In Mr. Knox's Country Part 20

"I took the white tie off me, and I tied it to the bush that was next me, for a token, and 'twas that way I got them again the next morning, thanks be to G.o.d."

Having concluded his story, James started on a perfunctory tour of the table with the wine card. He stopped to pull the turf fire together, and, with a furtive eye at the gla.s.s over the chimney-piece, he rearranged the long lock of hair that draped his bald pate. It was dyed, of that peculiar shade of chestnut that disdains subterfuge, and the fact and its suggestions were distressing where an old servant was concerned; so also was the manner in which he hobbled on his heels.

"His walk's full of corns," said the young doctor, eyeing him not without sympathy. "He's a great old character. I believe they keep him here to talk to the tourists."

It is a melancholy fact that in Ireland, in these later days, "characters" have become aware of their position, and palpably live up to their reputation. But James was in a cla.s.s of his own.

I said didactically, even combatively, that "characters" were free and easy, but that James was easy without being free.

"I'll bet he's not easy in his feet, anyhow!" said the Doctor brutally.

"Have you any more soup there, James?"

The mother of the young lady, who had hitherto preserved a silence, broken only by the audible a.s.similation of her soup, here laid down her spoon and said in cryptic disparagement:

"Tin!"

"Well, I'd say it was the best we had yet," said the Doctor. "I'd undertake to pull a puppy through distemper with it."

"That's the soup she has always for th'a.s.sizes," said James. "Grand soup it is, and I declare to ye, she makes it out of egg sh.e.l.ls and every old rubbish!"

The young lady's mother emitted a short laugh, but her empty soup-plate told heavily against her.

The meal wore slowly on. A sea fish, of a genus unknown to me, and amazingly endowed with bones, was consumed in distracted silence.

"I hear you have a fish shop opened in Ballinagar, Mrs. M'Evoy,"

remarked the Doctor, taking his last fish bone out of action with professional adroitness, and addressing the mother of the young lady, "That's very up-to-date. There wasn't one I met from Ballinagar but was bragging of it."

"It was the Hoolahanes that had it," said Mrs. M'Evoy. "It's closed."

"Oh dear, why so?" said the Doctor. "Why did they do that, I wonder?"

"They said that morning, noon, and night people were bothering them for fish," returned Mrs. M'Evoy, to whom this triumph of the artistic temperament presented no exceptional feature.

"Unless it might be on a fast day, I'd never ask to taste a bit of fish," remarked James, giving a helping hand to the conversation.

"There was a man I knew from this place got his death in Liverpool from a bit of fish. It stuck to the upper gum. 'Bill,' says he to the one that was with him, 'so help me G.o.d,' says he, 'I'm dyin',' says he; and sure that's how he met his death! It was in some grand hotel he was, and he was too shy to give the puff to send out the bit."

"I'd like to send that to the 'B.M.J.'," said the Doctor gravely.

"Maybe you could give me the man's name, James?"

"There was them that could swear to it," said James, depositing a syphon on the table in a determined manner, "but they were before your day, Doctor Hickey."

"How young he is!" said Miss M'Evoy archly. "Don't be flattering him, James."

"Indeed I'll not flatter him," returned James, "there's plenty doing that."

It was at about this point that a dish containing three roast ducks was placed in front of me. Circ.u.mstances had decreed that I sat at the end of the table; it was my task to deal with the ducks, and during the breathless and steamy struggle that ensued, I pa.s.sed out of the conversation, which, indeed, had resolved itself into a more personal affair between Dr. Hickey and Miss M'Evoy.

It was somewhere in the reposeful period that came with the cheese, that Dr. Hickey ordered a bottle of port, of which he very handsomely invited the ladies and me to partake. He leaned back in his chair.

"Was this in the cellar the time of the flood?" he said, putting down his gla.s.s. "I don't mean Noah's flood, James; you mightn't remember that; but the time the river came up in the town here."

"If it was Noah's flood itself," said James, instantly accepting combat, "it couldn't get into our cellars. But, faith, it was up in this room you're sitting in, and I had to get up on the table from it, and it ruz to the table, and I had to hang out of the chandelier, and a boat came into the room then and took me out. Sure that was the time that the porpoise came up the river, with the dint of the flood, and she was in it for a week, in front of the hotel."

"In compliment to the visitors, I suppose?" said the Doctor. "And what happened her, James?"

"She was in it till a whale came up the river," replied James, with the simplicity of Holy Writ, "and b'Jove he banished her!"

"It's a wonder you'd let him treat a lady that way, James," said Dr.

Hickey.

It was still twilight when we left the dining-room, and strayed to the open hall door, and out into the September evening. In the east a rose-pink moon was rising in lavender haze, and a faint wind blew from it; the subtle east wind of September, warmed by its journey across the cornfields, turf-scented by the bogs. There was a narrow garden between the hotel and the river, a place where were new and already-neglected flower-beds, and paths heavy with coa.r.s.e river gravel, and gra.s.s that had been cut, not too recently, with a scythe.

A thatched summer-house completed the spasmodic effort of the hotel to rise to smartness. The West of Ireland cannot be smart, nor should any right-minded person desire that it should be so.

Dr. Hickey and I sat and smoked on the parapet wall above the river, while the slated and whitewashed town darkened into mystery. Little lights came slowly out, and behind the town the grey shape of Dreelish mountain lowered in uncompromising abruptness, a brooding presence, felt rather than seen. In the summer-house James was lighting a Chinese lantern, of a somewhat crumpled and rheumatic outline.

"Well, now, that's a great notion!" said Dr. Hickey, with the lethargic and pessimistic humour of his type. "That'll be in the prospectus--'Hotel grounds illuminated every night.' I wonder did they buy that at the Jumble Sale after the Fancy Fair in the Town Hall?"

We sat there, and the moon and the round red Chinese lantern looked at each other across the evening, and had a certain resemblance, and I reflected on the fact that an Irishman is always the critic in the stalls, and is also, in spirit, behind the scenes.

"Look at James now," said the Doctor. "He's inviting the ladies out to have coffee in the summer-house. That's very fashionable. I suppose we should go there too."

We sat with Mrs. and Miss M'Evoy in the summer-house, and drank something that was unearthly black in the red light, and was singularly unsuggestive of coffee. The seats were what is known as "rustic," and had aggressive k.n.o.bs in unexpected places; the floor held the invincible dampness of the West, yet the situation was not disagreeable. At the other side of the river men were sitting on a wall, and talking, quietly, inexhaustibly; now and then a shout of laughter broke from one of them, like a flame from a smouldering fire.

"These lads are waiting to go back on the night mail," said the Doctor; "you wouldn't think they're up since maybe three this morning to come in to the fair."

Here a railway whistle made a thin bar of sound somewhere out under the low moon, that had now lifted herself clear of the haze. A voice called from the hill-side:

"Hora-thu! Tommeen! Let yee be coming on!"

The men tumbled on to the road, and hurried, heavy-footed, in the direction of the station.

"Sure, they've half an hour yet, the creatures," said Mrs. M'Evoy.

"They have, and maybe an hour before they have the pigs shunted," said James, re-entering with a plate of biscuits, adorned with pink and white sugar.

"Ah! what signifies half an hour here or there on this line!" said Dr.

Hickey. "I'm told there was a lady travelling on it last week, and she had a canary in a cage, and the canary got loose and flew out of the window, and by George, the lady pulled the communication cord, and stopped the train!"

"Well, now, she showed her sense," said Mrs. M'Evoy, with an utterance slightly m.u.f.fled in pink biscuit.

"She and the guard went then trying to catch the canary," continued Dr.

Hickey, "and he'd sit till they'd get near him, and then he'd fly on another piece. Everyone that was in the train was hanging out of it, and betting on it, from one carriage to another, and some would back the lady and some would back the bird, and everyone telling them what to do."

"It's a pity _you_ weren't in it," said Miss M'Evoy, "they'd have been all right then."

"It was that bare bit of bog near Bohirmeen," pursued Dr. Hickey, without a stagger, "not a tree in it. 'If he have a fly left in him at all,' says a chap out of a Third Smoker, 'ye'll get him in Mike Doogan's bush.' That was the only bush in the country."

"'Twas true for him," said James.