Waysiders Part 10

Mrs. Ford: Very well. Gather up all the people now, son. Let them come in about this place for many of them have a memory of it. Let me hear the welcome of their voices. They will have good words to say, speaking on the greatness of Donagh Ford who is dead.

Donagh: They are coming out from the fields with Hugh, mother. I see the young fellows falling into line. They are wearing their caps and sashes and they have the band. I can see them carrying the banner to the front of the crowd. Here they are marching up the road. (_The strains of a fife and drum band playing a spirited march are heard in the distance.

Mrs. Ford rises slowly, "humouring" the march with her stick, her face expressing her delight. The band stops._)

Mrs. Ford: That's the spirit of Carrabane. Let the people now look upon me in this place and let them take pride in my son.

Donagh: I see Stephen Mac Donagh.

Mrs. Ford: Let him be the first across the threshold, for he went to jail with Donagh Ford. Have beside him Murt c.o.o.ney that lost his sight at the struggle of Ballyadams. Let him lift up his poor blind face till I see the rapture of it.

Donagh: Murt c.o.o.ney is coming, and Francis Kilroy and Brian Mulkearn.

Mrs. Ford: It was they who put a seal of silence on their lips and bore their punishment to save a friend of the people. Have a place beside me for the widow of Con Rafferty who hid the smoking revolver the day the tyrant fell at the cross of Killbrack.

Donagh: All the old neighbours are coming surely.

Mrs. Ford (_crossing slowly to door, Agnes going before her_): Let me look into their eyes for the things I will see stirring there. I will reach them out the friends.h.i.+p of my hands and speak to them the words that lie upon my heart. The rafters of this house will ring again with the voices that Donagh Ford welcomed and that I loved. Aye, the very fire on the hearth will leap in memory of the hands that tended it.

Donagh: This will be such a day as will be made a boast of for ever in Carrabane. (_Agnes goes out door to meet the people._)

Mrs. Ford: Let there be music and the sound of rejoicing and shouts from the hills. Let those who put their feet in anger upon us and who are themselves reduced to-day look back upon the strength they held and the power they lost.

Donagh: I will bid the music play up. (_He goes out._)

Mrs. Ford (_standing alone at the door_): People of Carrabane, gather about the old house of Donagh Ford. Let the fight for the land in this place end where it began. Let the courage and the strength that Donagh Ford knew be in your blood from this day out. Let the spirit be good and the hand be strong for the work that the heart directs. Raise up your voices with my voice this day and let us make a great praise on the name of Ireland. (_She raises her stick, straightening her old figure.

The band strikes up and the people cheer outside as the curtain falls._)

A WAYSIDE BURIAL

The parish priest was in a very great hurry and yet anxious for a talk on his pet subject. He wanted to speak about the new temperance hall.

Would I mind walking a little way with him while he did so? He had a great many things to attend to that day.... We made our way along the street together, left the town behind us, and presently reached that sinister appendage of all Irish country towns, the workhouse. The priest turned in the wide gate, and the porter, old, official, spectacled, came to meet him.

"Has the funeral gone?" asked the priest, a little breathless.

"I'll see, Father." The porter shuffled over the flags, a great door swung open; there was a vista of whitewashed walls, a chilly, vacant corridor, and beyond it a hall where old men were seated on forms at a long, white deal table. They were eating--a silent, grey, bent, beaten group. Through a gla.s.s part.i.tion we could see the porter in his office turning over the leaves of a great register.

"I find," he said, coming out again, speaking as if he were giving evidence at a sworn inquiry, "that the remains of Martin Quirke, deceased, were removed at 4.15."

"I am more than half an hour late," said the priest, regarding his watch with some irritation.

We hurried out and along the road to the country, the priest trailing his umbrella behind him, speaking of the temperance hall but preoccupied about the funeral he had missed, my eyes marking the flight of flocks of starlings making westward.

Less than a mile of ground brought us to the spot where the paupers were buried. It lay behind a high wall, a narrow strip of ground, cut off from a great lord's demesne by a wood. The scent of decay was heavy in the place; it felt as if the spring and the summer had dragged their steps here, to lie down and die with the paupers. The uncut gra.s.s lay rank and grey and long--Nature's unkempt beard--on the earth. The great bare chestnuts and oaks threw narrow shadows over the irregular mounds of earth. Small, rude wooden crosses stood at the heads of some of the mounds, lopsided, drunken, weather-beaten. No names were inscribed upon them. All the bones laid down here were anonymous. A robin was singing at the edge of the wood; overhead the rapid wings of wild pigeons beat the air.

A stable bell rang impetuously in the distance, dismissing the workmen on the lord's demesne. By a freshly-made grave two gravediggers were leaning on their spades. They were paupers, too; men who got some privilege for their efforts in this dark strip of earth between the wood and the wall. One of them yawned. A third man stood aloof, a minor official from the workhouse; he took a pipe from his mouth as the priest approached.

The three men gave one the feeling that they were rather tired of waiting, impatient to have their little business through. It was a weird spot in the gathering gloom of a November evening. The only bright thing in the place, the only gay spot, the only cheerful patch of colour, almost exulting in its grim surroundings, was the heap of freshly thrown up soil from the grave. It was rich in colour as newly-coined gold. Resting upon it was a clean, white, unpainted coffin.

The only ornament was a tin breastplate on the lid and the inscription in black letters:

Martin Quirke, Died November 3, 1900.

R.I.P.

The white coffin on the pile of golden earth was like the altar of some pagan G.o.d. I stood apart as the priest, vesting himself in a black stole, approached the graveside and began the recital of the burial service in Latin. The gravediggers, whose own bones would one day be interred anonymously in the same ground, stood on either side of him with their spades, two grim acolytes. The minor official from the workhouse, the symbol of the State, bared a long, narrow head, as white and as smooth as the coffin on the heap of earth. I stood by a groggy wooden cross, the eternal observer.

The priest spoke in a low monotone, holding the book close to his eyes in the uncertain light. And as he read I fell to wondering who our brother in the white coffin might be. Some merry tramp who knew the pain and the joy of the road? Some detached soul who had shaken off the burden of life's conventions, one who loved lightly and took punishment casually? One who saw crime as a science, or merely a broken reed? Or a soldier who had carried a knapsack in foreign campaigns? A creature of empire who had found himself in Africa, or Egypt, or India, or the Crimea, and come back again to claim his pile of golden earth in the corner of the lord's demesne? If the men had time, perhaps they would stick a little wooden cross over the spot where his bones were laid down....

The priest's voice continued the recitation of the burial service and the robin sang at the edge of the dim wood. Down the narrow strip of rank burial ground a low wind cried, and the light, losing its glow in the western sky, threw a grey pall on the gra.s.s. And under the influence of the moment a little memory of people I had known and forgotten went across my mind, a memory that seemed to stir in the low wind, a memory of people who had at the last got their white, clean coffin and their rest on a pile of golden earth, people who had gone like our brother in the deal boards.... There was the man, the scholar, who had taught his school, who had an intelligence, who could talk, who, perhaps, could have written only--. The wind sobbed down the narrow strip of ground....

He had made his battle, indeed, a long-drawn-out battle, for he had only given way step by step, gradually but inexorably yielding ground to the thing that was hunting him out of civilised life. He had gone from his school, his home, his friends, fleeing from one miserable refuge to another in the miserable country town. Eventually he had pa.s.sed in through the gates of the workhouse. It was all very vivid now--his attempts to get back to the life he had known, like a man struggling in the quicksands. There were the little spurts back to the town, the well-shaped head, the face which still held some remembrance of its distinction and its manhood erect over the quaking, broken frame; that splendid head like a n.o.ble piece of sculpture on the summit of a crumbling ruin. Forth he would come, the flicker of resistance, a pallid battle-light in the eyes, a vessel that had been all but wrecked once more standing up the harbour to meet the winds that had driven it from the seas--and after a little battle once more taking in the sheets and crawling back to the anchorage of the dark workhouse, there to suffer in the old way, in secret to curse, to pray, to despair, to hope, to contrive some little repairs to the broken physique in order that there might be yet another journey into waters that were getting more and more shadowy. And the day came when the only journey that could be made was a shuffle to the gate, the haunted eyes staring into a world which was a nightmare of regrets. How terrible was the pathos of that life, that struggle, that tragedy, how poignant its memory while the robin sang at the edge of the dim wood!... And there was that red-haired, defiant young man with the build of an athlete, the eyes of an animal. How bravely he could sing up the same road to the dark house! It was to him as the burrow is to the rabbit. He would come out to nibble at the regular and lawful intervals, and having nibbled return to sleep and shout and fight for his "rights" in the dark house. And once, on a spring day, he had come out with a companion, a pale woman in a thin shawl and a drab skirt, and they had taken to the roads together, himself swinging his ashplant, his stride and manner carrying the illusion of purpose, his eyes on everything and his mind nowhere; herself trotting over the broken stones in her canvas shoes beside him, a pale shadow under the fire of his red head. They had gone away into a road whose milestones were dark houses, himself singing the song of his own life, a song of mumbled words, without air or music; herself silent, clutching her thin shawl over her breast, her feet pattering over the little stones of the road.... The wind whistled down over the graves, by the wooden crosses.... There was that little woman who at the close of the day, when the light was charitable in its obscurity, opened her door and came down from the threshold of her house, painfully as if she were descending from a great height. n.o.body was about. All was quietness in the quiet street. And she drew the door to, put the key in the lock, her hand trembled, the lock clicked! The deed was done! Who but herself could know that the click of the key in the lock was the end, the close, the dreadful culmination of the best part of a whole century of struggle, of life? Behind that door she had swept up a bundle of memories that were now all an agony because the key had clicked in the lock. Behind the door was the story of her life and the lives of her children and her children's children. Where was the use, she might have asked, of blaming any of them now? What was it that they had all gone, all scattered, leaving her broken there at the last? Had not the key clicked in the lock? In that click was the end of it all; in the empty house were the ghosts of her girlhood, her womanhood, her motherhood, her old age, her struggles, her successes, her skill in running her little shop, her courage in riding one family squall after another! The key had clicked in the lock. She moved down the quiet street, sensitive lest the eye of the neighbours should see her, a tottering, broken thing going by the vague walls, keeping to the back streets, setting out for the dark house beyond the town. She had said to them, "I will be no trouble to you." And, indeed, she was not. They had little more to do for her than join her hands over her breast.... The wind was plaintive in the gaunt trees of the dark wood.... Which of us could say he would never turn a key in the lock of an empty house? How many casual little twists of the wrist of Fate stand between the best of us and the step down from the threshold of a broken home? What rags of memories have any of us to bundle behind the door of the empty house when the hour comes for us to click the key in the lock?... The wind cried down the narrow strip of ground where the smell of decay was in the gra.s.s.

There was a movement beside the white coffin, the men were lifting it off the golden pile of earth and lowering it into the dark pit. The men's feet slipped and shuffled for a foothold in the yielding clay. At last a low, dull thud sounded up from the mouth of the pit. Our brother in the white coffin had at last found a lasting tenure in the soil.

The official from the dark house moved over to me. He spoke in whispers, holding the hat an official inch of respect for the dead above the narrow white shred of his skull.

"Martin Quirke they are burying," he said.

"Who was he?"

"Didn't you ever hear tell of Martin Quirke?"

"No, never."

"A big man he was one time, with his acres around him and his splendid place. Very proud people they were--he and his brother--and very hot, too. The Quirkes of Ballinadee."

"And now--"

I did not finish the sentence. The priest was spraying the coffin in the grave with the golden earth.

"Ashes to ashes and dust to dust." It fell briskly on the shallow deal timber.

"'Twas the land agitation, the fight for the land, that brought Martin Quirke down," said the official as the earth sprayed the pauper's coffin. "He was one of the first to go out under the Plan of Campaign--the time of the evictions. They never got back their place.

When the settlement came the Quirkes were broken. Martin lost his spirit and his heart. Drink it was that got him in the end, and now--"

"Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine: et lux perpetua luceat eis," the priest's voice said.

"All the same," said the official, "It was men like Martin Quirke who broke the back of landlordism. He was strong and he was weak. G.o.d rest him!"

I walked away over the uneven ground, the memory of the land agitation, its bitterness and its pa.s.sion, oppressing me. Stories of things such as this stalked the country like ghosts.

The priest overtook me, and we turned to leave. Down the narrow strip of the lord's demesne were the little pauper mounds, like narrow boxes wrapped in the long grey gra.s.s. Their pathos was almost vibrant in the dim November light. And away beyond them were a series of great heaps, looking like broad billows out to sea. The priest stood for a moment.

"You see the great mounds at the end?" he asked. "They are the Famine Pits."

"The Famine Pits?"