Read CHAPTER XXXIII of Mount Music, free online book, by E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross, on ReadCentral.com.

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.