The Wind Bloweth Part 34

"Nothing much, Granya, except that you are you. I heard you were a great actress ... and that you had two babies ... who died...."

"Not a great actress, Shane, a very good one, perhaps. I might have been great one day ... and again, I mighn't. I shall never know.... And I had two babies.... They were very nice little people, Shane. I was very fond of them.... But a physical life is a little thing, I have come to believe, and there is another life, a life of thought and emotion. And that one is so long.... It seems ages since I was an actress and had two pretty babies. It seems in another life.... Shane, I don't think I was alive until my babies died...."

"I don't understand, Granya."

"I mean this, Shane, that things were so casual to me. They came and they went, and I was what I was, and that was all.... When you were a boy, Shane, you had what I never had--wonder. I was the child of actors, Shane, brought up to a mechanical tradition, knowing the business thoroughly--a part was words and directions, and a salary.... That things were mimic meant nothing ... do you see? That there was a life that was unreal, and another life that was real, and then a further life, too subtle, too profound for the value of words ... one sees glimpses ... one feels ... and when you try to fix it, it eludes you. Do you understand? Like your mirage, a little.... That is only a symbol....

Am I talking nonsense, Shane? Anyway, I took things, well, just casually....

"See the moon rising, Shane?" she paused. She turned again.

"I got married, just got married; he was a good man, Shane. But I didn't love him. I loved n.o.body. I got married because he was a suitable and every one got married. And just the same way I accepted marriage.... And when he died, I was very sorry, but impersonally sorry ... as if something nice in the world had been gone ... a swan shot....

"And my little people, Shane, they were very nice little people.... I was fond of them, but as I might be fond of some terrier dogs.... I was good to them.... Often I sit here and wonder: Was I good enough? And, Shane, G.o.d is my witness and this garden, and the moon above, there is nothing I could give them I held back....

"You know how they died, Shane?... I was playing and my house went on fire, and the servants fled.... When I came back from the theater a policeman said: 'We got everything all right, Miss O'Malley. Your dogs, your piano.' ... 'Where did you put the babies?' I asked.... They said: 'What babies?'

"Shane, I knew after a little while that I cried too easily ... a little sweet rain of affection ... April ... I didn't forget them.... I wouldn't let myself.... And then I thought: G.o.d! if I had loved my husband my heart would have been like a cracked cup when he died.... And when my babies died, I could not have lived.... And all I shed of tears was a little shower of April.... O Shane, one isn't like that when one is hurt.... Do you remember David, Shane, when he went up to the chamber over the gate ... and as he went thus he said, 'O my son Absalom, my son Absalom! would G.o.d I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son!' ...

And he was only a man, Shane....

"Am I bothering you, Shane? No? I am just thinking aloud, with you there.... I never thought I could, with any human being....

"And then I knew, Shane.... Part of me was not alive.... That was terrible to know, like finding out a horrible deformity, or knowing you are insane.... And I began to watch people.... I could say: There is a woman who knows she is loved, Shane.... There is a radiance in her face, an indescribable something.... You remember the Bible word 'Shechinah,'

the glory of the Lord!... And there were women with children ... that had lost themselves in the joy of giving ... would always have that joy of giving.... And it made me feel strange, shameful ... as though I had no b.r.e.a.s.t.s....

"I must have been a little insane then, Shane. I would go along the streets, looking at people, and saying: 'That person looks as if they would understand,' and thinking of stopping them with: 'Please, a moment, there is something wrong with me!' But I knew they wouldn't understand ... wouldn't believe it real.... Even if they were kind, all they would say was: 'It's all imagination ... as if imagination were not the most terrible thing in the world.... All that is wrong with the poor mad people is imagination.... Shane, I was like some poor cripple holding out his deformity to the pa.s.sers-by, asking for help.... All he would want was money, but I wanted ... oh, I don't know what I wanted....

"And, then, Shane, I would go into a church, and pray, and wait, kneeling there, for something to happen.... It never happened.... Then I would laugh. People used to turn and look at me.... I began to hate them. I grew proud. I hated them more and more....

"I said I'd get back to work, and forget it all.... I was made as I was made.... Accept it.... I thought I could.... I was to play _Lady Macbeth_ in Nottingham.

"You know how she enters, Shane. She comes in reading a letter. She is alone on the stage, in _Macbeth's_ castle of Inverness: '"They met me in the day of success,"' she reads--_Macbeth_ is writing of the witches in the desert place: '"and I have learned by the perfectest report, they have more in them than mortal knowledge."' I came on as I always came on.... And the moment I left the wings, Shane, saw the audience, a strange thing happened.... Illusion died, not died ... but was dead....

And there I was supposed to be reading a letter that had never been written by people who had never possibly an existence, before an audience who had paid a little money to be amused.... I couldn't read it. I just couldn't....

"Behind me in the wings they were prompting, whispering fiercely.... But I couldn't.... I stood there.... Then I said: I'll go off the stage. But I couldn't do that even.... My feet were shackled to the ground.... I seemed to have been charmed.... My hand fell to my side.... And then a panic came. My knees. .h.i.t one another. My teeth chattered ... awful, awful....

"There was such a silence. The audience stirred, whispered.... Then some one laughed.... Never laugh, Shane, suddenly, with me.... I crumpled up.

They rang the curtain down ... I stole away to Ireland.... Whenever I am not hating--enough, the thought of that laugh comes to me...." She s.h.i.+vered on her seat.

"That was only nervousness, Granya. Somebody got nervous and laughed."

"No, Shane, no."

"They talk of people laughing in the face of death. It's just a nervous action, Granya."

"I tell you, no, Shane." She grew vehement. "It's a cruel country, England. And Shane, they hate us Irish. As long as we are pleasant, witty, as long as we are buffoons ... but let us be human beings, Shane, and they hate us."

"Don't be silly, Granya!"

"I'm not silly, Shane. I know. They hate us because we have something they have not. The starved Irish peasant is higher than the English peer. He has a song in his heart, a gay song or a sad song, and his eyes see wonders...."

"But, Granya, we are only a little people, and they all but rule the world.... You are wrong. They don't hate us."

"Do you remember Haman, Shane; Haman who had everything:

"'And Haman told them of ... all the things wherein the king had promoted'; and he said: 'Yet all this availeth me nothing so long as I see Mordecai the Jew sitting at the king's gate.'"

"Shane, do you remember how Haman died?"

"Granya!"

She rose. Her hands stretched out to the Irish hills. Her voice took on the throbbing of drums:

"Oh! the Erne shall run red With redundance of blood, The earth shall rock beneath our tread, And flame wrap hill and wood, And gun-peal and slogan-cry Make many a glen serene, Ere you shall fade, ere you shall die, My dark Rosaleen!

My own Rosaleen!"

"Poor Granya!" he said. He caught and kissed her hand.

She let her other fall on his shoulder for an instant.

"Good night, Shane!" she said abruptly. She moved swiftly toward the house through the yew-trees. In her pale dress against the moonlit turf, between the dark trees, she was like some old, heart-wringing ghost....

-- 10

He brought back from Tusa hErin that night a sense of dread. What in G.o.d's name had Granya done? To what committed herself? There were rumors abroad that the men of '67 were not dead yet.... In America, in the hills of Kerry, in Galway, there was plotting ... not glorious, but sinister plotting.... G.o.d! had they enmeshed her?

He had three times heard her sing the old Ulster ballad of General Munro:

Up came Munro's sister, she was well dressed in green, And his sword by her side that was once bright and keen.

And she said to the brave men who with her did go, "Come, we'll have revenge for my brother Munro!"

He had looked on that as only a queer romantic gesture, but with what she said last night, it occurred to him that there was a deeper motif to it all.... She was often in Dublin these days.... Did they? Had they?...

If it had been the Jacobite times, or '98 or even '48, he would not have minded. The Irish might call these Irish rebellions, but in reality they were world affairs. James and the Prince of Orange were the clash of the ideal of courtliness and tradition worn to a thin blade and of the stubborn progress of pulsing thought. And '98 was the echo of the surge for liberty--the frenzy of France and the stubborn Yankee steel.... And '48 was another breathing of the world.... Even '67 he would not have minded. Sixty-seven was a gallant romantic rally, a dream of pikes amid green banners, and men drilling by moonlit rivers....

But to-day was different.... Revenge was in the air, and revenge was no wild justice, as an old writer had said. Revenge was an evil possession.... An exhausting, sinister mood.... The men who would fight this modern battle, if battle there was to be one, were dark scowling men.... The amenities of battle, the gallantry of flags meant nothing to them. They would shoot from behind ditches in the dark.... In America was talk of dynamite--an idealist using a burglar's trick.... There was no gallantry that way....

And besides, it wasn't an Irish war. It was a matter of agriculture....

A war of peasants against careless landlords, Irish themselves in the main, who had fled to England to avoid the suicidal monotony of Irish country life, and lost their money in the pot-houses and gambling-dens of London, and turned to their tenants for more, forgetting in the glamour of London the poverty of the Irish bogs.... It was contemptible to squeeze the peasants as a money-lender squeezes his victims, but the peasants' redress, the furtive musket and horrible dynamite, that was terrible. G.o.d, what a mess!... And had Granya been caught into that evil problem, a kingfisher among cormorants?

And if she had what was he going to do about it?

What could he do? What right had he to meddle with her destiny? Friendly they had become, close sweet friends--the thought of her was like the thought of the hills purple with heather,--but friends.h.i.+p and destiny are a sweet curling wave and a gaunt cliff. They were two different people, independent. Shane Campbell and the Woman of Tusa hErin.

-- 11

She had been distraught all the evening. Merry, feverishly merry at times, and again silent, her eyes far off, her mouth set. She rose suddenly from the piano she was playing, and looked at him. Standing, above the light of the candles, her face and head were like some dark soft flower.