On a Little Business of His Own

I

IT had rained steadily for three days. Such rain! Relentless, driving, endless rain! It struck savagely against windowpanes, flooding down over them in wavy opaque layers after each attack. It crept between door and threshold in persistent little rills. The sod was drenched with it. Every footstep in field or meadow gushed small fountains of it back to meet the gray veils falling still; every road was sodden, rivulets of mud and pebbles running steadily from crest to gutter. Incredible rain — impossible rain — endless, chill, gray rain.

Such weather might well be expected to sap the vitality and lower the spirits of any human, young or old, compelled to endure it. Yet, down the crookedy, bramble-lined, stony little boreen leading from Martin’s door to the main road, through the dusk that was only a deeper shadow of the dim day, came a group of five, both young and old among them, and they all singing cheerily out of tune a rollicking ballad about the ‘Shores of Amerikay.’

Johnny’s cheeks glowed like ripe fruit. His bright hair, wet with rain, was plastered sleekly across his forehead. The peak of his cap was worn to the rear; perhaps because it was really more important to keep the rain off his neck than off his ruddy young face, but much more probably because caps are meant to be worn the other way. Beside him, stepping with a beautiful springing buoyancy despite the muddy road and her heavy boots, walked Bridie, her warm brown eyes stealing admiring glances at his sturdy figure. Her dark hair curled cloudily from under the soft woolly shawl that, slipping back, only half covered her head. If Johnny swaggered a bit under that shy gaze, if he sang more lustily still, though as badly out of tune as ever, who is to blame him? Certainly not the Yank, plodding along in her ineffective American Tight boots,’ a little ahead of the youngsters with Martin. Not that the same Yank, clever as she was supposed to be, had eyes in the back of her head, any more than another! She had, however, a long memory, an understanding heart, and a sort of light for turning on very young people newly in love, which had tenderness in it, and wisdom of a sort, and amusement, and a bit — oh, a very small bit — of envy. It was by this light that she knew, though she herself walked ahead with Martin, that Bridie was casting sidelong bright glances from under the woolly gray shawl and cloudy hair at Johnny; and that Johnny, apparently not seeing the glances at all, nevertheless was swaggering and singing more loudly still whenever they rested on him.

Martin was always in the van. To be in the rear of any procession might be to admit that he was, after all, growing old — an aspersion that, had anyone been bold enough to make it, he would have resented with all his soul. Seventy is not old to one of Martin’s spirit. He still made fields with his knotted, bony brown hands, picking up, pebble by pebble, stone by stone, rock by rock, the craggy layer over a bit of land that at first glance might appear to be a quarry. He whitewashed walls, tied down thatch, twisted suggans, even gave Bridie a hand about the house, where she was now the only woman, and her that young and soft! So he strode in advance of her and Johnny, — or did they linger a bit behind him? — his thin frame wrapped in a flapping black coat, his dripping slouch hat pulled low over his sharp face, his cane twirled ostentatiously often in the air, as though to deny any other use for it, his stiff leg gallantly setting pace for the good one. Martin never admitted that stiffness, as he never admitted age. Martin, in fact, never admitted impediments of any kind. He swung along in step with the Yank on one side of him, and on the other with his big, quiet, sturdy son, young Mattie. The latter was as silent as his father was loquacious, a good boy, hard-working, gentle, obedient, a little in awe of this man who, having in his youth spent several years in America, was ‘smartened up a bit’ beyond the others in the village.

Turning from the boreen into the main road, the five changed their tune, or rather they changed words and rhythm, since the melody remained woefully the same. ‘The Boys from Ould Erin the Green’ they sang now, a truculent ballad with references in every verse to ‘The beef-eating bullies o’ England’ and boastful accounts of how the latter sped before the former. It might or might not fall upon hostile ears, their loud chorus, and these were times when men frequently went to jail for singing songs in Ireland that echoed in many streets in London and Manchester and Liverpool. Two of the minstrels at least — the Yank and Martin — sang it because they knew they could with impunity.

‘Mattie will leave us here,’ said Martin as they stopped a moment at the door of Kilcannon’s public house. ‘He has the bicycle left here these twro days past to a son of Kilcannon’s. He will be off on it now like a good lad, to his grandmother behind in Tormakeady, the ways he can give her a hand with the work when the weather breaks fine. She’s a grand old woman altogether to do as well as she does. But sure two hands cannot, do all. Ourselves will have another bit to walk, a few stoneens to climb over maybe, till we come at the place where the boat is hid. We have Lough Carra to cross yet, and’t is a bad night, surely, with a wind near as big as the one blew the tailor into Mayo long ’go. Ah, well, Johnny here has a stout pair of arms, God bless them, and myself has two at anny rate, such as they are.’

‘I sha n’t mind,’ said the Yank, stoutly. ‘I couldn’t well be wetter than I am even if I found myself in the lake instead of on it. And I guess I can walk anywhere you can, Martin. Only I don’t want to be disappointed. You promised me a dance with a green uniform, a real live Republican uniform that I have n’t caught so much as a glimpse of in all the weeks I’ve been here. I don’t care a whoop who’s inside it, nor how it dances, just so I feast my eyes on it and feel the sleeve under my hand.’

‘My blessing to you!’ cried Johnny. ‘Sure, if we had more like you —’

‘If we had, then,’ interrupted Martin sternly, ‘there would be never an end to this trouble, and this distraction, and this destroying of property. ’T is aisy for her, is miles across the water in the midst of peace and plenty, to be encouraging a bad business to go on forever over here!’

‘But you remember, Martin, you promised!’ protested the Yank.

‘I did,’ he answered, ‘and you will!

And are n’t you on your way this minute? Let you walk on ahead, Johnny. ’T is a divil of a black night. See can you make out the way for us. Do you, Bridie, keep in here to me, the ways I won’t lose you, and you all the daughter I have in the world. As we go along,’ he went on, turning to the Yank, ‘I will be telling you how myself and Pat Kennedy was for fixing the bridge. You will be putting it into a song for me, the ways I can be singing it and you far away in America.’

‘I will, Martin,’ the Yank promised cheerfully; and a little later, much less cheerfully, ‘I will, if I ever see America again!’ For Johnny led them across ditch and dike, through fields that were stony as the bottom of some longevaporated lake, — which, in all probability, they were, — up rocky bits of boreens that offered no secure foothold anywhere. The dark was impenetrable. The wind hurled itself against them no matter which way they bent their straining bodies. The rain beat on them. The lake, when at last they reached it, was a writhing black mass that stormed and dashed in fearful harmony with wind and rain.

‘Do we — do we row across this, Martin?’ asked the Yank.

‘We do, agra,’ he answered kindly, helping Johnny to pull out the boat and adjust its two pairs of oars. ‘We do, and trust in God to reach Gort Mor on the other side.’

‘Well,’ said the Yank, hesitatingly, ‘we might have come a better night, I suppose.'

‘You could not, then, m’am,’ Johnny said cheerfully. ‘Sure ’t is n’t every night the column is in it. T is the flying column, do you see. ’T is here to-day, there to-morrow, another place the next day — wherever the work is in it to do. It strikes and is gone — back into the woods — up into the hills — away, away, away! Sure, there is manny a one has a part to do in this work, but only an odd one wears a uniform. One of the lads of the column is stopping in to the dance to-night for a minute only. Some little business of his own. A message, maybe, for another to carry on. Dances is n’t all for pleasure these days. Often they do be a cover for other things, do you see?’

‘I don’t,’ said the Yank, honestly. ‘Not exactly. But then, I don’t need to, do I? Let’s go. Whether we ever reach Gort Mor or not, let’s start.’

II

The four settled themselves in the boat. Not a single far dim light broke the blackness of the night. They seemed, indeed, to be set in the very heart of darkness. The Yank shivered a bit in her corner. The young folk were silent. Only Martin spoke, raising his voice against the wind, going on cheerily with the story which the Yank was to set to verses that the hero might some day chant about himself.

‘As I was telling you,’ he began when the boat had shoved off, ‘I have no patience with these young ones that does be destroying what they never’ll be able to replace. Is n’t it their own country they are tearing into little pieces? And there was enough at that business already. Fair and aisy, fair and aisy does it, I say, and not think to make over the world in a day. Are you listening to me, Johnny?’

‘I am, sir,’ came a meek and respectful voice. ‘Sure, you don’t think ’t was me, sir, that blew up the Bridge of Keel?’

‘How do I know? How do I know, lad?’ said Martin testily. ‘Maybe you had n’t hand, act, nor part in it — and maybe you had. The right hand does n’t know these days what is the left one at. The bridge was blew up, at anny rate. That the world knows ‘T was as fine a bridge as could be found in the Four Fields of Ireland. ’T was blew up because there was a detachment of Black and Tans in the town above and manny a gathering of our own ones in Kilcannon’s here below, especially on the bitter nights. The harder it was for them in the town to reach Kilcannon’s, the easier it was for them in Kilcannon’s to be coming and going on their own business. But between the two, d’ye see, was plenty of another sort of people had business of their own, that had need of that bridge. There was sheep and cattle to be druv to the market, flour and tea to be fetched home, and how was it to be done, I ask you, without the Bridge of Keel?’

‘I don’t know, Martin,’ murmured the Yank; and then, betraying a mind wandering from the story, ‘Can you swim?’

‘Sorra swim, then,’ said the old man. ‘ Why would I ? Nor anny within in this boat, unless it would be yourself.’

‘I can,’ the Yank assured him. ‘But where would I swim to? We’d need that bridge here, Martin, I think.’

‘We would, faith,’ the old man agreed, pulling steadily on his oars while he talked. ‘And we needed it where it was, as well. Which was the why of it that the priest preached a roaring great sermon of a certain Sunday, winding up with an order for all the women to be off home about their own affairs, which too many of them had learned to neglect in these days, while the men was to wait in the chapel yard outside after Mass. Himself met them there and gev them a grand talk about the hardships was worked on poor people with their little business to tend to in the town above, and no way of getting to the same town. A thin bit of a board, just, that they could cross over, one foot forninst the other, and them not to have the sign of drink on them. “The bridge,” says his Reverence, “ must be fixed. Let ye all, now, that are brave good men will help in this work, stand to me right. But the cowards that will have no hand in repairing the ruin, let them stand to me left, over there agin the wall!’”

Martin paused to let this picture sink into the minds of his listeners. ‘ ’T would make you laugh,’ he went on at last, ‘to watch the shifty ones, turning, twisting, glancing from one neighbor’s face to another’s, leaning now towards the left and now towards the right, hesitating on the foot, till at last, and at long last, there was a good ninety per cent stood to the right. A scattering handful of bold young things was on the left.’

‘Where, Johnny, were you?’ queried the Yank.

‘Ah, well, now—’ the boy began.

‘Oh,’ breathed Bridie softly from the dark, ‘sure, Johnny doesn’t be mending bridges!’

‘And you, Martin?’ asked the Yank.

‘I was on the side of law and order and the Church!’ answered Martin sternly.

‘You were,’ murmured the Yank, ‘this time. I seem to remember—’

‘We must be advising the young to what we believe to be best,’ interposed Martin, hastily, ‘and us having patience learned, bitterly, from life. At anny rate, the priest scattered those on his left with a wave of his hand and a promise of Hell in short order. For the rest of us he set a day and an hour when we would meet with him at the ruin of the bridge to make all right again. What happens now, do you think? In the couple of days that passes, the word goes about from one to another, at the fireside, in the dance, over a glass in Kilcannon’s, that what little was left of the Bridge of Keel would be blew to meet the high heavens on the day, at the hour, when the valiant men of this parish was gathered there to do the work his Reverence had laid out for them.’

‘Good!’ exclaimed the Yank. ‘That’s where your hard-earned wisdom and patience, teaching you never to attempt the dangerous and impossible, came to the fore! Did n’t they?’

Johnny chuckled. ‘’T might be as well for me to finish the story, m’am,’ he said. ‘There was two men at the bridge at the time set. One was Martin, here, and the other was Pat Kennedy, that has five years in the age on this man — and two stiff legs!’

‘’T is true,’ Martin admitted. ‘Sure, if the bridge to-day is as it was that day, no better and no worse, ’t is no fault of ours. Will you put myself and Pat in a song?’

‘That I will,’ the Yank promised; ‘to-morrow, maybe. Is that a light?’ she asked, hopefully. ‘Did you really know where you were going, after all?’

‘I had a kind of a sort of a notion, m’am,’ answered Johnny. ‘I do come this way often!’

‘He does indeed,’ Bridie put in eagerly. ‘ On the bitter nights, cold and black, when some of the lads on the run is behind in Kilcannon’s, getting a taste of the fire, and a hot sup for their poor empty stomachs, the word does come sometimes that the soldiers have wind of it and are on the way. If the boat is over here on the Gort Mor side, the lads have only to wave a small bit of a light up and down. The boat goes back and over, back and over, until it has them all landed safe on this side. The lorries has seven miles to go around to come at this place, should they ’spect it. Once they did come and found nothing, because by the time they got here, over broken and blocked roads, the boat had the lads all left back again in Kilcannon’s. The boat,’ she finished with great satisfaction, ‘the boat is a thing they know nothing about yet, nor could use it if they did. ’T is n’t everyone can cross Lough Carra in the dark of night.’

‘It is not, then,’ the Yank agreed heartily, as she stepped out of the boat, ankle deep in cold water, and stumbled up the path to the welcome light.

III

The light was in Aunt Mary’s kitchen, where a group of pleasant young people greeted the newcomers, drawing the Yank up at once to the fire and divesting her of her wet shoes. Aunt Mary was Martin’s sister, and aunt to the countryside. She condemned all rash young rapscallions of rebels as heartily as he — and kept the kettle boiling to make tea for any of them that might happen her way, cold and hungry. She seldom went to bed. All through the night she sat nodding on her three-legged stool, her ample body sunk down on itself like a sack, her gray head hanging over her comfortable shoulder. Now and then she roused to put another sod on the fire, to refill the kettle, to mix a small cake. Sometimes she sallied out to the yard, or the barn, or a corner of the field in the dark, looking for the rebels whom she so fiercely berated, lest there should be a stranger among them who did not know that her house was open to him. Having found and fed him, scolded him soundly, pointed out the folly of his ways, she generally sent him to sleep in her own bed, watching beside him that she might have him safely away before the dawn.

Aunt Mary’s house, in this wild, remote spot on the shores of Lough Carra, was one of the few, in these bad times, where there might still be music, light, dancing, a little gay young fun. The Yank enjoyed it all hugely — nor was it as a spectator. Her feet and her heart were as light as any there. She danced as often, with the same primitive vigor, the same cheerful disregard for ‘making the steps’ properly and ‘timing the music’ that the young people had and that the older ones, far better trained in the art, shook disapproving heads over. Something in her that never grew old, nor wise, felt entirely happy — the long muddy miles on foot, the drenching rain, the wild wind, the threatening lake, all fully compensated for — when a shy, awkward, beautiful boy, whose eyes were like hazel buds, and whose dark hair looked as though a brush dipped in gold had passed lightly over its crisp curls, approached her with a muttered, ‘Will ye dance, miss?’ His green uniform was neither trim nor spotless. It had been slept in, on lonely Irish hillsides, in wet Irish bogs. It was sadly rumpled, badly fitting, wet with rain, spotted with mud from weary miles traveled in it. But. in the eyes of the Yank it was beautiful — and so was the clear-eved, sturdy youngster encased in it!

Only one thing marred the dance — indeed, brought it to an early close. Johnny, having danced a dozen ‘sets’ with a gay disregard for wet clothes and boots from which the water oozed at every step, was absent from the kitchen for a long time on — as he himself would have said — some little business of his own. Returning, he held at the door with Martin a whispered consultation which Bridie quickly joined when she saw her father’s face grow grave. It was nothing, they assured her. Mattie had had a bit of an accident. Not anything serious. The brake on the bicycle had failed to hold and he going down a slippery bit of a hill, not a quarter of a mile from his grandmother’s, behind in Tormakeady. The boy had been dashed against a stone wall at the bottom. His face was bruised, and both wrists had doubled under him. They were not broken, the doctor had said, but badly wrenched.

‘We’ll stay the night here, as we planned,’ said Martin. ‘And come the morrow’s morning I’ll have a look at the lad myself.’

‘How’d you find out already?’ demanded the Yank, who was constantly amazed at the speed and accuracy with which news traveled in this phoneless section of the country. ‘How did you hear it, when Mattie is miles away on the other side of that lake?’

Johnny grinned engagingly, shoving his cap around until the peak rested over his ear. ‘Myself isn’t partial to anny one side o’ this lake,’he said, mildly. ‘And faith, I’m seldom the side you’d think I was on at all, at all!’

IV

The morning was a jewel, a sparkling, clear-cut, brilliant blue jewel. The whole world fairly gleamed with light. The lake was a placid sapphire pool — a little lake, after all. It seemed to the Yank, as Johnny and Martin sped t the boat swiftly over its bosom, that only some sweet magic could have changed the hungry black monster of the night before into this smiling bit of limpid water.

‘The lake is n’t very deep, is it?’ she asked after a bit ,

‘ ’T is,’ answered Martin,* and’t is n’t. I could show you places you could wade across, the ways I often did myself, the shoes hung around my neck, the trousers rolled to my knees. And I could show you other places again is fathoms deep.’

Aunt Mary, sitting in fearful rigidity in the how’ of the boat, crossed herself. She hated the lake, dreading it with a fear entirely without reason. She seldom crossed it, preferring the long, tedious way around by road. Only her haste to see Mattie, making sure for herself that ‘th’ould woman’ knew what to do for him, had enticed her into the boat to-day.

Johnny, delighting in her fear, played on it without remorse, drawing word pictures of the dangers to be encountered in crossing this particular lake, ‘the most misfortunate lake, m’am, in the whole Four Fields of Ireland, m’am, and the deepest. Oh, sorra doubt about that. The deepest, at all events!’

‘I suppose,’ said the Yank, remembering tales of other Irish lakes, ‘this one, too, has no bottom?’

The feather on Aunt Mary’s bit of a black bonnet quivered. Drawing her shawl closer about her pleasant bulk, Aunt Mary herself quivered as much as she dared.

‘Oh, it has, agra,’ she said in answer to the Yank’s question. ‘It has, asthore, but ’t is water!'

What a shout of laughter that brought from Johnny, as he pulled the boat up on the rocky beach. Dear Johnny, how many times he laughed again between there and Kilcannon’s, where his young laughter was hushed, and all their laughter, and t heir pleasant, easy talk. For at Kilcannon’s there was news, the kind of news that passed in quick short words, with hasty glances, with a subdued excitement that, if you were young, covered exultation, and, if you were old, masked fear and despair. An ambush — not more than an hour ago — in clear daylight — two lorry loads of Black and Tans, and not four out of the lot escaped!

‘The Tans is behind in McFee’s hotel, at the crossroads,’ said Kilcannon. ‘The doctor is in it, and the divil’s own confusion. The lads is gone, scattered back into the hills, and not a sign left behind them.’

A sudden look of terror passed over Martin’s face. ‘McFee’s!’ he gasped. ‘Is it McFee’s you said? Sure ’twas not behind in Tormakeady the ambush was ? ’

‘’Twas, to be sure. And why not? What’son you, man?’asked Kilcannon.

‘Mattie!’ cried Martin, scarcely able to form the word.

‘Arrah, Mattie wasn’t in it, man,’said Kilcannon, shaking Martin’s arm. ‘Yourself had the word he was hurt a bit on the wheel not half hour after he left you.’

‘And yourself knows they do search every house and barn — yes, and sty — for miles around after one of these things. And what do they do to the one they find wounded? What will happen to a broken bit of a boy if they come on him, and they mad with anger? I must go!’ he cried, shaking off Kilcannon’s detaining hand. ‘Get me a mare and saddle at once! Johnny! Where is the boy?’

It was only then that the agitated little group discovered that Johnny was gone, off again on some mysterious errand of his own.

‘The lad’s gone. I’ll get the mare. What can you do?’ said Kilcannon, all in one breath.

‘A bit of writing from the doctor,’ Martin answered shortly, ‘with his own name signed to it. Sure, they never’d believe the boy’s story without. They would n’t give him time to tell it, itself. Oro, oro, they’ll shoot him like a dog if they come on him. Or worse — or worse,’ he said, beating his gnarled old hands together. ‘For the love of God, let me out of here.’

‘Let me go, Dada,’ Bridie implored, clinging to him, her warm brown eyes wide with fear.

‘Have sense, agra,’ her father said, putting her gently aside. ‘ Have sense, acushla. Is n’t it enough, one of you to be in danger, and not to lose the other maybe? What matter about me? I’ll get the bit of writing from the doctor, never fear. When all is right I ’ll come back here. In the meantime let ye keep each other company till I return. Kilcannon! Give them a drop of hot punch will put heart, in them!’

When he had gone, for hours afterward, the three women huddled together at the fireplace in the deserted public house. No one passed on the road. There was a strange absence of the usual comforting human noises. Aunt Mary rocked back and forth on her chair, her beads slipping ceaselessly through her fingers. As endlessly one old hand tapped, tapped against her withered lips, as though to still their trembling. Bridie walked often to the door, looking up and down the road that lay so strangely still in the brilliant sunshine. The Yank worried silently with both of them.

It was dusk when old Martin stood again in the door. His shoulders drooped wearily. His stiff leg dragged frankly as he crossed the floor.

‘Dada!’ cried Bridie, alarmed. ‘Sure, you did n’t fail? You got the bit of writing?’

‘I did, to be sure, alannah,’ he answered, as he slumped down in the chair the Yank drew forward. ‘I did of course, my girl, gra. Come here to me, Bridie.’

She came quickly, standing beside him, looking down into his eyes, which were raised sorrow fully to hers.

‘What’s on you, Dada?’ she asked wonderingly. ‘Are n’t you after saying that our Mattie — ’

‘And so he is, little love. Our Mattie is safe,’ said her father tenderly. ‘I fought my way a-through them — an awful way through dead and dying, and them that was mad with rage. Them was the worst altogether! But I got the bit of paper in spite of all. ’T was through the kitchen I wrcnt out, when I was for going to the old woman’s to wn.it till someone Avould come searching. Bridie,’ he went on, hesitating curiously, ‘ Bridie, my girleen, Johnny was in the kitchen.’

‘Johnny?’ queried the girl, drawing her thick soft brows together in a puzzled frown. ‘Is it our Johnny? Our own Johnny from the village?’

‘ ’T is,’ replied her father, drawing her to his knee and tightening his arm around her. ‘Ye see,’ he went on with difficulty, looking from one to the other of the questioning faces turned to him, ‘ye see, when Johnny left us’t was on some business known to himself, a little errand of his own, a — a message, like. And — and — they caught him, crossing a field. He tore the paper up, but what good was that? And they had him left there in the kitchen till they’d have time to deal with him. “I think,” says he to me, “I’ll have a dash for it.” “You Avon’t, avic,” says I. “In the name of God, don’t! You Avould n’t make the second step from the door till they had you, and what was your chances then?” “Arrah, man dear,” says the lad, “what are they annyway, but to be stood up before a wall and shot full of holes? And if that was all? But Avho knoAvs what before that?” Not all I could say would stop the boy,’ the old man faltered on, a SIOAV, difficult tear forcing itself from under his reddened, wrinkled eyelid and down his seamed cheek. ‘Ah, well! Ah, well! God is good! Nothing happens but by His will. He put his cap on, the gallant lad, in the way he always wore it, with the peak around to the back, squared his shoulders, and off with him down the path to the gate. He was lying just outside that little gate when I saw him last, his face pressed into the earth of his own land, his young body riddled with the stranger’s bullets.’

‘Oh,’ said the Yank a little later, softly, ‘let us not cry any more for Johnny. Somehow I think his gallant, gay young soul is away—aw’ay on some fine thrilling business of its own!’