Little Mary Twomey, footing it into
Cluhir on a misty Saturday morning, with a basket
of fowl under her brown and buff shawl, was not sorry
when, from a side road on the line of march, a donkey-cart,
driven by an acquaintance, drew forth at the instant
of her passing.
“God bless ye, John Brien,”
she said, when the suitable salutations and comments
on the weather had been exchanged, with the rigorous
courtesy observed by such as Mary Twomey and John Brien
with one another, “this basket is very weighty
on me
“Put it up on the butt, ma’am,”
responded John Brien. “Put it up, for God’s
sake, and let you sit up with it. Sure the ass
is able for more than yourself!”
This referred, with polite facetiousness,
to Mrs. Twomey’s stature, and was taken by her
in excellent part.
She uttered a brief screech.
“Isn’t it what they say they puts the
best of goods in the small passels?” she demanded;
“but for all, I wouldn’t wish it to be
too small altogether! ‘Look!’ I says
to that owld man I have, ’Look! When I’ll
be dead, let ye tell the car-pennther that he’ll
make the coffin a bit-een too long, the way the people’ll
think the womaneen inside in it wasn’t altogether
too small entirely!’”
“Arrah, don’t talk of
dyin’ for a while, ma’am!” said John
Brien, gallantly. “Aren’t you an’
me about the one age, and faith, when you’re
dyin’ I’ll be sending for the priest for
meself!”
“Well, please God, the pair
of us’ll knock out a spell yet!” responded
Mrs. Twomey, cheerfully; “for as little as I
am, the fly itself wouldn’t like to die!”
John Brien did not question this assertion.
“The ’fluenzy is very raging these times,”
he remarked.
“’Tis a nassty, dirty
disease altogether, God help us!” said Mrs.
Twomey, with feeling.
“It is, and very numerous,”
replied John Brien. “There’s people
dying now that never died before.”
This statement presented no difficulty
to Mrs. Twomey, since she had no desire to exult over
Mr. Brien as being what is often called a typical
Irishman, and was able to accept its rather excessive
emphasis in the sense in which it was intended.
“I’m told Major Lowry
is sick enough,” went on John Brien; “an
impression like, on the heart, they tells me.”
“He have enough to trouble him,”
said Mrs. Twomey, portentously; “and I wouldn’t
wish it to him. A fine man he was. Ye’d
stand in the road to look at him! The highest
gentleman of the day!”
“Well, that’s true enough,”
said John Brien, cautiously. “There’s
some says the servants in the house didn’t get
their hire this two years.”
“Dirty little liars!”
said Mrs. Twomey, warmly. “Divil mend them,
and their chat! There isn’t one but has
as many lies told as’d sicken an ass! Wasn’t
I selling a score of eggs to the Docthor’s wife
a’ Saturday, and she askin’ me this an’
that, and ’wasn’t it said young Mr. Coppinger
was to marry Miss Christhian Lowry’? Ah
ha! She was dam’ sweet, but she didn’t
get ” Mrs. Twomey swiftly licked and
exhibited a grey and wrinkled finger that
much from me!”
“Ha, very good, faith!”
said John Brien; “them women wants to know too
much!”
“And if they do itself,”
retorted Mrs. Twomey, instant in defence of her sex,
“isn’t it to plase the min that’s
follyin’ them for the news! Yis! An’
they too big fools to hear it for theirselves!”
John Brien, somewhat stupefied by
this home thrust, made no reply, but smote the donkey
heavily, provoking it to a jog that temporarily jolted
conversation to death.
At the next incline, however, Mrs.
Twomey took up her parable again.
“Tell me now awhile, John, what
day is this th’ election is?”
“I d’no if it isn’t
Choosday week it is,” replied John Brien, without
interest. “There’s two o’ them
up for it now. Young Coppinger, that was the
first in it, and a chap from T’prairy. What’s
this his name is? Burke, I think it is.
Sure they had two meetin’s after chapel at Riverstown
last Sunday. Roaring there they were out o’
mothor-cars. But it’s little I regard them
and their higs and thrigs!”
“Why wouldn’t ye wote
for Larry Coppinger, John?” said Mrs. Twomey,
persuasively “and him ‘All-for-Ireland’!
A strong, cocky young boy he is too; greatly for composhing
he is, an’ painting, an’ the like o’
that. Sure didn’t I tell him it was what
it was he had a rag on every bush! ‘Well,’
says he, ‘Mrs. Twomey,’ says he, ’I’ll
have another rag on another bush soon,’ says
he. ‘Sir,’ says I to him, ’that
much would not surpass your honour!’ But faith,
they’re tellin’ me now Burke’ll
have him bet out, and I’m sorry to me heart for
it.”
John Brien looked from one side of
the road to the other, and ahead, between his donkey’s
ears. The mist was close round the cart as the
walls of a room; the only sound was the thin wind singing
in the telegraph wires.
“Mrs. Twomey,” murmured
John Brien, “the Clergy is agin him!”
“Oh, great and merciful Lord
God!” said Mrs. Twomey. She said it without
either irreverence or reverence. She merely wished
to express to John Brien her comprehension of the
importance of his statement.
Larry had flung himself into electioneering
as an alternative to drink. That was how he put
it to himself. He took rooms at Hallinan’s
Hotel, in Cluhir, in order to be on top of the railway
station, and the situation generally, and he had,
moreover, a standing invitation to N, The Mall,
for any meal, at any hour of the day or night, that
he found suitable. The district to be canvassed
was a wide one, and day after day Larry and the faithful
Barty went forth to interview “People of importance”;
darkly-cautious publicans, with wives lurking at hand
to make sure that “Himself” should do nothing
rash; uninterested farmers, who “had their land
bought,” and were left cold by the differences
’twixt Tweedledum and Tweedledee; and visits
to “The Clergy” of all denominations,
productive of much artificially friendly converse
and no very definite promises.
Of Larry’s own Communion, Father
Tim Sweeny alone announced himself, unhesitatingly,
as being of Larry’s camp. Father Tim’s
hostility had not been proof against Larry’s
charms, more especially since these were combined
with a substantial proof of the young candidate’s
interest in the decoration of the new chapel; and,
at the gate of that chapel, (the site of which he
did not forget that he owed to Larry) he attended
one of Larry’s meetings, and shook his bovine
head at his flock, and bellowed ferocious commendation
of the young man, who, he thundered, had not failed
in his duty by the Church and the people. There
was a downright, fighting quality in Father Sweeny
that was large and stimulating. Larry felt that
he had, at least, his own parish firmly at his back,
and wished that he had a few more such as Father Tim
to stand by him.
The Rev. Matthew Cotton (stiffened
by Mrs. Cotton) said that to enter a hustings for
a Home Ruler, of any variety, would be for him an
unauthorised bowing down in the House of Rimmon, a
simile that conveyed little to Larry, and nothing
at all, allegorically, to his agent, Barty Mangan,
though its practical interpretation presented no difficulties
to either of them.
The Reverend Mr. Armstrong, Pastor
of the Methodists, admitted to a preference for an
“All-for-Irelander,” as opposed to an Official
Nationalist; but evaded the responsibility of a promise
by saying that he would lay the matter before the
Lord, and would write later.
Neither did young Mr. Coppinger receive
much encouragement from his own class. Bill Kirby,
indeed, undertook to support him and even volunteered
to go round with him on his canvassing expeditions,
but this was considered by Larry’s Committee
as being of questionable advantage, even, possibly,
affording to the enemy an occasion to blaspheme, and
the offer (made, it may be said, at Judith’s
instigation) was declined.
Nor, as a matter of fact, was Larry
himself disposed to take Bill Kirby’s proffered
hand. He told himself that he was done with that
lot. He was bitterly angry with Christian.
He said to himself that he would never forgive her;
would never, if he could help it, see one of them
again. At a word from her father she had chucked
him; without a moment of hesitation, without a word
to show that she was even sorry for her father’s
treatment of him. “Apparently it’s
the only thing to do!” she had said. That
was all she thought of keeping a promise! What
about leaving father and mother and sticking to your
husband, he would like to know! These Protestants
who talked such a lot about reading the Bible!
It was quite true what old Mangan had said: “When
all comes to all, a man must stick to his own Church!”
All these others, these St. Georges, and Westropps,
and old Ardmore, and the rest of them, had only been
waiting to jump on him as soon as he put a foot out
of the rut they all walked in. They had waited
for the chance to make him a pariah. Now they
had it. All right! He could face that.
They should soon see how little he thought of them!
He pitched himself headlong into the
contest. The weather had fallen from grace.
October, having been borne in on the wings of a gale,
was storming on through wind and wet, and the game
of canvassing, that had seemed, on that sunny day
when he had written to Christian, so “frightfully
interesting,” was beginning to pall. Boring
as were the personal interviews, and exhausting the
evening oratory in town halls and school-houses, the
Sunday meetings at the gates of the chapels were still
more arduous. On each Sunday, during the period
between the death of Daniel Prendergast and the election
of his successor, did young Mr. Coppinger, with chosen
members of his “Commy-tee” he
had learnt to accept the inflexible local pronunciation splash
from chapel to chapel, to meet the congregations,
and to shout platitudes to them. Larry began
to feel that no conviction however fervently
held could survive the ordeal of being slowly
yelled to a bored crowd from the front seat of a motor
car. He told himself that he had become a gramophone,
and a tired gramophone, badly in want of winding up,
at that.
It would be of little avail to attempt
to define the precise shade of green of young Mr.
Coppinger’s political flag; whether, as a facetious
supporter put it, it was “say-green, pay-green,
tay-green, or bottle.” It is enough to
say that it varied sufficiently from that of Mr. Burke
to provide their respective followers with a satisfactory
casus belli. The shades of political opinion
in Ireland change, and melt and merge into each other
as the years pass, even as the colours of her surrounding
seas vary, deepening and paling with the changing
clouds, yet affecting only the surface, leaving the
sullen depths unchanged. Larry knew no more of
Ireland than a boy can learn in his school holidays;
it was only by degrees that he realised that in Ireland,
as he now found it, the single element of discord that
remained ever unchanged was Religion. He had spent
the four most recent and most receptive years of his
life in an atmosphere in which religion had no existence.
The hem of its raiment might, perhaps, have been touched,
when, as sometimes happened, the subject of a studio
composition was taken from the Bible, or the Apocrypha.
Then, possibly, would the young pagans of Larry’s
circle discover as much acquaintance with the Scriptures
as would point a jest, and give an agreeable sensation
of irreverence in discussing the details of the subject.
“There,” thought Larry,
“no one thought about your religion. No
one cared if you had one, and the presumption was
that you hadn’t.” But here, in these
little Irish towns, the question of a man’s private
views on a matter that might be supposed to concern
only himself, appeared of paramount importance.
He listened to denunciations of Protestants until
he felt, as he told the faithful Barty, that “for
tuppence” he would change over himself; just
as in some sections of the rival camp, he would have
heard to weariness of the bigotry and errors of Romanism.
He was brought, as many people more God-fearing than
he have been brought, to debate the question as to
whether a common atheism were not the only panacea
for the mutual hatreds that, as appeared to him from
his present point of view, ruled the Island of Saints.
He and Barty would sit up over the dying embers of
the dining-room fire of N, The Mall, talking;
wrangling, in a sort of country-dance of argument,
in which they advanced and retired, and joined hands,
and flung away from each other again; ending, generally,
in such agreement as might be found in a common determination
to lay all the blame for all the malice and uncharitableness
at the door of the clergy of the two creeds; a comprehensive
decision, and a consoling one, from the point of view
of two laymen.
Larry, in his loneliness, had fallen
into the habit of frequenting N; of “taking
pot-luck,” of “dropping in,” or of
“turning in,” all of which courses had
been urged upon him by his captor, Dr. Mangan.
Those great and special gifts of the Mangan family,
the love of music, and the habit of it (which are
not always allied) bestowed upon the household a charm
that was almost more potent for Larry than any other
could have been. At the end of a long day of canvassing,
spent with companions who, he felt, only half trusted
him, and were incapable of being amused by the things
that amused him (a factor in friendship that cannot
be valued too highly) it was comforting to “drop
in” to the hospitable, untidy house, where,
thanks to Mrs. Mangan’s early experiences, there
was always good luck in the pot, and to spend a peaceful
evening over the fire, smoking, and listening to the
famous Mangan Quartet. Music was the initial
point of contact between Larry and these people among
whom he had once more been cast, and the Big Doctor
was not unaware of the fact. Singly, or united,
the Mangan voices, mellow, tuneful, singing songs
of Ireland with artless grace and charm, wrought more
in Larry’s soul than he was aware of. Not
only to his ears, but to his eyes also, the Mangan
Quartet brought artistic satisfaction. The Big
Doctor, with his sombre face and overhanging brow,
looking, in the lamplight, like a Rembrandt burgomaster;
Barty and his mother, pale and dark-eyed, recalling
Southern Italy rather than Southern Ireland; and Tishy Larry’s
eyes used to dwell longest on Tishy, her face lit
by her most genuine feeling, the love of music, while
her voice of velvet (of purple velvet, he decided)
mourned for Patrick Sarsfield, or lamented with Emer
for Cuchulain, or thrilled her listener with the sudden
glory of “The Foggy Dew.” Larry’s
own voice was habitually exhausted by the cart-tail
oratory in which he daily expended it; it was enough
for him to listen and look, shutting his mind to the
past, living, as ever, in the present, like a wise
man, because its bounty sufficed him.