All on the Irish Shore Part 23

From the moment of leaving the railway station the fair was all pervading. It appeared that the whole district had turned horse dealer.

The cramped side pavements of the town failed to accommodate the ceaseless promenade of those whose sole business lay in criticising the companion promenade of horses in the narrow street. They haled horses before them with the aplomb of a colonel of cavalry buying remounts.

"Hi! bay horse! Pull in here! Foxy mare! Hi, boy, bring up that foxy mare!"

The ensuing comments, though mainly of a damaging nature, were understood on both sides to be no more than conventional dismissals. The bay horse and the foxy mare were re-absorbed in the stream; their critics directed their attentions elsewhere with unquenched a.s.siduity.

It is the truest, most changeless trait of Irish character, the desire to stand well with the horse, to be his confidant, his physician, his exponent. It is comparable to the inborn persuasion in the heart of every man that he is a judge of wine.

The procession of horses in the long, narrow street makes the brain swim. Hardly has the eye taken in the elderly and astute hunter with the fired hocks, whose forelegs look best in action, when it is dazzled by the career of a cart-horse, scourged to a mighty canter by a boy with a rope's end, or it is horrified by the hair-breadth escape of a group of hooded countrywomen from before the neighing charge of a two-year-old in a halter and string. Yet these things are the mere preliminary to the fair. At the end of the town a gap broken in a fence admits to a long field on a hillside. The entrance is perilous, and before it is achieved may involve more than one headlong flight to the safe summit of a friendly wall, as the young horses protest, and whirl, and buck with the usual fatuity of their kind. Once within the fair field there befal the enticements of the green apple, of the dark-complexioned sweetmeat temptingly denominated "Peggy's leg," of the "crackers"--that is, a confection resembling dog biscuit sown with caraway seeds--and, above all, of the "crubeens," which, being interpreted, means "pigs' feet,"

slightly salted, boiled, cold, wholly abominable. Here also is the three-card trick, demonstrated by a man with the incongruous accent of Whitechapel and a defiant eye, that even through the glaze of the second stage of drunkenness held the audience and yet was 'ware of the disposition of the nine of hearts. Here is the drinking booth, and here sundry itinerant vendors of old clothes, and--of all improbable commodities to be found at a horse-fair--wall-paper. Neither has much success. The old-clothes woman casts down a heap of singularly repellant rags before a disparaging customer; she beats them with her fists, presumably to show their soundness in wind and limb: a cloud of germ-laden dust arises.

"Arrah!" she says; "the divil himself wouldn't plaze ye in clothes."

The wall-paper man is not more fortunate. "Look at that for a nate patthern!" he says ecstatically, "that'd paper a bed! Come now, ma'am, wan an' thrippence!"

The would-be purchaser silently tests it with a wrinkled finger and thumb, and shakes her head.

"Well, I declare to ye now, that's a grand paper. If ye papered a room with that and put a hen in it she'd lay four eggs!" But not even the consideration of its value as an aesthetic stimulant can compa.s.s the sale of the one-and-threepenny wall-paper.

Down at this end of the fair field congregate the three-year-olds and two-year-olds; they pierce the air with their infant squeals and neighs, they stamp, and glare, and strike att.i.tudes with absurd statuesqueness, while their owners sit on a bank above them, playing them like fish on the end of a long rope, and fabling forth their perfections with tireless fancy. The perils of the way increase at every moment. In and out among the restless heels the onlooker must steer his course, up into the ampler s.p.a.ce on the hill-top, where the horses stand in more open order and a general view is possible.

Much may be learned at Bandon Fair of how the County Cork hunter is arrived at, of the Lord Hastings colt out of a high-bred Victor mare; of New Laund, of Speculation, of Whalebone, of the ancient and well-nigh mythical Druid, whose name adds a l.u.s.tre to any pedigree. These things are matters far more real and serious than English history to every man and boy in the fair field, whether he is concerned in practical horse-dealing or not. Even the mere visitor is fired with the acquisition of knowledge, and, in the intervals of saving his life, casts a withering eye on hocks and forelegs, and cultivates the gloomy silence that distinguishes the buyer.

It can hardly fail to attract the attention of the inquirer that, in the highest walks of horsiness, the desire to appear horsey has been left behind. These s.h.i.+ning ones have pa.s.sed beyond symbols of canes, of gaiters, of straws in the mouth; it is as though they craved that incognito which for them is for ever impossible. Bandon Fair was privileged to have drawn two such into its shouting vortex. One wears a simple suit of black serge, with trousers of a G.o.dly fulness; in it he might fitly hand round the plate in church. His manner is almost startlingly candid, his speech, what there is of it, is ungarnished with stable slang, his face might belong to an imperfectly shaved archbishop.

Yesterday he bought twenty young horses; next week he will buy forty more; next year he will place them in the English s.h.i.+res at prices never heard of in Bandon, and, be it added, they will as a rule be worth the money. Here is another noted judge of horseflesh, in knickerbocker breeches that seem to have been made at home for some one else, in leather gaiters of unostentatious roominess and rusticity. Though the August day is innocent of all suggestion of rain, he carries instead of a riding cane a matronly umbrella. When he rides a horse, and he rides several with a singularly intimate and finished method, he hands the umbrella to a reverential bystander; when the trial is over the umbrella is rea.s.sumed. If anything were needed to accent its artless domesticity, it would be the group of boys, horse copers in ambition, possibly in achievement, who sit in a row under a fence, with their teeth grimly clenched upon clay pipes, their eyes screwed up in perpetual and ungenial observation. Their conversation is telegraphic, smileless, esoteric, and punctuated with expectoration. If Phaeton and the horses of the sun were to take a turn round the fair field these critics would find little in them to commend. They are in the primary phase of a life-long art; perhaps with time and exceptional favours of fortune it may be given to them to learn the disarming mildness, the simplicity, that, like a water-lily, is the perfected outcome of the deep.

[Ill.u.s.tration: A HIERARCH OF HORSE-DEALING.]

Before two o'clock the magnates of the fair had left it, taking with them the cream of its contents, and in humbler people such a hunger began to a.s.sert itself as came near bringing even crubeens and Peggy's leg within the sphere of practical politics. While slowly struggling through the swarming street the perfume of mutton chops stole exquisitely forth from the door of one of the hotels, accompanied by the sound of a subdued fusillade of soda-water corks; over the heads of the filthy press of people round the entrance and the thirsty throng at the bar might be seen a procession of gaitered legs going upstairs to luncheon. It seemed an excellent idea. The air within was blue with tobacco smoke, flushed henchwomen staggered to and fro with arms spread wide across trays of whiskies and sodas, opening doors revealed rooms full of men, mutton chops and mastication. There was wildness in the eye of the attendant as she took the order for yet another luncheon. She fled, with the a.s.surance that it would be ready immediately, yet subsequent events suggested that even while she spoke the sheep that was to respond to that thirty-fifth order for mutton chops was browsing in the pastures of Bandon.

For eyes that had last looked on food at 7 A.M., neither the view of the street obtainable from the first floor parlour window, nor even the contemplation of the remarkable sacred pictures that adorned its walls, had the interest they might have held earlier in the day, and the dirty cruet-stand on the dirtier tablecloth was endued with an almost hypnotic fascination in its suggestion of coming sustenance. At the end of the first hour a stupor verging on indifference had set in; it was far on in the second when the dish of fried mutton chops, the hard potatoes, and the tepid whiskies and sodas were flung upon the board. No preliminary to a week's indigestion had been neglected, and a deserved success was the result.

The business of the fair was still transacted at large throughout the hotel. From behind the mound of mutton chops a buyer shoved a roll of dirty one-pound notes round the potato dish, and after due haggling received back one, according to the mystic Irish custom of "luck-penny".

On the sofa two farmers carried on a transaction in which the swap of a colt, boot money, and luck-penny were blended into one trackless maze of astuteness and arithmetic. On the wall above them a print in which Ananias and Sapphira were the central figures gave a simple and suitable finish to the scene.