THE PATRIARCH


I

First, for that strange name of his. Patriarch
was a laney malapropism for the name one would
expect the old hero to be called; it stuck, and in
its own queer way was most fitting. For if the
old man was not really as old as it made him
appear, he did seem to come to us out of another
world, and spoke with a different voice, like the
prophets to the people of Israel.

If I were put to it, I could mention a dozen
ways in which he crossed my life, never leaving
it quite the same. But it will be enough to
describe how we first met; I but seven or eight
years old; he already the patriarch of the long
grey hair and blazing eyes who stood behind
the counter of his little shop in the Marsh, selling
half-ounces of tea and quarter pounds of
sugar to the women of the lanes.

It was rumoured that he gave sweets
indiscriminately to boys and girls who could speak
a few words of Irish. That was the first I had ever
heard of the language. I was hurt that this most
practical of all subjects was ignored at school.
Where was it to be learned? Who was it spoken
by? Nobody, apparently; for nobody seemed to
know. Then appeared one or two fortunate
urchins, doves to the ark, who had been taught
a few words of it in the Brothers’ school on the
quays. You said _cooooooooooooo_ (just like that—
very long-drawn-out), and mysteriously it
meant a greyhound, or you said with a very
broad ‘o’ _boooooooooooow_, and it meant cow. That
a cow could be called anything but a cow was
not so understandable, for only the bigger boys
talked backslang, and spoke of a ‘reyhoundgay’
or an ‘owcay’. Altogether it was a problem. My
mother did not know it. My father, who had
travelled even as far as Nova Scotia, did not
know it. ‘

Then someone remembered that an old grandmother
whom I rarely visited was supposed
to have heard it spoken in her youth at
Aghada. I flew to her. O, yes, she had heard it
spoken, and what was more, spoke it herself,
more easily than English she assured me, but
this I was not prepared to believe. My doubt
sprang from her inability to teach it to me. It
should have been so simple; I was prepared to
devote a whole evening to it, yet she could do
nothing except voice extraordinary combinations
of sounds that merely made me laugh. No,
my grandmother was not a success.

After trying in vain to teach me the Lord’s
Prayer and some song the name of which I have
long since forgotten, she taught me with great
difficulty to say ‘_A chailin  og t'rom pog,
agus posfaidh mé thu_.’ With which sentence and
its English equivalent I went armed on my first
visit to the Patriarch’s shop. ’

The visit was not quite the triumph I had
expected. I was shy. I stuttered badly. I began
by saying that I knew Irish. The Patriarch asked
my name. I told him. No, no, that wasn’t it;
what was my name in Irish? I had never heard of
my having any other name, but as the Patriarch
seemed to expect it, and to look upon my not
knowing it as culpable ignorance, I felt I was
hopelessly in the wrong, and gave myself up to
tears. It was only when I was restored with
bulls’-eyes and acid drops that I could come back
to my prepared speech, and then somehow I felt
myself a little bit ridiculous. I was a wonderful
boy, the old man assured me, but I felt ridiculous.
It was only his asking me what the sentence
meant that restored my confidence in myself. It
was something, at least, to have a grandmother
with whose aid you could puzzle heads
as old as the Patriarch’s.

‘Young girl,’ I translated, ‘give me a kiss and
I’ll marry you.’

(My frivolous grandmother!)

At any rate she had now turned into a positive
gold mine, and most of my spare time was, spent
about her kitchen. I learned from her, first my
prayers, then various snatches of old songs which
I got her to translate for me, more for the
Patriarch’s benefit than my own enlightenment.

I remember one fateful day when I went into
the shop on the Marsh. There was a young
man inside talking over the counter with the
Patriarch. And when he saw me, the Patriarch
began to speak in his vivid and moving way
about Holy Ireland, and about the beautiful
tongue in which our fathers had sent down their
message of undying hatred to children forgetful
of their fame. Made bold by his great words and
those blazing eyes of his, I was induced to sing
an Irish chorus that I had picked up from my
grandmother. The old man listened in an
almost ecstasy.

‘Do ye hear it?’ he cried as I finished. ‘Do ye
hear it? The giants talking to the dwarfs!’

‘What does it mean?’ the young man asked
him.

He shook his head in despair.

‘I dunno, I dunno. For three years I tried to
learn it, and sorra word of it could I memorise.
Th’ oul’ head is gone on me.’

‘Oh, I thought you spoke it,’ the young man
exclaimed, and the Patriarch’s brow became
gloomier and gloomier.

‘I’d give five years of me life to know it,’ he
said passionately. ‘The kings and priests and
prophets of our race are speaking to us, they’re
speaking to us out of the mouths of children, and
they might as well be speaking to that counter
there.’ His fist crashed down on it.

‘What does it mean, young fellow?’ the
stranger asked.

‘Tell him, tell him,’ the Patriarch encouraged.

And I translated literally as I had heard my
grandmother do:

‘O, my wife and my children and my little
spinning-wheel. My couple of pounds of flax
each day not spun—two days she’s in bed for
one she’s about the house, and Oh, may the dear
God help me to get rid of her!’

The young man laughed, or rather sniggered,
profanely, and I had a longing to fling something
in his face. But the Patriarch looked down
on me with his bright despairing eyes as on a
favourite hen that had laid a robin’s egg.

‘Are you sure you have the meaning right,
/a ghile/?’ he asked at last.

‘That’s what my grandmother says,’ I replied,
feeling that the next word would make me weep.

‘Did she teach you ne’er a song about Ireland?’
he asked.

‘No,’ I replied.

‘Nor about Cathleen Nee Houlihan?’

‘No,’——I felt as if I were accusing her of some
dark treachery.

‘Nor about the Little Black Rose?’

‘No, sir, she did not.’

‘Begod then, but there’s some meaning in
that,’ he said hotly. ‘Believe me,’ and he turned
to the young man, ‘there’s a message in that you
and I don’t see. They wrapped up their meanings in
dark words to deceive their enemies.’

The young man said nothing, clearly not
wishing to hurt him. The conversation—seditious
no doubt, though it was all above my head
—went on. Suddenly the old man raised a
warning finger.

‘I have it,’ he exclaimed solemnly. ‘’Tis
England he means. The bad wife in the house.
That’s it—I have it all straightened out now.
You have to have them songs interpreted for
you. The pounds of flax she didn’t spin are all
the industries she ruined on us. England, the
bad wife—ah, how true it is! Dark songs for a
people in chains.’

And so I went away, dedicated to the revolution,
a youthful carrier of sedition that was never
even guessed at by the poor country singer who
had made my song. Still, the old man did not
fail to tell me find out if my grandmother knew
the other songs he mentioned, about Cathleen
Nee Houlihan, Kate O’Dwyer, and the Little
Black Rose. But though she could give him
some more difficult nuts of allegory to crack,
that wedding song for instance:

  Slattern Shiela was the cook, 
  And scabby goat’s meat was the roast they ate,
  And it stunk in a way you would not believe,
    Because it was killed for a quarter.

of the others she had never heard in her childhood
at Aghada, so I remained ignorant of those
symbols of Irish nationality till I was much
older.

But by that time, thanks to Michael Callahan,
I already knew some Irish, and had imbibed a
little of the old man’s boundless hatred of what
he called ‘the hereidhithary inimy.’


II

Old Michael had a housekeeper, or, as we
said, a woman that did for him, who was quite as
unusual a figure as himself. She had been with
him since she was a young girl, and that was a
long time ago. She had at one period of her life
spent a few months in an asylum, and people
said this was Michael’s only reason for not
marrying her. I thought myself he might not
have married her for the very sufficient reason
that he was afraid of her. I was—at least in the
beginning.

She was ugly, she dressed in the queerest old
black clothes, and wore her hair in a fashion I
had never seen on anyone else. Besides, she
talked, or rather thundered, in an unnaturally
passionate voice that terrified me.

But later on I discovered that this voice was
not really her own, for one day, when she found
out that I was fond of reading, she brought me
up to her bedroom to show me her enormous
collection of prayer-books and works of devotion.
(I had forgotten to say that she was pious
with an extravagance that fully accorded with
her character). And while I sat on her bed,
examining those books—some of them in a queer,
crabbed manuscript—Ellen sang hymns for me
or talked good—humouredly, quietly, and with a
slight trace of melancholy.

I must say in Ellen’s defence (if that excellent
woman needs defence) that she was the first
literary woman I met, and the best. When the
old man was engaged, as he frequently was, in
talks that I now know to have been seditious, I
sat in Ellen’s bedroom, on the edge of her bed,
reading devotional works that I only half
understood. I read there by the hour. My prime
favourites were the penny booklets she bought
in Church; things like _The Lure of Drink_, _Happy
Married Life_, _How to be a Saint in a Bar~room_,
and _The Miracles at Lourdes/. In those days
nothing, not even the Deerfoot stories, gave me
more delight, and to-day I can only look back
with regret on the beauty and mystery of that
infinitely moral literature.

There was the story of the drunkard, dead in his
sins, who came back to earth in order to remove
the decanter from the sideboard before his son
returned, and who, being surprised at his task
(probably more difficult for a ghost than, for
you and me), left the print of his fingers burned
in the panel of the door.  There is astonishing
poetry in that one word ‘burned’. And I recollect
something that was supposed to be the true story
of how Voltaire died, screaming for a priest—his
name stuck in my memory because of the delicious
thrills his hinted-at blasphemies gave me, and my
delight in the propriety of his fate. Yet there
are men and women in the world so barren of
imagination themselves that they would rob the
people of their heritage of imagination. Men and
women like the Drake— but I am anticipating. The
Drake has yet to be introduced.

These, then, are the two Ellens of my childish
memory, the real Ellen who went on happily
ironing and singing ‘To Jesus’ Heart All-Burning’
while I read, and the public Ellen, tall,
toothless and ugly, clapping her palms that gave
off a sound like boards, and thundering ‘I tell
you, Mrs. Clancy, St. John of Damascus distinctly
lays it down. . . .’ Her saints were always
outlandish, and I begin to suspect the orthodoxy
of her quotations.

There was one thing this curious pair had
in common, and that was their opinion—
mostly of politics. And lest you say the woman
followed where the man led, I must add that
the contrary was generally true. A full three
days before Michael was ready to give his
opinion on any subject, Ellen had already
broadcast it.

Now this is a great gift—the greatest perhaps
that God can give to any woman who has to live
with a man from day to day. One could almost
take out an insurance policy on the peace of a
household if one could guarantee that a woman
would anticipate her husband’s opinion even by
twenty-four hours. For eventually the man will
be driven to suspect that truth (since a man’s
opinion is of necessity truth) originates with the
woman, and before ever the horrid thought that
she has led him astray can occur to him, she will
seem to be leading him from his own errors on
to her native path of righteousness.

Whether it was Ellen’s feminine intuition
that anticipated the laborious workings of
Michael’s mind or not, I cannot tell. But it is
certain, that it took old Michael a full week to
make up his mind about the rights and wrongs
of the Great War, while on the very evening of
mobilisation, when the Marsh was seized by an
imperialist frenzy, Ellen was proclaiming at
every street corner that ‘England’s difficulty was
Ireland’s opportunity’—and getting stoned for
her pains.

It was soon after this that I began to drift
away for the first time from the Patriarch. My
father and elder brother were in France, and the
meaning of the lists of names my mother worked
through. with such suspense and anguish. was
gradually dawning on me. It was thought for her
rather than any bitterness towards the old man
that kept me away. He in fact had already made
his own quiet compromise. He did not cease
proclaiming his convictions, but he did not let
them interfere with his own humanity. So,
though he naturally rejoiced at every German
victory, he was the first to sympathise with any
poor afflicted creature of the slums who had
been bereaved by it.

I like to think of the Patriarch, with all his
hatred of England, as he was then; acting as
go-between for the women of the lanes, reading
their letters for them, filling up forms, writing
appeals to Whitehall, applying for leave for men
to come and visit sick wives and children, inventing
sick wives and children for those who hadn’t
them, disputing pensions, allowances, and what
not else. And the money that rolled in to him,
bad debts from before the war, and the price of
newer and bigger purchases made by women
who before it had never changed a pound note—
portion of all this was being steadily diverted to
finance gun-running, or seditious newspapers,
or Irish lessons for the few boys and girls who
still wanted them! Yes, Ireland is a queer
country, and it was never queerer than in those
bad days before nineteen-sixteen.

Then came the bombshell of the rebellion. I
cannot write about its immediate effect, because
curiously it only affected me indirectly. The
boys and girls about me buzzed with it; instead
of stamps or birds’ eggs they collected prints of
the dead leaders or rebel ballads. But it did not
touch me until one fine summer day when I was
returning from the baths and saw old Callanan
in a lorry between half a dozen policemen. He
gave me the greeting I sought from him—I
should have been broken-hearted if I had not
had it.

I cannot describe the tumult of my mind that
evening. All my old enthusiasms mounted like
strong drink to my head. I rushed home and
fished out my battered Irish primer, begged for
pennies to buy picture postcards of Pearse and the
other leaders, and began to furnish my bedroom
with them. Down came ‘The Munster Fusiliers
at Mons’ and ‘The Irish Division at Gallipoli’;
up went Pearse, M‘Donagh and Plunkett.

The Patriarch was not long in custody. It was
his third spell in gaol, I learned to my
astonishment; for, of course, when he came out I
lounged round his shop as much as ever before.
The shop had now become a very important
place, a sort of clearing—house, and every day
scores of young men drifted in, leaned across the
counter, and talked confidentially with him.
There one was able to keep in touch with all the
latest developments of the election warfare,
reports of raids and arrests (as later on of ambushes
and the number of casualties concealed under
the official ‘our troops suffered no loss’);
broadsheet ballads, like ‘Who is Ireland’s Enemy?’
‘Wrap the Green Flag round me, Boys,’ and
‘The Felons of Our Land.’

Some of these I copied out and brought home
with me. My mother read them with tears in her
eyes. My brother back on leave from France
copied them afresh, and took them to the front
with him. He was killed there shortly after by a
bomb explosion, and the ballads came home to us,
torn by the splinter that had pierced his heart,

About the same time my grandmother died.
She was very troubled. towards the end by a
confusion of her wits. Lying on her bed she
recited long prayers in Irish, but she would be
tortured by an evil imp that turned the prayers
into ‘Vision-poems’ and the Blessed Virgin into
the spéirbhean, the sky—lady whose immortal
loveliness was sung in sensuous rhymes by every
Gaelic poet. This led to an occasional
unintentional irreverence which troubled her more
than it need have done. '

On the day she died she asked for a mirror.
My mother, after some hesitation and protesting,
gave it to her. She looked at herself for a
long while, fixedly and dispassionately, then she
murmured, ‘Jesus, there’s a face!’ and handed
back the mirror. She could not be prevailed on
to speak for hours after, and that evening, just
as dusk was falling, she gave a great sigh and
died.


III

After this things seemed to begin again for
my mother. It was as if she had exhausted her
capacity for suffering with the death of Peter.
My father had been sent back to England for
good. Now she and I drew closer together. It
was, I suppose, the combination of her piety and
my patriotism that dragged us out of our beds at
half-past five of a winter’s morning to attend
Mass for the souls of the men killed in Easter
Week. Again I like to think of this period—
how many grey, bitter-cold mornings we walked
the streets of the sleeping city, and heard the
dogs howling at us in the half-darkness. It
became something of an adventure; the dogs’
howling, the clang of our feet on the deserted
flagstones, the shadows of solitary workmen, the
dying blaze before a watchman’s fire on the
quays, the river when the gulls flashed out at us;
cold, rain, that unearthly feeling of contemplation
that the silence of houses gives; then the
door swinging to behind us and shutting us into
the warm, dim, smelly church with its pink and
blue and chocolate statues, where a young priest
said Mass for twenty or so other adventurers like
ourselves; and last, the quick walk back through
wakening streets to the little kitchen where a fire
was set before us, waiting for the match and the
kettle to crown it.

By this time the whole country was on the
edge of a volcano, and the Patriarch was happier
than he had ever been in his life before. He
loved the sight of young men, and now he had
young men in plenty to listen to him. He would
shake me by the shoulder—I was then a gawky
lad of sixteen—and shout, ‘Hurry up, hurry up,
Dermod, will you! Hurry and grow up before
we free old Ireland without you!’

It was through him I was put on volunteer
work so young—dirty, rather useless work it
was too, but for me full of thrills. Lounging
round street corners, cap pulled over my eyes,
hands in pockets, being smacked or kicked
about by sundry spiteful old policemen,
reporting at night to someone in 'Michael’s
little shop—oh, it was all thrilling and wonderful!

And with it parades in the country of a
summer’s evening. Little parties of men scattered
everywhere, falling in and tramping up long,
summer—shaded lanes to a distant field that
topped some hill; drilling under the sunset and
the first dusk, doubling through the tall grass,
and taking cover, soaked with dew, behind some
hillock. And the early stars faint in the
after-glow, the silhouettes of a half-company
topping a rise, file by file, the flapping and
cracking of signal flags; whistles blowing, illicit
news-sheets being circulated, and the thrill of
pleasure with which one was allowed, so very rarely,
to handle a revolver. One is glad to have been young
in such a time, not too young to miss being occupied
with the mimic soldiering, yet not old enough to
have had one’s fancy rubbed the wrong way by
it—just at the age when one’s mind was ready
for impressions, and when without all this it
would have found no more to brood upon than
books or games or a first love affair.

It was understood, of course, that I told my
experiences to Michael. Even my secrets—for
he was as excited over them as myself, and more
discreet—such as the hour when Captain Maunsell,
whom I was shadowing, went home; the house
beside the barrack where I had found that
a German rifle, in splendid condition, was kept;
or where we stayed when some job forced us to
sleep out.

We were innocent in those days, and yet
strangely, when the armistice came and there
was no longer anything for us to do, we woke
and found ourselves hardened, almost grown up,
a little sly, a little given to bragging, a little
contemptuous of people like the Patriarch who
indulged in what we thought false sentiment.

And this was how once again he and I parted
company.


IV

While the Treaty squabble was on a group of
us attended a party meeting. It was a pitiful
business. There was sentiment by the barrel,
lakes and rivers of sentiment. ‘Comrades who
had fought shoulder to shoulder—must be no
split—Ireland is—Ireland was—all personalities
must be avoided.’ And a Free Stater rose to propose
something or other in terms of such woolly
sentiment that a republican rose to second it,
and the first man rose to explain that he hadn’t
really meant that. And then one of our men
walked up and laid a revolver on the table.

Immediately there was pandemonium. It was
a declaration of war, and all the pious sentiments
were forgotten while people shouted, thumped,
and called other people all the ugly names they
could think of. This was all that interested me,
so I left. Michael Callanan was standing in the
corridor. We shook hands, and I noticed that his
hands were trembling. He dribbled profusely.

‘’Tis an awful thing,’ he said heavily. ‘’Tis so.
They used to tell us we could never agree, and
now they’re after proving it to us.’

‘It was bound to happen,’ I replied.

I was for saying good night when he asked
me to come home with him. His house was
lonely now, with no young men at all coming. It
was a long time since I’d been to see them, and
we might talk it over. Surely, surely, there was
some way out, surely we could all join hands
again? (All the old men talked like that.)

When we appeared Ellen pretended to busy
herself in preparing the supper, but she was only
waiting her chance. At Callanan’s first sigh, she
planted herself square before the fireplace, hands
crossed upon her belly, chin lifted, while she laid
down the law. She out-talked him. every time he
raised his voice in our defence.

‘Believe me, Mr. Callanan,’ she said with
pitying scorn, ‘believe me, oh, believe me that
you’re worrying the heart and soul out of
yourself for nothing! For less than nothing, Mr.
Callanan—for a pack of young pups without
education or morals!’

‘Oh, easy, easy, Ellen!’ I cried.

‘Pups!’ she repeated triumphantly. ‘Vile pups!
Miserable pups! The scum and dirt and leavings
of Ireland! You’ll remember my words, Mr.
Callanan. In the nobility of your heart you don’t
know who and what you’re sacrificing yourself
for, but when the public hangman has had his
say with them, you’ll remember what I’m telling
you this blessed and holy night.’

‘Don’t bother me, Ellen,’ he cried impatiently,
‘I won’t hear a word agin them. They’re fine
boys, dacent boys, gentlemanly boys, all of
them.’

‘Scum!’ screamed Ellen again, throwing herself
forward from the hips. With a massive
gesture that consigned us all to the outer spaces
of the universe, she opened wide her fingers and
threw her hand out level with her shoulder.
‘They are cast out, body and bones,’ she intoned,
‘from the buzzum of my church. “They
live by the sword, and they shall perish by the
sword. They shall not see my face, saith the
Lord.” ’

At this moment a woman rattled a penny on
the counter, and Ellen went out to serve her.
But when she came back she sat by the table and
renewed her harangue. As she did so, one by one,
and little by little, cups, plates, knives, forks, and
spoons were pushed out of her way until a desert
space of white cloth was cleared before her. This,
we knew, was a certain sign of Ellen being in her
theological tantrums. Old Callanan continued
his protests, but they grew weaker and weaker
under her relentless fire.

‘Ellen,’ I said at last. ‘I know what it is. You
think we’re all damned.’

‘That is not for me nor for any mortal creature
like me to say, Jeremiah,’ she replied coolly.
‘There is a Higher Judge whose judgments
may not be my judgments. We are only poor,
blind, ignorant creatures who must obey the
laws laid down for us by Our Lord and the
Fathers of the Church.’

‘The same laws,’ I said, flaring up without
reason, ‘as ye invoked. against anyone that ever
tried to help ye.’

‘Those laws were never invoked without
reason, Jeremiah.’

‘They were invoked to destroy Parnell.’

‘Parnell have nothing to do with it.’

‘They were invoked again’ the Fenians,’ said
old Michael weakly.

‘Individual opinions, Mr. Callanan. Don’t
try to confuse me. Those were only individual
opinions.’

‘And against me and my likes,’ I added, ‘for
two years past.’

‘Which proves again that our spiritual directors
can see farther than we can see,’ retorted Ellen,
complacently rubbing her folded hands upon
her belly.

‘And against anyone,’ I cried, losing the
last shred of my patience, ‘that ever showed a
tack of intelligence or courage in a country
where everyone of you is afraid to speak above
a whisper for fear he’d be heard in Rome.’

‘Excuse me, Jeremiah Coakley,’ hissed Ellen,
turning white with rage, ‘excuse me———

‘Be quiet, Ellen,’ old Michael interrupted
suddenly. ‘Be quiet and make the tay. I’m tired.
I think I’ll go to bed.’

‘You’ll go to bed now,’ said Ellen. ‘’Tis time
you took your rest, you poor, misguided man.
Come on with me!’

I was still more astonished to see him rise at
her bidding. He bade me good night, apologising
weakly for going, and I rose and saw him
climb the stairs, holding tight to Ellen’s arm. I
went away, my tail between my legs, feeling
indignant with the old slobberer. ‘To be led by
the nose in that way by a woman!’ I thought
disgustedly. I forgot his seventy years and his
days in prison.


V

And so the ding-dong of fighting went on.
We—that is to say, the little group that had
grown up under Michael Callanan’s nostrils——
managed to keep fairly well together. We never
saw him now, in fact we rarely dared to go into
the city at all. After the first flush of enthusiasm
has died away, fighting of this sort is a filthy
game in which obstinacy and the desire for
revenge soon predominate. Autumn dragged on
into winter, and we still managed to remain
intact.

Then one day, passing through one of the
narrow streets along the quays, I saw Ellen. My
slight disguise of spectacles and moustache did
not deceive her. She put out her hand to stop
me, while the blue hollows of her cheeks narrowed
into a smile.

‘Wisha, wisha,’ she exclaimed. ‘Is this Jeremiah
I behold?’ (She never would call me by the
Irish form of my name, Dermod; there being
no such saint—so she obstinately maintained.)

‘Hullo, Ellen,’ said I.’

‘’Tis a cure for sore eyes to see you, Jeremiah.’

‘Ah, we know who you’re glad to see nowadays,’
said I.

‘Is that all you know?’ she asked with an air
of surprise. ‘Young man, don’t ever dare to say
the like of that to me again—the longest day
you live.’

‘Is that the way with you?’ I asked.

‘Ah, lave me alone! Sure, them bishops would
rouse anyone agin them! Why don’t they preach
what they were consecrated to preach instead of
airing their opinions like a lot of old market
women?’

‘And the Patriot? What about him?’

‘Wisha, th’ ould fool, he’ll get sense yet!’

And, of course, I knew before she said it that
he would; but did that astonishing woman feel
in her bones that Seumas Kelly, the youngest of
our gang and Michael’s favourite, would be
dead within the next ten days? How else can I
account for the change in her?

It was a blow to all of us; the integrity of the
gang had been defeated, our luck was broken.

In the morning Alec Gorman, defying the
spotters, went down to the hospital to have a
last look at him. In the evening I braved it. But
I have a horror of violent death, and after one
glance at him I closed my eyes and knelt down.
A hand touched my shoulder.

‘Dermod.’

‘Yes, Michael?’

‘Come on out.’

I went out with him. We strolled across St.
Vincent’s Bridge and up Sunday’s Well. Old
Michael was literally shaking with excitement,
and I saw that he was making a great struggle
to regain control of himself before he spoke. But
on Wyse’s Hill he could stand it no longer and
sank on to one of the wooden benches.

"Twas I done it, Dermod,’ he said.

‘What?’ I asked.

‘I seen it on his face. He was blaming me.’

‘Have sense, man,’ said I. ‘He was very fond
of you.’
 
‘I brought him into it, didn’t I?’ he asked.
‘I brought you into it. I brought ye all into
it.’

‘You did.’

‘And then I turned my back on ye. I reneged,
and I left ye to fight alone. Didn’t I?’

‘You didn’t,’I replied consolingly. ‘We never
doubted you, Michael, any of us.’

‘Ah, ah, ah, amn’t I the old fool,’ he moaned,
‘amn’t I the wicked old fool? Sure, ye were me
own flesh and blood, the ones I put all me heart
and courage into, that I cared for more than if
ye were me own children. I should have known
I was in the wrong, and that the best of me was
in ye. After me seventy years and me three times
in gaol I should have known it!’

I had to take him home. Already he seemed
to be easier in his mind, as if he had shaken off a
great burden.


VI

He was ill. Ellen said he was dying. One
night I went to see him. He had grown a little
beard which added a certain graciousness and
dignity to his old head. To me he looked quite
well and lively, but he complained of asthma,
and seemed to take it for granted that it was a
complaint from which he would not recover.

All his rebel portraits he had called in from
other parts of the house: O’Donovan Rossa,
John O’Leary, Bryan Dillon, O’Neill Crowley——
all looked at you from the crowded walls, and
Michael lay like an old hero in his Fenian pantheon.
He was not quite the same Michael. He
was more difficult to please and had begun to be a
drag on Ellen’s patience. She complained of him
to me even as she opened the door. He seemed
to have turned completely against her, and saw
far too much of the Drake, which was no credit
to him and he with one foot in the grave; he
even gave her money, and wouldn’t I tell him
that people were beginning to talk?

No sooner had Ellen shut the door behind
her than the old man began complaining of her;
the way she kept forcing him to do things he
didn’t want to do, and the sour face she put on
whenever he had visitors. There was a little
woman now, Mrs. Broderick (it was difficult
to recognise the Drake under that name, but
Michael would never use a nickname to describe
a lady). Mrs. Broderick’s grandson was in gaol
for the cause; she had four other grandchildren,
helpless little orphans, to feed and clothe; yet
Ellen begrudged her the scrap of meat left over
after their dinner!

I stood up strongly for Ellen, but he interrupted
me impatiently. I could tell him nothing
about Ellen. Hadn’t he known her for thirty-five
years?

‘She’s too conceited,’ he complained bitterly.
‘She thinks she’s God Almighty because she’ve
a little bit of knowledge, but she haven’t got
what’s more important, she haven’t got Christian
charity.’

‘Anyway,’ I said, ‘the Drake is a Vicious,
dissolute, shameless old hag, and no woman with
any bit of pride would like to have her in and
about her house.’

(As I spoke I saw her with the shawl dragged
tight about her wizened face, her palm, varnished
with filth, outstretched, and heard her high,
cracked voice saying, ‘Alanna machree, fork out
de dough!’)

‘You’re too hard on her,’ muttered Michael.

‘We must have charity. Anyway, you don’t know
her.’

"I do.’

‘You don’t. I knew her when she was a girl.
’Twas only when she came to me a few weeks
ago for the loan of a couple of shillings that I
fixed her.’ He was silent for a while. Then he 
nodded to me and said ‘Whisper!’

He raised himself on the pillows; I bent
across and lifted him while he put his mouth
to my ear. He whispered hotly and shamefastly
for a moment.

‘Oh, was she?’ I asked without surprise. ‘And
why didn’t he marry her?’

He looked at me reproachfully, clucking his
tongue in wonderment and deprecation. All the
innate Gaelic conservatism rose up in him at the
thought.

‘Well, well, well, well, Dermod! Is it him, a
national figure, a man the people of Cork looked
up to? I’m surprised at you. She was only a
servant in his house.’

‘That makes no difference,’ said I.

He glanced with awe and affection at the
faded photograph on the wall.

‘And it was after he came out of gaol, too,’ he
said, as though that clinched it.

‘He must have been over fifty then,’ I remarked
casually.

‘He was sixty-three,’ said Michael flatly.

He looked at me for a fraction of a second and
guiltily lowered his eyes. Then a radiant blush
covered all his long innocent face, spread to his
ears, which began to glow scarlet about their
bushes of white hair, and stealthily crept down
the neck of his shirt. His thin hands fiddled
nervously at the bedclothes. At last he could
stand it no longer and turned his head, as though
diverting his attention to what was going on
along the roof-tops outside his window.» But the
deadly, tell-tale blush crept round the back of
his neck and glowed furiously under his ears.
Suddenly he dropped back without warning in
the bed and covered himself with clothes until
nothing appeared but two bright, abashed eyes
and a crimson forehead. That was as much as I
ever heard Michael say about what are called
‘the mysteries of life’.

He had another row with Ellen before I left.
Except the Fenian leaders, the only one of the
heavenly hierarchies he was interested in was a
group of Franciscan saints, chief of them, of
course, St. Francis himself, but he developed a
particular veneration for St. Rita of Cascia, and
a prayer to her was nailed to the wall above his
bed. He had been waiting for Ellen to come in
from the chapel, and when he heard her step
below stairs he called out to her.

‘Did you get it?’ he asked.

‘Did I get what?’ she shouted back.

‘Oh, she wouldn’t know!’ he commented
bitterly with a loud groan. ‘’Tisn’t to be expected
she’d know.’

She grumbled her way up the stairs and
peered in.

‘They hadn’t it at St. Peter and Paul’s.’

‘Did you look?’

‘I told you they wouldn’t have it before I
went out.’

‘’Tis a good job I don’t want much done for
me in this house.’

‘What is it, Michael?’ I asked soothingly.

‘’Tis a life of St. Rita I’m asking that wan to
get for me for a month past, but she’s too lazy to
stir hand or foot.’

‘Whatever took your fancy in St. Rita, Mr.
Callanan....’

There was danger in Ellen’s calm tones. Her
map of the heavens I knew to be carefully
plotted, and she prided herself upon having
tested by experiment the position of every major
luminary. She had a table laden with cheap
coloured statuary, and by the position of these
you could at any time deduce where her speculations
were tending. When a lamp was lit before
a saint you might be certain that that saint was in
high favour with her, and the apotheosis of her
disillusionment was expressed when she turned
him, face to the wall, as a punishment for his
inaction. In this there was more traditional
catholicism than you might imagine, for there is
an Irish poem in which a saint is bitterly
reproached for having withheld his favours; but
Ellen did not need to rely on precedent, she was
the law and the fathers in herself.

‘What’s that you’re saying?’ growled Michael.

‘Whatever took your fancy in St. Rita . . .
In my humble opinion St. Rita is an Ould
Show!’

‘Get out,’ he spluttered. ‘Listen to her, Dermod,
that’s the way she’s at me until she drives
me past patience. I tould you before not to be
irreverent.’

‘Oh, I’m not being irreverent, Mr. Callanan.
Far from it. I’m merely expressing an opinion,
which I’m perfectly entitled to do, here, or
elsewhere, or at any time. I don’t say that St. Rita
isn’t all the Church says she is. I merely say that
in my opinion she’s an Ould Show. Any little
intention I ever asked of her was never granted,
and that doesn’t surprise me, Mr. Callanan,
seeing who she was. I have no use for married
women in religion. A woman that can’t make up
her mind——— ’

‘Why shouldn’t she be married?’ he shouted.

‘A woman that can’t make up her mind,’ she
went on imperturbably, ‘to leave the world
_before_ she takes a husband should not leave it at
all.'

Old Michael grew almost purple with anger.

‘Are you contradicting me again?’ he shouted.
‘Did I ask you before not to speak about St.
Rita in my presence? Did I?’

‘I’m sure——— ’ she began; then she caught
Sight of my clenched fist being shaken at her
behind the Patriarch’s head. She stumbled in
her speech, stuttered, came out with, ‘I’m sorry,
I’ll say no more,’ and left us.

There was a spring flood on the river and a
high March wind when she sent for me again to
say that the old man was dying. I saw by her
eyes that she had been weeping. She had been
up all night with him, and though he was a little
better now, the doctor did not think he would
last another night.

When I entered the room I saw how far gone
he really was. Only his eyes were alive, death
had already taken the rest of him. And the
magnificent spring storm was whistling and
clanging along the slates and irons of the roofs
outside, and the clouds, ‘the grey castles’, that
precede rain were sailing by high overhead, for
long minutes plunging a whole street into gloom
and chilling the white shiny face of Shandon. A
great purple cloud was rising at the other side of
the river; it was night coming on.

His voice was feeble, that was the ‘asthma’ he
said; it made it very difficult for him to breathe.
It was about his money he wanted to speak to
me. Would I take charge of it? Half his little
fortune he was leaving to the Cause and half to
Ellen.

‘That wan,’ he gasped faintly, ‘she’d disgust
you, she’d positively disgust you! She’s crossing
and thwarting that poor Mrs. Broderick, all
because she’s in dread I’d leave her me money.’

‘She’s a good, pious woman,’ I said, ‘so let her
alone.’

‘Good?’ He clucked his tongue at me, in pity
for my wits. ‘Good? When I was gasping me
last in this bed during the night, did she say that
prayer to St. Rita? Did she? To St. Rita of
Cascia, the Patroness of the Impossible? Did
she? She did not.’ His disgust went beyond all
bounds. ‘That wan, Dermod, whisper to me,
she was praying for hours, and do you know?
she was _making up_ saints.’

It was all so strange: here was death, here the
hero of my boyhood, and I was listening only to
a display of senile hatred of his housekeeper.
Strange, I thought, how death tries to divest
itself of all human dignity!

I heard the Drake’s sigh as she came in below
stars.

‘Mercy, mercy, mercy!’ she panted, trying
to force the shop door to behind her. ‘’Twould
tear you into tatters, dat wind!’

Ellen and she came up. It was darkening to a
an early nightfall. The old man would not have
the lamp lit, so she put a match to the candle
on the dresser.

‘Dat wind,’ said the Drake, ‘would shake you
asunder. Mike Callanan, you’re a lucky man to be
lying dere in your warm comfortable bed instead
of being out under dat like me.’

‘Where were you?’ he asked feebly.

‘Where was I? I was foraging, what else?’ She
laughed her high, cracked laugh. ‘I was foraging.
Bridie is going to make her confirmation, if
you please, and dey wanted me to get a dress for
her. Where did dey tink I was going to get the
money for a dress for her? So I wint up to Fader
Duane. “Dis and dat,” says I, “the teacher wants
a new dress for Bridie for her confirmation, and,
God help me,” says I, “where would I get the
price of a new dress?” So he puts his hand in his
pocket and what. do you tink he give me, my
dear? What do you tink?’

‘I dunno,’ said Michael.

‘He give me half-a-crown. How did he tink I’d buy
a dress for a half-a-crown? And I ups and tells
him so, my dear, so I did! “Dat’s all you’re
going to get from me, y’oul vagabone,” says
he. “If dat’s the way it is, fader,” says I, “if
dat’s the way it is, I won’t be troubling you,”
says I, “but I’ll go down to Minister Bolster and
see if he won’t give it to me.”’ She laughed
again.  ‘Off I wint, my dear, off I wint, and
Fader Duane after me, and I starts running and he
starts running. “Come back,” says he. O, he
chased me down Shandon Street I declare, before
Jesus and the world!’

The 'wind is blowing more loudly, tugging
with might and main at the windows. Rain has
begun to fall heavily. The candle flickers; the
old hag gets into a violent discussion about
religion with Ellen.

‘Nuns? Nuns?’ I hear her exclaim. ‘Dey’d
work you to train oil for a half-a-crown!’

‘Dermod,’ says old Michael faintly, and I go
and sit by him.

‘This night,’ he said. ‘It reminds me of when
I was a boy. There’s a flood on the river, you said?’

‘There is.’

‘It was when I was six or seven. We were
evicted from the little house in Dunmanway.
Can you hear me?’

‘Yes.’

‘We had to come into the city and take a room
for the three of us, my grandmother, my mother
and myself. ’Tis funny I didn’t think of it until
to-night. There was an old man staying with us
in Dunmanway, but he wouldn’t come in here
at all. He hung round the old wreck of a house
after the soldiers and bailiffs were done with it.
For four months. Until the winter came on.’

‘Go on.’

‘Then he got lonely and downhearted. He
wanted to come in to us, but he didn’t know
how to find us. He couldn’t speak English, you
see. He started to walk the thirty odd miles. He
was so old it took him three days. He got here
one night after dark. The river was in a flood,
and the rain was falling, and the wind was up,
just like now. He asked the few people he met
for the Callanans, but none of them had heard of
us, natural enough. The water was up to his
knees and the wind was pelting him. And then
what did he do? He went from street to street,
crying out in his Irish, and what do you think
he called?’

‘I don’t know. I suppose he called for you.’

‘He called—in Irish this was—his curse on
God (his voice dropped to the faintest of whispers)
for sending the floods and the wind, and
God’s curse on the Callanans for losing their
land. ’

‘And ye heard him?’

‘My grandmother heard him. She was blind,
and she could hear what you were thinking
almost. She cocked her head, and she said “That
is the voice of Donal the Piper O’Leary!” and
my mother went downstairs and brought him
in, nearly dying. He was after being two hours
calling then. He lived with us for six years
after....’

The two women had gone downstairs. When
I went down to call Ellen to him, the old hag
and she were still fighting.

‘When you’re dead,’ said Ellen, ‘your soul
flies like a bird to the judgment seat of God!’

‘When you’re dead,’ said the Drake, spitting
on the floor, ‘you go down into the cart, and
neider Fader Duane nor Minister Bolster
can put a stir in your little finger or your big
toe.’

It was about two o’clock when old Michael
died. For an hour before a sniper had been at
work, and when the wind blew towards us the
shot would ring out, as though it were being fired
in the room, and then we would hear everything
off stage, the sniper’s rifle and the rattle of
a machine gun. Michael lay in a heavy stupor.
At last he came to with a start; his breathing
became more and more laboured, his face turned
purple, and before I could reach him he leaped
out of bed. I caught him in my arms, but he
gasped and struggled fiercely, his lips growing
darker, his tongue protruding. Then he shook
me off and reached the window. He forced it up,
and fell upon the sill, his two hands clutching at
his throat. I bent over him and heard the death
rattle there. Ellen was on her knees saying the
‘De Profundis’ when the candle went out in the
high, raging wind. She continued, however, and
the darkness was filled with the noise of the
storm, the spluttering of the rain about the floor,
the cracking of the sniper’s rifle—all magnified
into something terrifying, remote, and cruel—
and her frightened, penetrating voice that made
the last supplications.

‘If Thou shalt mark iniquities, Lord, who
shall endure it?’