.

"There's a sort of a butcher in the town," said Dr. Hickey, when the search-parties had converged on each other, empty-handed, "maybe we could cook something----"

"If it was even a bit of salt pork--" said Mrs. M'Evoy, seizing the poker and attacking the sleepy fire.

"Let you get some water, and I'll wash the plates," said Miss M'Evoy to Dr. Hickey.

I looked at my watch, saw that I had still an hour and a half to play with, and departed to look for the butcher.

Neither by sign-board nor by shop front did the Carrow Cross butcher reveal himself. I was finally investigating a side street, where the houses were one-storeyed, and thatched, and wholly unpromising, when a heavy running step, that might have been a horse's, thundered behind me, and a c.u.mbrous pale woman, with the face of a fugitive, plunged past me, and burst in at a cottage door like a mighty blast of wind. A little girl, in tears, thudded barefooted after her. The big woman turned in the doorway, and shrieked to me.

"Thim's madmen, from th' Asylum! Come inside from them, for G.o.d's sake!"

I looked behind me up the street, and saw a small, decorous party of men, flanked by a couple of stalwart keepers in uniform. One of the men, a white-faced being in seedy black, headed them, playing an imaginary fiddle on his left arm, and smiling secretly to himself.

Whether the lady had invited me to her house as a protector, or as a refugee, I did not know: she herself had vanished, but through the still open door I saw, miraculously, a fragment or two of meat, hanging in the interior. I had apparently chanced upon the home of the Carrow Cross butcher.

A greasy counter and a chopping-block put the matter beyond doubt; I beat upon an inner door: a wail of terror responded, and then a m.u.f.fled voice:

"Come in under the bed to me, Chrissie, before they'd ketch ye!"