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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Wind Bloweth, by Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne,
+Illustrated by George Bellows
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: The Wind Bloweth
+
+
+Author: Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
+
+
+
+Release Date: July 5, 2007  [eBook #21999]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WIND BLOWETH***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Suzanne Lybarger, Brian Janes, Janet Blenkinship, and
+the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team
+(https://www.pgdp.net)
+
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+
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+
+
+
+
+
+THE WIND BLOWETH
+
+by
+
+DONN BYRNE
+
+Author of "Messer Marco Polo," etc.
+
+Illustrated by George Bellows
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+New York
+The Century Co.
+Copyright, 1922, by
+The Century Co.
+Printed in U. S. A.
+
+
+
+
+A DEDICATION: A PRAYER
+
+
+Whilst I was working on the various problems of "The Wind
+Bloweth"--problems of wisdom, of color, of phrasing, and trying to
+capture the elusive, unbearable ache that is the mainspring of humanity,
+and doing this through the medium of a race I knew best, a race that
+affirms the divinity of Jesus and yet believes in the little people of
+the hills, a race that loves its own land, and yet will wander the wide
+world over, a race that loves battle, and yet always falls--whilst doing
+this, it seemed to me that I was capturing for an instant a beauty that
+was dying slowly, imperceptibly, but would soon be gone.
+
+Perhaps it was the lilt of a Gaelic song in these pages that brought a
+sorrow on me. That very sweet language will be gone soon, if not gone
+already, and no book learning will revive the suppleness of idiom, that
+haunting misty loveliness.... It is a very pathetic thing to see a
+literature and a romance die.
+
+But then, what ever dies? There is only change. For people in the coming
+times the economist and the expert in politics may have the beauty and
+wisdom old men have known in poems and strange tales. A mammoth building
+is as romantic to a new age as were the subtle carvings of Phidias to
+Greeks of old. For the master of commerce an oil-driven steel ship has
+the beauty old folk have seen in cloudy pyramids of sail. What we have
+considered beautiful will be quaint. And their tolerant smile will hurt
+us under the wind-swept grass.
+
+To whomever this writing of mine may give a moment's thought, a moment's
+dreaming, I would ask a privilege, to call out of the romantic sunset
+the memories of Irish writers whom it is deep in my heart to praise, not
+masters of verse, but those whom in English we call novelists, being too
+exact in matters of language to name them poets: the Four Masters of
+Donegal who dedicated their tradition _do chum gloire De agus onora na h
+Eireann_,--to the glory of God and the honor of Ireland,--so high their
+motive was. And Thomas Moore, not as author of Irish ballads or of
+"Lalla Rookh," but as writer of "The Epicurean." And Lever and Lover.
+And William Carleton from the County of Tyrone. And gentle Gerald
+Griffin, dead at his desk. And Michael and John Banim, with their
+"O'Hara Tales." And Sheridan Le Fanu, and Fitz-James O'Brien, who fell
+fighting for America. And Charles Kickham, who wrote "Knocknagow." And I
+was all but forgetting Oliver Goldsmith, Dr. Johnson's friend.
+
+Old fathers, old masters, I will never believe but that you wrote
+because it sprang from you as the lark sings in the high air. No little
+sum of money, no great man's patronage, no doffed caps of the populace,
+could have moved you to strike out or write in one line. Old fathers,
+let me say aloud your names; it will give me bravery. And, sirs, take
+this book kindly to you. It is written caring nothing for money, nothing
+for light acclaim. Its faults are because I cannot write better yet....
+
+DONN BYRNE
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+  PART                                              PAGE
+
+  I   DANCING TOWN                                    3
+
+  II  THE WAKE AT ARDEE                              57
+
+  III THE MOUTH OF HONEY                            109
+
+  IV  THE WRESTLER FROM ALEPPO                      169
+
+  V   THE VALLEY OF THE BLACK PIG                   229
+
+  VI  THE BOLD FENIAN MEN                           287
+
+  VII THE KINGDOM AND THE POWER AND THE GLORY       353
+
+
+
+
+PART ONE
+
+DANCING TOWN
+
+
+Section 1
+
+Because it was his fourteenth birthday they had allowed him a day off
+from school, his mother doubtfully, his uncles Alan and Robin with their
+understanding grin. And because there was none else for him to play with
+at hurling or foot-ball, the other children now droning in class over
+Caesar's Gallic War, he had gone up the big glen. It was a very
+adventurous thing to go up the glen while other boys were droning their
+Latin like a bagpipe being inflated, while the red-bearded schoolmaster
+drowsed like a dog. First you went down the graveled path, past the
+greened sun-dial, then through the gate, then a half-mile or so along
+the road, green along the edges with the green of spring, and lined with
+the May hawthorn, white, clean as air, with a fragrance like sustained
+music, a long rill of rolling white cloud. There was nothing in the
+world like the hawthorn. First it put out little bluish-green buds firm
+as elastic, and then came a myriad of white stars. And then the white
+drift turned a delicate red, dropped, and the scarlet haws came out, a
+tasteless bread-like fruit you shared with the birds, and the stone of
+it you could whip through your lips like a bullet....
+
+He left the main road and turned into a loaning that came down the
+mountain-side, a thing that once might have been a road, if there had
+been any need for it, or energy to make it. But now it was only a wedge
+of common land bounded on both sides by a low stone wall. Inside one
+wall was a path, and inside the other a little rill, and betwixt the two
+of them were firm moss and stones. And here the moss was yellowish-green
+and there red as blood. And the rill was edged with ferns and queer blue
+flowers whose names he did not know in English, and now the water just
+gurgled over the rounded stones, and now it dropped into a well where it
+was colorless and cold and fresh as the air itself, and oftentimes at
+the bottom of a pool like that would be a great green frog with eyes
+that popped like the schoolmaster's....
+
+And to the left of the loaning as he walked toward the mountain was a
+plantation of fir-trees, twenty acres or more, the property of the third
+cousin of his mother's brother-in-law, a melancholy, thin-handed man
+who lived on the Mediterranean--a Campbell, too, though one would never
+take him for an Ulster Scot, with his la-di-da ways and his Spanish
+lady. But the queer thing about the plantation was this, that within,
+half a mile through the trees, were the ruins of a house, bare walls and
+bracken and a wee place where there were five graves, two of them
+children's. A strange thing the lonely graves. In summer the sun would
+shine through the clearing of the trees, and there was always a bird
+singing somewhere near. But it was a gey lonely place for five folk to
+lie there, at all times and seasons, and in the moonlight and in the
+sunlight, and when the rain dripped from the fir-trees. And all the
+company they had was the red fox slipping through the trees or the
+rabbit hopping like a child at play or the hare-wide-eyed in the
+bracken. They must have been an unsociable folk in life to build a house
+in the woods, and they were an unsociable folk in death not to go to the
+common graveyard, where the dead folk were together, warm and kindly
+lying gently as in their beds....
+
+He turned now from the loaning to the mountain-side, passing through the
+heather on a little path the sheep made with their sharp cloven hoofs.
+In single file the sheep would go up the mountain-side, obedient as
+nuns, following the tinkle of the wether's bell, and they hunting a new
+pasture they would crop like rabbits. Now was a stunted ash, now a
+rowan-tree with its red berries--_crann caorthainn_ they call it in
+Gaidhlig,--and now was a holly bush would have red berries when all the
+bitter fruit of the rowan-tree was gone and the rolling sleets of winter
+came over Antrim like a shroud. Everywhere about him now was the
+heather, the brown, the purple heather with the perfect little flower
+that people called bells, all shades of red it was, and not often you
+would come across a sprig of white heather, and white heather brought
+you luck, just as much luck as a four-leaved shamrock brought, and
+fairer, more gallant luck.
+
+A very silent place a mountain was, wee Shane Campbell thought, not a
+lonely but a silent place. A lonely place was a place you might be
+afraid, as in a wood, but a mountain was only a place apart. Down in the
+fields were the big brooks, with the willow branches and great trout in
+the streams; and fat cattle would low with a foolish cry like a man
+wouldn't be all there, and come home in the evenings to be milked,
+satisfied and comfortable as a minister; wee calves shy as babies;
+donkeys with the cross of Christ on their back; goats would butt you
+and you not looking; hens a-cackle, and cocks strutting like a
+militiaman and him back from the camp; quiet horses had the strength of
+twenty men, and scampering colts had legs on them like withes. Up here
+was nothing, but you never missed them.
+
+The only thing to break the silence up here was the cry of an occasional
+bird, the plaintive call of the plover, the barking of an eagle, the
+note of the curlew, a whinny as of a horse of Lilliput, the strange
+noise a pheasant makes and it rising from the heather: _whir-r-r_, like
+a piece of elastic snapping. Barring these you'd hear nothing at all.
+And barring a mountainy man or woman, and they cutting turf, you'd meet
+nothing unless it were the sheep.
+
+You'd never hear the sheep, and you coming; you'd turn a wee bluff in
+the hill, and there they were looking, a long, solemn, grayish-white
+line, with aloof, cold eyes. You could never faze them. They'd look at
+you cool as anything, and "What license have you to be here?" you'd
+think they were saying. Very stupid, but unco dignified, the sheep.
+
+But up to the top of the mountain, where wee Shane was going, you'd find
+no sheep; too bare and rocky there. There'd be nothing there but a
+passing bird. On the top of the mountain was a little dark lake into
+which you couldn't see more than a foot, though they said the depth of
+it went down to the sea. There were no fish in it, people said, and that
+was a queer thing, water without fish in it, wee Shane thought, like a
+country without inhabitants. In the sea were a power of fish, and in the
+rivers were salmon, long and thick as a man, and pike with snouts and
+ominous teeth, and furry otters, about which there was great discussion
+as to whether they were fish or animal ... In the lake in the
+lowlands--Lochkewn, the Quiet Lake--were trout with red and gold and
+black speckles; and perch with spiked fins; and dark roach were easy to
+catch with a worm; and big gray bream were tasty as to bait, needing
+paste held by sheep's wool; and big eels would put a catch in your
+breath.
+
+But in the lake on the mountain-top were no fish at all, and that was a
+strange thing ...
+
+There was another eery thing about the mountain, and a thing wee Shane
+was slightly afraid of. Oftentimes you'd be sitting by that lake, and
+sunlight all around you, and you'd turn to come down, and there'd be a
+cloud beneath you, a cloud that rolled in armfuls of wool that bound the
+mountain as by a ring; and the lonely call of a bird ... and you'd feel
+shut off from the kindly earth, as if you were on another planet maybe,
+or caught up into the air by some flying demon, and you knew the world
+was spinning like a ball through the treeless fields of space.
+
+And what could a wee fellow do up there then but sit quiet and cry and
+be terribly afraid? And your cry would be heard no more than the
+whinnying of the curlew.... Or you might venture down through it, and
+that was more terrible still, for the strange host of the air had their
+domicile in the clouds, and there they held cruel congress, speaking in
+their speechless tongue, and out of the clouds they took shape and
+substance ... their cold, malevolent eyes, their smoky antennae of hands
+... and nothing to turn to for company, not even the moody badger or the
+unfriendly sheep. There was no going down. You must stay there by the
+lake, and even then the cloud might creep upward until it capped
+mountain and lake, and enveloped a wee fellow scared out of his wits....
+
+Nevertheless, he was going to the top of that mountain, clouds or no
+clouds. For he had heard it said that the mirage of Portcausey was being
+seen again--the Devil's Troopers, and the _Oilean-gan-talamh-ar-bith_,
+the Isle of No Land At All, and the Swinging City, and they were to be
+seen in the blue heat haze over the sea from the Mountain of Fionn....
+
+And wee Shane was going to see it, clouds or no clouds, host or no host
+of the air.
+
+
+Section 2
+
+He had won half-ways up the mountain now, and from the brae of heather
+he could see the glen stretch like a furrow to the sea. The Irish
+Channel they called it on the maps in school, but _Struth na Maoile_ it
+was to every one in the country-side, the waters of Moyle. Very green,
+very near, very gentle they seemed to-day, but often they roared like
+giants in frenzy, fanned to fury by the winds of the nine glens, as a
+bellows livens a fire. But to-day it was like a lake, so gentle.... And
+there was purple Scotland, hardly, you'd think, a stone's throw from the
+shore--the Mull of Cantyre, a resounding name, like a line in a poem. It
+was from Mull that Moyle came, _maol_ in Gaidhlig, bald or bluff ... a
+moyley was a cow without horns. The Lowlanders were coming into the Mull
+now, and the Highlanders being pushed north to Argyll, and westward to
+the islands, like Oran and Islay. He knew the Islay men, great rugged
+fishers with immense hands and their feet small as a girl's. They sang
+the saddest sea-chanty in the world:
+
+  _'S tric mi sealltuinn o'n chnoc a's airde,
+  Dh' fheuch am faic mi fear a'bhata;
+  An tig thu'n aniugh, no'n tig thu amaireach,
+  'S mur tig thu idir, gur truagh a ta mi._
+
+"From the highest hilltop I watched to see my boatman," went the sense
+of it. "Will you come to-day or will you come to-morrow? And if you
+never come--O God! help me!"
+
+And there was a chorus to it that was like a keening for the dead:
+
+  _Fhir a' bhata na horo eile! Fhir a' bhata na horo eile!
+  Fhir a' bhata na horo eile! Mo shoraidh slan leat, fhir a' bhata!_
+
+My heart's good-by to you, O man of the boat!
+
+But nearer than Islay was their own Raghery--Rathlin Island the maps had
+it--he could see it now to the north. A strange little world of its own,
+with great caves where the wind howled like a starving wolf, and the
+black divers went into the water like a bullet. It was in the caves of
+Raghery that the Bruce took refuge, and it was there he saw the spider
+of Scots legend.... Rathlin was queer and queer.... There were many
+women with the second sight, it was told, and the men were very big,
+very shy, very gentle, except when the drink was in them, and then they
+would rage like the sea.
+
+A strange, mystical water, the Moyle, to have two isles in it like Islay
+of the pipers and Raghery of the black caves. It was over Moyle that
+Columkill went in his little coracle to be a hermit in Iona, the
+gentlest saint that Ireland ever knew. And it was over the Moyle that
+Patrick came, landing whilst the Druids turned their cursing stones and
+could not prevail against him. And it was on the Moyle that the Children
+of Lir swam and they turned into three white swans, with their great
+white wings like sails and their black feet like sweeps.... And in the
+night-time they sang a strange, sad music, and the echoes of it were
+still in the nine glens....
+
+And northerly again were the pillars of the Giant's Causeway, blue-black
+against the sun. They were made so that the Finn MacCool, the champion
+of the giants, could take a running jump over to Scotland and he going
+deer-hunting in the forests of Argyll. So the country folk said, but wee
+Shane thought different, knew different. The Druids had made it for
+their own occult designs, the Druids, that terrible, powerful clan with
+their magic batons, and their sinister cursing-stones, and their long,
+white, benevolent beards....
+
+And there, green and well kept as a duke's garden, was the Royal Links
+of Portrush. And the Irish golfers said that it was harder than St.
+Andrew's in Scotland and better kept. There King James had played a game
+before he went down to the defeat of the Boyne Water.
+
+"And if he golfed as well as he fought," Shane's Uncle Robin used to
+laugh, "they s'ould never have let him tee up a ball on the course!"
+
+_Eigh!_ how wonderful it all was! wee Shane felt: Raghery and the waters
+of Moyle; Portrush and the Giant's Causeway; the nine glens with the
+purple heather, and the streams that sang as they cantered to the sea;
+the crowing grouse and the whinnying curlew, and the eagles barking on
+the cliffs; the trout that rose in the summer's evening, and the red
+berries of the rowan; the cold, clear lakes, and the braes where the
+blueberries grow. He could well understand the stories they told of
+Napper Tandy, and the great rebel in the gardens of Versailles. Napoleon
+had found him weeping amid all that beauty.
+
+"Don't be afraid, Napper Tandy. I shall keep my word and send General
+Hoche to Ireland."
+
+"It's not that, sir; it's not that." And Tandy could not keep the tears
+back. "Och, County Antrim, it's far I'm from you now!"
+
+
+Section 3
+
+He had reached the cairn of round stones that marks the town land of
+Drimsleive, and was turning the brae when a voice called to him:
+
+"Eh, wee fellow, is it mitching from school you are?"
+
+An old woman in a plaid shawl was coming slowly down the hillside. He
+recognized her for Bridget Roe MacFarlane of Cushendhu, a cotter tenant
+of his Uncle Alan's.
+
+"No, cummer," he told her; "I'm not mitching. I got the day off."
+
+"For God's sake! if it isn't wee Shane Campbell! And what are doing up
+the mountain, wee Shane?"
+
+"Ah, just dandering."
+
+"I was up mysel'," she went on, "to the top of it, because I heard tell
+there was a cure for sore eyes in the bit lake on the top. Not that I
+put much store in such cures, but there's no use letting anything by. I
+got a pair of specs from a peddling man of Ballymena," said she, "but
+they don't seem to do me much good. I'm queer and afeared about my
+eyes, hinny. It would be a hard thing for me to go blind and none about
+the wee bit house but mysel'."
+
+"Ay! I should think it would be a terrible thing to be a dark person,"
+wee Shane nodded.
+
+"Och, it wouldn't be so bad if you were born that way, for you'd know no
+different. And if you went blind and you young, there's things you could
+take up to take the strain from your head like a man takes up piping.
+When you're old it's gey hard. If you're an old man itself, it's not so
+bad, for there'll always be a soft woman to take care of you. But if
+you're an old cummer, without chick or child, it's hard, _agra vig_. My
+little love, it's hard."
+
+"Maybe it's in your head, Bridget Roe. My Uncle Robin says there's a lot
+of sickness that's just in your head."
+
+"I trust to my God so, and maybe your Uncle Robin's right, for there
+does be a lot in my head, and it going around like a spinning-wheel. I'm
+a experienced woman, wee Shane, too experienced, and that's the trouble.
+You've no' heard because you're too young and you would no' understand.
+I was away from here for twenty years," she said, "for more nor twenty.
+And I knew a power of men in my time, big men, were needful of me. And
+a power of trouble I raised, too, and it does be coming back to me and
+me in my old days.... But you'll be wanting to be getting on?"
+
+"Och, no, Bridgeen Roe; there's no hurry."
+
+"It does me good to have a wee crack, the folk I see are so few ... Aye!
+There was a power of trouble. There were two men killed themselves and
+families broken up all by reason of me. I meant no harm, wee Shane, but
+it happened, and it does be troubling me in my old days. And I sit there
+afeared by the peat fire, and when I've thought too much on it, I get up
+and go to the half-door. And I look out on the Moyle, wee Shane, and I
+think: that's been roaring since the first tick of time, and I see the
+stars so many of them, and the moon that never changed its shape or
+size, and it comes to me that nothing matters in the long run, that the
+killed men were no more nor caught trout, and the rent families no more
+nor birds' nests fallen from a tree.... None of us are big enough that
+anything we do matters.... And then another feeling comes on me, that
+God is around, and that He'll be dreadful hard.... And a wee bit of luck
+comes my way. The hens, maybe, are laying well, and there's a high price
+on the eggs, and I think, sure He's the Kindly Man, after all.... But
+if my eyes leave me, Shane Beg, what will I do? Sure, I won't have the
+moon or the stars or the waters of Moyle to put things in their place.
+And there'll be no luck about me, so as I'll know Himself is the
+Unforgiving Man."
+
+"But some one will take care of you, Bridget Roe."
+
+"And who, _agra_? 'Tis not me to go to the poorhouse, and take charity
+like a cold potato. And my name is MacFarlane, wee Shane, and they're a
+clan that fights till it dies, that never gives in. And it isn't to the
+big ones I knew I'd be writing for help.... Sure I see them now, what's
+left alive of them, sitting by their firesides, figuring out their life,
+and tired with the puzzle of it; and then they'll remember me for an
+instant, and a wee joy will come to them in the dim twilight. They'll
+remember as you'd remember an old song you hadn't rightly got the air
+of. But you knew it was sweet and there was a grand swing to it.... Aye,
+they'll remember me, and they looking into the heart of the fire.... And
+you wouldn't have me write them now and tell them I'm only an old
+_cailleach_ in a cabin on the mountain-side, and my eyes, that they'll
+remember, are dull like marbles.... You wouldn't understand, wee
+Shane.... But I'm blethering too much about myself. And where is it you
+were going, my little jo? Where is it?"
+
+"I heard tell the Dancers were to be seen from the mountain-top over the
+sea, and I thought maybe I'd go up and gi'e them a look, cummer ... just
+a look."
+
+"So you would, wee Shane, so you would. You wouldn't be your father's
+son or your uncles' nephew if you were to let a marvel like that pass
+by. It's after adventure you are, and you only four and ten years old.
+'T is early you begin, the Campbells of Cosnamara.
+
+"But sure that isn't adventure, cummer, to be seeing the Dancers in the
+heat haze of the day. Adventures are robbers and fighting Indians and
+things like in Sir Walter Scott."
+
+"Oh, sure everything's adventure, hinny, every time you go looking for
+something queer and strange, and something with a fine shape and color
+to it. Adventure isn't in the quick fist and the nimble foot; it's in
+the hungry heart and the itching mind. Isn't it myself that knows, that
+was a wild and wilful girl, and went out into the world for more nor
+twenty years, and came back the like of an old bitch fox, harried by
+hunting, and looking for and mindful of the burrow where she was
+thrown?... As we're made, we're made, wee fellow; you're either a
+salmon that hungers for the sea, or a cunning old trout that kens its
+own pool and is content.... Adventures! Hech aye!"
+
+"Well, I hope your eyes get better, cummer. I do so."
+
+"I know you mean it, Shaneen Beg, and maybe your wish will help them,
+maybe it will."
+
+"Well, I'll be going on my way, Bridget Roe."
+
+"And I'll be finishing mines, wee Shane Campbell. And I hope to my God
+you're better off at the end nor me--me that once talked to earls and
+barons, and now clucks to a wheen o' hens; me that once had my coach and
+pair, and now have only an ass with a creel o' turf; and no care of
+money once on me, and now all I have is my spinning-wheel, and the flax
+not what it used to be, but getting coarser. And my eyes going out, that
+were the delight of many ... I hope you're better off nor me at the end
+of the hard and dusty road, wee Shane. I hope to my God so...."
+
+
+Section 4
+
+He thought hard of what the cummer of Cushendhu had said about his
+family, and he on the last leg of the mountain. That he was his
+father's son puzzled him more than that he was his uncles' nephew, for
+there was little mention of his father in the house. At the dead man's
+name his prim Huguenot mother from Nantes pursed her mouth, and in her
+presence even his uncles were uncomfortable, those great, gallant men.
+All he knew was that his father, Colquitto Campbell, had been a great
+Gaelic poet, and that his father and mother had not quite been good
+friends. Once his Uncle Robin had stopped before a ballad-singer in
+Ballycastle when the man was striking up a tune:
+
+  On the deck of this lonely ship to America bound,
+  A husk in my throat and a mist of tears in my eyes--
+
+His Uncle Robin had given the man a guinea.
+
+"Why for did you give the singing man a golden piece, Uncle Robin?"
+
+"For the sake of an old song, laddie, an old and sad song.... A song
+your father made.... It was like seeing his ghost...."
+
+"But my father, Uncle Robin--"
+
+"Your father was the heart of corn, wee Shane, for all they say against
+him.... I never knew a higher, cleaner heart, but he was easy
+discourag't.... Aye, easy thrown down and easy led away.... I was fond
+of him.... Am ... always, and no matter.... However ... shall we go and
+see the racing boats, wee fellow?"
+
+And that was all he ever got from Uncle Robin. But he knew some of his
+father's songs that were sung in the country-side ...
+
+  _Is truagh, a ghradh, gan me agas thu im Bla chliath!
+  No air an traigh bhain an ait nach robh duine riamh,
+  Seachd oidhche, seachd la, gan tamh, gan chodal, gan bhiadh,
+  Ach thusa bhi 'm ghraidh's lamh geal thardam gu fial!_
+
+"O God! my loved one, that you and I were in Dublin town! Or on a white
+strand, where no foot ever touched before. Day in, night in, without
+food or sleep, what mattered it? But you to be loving me and your white
+arm around me so generously!"
+
+He couldn't understand the song, though the lilt of the words captured
+him. What should people accept being without food or sleep? And what
+good was a white arm generously around one? However, that was love, and
+it was a mystery.... But that song could not have been to his mother. He
+could not imagine her being generous with even a white arm. And none
+would want to be with her on a strand without food or sleep; that he
+instinctively felt. She was a high, proud cliff, stern and proud and
+beautiful, and that song was a song of May-time and the green
+rushes....
+
+And other songs of his father's were sung: "Maidne Fhoghmhair--Autumn
+Mornings," and "In Uir-chill an Chreagain--In the Green Graveyard of
+Creggan...."
+
+A queer thing that all that should be left of his father was a chill
+silence and a song a man might raise at the rising of the moon....
+
+Silent he was in his grave, dumb as a stone, and all his uncles were
+silent, too, barring the little smile at the corners of their mouths,
+that was but the murmuring of the soul.... There were paintings of them
+all and they young in the house, their high heads, their hawks' eyes,
+Alan and Robin and Mungo.... And Mungo, too, was dead with Wellington in
+the Peninsula. He and three of his men were all left of the Antrim
+company. "Christ! have I lost this fight, too?" He laughed and a French
+ball took him in the gullet. "Be damned to that!" He coughed. "He might
+have got me in a cleaner place!" And that was the end of Mungo....
+
+And Alan had gone with Sir John Franklin to the polar seas, and come
+back with the twisted grin. "'T was a grand thing you did, Alan, to live
+through and come back from the wasted lands." "'T was a grand thing they
+did, to find the channel o' trade. But me, I went to find the north
+pole, with the white bear by the side of it, like you see in the
+story-books. And I never got within the length of Ireland o' 't! Trade,
+aye; but what's trade to me? It's a unco place, the world!"
+
+His father he could imagine: "Poor Colquitto Campbell! He wanted to bark
+like an eagle, and he made a wee sweet sound, like a canary-bird! Ah,
+well, give the bottle the sunwise turn, man o' the house, and come
+closer to me, a _bheilin tana nan bpog_, O slender mouth of the kisses!"
+His father, wee Shane thought, must have worn the twisted grin, too.
+
+He knew what the twisted grin meant. It meant defeat. He had seen it on
+his Uncle Alan's face when he lost the championship of Ireland on the
+golf links of Portrush. And that morning he had been so confident! "'T
+is the grand golf I'll play the day, and the life tingling in my
+finger-tips!" And great golf he did play, with his ripping passionate
+shots, but a thirty-foot putt on the home green beat him. All through
+the match his face had been dour, but now came the outstretched hand and
+the smile at the corner of the mouth:
+
+"Congratulations, sir! 'T is yourself has the grand eye for the hard
+putt on the tricky green!"
+
+The wee grin meant that Alan had been beaten.
+
+And Uncle Robin, too, the wisest and oldest of them all, who had been to
+Arabia and had been all through Europe and was Goethe's friend, he had
+the twisted grin of the beaten man. Only occasionally you could get past
+the grin of Uncle Robin, as he had gotten past it the day Uncle Robin
+had spoken of his brother, Shane's father. And sometimes when a great
+hush was on the mountains and the Moyle was silent, Uncle Robin would
+murmer a verse of his great poet friend's:
+
+  Ueber allen Gipfeln
+  Ist Ruh,
+  In allen Wipfeln
+  Spuerest du
+  Kaum einen Hauch;
+  Die Voegelein schweigen im Walde.
+  Warte nur, balde
+  Ruhest du auch.
+
+The sharp u's and heavy gutturals were so like Gaidhlig, it seemed queer
+wee Shane could not understand the poem; but Uncle Robin translated it
+into Gaidhlig:
+
+  _Os cionn na morbheanna
+  Ta sith_--
+
+And the melody of it was like the plucking of a harper's strings. So
+much in so little, and every note counted, and the last line like a dim
+quaint bar:
+
+_Beidh sith agad fein!_ "You will rest, too!"
+
+A queer thing, the men who were beaten and smiled. A queer thing the men
+who, beaten, were more gallant than the winners. A queer thing for the
+cummer of Cushendhu to say, she who was so wise after the hot
+foolishness of youth, that he was his uncles' nephew and his father's
+son. A queer thing that. A queer, dark, and secret thing.
+
+
+Section 5
+
+The memory of his Uncle Robin stuck in his mind and he going up the
+mountain. His Uncle Robin knew all there was to be known in the world,
+the immense learned man. When he was spoken to of anything strange, he
+had always an explanation for it. When the mirage off Portrush was
+mentioned, he could talk at length of strange African mirages that the
+travelers see in the desert at the close of day, oases and palm-trees
+and minarets, so you would think you were near to a town or a green
+pasture and you miles and miles away. And there was a sight to be seen
+off Sicily that the ignorant Italian people thought was the work of
+Morgan le Fay. And in the Alps was a horror men spoke of and called the
+Specter of the Brocken.
+
+All these strange occurrences were as simple as the alphabet to Uncle
+Robin. He would explain it as a sight reflected on the cloud and thrown
+on a sea of mist or a desert as on a screen, using difficult words, like
+"refraction," and words from Euclid, like "angles." But Uncle Alan would
+object, Uncle Alan mistrusting difficult words and words from Euclid.
+Alan would raise his head from splicing a fishing-rod or cleaning the
+lock of a gun or polishing a snaffle:
+
+"You were ay the one for explanations, Robin. Maybe you've got an
+explanation for the gift?" By the gift Uncle Alan meant the second
+sight.
+
+"Ah, sure; 't is only mind reading and sympathy."
+
+"O my God! Now listen, Robin. You ken when you dragged me from the
+horse-show the last time we were in Dublin, to the library of the
+What-you-may-call-him--Archaeological Society or so'thin'. You ken the
+book you showed me about Antrim, and what was seen off the cliffs one
+time. There was a great black arm in the air, and a hand to the wrist
+of it, and to the shoulder a crosspiece with a ring, like one end of an
+anchor. And that disappeared. And then immediately there showed a ship,
+with the masts and sails and tackles and men, and it sailed stern
+foremost and it sank stern foremost, all in the red sky. And then there
+was a fort with a castle on the top of it and there were fire and smoke
+coming out of it, as if a grand fight was on. And the fort divided into
+two ships, that chased each other, and then sank. Then there was a
+chariot with two horses, and chasing that was a strange thing like a
+serpent, a snake's head at one end, and a bulk at the other like a
+snail's house. And it gained on the chariot and gave it a blow. And out
+of the chariot came a bull, and after it came a dog, and the bull and
+the dog fought as in a gaming-pit. And then suddenly all was clear, no
+cloud or mist or anything in the northern air. Am I right or am n't I?
+Wasn't that in the book, Robin More?"
+
+"It was."
+
+"And now, Robin, my man, wasn't that signed by respectable people: Mr.
+Allye, a minister, and a Lieutenant Dunsterville and a Lieutenant Dwine
+and Mr. Bates and twelve others, all of whom saw it near or around the
+time of the Boyne Water? Wasn't it signed by the decent people?"
+
+"It was."
+
+"And what explanation have you got for that, you and your master of arts
+of Trinity College!"
+
+"They were daft--gone in the head. Daft or drunk."
+
+"My song! And maybe John was daft when he saw the vision of Patmos!"
+
+"I would no' be surprised."
+
+"Na, Robin More; you would not be surprised if you saw a trout that
+cantered or a horse that flew. You'd have an explanation. You're the
+queer hard man to live with, Robin, with your explanations."
+
+Willie John Boyd, the servant boy, removed his cutty pipe and hazarded a
+suggestion.
+
+"Queer things happened in the auld days."
+
+"If there were queerer things nor you in the auld days," Alan laughed,
+"it must have been like a circus."
+
+But mightn't they both be right? wee Shane thought, and he trudging up
+the mountain-side. His Uncle Alan knew an awful lot. There was none
+could coax a trout from a glass-clear pool with a dry fly like Alan
+Campbell. He knew the weather, when it would storm and when it would
+clear, and from what point the wind would blow to-morrow. He could nurse
+along the difficult flax and knew the lair of the otter and had a great
+eye for hunting fox and a better eye for a horse than a Gipsy. Might
+there not be things in nature, as he said, that none knew of? And
+mightn't there be explanations for them, as Uncle Robin, who had read
+every book, claimed there were? Mightn't they both be right, who thought
+each other wrong, and they arguing by the red fire, fighting and
+snarling like dogs and loving each other with the strange soft love of
+lovers when the trees are a-rustle and the moon high?
+
+
+Section 6
+
+He had thought to come up to the top of the mountain where the cairn
+was, and the dark and deepest lake, and to sit down in the heather and
+wait half an hour maybe while the curlew called, and then have Dancing
+Town take form and color before his eyes, hold it until every detail was
+visible, and then fade gently out as twilight fades into night. He had
+thought to be prepared and receptive.
+
+But suddenly it was upon him, in the air, over the waters of Moyle....
+
+A sweep of fear ran over him, and he grew cold, so strange it was, so
+against nature. Clear and high, as in some old print, and white and
+green, the town and shore came to him. The May afternoon was in it, hot
+and golden, but the town itself was in morning sunlight. A clutter of
+great houses and little houses, all white, a great church, and a squat
+dun fort, and about it and in it were green spaces and palm-trees that
+swayed to a ghostly breeze. And the green ran down to a white beach, and
+on the beach foamy waves curled like a man's beard. And in the air the
+town quivered and danced, as imaged trees seem to dance on running
+water....
+
+On one side was Ireland, and _on one_ side was Scotland, and high in the
+air between them was Dancing Town....
+
+No one was in the streets that wee Shane could see, and yet the town was
+lifeful, some tropical city where the green jalousies were closed in the
+heat of the midday sun, and where no one was on the streets, barring
+some unseen old beggar or peddling woman drowsing in the shade. The town
+was sleeping not with the sleep of Scotland, that is the sleep of dead
+majestic, melancholy kings, nor with the sleep of Ireland, that is
+tired and harassed and old. It was not as lonely as sleeping lakes are
+where the bittern booms like a drum.... It slept as a child sleeps, lips
+apart and chubby fingers uncurled, and happy.... And all the time it
+quivered in the clear air....
+
+In the morning, wee Shane thought, it woke to bright happiness, the
+green parrakeets chattered, the monkeys whistled, the lizards basked in
+the sun. And the generation of the town came out and gossiped and worked
+merrily, until the heat of the sun began to strike with the strokes of a
+mallet, and then they went into the cool, dark houses and slept as
+children sleep. And then came blue twilight, and lamps were lit in the
+green spaces, and into the odorous night would come the golden rounded
+women with smiles like honey, and the graceful feline men.... A woman's
+laughter, a man's song.... And the moon rising on tropic seas, while a
+guitar hummed with a deep vibrant note.... And the perfume of strange
+tropic trees....
+
+But meantime the town danced in the clear air.... And--
+
+"It's gone!" said wee Shane.
+
+One moment it was there, and the next there were only Ireland and
+Scotland and the waters of Moyle, and a ship going drowsily for the
+Clyde.
+
+And for a long time he waited, thinking Dancing Town might come again.
+But it did not come. The schooner off the Mull lay over, and the Moyle
+awoke. A breeze rambled up the mountain, and the heather tinkled its
+strange dry tinkle. And afar off a curlew called, and a grouse crowed in
+defiance.
+
+The moment of magic was by, and wee Shane went down the mountain.
+
+
+Section 7
+
+As he went down the mountain he tried to puzzle out the why and
+wherefore of Dancing Town.
+
+Of course there were things you could not explain, like the banshee; or
+the Naked Hangman, who strides through the valleys on midsummer's eve
+with his gallows under his arm; or the Death Coach, with its headless
+horses and its headless driver. There was no use bringing these matters
+up to Uncle Robin. Uncle Robin would only laugh and shout: "Havers,
+bairn! Wha's been filling your wee head with nonsense?" But you could no
+more deny their existence than you could that of Apollyon, whom you read
+about in "Pilgrim's Progress," and who wandered up and down the world
+and to and fro in it; or of the fairies, whose sweet little piping many
+heard at night as they passed the forts of the little people; or of the
+tiny cobbling leprechawns, who knew where the Danes had hid their store
+of gold in crocks such as hold butter.... Of these there was no
+explanation but the Act of God. And Uncle Robin was queer. He put no
+store in the Act of God.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Now, if it had been an angel he had seen in the high air, it would have
+been the Act--or the banshee, and her crooning and keening by the
+riverside, with her white cloak, her red, burnished hair.... But it was
+an island he had seen, a dancing town, with his own hard wee Scots-Irish
+eyes. And that was not an Act of God; it was a fact, and so outside his
+Uncle Alan's bailiwick and within his Uncle Robin's. His Uncle Robin
+would say it was the reflected image of some place in the world. Aye,
+he'd take his Uncle Robin's word for that. But where was it? Surely, as
+yet, it was undiscovered. It had the quiet of a June evening, that land
+had, and a grand shimmering beauty.... And if it was known where it was,
+wouldn't the mountainy folk be leaving their cabins, and the strong
+farmers their plowed lands, and the whining tinkers be hoofing the road
+for it? If it was known where that land was....
+
+It occurred to him it must have been that land his father meant and he
+writing his poem of the Green Graveyard of Creggan. While he was
+sleeping under the weeping yew-trees the young queen had touched the
+sleeping poet on the shoulder.
+
+"_A shiolaigh charthannaigh_," she said, "O kindly kinsman, _na
+caithtear thusa ins na nealtaibh broin_, let you not be thrown under the
+clouds of sorrow! _Acht eirigh in do sheasamh_, but rise in your
+standing, _agas gluais liomsa siar' sa' rod_, and travel with me
+westward in the road. _Go Tir Dheas na Meala_, to the shimmering land of
+honey where the foreigner has not the sway. And you will find pleasantry
+in white halls persuading me to the strains of music."
+
+Surely his father, too, had seen Dancing Town!
+
+And it was an old story that Oisin had found it, when he rode with the
+princess over the waves on a white horse whose hoofs never touched
+water, and he abode with her in _Tir nan Og_, in the Land of Them Who
+are Young, for a thousand years or more, until the great homesickness
+for Ireland took him, that takes the strongest, and he came for a visit
+on the white horse; but the girths of the saddle broke, and he fell to
+the ground, and the horse flew away. And he who had been strong and
+young and beautiful became old and bald and blind, and Patrick of the
+Bells and Crosses took him, and put him with the groaning penitents, who
+beat their breasts under the fear of hell. And he, who had known Tir nan
+Og and the Silver Woman, was a drooling ancient with a wee lad to lead
+him.... But that was just a winter's tale with no sense to it.
+
+But there were other things in books that had the ring of truth to them.
+There was the voyage of Maeldun, who had set out in his coracle, and
+visited strange islands. The Island of Huge Ants was one, and wee Shane
+had seen in his geography book pictures of armadillos, and he shrewdly
+surmised that Maeldun had been to South America. And there was the
+Island of Red-Hot Animals, but that was a poser. Still and all, the
+rhinoceros had armor like an old knight's, and that would surely get
+red-hot under the suns of the equator. It would explain, too, why the
+rhinoceros favored the water, like a cow in July.... Sure that was it:
+Maeldun had been to Africa. And Maeldun, too, had found the Fortunate
+Isle. Brendan, too, had known it. Wasn't it in old charts--St. Brendan's
+Isle? He said he found it, and surely a saint of God wouldn't lie....
+
+Och, it was there somewhere, but people were different from what they
+were in the ancient days. They didn't bother. If they had told his
+father about it, sure all Colquitto would have done was to call for pen
+and paper.
+
+"_Mo bhron air an fhairrge_," he would have written: "My grief on the
+sea--how it comes between me and the land where my mind might be easy--"
+And then he'd have lain back and chanted it. "'_Avourneen_, did you ever
+in all your life hear a poem as good as my poem? Sure old Homer's
+jealous in the black clouds. Was there ever a Greek poet the equal of a
+Gaelic one? _Anois, teacht an Earraigh_--now the moment spring comes in,
+'t is I will hoist sail, _inneosad mo sheol_...."
+
+And Alan Donn might have started to find it, but at the first golf links
+he'd stop, "to take the conceit out of the local people, and to give
+them something to talk of, and they old men," or to match his coursing
+greyhound against any dog in the world for a ten-pound note, or to
+deluther some red-cheeked likely woman....
+
+And Uncle Robin might hear of it, and he'd sit down and write a book,
+saying where it probably was, and how you might get there, and what the
+people were like, and whom they were probably descended from.... And
+the book would be in all the libraries of the world, and people would be
+writing him telling him what a great head was on him, and he'd mutter:
+"Nonsense! Nonsense! All nonsense!" and stroke his great red beard....
+
+But wouldn't it be the funny thing, the queer and funny thing, if he
+himself, wee Shane Campbell, were to go out and discover that island,
+and to own it, and to have it marked in the maps and charts, "Wee Shane
+Campbell's Island," for all to read and see?...
+
+"Decent wee fellow, is it about here somewhere the house of the McFees?"
+
+Shane had turned into the main road that ran along the sea-shore on the
+way homeward when the voice hailed him. It was a great black-bearded
+man, sitting on the ditch, holding his shoes in his hand. His face was
+tanned to mahogany, and in his ears were little gold rings. He wore
+clothes that were obviously new, obviously uncomfortable.
+
+"If you keep on the road about a half a mile and then turn to the left,
+and keep on there until you come to a loaning near a well with a
+hawthorn-bush couching over it, and turn to the left down that loaning,
+you'll come to it. It's a wee thatched house, needing a coat of
+whitewash. It's got a byre with a slate roof, and a rowan-tree near it.
+You canna' miss it."
+
+"Now isn't that the queer thing," the big man said, "me that thought I
+knew every art and part of this country, and that could find my way in
+the dark from Java Head to Poplar Parish, can't remember the place where
+I was born and reared? Forty years of traveling on the main ocean and
+thinking long for this place, and now when I come back I know no more
+about it than a fish does of dry land." He stood up painfully. "And me
+that thought I would come back leaping like a hare am now killed
+entirely with the soreness of my feet."
+
+"You're not accustomed to walking, then, honest man?"
+
+"'Deed, and you may say I'm not, decent wee fellow. I'm a sailorman, and
+aboard ship there's very little use for the feet. You've got to be quick
+as a fish with the hands, and have great strength in the arms of you.
+And you must have toes to grip, and thighs to brace you against the
+heeling timbers. But to be walking somewhere for long, hitting the road
+with your feet like you'd be hitting a wall with your head, it's
+unnatural to a sailing man. A half a mile, did you say?"
+
+"Honest man," said wee Shane, troubled, "are you looking for any one in
+the house of the McFees?"
+
+"For a woman that bore me and put me to her breast. An old woman now,
+decent wee fellow."
+
+"You'll no' find her, honest man."
+
+"She's dead?"
+
+"I saw her with the pennies on her eyes not two months gone."
+
+"So my mother's dead," said the big man. "So my mother's dead. Ah, well,
+all her troubles are over. It's forty years since I saw her, and she the
+strapping woman. And in forty years she must have had a power of
+trouble."
+
+"She looked unco peaceful, honest man."
+
+"The dead are always peaceful, decent wee fellow. So my mother's dead.
+Well, that alters things."
+
+"You'll be staying at home then, honest man?"
+
+"I'll be going back to sea, decent wee fellow. I had intended to stay at
+home and be with the old woman in her last days, the like of a pilot
+that brings a ship in, as you might say. But it would have been queer
+and hard. Herself, now, had no word of English?"
+
+"Old Annapla McFee spoke only the Gaidhlig."
+
+"And the Gaidhlig is gone from me, as the flower goes from the
+fruit-tree. And there could have been little conversation betwixt us,
+she remembering fairs and dances and patterns in the Gaidhlig, and me
+thinking of strange foreign ports in the English tongue. Poor company
+I'd have been for an old woman and she making her last mooring. I'd have
+been little assistance. Forty years between us--strange ports and deep
+soundings. Oh, we'd have been making strange."
+
+"Ah, maybe not, honest man."
+
+"How could it have been any other way, decent wee lad? She'd have been
+the strange, pitiful old cummer to me, who minded her the strapping
+woman, and I'd have been a queer bearded man to her, who minded me only
+as a wee fellow, the terror of the glen. People change every day, and
+there's a lot of change in forty years.
+
+"And, besides, it would have been gey hard on me, wee lad. The grape and
+spade would be clumsy to my hands, there being no life to them after the
+swinging spars. And my fingers, used to splicing rope, would not have
+the touch for milking a cow. And I'd feel lost, wee fellow, some day and
+me plowing a field, to see a fine ship on the waters, out of Glasgow
+port for the Plate maybe, and to think of it off the Brazils, and the
+pampero coming quick as a thrown knife, and me not aboard to help
+shorten sail or take a trick at the wheel. And it might have made me
+ugly toward the old woman. And I wouldn't have had that at all, at
+all.... But she's finished the voyage, poor cummer.... And it's a high
+ship and a capstan shanty for me again ... all's well...."
+
+"It's a wonder, honest man, you wouldn't stay on land at peace and you
+forty years at sea."
+
+"Well, it's a queer thing, decent wee fellow, but once you get the salt
+water in your blood you're gone. A queer itching is in your veins. It's
+like a disease. It is so. It spoils you for the fire on winter nights
+and for the hay-fields in the month o' June. And it puts a great bar
+between you and the folk o' dry land, such as there is between a
+fighting man and a cowardly fellow. It's the salt in the blood, I think;
+but you'd have to ask a doctor about that.
+
+"I'm not saying it's a good life. It's a dog's life. It is so. And when
+you're at sea you say: 'Wasn't I the fool to ever leave dry land; and if
+I get back and get a job,' says you, 'you'll never see me leave it
+again. It's a wee farm for me,' you'll say. And then somehow you'll find
+yourself back aboard ship. And you'll be off the Horn, up aloft,
+fighting a sail like you'd fight a man for your life, or you'll be in
+the horse latitudes, as they call them, and no breeze stirring, and not
+a damned thing to do but holystone decks, the like of an old pauper that
+does be scrubbing a poorhouse floor. And you say: 'Sure I'd rather be a
+tinker traveling the roads, with his ass and cart and dog and woman, nor
+a galley-slave to this bastard of a mate that has no more feeling for a
+poor sailorman nor a hound has for a rabbit. It's a dog's life,' you
+say, 'and when we make port I'm finished.'
+
+"But you make port and you stay awhile, and you find that the woman
+you've been thinking of as Queen of Sheba is no more nor a common drab.
+And the publican you thought of as the grand generous fellow has no more
+use for you and your bit silver gone. It's a queer thing, but they on
+land think of nothing but money. And one day you think, and the woman
+beside you is pastier nor dough, and the man of the public house is no
+more nor a cheap trickster, and you're listening to the conversation of
+the timid urban people, and the house you're in is filthier nor a pig's
+sty. And you say: 'Is this me that minds the golden women of the
+islands, and they with red flowers in their hair? Is this me that fought
+side by side with good shipmates in Callao? Am I listening to the
+chatter of these mild people, me that's heard grand stories in the
+forecastle of how this man was marooned in the Bahamas, and that man was
+married to a Maori queen, by God? Me, the hero that dowsed skysails, and
+they cracking like guns. Is this lousy room a place for me that's used
+to a ship as clean as a cat from stem to stern?' And you stand up
+bravely, and you look the man of the public house square in the shifty
+eyes, and you say: 'Listen, bastard! Do you ken e'er a master wants a
+sailing man? A sailor as knows his trade, crafty in trouble, and a
+wildcat in danger, and as peaceful as a hare in the long grass?' And
+you're off again on the old trade and the old road, where the next port
+is the best port, and the morrow is a braver day.... So it's so long,
+decent wee fellow! I'm off on it again. It's a dog's life, that's what
+it is, the life of a sailing man. But you couldn't change. I suppose
+it's the salt in the blood."
+
+"You're off, honest man?"
+
+"Aye, I'm off, wee fellow. And thank you kindly for what you told me,
+and for telling me especially the old woman looked so peaceful and her
+with the pennies on her eyes."
+
+"But aren't you going up to see the house?"
+
+"I don't think I will, wee lad. I've had a picture in my mind for forty
+years of the big house was in it, and the coolth of the well. And maybe
+it isn't so at all. I'd rather not know the difference. I'll keep my
+picture."
+
+"But the house is yours," wee Shane urged him. "You're not going to
+leave it as it is. Aren't you going to sell it and take the money?"
+
+"Och, to hell with that! I've no time," said the sailing man, and he
+limped painfully back down the road.
+
+
+Section 8
+
+His Uncle Robin had gone off to discuss with some Belfast crony the
+strange things he used to discuss, like the origin of the Round Tower of
+Ireland or the cryptic dialect of the Gaelic masons or whether the Scots
+came to Scotland from Ireland or to Ireland from Scotland, all very
+important for a member of the Royal Irish Academy. And his mother had
+gone off shopping to buy linen for the house at Cushendhu, poplin for
+dresses, delft from Holland for the kitchen and glass from Waterford for
+the sideboard in the dining-room. And because he was to go to the
+boarding-school that night and thereafter would be harsh discipline,
+and because his Uncle Robin had known he was on the point of crying, he
+had been allowed to wander around Belfast by himself for a few hours
+with a silver shilling in his pocket. And wee Shane had made for the
+quays....
+
+The four of them had sat in a cold, precise room that morning, his Uncle
+Robin, his mother, wee Shane, and the principal, a fat, gray-eyed,
+insincere Southerner, with a belly like a Chinese god's, dewlaps like a
+hunting hound's, cold, stubby, and very clean hands, and a gown that
+gave him a grotesque dignity. And he had eyed wee Shane unctuously. And
+wee Shane did not like fat, unctuous men. He liked them lean and active,
+as glensmen are.
+
+And the principal had spoken in stilted French to his mother, who had
+responded in French that cracked like a whip. And the principal had
+licked the ground before Uncle Robin. It was "Yes, Dr. Campbell!" And,
+"No, Dr. Campbell!" where the meanest glensman would have said "Aye,
+maybe you're right, Robin More," or, "Na, na, you're out there, Robin
+Campbell."
+
+"The old hypocrite!" It was the only word wee Shane could describe the
+master by, a favorite word of his Uncle Alan's.
+
+And in the corridors he had met some of the scholars, white-faced
+fellows; and the masters--they had mean eyes, like the eyes of badgers.
+
+"I dinna want to go!" He blurted out on the quays of Belfast.
+
+"Where dinna you want to go, wee laddie?" A black, curly-headed man with
+gray eyes and a laugh like a girl's stopped short. He had blue clothes
+and brass buttons and stepped lightly as a cat.
+
+"I dinna want to go to school."
+
+"Sure, all wee caddies go to school."
+
+"I ken that. But I don't want to go to school with a bunch of whey-faced
+gets, and masters lean and mean as rats, and a principal puffed out like
+a setting hen."
+
+"Oh, for God's sake! is that the way you feel about it? Laddie, you
+don't talk like a townsman. Where are you from?"
+
+"I'm from the Glens of Antrim. From Cushendhu."
+
+"I'm a Raghery man myself. _Tha an Gaidhlig agad?_
+
+"_Tha, go direach!_"
+
+"So you've got the Gaidhlig too? Who are your people, wee laddie?"
+
+"I'm a Campbell of Cushendhu."
+
+"For God's sake! you're no' a relation of Alan Campbell's, wha sailed
+with Sir John Franklin for the pole?"
+
+"I'm his nephew."
+
+"I've sailed under your Uncle Alan. He's the heart o' corn. And so
+they're going to make a scholar out of you, like your Uncle Robin. Oh,
+well, oh, well. Would you like to come around with me and see the
+ships?"
+
+"I'd like fine to see the ships."
+
+"You'll see all manner of ships here. Square-riggers, fore-and-afters,
+hermaphrodites. You'll see Indiamen and packets from Boston. You'll see
+ships that do be going to Germany, and some for the Mediterranean ports.
+You'll see a whaler that's put in for repairs. You'll see fighting
+ships. You'll see fishers of the Dogger Banks, and boats that go to
+Newfoundland, where the cod do feed. All manner of sloops and schooners,
+barkantines and brigs, but the bonniest of them all lies off
+Carrickfergus."
+
+"And who's she, Raghery man?"
+
+"The _Antrim Maid_ is her nomination."
+
+"And do you sail her?"
+
+"I sail in her, laddie. Sail and sail in her. Mine from truck to keelson
+she is, and I'm master of her. Father and mother and brother to her, and
+husband, too. I'm proud of her." The Rathliner laughed. "You may
+notice."
+
+"And why for shouldn't you be? She must be the grand boat surely, man
+who sailed with my Uncle Alan."
+
+
+Section 9
+
+"Raghery man, you who've sailed the high seas and the low seas, did you
+ever put into an island that has great coolth to it and great sunshine,
+a town quiet as a mouse, a strip of sand like silver, the waves turning
+with a curl and chime?"
+
+"Where did you hear tell of that island, wee laddie? Was it in the books
+you do be reading at school?"
+
+"I saw it, and it dancing in the sun. From Slievenambanderg I saw it,
+and it over the waters of Moyle."
+
+The Rathliner sat on a mooring bitt on the quay and filled his pipe.
+
+"I ken that island," he said. "I ken it well."
+
+"And what name is on it, Raghery man?"
+
+"The name that's on it is Fiddlers' Green."
+
+"Were you ever there, Raghery man?" There was a sinking in wee Shane's
+heart.
+
+"I was never there, laddie, never there. Oftentimes I thought I'd
+raised it, but it was never there, wee laddie, never there. There's men
+as says they've been there, but I could hardly believe them, though
+there's queer things past belief on the sea. There's a sea called
+Sargasso, and if I told you half the things about it, you'd think me
+daft. And there's the ghost of ships at sea, and that's past thinking.
+And there's the great serpent, that I've seen with my own eyes....
+
+"Aye, Fiddlers' Green! Where is it, and how do you get there? The
+sailormen would give all their years to know."
+
+"Why for do they call it Fiddlers' Green?"
+
+"It's Fiddlers' Green, laddie, because it's the place you come to at the
+cool of the day, when the bats are out, and the cummers put by their
+spinning. And there's nou't there but sport and music. A lawn like a
+golf green, drink that is not ugly, women would wander with you on to
+the heather when the moon's rising, and never a thought in their mind of
+the money in your pocket, but their eyes melting at you, and they
+thinking you're the champion hero of the world.... And all the fiddlers
+fiddling the finest of dance music: hornpipes like 'The Birds among the
+Trees' and 'The Green Fields of America'; reels like 'The Swallow-tail
+Coat' and 'The Wind that Shakes the Barley'; slip-jigs would make a
+cripple agile as a hare.... And you go asleep with no mate to wake you
+in a blow, but the sound of an old piper crooning to you as a cummer
+croons. And the birds will wake you with their douce singing.... Aye,
+Fiddlers' Green...."
+
+And they were silent for a minute in the soft Ulster sunshine.
+
+"Would you have any use for a lad like myself aboard your ship, Raghery
+man?"
+
+"Och, sure, what would you do with the sea, wee fellow?"
+
+"I ken it well already, Raghery man. And I'm no clumsy in a boat. I can
+sail a sloop with any man. On a reach or full and by, I'll keep her
+there. With the breeze biting her weather bow, I'll hold her snout into
+it. Or with the wind behind me, I'll ride her like you'd canter a
+horse."
+
+"I might take you to learn you seamanship and navigation, but you'd be
+no use as a sailor, wee laddie, and it's not for a Campbell to be a
+cabin-boy."
+
+"Take me to learn the trade, then. Take me now."
+
+"I'd like fine, wee fellow, but I couldn't do it. You might be cut out
+for a scholar for all you think you're not. Or it might be a soldier
+you're meant for. I couldn't interfere with your life. It's an unco
+responsibility, interfering with a destiny, a terrible thing."
+
+"Will you talk to my Uncle Robin? Will you?"
+
+"Och, now, how could I talk to your Uncle Robin, him that's written
+books, and is counted one of the seven learned men of Ireland? Sure, I
+wouldn't understand what he'd be saying, and he'd have no ear for a
+common sailing man. If it was your Uncle Alan, now--"
+
+"There's not a person in the world but has the ear of my Uncle Robin.
+And there's none easier to talk to, not even the apple woman at the
+corner of the quay. Will you come with me and talk to him?"
+
+"I couldn't, laddie. Your Uncle Alan, now--"
+
+"I'll do the talking, then; but will you come?"
+
+"Och, wee fellow, it would be foolish."
+
+"You wouldn't have me think hard of a man of Raghery?"
+
+"No, I wouldn't have any one think hard of the folk of Raghery, so I
+suppose I'll have to come. I don't know what your Uncle Robin will say
+to me for putting notions in your head. It's awful foolish. But I'll
+come."
+
+
+Section 10
+
+"So there'd never be the making of a scholar in me, Uncle Robin. A ship
+on the sea or a new strange person would be always more to me nor a
+book. I can read and write and figure; what more do I want? And, och,
+sir, the school would be a prison to me, the scholars droning and ink on
+their fingers, and the hard-faced masters at the desk. I'd be woe for
+the outside, for the sunshine and the water and the bellying winds--"
+
+His Uncle Robin tapped the window-pane of the club and thought hard. The
+Rathlin sailor stood by, puzzled.
+
+"But, childeen asthore, sure you don't know now what you want. Your
+career, laddie! Think a bit! The church, for instance--"
+
+"Och, Uncle Robin, is it me in the church that must say my prayers by my
+lee lone, so loath am I to let the people see what's in me? I'd be the
+queer minister, dumb as a fish--"
+
+"You once had a notion for the army, laddie."
+
+"So I had, sir, and fine I'd like the uniforms and the swords and the
+horses, but I wouldn't have the heart to kill a man, and me never
+seeing him before. If a man did me a wrong, I'd kill him quick as I'd
+wash my hands, but never seeing him before, I could na, I just could
+na--"
+
+"It's a clean thing, the sea," the Raghery man ventured.
+
+"He's so very young," objected Uncle Robin.
+
+"There's nothing but that or the books for me, Uncle Robin. A sailor or
+a scholar--and I don't think I'd make out well with the books."
+
+"The books aren't all they're cracked up to be, wee Shane. I've written
+books myself, and who reads them but a wheen of graybeards, and they
+drowsing by the fire? Knowledge, laddie, I have that.... And it isn't
+even wisdom. Knowledge is like dry twigs you collect with care to make a
+bit fire you can warm your shins at, and wisdom is the gift of God
+that's like the blossom on the gorse. I've searched books and taken out
+the marrow of dead men's brains, and after all, even all my knowledge
+may be wrong.... Your father's name will be remembered as long as the
+Gaidhlig lasts, for songs that came to him as easily as a woman's kiss.
+And your Uncle Alan's footprints are near the pole. And Mungo is
+remembered forever because he died with a laugh. Not that I'm saying
+anything against them, wee Shane; better men will never be seen. But
+Daniel Donelly's name is remembered because he beat Cooper in a fight,
+and songs were made about it. And I'll be remembered only when some old
+librarian dusts a forgotten book. And I was supposed to be the wise pup
+o' the litter, with my books and my study. And all I have now is a
+troubled mind in my latter days. Aye, the books!..."
+
+"Shall I go to sea, sir?"
+
+"Is it up to me? And how about your mother, laddie?"
+
+"Oh, there's little warmth within her for me, sir. She's a bitter woman.
+She does na like my father's breed."
+
+"Are you your father's breed through, wee caddie? Are you Campbell all?
+Here, gi' us a look at your face. Aye, the eyes, the nose, the proud
+throw to the head of you. I'm afeared there's little of your mother in
+you, laddie; afeared there's none at all."
+
+"I'm no' ashamed o' my kind, sir."
+
+"And you're set on going to sea?"
+
+"I'd like it fine, sir."
+
+"And if it does na turn out the way you thought it would, you're not
+going to cry or turn sour?"
+
+"I thought you knew me better nor that, Uncle Robin."
+
+"I do." The big man laid his hand on the boy's shoulder and smiled at
+the shipmaster. "Take him, Raghery man!"
+
+
+Section 11
+
+Though all was wonder to wee Shane, there was so much of it that it
+flicked through his head like a dream: the hazy September afternoon; the
+long, lean vessel like a greyhound; the sails white as a swan's wing;
+the cordage that rattled like wood; the bare-footed, bearded sailors;
+the town of Carrickfergus in the offing; the _lap-lap-lap_ of water; the
+silent man at the wheel; the sudden transition of the friendly Raghery
+man into a firm, authoritative figure, quick as a cat, rapping out
+commands like a sergeant-major.
+
+The town of Carrickfergus began to slip by as if drawn by horses. The
+mate ran up the ladder of the poop.
+
+"Topsails, McCafferty!" the Raghery man ordered.
+
+"Topsails, sir."
+
+A minute later there came the mate's voice from amidships:
+
+"Sheet home the topsails--and put your backs into it!"
+
+Patter of feet. An accordion began to whine like a tinker. Creak and
+strain. Faster lapping of water. A song raised in chorus:
+
+  As I came a-tacking down Paradise Street--
+    Yo-ho! Blow the man down!
+  As I came a-tacking down Paradise Street--
+    Give us some time till we blow the man down!
+
+  A trim little bumboat I chanced for to meet!
+    Blow, bullies, blow the man down!
+  A trim little bumboat I chanced for to meet!
+    Give us some time till we blow the man down!
+
+  She was round in the counter and bluff in the bows!
+    Yo-ho! Blow the man down!
+  She was round in the counter and bluff in the bows!
+    Give us some time till we blow the man down.
+    Blow the man down!
+    Blow, bullies! Blow the man down!
+
+
+
+
+PART TWO
+
+THE WAKE AT ARDEE
+
+
+Section 1
+
+The feeling that was uppermost in him as he sat outside the thatched
+cottage in the moonlight, while the wake was within, was not grief at
+his wife's death; not a shattered mind that his life, so carefully laid
+out not twelve months before, was disoriented; not any self-pity; not
+any grievance against God, such as little men might have: but a strange
+dumb wonder. There she lay within, in her habit of a Dominican lay
+sister, her hands waxy, her face waxy, her eyelids closed. And six
+guttering candles were about her, and women droned their prayers with a
+droning as of bees. There she lay with her hands clasped on a wooden
+crucifix. And no more would the robins wake her, and they fussing in the
+great hawthorn-tree over the coming of dawn. No longer would she rake
+the ash from the peat and blow the red of it to a little blaze. No
+longer would she beat his dog out of the house with the handle of the
+broom. No longer would she forgather with the neighbors over a pot of
+tea for a pleasant vindictive chat. No longer would she look out to sea
+for him with her half-loving, half-inimical eyes. No longer in her
+sharpish voice would she recite her rosary and go to bed.
+
+And to-morrow they would bury her--there would be rain to-morrow: the
+wind was sou'east,--they would lower her, gently as though she were
+alive, into a rectangular slot in the ground, mutter alien prayers in an
+alien tongue with business of white magic, pat the mound over as a child
+pats his castle of sand on the sea-shore, and leave her there in the
+rain.
+
+A month from now they would say a mass for her, a year from now another,
+but to-morrow, to-day, yesterday even, she was finished with all of
+life: with the fussy, excited robins of dawn; with the old dog that
+wanted to drowse by the fire; with the young husband who was either too
+much or too little of a man for her; with the clicking beads she would
+tell in her sharpish voice; with each thing; with everything.
+
+And here was the wonder of it, the strange dumb wonder, that the
+snapping of her life meant less in reality to him than the snapping of a
+stay aboard ship. The day after to-morrow he would mount the deck of
+Patrick Russell's boat, and after a few crisp orders would set out on
+the eternal sea, as though she were still alive in her cottage, as
+though indeed she had never even lived, and northward he would go past
+the purple Mull of Cantyre; past the Clyde, where the Ayrshire sloops
+danced like bobbins on the water; past the isles, where overhead drove
+the wedges of the wild swans, trumpeting as on a battle-field; past the
+Hebrides, where strange arctic birds whined like hurt dogs; northward
+still to where the northern lights sprang like dancers in the black
+winter nights; eastward and southward to where the swell of the Dogger
+Bank rose, where the fish grazed like kine. Over the great sea he would
+go as though nothing had happened, not even the snapping of a stay--down
+to the sea, where the crisp winds of dawn were, and the playful, stupid,
+short-sighted porpoises; the treacherous sliding icebergs; and the gulls
+that cried with the sea's immense melancholy; and the great plum-colored
+whales....
+
+
+Section 2
+
+To his nostrils, sterilized as they were by the salt air of the sea, the
+rich scents of Louth came in a rushing profusion. The wild roses of
+June were like the high notes of a violin, and there was clover, and
+mown hay. In the southeast the clouds were banking, but still the moon
+rose high, and the cottage was clear as in daylight, clearer even in the
+mind's eye--the whitewashed walls, the thatch like silver, the swallows'
+nests beneath the eaves. The hard round sea-cobbles beneath his feet
+were clear and individual, and to where he sat in the haggard came a
+girl's song from down the road:
+
+  "Oh, Holland is a wondrous place and in it grows much green.
+  It's a wild inhabitation for my young love to be in.
+  There the sugar-cane grows plentiful, and leaves on every tree,
+  But the low, lowlands of Holland are between my love and me."
+
+He listened with a cocked ear, and smiled as he thought how easy it
+would be to stroll down the road to where the singing girl was, and
+accost her pleasantly: "So he's in Holland, is he? That's the queer and
+foolish place for him to be, and I here!" There would be banter, quick
+and smart as a whip, a scuffle, a clumsily placed kiss, laughter,
+another scuffle, and a kiss that found its mark somehow, then a saunter
+together down the scented loaning while the June moon rode high and the
+crickets sang.
+
+O my God! here he was thinking about love, and his wife lay inside and
+she dead!
+
+And a new light wonder sprang up and whirled within the big dumb wonder
+that was on him: that here was he, a lad not yet twenty-two, with a dead
+wife on his hands, while his shipmates were off with the laughter of
+young women in their ears after the silent and tense watches of the sea.
+His captain had gone home to Newry to where his wife awaited him, the
+tall, graceful woman with the hair like black silk and the black eyes
+and the black ear-rings and the slim, white, enigmatic hands. And the
+first mate had gone to Rostrevor with a blond, giggling girl, and the
+crew were at Sally Bishop's in Dundalk, draining the pints of frothy
+porter and making crude material love to Sally Bishop's blowsy brown
+girls, some chucking their silver out with a laugh--the laugh of men who
+had fought hurricanes, and some bargaining shrewdly.... But here he was,
+home, with his wife, and her dead. And if she hadn't been dead, she
+would have been half loving, half inimical toward him, her arms and
+bosom open, but a great stranger.... He couldn't understand. Well, she
+was dead, and ... he didn't know....
+
+A bent, fattish figure in a shawl came toward him through the haggard,
+his wife's mother. There was the sweetish, acrid odor of whisky.
+
+"Shane _avick_, are you there all alone, mourning for the pleasant,
+beautiful one who's gone?"
+
+"I was just sitting down."
+
+"You wouldn't like a wee drop of consolation?"
+
+"Whisky? No, thanks."
+
+"Just the least taste?"
+
+"No, thanks."
+
+"And I after bringing it out to you in a naggin bottle. Just the wetting
+of your lips, _agra_, would cheer you up, and you down to the ground."
+
+"No!"
+
+The old woman sat on the stone ditch beside him and began swaying
+backward and forward, and the keening note came into her voice:
+
+"Is it gone? Is it gone you are, Moyra _a sthore_? Sure, 't was the
+kindly daughter you were to me, and me old and not worth my salt, a
+broken _cailleach_ hobbling on a stick. Never did you refuse me the cup
+o' tea so strong a mouse could walk on it. And the butcher's meat o'
+Christmas, sure your old ma must have a taste, too. And many's the brown
+egg you let me have, and they bringing a high price on the Wednesday
+market. And the ha'porth o' snuff--sure you never came home without it,
+and you at Dundalk fair. Kindly you were as the rains of April, and my
+heart is ashes now you're gone...."
+
+Shane paced off through the haggard. There was the _glug-glug_ of a
+bottle, and again the sweetish, acrid odor of whisky. He turned back.
+
+"Only to one were you kinder nor to myself and that was to the lad here,
+whose heart is broken for you. Dumb with grief he is, now you're gone.
+And all you did for him! You might have married a strong farmer would
+have a dozen cows, horses would pull a cart or plow, hens by the dozen,
+and flitches of bacon hanging in the kitchen. Or you might have married
+a man had a shop and sat at your ease in the back room, like a lady
+born. Or you might have married a gager and gone to Dublin and mixed
+with the grand quality. And your mother would have a black silk dress,
+and shoes with buttons on them. But you married this young fellow goes
+to sea, so much was the great love on you for him. Love came to you like
+a thunder-storm, and left you trembling like a leaf, and now you're
+dead--ochanee! ochanee! ochanee o!"
+
+Her voice changed from the shrill keen to a shrewd whine:
+
+"You'll be leaving me something to remember her by, Shane Oge, and her a
+fathom deep beneath me in the cold ground. And a trinket or two, or a
+dress, maybe, or a bangle would keep my heart warm?"
+
+"You can have them all."
+
+"All is it? Ah, sure, it's the grand big heart is in you, lad o' the
+North. And are they all to be mine, the silver brooch you bought her
+from the Dutch city, and the ring with the pearl in it, and the dresses
+of silk from France, and the shoes that have buckles? Are they for me,
+hinny?"
+
+"Yes, yes. Take them."
+
+"And the wee furnishings of the house, the feather-bed is soft to lie
+on, and the dresser with the delft, and the creepy stool beside the
+fire, the noble chairs? You wouldn't be selling them to the stranger,
+Shane Oge?"
+
+"No, you can have those, too."
+
+"And the house, too? Young noble fellow, where is your wife's mother to
+lay her gray hairs? Couldn't you fix the house, too?"
+
+"The house is not mine, and I can't afford to buy it."
+
+"But 't is you you are the rich Protestant family. Your uncles and your
+mother, hinny. Rotten with gold they are, and me just a poor old
+_cailleach_ that gave you the white lamb o' the flock."
+
+"We'll look after you. My uncle Alan Campbell will be here in a day or
+so and fix everything. But I'm afraid the house is out of the question."
+
+"Oh, sure it would be a noble thing to have the house, and they around
+me dying with envy of my state and grandeur. At fair or at wake great
+respect they would pay me, and the priests of God would be always
+calling. The house, fine lad, give me the house!"
+
+"You'll have to speak to my Uncle Alan."
+
+"Alan Campbell is a hard Northern man."
+
+"Nevertheless, you'll have to speak to him."
+
+"_A mhic mheirdrighe!_" Her mouth hissed. "O son of a harlot!"
+
+Shane wheeled like a sloop coming about.
+
+"You forget I've got the Gaelic myself, old woman."
+
+"Oh, sure, what did I say, fine lad, but _avick machree_, son of my
+heart? _Avick machree_, I said. O son of my heart, that's what you are.
+You wouldn't take wrong meaning from what an old woman said, and her
+with her teeth gone, and under the black clouds of sorrow!"
+
+A glint in the moonlight caught Shane's eyes. He gripped her right hand.
+
+"Is that Moyra's wedding-ring you have on? Did you--did you--take
+it--from her hand?"
+
+"Oh, sure, what use would she have for it, and she in the sods of
+Ballymaroo? And the grand Australian gold is in it, worth a mint of
+money. And what use would you have for it, and you in strange parts,
+where a passionate foreign woman would be giving you love, maybe? The
+fine lad you are, will draw the heart of many. But it's drawing back
+coldly they'd be, and they seeing that on your finger, or on a ribbon
+around your neck. Drawing back they'd be, and giving the love was yours
+to another fellow. A sin to waste the fine Australian gold it is. And
+you wouldn't begrudge me the price of a couple o' heifers would grow
+into grand cows? You wouldn't, fine lad--"
+
+He flung her hand from him so savagely that she fell, and he went
+swiftly toward the house where the dead woman was. Back of him in the
+haggard came the _glug-glug_ of the naggin bottle, and from down the
+loaning came the rich, untrained contralto of the singing girl:
+
+  "Nor shoe nor stocking will I put on, nor comb go in my hair.
+  And neither coal nor candle-light shine in my chamber fair.
+  Nor will I wed with any young man until the day I die,
+  Since the low lowlands of Holland are between my love and me."
+
+
+Section 3
+
+As he paused at the half-door, the laughter and the chatter in the
+kitchen ceased, and he was aware of the blur of faces around the room,
+white faces of men and women and alien eyes. Over the peat fire--there
+was a fire even in June--the great black kettle sang on the crane, to
+make tea for the mourners. Here and there were bunches of new clay pipes
+scattered, and long rolls of twisted tobacco, for the men to smoke, and
+saucers full of snuff for both men and women. A great paraffin lamp
+threw broad, opaque shadows, making the whole a strange blur in the
+kitchen, while in the bedroom opening off it, where the tense, dead
+woman lay, was a glare of candles as from footlights, and there gathered
+the old women of the neighborhood, discussing everything in hushed,
+vindictive whispers--the price of cows, morbid diseases, the new wife
+some man had, and whether such a girl was with child.... And the dead
+woman, who had loved talk such as this, as a drunkard loves the glass,
+gave no heed.... Strange!... And every hour or so they would flash to
+their knees, like some quick instinctive movement of birds, and now
+carelessly, now over-solemnly they would say a rosary for the dead
+woman's soul:
+
+"_Ar n-Athair, ta ar neamh_--" they would gabble. "Our Father, Who art
+in Heaven--" and then a long suspiration: "'_Se do bheatha, 'Mhuire_!"
+"Hail, Mary! Full of grace!"
+
+But in the kitchen they would be laughing, chatting, playing crude
+forfeits, telling grotesque stories, giving riddles, and now, to the
+muted sound of a melodeon, a man would dance a hornpipe.... And men
+would sneak out to the byre in twos and threes for a surreptitious glass
+of whisky.... And suddenly they would rush in and join in the rosary:
+
+"_Ar n-Athair, ta ar neamh_.... _Se do bheatha, 'Mhuire!_ ..."
+
+It was all so grotesque, so empty, so play-actor-like--so inharmonious
+with Death! Death was very terrible or very peaceful, thought Shane
+Campbell of the sea and the Antrim Glens. "Down from your horse when
+Death or the King goes by," went the Antrim old word. But here the house
+of death was a booth of Punchinello.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+More aware even than of the indignity of it all was he of the hatred
+about him. They hated him for his alien race, his alien faith. Not
+one of the men but would have killed him had they had courage,
+because his head was high, his step firm. The women hated him because he
+had chosen one from among them and given her honor and gifts. And his
+wife's mother hated him with the venomous, nauseous hatred that old
+women bear. And yet they'd have loved him if he'd given way to
+hysterical, unprofound grief, or become ... drunk! They'd have
+understood him. But all they had for him was hatred now. Even the dead
+woman on the bed hated him.... Ah, well, only a day or so more, and he'd
+come about. A leg to leeward, and he'd shake them off as a great ship
+leaves behind it the troublesome traders' bumboats.
+
+There came to him the shrill keening of the old woman as some one
+brought her toward the house:
+
+"Ochanee! Ochanee! Ochanee o! the Shepherd's lamb! She's gone from us!
+The high branch on the pleasant little tree! And what's to become of me
+in my latter days! Me that thought I'd have the beautiful house to live
+in, and a horse and cart, and a wake would be the envy of many, and not
+the curate, but the parish priest himself, to be at the head of the
+funeral. And now I'm to be thrown against the great cruelty of the harsh
+Northern men! Nine black curses against them and theirs, and on my bare
+knees I say it. Och, white gull o' the harbor, why did you die? Ochanee!
+Ochanee!"
+
+The gabbled rosary, the low laughter in the kitchen, the clink of
+glasses, the howling of the _cailleach_--all these noises repulsed him
+like a forefront of battle. So he did not go into the house, but took
+his hand from the half-door and returned to the haggard, to the grave,
+understanding silence of the moon.
+
+
+Section 4
+
+Because he was so young, and thought he knew so much when in reality he
+knew so little, young Shane had thought, when he met Moyra Dolan, that
+he had discovered the morning star. Five and a half years at sea, as
+apprentice and navigator, had shown his eyes much and his heart little.
+He knew Bermuda and the harbor of Kingston. He had beaten up the China
+Seas. He had seen the clouds over Table Mountain. He knew Baltimore. He
+had seen the bowsprits of the great Indiamen thrust over the quays of
+Poplar parish like muskets leveled over a barricade. And to him it was
+just a wonder, a strange spectacle. The streets were strange as in a
+dream, and the folk were strange as in a play. One wandered down an
+avenue, seeing the queer commodities in the shops and booths. One
+wandered to the right. One wandered to the left. And there was great
+delight to finding a street one had seen before, maybe only five minutes
+ago, and one felt one was getting somewhere, was understanding the new
+country.
+
+But one never did understand the new country. All the people were
+strange. One could not imagine them about the daily business of life,
+waking, eating, buying, and selling. Black men and ocher-colored folk.
+There seemed to be a mystery somewhere. One imagined them gathering at
+night in secret to begin their real un-understood life. At times it
+seemed impossible that it was the same world. Surely the sun that struck
+like a hammer in Jamaica could not be the gracious warm planet that
+gilded the gorse of the Antrim glens. And up the Baltic in mid-winter it
+was bleak as a candle, and even then in Antrim it had a great
+kindliness. Nor were the winds the same. The hot puffs of the Indian
+Ocean, the drunken, lurching flaws of Biscay Bay, the trades that worked
+steadily as ants, had not the human quality of the winds of the Nine
+Glens, that were now angry as an angry man, now gentle as a gentle
+woman.
+
+Only one thing was constant, and that was the women whom sailors know in
+ports. And they wore masks. The same easily forced laughter, the same
+crude flattery, the complacent arms, the eternal eager hand....
+
+And then one day the new port palled, like a book one has read too
+often, or a picture one has looked at over-long. And it was sheet home
+the royals and off to a new port, where there were new strange people,
+and streets laid another way, and other things in the merchants' booths,
+and a new language to pick up a phrase or two of.
+
+But in the end all palled for a time, the aphrodisiac tropic smell; the
+coral waters, clear as well water at home; the white houses with the
+green jalousies; the lush, coarse green. And the melancholic drums of
+the East palled. And palled the grimness of the North. And the unceasing
+processional of strange secret faces wearied the eye and the mind. And
+the angular spiritual edges of shipmates wore toward one through the
+uniform of flesh, became annoying, sometimes unbearable.
+
+And then an immense yearning would come over young Shane for the beloved
+faces in the lamplight, for the white road over the purple heather, for
+the garden where the greened sun-dial was, with its long motto in the
+Irish letter:
+
+  _Is mairg a baidhtear in am an anaithe
+  Na tig an ghrian in dhiaidh na fearthainne_--
+
+as if anybody didn't know that, that it was a pity to be drowned in time
+of storm, for the sun shines brightly when the rain goes!
+
+But the sun-dial was mirrored in his heart, and the purple mountain and
+the great dun house. The winds he sniffed as a hunting dog does, and
+each tack to port or starboard either thrilled or cast him down.... When
+would he get there? Would it be cool of the evening, when the bats were
+out? Or would it be in the sunshine of the morning, when a great smell
+was from the heather? And who would hear the wicket-gate click as the
+latch was lifted, and put a welcome before him with a great shout,
+uncles Alan or Robin, or a servant girl or boy, or the bent old gardener
+who kept the lawn true as a bowling-green?... Or would it be his mother?
+
+
+Section 5
+
+Aboard ship the young apprentices had their problems, problems of
+conduct, or of girls at home, or of money in port, but for young Shane
+there was always the problem of his mother.
+
+At home he had regarded as a matter of fact that she should come and go
+in her hard, efficient French way. It had not seemed strange to him that
+her mouth was tight, her eyes hard as diamonds. It was to him one with
+his Uncle Robin's solemnity and Alan Donn's gruff sportsmanship. But
+away from home he thought of it, brooded over it. Her letters to him
+were so curt, so cut and dried! She wrote of the birth of another child
+to young Queen Victoria,--as if that mattered a tinker's curse!--or how
+her Holland bulbs, which she had bought at Belfast, had withered and
+died. She directed him "to pray God to keep him pure in mind and body,
+your affectionate mother, Louise de Damery Campbell." Alan Donn's
+letters had the grand smell of harness about them. "You'll mind the
+brown gelding we bought at Ballymena. He disgraced us at Dublin in the
+jumping competitions. You know he can jump his own height, but he got
+the gate after three tries. I could have graet like a bairn. Well, this
+will be all from your loving Uncle Alan. P.S. I caught the white trout
+in Johnson's Brae burn. I was after him, and he was dodging me for six
+years. Your loving Uncle Alan, P.P.S. The championship is at Newcastle
+this year, and I think I've a grand chance. If you're home, you can
+caddy for me. Your loving Uncle Alan."
+
+Uncle Robin's letters had vast wisdom. "Ay be reading the books, laddie.
+An ill-educated man feels always at a disadvantage among folk of talent.
+Aboard ship you can read and think more than at a university. I've got a
+parcel for you to take when you go again. Hakluyt's Voyages and a good
+Marco Polo. And the new book of Mr. Dickens, 'The Haunted Man.' And
+there's a great new writer you'll not want to miss, by name of
+Thackeray." And there'd be the Bank of England note, "for fear you might
+be needing it on a special occasion, and not having it, and feeling
+bad." Dear Uncle Robin! And then the flash of tenderness, like a
+rainbow: "God bless you and keep you, my brother's son!"
+
+His Uncle Robin's letters he would greet with a smile, and perhaps a bit
+moistness in the eye; Alan Donn's with a grin, as an elder brother's.
+But his mother's letters he would approach with a coldness akin to fear.
+He hated to open them. It was like an unpleasant duty.
+
+The realization of her was always a chilling disappointment, but the
+dream of her was a great hope. And in the black waters of the China
+Seas, or in the night watches off the Azores, where the porpoises played
+in the phosphorescence, there would come a sea-change over the knowledge
+he had of her. All the spiritual, all the mental angles of her faded
+into gracious line, and on the tight French lips of her a smile would
+play as a flower opens, and her eyes, hard as diamonds, would open and
+become kindly as a lighted house. And the strange things of the heart
+would come out, like little shy rabbits, or like the young tortoises,
+and bask in that kindly picture. And the things that were between them,
+that could not be said, but just sensed, as the primroses of spring are
+sensed, not seen, not felt, hardly smelt even, but sensed.... The
+hesitant deep things he would say and the dignified, smiling answer, or
+the pressure of the hand even, and the inclination of the shoulder....
+
+And the people he would meet who would ask him about his mother, and he
+could answer nothing, so that they thought him stupid and unthoughtful.
+But really what was there to say?... And once when he sprang into Biscay
+Bay after a cabin-boy who had fallen over the taffrail, and the lad's
+mother had thanked him in Plymouth for saving the child's life: "Your
+mother will be very proud of you," the old woman said. But the reality
+of the harsh Frenchwoman came to him like a slap in the face. "Christ,
+if she only were!" his heart cried. But the clipped little Scots-Irish
+voice replied, "Aye, I suppose she will."
+
+And again the soft mood would come, and then he would have a letter from
+her, ending with that harsh command, that was a gust of some bleak
+tempest of her own life, where his father had perished: "Pray God to
+keep you pure in mind and body!"
+
+And homeward bound again, in the soft murmur of the wind among the
+shrouds, and the little laughter of the water at the bows, there would
+abide with him again the dream mother of the night watches, until he
+said to himself that surely the reality was false, and at the
+garden-gate she would be waiting for him with a great depth of kindness
+in her eyes, and arms warm as sunshine, and a bosom where a boy might
+rest his head for a moment after the great harshness of the strange
+places.
+
+But the kindliness came not from her. It came from Robin More, who ran
+down the garden faster than his dignity should have allowed him. "Are
+you all right, wee Shane? Is everything all right with you? You're
+looking fine, but you haven't been sick, wee fellow? Tell me, you
+haven't been sick?" Or from Alan Donn, with his great snort of
+laughter: "Christ! are you home again? And all the good men that's been
+lost at sea! Well, the devil's childer have the devil's luck. Eigh,
+laddie, gie's a feel o' ye. _A Righ_--O King of Graces, but you're the
+lean pup! Morag, Nellie, Cassie, some tea! and be damned quick about
+it!"
+
+And then his mother would come into the room, like a cold wind or a thin
+ghost, and there would be a kiss on the cheek, a cold, precise peck,
+like a bird's. And, "Did you have a good voyage?" just as if she said,
+"Do you think we'll have rain?"
+
+Oh, well, to hell with it! as Alan Donn said when he flubbed his
+approach to the last green for some championship or other. "What you
+never had, you never lost!"
+
+Aye, true indeed. What you never had you couldn't very well lose. Aye,
+there was a lot in that. Just so; but--
+
+Boys do be thinking long....
+
+
+Section 6
+
+Because his Uncle Alan was in Scotland somewhere shooting deer and would
+not be home for several days, and because Uncle Robin was in Paris, and
+because the _Goban Saor_ put into Dundalk to take a cargo of unbleached
+linen, young Shane decided to stay there for a few days before
+proceeding northward to the Antrim Glens. He felt he couldn't face the
+house at Cushendu with his cold, precise mother alone there, so he
+accepted the hospitality of an apprentice friend.
+
+It was at a country barn dance during these few days that he met Moyra
+Dolan.
+
+A tallish, tawny-haired woman with the dead-white skin that goes with
+reddish hair, with steel for eyes, there was a grace and carriage to her
+that put her aside from the other peasant girls as a queen may
+masquerade as a slave and yet betray herself as a queen. Other girls
+there were as pretty, with their hair like flax and their eyes like blue
+water; with hair like a dim blue cloud and eyes like a smudge of
+charcoal. But none had her teeth, her small ankles, her long, sensitive
+hands. Some strain of the Stuart cavaliers had crept into that hardy
+peasant stock on the way to the defeat of the Boyne Water.... She might
+have seemed nothing but a pretty lady's maid in London or Dublin but in
+North Louth she was like a queen....
+
+Her looks were her tragedy, for she held herself too good for a
+laboring man to marry, and, having no dower, no farmer would have her.
+Among the peasantry romance does not count, but land. And if the Queen
+of Sheba, and she having nothing but her shift, were to offer herself in
+marriage to a strong farmer, he would refuse her for the cross-eyed
+woman in the next townland who had twenty acres and five good milch
+cows.... Only for the very rich or the very poor is romance!
+
+Her only chance for marriage was a matter of luck. She would have to
+meet some government official, or some medical student home on his
+holidays, or some small merchant whom her beauty would unbalance, as
+drink would unbalance him. And she must dazzle, and her old mother play
+and catch him, as a jack pike is dazzled by a spoon bait, hooked, and
+brought ashore. She might marry or might miss, or grow into an acidulous
+red-headed woman. It was a matter of luck. And her luck was in. She met
+young Shane Campbell.
+
+They danced together. They wandered in the moonlight. They met in the
+country lanes. And they were very silent, she because she played a game,
+and a counter is better than a lead, and he because he was in love with
+her. Had it been only a matter of sweethearting, he would have been
+merry as a singing bird, full of chatter, roughing it with her for a
+kiss. But it was love with him, and a thing for life, and life was long
+and more serious than death.... So he was silent.
+
+He was silent when he went home for a week, silent with uncles Robin and
+Alan, who sensed he was going through one of the crises of adolescence,
+and knew the best thing to do was to leave him alone. He was silent with
+his mother, who saw nothing, cared nothing, so intent was she on
+revolving within herself as inexorably as the planets revolve in space.
+He decided to spend the last days of his leave in Dundalk. And at the
+railroad station in Ballymena he hazarded a look at Alan Donn.
+
+"Uncle Alan--" and he stopped.
+
+"What is it, laddie? Is it a girl troubling you? Take my advice and look
+her in the eyes and, 'You can love me or leave me, and to hell with
+you!' tell her. 'Do you see this right foot of mine?' says you. 'Well,
+it's pointed to the next townland, where there's just as pretty a one as
+you.' And you'll find her come around; maybe there'll be a bit of an
+argument, but she'll come around. And if she doesn't, there'd have been
+no hope for you, anyway. A touch o' the spur for the lazy mare and a bit
+sugar for the jumper! And when you've done loving her, gie her a chuck
+in the chin: 'Good-by! Good luck! What you keep to yoursel' 'll worry
+nobody,' says you. And to hell with her!"
+
+"Alan Donn!"
+
+"Oh, it's that way, is it, Shaneen? If you're in deep water, there's
+none but yourself can help you, laddie. I thought it was just maybe a
+case o' laugh and kiss me. But it's different, is it? There's no use
+giving advice. What's in you will out. But remember this: when it's
+over, for good or bad, your Uncle Alan's here, to laugh with you or
+greet with you or help you out of a hole. So--
+
+"Good-by, laddie. _Beannacht leat!_ My blessing with you!"
+
+
+Section 7
+
+"Young lad, what is this you have done to my fine young daughter?"
+
+"I have done nothing, Bhean 'i Dolain," young Shane flared up, "save in
+honor, and the man or woman who says other lies."
+
+"Agra, I know that. I know there's no harm in you from head to foot. And
+the trouble you've put on her is in her heart. All day long she sighs,
+and is listless as a shaded plant that does be needing the sun. All
+night long she keeps awake, and the wee silent tears come down her face.
+And before my eyes she's failing, and her step that was once light now
+drags the like of a cripple's. Young lad of the North, you've put love
+in the heart of her and sorrow in the mind."
+
+"I'm not so sprightly in the mind myself, woman Dolan."
+
+"I know, avick. I know. Isn't it myself that's suffered the seven pangs
+of love and I a young girl? But it's easy on a man, avick. He can go
+into the foreign countries, and put it out of his mind, or take to the
+drink and numb the great pain. But for a woman it's different. It's the
+like of a disfiguration that all can see. And when you're gone away,
+sure all will remember, for men do be minding long. The marrying time
+will come, and they'll look at my grand young daughter: strong farmer,
+and merchant of the shop, and drover does be going to England for the
+cattle-fairs, and they'll say: 'Isn't that the red girl gave love to the
+sailing fellow, and burnt her heart out so that there's no sap in it for
+me?' And they'll pass her by, my grand young daughter, that's the equal
+of any."
+
+"And what would you have me do, woman of the house?"
+
+"What would any decent man do but marry her?"
+
+"Aye!... Aye! I thought of marrying her, if she'd have me.... But we
+hardly know each other yet ... and maybe I'm too young...."
+
+"If you're able to handle a ship, you're able to handle a woman, young
+lad. And what time is better for marriage nor the first flush of youth?
+Sure you grow together like the leaves upon the tree. Let you not be
+putting it off now, but spring like a hero."
+
+"But isn't the matter of her faith between us, woman of the house?"
+
+"And sure that can be fixed later. Will the priest mind, do you think,
+so long as she does her duty? And a sixpence in the plate on Sunday is
+better nor a brown ha'penny, and a half-sovereign at Easter will soothe
+black anger like healing grass. Very open in thought I am, and I knowing
+the seven pangs of love. Let you go to your own clergyman, and she'll go
+with you, I'll warrant, so eaten is she by love."
+
+"My people, woman o' the house--"
+
+"Your people, is it? Sure it isn't your people is marrying my grand
+young daughter, but you yourself. The old are crabbit, and they do be
+thinking more of draining a field, or of the price of flax, nor of the
+pain and delights of love. And it's always objections. But there can be
+no objecting when the job's finished."
+
+She looked at him shrewdly.
+
+"A grand influence, a grand steadying influence is marriage on a sailing
+man. It keeps you from spending your money in foreign ports, where you
+only buy trickery for your silver. And when you have a wife at home,
+you'll have little truck with fancy women, who have husbands behind the
+screen, sometimes, and them with knives.... So I've heard tell.... Or
+maybe get an evil sickness. Listen to an old woman has wisdom, bold
+lad."
+
+"When I come from my voyage...."
+
+"Dark lad, if anything happens to you, and you drowning in the black
+water, the great regret that will be on you and the water gurgling into
+your lungs, and, 'Wasn't I the fool of the world,' you'll say, 'that
+might have heard the crickets singing in the night-time and my white
+love by my side? And might have had power of kissing and lovemaking, but
+was young and foolish, and lay be my lee lone....'"
+
+But this was the wrong tack, the old woman noticed, and came about.
+
+"And all the time you're away, my daughter will be pining for you,
+drooping and pining, my grand young daughter, and the spring will go out
+of her step and the light from her eyes and the luster from the hair
+that's a wonder to all.... Oh, isn't it the cruel thing?"
+
+"My ship sails the day after to-morrow."
+
+She saw surrender in his face, rose quickly, and went to the door.
+
+"Come inside, Moyra, Moyreen! And be putting your cloak on, with the
+ribbons that tie beneath your chin. And your dress of muslin that the
+lady in Newry gave you. And stockings. And your shoes of leather. And
+I'll be putting on my Paisley shawl. And this young boy will be getting
+Michael Doyle's horse and trap. Come in, Moyreen, come in and put haste
+on you, for it's going to Dundalk we are, this day, this hour, this
+minute even!"
+
+
+Section 8
+
+It occurred to him as he sat in the haggard under the riding moon, not a
+pitch shot from the house where his wife was being waked, that nothing
+was disturbed because she was dead. It was not strange that the stars
+kept on their courses, for the death of neither king nor cardinal nor
+the wreck of the greatest ship that ever sailed the seas would not move
+them from their accustomed orbit. But not a robin in the hedge was
+disturbed, not a rabbit in the field, not a weasel in the lane. Nature
+never put off her impenetrable mask. Or did she really not care? And was
+a human soul less to her than a worm in the soil?
+
+There was a stir in the house. They would be making tea now for the men
+and women who said they were mourners.... The querulous voice of his
+wife's mother came to him as some one led her from the heated house into
+the coolth of the June night.
+
+"Great sacrifices we made for him, myself and the white love that's
+stretched beyond in the room. All we had we gave him, and all she found
+was barren death, and I the barren charity of Northern men...."
+
+"Oh, sure, 'tis the pity of the world you are, Pegeen," a neighbor
+comforted her.
+
+"On his bended knees he came to her, asking for love," the _cailleach_
+went on. "On his bare and bended knees. And her heart melted toward him
+as the snow melts on the hills. 'And hadn't you better wait,' said I,
+'Moyreen Roe? With the great looks and the grand carriage of you, 'tis
+a great match you can make surely. A gentleman from England, maybe,
+would have a castle and fine lands, or the pick of the dealing men, and
+they going from Belfast to Drogheda and stopping overnight at Ardee. Or
+wouldn't it be better for you to marry one of your own kind, would go to
+church with you in a kindly way?'
+
+"'But if I don't marry this lad, he'll kill himself,' she says to me.
+
+"'But your faith,' says I, ''avourneen, your holy faith, surely you will
+not be forsaking that for this boy!'"
+
+"And what did she say to that, Pegeen?" the neighbor asked.
+
+"'Sure it's promised to turn he has,' she answered. 'And do everything
+is right by me, so much I love him!'"
+
+"The treacherous Ulster hound!" The neighbor inveighed.
+
+"Treacherous by race and treacherous by nature. Sure, can't you see it,
+the way he treats me? Sorrow word he has for me, that bore the wife of
+his bosom, barring, 'Alan Donn Campbell will see you and fix up
+everything.' And haven't I met Alan Campbell once before, and it's the
+cold eye he has and the hard heart. And this is all the return I get for
+bearing the white darling would be fit mate for a king. There was a
+publican of Dundalk had an eye on her, a big red-faced, hearty man. And
+she might have married him but this lad came and spoiled everything. And
+if she'd married him, I'd have been sitting in the parlor of the public
+house, in a seemly black dress and a brooch in the bosom of it, taking
+my pinch of snuff and my strong cup of tea with a drop of Hollands in it
+would warm the cockles of your heart, and listening to the conversation
+of the fine customers and them loosening up with the drink. And the ould
+grannies would have courtesied to me and hate in their hearts. But now a
+leaf on the wind am I, a broken twig on the stream. And the black men of
+Ulster have me for a plaything, the men that have a hatred for me and my
+kind, so that it's a knife they'd put in you, or poison in your tea--"
+
+"Let you be coming in now, Pegeen. Let you be coming in now. And take a
+cup of tea would put heart in you, or something strong, maybe. And then
+we'll be saying a prayer for her who's gone--"
+
+"Dead she is, the poor heart, dead she is, and better off nor I am--"
+
+Her high querulousness died away as she went into the house, and again
+was the silence of the riding moon. All her grief, all her lies, all
+her bitterness had not stirred a leaf upon the bough. Not a robin in
+the hedge was disturbed by her calamity, not a rabbit in the field, not
+a weasel in the lane....
+
+
+Section 9
+
+He thought to himself: had they rushed him into this marriage? And he
+answered himself truthfully, they had not. He could have said no, and
+stood by his no, young as he was, against every old woman and every
+young woman in the world. No, fast as they had worked, they hadn't
+worked faster than his thought had.
+
+And did he marry because he was in love with Moyra Dolan? He was in love
+with her, he conceded that. For what the term was accepted at, he was in
+love with her. Women he had met in his twenty years, great ladies of the
+Ulster clans; shy, starched misses from the Friends' School; moody
+peasant girls; merry women of the foreign ports, and to none of them had
+he felt that strange yearning he had felt toward Moyra Dolan, the
+strange pull that sends the twig in the diviner's hands down toward the
+hidden water. Yes, he was in love with her, but was it because of that
+he had married her? And he truthfully answered, no.
+
+He remembered, the mood coming back to him as concretely as an action,
+what he had thought while the old woman had wheedled him with her voice
+like butter. All he had thought in his prentice days at sea, all he had
+thought of in the night watches, all he had thought of in the loneliness
+of his mother's house, had gathered like great cloud-banks at night, and
+had suddenly taken form and color and purpose in that one moment, as a
+cloud-bank at the coming of the sun.... Life had appeared to him in one
+brief moment, and he had tried to grasp it.
+
+It had seemed to him right that he would go down to the sea in ships all
+his days, and trade in foreign ports, and work, transmuting effort into
+gain, and should come home to rest.
+
+And for whom was the gain? And where was home? Surely not for himself
+was the gain, and home was not his cold mother's house? And now that he
+had come to manhood as boys come at sea, braving danger and thinking
+mightily, it was for him to decide.
+
+A mirage, a seeming, a thing to look at, to go get bravely had come into
+his mind in little pictures, like prints in a book. A thing of
+simplicity, simple as the sea, and as colorful and as wholesome and as
+beautiful. He thought of a little thatched and whitewashed house with a
+cobbled yard clean as a ship's decks, and a garden where the bluish
+green stalks and absurdly pretty flowers of potatoes would come in
+spring, and one side would be the red and white of the clover, and on
+the other would be the minute blue flower of the flax; and an old dog
+drowsing on the threshold.... And this would be in his mind as he
+wandered the hot foreign streets.... And there would be the droning of
+the bees in the clover, and the swish of the swallows darting to and
+from the eaves, and in the evening would be the singing of the
+crickets.... And these he would hear over the capstan's clank.... When
+he tumbled into his cabin after his watch, into the heeling room where
+the lamp swung overhead like a crazy thing, and all was a litter of
+oilskins and sea-boots, and a great dampness everywhere, he would know
+there was a swept cottage in Louth where the delft shone on the dresser
+in the kindly light of the turf, and there would be a spinning-wheel in
+the corner, and big rush-bottomed chairs, and the kettle singing on the
+hob.... And when his comrades would leave the ship in port of nights to
+go to the houses where music and dancing were, and crazy drinking, and
+where the adroit foreign women held out their arms of mystery and
+mercenary romance, he would lean over the taffrail and laugh and shake
+his head:
+
+"No, I think I'll stay on board." "Come on, young Shane. There's a woman
+down at Mother Parkinson's and they say she's an Austrian archduchess
+who has run away with a man, and got left. Come on." Or, "There's a big
+dance over on the beach to-night, and a keg of rum, and the native
+women. Jump in." "No, I think I'll stay on board and read." "Come on.
+Don't be a fool." "No, go ahead and enjoy yourselves. I'll stay on
+board." And there would be the plash of oars as they rowed shoreward,
+and maybe a song raised.... And he would make himself comfortable under
+the awning of the after deck, and read the bundles of newspapers from
+home, of how Thomas Chalmers, the great Scottish preacher, was dead, or
+how a new great singer had been heard in London, a Swedish girl, her
+name was Jenny Lind, or how Shakspere's house had been bought and a
+great price paid for it, three thousand pounds.... Or he would read one
+of the new books that were coming out in a flood, a new one by Mr.
+Dickens, the bite of the new writer, Mr. Thackeray with his "Vanity
+Fair," or that strange book written by a woman, "Wuthering Heights"....
+But in a little minute the volume would fall to his knees, and the
+people of the book would leave the platform of his mind, and a real,
+warmer presence come to it.... He could see the gracious, kindly
+womanhood now move through the house, now come to the door to watch the
+far horizon.... Of evenings she would stand dreaming at the lintel while
+he was leaning dreaming over the taffrail, and though there were ten
+thousand miles between them their hearts would be intimate as
+pigeons.... And he would think of coming home to the peaceful cottage
+and the wife with the grave eyes and kindly smile, and if he were a day
+ahead of time, she would forget her reserve in great joy, and low,
+pleased laughter would jet from her throat.... And if he were on time,
+there would be the quiet grave confidence: "I knew your step!" ... And
+if he were late, there would be the passing of the cloud from the brows:
+"Thank God! I--I was--just a trifle worried!" ... And the greetings
+over, she would look at him with a smile and a little lift of the
+eyebrows, and he would give her what he had brought from the voyage: a
+ring from Amsterdam, maybe, where the great jewelers are, or heavy
+silken stockings of France; or had he gone to the West Indies, a great
+necklet of red coral; or some fancy in humming-birds' feathers from the
+Brazils; lace from Porto Rico, that the colored women make with their
+slim brown fingers; things of hammered brass from India; and were he to
+China in the tea-trade, a coat such as a mandarin's lady would wear....
+And with each gift there would be gasp of incredulous surprise, and "O
+Shaneen, you shouldn't have!" ... And then the evening would come, and
+they would stand on the threshold, and he would listen to the sounds the
+seamen never hear: the swish and ripple of the wind among the trees, the
+birds settling themselves to sleep amid the boughs, the bittern that
+boomed like a horn, and the barking of a distant dog, and the crickets
+that do be singing when the evening falls.... And he would turn from
+that to find her arms out and her lips apart, who could wait no longer,
+and together they would go into their house, where the red turf had
+turned yellow--together, over their own threshold, into their own
+house.... And when the time came for him to go to sea again, she would
+be grave with unshed tears and a brave smile.... And one day after a
+long voyage, when she had greeted him, she would say, "Some one has come
+to our house!" and he wouldn't understand, and be annoyed, until she
+showed him the little warm head in the cradle, and he would drop on his
+knees reverentially, and there would be great silent tears from him,
+and all her heart would show in her quiet smile....
+
+And never an old woman on Naples quay would ask him for an alms but
+would get it, he thinking all the time of the old woman with the
+tow-like hair who abode in his house, his wife's mother. And she would
+be comfortable there in her old days, with always a fire to warm her,
+and always a cup of tea to cheer her up, and a kindly ear for her
+stories of ancient days, and a thanks for the alien rosaries she would
+say, praying for his safe return from the almighty waters.... And never
+a dog on his travels but would get a pat and a whistle, and he thinking
+of the grizzled terrier in Louth that guarded the threshold of quiet
+beauty....
+
+And so he would have been content to live all his days, so he thought he
+would live, going down to the dangers of the sea, trading in strange
+ports, and transmuting hard, untiring effort into gain for her at home
+and her children, and he would grow old and grizzled, until he could no
+longer brace to a heeling plank or stand the responsibility of a ship's
+mastery, and then they would buy a little house on some harbor, while
+their sons went rolling down to Rio or fought the typhoon in the China
+Seas, and he could sit there with his telescope, watching the ships go
+by, or come in and out hauling up mainsail or making their mooring, and
+grumbling pleasantly at how good seamanship fades and dies....
+
+All this he had thought out in the loneliness of foreign ports, in the
+night watches aboard ship, in the inhospitality of his mother's house,
+and on the jaunting-car to Dundalk. All this he had thought out, and on
+its basis gone into marriage. And it would just have been as well for
+him, better perhaps, had he thrown a coin into the air to find out
+whether he should marry or no.
+
+And that was what human thought was worth--a brown penny thrown into the
+empty air!
+
+"_Gloir do'n Athair, agas do'n Mhac, agas do'n Spiorad Naomh_," went the
+drone of the rosary within. "Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and
+to the Holy Ghost, Amen!"
+
+
+Section 10
+
+And the house that he had known in a dream was no more in reality than a
+cold strange dwelling; all was there, the whitewash, the thatch, the
+delft on the dresser, but as a home it was stillborn. The turf did not
+burn well and the swallows shunned the eaves, feeling, in nature's
+occult way, that the essential rhythm was wanting. Nor would bees be
+happy in the skips, but must swarm otherward. One would have said the
+house was built on some tragic rock....
+
+Only the old dog was faithful, and stayed where his master put him.
+
+And the face he had dreamed would not look toward him over the
+illimitable ocean. Seek as he would, it was never there, with warm
+gravity. His eyes might strive, but all they would see was the oily
+swell of the Dogger Bank, and the great plowed field of Biscay Bay, and
+the smash of foam against the Hebrides. Never would a space in the
+watery horizon open and show him a threshold of beauty with quiet,
+brooding face.... And when he came home, either late or early, or on
+time to the moment, it was, "Och, is it yourself?" And the only
+interruption to the house was the little more trouble he caused. And his
+gifts were treated tepidly, though with cupidinous eyes. In the evening,
+if he stood on the threshold, it was: "Wisha, is it going out you are?
+And isn't it enough of the fresh air you have, and you on the salt
+water?" And her embraces were half chastity, half sin, tepidly
+passionate, unintimate ... so that shame was on him, and no pride or
+joyousness.... Cold! cold! cold!... A cold house, a cold woman.... No
+light or warmth or graciousness....
+
+And the old woman whom he had thought of as warm and peaceful by the
+fire was a hag with a peasant's cupidity: "And isn't it a little more
+you can be leaving us, darling lad, what with the high price that does
+be on things in this place and you not spending a brown ha'penny aboard
+ship?... And herself might be taken sick now, and wouldn't it be a grand
+thing, a wee store of money in the house? Or the wars might come, find
+you far on the sea! An extra sovereign now, brave fellow, a
+half-sovereign itself!"
+
+And when he left it was of less import than the cow going dry. Only one
+mourned him, the old dog. Only one remembered him, the half-blind badger
+hound, that dreamed of ancient hunting days....
+
+And he would go down to his ship, heartbroken, when none was looking a
+mist of tears in his eyes,--he was not yet twenty-one,--but in a day or
+so that would pass, and the sea that was so strong would give him of its
+strength and heal him, so that after a few days he could stand up and
+say: "Well.... Huuh.... Well...."
+
+A trick had been played him, like some tricks the sea and sun play. Afar
+off he had seen an island like an appointed dancing place, like the
+Green of Fiddlers, and he had asked to be put ashore there, to live and
+be a permanent citizen. And when he was landed, he found that his
+dancing place was only a barren rock where the seagulls mourned. Past
+the glamour of the sun and sea mists, there were only cold, searching
+winds and dank stone....
+
+But he came of a race that are born men, breed men, and kill men. Crying
+never patched a hole in a brogue, and a man who's been fooled is no
+admirable figure, at least to Antrim men. So shut your mouth! When a
+master loses a ship he gets no other. That is the inexorable rule of the
+sea. So when a man wrecks his life....
+
+What he had decided was this: go ahead. He had been fooled; pay the
+forfeit. Retreat into his own heart, and go ahead. Thirty, forty
+years.... He had himself to blame. And it wasn't as if he had to live in
+the house all the time; he had only to come back there. All that was
+killed was his heart. His frame was still stolid, his eye clear....
+There would be little oases here and there, some great record of a
+voyage broken, friends bravely made, a kiss now and then, freely,
+gallantly given.... But ... go ahead!
+
+And then suddenly death had come, and the scheme of life was broken,
+like a piece from the end of a stick. Death he had seen before, but
+never so close to him. A good man had died and he had said: "God!
+there's a pity!" though why he didn't know. And a young girl might die,
+and it would seem like a tragedy in a play. And a child would die, and
+he would feel hurt and say, "Yon's cruelty, yon!" And death had seemed
+to be an ultimate word.
+
+But never before now had he seen the ramifications of death. Life had
+seemed to him to be a straight line, and suddenly he was inspired to the
+knowledge that it was a design, a pattern, a scheme.... And now he felt
+it was only a tool, like a knife, or scissors, in the hands of what?...
+What? Destiny?... or what?...
+
+
+Section 11
+
+"_A chraoibhin aoibhinn!_ O pleasant little branch, is there regard in
+you for the last words of the dead woman?" The old _cailleach_ had come
+again to ruffle the grave silence about young Shane in the haggard.
+
+"Was it--was it anything for me?"
+
+"And whom would it be for, _acushla veg?_ Sure the love of her heart
+you were, the white love of her heart. You and me she was thinking of,
+her old mother that saw a power of trouble. Ill-treated I was by
+Sergeant Dolan, who fought old Bonaparte in the foreign wars, and took
+to drinking in the dreadful days of peace. Harsh my life was, and
+peaceful should my end be, the like of a day that does be rainy, and
+turns fine at evening-time. And that was what she wanted, _a charaid
+bhig_, little friend o' me."
+
+"What now?"
+
+"She said to me, and she dying in my arms and the blue spirit coming out
+of the red lips of her--och! achanee!--'Sure it's not in that grand
+Northern lad to see you despised in your old age, and the grannies of
+the neighborhood laughing at you who boasted often. The wee house he'll
+give you--the wee house is comfortable for an old woman--'"
+
+"But the house isn't mine. It's Alan Donn Campbell's. It isn't mine to
+give, and I haven't the money to buy it. All the money I have is my pay
+and what my uncles give me--and they won't see you want."
+
+"But isn't it the grand rich Northern family you are? And won't there be
+money coming to you when your uncles and mother die?"
+
+"I suppose so."
+
+"Well now, agra, a few of us have been thinking. And Manus McGinty, the
+priest's brother, is willing to advance you the money at interest, to be
+paid him when your people die. And you can buy the house, and a slip of
+a pig I can be fattening against the Christmas market."
+
+"No!"
+
+"Och, agra," she whined, "you wouldn't go back on the words of the poor
+girl, and her dying in my arms? And she was thinking of you when she
+should have been thinking of her God! And the grand subtle things she
+said of you, that only a woman can understand! Sure it was of love for
+you she died, you being away so long from her on the salt and bitter
+sea--"
+
+"Listen, woman Dolan. I heard how Moyra died as I came through the
+village. She died as she was beating my poor old hound. She dropped dead
+from the passion in her, like a shot man. So where's all your love and
+your long dying wishes as she lay in your arms?"
+
+He arose and walked away from her, through the haggard, under the sky,
+where the southeast cloud-banks rolled steadily toward the placid moon.
+And there was silence for an instant, so speechless he left her. And
+then suddenly her ancient shrill voice cut the air like a drover's
+whip:
+
+"You Orange bastard!"
+
+
+Section 12
+
+The feeling that was uppermost in him as he sat outside the thatched
+cottage in the moonlight while the wake was within was not grief at his
+wife's death; not a shattered mind that his life so carefully laid out
+not twelve months before was disoriented; not any self-pity; not any
+grievance against God such as little men might have. But a strange dumb
+wonder.... There she lay within, in her habit of a Dominican lay sister,
+her hands waxy, her face waxy, her eyelids closed. And six guttering
+candles were about her, and woman droned their prayers with a droning as
+of bees. There she lay with her hands clasped on a wooden crucifix. And
+no more would the robins wake her, and they fussing in the great
+hawthorn-tree over the coming of dawn. No longer would she rake the ash
+from the peat and blow the red of it to a little blaze. No longer would
+she beat his dog out of the house with the handle of the broom. No
+longer would she forgather with the neighbors over a pot of tea for a
+pleasant vindictive chat. No longer would she look out to sea for him
+with her half-loving, half-inimical eyes. No longer in her sharpish
+voice would she recite her rosary and go to bed.
+
+And to-morrow they would bury her--there would be rain to-morrow: the
+wind was sou'east,--they would lower her, gently as though she were
+alive, into a rectangular slot in the ground, mutter alien prayers in an
+alien tongue with business of white magic, pat the mound over as a child
+pats his castle of sand on the sea-shore--and leave her there in the
+rain.
+
+A month from now they would say a mass for her, a year from now another,
+but to-morrow, to-day, yesterday even, she was finished with all of
+life--with the fussy excited robins of dawn; with the old dog that
+wanted to drowse by the fire; with the young husband who was either too
+much or too little of a man for her; with the clicking beads she would
+tell in her sharpish voice; with each thing; with everything....
+
+And here was the wonder of it, the strange dumb wonder, that the
+snapping of her life meant less in reality to him than the snapping of a
+stay aboard ship. The day after to-morrow he would mount the deck of
+Patrick Russell's boat, and after a few crisp orders would set out on
+the eternal sea, as though she were still alive in her cottage, as
+though, indeed, she had never even lived, and northward he would go past
+the purple Mull of Cantyre; past the Clyde, where the Ayrshire sloops
+danced like bobbins on the water; past the isles, where overhead drove
+the wedges of the wild swans, trumpeting as on a battle-field; past the
+Hebrides, where strange arctic birds whined like hurt dogs; northward
+still to where the northern lights sprang like dancers in the black
+winter nights; eastward and southward to where the swell of the Dogger
+Bank rose, where the fish grazed like kine.... Over the great sea he
+would go, as though nothing had happened, not even the snapping of a
+stay--down to the sea, where the crisp winds of dawn were, and the
+playful, stupid, short-sighted porpoises; the treacherous, sliding
+icebergs; and the gulls that cried with the sea's immense melancholy;
+and the great plum-colored whales....
+
+
+
+
+PART THREE
+
+THE MOUTH OF HONEY
+
+
+Section 1
+
+It was all like a picture some painter of an old and obvious school
+might have done. First, there was the port, with the white ships riding
+at their moorings in the blue sea. Then grayish white Marseilles, with
+its two immense ribbons, the Cannebiere running northward, and the Rue
+de Rome and the Prado intersecting it. The great wooded amphitheater
+rising like a wave and little Notre Dame de la Garde peeking like a
+sentry out to sea. And eastward from the quays were the little jagged
+islands the Phenicians knew, If, and Rion, Jaros, strange un-French
+names ... the sunshine yellow as a lamp, and the sea blue as flax, and
+the green woods, and the ancient grayish white city--all a picture some
+unimaginative painter would have loved. Next to Belfast, Marseilles was
+to Shane Campbell a second home. There it was, like your own house!
+
+Obvious and drowsy it might seem, but once he went ashore, the swarming,
+teeming life of it struck Shane like a current of air. Along the quays,
+along the Cannebiere, was a riot of color and nationality unbelievable
+from on board ship. Here were Turks dignified and shy. Here were Greeks,
+wary, furtive. Here were Italians, Genoese, Neapolitans, Livonians,
+droll, vivacious, vindictive. Here were Moors, here were Algerians,
+black African folk, sneering, inimical. Here were Spaniards, with their
+walk like a horse's lope. Here were French business men, very important.
+Here were Provencals, cheery, short, tubby, excitable, olive-colored,
+black-bearded, calling to one another in the _langue d'oc_ of the
+troubadours, _"Te, mon bon! Commoun as? Quezaco?"_
+
+And the bustle of the shops and the bustle of cafes, until Shane was
+forced to go out to the olive-lined roads to the rocky summit of La
+Garde, and once there, as if drawn by a magnet, Shane would enter the
+chapel in the fort, where the most renowned Notre Dame of the
+Mediterranean smiles mawkishly in white olive-wood. After the blinding
+sun of the Midi, the cool dark chapel was like a dungeon to him, so
+little could he see anything; but in a while the strange furniture of
+the place would take form before his eyes: the white statue of the
+Virgin, the silver tunny-fish, the daubs of sea hazards whence the
+Virgin had rescued grateful mariners, the rope-ends, the crutches....
+And though none might be in the chapel, yet it was full of life, so much
+did the pathetic ex-votos tell.... And he would come out of the chapel,
+and again the Midi sun would flash in a shower of gold, and he could see
+the blue Mediterranean, pricked with minute lateen-sails, and the
+grayish town beneath him, so old and yet so vital, and the calm harbor,
+with the forest of spars, and Monte Cristo, white as an egg....
+
+A queer town that, as familiar as a channel marking, teeming as an
+ant-hill, and when darkness came over it, and he viewed it from the
+after deck, mystery came, too.... For a while there was a hush, and
+around the hills gigantic ghosts walked.... One thought of the Phocaeans
+who had founded it, and to whom the Cannebiere was a rope-walk, where
+they made the sheets for their ships.... And one thought of Lazarus, who
+had been raised from among the silent dead and who had come there, so
+legend read, a gray figure in ceramic garments, standing in the prow of
+a boat....
+
+One thing Robin More had told him remained in his mind and captured his
+fancy, and that was that Pontius Pilate had been governor of Marseilles
+after his office in Judea. And of him Shane would think when the
+mysterious dusk came on the Midi hills ... Pilate, who had smiled, "What
+is truth?" and who had turned Christ over to the mob.... A big man, he
+imagined the Roman to have been, with clever eyes, and a great black
+beard covering a weak chin.... A man who knew all the subtleties of
+mind, and had no backbone.... And he could see the Roman, sitting on his
+villa porch in the dusk with tortured eyes, and fingering his beard with
+fingers that shook.... Paul was going through Greece and Rome like a
+flame, and the Pilate wondered.... Could it have been possible?...
+Ridiculous! a Jewish carpenter! A crazy man!.... And yet.... Could it
+have been possible.... No! no! no! And yet.... People had seen Him walk
+on the waves.... But people never knew what they saw, exactly.... No!
+How foolish!... He raised a man from the dead they said.... And that
+centurion--what was his name?--his daughter!... No, a stupid Jewish
+legend.... And yet.... Could it be possible? Could it? Could it?
+
+"Lights! Lights! Do you hear me! Bring lights! Lights!" Pilate would all
+but scream, panic-stricken in the Midi dusk....
+
+To Shane Campbell Marseilles had been all this for two years while he
+journeyed from Liverpool for silk and scented soaps--a landmark
+familiar as the Giant's Causeway, a strange, motley human circus, a veil
+behind which hid gigantic ghosts.... Until he met _La Mielleuse_ on the
+road to Aix.
+
+
+Section 2
+
+For six years now, since the day they had buried his wife in the green
+divots of Louth, women had been alien to him. It was not that he hated
+them, not that he was uncomfortable among them; but the thought of close
+mental or spiritual or physical contact with them put him in a panic, as
+one might be in a panic at the thought of contact with some Chinaman, or
+Eskimo. The women of the better class in ports importuned him, but he
+passed with a grave humorous smile and an unexpected courtesy. His
+friends' wives or acquaintances could get nothing out of him but a grave
+answer to any questions they might put, so that they characterized him
+as a stick. And at home in Ulster, whither he went after occasional
+voyages, where Robin More still drowsed over his books; where Alan Donn
+still hunted and fished and golfed, haler at five and fifty than a boy
+in his early twenties; and where his mother sat and did beautiful
+broidery, dumbly, inimically, cold as a fish, secretive as a badger,
+there he would meet the women of the Antrim families, women who knew of
+the disaster of his marriage, and they would look approvingly at his
+firm face and smiling, steady eyes, and they would say: "A man, thon! He
+could be a good friend. You could trust him, a woman could." They were
+unco good folk, Antrim folk.
+
+For the peasant girls around he had always a laugh and a joke. And for
+the young girls from school he had always a soft spot in his heart
+somehow, appreciating them as one appreciates the first primrose or a
+puppy dog playing on the lawn or the lark in the clear air. There came
+such a current of beauty and freshness from them.... New from the hand
+of the Maker.... They were pausing now, as the wind pauses on the
+tide.... And in a little while the world, the damned world!... And so he
+treated them with a great gravity, answering their questions on
+geography, telling them what an estuary was, and what the trade-winds,
+and how a typhoon came and paused and passed: and how jute and grain and
+indigo were taken from Calcutta, and of the Hooghly, the most difficult
+river in the world to navigate, and of the shoal called "James and
+Mary".... And they listened to him with wide-open, violet eyes....
+
+And there were two women, Leah Fraser, a slight woman with hair smooth
+and reddish like a gold coin, and eyes that thought and saw back of
+things, and slender, beautiful hands, and she moved with the dignity of
+a swan.... And there was Anne MacNeill, who handled a horse as a man
+would, and was a great archer--she could shoot as far as Alan could
+drive a golf-ball with a spoon.... Shane could always see her, a Diana
+on the greensward, leaning forward, listening to hear the smack of the
+arrow on the target.... And both these women were his good friends, the
+thought of them filling his mind like sweet lavender.... But when they
+were each alone with him, and a little silence would come, then panic
+would fall on him, and he would make an undignified escape from their
+company proffering any old excuse.... And they would watch him go, with
+little twisted smiles.... Poor Leah! Poor Anne!
+
+All the love in him, that some sweet, gracious woman should have had,
+was anesthetized, or it was deflected, perhaps, to the great
+three-masted schooner he was now owner and master of, a beautiful boat
+that had been christened the _Ulster Lady_, and came from the yards at
+Belfast, taking the water as nobly as a swan. From truck to keelson
+there was no part of her imperfect; from stem to stern. Barring a little
+tendency to be cranky before the wind in a seaway, nothing better
+sailed. Jammed, or on the wind, she was like a hare before the hounds,
+so quickly did she go. Her slim black body, her white, beautifully set
+sails--not a strake or an inch of canvas on her that he did not know and
+love. And more thought was given by him to the proper peaking of a spar
+and the exact setting of a leech than to the profits of the cargo. It
+was like having one's own country, and his cabin aboard was like his own
+castle--the little stateroom with the swinging-lamps, and the compass
+above the fastened bed, the row of books, the Aberdeen terrier, _Duine
+Uasal_, who slept peacefully on the rug, and who would go on deck and
+sniff the wind like a connoisseur.... And there was a manuscript poem of
+his father's in the Irish letter, _Leaba Luachra_, "The Bed of Rushes,"
+which he had discovered and had framed. And there was a prized thing of
+his boyhood there, a dagger the Young Pretender wore in his stocking,
+and he in Highland dress, as he swung toward London with pipe and drum.
+Alan Donn had given it to him, and he after getting it on a visit to
+Argyll. "Not only is it Charlie's, but it's a nice handy thing, thon!"
+... A beautiful piece of work it was, perfectly balanced, keen as a
+razor, with a handle of the stag's horn.... It was the only weapon Shane
+had, and about it curled romance and the smoke of dead, royal hopes....
+A bonny, homy place that cabin, peaceful as a garden of bees, when the
+water slipped past the beam. It was like a warm hearth-fire to come down
+there after a strenuous time on deck while the sou'wester crashed on the
+Welsh coast. Or in the roll of the Bay of Biscay, after a space watching
+the swinging fields of stars, to come down there was to drop into a
+welcoming circle of friends, to throw one's self down and pick up a
+book, the Laureate's "In Memoriam" or Mr. Thackeray's latest--and to
+glance from the pages of "Henry Esmond" to Prince Charlie's dagger lying
+peacefully on the desk.... How near! how near!... And up forward the
+lookout paced, or leaned over the bows, humming in Gaidhlig:
+
+_'S tric me sealtuinn do'n chnoc is airde D'fheac a faic mi fear a bhata
+An dtig tu andiu no'n dtig tu 'maireach? Is mur dtig tu eader gur truagh
+mar ta mi!_
+
+  Will you come to-day or will you come to-morrow?
+  If you never come how piteous for me!
+  _Fhir a' bhata, na horo eile!_
+    _Hi horo, fhir a bhata--_
+
+All the nostalgia of the Scottish isles was in the minors of that
+song.... And it was like a lullaby.... And the wind hummed through the
+rigging.... And underneath was the flow and throb of the immense
+circulation of the sea.... And overhead the helmsman rang the ship's
+bell. _Tung-tung, tung-tung, tung-tung, tung._ And all was well on board
+the _Ulster Lady_. And she was his only sweetheart and delight ... until
+he met _La Mielleuse_ on the road to Aix....
+
+
+Section 3
+
+The babble of the Greek merchants in the Cafe Turc at last began to bore
+him, and hiring a horse and sort of gig he decided to drive to Aix. He
+had always wished to see the old Provencal capital, but somehow the
+opportunity had always passed by, or something.... But on this bright
+September afternoon it seemed such a pity to go back on board ship....
+He examined the old white horse with interest.
+
+"Are you sure he'll take me there? You see his--" Shane wanted to say
+suspensory ligaments, but his French didn't quite go that far--"his
+legs--"
+
+"But, Monsieur, he has won several races--"
+
+"Well, in that event"--Shane grinned, "K-k-k-k!"
+
+The white horse trotted steadily out the Prado, the Rue de Rome, trotted
+out in the country, passed Bains de la Mediterranee. A northerdly breeze
+was out rippling the gulf and giving promise of autumn, and the heavy
+heat of the Midi had disappeared for the instant. Soon they would be
+plucking the grapes of Provence. The olive-trees were black on the white
+road. The white horse trotted on....
+
+There were peasants on the road going into town, and townspeople going
+out to the country.... And children who insulted one another shrilly....
+But the white horse plodded on. On a stretch of level road he passed a
+pair talking, noting casually that the woman was a lady from her
+carriage, and from his threatening cringe that the man was a cad.
+Italian riff-raff of some kind....
+
+"But you are mistaken," the woman was saying. "You are making an error."
+
+The man's reply was low, inaudible.
+
+"But I assure you, you are mistaken."
+
+The white horse plodded on.
+
+"Please, please"--the woman's voice followed Shane, and there was
+embarrassed fear in it--"please let me pass! You are mistaken."
+
+And then again: "I swear to you ... please ... please!"
+
+The white horse was surprised at a firm pull on his mouth, a crack of
+the whip, and a turn.... He broke in a lolloping canter.... Shane jumped
+down....
+
+"Madame, is this man annoying you?"
+
+"_Sirvase, Signor_--"
+
+But one look at the woman's face was sufficient. Shane turned on the
+fawning Sicilian with a snarl.
+
+"Get to hell out of here, quick!" The man shuffled off, walked quickly,
+ran, disappeared....
+
+The great dark eyes had agony in them. Her mouth quivered. Shane knew
+her knees were shaking as she stood.
+
+"Better get in here. I'll drive you home." He helped her into the trap.
+"I ought to have held that fellow," he grumbled. "Marseilles? No! Oh,
+Les Bains! We'll be there in a minute. You're all right now, Madame."
+
+"He mistook me--for--somebody else--" She had a voice deep and sweet as
+a bell, but there was a tremor in it now--a marked accent of fear,
+past, but not recovered from.
+
+He was aware of a great vibrant womanhood beside him, as some people are
+aware of spirits in a room, or a mother is aware of a child. He was
+aware, though he hardly saw them, though he didn't know he saw them, of
+the proud Greek beauty of her face, so decisively, so finely chiseled,
+so that it seemed to soar forward, as a bird soars into the wind; of the
+firm, dark ellipsis of the eyebrows; of the mouth that quivered, and yet
+in repose would be something for a master of line and color to draw; the
+little hands that plucked nervously at the dark silk gown, unquiet as
+butterflies. Her eyes, he knew, were wide with fear, great black pupils,
+deep, immensely deep. And he was aware, too, of something within her
+that vibrated, as a stay aboard ship vibrates in a gusty, angry wind, or
+as an ill-plucked harpstring will vibrate to and fro, unable to stop.
+
+"I live here, Monsieur."
+
+It was a little white villa, with green jalousies such as the Midi has
+in thousands. He pulled up, and she was down before he could help her.
+Her face was quiet now but for the tremor of her eyes.
+
+"Thank you ever so much," she said.
+
+"But this man, Madame. Are you safe? Ought not one to--the police?"
+
+"It was nothing, Monsieur." She laughed, but her voice still quivered.
+"Some good-for-nothing who took me for some one else, whom he had seen
+somewhere else, and knew--something--about. Nothing at all, a bagatelle,
+that might happen to any one. But I thank you so much! You were going
+somewhere?"
+
+"To Aix, Madame."
+
+"But your horse is lame!"
+
+"So he is, poor old boy! I hadn't noticed."
+
+"Then--_adieu, Monsieur_. And thanks again."
+
+He drove back to town. "I shall never get to Aix," he thought. "Perhaps
+I shouldn't go.... Some fate...." At the livery post he got down and
+examined the horse's fetlock.
+
+"So you won several races, eh?" But the white horse seemed to shake its
+head. "No! Oh, well, no matter, old codger!" And he stroked the long
+lugubrious muzzle....
+
+And thus, casually as he would light a match for his cigarette, casually
+as he would stumble over something, casually as he would pick up a book,
+he met _La Mielleuse_ on the road to Aix....
+
+
+Section 4
+
+For days now he had been aware of her presence in Marseilles without
+thinking of her--aware of her as he was aware of the Hotel de Ville, or
+of the Consigne, as of the obelisk in the Place Castellane. These things
+were facts, had their place, and she was a fact. She had become
+imprinted on his memory as on a sensitive plate. So one dusk on the
+Prado, as he met her, he was no more surprised than if, in their
+appointed places he had come across the obelisk or the Consigne or the
+Hotel de Ville.
+
+She was standing looking out to sea, and the little wind from Africa
+blew against her, and made her seem poised for flight, like a bird.
+
+And because he saw no reason why he shouldn't and because he was direct
+and simple as the sea itself, he went to her.
+
+"Are you a sea-captain's wife?"
+
+"No, Monsieur." She seemed to know him without turning. Perhaps she
+recognized his voice.
+
+"I saw you looking out toward the Pharo. I thought perhaps you were
+waiting for some one to come home on a ship."
+
+"No," she said slowly. "No. I--I come here some dusks, and look out to
+sea. There is something. It seems to pull me. The great waters and the
+blinking lighthouse--I seem to stand out of myself. And miles and miles
+and miles away there is a new land with a new life where one might go
+... and begin.... What is in me seems to struggle to go out there, but
+it never gets more than an inch or so outside. But even that.... And the
+wind ... so clean. Are you a sailor?"
+
+"Yes, I am a sailor."
+
+"It is very beautiful and very pure, the sea?"
+
+"Yes, sometimes it is very beautiful. I think it is always beautiful.
+And it must be pure--I never thought.... It is strong, and sometimes
+cruel. It heals, and sometimes it is very lonely. One never quite
+understands. It is so big."
+
+"Yes, so big and strong ... and it heals. One seems, one's self, one's
+little cares, to be so little."
+
+And they were silent for a while.
+
+"But perhaps I intrude, Madame. Your husband----"
+
+"My husband is dead in Algiers these six years."
+
+"I am sorry."
+
+Everything was hushed, the tideless sea, the silent wind. Behind them,
+and still about them, hung the strange dusk of Pontius Pilate. Before
+them blazed Marseilles.
+
+"You are married?"
+
+"I was married."
+
+"Then your wife is--dead?"
+
+"Yes, Madame, she is dead."
+
+"You grieve?"
+
+"No, I do not grieve."
+
+"Did you not love her?"
+
+"I loved some one I thought was she. It wasn't she."
+
+There was another instant's silence as they walked.
+
+"Ah, I think I understand," she said. And they walked into the blaze of
+the city. She paused for a moment.
+
+"Will you pardon me for asking things like that? I don't usually.... But
+in the dusk I seem to be another person...."
+
+"No. In the light we are other persons."
+
+"Ah," she smiled understandingly. "You are going to your ship now?"
+
+There was a finality in her voice. It was more an affirmation than a
+question.
+
+"Madame," Shane said, "will you please let me see you to your door?"
+
+She looked at him for an intense second, and a little cloud of--was it
+fear?--flitted across her face.
+
+"Madame, there are thieves and villains of all kinds abroad. You have
+had one experience. Please let me protect you from a possible second."
+
+"If you wish." She smiled. He called a carriage.
+
+In the light she was a different person. Along the sea-shore walking in
+the dusk, she was a troubled phantom, a thing of beauty, but without
+flesh, without the trappings of clothes--as if a spirit had been
+imprisoned in cold white statuary. But now she was a beautiful woman,
+gravely gay, a woman of the world, not of the great world, perhaps, and
+not of the half-world--just a woman aware of and experienced in life.
+And poised.
+
+"You are English?"
+
+"Not English. Irish."
+
+Poised she was, but she was like a player playing a game, and the breaks
+against her. He knew the smile. He had seen it often on Alan Donn's
+face, playing in some of the great title matches. Four holes to go, and
+he must better par. It's all right, the smile said; there's nothing
+wrong. But in Alan Donn's was the glint of a naked knife, and in this
+woman's eyes, down deep, veiled, but ill concealed, was appeal.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+They stopped at her house. He helped her out.
+
+"_Adieu, Monsieur_. And again a thousand thanks."
+
+"_C'etait un vrai plaisir!_"
+
+"Monsieur!"
+
+"Madame!"
+
+The cabman looked surprised when ordered to return. He turned and
+regarded his fare with amazement.
+
+"_Quai de la Fraternite_," I said.
+
+"_Hup, alors!_" The cabby shrugged his shoulders. And they trotted
+ploddingly through the dusk of Pontius Pilate to the burning cloud which
+was Marseilles....
+
+
+Section 5
+
+He knew he should meet her again, and where he should meet her, and he
+did, on the Prado. He knew when. In the Midi dusk. A touch of mistral
+was out, and the wind blew seaward. She was sitting down, looking toward
+Africa.
+
+"You oughtn't to come out here alone," he said. "Marseilles is a bad
+port."
+
+"I know," she said. "I know. But it draws me, this spot. You leave
+soon?" she asked.
+
+"In a few days."
+
+"But you will be back."
+
+"Yes, I will be back," he told her. "I don't know why, but I think I'd
+rather die than not see Marseilles again. It is a second home, and yet I
+know so few people here."
+
+"If one has the temperament, and conditions are--as they should
+be--Marseilles is wonderful."
+
+"One could be happy here."
+
+"Yes," and she sighed.
+
+The spell of the archaic dusk came on him again; a dusk old as the
+world. About them brooded the welter of passion and romance that
+Marseilles is. Once it was a Phocaean village, and hook-nosed Afric folk
+had stepped through on long, thin feet. And then had come the Greeks,
+with their broad, clear brows, their gray eyes. And further back the
+hairy Gauls had crept, snarling like dogs. And Greece died. And came the
+clash of the Roman legions, ruthless fighting hundreds, who saw, did
+massive things. And Rome died. And over the sea came the Saracens, their
+high heads, their hard, bronzed bodies, their scarlet mouths. And they
+conquered and builded and lived.... And were hurled back.... Years
+hummed by, and passion died not, or romance, and it was from Marseilles
+that a battalion had come to Paris gates singing the song that Rouget de
+Lisle had written in Strasburg:
+
+  _Allons, enfants de la Patrie,
+    Le jour de gloire est arrive._
+
+And passed that day, and came another, when a handful of grizzled
+veterans left the gates to join their brothers and meet the exiled
+emperor.... Passion and romance! Their colors were in Marseilles
+still.... Over in _Anse des Catalans_ weren't there the remains of the
+village of the sea-Gipsies, who had come none knew whence?... And along
+the gulf there were settlements of Saracen blood--_les Maures_, the
+Provencals called them ... and the shadow of Pontius Pilate wild-eyed in
+the dusk....
+
+"It's strange"--her voice came gently to him,--"but I can hear you
+think."
+
+"And I can feel your silence," he said. "Just feel--you--being silent--"
+
+The wind whipped up, grew shrill, grew cold. She shivered in her thin
+frock.
+
+"You are becoming cold."
+
+"I am cold."
+
+"Then hadn't you better go home--to your house?"
+
+She rose silently. It seemed to him somehow that she had put herself
+under his care. She was like some gentle little craft that had anchored
+humbly under the lee of a great ship. He felt somehow that she was a
+thing to be protected. He hailed a carriage, and she made no
+protest--all the time under his lee, so needful of protection. It was a
+shock when they came into the lights of Marseilles to find a proud,
+grave woman there and not a shrinking, wide-eyed child.... Her face,
+poised for flight, like a bird's wing; the beautiful, half-opened mouth,
+the hands, the little feet in their shoes. She was like some beautiful
+shy deer. And somewhere hovered disaster, like a familiar spirit.... And
+yet she was smiling....
+
+At the door he made to bid her good-by.
+
+"Would you--would you care to come in?"
+
+"Why--why, yes." He sent the carriage away.
+
+He followed her up the path to the little villa and with her entered the
+house. There were no servants to answer the door; she let herself in
+with a latch-key, but so scrupulously clean was the place, so furnished
+in its way, that there must have been servants somewhere. The
+living-room into which she conducted him was spacious and a little bare,
+though not bare for the Midi--a plain white room, high in the ceiling,
+with chairs of good line. Here was a big piano, here a fireplace, here a
+few paintings, colorful landscapes, on the wall. Together they lit
+candles.
+
+"Back of here is a garden," she said, "where I spend most of the day.
+And I have a cook"--she smiled--"and a maid who waits on me. And yet I
+go out to walk on the Prado...."
+
+Shane wasn't surprised. It wasn't home, somehow. The room was like a
+setting in a play, here light, here shadow.... The paintings, the
+instrument of music, the chairs, they were not things owned and loved.
+They were properties.... In the golden candle-light, as she moved, she
+was like an actress of great restraint. Every step, posture, gesture
+seemed to have an occult significance. Even her bedroom, away off
+somewhere, he felt, was not a place where one slept easily and dreamed.
+It would be like the dressing-room of some woman mummer.... It was all
+like a play, of which he was seeing a fragment from the wings.... What
+was it all about? Who was she? And why was his heart a-flutter?
+
+She had taken off her hat, and her hair was coiled close about her
+exquisite head. White and black, regular, significant, antique--like a
+cameo of some Greek woman, long dead. She stood by a little table, one
+hand on it, the other like some butterfly against her gown.... It was
+like a pose--but unconscious, he knew, utterly unconscious....
+
+"Tell me," she said, "why did you speak to me?"
+
+"I don't know," he said, "I just spoke."
+
+"You weren't"--her words were weighty, picked--"looking for a flirtation
+with a pretty woman?"
+
+"Why, no. Of course not," he answered. "I never thought--"
+
+"No. No, you didn't." She decided for herself.
+
+She came toward him suddenly in the candle-light. Stood before him.
+
+"Tell me, who are you? What are you?" There was a tragic appeal in her
+face. "Where do you come from? Where are you going?"
+
+"I don't know." His throat was dry, his heart pounding. "A few days ago
+I was a contented man, unhappy but contented. And now I don't know."
+
+"And I don't know who I am." Her mouth quivered. "I am two people--three
+people."
+
+They looked at each other with a sort of agony, as though they had lost
+something dear to each, and to both of them. They were immensely
+intimate. He put out his hand....
+
+"Poor ... poor...."
+
+Their hands touched, and there seemed to rush between them, through
+them, some powerful current; and how it happened he did not know, but
+they were kissing each other.... He thought with a queer shock, was a
+woman's mouth so soft, so sweet, so vibrant? He hadn't known. And was he
+kissing her? And how had it happened? It was impossible!... Or was he
+dreaming?... Or was he--was he dead?...
+
+She released herself from him for an instant, putting her hands on his
+shoulders, her eyes looking into his eyes....
+
+"What is your name?"
+
+"Campbell. Shane Campbell."
+
+"Campbell. Shane Campbell. Shane--Shane Campbell. Mine is
+Claire-Anne--Claire-Anne Godey."
+
+
+Section 6
+
+It seemed to him as he went to Les Bains that next evening that the
+world had somehow changed into another dimension, so much clearer the
+air was, so much brighter the stars.... He had discovered a higher, more
+rarefied stratum of life, in the dim, keen atmosphere of which things
+took on incomparable beauty and mystery, so that the water on his left
+hand, unseen, yet so blue, was not the Gulf of Lyons, but the whole
+Mediterranean, which washed Genoa and Naples and Sicily, and the little
+islands of the Greeks, and the barbaric shores of Africa, Morocco, and
+Algiers; and Gibraltar, where the English were, like an armed sentry in
+a turret. The ships in the harbor were not ships of commerce, but
+stately entities, each whispering to each in the _shush-shush_ of water
+and wind, telling of the voyages they had made, adventurous as
+sturgeons. Even from the mud-and-rush huts along the sea-shore came the
+note of brave romance. And the softly singing trees! And in the great
+amphitheater of the woods no longer the shade of Pontius Pilate gnawed
+his bitten nails, but more gallant presences were, gray-eyed Greek
+women, with proud composed faces and eloquent hands, and Saracens calmly
+awaiting the morrow's battle, and troubadours puzzling keenly for a
+rime.... They were not colored thoughts, but sentient presences. Spirit
+and thought had united in him into a being like a bird, leaving the
+earth, and flying into a realm of ancient forgotten beauty, spirit being
+the will, and thought the vibrating wing.... How harmonious everything
+was, the stars, the earth, the sea, the people! How clear it had all
+become! How one!...
+
+He came to her in her garden where she sat beneath a tree. Around, the
+cicadas whirred in the speaking trees. _Zig-zig-zig-zig._ But they were
+no longer strident. They seemed but a vibration of the high atmosphere
+in which he was....
+
+"Claire-Anne! Claire-Anne...."
+
+"Yes ... yes, lover...."
+
+"Claire-Anne!"
+
+She stood up as he took her lovely, pale hands. There was no shame to
+her glance, nothing but a wonderful frankness, her eyes going to his
+like brave winged things.
+
+"Claire-Anne, I want to ask you something."
+
+"Yes ... Lover...."
+
+"Claire-Anne, when will you marry me?"
+
+Her hands never quivered, but he was aware that her mouth did, in the
+high diluted starlight.
+
+"Why do you want to marry me? Is it because ...? Do you feel bound?...
+or ... just why?"
+
+"I want to be with you, Claire-Anne."
+
+"Then--dearest, does it matter to go before the mayor and arrange about
+property? And to go before a priest and make promises--to God!... Sit
+down, lover; sit down with me here, in the dusk, under the tree."
+
+She still clasped both his hands. He might have been talking to some
+beautiful disembodied spirit, as Pontius Pilate was a poor
+panic-stricken spirit, or to something he had conjured out of his head,
+but for her firm, warm hands. To-night it was she had strength....
+
+"Dearest, promises are so easy to make. I have made promises, oh, so
+many promises!... And life or destiny.... And when you can't keep them,
+your heart breaks. You know nothing of me--Shane...."
+
+"I don't want to know; I just want you, Claire-Anne!"
+
+"You must know something. I was just a girl, well brought up, well
+educated.... I dreamed of being a great actress. I was an actress, but I
+was ... _manquee_ ... didn't succeed, get success.... And then I
+married, and my husband died.... And here I am.... And there are other
+things you mustn't know.... Not that they are dear to me; oh, no!... but
+you must never hear them.... O Shane, if seven years ago.... But Destiny
+or life wouldn't let us. And now we can only cheat him, and that only
+for a while.... Because Destiny is all-seeing and jealous and cruel....
+Only for a while, a sweet while...."
+
+"But, Claire-Anne, I don't understand--"
+
+"Don't understand, don't, my lover. Don't anything.... Only let me give
+all I have, can give to you, and let me take what you care to give in
+return, only that.... O Shane, we are two people in a dark wood, and it
+is lonely and terrifying.... And we have met, and our hands ... _se sont
+serrees_ ... gripped and held.... And we aren't lonely any more, or
+afraid. And you have a picture in your mind of me, a beautiful, warm
+picture.... But if the night passed, and we came to the meadow-lands....
+O Shane, don't let's go into the light--not into the open, not into the
+light.... Oh, no! no!"
+
+"But, Claire-Anne...."
+
+"Come closer, Shane. The night is empty. There are only we two in the
+world.... Come close. Closer. Closer still...."
+
+
+Section 7
+
+He was sitting in her garden one sunset, under the mulberry-tree, and
+she had gone into the house for a minute, moving with the firm, gracious
+walk of hers that was like the firm swimming of swans. In the little
+hush of sunset, and she gone, there came a sudden knowledge to him....
+For a space of time, how long he knew not, he was in an Antrim study....
+Without, the sun had gone down, and there was the purple, twilight
+water, and the gentle calling of the cricket.... And within was a gray
+head that had fallen on a book ... fallen ... fallen as the sun went
+down.
+
+"Why, Uncle Robin!" he called.
+
+Then came a great gush of tears to his heart and eyes....
+
+She came from the house, as again he became cognizant of the Midi garden
+instead of the Antrim glen, of the Mediterranean instead of the waters
+of Moyle. She came down the dusky pathway. At a little distance she saw
+his face. She stopped short, her face white....
+
+"Shane! Shane! what is wrong? Are you hurt? Ill?"
+
+"My Uncle Robin is dead, Claire-Anne."
+
+She looked at him for a little instant, not quite understanding. She
+came to him swiftly as a swallow. She sat close beside him. Her arm went
+through his. Her hands clasped his hands.
+
+"Why didn't you tell me, heart?" she whispered.
+
+"I just knew this instant. I felt, saw.... We were that close ... my
+Uncle Robin! _Beannacht De ar a anam!_ God's blessing on his soul!"
+
+She never spoke. She never stirred. She hardly breathed. She was just
+there, her hands, firm and strong, on his, did he want her.
+
+"Was it ... a hard death, Shane?"
+
+"No; I seemed to see him, asleep, among his books."
+
+"His books were his friends ... you told me....
+
+"Yes, dear. His life was with them."
+
+"And he wasn't a young man, your Uncle Robin?"
+
+"Eight and sixty years of age."
+
+"Is it so ill, heart, to go quickly, quietly, with your friends about
+you, on an autumn afternoon?"
+
+"No, dear, not ill. Very rightly ... I think. But there is something....
+Something is gone from the world, like a fine tree from a garden....
+And he was awful' dear to me, my Uncle Robin.... It will be a hard thing
+to go home, and he not there to come and ask: 'Are you all right,
+laddie? You're no sick?' Claire-Anne, I'll be thinking long...."
+
+She sat with him in silence in the garden, and after a little while got
+up and went without a word.... And he sat in the garden thinking to
+himself, had he been lax to Uncle Robin in any way? He might have
+written oftener. It wasn't fair to have kept the old man worried and he
+an apprentice at sea. Yes, he could have written, could have written
+oftener. And thought more. And there were books he might have brought
+the old man--books from 'Frisco and New York and Naples. The book-stores
+were so far from the quays, and he had put it off. And he could have so
+easily.... When one is young, one is so thoughtless.... A message from
+somewhere ran into his consciousness like a ripple of code-flags: 'It
+doesn't matter, dear laddie. Don't be taking on. Don't be blaming
+yourself. You were the dear lad ... and I'm happy....'
+
+Ah, yes, but a great tree was gone from the garden. An actuality had
+been converted into thought and emotion, and thought and emotion may be
+all that endure, and an actuality be unreal ... but an actuality is so
+warm ... so reassuring....
+
+He rose and went toward the house, and as he walked he met her....
+
+"Claire-Anne, do you mind if I go back to the ship?... Somehow, I'm a
+little lost...."
+
+"There is a carriage waiting for you outside."
+
+For the first time it occurred to him that in this occult experience she
+had not uttered one jarring note. She had not asked questions, nor had
+she tried to argue with him, as other women would have, telling him he
+fancied all this. Nor had she bothered him with vain, unwelcome
+sentiment. She had just--stood by, as at sea. And how swiftly she had
+divined his need of privacy, of his own ship!
+
+"There are none like you in this world, Claire-Anne," he told her.
+
+"I am what you make me, Shane--what you need of me." Her hand sought his
+in the stilly dusk. "Come back only when you are ready dearest ...
+dearest ... I am here! Always here!"
+
+
+Section 8
+
+Though she never said so, yet he knew she wanted to go on board the
+ship that was so much of his life, and one day he had her rowed across
+to the _Ulster Lady_. He smiled as he saw how firmly she got on board,
+though ships were unknown to her. Queer, how she never lost dignity,
+grace. And it was so easy for a woman to look silly, undignified,
+getting on board ship. She never disappointed him....
+
+She mused over the sweet line of the schooner, the tapering masts, the
+snug canvas, the twinkling brass. The wake of a passing paddle-steamer
+made the boat pitch gently. It was like breathing.
+
+"She is so much a pretty lady," Claire-Anne said. "So much like you,
+Shane, in a way. She might be a young sister--a young, loved sister. And
+where is your place on board when she sails?"
+
+He pointed her out the space behind wheel and binnacle.
+
+"Whenever there's any need, I'm there, just there."
+
+"And Shane, great waves like you see in pictures--great enormous waves,
+does she stand those?"
+
+"Yes, great waves, like you see in pictures, she stands those. Drives
+through them, and over them, and under them."
+
+"And Solomon said"--she was just thinking aloud--"that he couldn't
+understand the way of a ship on the sea. And he was immensely wise.
+Dearest ... it can't be just wood and canvas, a ship ... power and grace
+and beauty.... It's like great people...."
+
+"They're as different as people are, Claire-Anne."
+
+"Are they, Shane? I knew they weren't ... just things."
+
+He took her below in the dusk of his cabin. She filled the space like
+some gracious green tree.
+
+"And here is where I live on board ship."
+
+The Aberdeen terrier came forward to greet her, his tail waving gently,
+his ears up, his brown eyes grave and warm.
+
+"_Duine uasal! Duine uasal!_" she knelt to him.
+
+"You remember?" He minded he had told her casually of the dog's name.
+
+"Of course I remember! Shane, what does _Duine uasal_ mean?"
+
+"_Gentilhomme_," he translated.
+
+"He has the eyes," she said.
+
+The framed manuscript of his father's verses caught her eyes, and she
+looked at him in inquiry.
+
+"What is it?"
+
+"A poem of my father's, in Gaidhlig, Claire-Anne. 'The Bed of Rushes.'"
+
+"How queer the letters are! Slim and graceful, and powerful, too. Would
+you read it, Shane?"
+
+"_Leaba luachra_," he read, "a bed of rushes, _bhi fum areir_, was
+beneath me last night, _agas do chaitheas amach e le banaghadb an lae_,
+and I threw it out with the whitening of day. _Thainic mo chead gradh le
+mo thaobh_, my hundred loves came to my side; _guala ee qualainn_,
+shoulder to shoulder, _agas beal re beal_, and mouth to mouth."
+
+"Now I know you better, Shane."
+
+"How, dearest?"
+
+"I know how you come by your--your sense of beauty, Shane. It's from
+your father. You have it just as he had. But he could say and you can't,
+Shane. You have it, but it doesn't come out that way. It comes out in
+the sailing of the ship, Shane. You must sail beautifully. Shane, I
+should love to see you sail."
+
+With a quick movement she dropped on her knees, and her beautiful dark
+head on the pillow of his bed.
+
+"Couldn't you take me with you once, Shane, when you sail? Away on just
+one voyage?"
+
+"Of course I could, dearest, and will."
+
+"Would you, my heart? Would you?" She stood up again, and swift tears
+came to her eyes.
+
+"I couldn't come," she said.
+
+"But, Claire-Anne--"
+
+"No," she said. She turned her back to him, so that he shouldn't see her
+face, and her voice vibrated. "No, Shane dear. No. You go to sea and
+sail your ships, and take care of them in the tempest and coax them in
+light weather. And go from port to port, watching the strange cities and
+the peoples, and seeing into them, with ... _tes yeux d'enfant_ ... your
+eyes of a child.... And have your life, free, big, clean.... And just in
+a corner ... _le plus petit coin_ ... keep me ... so when you come to
+Marseilles, you will come up the garden path in the dusk, and call,
+'Claire-Anne!'" There was something like a sob from her. "Just say,
+'Claire-Anne'...."
+
+She turned around and caught his hands for a minute, looked at him,
+smiled, laughed.... From his desk she picked up the Young Pretender's
+dagger.
+
+"What is this for, Shane? Is this yours?"
+
+"Mine now, Claire-Anne; but it was--some one else's once. My Uncle Alan,
+Alan Donn, gave it to me."
+
+"Yes?..."
+
+"It belonged once to Charles Edward Stuart, the Young Pretender. He wore
+it at his knee in '45. Do you remember, Claire-Anne? He landed in
+Scotland and advanced on England, and got as far as Derby at the head of
+the Scottish clans and Jacobite gentlemen. 'Black Friday' they called it
+in London."
+
+"But he never got to London."
+
+"No, he never got to London. Crash and whir of battle, and when the
+smoke cleared, there were the gallant Highland clansmen scattered, and
+the sturdy English nobles, and the bonny Irish gentlemen. And a king on
+the run!"
+
+"And, Shane, what happened to him after that?"
+
+"I think--my history may not be right, but I think he spent the rest of
+his life a pensioner of the king of France, playing petty politics,
+drinking, and accepting love from romantic women, and loyalty from the
+beaten clans."
+
+"What a pity, Shane! What a pity!"
+
+"That he failed, dearest? I don't know."
+
+"Not that he failed, Shane! No! The most gallant fail, nearly always
+fail, for they take the greatest odds. But that he lived too long, Shane
+... the high moment gone...."
+
+She looked at the dagger again that had once snuggled to Prince
+Tearloch's knee, hefted it, caressed it.
+
+"Shane dearest, why didn't he use his own knife to--set himself free?"
+
+"I don't know."
+
+"I think I know."
+
+She faced him suddenly.
+
+"Shane, why didn't somebody do it for him?"
+
+"I suppose they couldn't see the end, Claire-Anne. They couldn't foresee
+the king of France's charity, the tricked women, the wine-stained cards.
+There's many the Scots gentlemen who would have--set him free."
+
+"But they didn't, Shane dearest. It seems--Destiny must always win.
+Shane, what is that poem in Gaidhlig about the world, the verses you
+once said?"
+
+  "_Treasgair an saoghal, agus tigeann an garth mar smal.
+  Alaistir, Caesar, 's an mead do bhi d'a bpairt
+  Ta an Theamhair na fear agas feach an Traoi mar ta_--
+  Life goes conquering on. The winds forever blow
+  Alexander, Caesar, and the crash of their fighting men
+  Tara is grass, and see how Troy is low--"
+
+He stopped with a little shock, for her face was a mask of tears.
+
+"Dearest, dearest, it's only an old, sad story. It has nothing to do
+with us. Claire-Anne--"
+
+"Is any story old, Shane? Is any story ever new? Isn't it always the
+same story?"
+
+She looked at the dagger for an instant more, and put it down with a
+little sob.
+
+"Poor gentleman!"
+
+
+Section 9
+
+From his cabin below he could hear the Belfast mate roaring at the
+helmsman:
+
+"What kind of steering do you call that? Look at your damned wake. Like
+an eel's wriggle. Keep her full, and less of your damned luffin'."
+
+"Keep her full, sir!" the steersman repeated.
+
+"Look at your foretopsail! Bouse it, blast ye! Bouse it! You Skye
+cutthroats!"
+
+If the nor'easter held, Shane calculated, he could run through Biscay
+full, come into the Mediterranean on a broad reach, and jam her straight
+at Marseilles. About him was the tremor as she took the head seas.
+Plunge! Tremble! Dash on! Overhead the squeaking of the sheets, the
+squeal of blocks, the _thrap-thrap-thrap_ of the lee halyards, the
+melancholy whining of the gulls. With luck he would be in Marseilles
+within the week. And if the wind swung westward after he left Gibraltar
+to port, he would nip off hours, a day even. And every hour counted
+until the moment he went up the dusky path and called, "Claire-Anne!"
+
+He had never before driven the _Ulster Lady_ as he was driving her now.
+Before, he had been content to get what he could out of her, coaxing
+her, nursing her, as a trainer does a horse he is fond of; but now he
+was riding her like a jockey intent on winning a race. On deck the crew
+wondered what had got into the old man, as they called him, for all his
+twenty-eight years.
+
+"Before, he was a sailor," the isles crew complained. "Is he now a
+merchant at last? _A Righ is truagh!_ O King, the pity!"
+
+But it was not interest in cargoes that compelled him; it was the
+thought of a face like the wing of a bird, ready to soar. The dark,
+gracious face, with the eyes where emotion swirled like a mill-race, the
+parted ruddy lips-_La Mielleuse_--mouth of honey. And the word he must
+not say aloud, like some occult word of magic until a certain moment
+should come:
+
+"Claire-Anne!" Just "Claire-Anne!"
+
+Before he had left Marseilles he had not been able to think of her, to
+weigh what happened, to understand. Things were too close. But at sea,
+and in the dusk of the Antrim glen, and in Belfast and Liverpool, he had
+had time to view the incident in perspective; to stand aside, as one
+stands back from a picture, and appreciate the color, the line, the
+truth; to see that that rich purple, that splash of orange, that
+rippling, rich silver-gray are not spots like flowers, but a definite
+design....
+
+In Antrim he had remembered Dancing Town, the vision of Fiddlers' Green.
+Fourteen years before!
+
+And now that he remembered, it seemed to him foolish not to have known
+he was sailing somewhere. He was always sailing.... And unexpectedly,
+after he had given up all hope, under his lee bow had risen suddenly
+Fiddlers' Green.... Once before he thought he had made port there, but
+that only made this island the true one.... For there were always two
+things, and the second was right.... False dawn and dawn; the False Cape
+and Cape Horn; the Southern Crosses, the false and true....
+
+And he would tell her this, when he met her again, of how he had been
+thinking, and discovered her to be the true life....
+
+The wife he had married and buried seven years before he thought of now;
+she was the second woman he had known, his mother the first. And from
+the cold precipice of his mother he had fled into the flinty fields of
+Moyra Dolan.... He felt a little sorry for the boy he was seven years
+before--so young, so gallant, so wrong.... He had thought that all there
+was in life was a home to return to, a wife, children.... He had wanted
+an acre of land in the sun, where all the world was his. When one was
+young, one knew so little.... Wisdom came with the lapping of the waves,
+and years of quiet thinking under the gigantic stars.... A plot of land
+he had wanted then, and now he had the stars, they belonging more to him
+than to the astrologers who conned them, the fields, more than to the
+tillers who cultivated them, the sea than to the fishermen who
+trawled.... He was one with everything, understanding everything, its
+immense harmony.... From hard earth and wet sea he had arisen on swift,
+dark pinions until he had been one with the spirit that infused all
+earth and sea and sky holding the multitudinous atoms in One with
+immense will and scheme.... And it was she who had given them to
+him--Claire-Anne ... the wings of the morning.... The flutter of her
+white hands ... the eyes that looked and drooped, looked, drooped ...
+the little catch in her breath....
+
+His life opened before him now, like a fair seaway. About his appointed
+tasks he would go in his appointed life ... sailing ships with needed
+cargoes ... a despatch messenger for the peoples of the world over the
+vast solitudes of sea ... doing his work well and willingly ... and
+asking no reward but that the bird of dusk, the mouth of honey, be his
+to love and be loved by ... to melt with and be one in occult alchemy of
+soul and mind and body ... to get strength and knowledge, and the
+understanding which is more than strength and knowledge....
+
+He was twenty-eight, she was twenty-five. There were twenty years before
+them still, twenty years of love and understanding, and then a strange
+happy twilight, like the dusk of Antrim, that gives way hardly to the
+short night.... Some day she would marry him and come to his house ...
+some day when something that was wrong in her heart was righted and
+forgotten, something he had no wish to intrude upon, so closely did she
+conceal it.... There was a locked, haunted room in her heart ... poor
+heart!... but one day the presence would be exercised, and the room
+swept and garnished.... Some day she would marry him, and he would bring
+her home to Ulster.... And who better than she could understand the
+springy heather and the blue smoke-reek, the crickets of the evening
+and the curlew's call? And in the house where his mother was cold and
+arrogant, would be a warm and gracious lady ... Claire-Anne!...
+
+God! he was thinking long to be in Marseilles again, to go up the dusky
+path, to call, "Claire-Anne!"
+
+The big Belfast mate larruped down the short companionway.
+
+"How's she doing, Mr. McKinstry?"
+
+"She's doing fine, sir. If I may say so, there's not a better boat sails
+the water, not the _Sovereign of the Seas_ itself. Nor a better crew to
+handle things, not on board the king's yacht."
+
+"Nor a better mate, Mr. McKinstry."
+
+"Ah, well, sir; we do wir best."
+
+He tumbled on deck again, and Shane could hear him roar from amidships:
+
+"Lay forward, a couple of you damned farmers, and see if you can't get
+more out of those jibs. Faster! faster! You're as slow as the grace of
+God at a miser's funeral.... If I only had a crew...."
+
+
+Section 10
+
+She stopped in her swift flight to him through the dusk of the Midi
+garden.
+
+"Dearest, why is your face so white? Your hands bruised?"
+
+"The consul said something to me--about you--and I knocked him down."
+
+"Oh!" she said, a shocked little cry, and: "Oh!" a drawn-out wail of
+pain. "Why did you strike him?"
+
+"Because he lied about you."
+
+Her face was turned from him, in the dusk of the crickets, toward the
+wooded amphitheater, where dead Pontius roved wild-eyed in the dusk,
+where Lazarus tossed uneasily in his second sleep, where the Greeks lay
+in alien soil, and the shadows of Roman legionaries looked puzzled at
+the flat sea, not recognizing busy Tiber--her back was to him, her head
+up in pain, her nerve-wrenched hands uneasy, white....
+
+"He didn't lie," she said at last. "Oh, you'd have known it sooner or
+later. No! no! He didn't lie."
+
+"Claire-Anne!"
+
+"He didn't lie. I was just a fool to think--oh, well, he didn't lie. No,
+no!" she repeated. "He didn't lie." She threw out a hand hopelessly. "He
+didn't lie."
+
+He went up to her in the dusk, put his hands gently on her shoulders.
+The quivering frame became still suddenly, with a greater nervousness.
+She was like a deer ready to bound away....
+
+"I don't see what I could have done, Claire-Anne. But--can I do anything
+now?"
+
+She turned toward him suddenly. Her face was a mask of pain--and
+surprise.
+
+"Then you haven't grown cold to me, unmerciful, ... or gross?"
+
+"Why, no, Claire-Anne!"
+
+"And you know."
+
+"I--know, but I don't understand...."
+
+She gave a queer, little shuddering cry, half laugh, half sob. She moved
+over to the seat by the whispering mulberry-tree, and dropped in it, her
+hands covering her face.
+
+"All the wrong," she said, "that people call wrong I've done I didn't
+mind. But the one decent thing--of loving you--that's kept me awake all
+the time you were away. It's been like a sin, letting you love me. The
+rest was destiny, but this one thing was--I."
+
+She suddenly raised her face, her eyes shining through the humid mask of
+it.
+
+"Would you--could you--understand?"
+
+"Tell me, Claire-Anne, what you want to."
+
+She drew a short gasping breath, turned her head away, looked up,
+turned it away again, paused for breath, gripped his hand by the
+wrist....
+
+"I ... I ... I was the child of actors, and they died, and there was
+enough money to bring me up and educate me, and give me my chance on the
+stage.... And I wasn't good enough.... I was too much myself. Couldn't
+quite be other characters. I don't know if you understand.... But ...
+then a man got infatuated with me and married me.... And later he wished
+he'd married a--comfortable woman with a fortune.... And then he died
+and left me ... not very much.... But that was not the reason.... I was
+left, how do you say?... stranded. I had no career, no husband, no
+child, no business. France, it is not easy ... not easy anywhere....
+Friends? People are too busy.... And I was ... just there.... And all
+around me life bubbled and flowed, and I was ... not dead, not alive ...
+and alone ... I might have been a leper, but even lepers have colonies,
+and some one to be kind to them ... not dead, not alive ... and alone. I
+was so young.... It was unfair. Life was everywhere like a sparkling
+wine ... but where I was, was flat....
+
+"And then--then I met a man ... it was pleasant for a while--to have
+some one to talk to, to go around with. It's so pleasant to laugh. You
+don't know how pleasant until you haven't laughed for a long time.... He
+didn't want to marry ... and in the end it was a choice of--oh, well ...
+or going back to being not dead, not alive ... and I couldn't go, just
+couldn't. And he gave me presents of money.... And then he got married.
+I don't blame him ... a comfortable woman with a fortune ... but I
+wasn't left for long.... Where one goes, others always follow....
+There's a sort of ... _sentier intuitif_, a psychic path....
+
+"And I wasn't so ashamed ... I was a little glad I had a place in the
+world ... a work even.... And every one might despise me.... I had a
+place.... I was no longer not dead, not alive.... I was even thankful
+for that.... Until I met you with your--terrible courtesy, with your
+understanding.... My head and my heart melted, and my body, too, and all
+had been so firm, so decided.... And I dreamed that I could snatch a
+while from destiny.... But--you see.... What the consul said was true,
+so ... dearest--but I mustn't ever call you dearest again."
+
+"Claire-Anne!"
+
+"Well, then--dearest, you see why I couldn't marry you when you asked."
+She laughed bitterly. "If you had only known...."
+
+He took a terrible grip on himself, faced her, looked at her.
+
+"Claire-Anne, will you marry me now?"
+
+"I don't know why you say it, but I know one thing: you are true. And I
+thank you ... but please don't make me cry any more. I have cried so
+much when you were away.... If only five years ago before I was ...
+_estropiee_ ... crippled....
+
+"Destiny...."
+
+
+Section 11
+
+Dusk had gone; darkness had come, and now darkness itself would leave
+soon, for the third quarter of a great saffron moon showed its edge in
+the eastward. Marseilles was like the pale light of a candle. And a
+great palpable darkness had settled like water in the hollow of the
+woods.
+
+"Dearest"--her voice took sudden strength--"will you forgive me? I don't
+say that just as if I'd done a small wrong. But will a big power come
+out of your heart and say: 'It's all right, Claire-Anne. I understood.'
+It will be so much for me to know that--in the days when you are gone--"
+
+"But, Claire-Anne, I'm not gone--"
+
+"You must go, dearest. You must go now. Don't you see?" Her voice grew
+gentle. "You couldn't stay any more. It wouldn't be like you, somehow.
+And I wouldn't have you spoiled in my eyes ... darling, you could never
+be ... but you must go...."
+
+"And you, Claire-Anne--"
+
+"Destiny ... a long, lean finger ... a path...."
+
+"But you never know--"
+
+"We know, we poor women, Shane. We know.... Shane, don't you understand
+... what makes the ... girl in the archway, the emperor's mistress,
+drink, take ether ... do strange horrors?.... They know.... And they
+want to escape from seeing it ... for an instant even ... the terrible
+story of the _Belle Heaulmiere_ ... the 'Armorer's Daughter':
+
+  _"Ainsi le bon temps regretons
+    Entre nous, pauvres vielles sotes,
+  Assises bas, a crouppetons,
+    Tout en ung tas commes pelotes_,
+    _A petit feu de chenevotes
+  Tost allumees, tost estaintes:
+    Et jadis fusmes si mignotes!...
+  Ainsi emprent a maintes et maintes._
+
+"Do you understand, Shane, do you understand? So we regret the good old
+times, poor old light women, gathered together like fagots, and
+hunkering over a straw fire, soon lit, soon out--_tost allumees, tost
+estaintes_ ... and once we were so dainty. To many and many's the one it
+happens. _Pauvres vielles sotes!_ Poor old light women, Shane.... _Et
+jadis fusmes si mignotes!_ ... Dainty as I am, they were once.... And do
+you blame them now when see it coming ... the drink, the ether ... the
+abominable things...."
+
+"O my God! Claire-Anne!"
+
+"Heart of hearts, Shane. I once escaped to light, where they escape to
+oblivion.... Once I had you, and all my life I'll remember it.... All my
+life I'll remember: I once knew a man.... And it will be a help, so much
+a help...."
+
+"Oh, Claire-Anne, it can't be!"
+
+"It must be, dearest heart. It is--decreed. Darling, sometimes I
+thought--Do you remember your showing me the poor prince's dagger, and
+our talking about him--setting himself free--and I said I thought I
+could understand why he did not.... I've wanted to, myself.... But....
+There's a way you're brought up, when you're young.... They put such
+fear of God in you ... such fear of hell ... you never could--throw
+things down and go straight to Him, and say: 'I couldn't. I just simply
+couldn't. I hadn't the strength. I couldn't ... just....' And they never
+think of Him saying: 'Of course you couldn't.... And it was all My
+fault. I wasn't looking.... I've so much to think of.... You did right
+to come to Me....' But, no! no! One fears. They teach you so much fear,
+Shane, when you are young ... so that even this is better--this--game,
+where none win.... And so--one goes on...."
+
+She rose suddenly and clutched his shoulders in panic. Her mouth twisted
+in piteous agony....
+
+"Oh, but dearest, dearest, _pauvres vielles sotes_, poor old light
+women.... Shane, _assises bas, a crouppetons_, in an archway, hoping for
+a drunken farmer with a couple of sous ... and so cold, so cold, with a
+little fire of straw stalks ... _tost allumees, tost estaintes!_" ...
+
+"No, Claire-Anne! no!"
+
+"A drunken farmer, or traveling pedler.... _Et jadis fusmes si
+mignotes_ ... and so dainty once!"
+
+"No!" His voice took the ring of decision. She didn't hear him. Her
+voice broke into a torrent of sobs.
+
+"Take me in your arms, Shane, once more. And let my heart come into your
+heart, where it's so warm ... and I'll have something to remember in the
+days when it will be ... so cold, so cold ... and I'll be there warming
+old bones.... _A petit feu de chenevotes_.... Shane, dearest,
+please...."
+
+He took her in his arms, and her body seemed to be some light envelope
+in which a great turmoil of spirit beat, as a wild bird beats against a
+cage.... He could hardly hold her body so much was her tortured
+sobbing.... So much did what was within wheel and beat, beat and wheel,
+in unendurable panic. Her voice murmured in his wet shoulder:
+
+"_Pauvre vielle sote!_ O Shane, Shane ... _pauvre vielle sote!"_ ...
+
+
+Section 12
+
+Above him, to starboard, he could hear the churning of the tug that was
+to take them from the docks to the open sea. Overhead the pilot was
+stamping impatiently. Forward the mate was roaring like a bull:
+
+"Where is that damned apprentice? Tell him to lay aft and bear a hand
+with the warps."
+
+In a minute or so he would have to go on the poop and give orders to let
+go and haul in. The tug was blowing, "Hurry up...." He ought to be on
+deck now.... He hated to go up ... he hated to see the last of
+Marseilles ... he would never see Marseilles again....
+
+Was all ready? Yes, all was ready. Cargo, supplies, sea-chest,
+everything for the long voyage he had decided--had to decide--on at the
+last minute. Forward across the Atlantic to where the sou'east trades
+blew, and then south'ard reaching under all sail--the fleecy clouds, the
+bright constellations of the alien pole, the strange fish-like birds,
+the flying-fish, the bonita, the albacore; the chill gust from the River
+Plate; the roar of the gales of the forties; the tremendous fight around
+the Horn, with a glimpse of land now and then as they fought for
+easting--the bleak rocks of Diego Ramirez and the Iledefonsos, and
+perhaps the blue ridge of Cape Horn, or of the False Cape; then,
+northward to Callao ... anywhere, everywhere ... new seas, new lands,
+new cities ... but never again Marseilles....
+
+And he would never see her again, _La Mielleuse_--couldn't if he wanted
+to ... never again ... irrevocable.... On that pillow she had laid her
+head, her dark darling head!... And last night he had seen it for the
+last time, dark, smiling in sleep, on a snowy pillow.... He remembered
+as he might remember a strange pantomime.... His going to his coat
+for--what he had there ... the silent tiptoe ... the gentle raising of
+her left arm, as she smiled in her sleep ... the sudden weakness at her
+soft warm beauty ... the decision.... Of course he had done right!... Of
+course!... Of course!...
+
+Overhead the pilot stamped on the deck in a flurry of impatience. The
+tug wailed in irritation. He must get on deck....
+
+He threw one last glance around.... He had everything he needed for
+himself.... Nothing lacking.... His eyes paused for a moment on his
+desk. Wait! Where was the dagger? Prince Charles's dagger?
+
+He gripped himself in fright. Was he going--had he gone--mad? He knew
+where that was ... he knew ... he knew.... It was--
+
+"Ogh!" A flash of horror went over him.... But he had done right ... of
+course he had done right....
+
+"All's ready, sir," the mate called in to his cabin.
+
+"Yes?..."
+
+"Man, you're no' ill?" the mate looked at him, queerly.
+
+"Of course I'm not ill." He swung on deck. "All right? Let go aft, then,
+and haul in. Tug a little westward: a little more westward. Hard a port,
+Mr. McKinstry. All right! Let go all, for'a'd.... She's off...."
+
+
+
+
+PART FOUR
+
+THE WRESTLER FROM ALEPPO
+
+
+Section 1
+
+"_Ya Zan_," came his wife's slow grave voice, "O Shane, when your ship
+is in trouble, or does not go fast, do the passengers beat you?"
+
+"Of course not," Campbell laughed. "What put that in your little head?"
+
+"When I went with my uncle, Arif Bey, on the pilgrimage to Mecca--Arif
+was a Moslem that year"--she bit the thread of the embroidery she was
+doing with her little sharp teeth, _tkk!_--"our ship anchored for the
+night in _Birkat Faraun_--Pharaoh's Bay. In the morning it would not
+move, so the Maghrabi pilgrims beat the captain terribly. And once at
+Al-Akabah, when the captain lost sight of shores for one whole long day,
+the Maghrabis beat him again. They said he should have known better.
+Don't--don't they ever beat you, _ya Zan_?"
+
+"Not yet, Fenzile. They only beat bad skippers."
+
+"But our _Rais_ was a good sailor. He must have been a good sailor, Zan.
+He was very old. He was very pious, too. He said the prayers. Do you
+ever say the prayers, Zan, when the sea looks as if it were about to be
+angry?"
+
+"What sort of prayers, Fenzile?"
+
+"Oh, prayers. Let me see." Her dark eyes had the look he loved, as if
+she had turned around and were rummaging within herself, as a woman
+seeks diligently and yet slowly in a chest. "Oh, like the Moslem's _Hizb
+al-Bahr_. You ought to know that prayer, _ya Zan_. It will make you safe
+at sea. I wonder you, a great _Rais_, do not know that prayer."
+
+"What is the prayer, Fenzile?"
+
+"'We pray Thee for safety in our goings forth and our standings
+still.... Subject unto us this sea, even as Thou didst subject the deep
+to Moses, and as Thou didst subject the fire to Abraham, and as Thou
+didst subject the iron to David, and as Thou didst subject the wind and
+the devils and djinns and mankind to Solomon, and as Thou didst subject
+the moon and _Al-Burah_ to Mohammed, on whom be Allah's mercy and His
+blessing! And subject unto us all the seas in earth and heaven, in Thy
+visible and in Thine invisible worlds, the sea of this life and the sea
+of futurity. O Thou Who reignest over everything and unto Whom all
+things return.' ... You must know that prayer, and say that prayer, _ya
+Zan_. What do you do when it is very stormy?"
+
+"Oh, take in as little sail as possible and keep shoving ahead."
+
+"I don't understand," she let the embroidery fall in her lap. "I see
+your ship from the quays and I can't understand how you guide such a big
+ship. And how you go at night, Zan, that I cannot understand. It is so
+dark at night. There is a terrible lot I do not understand. I am very
+stupid."
+
+"You are very dear and darling, Fenzile. You understand how to take care
+of a house and how to be very beautiful, and be very loving--"
+
+"Do I, Zanim? That is not hard. That is not very much. That is not like
+sailing a ship on the sea."
+
+Without, Beirut seethed with life. Thin, gaunt dogs barked and snarled
+in the narrow staired streets. Came the cry of the donkey-boys. Came the
+cry of the water-sellers. Came the shouts of the young Syrians over the
+gammon game. Loped the laden camels. Tramped the French soldiers. Came a
+new hum....
+
+Fenzile rose and went through the courtyard, past the little fountain
+with the orange-trees, past the staircase to the upper gallery, came to
+the barred iron gates, looked a moment, moved modestly back into the
+shadows....
+
+"O look, _ya Zan_," her grave voice became excited. "Come quickly. See.
+It is Ahmet Ali, with his attendants and a lot of people following him."
+
+"And who is Ahmet Ali?"
+
+"Ahmet Ali! don't you know, Zanim? The great wrestler, Ahmet Ali. The
+wrestler from Aleppo...."
+
+
+Section 2
+
+Through the grilled door, in the opal shade of the walls, Shane saw the
+wrestler stroll down the street; a big bulk of a man in white robe and
+turban, olive-skinned, heavy on his feet, seeming more like a prosperous
+young merchant than a wrestling champion of a vilayet. Yet underneath
+the white robes Shane could sense the immense arms and shoulders, the
+powerful legs. Very heavily he moved, muscle-bound a good deal, Shane
+thought; a man for pushing and crushing and resisting, but not for fast,
+nervous work, sinew and brain coordinating like the crack of a whip. A
+Cornish wrestler would turn him inside out within a minute; a Japanese
+would pitch him like a ball before he had even taken his stance. But
+once he had a grip he would be irresistible.
+
+"So that's Ahmet Ali."
+
+"Yes, Zan," Fenzile clapped her hands with delight, like a child seeing
+a circus procession. "Oh, he is a great wrestler. He beat Yussuf
+Hussein, the Cairene, and he beat a great Russian wrestler who came on a
+pilgrimage to Jerusalem. And he beat a French sailor. And he beat a
+Tartar. Oh, he is a great wrestler, Ahmet Ali."
+
+The wrestler had come nearer. Behind him came four or five supporters,
+in cloth white as his. Behind them came a ruck of Syrian youths,
+effeminate, vicious. Came a croud of donkey-boys, impish, black. The
+wrestler walked more slowly as he approached to pass the iron doors. And
+Shane was startled into a sudden smile at the sight of his face--a
+girl's face, with a girl's eyes. And in his hand was a rose. A wrestler
+with a rose!
+
+"Why, a man could kill him."
+
+"Oh, no! Oh, no, Zan!" Fenzile said. "He is very strong. He conquered
+Yussuf Hussein, the Cairene, and Yussuf Hussein could bend horseshoes
+with his bare hands. He is very strong, very powerful Ahmet Ali."
+
+The wrestler was walking slowly past the house throwing glances through
+the grill with his full girl's eyes. A quick suspicion came into
+Campbell's mind. He turned to his wife.
+
+"Does he come past here often?"
+
+"Yes, yes, Zan. Every day."
+
+"Does he stop and look into the court like that, every time?"
+
+"Yes, Zan. Every time," she smiled.
+
+"Do you know whom he's looking for?"
+
+"Yes, Zan. For me."
+
+Campbell's hand shot out suddenly and caught her wrist.
+
+"Fenzile," his voice was cold. "You aren't carrying on with, encouraging
+this--Ahmet Ali?"
+
+"Zan Cam'el," her child's eyes flashed unexpectedly. "I am no cheap
+Cairene woman. I am a Druse girl. The daughter of a Druse Bey."
+
+"I am sorry, Fenzile."
+
+She looked at him steadily with her great green eyes, green of the sea,
+and as he looked at her sweet roundish face, her little mouth half open
+in sincerity, her calm brow, her brown arch of eyebrow, she seemed to
+him no more than a beautiful proud child. There was no guile in her.
+
+"You mustn't be foolish, you know, Fenzile."
+
+"_Severim Seni._ I love only you, Zan. But it is so funny to see him go
+by, I must always smile. Don't you think it funny, Zan?"
+
+"No, I don't think it at all funny."
+
+"Oh, but it is funny, Zan. A big strong wrestler like that to be foolish
+over a very little woman. And for a cheap showman of the market-place to
+be lifting his eyes to a daughter of the Druse emirs. It is funny."
+
+"It isn't funny. And he isn't much of a wrestler anyway."
+
+"Oh, but he is, Zan. He is a very great wrestler. They say he threw and
+killed a bear."
+
+"O kooltooluk. Hell! I could throw him myself."
+
+She said nothing, turning her head, and reaching for her embroidery.
+
+"Don't you believe me, Fenzile? I tell you I could make mince-meat of
+him."
+
+"Of course, Zan. Of course you could." And she smiled. But this time it
+wasn't the delighted smile of a child. It was the grave patient smile of
+a wise woman. And Shane knew it. Past that barrier he could not break.
+And on her belief he could make no impress. There was no use arguing,
+talking. She would just smile and agree. And her ideal of strength and
+power would be the muscle-bound hulk of the Aleppo man, with the girl's
+face and the girl's eyes, and the rose in his hand. And Shane, all his
+life inured to sport, hard as iron, supple as a whip, with his science
+picked up from Swedish quartermasters and Japanese gendarmes, from mates
+and crimps in all parts of the world, would always be in her eyes an
+infant compared to the monstrous Syrian! Not that it mattered a tinker's
+curse, but--
+
+Oh, damn the wrestler from Aleppo!
+
+
+Section 3
+
+He had thought, when he left Liverpool on a gusty February day, of all
+the peace and quiet, of the color and life there would be on the Asian
+shore ... Europe had somehow particularly sickened him on this last
+voyage.... All its repose was sordid, all its passion was calculated.
+England and its queen mourned the sudden death of the prince consort,
+but it mourned him with a sort of middle-class domesticity, and no
+majesty. So a grocer's family might have mourned, remembering how well
+papa cut the mutton.... He was so damned good at everything, Albert was,
+and he approved of art and science--within reason.... There was a
+contest for a human ideal in America, and in the ports of England
+privateers were being fitted out, to help the South, as the Greeks
+might, for a price.... And Napoleon, that solemn comedian, was making
+ready his expedition to Mexico, with fine words and a tradesman's
+cunning.... And the drums of Ulster roared for Garibaldi, rejoicing in
+the downfall of the harlot on seven hills, as Ulster pleasantly
+considered the papal states, while Victor Emmanuel, sly Latin that he
+was, thought little of liberty and much about Rome.... Aye, kings!
+
+And so a great nostalgia had come over Shane Campbell on this voyage for
+the Syrian port and the wife he had married there. He wanted sunshine.
+He wanted color. He wanted simplicity of life. Killing there was in
+Syria, great killing too. But it was the sort of killing one understood
+and could forgive. A Druse disliked a Maronite Christian, so he went
+quietly and knifed him. Another Maronite resented that, and killed a
+Druse; and they were all at it, hell-for-leather. But it was passion and
+fanaticism, not high-flown words and docile armies and the tradesmen
+sneaking up behind.... Ave, war!
+
+And he was sick of the damned Mersey fog, and he was sick of the
+drunkenness of Scotland Road, and he was sick of the sleet lashing
+Hoylake links. He was sick of Pharisaical importers who did the heathen
+in the eye on Saturday and on Sunday in their blasted conventicles
+thumped their black-covered craws in respectable humility.... In Little
+Asia religion was a passion, not a smug hypocrisy; and though the
+heathen was dishonest, yet it was not the mathematical reasoned
+dishonesty of the Christian. It was a childish game, like
+horse-coping.... And in the East they did not blow gin in your face,
+smelling like turpentine....
+
+And he was sick of the abominable homes, the horsehair furniture with
+the anti-macassars--Lord! and they called themselves clean.... He wanted
+the spotlessness of the Syrian courtyard.... The daubs on the British
+walls, sentimental St. Bernard dogs and dray-horses with calves' eyes,
+brought him to a laughing point when he thought of the subtlety of color
+and line in strange Persian rugs....
+
+And he was sick of British women, with their knuckled hands, their
+splayed feet. Their abominable dressing, too, a bust and a brooch and a
+hooped skirt--their grocers' conventions, prudish, almost obscene,
+avoiding of the natural in word, deed, or thought.... He wanted Fenzile,
+with her eyes, _vert de mer_, her full childish face, her slim hands
+with the orange-tinted finger nails, her silken trousers, her little
+slippers of silver and blue.... Her soft arms, her back-thrown head, her
+closed lids.... And the fountain twinkling in the soft Syrian night,
+while afar off some Arab singer chanted a poem of Lyla Khanim's:
+
+"_Beni ser-mest u hayran eyleyen ol yar; janim dir_.... The world is a
+prison and my heart is scarred.... My tears are like a vineyard's
+fountain, O absent one...."
+
+And here was Beirut again: here the snowy crest of Lebanon, here the
+roadstead crowded with craft; here the mulberry groves. Here the
+sparkling sapphire sea; here the turf blazing with poppies; here the
+quiet pine road to Damascus; here the forests, excellent with cedars.
+Here the twisting unexpected streets. Here his own quiet house, with the
+courtyard and its fountain. Here the hum of the bazaars, here the
+_ha-ha_ of the donkey boys, here the growling camels. Here the rugs on
+the wall; here the little orange-trees. Here the two negress servants,
+clean, efficient. Here color, and peace, and passion. Here Fenzile....
+
+And this damned wrestler from Aleppo must go and spoil it all.
+
+
+Section 4
+
+He might have shipped with one of the great American clippers racing
+around Cape Hope under rolling topsails, and become in his way as well
+known as Donald Mackay was, who built and mastered the _Sovereign of the
+Seas_, with her crew of one hundred and five, four mates and two
+boatswains. He might have had a ship like Phil Dumaresq's _Surprise_,
+that had a big eagle for her figurehead. He might have clipped the
+record of the _Flying Cloud_, three hundred and seventy-four miles in
+one day, steering northward and westward around Cape Horn. He might have
+had a ship as big as the _Great Republic_, the biggest ship that ever
+took the seas. He might have had one of the East Indiamen, and the state
+of an admiral. He might have had one of the new adventurers in steel and
+steam.
+
+But fame and glory never allured him, and destiny did not call him to be
+any man's servant. He was content to be his own master with his own
+ship, and do whatsoever seemed to him good and just to do. If they
+needed him and his boat anywhere, he would be there. When they needed
+boats to America, he was there. But if they didn't need him, he was not
+the one to thrust himself. Let destiny call.
+
+Success, as it was called, was a thing of destiny. When destiny needed a
+man, destiny tapped him on the shoulder. Failure, however, was a man's
+own fault. There was always work to do. And it was up to every man to
+find his work. If there was no room for him in a higher work it was no
+excuse for his not working in a lower plane. There would be no failures,
+he thought, if folk were only wise. If a man came a cropper in a big
+way, it was because he had rushed into a work before Destiny, the
+invisible infallible nuncio of God, had chosen her man. Or because he
+was dissatisfied, ambition and ability not being equal. Or because he
+was lazy.
+
+Always there was work to do, as there was work for him now. Clouds of
+sail and tubby steamboats went the crowded tracks of the world's waters,
+not to succor and help but for gain of money. And Lesser Asia was
+neglected, now that the channel of commerce to the States was opened
+wide. Syria needed more than sentimental travelers to the Holy Land. It
+needed machinery for its corn-fields and its mines. It needed prints and
+muslins from the Lancashire looms. It needed rice and sugar. And it had
+more to give than a religious education. Fine soap and fruit and wine
+and oil and sesame it gave, golden tobacco, and beautiful craftmanship
+in silver and gold, fine rugs from Persia. Brass and copper and
+ornamental woodcarving from Damascus, mother of cities; walnuts, wheat,
+barley, and apricots from its gardens and fields. Wool and cotton, gums
+and saffron from Aleppo, and fine silk embroidery.
+
+Others might race past Java Head to China for tea and opium. Others
+might make easting around the Horn to the gold-fields of California.
+Others might sail up the Hooghly to Calicut, trafficking with mysterious
+Indian men. Others might cross to the hustle and welter of New York,
+young giant of cities, but Campbell was content to sail to Asia Minor.
+He brought them what they needed and they sent color and rime to prosaic
+Britain, hashish to the apothecaries, and pistachios from Aleppo,
+cambric from Nablus and linen from Bagdad, and occasionally for an
+antiquary a Damascene sword that rang like a silver bell.
+
+For others the glory and fame to which destiny had called them. For
+others the money that they grubbed with blunted fingers from the
+dross-heaps of commerce. But for Campbell what work he could do, well
+done--and Lesser Asia ...
+
+
+Section 5
+
+Of all the seas he had sailed it seemed to Shane that Mediterranean had
+more color, more life, more romance than any. Not the battles round the
+Horn, not the swinging runs to China, not the starry southern seas had
+for him the sense of adventure that Mediterranean had. Mediterranean was
+not a sea. It was a home haven, with traditions of the human house. Here
+Sennacherib sailed in the great galleys the brown Sidonian shipwrights
+had made for him. Here had been the Phenicians with their brailed
+squaresail. Here had been the men of Rhodes, sailors and fighters both.
+Here the Greek penteconters with their sails and rigging of purple and
+black. Here the Cypriotes had sailed under the lee of the islands Byron
+loved and where Sappho sang her songs like wine and honey, sharp wine
+and golden honey. Here had the Roman galleys splashed and here the great
+Venetian boats set proud sail against the Genoese. Here had the
+Lion-heart sailed gallantly to Palestine. Here had Icarus fallen in the
+blue sea. Here had Paul been shipwrecked, sailing on a ship of
+Andramyttium bound to the coast of Asia, crossing the sea which is off
+Cilicia and Pamphylia, and trans-shipping at Myra. How modern it all
+sounded but for the strange antique names.
+
+"And when we had sailed slowly many days"--only a seaman could feel the
+pathos of that--"and scarce were come over against Cnidus, the wind not
+suffering us, we sailed under Crete, over against Salmone;
+
+"And, hardly passing it, came unto a place which is called The Fair
+Havens--"
+
+Was Paul a sailor, too, Campbell often wondered? The bearded Hebrew,
+like a firebrand, possibly epileptic, not quite sane, had he at one time
+been brought up to the sea? "Sirs," he had said, "I perceive that this
+voyage will be with hurt and much damage, not only of the lading and
+ship, but also of our lives." There spoke a man who knew the sea--not a
+timid passenger. But the master of the ship thought otherwise and yet
+Paul was right. And then came "a tempestuous wind, called Euroclydon."
+And that was the Levanter of to-day, Euraquilo, they call it--hell let
+loose. Then came furious seas, and the terrors of a lee shore; the
+frapping of the ship and the casting overboard of tackle, the
+jettisoning of freight--
+
+"And when neither sun nor stars in many days appeared, and no small
+tempest lay on us, all hope that we should be saved was then taken
+away." Somehow the absolute fidelity of the sea-life of the story went
+to Campbell's heart, and the figure of Paul the mariner was clearer than
+the figure of Paul the Apostle.
+
+"Howbeit, we must be cast upon a certain island.
+
+"But when the fourteenth night was come, as we were driven up and down
+in Adria, about midnight the shipmen deemed that they drew near to some
+country--"
+
+The intuition of seamanship. The flash. How modern! Oh, Paul lived in
+that sea. His ghost and memory were forever there, as were the ghosts of
+the Lion-heart; and of Sappho, singer of songs; and of the stout
+Phenician sailing men; and of the doges of Venice, lovers and husbands
+of the sea. On the tideless Mediterranean beauty still abided, as
+nowhere else; would abide, when nowhere else--
+
+Would it, though? Would it abide anywhere? A pang came into Campbell's
+heart. Off Finisterre he had been passed by Robert Steel of Greenock's
+_Falcon_, every sail drawing, skysails and moonrakers set, a pillar of
+white cloud she seemed, like some majestic womanhood. And while boats
+like the _Fiery Cross_ and the _Falcon_ tore along like greyhounds,
+there were building tubby iron boats to go by steam. The train was
+beating the post-chaise with its satiny horses, the train that went by
+coal one dug from the ground. And even now de Lesseps and his men were
+digging night and day that the steamboat might push the proud clipper
+from the seas. Queer! Would there come a day when no topgallants drew?
+And the square-rigged ships would be like old crones gathering fagots on
+an October day. And what would become of the men who built and mastered
+great racing ships? And would the sea itself permit vile iron and smudgy
+coal to speck its immaculate bosom? Must the sea, too, be tamed like a
+dancing bear for the men who are buying and selling? It seemed
+impossible.
+
+But the shrewd men who trafficked said it must be so. They were spending
+their money on de Lesseps's fabulous scheme. And the shrewd men never
+spent money without a return. They would conquer.
+
+Poor sea of the Vikings! Poor sea of the Lion-heart and of the Sappho of
+the songs! Poor sea of Admiral Columbus! Poor sea to whom Paul made
+obeisance! Sea of Drake and sea of Nelson, and sea of Philip of Spain.
+Poor sea whom the great doges of Venice wed with a ring of gold! Christ!
+If they could only bottle you, they would sell you like Holland gin!
+
+
+Section 6
+
+He had figured his work. He had figured his field. It seemed to him that
+this being done life should flow on evenly as a stream. But there were
+gaps of unhappiness that all the subtle sailing of a ship, all the
+commerce of the East, all the fighting of the gales could not fill.
+Within him somewhere was a space, in his heart, in his head, somewhere,
+a ring, a pit of emotion--how, where, why he could not express. It just
+existed. And this was filled at times with concentration on his work, at
+times with plans of the future and material memories of the past or
+thoughts of ancient shipmates, of his Uncle Robin. It was like a house,
+that space was, with a strange division of time, that corresponded not
+with time of day, but with recurrent actions, memories, moods. There
+would be the bustle of his work, and that seemed to be morning. There
+would be the planning of future days, and that seemed like an
+afternoon, of sunshine; and there would be memories, as of old
+shipmates, as of Uncle Robin--God rest his dear soul; as of Alan Donn
+with his hearty cursing, his hearty laugh. And that was like an evening
+with golden candle-light and red fire burning. And then would come the
+quietness of night, all the bustle, all the plans, all the memories
+gone. The fire out, the rooms empty. And in the strange place somewhere
+within would come a strange lucidity, blue and cold and absolute as the
+stars, and into that place would walk, as players stalk upon the stage,
+each of three ghosts.
+
+The first was his mother, who was dead, an apparition of chilling
+terror. From afar she beheld him with eyes that were queerly inimical.
+She had done nothing to him, nor he anything to her. She had done
+nothing for him, nor he for her. Between them was nothing. When she had
+died he had felt nothing, and that was the tragedy. No tears, no relief,
+nothing. She had carried him in her womb, born him, suckled him; and he
+had always felt he had been unwelcome. There had been no hospitality in
+her body; just constraint. She had had no welcome for the little guest
+of God; her heart had been hard to him and he at her breasts. Nothing
+common to them in life, and now joined through the horrible significant
+gulf of death. She could be with him always now, being dead. But where a
+man's mother should come to him smilingly, with soft hands, with wisdom
+and comfort passing that of life, she came with terrible empty eyes. He
+could see her gaunt profile, her black brows. She was like an engraving
+he had once seen of the witch Saul had used at En-dor, to call up
+Samuel, who was dead. She had the same awful majesty, the same utter
+loneliness.
+
+"You gave me nothing in life. In death give me peace," he would cry. But
+she stayed until it suited her to go, as she would have done in life.
+Her haunted, haunting eyes ...!
+
+And there would come another ghost, the ghost of the girl he had married
+and he a boy--fourteen years ago. It was strange how he could remember
+her--her red hair, her sullen mouth, her suspicious eyes. Her shoulders
+drooped a little; there was no grace to her stance. She complained
+against something, but she did not accuse him. He had married her, and
+she had married him, and she had died. That was all there was to it. And
+though she had sorrowed his younger days, yet he felt very kindly to
+her. There she was, with her sullen mouth, her drooping shoulders,
+complaining. "Life is so short, and there was so little to it, and
+others have so much," she seemed to say. "I had a right to have my man
+and a place in the country, the like of other girls, but all I got was
+you. And death at the end of a short year. Wasn't it hard, och, wasn't
+it so!" And he had to comfort her. "It was nobody's fault, Moyra. It
+just happened. We were awfully young." But her lips were still sullen,
+her eyes suspicious as she went away. "A short life and a bitter one. A
+hard thing surely!" When she left him there was a sigh of relief. Poor
+girl!
+
+And the third ghost was hardly a presence, but an absence, or a presence
+so intangible that it was worse than an absence. Claire-Anne, who was
+dead, whom he had--made dead, whom he had taken it upon himself to set
+free. For a year after he had left Marseilles she had seemed to be
+always with him, closer in spirit, now she was dead, than she had ever
+been in flesh and spirit when alive. A part of him she seemed always to
+be. Always there, in the quiet cabin, on the heeling decks, on the solid
+shore. And the long thoughts of him seemed to be conversation with her,
+on strange beautiful things, on strange terrible things, on the common
+commodity of life.... And then one day she left him....
+
+He was coming into Southampton Water and waiting for the pilot's cutter
+from the Solent, one bright July morning. And all the Solent was dotted
+with sails, the snowy sails of great yachts and the cinnamon sails of
+small ones. Little fishing-craft prowled near the shore. And afar off,
+in fancy, he could see the troops of swans, and the stalking herons. The
+pilot's cutter plowed toward him, her deep forefoot dividing the water
+like a knife. Immense, vibrant beauty. And he felt, as always, that
+Claire-Anne was by him, her dark understanding presence, her clear Greek
+face, her little smile.
+
+"In a minute now we will come into the wind and lower a boat,
+Claire-Anne." And a shock of surprise came over him. She was not there.
+It was as though he had been talking with his back turned to some one,
+and turning around found they weren't there. For an instant he felt as
+if he had lost somebody overboard. And then it came to him that water,
+earth, material hazards were nothing to her any more. She had gone
+somewhere for a moment. And he turned to greet the pilot as he swung
+aboard.
+
+"She will come back," he thought.... But she never came back. Once or
+twice or maybe three times, a month, six months, and ten months later,
+he felt her warm lover-like presence near him. "Claire-Anne! Is it you,
+Claire-Anne?" And she was gone again. Something that had hovered,
+fluttered, kissed, and flown away. Never again!
+
+She had become to him in death much more real than she had ever been in
+life. In life she had been dynamic, a warm, multicolored, perfumed
+cloud. In death she was static. All the tumult of material things gone,
+he had a vision of her clear as a line drawing. And he had come to
+depend on her so much. In difficulty of thought he would say: "Is this
+right, Claire-Anne?" And her answer would come: "Yes, Shane!" Or
+possibly when some matter of trade or conduct seemed dubious, not
+quite--whatever it was, her voice would come clear as a bell. "You
+mustn't, Shane. It isn't right. It isn't like you to be small." It might
+have been conscience, but it sounded like Claire-Anne. And oftentimes in
+problems, she would say: "I don't know, Shane. I don't quite know." And
+he would say, "We must do our best, Claire-Anne."
+
+Well, she was gone. And he thought to himself: What do we know of the
+destiny of the dead? They, too, must have work, missions to perform. The
+God he believed in--the wise, firm, and kindly God--might have said:
+"Claire-Anne, he'll be all right now. At any rate he'll have to work out
+the rest for himself. Leave that. I want you to--" And she had gone.
+
+That was one majestic explanation, but at times it seemed to him that no
+matter what happened in the world, or superworld, yet she must be in
+touch with him. "Set me, as a seal upon thy heart, as a seal upon thine
+arm," cried the prince's daughter, "for love is strong as death." If she
+loved him she must love him still.
+
+It suddenly occurred to him that the fault was not occult, but a matter
+of spiritual deterioration in himself. To be in harmony with the lonely
+dead there must be no dross about the mind. The preoccupations of
+routine, the occasional dislikes of some stupid ship's officer, or
+boatswain, the troubles about cargo--this, that, the other pettinesses
+might cloud his eye as a mist clouds a lens. There came to him the
+memory of a translation from some Chinese poet he had heard somewhere,
+in some connection:
+
+  How am I fallen from myself! For a long time now
+  I have not seen the prince of Chang in my dreams.
+
+He decided he would clear and make ready the quiet sweet place in his
+heart, the room of ghosts, so that she might come and dwell there. But
+induce the spiritual mood of the quiet October evening much as he could,
+yet she never came again.
+
+From his mind now there faded the memory of her face, the memory of her
+hands, the memory of her voice even. With every week, with every month,
+with the year, she was gone. Like a lost thought, or a lost bar of
+music, she was gone. She had been there, but she was gone. The loss was
+a terrible one. To lose one who was alive was much. But to lose one who
+was dead was unbelievable, horrible ... to lose the sun ... forever....
+
+He decided he could go back to the Prado of Marseilles, where first he
+had met her, where she would of all places have kept a tryst with him.
+There was no risk. The folk of the sea come and go so easily, so
+invisibly, and French law bothers itself little about the killing of a
+woman of evil repute.... One of the risks of the trade, they would say.
+Even had there been a risk he would have gone. He went.
+
+It was a dark night, a night of wind with the waves lashing the shore. A
+night of all nights to keep a tryst with a dead woman. Immense privacy
+of darkness and howling winds and lashing waves. With awe he went there,
+as a shaken Catholic might enter a cathedral, dubious of the mystery of
+the eucharist, expecting some silent word, some invisible sign from the
+tabernacle.... He went with bowed head....
+
+She never came.
+
+He concentrated until all faded away, even the night, the wind, the
+insistent waters. He might have been standing on a solitary rock in an
+infinite dark sea, to which there was no shore. Asking, pleading,
+willing for her.... But she never came....
+
+And it suddenly became inevitable to him that she would not come; and
+slowly, as a man comes slowly out of a drug into consciousness, he came
+back into the world of lights and laughter and sodden things. And
+turning on his heel without a look, he went away....
+
+He never called to her again.... He thought over her often enough, and
+she had never been real, he decided. His mother and his wife had been
+real. They were their own dimensions. But she was something he had made
+in his head, as an author may create a character. She was a
+hallucination. And she had never been with him after death; that had
+been a mirage in the hinterland of the mind.
+
+And he asked: Who was she, anyway? She was a woman who said she loved
+him, might even have believed it. Women under stress believe so many
+things. A little anger, a little passion, a little melancholy, and
+things resolve themselves into so many differences of color and line.
+And what standard of truth is there? Suppose he were to tell any man of
+the world of the occurrence, and to ask who she was, what she was, and
+what he had been to her. They would have said it was simple. She was a
+harlot of Marseilles, and he was her _amant de coeur_. But the beauty
+of it! he would have objected. All the beauty was in yourself. Or as
+they would have put it: All imagination!
+
+What a snare it all was, and what was truth? How much better off a man
+was if he had never anything to do with them, and yet....
+
+A world of men, there would be something lacking! Friends he had in
+plenty, men would help him, as a ship stands by another ship at sea.
+Friends to talk to, of ships and sports, of ports and politics; but when
+one left them, one was left by one's self. And all the subtleties of
+mind came again like a cloud of wasps. To each man his own problem of
+living. To each man to decide his own escape from himself.
+
+"And the Lord God said: It is not good that the man should be alone--"
+the Hebrew chronicler had imagined. No, it was not good. It was
+terrible. After the day's work was done, after the pleasant evenings of
+friends, then came the terror of the shadows. Unreal they might be, but
+they hurt more than real things did. Unless one sank into the
+undignified oblivion of drink, there was no escape. Shadows came.
+Acuter than the tick of a watch, they were there, the cold mother with
+the haunting eyes, the dead wife with the sullen mouth, visible as
+stars. And empty as air was the space Claire-Anne should have occupied,
+with her clear-cut beautiful features, her understanding eyes. Three
+ghosts, and the ghost that was missing was the most terrible ghost of
+all ... He could not stand them any more.... He must not be alone....
+
+
+Section 7
+
+He could not marry a Christian of the East, they were such an
+unspeakably treacherous race. He could not marry a Jewess, for about
+each one of the nation there seemed to be an awesome destiny, a terrible
+doom or an ultimate majesty blinding human eyes; a wall, so high that it
+was terrible.... He could not marry a Moslem woman, for that would mean
+acceptance of Islam. And though Islam was very fine, very clean, and
+Campbell believed in resignation, and acknowledged there was no god but
+God, as the crypticism was, yet the Scots-Irish honesty of him would not
+accept Mohammed as the prophet of God. It would be like putting
+Bonaparte above the Lord Buddha. A faith is a very solemn thing and not
+to be approached lightly. To accept a faith publicly, the tongue in the
+cheek, was the sin of insincerity and rank dishonesty, having committed
+which no man should hold up his head. And moreover Moslem women were
+queer things. For centuries they had been held to be a little more
+beautiful than a flower, a little less valuable, less personal than a
+fine horse. Being told that for centuries, they had come to believe it,
+and believing one's self to be particular leads one to become it. Moslem
+women, no!
+
+He had become familiar with the Druses around Beirut. There was
+something in the hard independent tribesmen that reminded him of the
+Ulster Scot. Aloof, unafraid, inimical, independent, with a strain of
+mysticism in them, they were somehow like the glensmen of Antrim. Fairly
+friendly with the Moslems, contemptuous of the Latin Christians,
+impatient of dogma, they might have been the Orangemen of Syria. Their
+emirs had a great dignity and a great simplicity, like an old-time
+Highland chief. They acknowledged God, but after that their faith ran
+into esoteric subtleties of nature-worship, which they kept to the
+initiates among themselves.... And the common run of them had strange
+legends, as that in a mountain bowl of China lived tribe on tribe of
+Druses, and that one day these of Syria and of China would be reunited
+and conquer the world.... They were very dignified men, and muscular....
+Their women had the light feet of gazelles ... One only saw their sweet
+low foreheads, their cinnamon hands.... They claimed they were
+Christians sometimes, and other times they said they were Moslems, but
+the truth no stranger knew.... A secret sect, like the ancient
+Assassins, who had the Old Man of the Mountain for their king.... With
+them dwelt beauty and terror and the glamour of hidden things....
+
+To Shane they were very kindly. They recognized him for a mountain man
+born, and for an honest man. They could not understand him, as a
+Christian, seeing he took no part in Greek or Latin politics. They
+decided he must have some faith of his own.... He did them some kindness
+of errands, and they were very hospitable to him....
+
+In '61, after the massacres, when the tribesmen were preparing to
+retreat to the mountain of the Druses, he returned to find Syria
+occupied by the troops of Napoleon III and to hear that his friend
+Hamadj Beg of Deir el Kour was dead in the war.... He went to condole
+with the family.... Arif Bey, Hamadj's brother, was preparing to retreat
+toward Damascus....
+
+"Arif Bey," Campbell suddenly said, "also this, I seek a wife."
+
+"Yes." The grizzled Druse scratched his head, and looked at him keenly.
+
+"I am making Lebanon my home; therefore I don't want a wife of my
+country. There is no people sib to me here but the Druse people....
+Would a Druse woman marry me?"
+
+"I--I see nothing against it."
+
+"Do you know a Druse woman who would have me?"
+
+"Well, let me see," Arif said. "There is Hamadj's daughter, Fenzile."
+
+"Is she young, Arif Bey?"
+
+"Not so young, nineteen, but she is a mountain woman and lasts."
+
+"Is she good-looking?"
+
+"Yes, she is very good-looking."
+
+"Is she kindly?"
+
+"Yes, yes, I think so."
+
+"Is she wild?"
+
+"No, She is very docile."
+
+"You trust me a lot, Arif Bey."
+
+"Yes, we trust you much."
+
+"And I trust you, Arif Bey.... Will Fenzile marry me?"
+
+"Yes," Arif Bey decided, "Fenzile will marry you."
+
+
+Section 8
+
+It seemed to him, at thirty-five, that only now had he discovered the
+secret of living. Not until now had his choice and destiny come together
+to make this perfect equation of life. The work he loved of the bark
+_Queen Maeve_, with her beautiful sails like a racing yacht's, her white
+decks, her shining brass. The carrying of necessities from Britain to
+Syria, the land he loved, next to Ulster, his mother. And the carrying
+from Syria into harsh plain Britain of cargoes of beauty like those of
+Sheba's queen, on camels that bare spices, and very much gold and
+precious stones. And the great ancient city where he lived; not even
+Damascus, the pride of the world, exceeded it for beauty. Forward of
+massed Lebanon, white with snow it lay, a welter of red roots and green
+foliage--the blue water, the garlanded acacias, the roses, the sally
+branches. Beauty! Beauty! The Arab shepherds in abbas of dark magenta,
+the black Greek priests, the green of a pilgrim's turban, the veiled
+women smoking narghiles and daintly sipping sherbet, pink and yellow and
+white. The cry of the donkey-boy, and the cry of the cameleer, and the
+cry of the muezzin from the mosque. The quaint salutations as he passed
+along the staired streets: _Naharkum Sayeed!_--May your day be blessed.
+_Naharaka abyad!_--May your day be white. _Allah yahtikum el
+afiyeh!_--God give health to you. They were chanted like a refrain of a
+song.
+
+Beauty! Riot and slashing of color. Yet there was line here and massive
+proportion. The sparkling, magenta city had been the theater of great
+marching hosts. The Phenicians had built it: "the root of life, the
+nurse of cities, the primitive queen of the world," they had named her.
+And gone the Phenicians, and came the slim subtle Egyptians. And the
+massive burly Assyrians came next: and now the memory of them was
+forgotten, also their love and their hatred and their envy was now
+perished. And then came the tramp of the Roman legions, Agrippa's men,
+and held the city for centuries. Justinian had one of his law schools
+there, until the earth quaked and the scholars dispersed. And then the
+Saracens held it until Baldwin, brother of Godfrey de Bouillon, clashed
+into it with mailed crusaders; and Baldwin, overcome with the beauty of
+the land, took him a paynim queen. And then came the occult reign of the
+Druse. And then the Turk.
+
+And St. George had killed the Dragon there, after the old monk's tale.
+
+Shane Campbell was never weary of looking at the inscriptions on the
+great cliffs at the River of the Dog--the strange beauty of that name!
+It was like the place-names of native Ulster--_Athbo_, the Ford of Cows,
+_Sraidcuacha_, the Cuckoo's Lane--one name sounded to the other like
+tuning-forks. And the sweet strange harmony of it filled his heart, so
+that he could understand the irresistible charm of Lebanon--the high
+clear note like a bird's song. Here was the sun and the dreams of mighty
+things, and the palpable proximity of God. Here was beauty native, to be
+picked like a nugget, not to be mined for in bitter hours of torment and
+distress.
+
+High, clear, sustained, the note held. Arose the moon and the great
+stars like spangles. The slender acacias murmured. The pines
+_hush-hushed_. The _bronhaha_ of the cafes was like a considered
+counterpoint. Everywhere was harmony; beauty. And there would be no
+depression. It would last. There would be no ghosts. They were
+exorcised. For now there was Fenzile. How understandable everything was!
+It must have been under a moon like this, under these Syrian stars, to
+the _hush-hush-hush_ of the pine and the rustle of willow branches, that
+Solomon the king sang his love-song. And it must have been to one whose
+body was white as Fenzile's, to eyes as emerald, to velvety lips, to
+slim hands with orange-tinted finger nails that he sang. Surely the
+Shulamite was not fairer than the Fenzile, daughter of Hamadj, a Druse
+emir!
+
+  How beautiful are thy feet with shoes, O prince's daughter!
+  The joints of thy thighs are like jewels,
+  The work of the hands of a cunning workman.
+  Thy navel is like a round goblet,
+  Which wanteth not liquor:
+  Thy belly is like an heap of wheat set about with lilies.
+  Thy two breasts are like two young roes that are twins.
+  Thy neck is like a tower of ivory:
+  Thine eyes like the fishpools in Heshbon,
+  By the gate of Bath-rabbim:
+  Thy nose is as the tower of Lebanon which looketh toward Damascus.
+  Thine head upon thee is like Carmel,
+  And the hair of thine head like purple;
+  The king is held in the galleries.
+  How fair and pleasant art thou,
+  O love, for delights!
+  This thy stature is like to a palm tree.
+  And thy breasts to clusters of grapes.
+
+  I said, I will go up to the palm tree.
+  I will take hold of the boughs thereof:
+  Now also thy breasts shall be as clusters of the vine,
+  And the smell of thy nose like apples;
+  And the roof of thy mouth like the best wine for my beloved,
+  That goeth down sweetly,
+  Causing the lips of those that are asleep to speak....
+
+
+Section 9
+
+Where before he had made his mistake with women was allowing them to
+become spiritually important. His mother had been important; he had
+suffered from the sense of her lack of heart to him. His wife had been
+important; they hadn't understood life together, he made no attempt
+to.... They were so young.... And Claire-Anne had become spiritually
+important to him. So that when she was gone, it was hell.
+
+If he had treated his mother casually, depending on his uncles, it would
+have been all right. If he had discerned--and he had discerned, though
+he knew not how to act--that his wife and he would forever be
+inharmonious, it would not have been a scar on his youth. If he had gone
+for instance to Alan Donn and said, "Uncle Alan, I'm afeared there's a
+mistake been made. And what are we going to do about this woman o'
+Louth?" And Alan would have said: "I ken't well you were a damned young
+fool. Ah, well, gang off aboard your boatie, and I'll see to her." Alan
+would have ditched her and her mother mercilessly, and there would have
+been no scar on his youth....
+
+And Claire-Anne, had he only taken her as he should have taken her, as a
+light love, easily gotten, to be taken easily, instead of tragedizing
+until his fingers were scarlet.... God!... Yes, where before he had made
+his mistakes with women was allowing them to become spiritually
+important.
+
+Well, he wouldn't do that with Fenzile. He knew better now. Keep the
+heart free. Let there be beauty and graciousness and kindliness, but
+keep the heart free, and ask for no heart. All tragedies were internal,
+all the outward deeds being only as sounds. Keep the heart free.
+
+There were so many aspects to her. She was like a bird about the house,
+gaily colored, of bright song. He loved to see her move here and there,
+with movements as of music. And she was like a child at times, as she
+solemnly made sherbets--very like a child she was, intense, simple. And
+she was like a young relative; there was emptiness in the house as she
+went, and when she came back it was like a bird singing.
+
+And she was so beautiful about the place, with her eyes green of the
+sea, her dusky velvet lips, her slim cinnamon hands, with the dramatic
+orange tinting on the nails. Always was some new beauty in her, a tilt
+of the head, a sudden gracious pose. She was like some piece of warm
+statuary. From any angle came beauty, shining as the sun.
+
+And in the dusk when his arms were about her, she was no longer child,
+relative, or statue. She was woman, vibrant woman. Tensed muscles and a
+little stifled moan. And an emotional sob, maybe, or a tear glistening
+on her cheek. Relaxation, and a strange, easy dignity. With her arms
+about her white knees, her little head upraised, thoughts seemed to be
+going and coming from her like bees in and out of their straw skep. And
+often he was tempted to ask her what she was thinking of. But he stopped
+himself in time. Of course she was thinking of nothing at all, barring
+possibly a new sherbet to be made, or whether, if they sold Fatima, the
+Abyssinian cook, who was becoming garrulous, would Fatima have a good
+home. Trifles! What was the use of asking her? And here was another
+possibility. She might--anything was possible--be in some deep subtle
+thought, into which, if he asked, he might get enmeshed, or be trapped
+emotionally. Better not ask. He wanted to know nothing of her heart, and
+to keep his.
+
+He loved her in a happy guarded way. And she loved him. When he came
+back after a voyage she looked at him with an amazed joy. "O Zan! Zan,
+dear! Is it you? Is it really you?" She would rush and hold him. What
+amazing strength her little arms had! And she would stand back and look
+at him again. "O Zan! Zan!" And she would bury her perfumed head in his
+shoulder to hide the glad tears. "O Zan!"
+
+"Do you know why I love you so much, Zan dear?" she once said.
+
+"Why, Fenzile?"
+
+"Because you are so big, and yet you are so gentle. And you wouldn't do
+a little thing, my Zan."
+
+"Don't be foolish, Fenzile!"
+
+"I am not foolish."
+
+Only once she asked him how he loved her.
+
+"I wonder--how much do you love me, my Zan?"
+
+"Oh, lots, Fenzile. A terrible lot." And he smiled.
+
+"As much as you do your ship?"
+
+"Yes, as much as I do my ship."
+
+"That is a lot, Zan.... Zan, would you miss me, if I should die?"
+
+"I should miss you terribly."
+
+"If you died, I should die, too." Her voice quavered.
+
+"Don't be silly. Of course you wouldn't."
+
+"Don't you think I would?" And she laughed with him one of her rare,
+rare laughs. And that was the way it all should end, in pretty laughter.
+Let there be none of this horrible emotionalism, this undignified welter
+of thought and feeling. Kindness of eyes, and pleasantness of body, but
+keep the heart away. Let them be--how? There wasn't a word in English,
+or in Gaidhlig to express it; in French there was--_des amis_, not _des
+amants_. Let them be that. Let there be no involution of thought and
+mind about it. Let there be this time no mistake.... Where before he had
+made his mistake with women was allowing them to become spiritually
+important....
+
+
+Section 10
+
+Into this idyl of Beirut came now the wrestler from Aleppo, Ahmet Ali,
+and the occurrence irritated Campbell to a degree which he had not
+conceived possible. There he passed the door with his dreamy Syrian
+face, his red rose, his white burnoose, his straggling followers. And
+Fenzile smiled her quiet aloof smile.
+
+There might be amusement in it, a queer Eastern comedy of the mountebank
+who raised his eyes to a Druse princess, and wife of a Frank ship's
+master. It might be amusing to Fenzile to see this conqueror of men
+conquered by her presence, but it wasn't dignified. By God! it wasn't
+dignified.
+
+But it wasn't dignified to talk about it. To show Fenzile that it
+mattered a tinker's curse to him. So he said nothing, and the wrestler
+went by every day. It was becoming intolerable. It seemed to amuse
+Fenzile, but it didn't amuse him.
+
+And suddenly a chill smote him. What did he know of these people of the
+East anyhow? In six years one could learn their language perfectly,
+know their customs, know themselves, but know only as much as they
+wanted to be known. The outer person, which is hallucination, one might
+know, but what of the inner, which is reality? A strange country, where
+the merchants spoke like princes and the princes like cameleers, and the
+_sakyeh_, the water-carrier, might quote some fancy of Hafiz, as the
+water gurgled from the skin. The obedience, the resignation in the
+women's eyes might cover intrigue, and what was behind the eyes of the
+men, soft as women's?
+
+"Fenzile, you say you love me, because I am kind. Don't you love me
+because I am strong?"
+
+"Anyway, anyhow, dear Zan."
+
+"I am strong, you know. As strong as your friend, Ahmet Ali."
+
+"Of course, dear Zan." But somehow her tone did not carry conviction. If
+she understood there was nothing this wrestler had he did not have
+better, it would have been all right. All attributes in the world would
+have been for her in him. But she thought the wrestler was strong. Damn
+women! Couldn't they understand the difference between the muscles of a
+hunting leopard and the bulk of a sea-cow? It was silly, but it
+irritated him.
+
+And then a thought came to him that he felt degraded him, but of which
+he could not rid himself, try as he would. What did he know of Fenzile,
+barring that she was young and strong and beautiful? Nothing. Of what
+was she thinking in those dreamy eyes, green of the sea? And women
+always admired strength in a man. And he was away most of the time, half
+anyway. And the breath of the East was intrigue.
+
+"Oh, don't be rotten," he told himself. But the occasional hot and
+searing pain remained, and the little black cloud was in his mind. When
+they were close in the soft gloom, shoulder to shoulder, her eyes
+closed, her slim cinnamon hands clenched, pain stabbed him like a knife.
+And in the gay mornings, when she was arranging her flowers in vases of
+Persian blue, it made him silent as the grave. And in the evening when
+she was doing her subtle Syrian broideries, it aroused in him queer
+gusts of controlled fury.... Could it be possible? A mountebank.... And
+the "Thousand and One Nights" began with _Shah Zamon's_ queen and her
+love for the blackamoor slave....
+
+If the wrestler would only go away, become tired of parading, and
+Fenzile would tire of smiling.... And later on Campbell would laugh....
+
+But the wrestler stayed, and many times Campbell met him in the streets,
+and each time was exaggerated, insulting courtesy from the Aleppo man,
+as he drew aside to let the Frank pass. There was hostility and contempt
+in his veiled eyes.... There nonchalance in his smelling of the rose ...
+Campbell passed by frigidly, as if the man weren't there, and all the
+time his blood was boiling.... But what was one to do? One could not
+make a scene before the riff-raff of Syria. And besides, there was too
+much of a chance of a knife in the back.... Franks were cheap these
+days, and it would be blamed on the war of the Druses....
+
+Argue with himself as much as he could, it was intolerable. It was
+silly, but it was intolerable.... To think of another caressing that
+perfumed hair, of another kissing the palm of that slim hand, of another
+seeing those sleek, sweet shoulders....
+
+Was he jealous ...? No, irritated, just, he told himself. Was he in love
+with her himself? Of course not. She wasn't close enough to him for
+that.... Then why ...?
+
+Oh, damn it! He didn't know why, but it was just intolerable....
+
+
+Section 11
+
+The bark was in the open roadstead, cargo all ready, Levantine pilot on
+board. A reaching breeze from the north and all favorable. And when he
+would get home to Liverpool, he had a design to spend a few weeks in
+Ulster.... The roads would be glistening with frost there, and the
+pleasant Ulster moon at the full.... The turf would be nearly black, and
+bare as a board, and there would be coursing of hares ... November
+mists, and the trees red and brown.... Eh, hard Ulster, pleasant Ulster!
+
+He should have been happy, as he made his way down the Beirut streets to
+go aboard, leaving the land of his adoption for the land of his birth,
+leaving pleasant Fenzile for the shrewd pleasantry of his own folk.... A
+little while of Ulster and he would be coming back again.... One's heart
+should lift the glory of the world, the bold line of Ulster and the
+lavish color of Syria; the sincere, dour folk of Ulster and the warmth
+of Fenzile.... He should have left so warmly. "In a little while,
+dearest, I'll be back and my heart will speak to your twin green eyes."
+"Yes, Zan. I'll be here." But he had left dourly. And Fenzile had
+watched him go with quivering lip.... Oh, damn himself for his
+suspicions, for his annoyance, and damn the fatuous Arab fool for
+arousing them.... Christ, if only he had that fellow on board ship. And
+suddenly he met him, with his attendants and hangers-on. The wrestler
+drew aside with his insolent smile. Campbell's temper broke loose.
+
+"Listen, O certain person," he insulted the Aleppo man, "there is a
+street in Beirut down which it does not please me to see you go."
+
+"Will the foreign gentleman tell me," the wrestler's voice drawled, and
+he smelled his rose, "who will stop a Moslem from going down a Moslem
+street?"
+
+"By God, I would!" The Syrians of Ahmet Ali's escort gathered around,
+smiling.
+
+"The foreign gentleman forgets that I am the wrestler from Aleppo."
+
+"Just so. I happen to be a bit of a wrestler myself."
+
+"Some day perhaps the foreign gentleman will condescend to try a fall
+with me."
+
+Syrians, Egyptians, Turks, were pouring from all quarters. Six French
+soldiers, walking gapingly along the bazaars, stopped wonderingly.
+
+"Dites, les soldats," Shane called. "Vous ne voulez pas voir quelque
+chose d'interessant?"
+
+"Mais si, Monsieur!"
+
+"Eh bien, je vais lutter contre l'homme avec la rose. C'est un lutteur
+arabe. Voulez-vous-y assister?"
+
+"Mais, pour bien sur, Monsieur."
+
+"All right, then, by God!" Shane looked square at Ahmet Ali. "We'll
+wrestle right here and now."
+
+"But the stones, the street," Ahmet Ali looked surprised. "You might get
+hurt."
+
+"We'll wrestle here and now."
+
+"Oh, all right." The Arab lifted an expressive shoulder. Carefully he
+removed the great white robe and handed it to an attendant. To another
+he gave the rose. Shane handed his coat and hat to a saturnine French
+corporal. Ahmet Ali took his shirt off. Kicked away his sandals. There
+was the dramatic appearance of an immense bronze torso. The Syrians
+smiled. The French soldiers looked judicially grave. Ahmet Ali stood
+talking for an instant with one of his men, a lean bilious-seeming Turk.
+The Turk was urging something with eagerness. The wrestler's soft girl's
+face had concentrated into a mask of distaste. He was shaking his head.
+He didn't like something.
+
+"How God-damned long are you going to keep me here?"
+
+Ahmet turned. There was a smile on his face, as of amused, embarrassed
+toleration. He was like a great athlete about to box with a small boy.
+And the boy in earnest.
+
+"Ready?" he asked.
+
+"Any time," Shane snapped.
+
+"All right."
+
+Very easily he came forward over the cobbled street. He was like some
+immense bronze come suddenly to life and shambling. Like the brazen
+servant Thomas Aquinas made under the influence of particular stars. His
+great brown shoulders, his barreled chest, his upper arms like a man's
+leg, his packed forearms, his neck like a bull's, his shaven head. All
+seemed superhuman, and then came his shy embarrassed smile, his troubled
+eyes. One felt he hated to do this....
+
+He dropped suddenly, easily, into his wrestler's crouch. His shoulders
+swayed lightly. He pawed like a bear.
+
+Campbell stood easily, left foot forward, like a boxer. His left arm
+shot out suddenly. The heel of his hand stopped, jolted, Ahmet on the
+chin. The Syrian shook his head. Pawed again. Campbell slapped him on
+the forearms, jolted him again on the chin, broke away easily to the
+right. Ahmet's brown forehead frowned. "Don't be childish," he seemed to
+chide Campbell. The crowd pressed. The French soldiers rapped them back
+with the scabbard of their sidearms. _En arriere, les puants, en
+arriere!_ "Back, sons of polecats, get back." The scabbards clacked like
+slapsticks.
+
+Ahmet Ali stood up straighter. He wanted to get away from that annoying
+hand on his chin. His forearms moved faster now, like brown pistons.
+There was a slight frown on his face. He was becoming impatient. Shane
+broke again to the right. Ahmet followed, his immense hands poised.
+Campbell feinted for the chin again with his left hand. The wrestler's
+smile flickered. His right arm went out in guard. Campbell shifted,
+caught the brown wrist in his right hand, his left hand shot forward to
+the chin again. He brought forward all his forces to twisting that
+gigantic arm. He held the Syrian locked. The right arm began to give. If
+he could only shift his feet, get some sort of leverage. But how in
+God's name, how? How could he get behind. With an immense wrench of
+shoulders Ahmet got free. He stood for an instant, nursing his numbed
+wrist. He nodded and grinned. "That wasn't bad," he seemed to say. The
+lean bilious Turk on the edge of the crowd began talking viciously. The
+saturnine French corporal turned and smacked him terribly across the
+nose with the edge of the scabbard of his bayonet. "_Et-ta soeur!_" He
+had the air of a schoolmaster reproving a refractory pupil. But his
+language was obscene and his blow broke the man's nose.... He vouchsafed
+no further interest in the Turk, but turned to watch the wrestling,
+twirling an oiled mustache....
+
+The Syrian closed his mouth, breathed heavily through his nostrils. His
+brow corrugated. His eyes became pinpoints. He was a workman out to do a
+job. He began to weave in, his brown arms describing slow arabesques.
+The crowd around became oppressively silent. They breathed hissingly.
+
+Shane feinted, dodged, broke away. Doggedly Ahmet Ali followed. Faster
+than time, Shane's right hand shot out and gripped the wrestler's right
+wrist. His right foot hooked around the Syrian's right ankle. He pulled
+downward with sudden, vicious effort. Ali crashed forward on his face, a
+great brown hulk like an overturned bronze statue. Shane stooped down
+for either the half-Nelson and hammer-lock, or full Nelson.... An
+instant too long of hesitation. Light as a lightweight acrobat Ahmet
+Ali had rolled aside, put palm to ground, sprung to his feet. His face
+was bloody, his right knee shook. With the back of his hand he wiped the
+blood from his eyes. There was a twitter from the Syrians. The wrestler
+lumbered forward again.... A little quake of fear came into Campbell's
+being. There was an impersonal doggedness about the wrestler from
+Aleppo's eyes, a sense of inevitability.... Shane's eyes shifted, right
+and left....
+
+Then suddenly, the wrestler had him....
+
+He felt a twirl to his shoulder, and then he was pinioned by two immense
+brown arms. They caught him above the elbows around the chest. First
+they were like boys' arms, light. They became firm as calipers. They
+settled, snugged. Then they tightened slowly, with immense certainty.
+There was something about it like the rise of the tide. A gigantic cable
+around his chest. At his shoulder-blades the Syrian's pectoral muscles
+pressed like shallow knobs of steel. His arms began to hurt. His
+breathing began to be hard with every output of breath. The arms
+tightened.... All his vitality was flying through his opened mouth....
+He hit futilely with his knuckles at the rope-like sinews of the brown
+forearms.... His head throbbed like drums.... In an instant he would be
+like a bag bound midways ... his ribs giving like saplings in the wind
+... Lights danced....
+
+Stupidly he looked down at the clasped hands, and a sudden fury of
+fighting came on him.... Something terrible, sinister, cold. His free
+hands caught the Syrian's little finger, tugged, pulled, bent, tore....
+He wanted to shred it from its hand.... Rip it like silk.... He felt the
+great arms about him quiver, grow uncertain.... Tear, tear!...
+
+With a little whine like a dog's, the wrestler let go.... He nursed the
+finger for an instant like a hurt child.... Opening and shutting the
+hand.... Looking worried.... Great waves of air came into Shane's
+chest.... His knees were weak.... The Syrian walked around an instant,
+thinking, worrying.... He was serious now.... Suddenly he plunged....
+
+But swifter than Ahmet's plunge was thought and memory.... Of a day at
+Nagasaki ... of a little brown smiling Japanese and a burly square-head
+sailorman.... Of the Japanese's courteous explanation in smiling
+Pidgin.... With luck and timing he could do it.... Fast, but not too
+fast, and steady.... Handsomely, as the ship-word was.... There!
+
+The hands trained to whipping lanyards caught Ahmet's wrists as he
+plunged. Shane's right leg went outward, foot sunk home. Backward he
+fell, leg taunt, hands pulling. Above him Ahmet's great bulk soared,
+hurtled grotesquely. For an instant; a flash.... The squeals of startled
+Syrians, the panic of feet.... Then a crash, an immense crash....
+
+A long shuddering, frightened _eh_ from the crowd.... A French soldier
+mumbling ... "_'Cre nom de nom de nom de nom de Jesus Chri!_"
+
+He staggered to his feet, put his hand to his face.... It came away
+dripping.... His face was like the leeward deck of a flying yacht ...
+swimming.... A few feet away Syrians and French soldiers were milling
+over ... something.... The corporal wrenched Shane's arms into his coat.
+Pushed his hat into his hands.
+
+"_Courez donc, le citoyen_.... Come on, get away.... Get...."
+
+"Is he dead?"
+
+"No, not dead.... But get away.... He'll never wrestle again.... _Vite,
+alors!_"
+
+He pushed him down the street.
+
+"But----"
+
+[Illustration]
+
+"Go on. We can take care of ourselves...." He shoved him roughly
+forward.... Shane staggered, walked, ran a little.... Behind him a
+few blocks away, an ominous hum. He ran on.... Some one was
+shrieking....
+
+"_Ma hala ya ma hala Kobal en Nosara_.... How sweet, oh, how sweet, to
+kill the Christians...." The crack of a gun.... Tumult.... The long
+Moslem war-song.... Two rifles. "_A nous, les Francais_.... _A nous, la
+Legion_!"
+
+A nausea, a great weakness, an utter contempt for himself came over him
+in the boat pulling him toward his ship ... God! He had fought with and
+nearly killed--possibly killed--a man for personal hatred! From
+irritation, and in a public place! A spectacle for donkey-boys and
+riff-raff of French towns.... He tottered on the ship's ladder.... The
+sailors caught him. The mate ran up.
+
+"Anything wrong, sir? You look like a ghost."
+
+"No, nothing. All aboard? Everything ready? Is she a-drawing? Anchor
+a-peak? All right. Get her up...."
+
+
+Section 12
+
+"Arif Bey, where is my wife? I come back to Beirut. I find my house
+deserted. My servants gone. Where is Fenzile? Is she here?"
+
+"No, son."
+
+"Is she dead?"
+
+"No--no, son, I wish she were...."
+
+"Then where is she gone? With whom?"
+
+"Trebizond. Stamboul. Cairo. I don't know where."
+
+"With whom?"
+
+"With--oh, don't bother yourself, son. Forget her."
+
+"With whom? I must know."
+
+"With--do you remember that wrestler you crippled, the wrestler from
+Aleppo?"
+
+"With Ahmet Ali! Impossible! I all but killed him."
+
+"She went, though...."
+
+"No, uncle, no. If he had been strong she might, but,--"
+
+The old Druse chief shook his head, smiled in his beard, a little,
+bitter, wise smile.
+
+"You were never sick with her, never poor."
+
+"No, never sick, never poor."
+
+"Well, he was sick and poor, so she went with him."
+
+"Then she loved him all along."
+
+"No, son Zan, she loved you--until you threw him. She might have been
+amused at seeing him pass the house, laugh a little, be flattered....
+Such a big fool, and she a little woman.... But she would never have
+left you...."
+
+"But she did."
+
+"Well ... after the fall, he had no friends ... the Christians despised
+him, the Moslems hated him.... There was no train to follow him ... he
+went on crutches.... He passed her door and looked, and looked.... What
+could she do but come out.... It was her fault, after all.... And she
+was very tender-hearted...."
+
+"Tender-hearted?"
+
+"Didn't you know?"
+
+"No, I never knew."
+
+"She used to cry when the leaves fell from the trees.... You didn't know
+your wife well?"
+
+"No, sir, I did not."
+
+"Well, she is gone, Zan.... Where, one doesn't know.... What will become
+of her, one doesn't know. Destiny is like a blind camel. He doesn't know
+against what he stumbles. We do not see him come.... Only when the harm
+is done, do we say: We might have listened for the tinkle of his
+bell.... Eh, one is young and does everything and sees nothing. One is
+old and sees everything and does nothing. There is no mystery ... only
+ignorance...."
+
+"You say she was very tender-hearted, my uncle. I didn't know.... I
+thought of her as something else...."
+
+"Son Zan, you had better forget her in another woman. Listen son, I will
+give you Aziyed in marriage, my own daughter. She is just as pretty and
+younger and not so foolish as Fenzile."
+
+"Oh, no, sir. No!"
+
+"Well, I don't blame you."
+
+"It isn't that, Arif Bey. It isn't that. I'm very beholden to you ...
+for your kindness ... and your patience.... I didn't know.... And I
+thought I knew everything nearly, and am so ignorant.... Why until now I
+didn't know even this--the sun shone so brightly, and life was so
+pleasant, I thought that was the way of life.... But I was in love with
+Fenzile.... And that was what made everything so wonderful ... in love
+with the wife you gave me ... head over heels, sir ... just simply--head
+over heels...."
+
+
+
+
+PART FIVE
+
+THE VALLEY OF THE BLACK PIG
+
+
+Section 1
+
+To him, for a long time now, the sea had been only water. All the
+immense pelagic plain, dotted with ships; with bergs of ice, like
+cathedrals; with waves that curled or swept in huge rhythms; with
+currents defined in lines and whorls; with gulls that mewed and whales
+that blew like pretty fountains; with the little Portuguese men-of-war;
+with the cleaving of flying fish and the tumbling of dolphins, all this
+was water. All this joyous green, this laughing white, the deep
+reflective blue, the somber exquisite gray, was water. An infinity of
+barrels of water, immense vats of water, water, wet water....
+
+To him, for a long time now, a ship had been a means of keeping afloat
+on water, of going from place to place. All its brave strakes, its
+plunging bows, its healing beams, were wood, such as one makes a house
+of, or a tinker's cart. All the miracle of sails; the steady foresail;
+the sensitive jibs; the press canvas delicate as bubbles; the reliable
+main; the bluff topsails; topgallants like eager horses; the
+impertinent skysails; the jaunty moonraker, were just canvas stretched
+on poles. All the pyramidal wonder of them, fore, main, and mizzen, were
+not like a good rider's hands to a horse; compelling, coaxing, curbing
+the wind, they were utilities. The spinning wheel was a mechanical
+device. Port was left, and starboard only the right hand. The chiming of
+the ship's bell was not an old sweet ceremony but a fallible thing, not
+exact as the ticking of a cheap watch. And "The lights are burning
+bright, sir," was not a paean of comfort, but a mechanical artisans'
+phrase....
+
+To him, for a long time now, they who went down to the sea in ships were
+men only; men such as sell things in shops or scrub poorhouse floors, or
+dig tracks for a railroad. The slovenly Achill man, who would face death
+with a grin, the shambling Highlander who on occasion could spring to
+the shrouds like a cat; the old bos'un who had been for years a castaway
+on Tierra del Fuego; the wizened chantey-man with his melodeon, who
+could put new vigor into tired backs, with his long-drag chanteys, like
+"Blow the Man Down," and "Dead Horse," and "Whisky Johnnie," and
+short-drags like "Paddy Doyle" and "Haul the Bowline," and capstans like
+"Homeward Bound" and "Wide Missouri," and pumping chanteys like "Storm
+Along"; the keen men at the wheel and the hawk-eyed lookout; the sailor
+swinging the lead in the bows, with a wrist and forearm of steel--all
+these were only men, following the sea because they knew no better. And
+the mate who would wade into a mob of twenty with swinging fists, and
+the navigator who could calculate to a hair's-breadth where they were by
+observing the unimaginable stars--they were not of the craft of Noah,
+they were men who knew their job ... just men ... as a ticket-clerk on a
+railroad is a man....
+
+To him, for a long time now, ports were ports, only places whither one
+went to get or deliver cargo. Baltimore, like some sweet old lady; Para,
+heavy, sinister with rain; Rio, like some sparkling jewel; Belfast,
+dour, efficient, sincere; Hamburg, dignified, _gemuetlich_; Lisbon, quiet
+as a cathedral--they were not entities, they were just collections of
+houses covering men and women. And men were either fools or crooks, and
+women were either ugly bores or pretty--bitches.... Men and women, they
+were born crudely, as a calf is born of a cow, they lived foolishly or
+meanly, and they died.... And they were hustled out of the house
+quickly.... They thought themselves so important, and they lacked the
+faithfulness of the dog, the cleanliness of wild animals, the strength
+of horses, the beauty of tropic birds, the mathematical science of the
+spider, the swiftness of fishes.... And they grew old abominably, the
+women's breasts falling, the men getting pot-bellies.... How the devil
+had they ever arrogated to themselves the lordship of created things?
+
+To him, for a long time now, the world had been, was, one mean
+street....
+
+
+Section 2
+
+Of all cities, none was better calculated to foster this mood of his
+than the one to which his business now brought him--Buenos Aires on the
+Plate. Leaving Liverpool with steel and cotton, there was an immensity
+of ocean to be traversed, until one came to the river mouth. Then fifty
+leagues of hard sailing to the abominable anchorage....
+
+Here now was a city growing rich, ungracefully--a city of arrogant
+Spanish colonists, of poverty-stricken immigrants, of down-trodden lower
+classes ... a city of riches ... a city of blood.... Here mud, here
+money....
+
+Into a city half mud hovels, half marble-fronted houses, gauchos drove
+herd upon herd of cattle, baffled, afraid. Here Irish drove streams of
+gray bleating sheep. Here ungreased bullock carts screamed. From the
+blue-grass pampas they drove them, where the birds sang, and water
+rippled, where was the gentleness of summer rain, where was the majesty
+of great storms, clouds magnificently black and jagged lightning, where
+were great white moons and life-giving suns, where was the serpent in
+the grass, and the unique tree, where were swift horses.... Beeves that
+had once been red awkward calves, and then sullen, stupid little
+bullocks, and then proud young bulls, with graceful horns.... Such as
+earnest Christians believed had lowed at the manger of Christ born in
+Bethlehem.... And stupid, suspicious sheep, that had once been white
+gamboling lambs, playful as pups, and so ridiculously innocent
+looking!--didn't they call their Lord _Agnus Dei_, Lamb of God?--and
+gentle ewes and young truculent rams, like red-headed schoolboys, eager
+for a fray, and shamefaced wethers.... And by their thousands and their
+tens of thousands they drove them into Buenos Aires, and slew them for
+their hides....
+
+But this was sentimental, Shane said. Bullocks and sheep must die, and
+the knife is merciful as any death. But oughtn't these things be done
+by night, privily, as they should bury the dead? Must they drive down
+these infinities of creatures, and slaughter them openly and callously,
+until the air was salt with blood, until the carrion crows hovered over
+the city in battalions? Had they no feeling, had they no shame? Must the
+pitiful machinery of life be exposed so airily?
+
+Of course it must, he knew. These things had to be done in bulk. Now
+weren't the middle ages when one killed a cow because one had to eat:
+one killed a sheep because the winter was coming when woolens were
+needed. All Europe needed shoes, saddles, combs, anti-macassars,
+afghans--what not? And Europe was a big place, so in bulk they must
+bellow and bleat and die, and have their hides torn from their pitiful
+bodies, salted, and chucked in the hold of a ship.
+
+Of course it must. That was civilization.
+
+
+Section 3
+
+From long ago, from far away, came the chime of old romance, but very
+thin, like the note of a warm silver bell, that could not hold its own
+against this blatancy. Came ancient immortal names--Magellan, that hound
+of the world, whining fiercely, nosing for openings that he might
+encircle the globe, he had been up the silver river. Sebastian Cabot,
+too, the grim marauder, seeking to plunder the slender Indians, he had
+been here. It was he had christened the great stream--Rio de la Plata,
+the river where silver is. And Pedro Gomez, who headed the greatest
+expedition the Argentine ever saw, and founded and named the city. And
+fighting Beresford, the British general who took it from Spain, and
+Whitelock who lost it again.... Campbell could see his bluff grenadiers,
+their faces blackened with powder, their backs to the wall, a strange
+land, a strange enemy, and blessed England so far away.... And the last
+of the Spanish viceroys, with a name like an organ peal, Baltazar
+Hidalgo de Cisneros y Latorre--a great gentleman, he had been wounded
+fighting Nelson off Cape Trafalgar. Campbell could almost see his white
+Spanish face, his pointed fingers, his pointed beard, his pontifical
+walk.... And of them nothing remained. Nothing of Magellan, nothing of
+Cabot, nothing of Gomez, nothing of staunch Beresford, or bluff John
+Whitlock, or of the great hidalgo.... _Stat magni nominis umbra?_ ...
+No, not even that. The shadows of the great names had gone. The dim
+chime of a silver bell drowned by the lowing of dying cattle, by the
+screech of bullock-carts, by the haggling of merchants over the price of
+hides....
+
+But he could not remain on board ship in port. Ships, he had enough of
+them! There was nothing to do but go ashore, landing at high tide at one
+of the two lugubrious piers, and make his way toward the squares ...
+past the blazing water-front where the prostitutes chanted like demented
+savages, past the saloons where the sailors drank until they dropped, or
+were knifed, or robbed, or crimped. Down the ill-lit streets, which must
+be trodden carefully, lest one should stumble into a heap of refuse.
+Down to the Plaza Victoria, with its dim arcades, or to the 25 de Mayo,
+with its cathedral, its stunted paradise trees. And from the houses came
+shafts of light, and the sound of voices, thump of guitars like little
+drums, high arguments, shuffle of cards.... Dark shadows and lonely
+immigrants, and the plea of some light woman's bully--"_cosa
+occulta_...." A dim watery moon, the portico of the cathedral, a woman
+exaggerating her walk.... Pah!... immigrants fearful of the coming
+snow.... A vigilante strutting like a colonel.... Mournful pampa
+winds....
+
+The theaters? Sugary Italian opera; a stark Spanish drama, too intense
+for any but Latins, foreign; debauched vaudeville, incredibly vulgar; or
+at the concert-hall, sentimental Teutonic and Anglo-Saxon songs, with an
+audience of grave uncritical exiles--a little pathetic. No!
+
+The clubs? Oh, damn the clubs! A blaze of light and raucous voices,
+ships' masters, ships' chandlers, merchants, discussing the riddle of
+local politics, and the simony of office; or the price of hides, and
+freight charges; how a ship's master could turn a pretty penny in
+bringing out shoddy clothes, or pianos--Jesus! they were crazy for
+pianos here! Rattle of glasses and striking of matches. Bluff,
+ceremonious salutations.
+
+"Well, captain, what kind of a trip did you make out?"
+
+"Pretty fair, captain."
+
+"Will you have a little snifter, captain?"
+
+"Well, captain, seeing that it's you--"
+
+"Paddy, a little of what ails him for the captain--"
+
+And after a while the whisky would dissolve the ceremony, and would come
+nauseating intimacies.
+
+"We shipped a stewardess in Hull--" or "There was an Irish girl in the
+steerage, a raving beauty, and when I saw her, I said: Wait. So--"
+
+They were all the same. Give them whisky and time and the talk would
+come around to easy money and easy women. All were the same, bluff,
+sentimental, animal, all but the one or two hawk-eyed, close-lipped men
+who came and went silently, who drank little and drank by themselves.
+These men made the really big money, but it wasn't easy; they took a
+chance with their lives, smuggling slaves from Africa for the Argentine
+plantations, or silver from Chile and Peru. But as for the rest, easy
+money, easy women!
+
+Well, what was Campbell fussing about? Wasn't he too making easy money,
+bringing agricultural steel and cotton goods here and taking away his
+tally of hides?
+
+And as to easy women, wasn't there Hedda Hagen?
+
+
+Section 4
+
+A ship's master had introduced him to her at a band concert in one of
+the public squares--a tall Amazonian woman with her hair white as corn,
+and eyes the strange light blue of ice. Her head was uptilted--a
+brave woman. The introduction had a smirking ceremony about it that
+defined Froken Hagen's position as though in so many words. Her bow was
+as distant to Shane as his salutation was curt to her. Shane was
+suddenly annoyed.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+The captain of the American boat talked incessantly while the band
+blared on. Strolling Argentines eyed the woman's blond beauty at a
+respectful distance. They trotted to and fro. They loped. They postured.
+She paid no attention. To her they were nonexistent. To the American
+skipper's conversation she replied only with a flicker of the eyelids, a
+fleeting smile of her lips. Shane she seemed to ignore. She was so
+clean, so cool, so damnably self-possessed.
+
+"Froken Hagen," Campbell ventured, "aren't you sick of all this? Captain
+Lincoln says you have been here for five years. Aren't you dead tired of
+it?"
+
+"No." Her voice was a strong soprano timbre.
+
+"Don't you want to get back to the North again?"
+
+"Often." She had a quiet aloof smile. Somewhere was the impression of a
+gentlewoman. She did not mean to be abrupt. She was just immensely
+self-possessed.
+
+It occurred to Shane suddenly that he liked this woman. He liked her
+dignity, her grave composure. He liked her coolness, her almost Viennese
+grace. He liked her features; but for the wideness of her mouth, and the
+little prominence of chin, she would have been immensely beautiful. Her
+corn-like hair, massively braided, must be like a mane when down, and
+beneath her Paris frock he could sense her deep bosom, great marble
+limbs. Her voice had the cool sweet beauty of Northern winds.... Her
+eyes were steady, her chin uptilted. Somewhere, some time, somehow she
+had mastered fate.
+
+About, in the gas-lit square, escorted, guarded, went other women,
+reputable women. Great rawboned women, daughters of Irish _portenos_,
+with the coarseness of the Irish peasant in their faces, the brogue of
+the Irish peasant on their Spanish, but punctiliously Castilian as to
+manners; gross Teutonic women; fluffy sentimental Englishwomen, bearing
+exile bravely, but thinking long for the Surrey downs; gravid Italian
+women, clumsy in the body, sweet and wistful in the face; Argentines,
+clouded with powder, liquid of eyes, on their lips a soft little down
+that would in a few years be an abomination unto the Lord; women of
+mixed breed, with the kink of Africa in their hair, or the golden tint
+of the Indian in their skin. Good women! And yet.... For grace, for
+coolness, for cleanliness, the venal Swedish girl outshone them all....
+
+"Froken Hagen," Campbell said, "may I call on you some time?"
+
+"If you like."
+
+"Does that mean you don't want me to come?"
+
+She smiled at him.
+
+"Mr. Campbell," she laughed gently, "you know very well what I am. If
+you don't call on me it won't mean anything to me. If you do call I
+think I'll be rather glad. Because on first appearances I like you. But
+do whatever you like. I have no wiles."
+
+"Thank God for that!"
+
+Lincoln, master of the _Katurah Knopp_, listened in with a silent
+chuckle. She was a queer one, Hedda was. And Campbell, he was a queer
+one, too. Two queer ones together. Hedda was all right, but a man
+sickened of her quick. She wasn't what you might call warm. No
+affection; that's what a man missed far from home, affection. Yes,
+affection. Hedda had none. She was a fine woman, but she had no
+affection. He liked to see men get stung. In a few days Campbell would
+be down at the club with a face as long as to-day and to-morrow. He
+would call for a drink angrily.
+
+"Well, captain, what's got into you? You don't look happy."
+
+And Campbell, like the others, would grumble something about a
+God-damned big Swede.
+
+"Hey, what's wrong? Ain't Hedda treated you right?"
+
+"Sure, she treated me right," he would say as the others said, "but God
+damn! that woman's not human. Take away that rot-gut and gi' me whisky.
+I got a touch o' chill."
+
+Lincoln had seen it all before. He liked to see it all the time. He
+chuckled as Shane turned to him.
+
+"Lincoln, are you seeing this lady home?"
+
+"Not if you want to."
+
+"I don't want to break up any arrangements of yours."
+
+"Tell the truth," Lincoln said, "I've got a little party to-night. A
+party as is a party--Spanish girls, Spanish dancers ... I wish I could
+take you, but it ain't my party...."
+
+"Then I'll see Miss Hagen home."
+
+Dog-gone, Lincoln would have to go down to the club and tell 'em how
+Campbell of the _Maid of the Isles_ got stuck with the human iceberg!
+
+
+Section 5
+
+Without, the west wind had increased suddenly, a cold steady wind,
+coasting down the Argentine pampas, bending the sparse trees and giant
+thistle, ruffling the river, shallowing it, until to-morrow many a poor
+sailorman would regret his optimistic anchorage ... Shane shivered....
+To-morrow October would be making a din in the streets.... And the poor
+skippers fighting their way round the Horn, icy winds and head seas and
+immense gray dirty-bearded waves.... To-morrow three men were to be shot
+in the 25 de Mayo for a political offense, and Shane could see them in
+the bleak dawn, three frightened stanch figures; the soldiers would be
+blowing their fingers in the cold air, and their triggers would be like
+ice to the touch ... the shoddy tragedy....
+
+But within the room was warm, a little fire of coal in the unusual
+grate, and the soft and mellow lights of candles, and here and there
+gauchos' blankets on the wall, and here a comfortable chair and there a
+table of line, and brass things ... clean and ascetic, and yet
+something womanly about the place, the grace and composition of
+things.... And with her coming into her house, Hedda Hagen's manner had
+changed gently.... She was no longer frigid, aloof.... She unbent into
+calm smiles, and the grace of a hostess of the big world ... the quiet
+masonic signal of a certain caste....
+
+"I wonder," he said; "am I dreaming?"
+
+She paused suddenly. She had taken her hat off, and was touching things
+on the tables with her large fine hands. She turned her head toward him.
+There was a half smile in her eyes.
+
+"Why?"
+
+"It doesn't seem right."
+
+"That you never saw me before, that you are here in this house after
+meeting me half an hour ago, and that you can stay here the night?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Well, it's true."
+
+She was once more the hostess. It was as if some one had sprung nimbly
+from a little height to the ground.
+
+"I can't give you any whisky. But I can make you tea. Or have my maid
+brew you some coffee."
+
+"Is that a Russian samovar?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Then I'll have tea."
+
+So queer! Without the wind blustered and the little din of it crept into
+the room somehow, and within was warmth, and the stillness of still
+trees. And grace. Beauty moved like an actress on the stage. All her
+motions were harmonious, could have gone to some music on the violin.
+Now it was the easy dropping to her knees as she lit the quaint Russian
+teapot, now an unconscious movement of her hand to push back a braid of
+her hair, now the firm certain motion of her strong white unringed
+fingers. Now her large graceful body moved like some heroic statue that
+had become quick with life. The thought came into his head, somehow,
+that if he had had a sister he would have liked her to have been like
+this splendid blond woman....
+
+Yet into this house, where she had settled like some strange bird in an
+alien land, came ships' masters, reeking with drink, came merchants with
+their minds full of buying and selling and all the petty meannesses of
+trade, came dark Latins who hankered for blond women....
+
+"God! I can't understand."
+
+She came toward him frankly....
+
+"_Amigo mio_, have you a right to understand?"
+
+"I'm sorry."
+
+"No, but--see! You and I have often met. I mean: there is a plane of us,
+who must be loyal to one another. You understand. And to you, to one of
+us, I don't want to lie. Only certain persons have a right to ask. A
+father, a mother, a child, a sister or brother or husband. But our
+destinies touch only, hardly even that. Will never grip, bind. There is
+no right you have, beyond what--you buy; and there are things--I don't
+sell."
+
+"I'm sorry," Shane turned aside. "I was just carried away. But I should
+go."
+
+"Do you want to go?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Then stay. Others stay."
+
+"But--"
+
+"Are you better than the others? Think."
+
+"No," he thought. "Of course not. Worse perhaps. I know better."
+
+"You are nearly as honest as I am," she laughed. She put her hand out in
+a great frank gesture.
+
+"If I can smile, surely you can." Her fingers beckoned. "Come, don't be
+silly."
+
+He caught her hands and laughed with her. He had been acting like a boy
+in his twenties, and he a man of forty-two....
+
+
+Section 6
+
+He had thought somehow that in this affair of Hedda he would find--oh,
+something: that once more the moon would take on its rippling smile and
+the sun its sweet low laughter, and the winds be no longer a matter of
+physics, but strong entities. Quickly, unconsciously, the thought had
+come to him.... With the wife of his young days had come the magic of
+romance, and with Claire-Anne of Marseilles had come a sublime storm of
+passion, and with the Arab lady had come the scheme of an ordered life,
+good composition and rich color.... They had lasted but little and gone
+as a rainbow goes.... With Hedda there was nothing.... It was just
+abominably wrong....
+
+Here he was, young--for his forty-two he was young,--supple, successful
+in his way, rich if you wanted to put it in that word. And no heart for
+life; listless. It was wrong.... All he could think of doing was to be
+intimate with an easy woman. No zest for her great noble frame, her
+surge of flaxen hair. The veneer of conventional good manners,
+conventional good taste, only made the actuality of it more appalling
+... she with the gifts of life and grace, he with his, and all they
+could do was be physically intimate.... And she took money with a little
+smile, contemptuous of herself, contemptuous of him.... They both knew
+better, yet there you were ... God! Even animals had the excuse of
+nature's indomitable will!
+
+Yes, this made him face things he had been trying to pass casually by.
+Forty-two, a touch of gray at the temples, a body like a boy's, hooded
+eyes like a hawk's, and a feeling in him somehow that an organ--his
+heart maybe--was dead: not ailing--just unalive. Once he had zest, and
+he didn't even have despair now. If he could only have despair....
+
+Despair was healthy. It meant revolt. A man might sob, gnash his teeth,
+batter walls with his bare fists, but that only meant he was alive in
+every fiber. He might curse the stars, but he was aware of their
+brilliance. He might curse the earth that would one day take his
+lifeless body, but he must know its immense fecundity. A man in revolt,
+in despair, was a healthy man.
+
+But despair was so futile. Ah, there it was! Life's futility. It was the
+sense of that which had eaten him like a vile leprosy. Mental futility,
+spiritual futility. Of physical he did not know. All that was left him
+of his youth was a belief in God. At sea he was too close to the immense
+mechanism of the stars, on land too close to milling millions, not to
+believe, not to accept him as an incontrovertible fact.
+
+But the God of degenerate peoples, the antagonistic, furious, implacable
+God--that was a ridiculous conception. A cheap, a vain one. "As flies to
+wanton boys, are we to the gods." Wasn't that how Shakspere's blind king
+had uttered it? "They kill us for their sport." How strangely
+flattering--to believe that the Immensity that had conceived and wrought
+the unbelievable universe should deign to consider man, so weak that a
+stone, a little slug of lead, could kill him, an enemy worth bothering
+about. Man with his vanity, his broad fallibility, his poor natural
+functions!
+
+And as to the God of the optimists, how ridiculous, too. "The Lord is my
+shepherd, I shall not want." So pathetic! They never saw that they did
+want. That for every well-filled body, there were a hundred haggard men.
+They thought of him as benevolent, firm but benevolent, like Mr.
+Gladstone. To them he was an infinitely superior vestryman with a
+tremendous power for dispensing coal and food to the poor. And the poor
+devils were so patient, so loyal. And so stupid; they thought that much
+flattery, much fear, would move Him. Their conception never even rose to
+considering God as a gentleman, despising flattery and loathing fear.
+Poor, poor devils!
+
+To Shane He existed, though how to think of Him was difficult. Why a
+man? Why not some strange thing of the air, as a cuttlefish is of the
+sea? Something tenuous, of immense brain power, of immense will.
+Something cold. But why even that? Why not, as the cabalists had it, a
+Figure, arithmetical or geometrical, a Sound.... A Formula of some great
+undiscoverable indefinable Thought.... He was cold, He was efficient. He
+had so much brains....
+
+It seemed to Shane that this optimism, this despair were strange mental
+drugs, going through the mental system as a depressant or a stimulant
+would go through the physical, creating illusions ... illusions ... and
+the sane man was one who had no illusions, not the meaning a man uses of
+the phrase when he has been jilted by a woman or wronged out of money by
+a friend, but actually, finitely, no illusions.... He was sane, a few
+other men in the world must be sane, but the rest were drugged for their
+hell or their Fiddlers' Green....
+
+Fiddlers' Green! Good God! Fiddlers' Green!
+
+His mind flashed back a moment to the shining isle, the green sward, the
+singing waves, the sunlight on the green jalousies, but strangely his
+mind could see nothing. He could no longer make a picture for himself.
+Symbols were barren algebraic formulae. Not enchanters' words. No light.
+No glamour. Only strange sounds reverberating in the gray caverns of his
+head.... Once in the dead past he could see the Isle of Pipers--no more!
+It wasn't his past that was dead. The past lived. It was he was dead,
+he, his present, his future.
+
+Out of the gray caverns of his head came a thin echo of a word he had
+known and he a boy. The Valley of the Black Pig. A phrase from some old
+folk-tale heard on a wintry Antrim coast. Some prophecy of old wives
+that when the Boar without Bristles would appear in the Valley of the
+Black Pig, then the end of all things was nigh.... He had a faint memory
+that somewhere in Roscommon was the Valley of the Black Pig.... But that
+didn't matter; what mattered was the memory it evoked.... Gray, gray,
+gray.... Gray hills, gray boulders, gray barren trees, a gray mist
+sluggishly rising from the ground, and a gray drizzle of rain, falling,
+so slowly.... And gray rotting leaves beneath his feet.... A little wind
+that moaned among the boulders, and the cawing of unseen, horrible
+birds.... Neither was there direction, nor time, nor space....
+Everything gray like the grayness of old women's bodies.... There was no
+sun, and the moon abhorred the valley. In such a place as this wandered
+the souls of women who had killed their children, of monks who at dark
+of night had said the Black Mass.... Here were masters who had deserted
+tall, gallant ships.... Hither witches rode on the bleak east wind, to
+be flogged by their masters and horribly caressed.... The Valley of the
+Black Pig.... Here were those who had read the frightful inscription on
+the altar of the Unknown God ... Gilles de Rais, marshal of France, and
+Avicenna; Nicolas Flamel and his wife Petronella; Lady Alice Kyteler of
+Kilkenny, and Gerald of Desmond, the Great Earl; and newer names, Dee
+and Edward Kelly.... Degraded majesty with soiled beards.... Gray,
+gray.... And the faint ghosts in cerecloths, and the horrible shapes of
+the mist.... The drizzle of the rain, and the rustle of the Feet of the
+Goat.... The cawing of strange birds and the wind among the boulders
+and souls, weeping, weeping--unhoping, undespairing, weeping,
+weeping.... The Valley of the Black Pig....
+
+What was it? In God's name what was it that had made him this way, his
+being suddenly lifeless, like a cow that goes dry, or a field that is
+mysteriously, suddenly fallow.... And weariness seemed immortal.... What
+had led him into this dreadful cemetery of the mind? Had he gone too far
+in thought and emotion and come to a dreadful desert plane within
+himself ...? Had he eaten of the tree of which the cabalist wrote:
+
+  Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat;
+  But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou
+    shalt not eat of it; for in the day that thou eatest
+    thereof thou shalt surely die.
+
+Had he blundered on it unwittingly, eaten ignorantly and surely died?...
+Or was he going mad? Good God! Could that be it? Was there something
+they hadn't told him--a strange taint in his blood, or his mother's
+blood.... Would he end his days in a madhouse.... What a fate, what a
+dreadful fate! A slavering gray-headed man, wandering through the
+Valley of the Black Pig, forever and forever?
+
+Better to end it now.
+
+Yes, but would that end it? The material envelope of cells and fluids
+gone, might there not ...? Christ! Worse off yet, if anything were
+left.... There might be something left; there was the trouble.... One
+knew so little, so abominably little.... Only material wisdom was
+certain, and that said: Don't chance it....
+
+Drink? He had his men to think of, his ship.... It might grip him.
+
+But was he forever doomed to this mournful weeping place, place of rain,
+place of mists, gray boulders, and moaning winds? Must he abide in the
+Valley of the Black Pig until the Boar without Bristles came lumbering
+out of the red west, and went grunting, eating ravenously, eating prey
+of souls, until he lay down in obscene sleep, and the stars one by one
+guttered like candles, and the sun shot into a vast explosion, and the
+moon was a handful of peat ashes, and the whole great universe snapped
+like a gunshot and the debris of all created things fell downward like a
+shattered wall, faster, faster, faster, to where, where, where?
+
+
+Section 7
+
+In the streets now the June snow fell, not the soft and flaky petals of
+the North, but a bitter steel-like snow, that whirled. And the winds of
+the pampas hurried like Furies through the sordid streets, and stopped
+to snarl, as a dog snarls, and now moaned, and now howled sharply, as a
+wolf howls. There was something cold, malignant, about it all ... Old
+Irish writers said that hell was cold. _An Ait Fuar_, they called it,
+the Cold Place. _Ait gan chu gan chat, gan leanbh, ait gan ghean, gan
+ghaire_, a place without a dog, or cat, or child, a place without
+affection or laughter.... Had sainted Brendan come on Buenos Aires in
+winter on his voyage to Hy Brazil, and thought in his naivete that here
+was hell ...? And was he wrong?
+
+Cold of wolves! It must have been like this in ancient Paris when Villon
+thieved and sang, and the wolves came clamoring at the gates ... and the
+crusaders in warm Palestine.... Or in Russia--Siberia, a cold name....
+Here it was hell, but in Europe ... oh, different there! The heavy
+flakes, so solid, so wonderful, the laden trees, the great stretch of
+white. And in the houses the farmers blessing the snow, that would keep
+the ground warm and fertile for the coming year, that the blue flax
+might arise, and the fields of corn, with the great pleasance of the
+clover, and the golden-belted bees.... And the turf fires of Ulster, and
+Christmas coming, and after that Candlemas, and then March of the
+plowing, and glossy crows busy in the fields.... Always something to see
+ahead.... Not in Ireland only, but England, the jingle of bells and the
+people of ruddy faces.... And in Germany, too, the bluff important
+burghers having their houses heated by quaint porcelain stoves, huddling
+themselves in furs, and waddling obesely.... Very pleasant.... And in
+France, too, in the _assommoirs_, the tang of wine in the air and the
+blue hue of smoke, excited Latin voices. "_Encore un bock! T'es saoul,
+mon vieux! Flute! Je suis comme le Pont Neuf!_" A raucous voice singing
+a political skit:
+
+  Cordieu, Madame! Que faites-vous ici?
+  Cordieu, Madame! Que faites-vous ici?
+  Je danse le polka avec tous mes amis!
+  Je danse le polka avec tous mes amis!
+
+Buenos Aires, hell!
+
+And the worst was the strange inversion of time. Here winter was, cold
+streets, steely snow, garbage frozen to stone.... And in Europe was sane
+June. Purple flower of the heather in Ulster, and white flower of the
+bogs, and in the little bays of Antrim, men spearing flounders from
+boats in the long summer evenings. And the bairns hame from school, with
+a' their wee games, fishing for sticky-backs wi' pins, and the cummers
+spinning. Eigh, Ulster! And in England, they punting on the Thames,
+among the water-lilies. Soft Norman days, and in Germany the young folks
+going to the woods.... In Buenos Aires, hell!
+
+Within the house a cold that the little fire could only gallantly fight
+against. Without, cold of wolves.
+
+"Hedda, you come from a cold country. Tell me, is it like this in
+Sweden, any time?"
+
+She was sitting in the candle-light, doing the needlework she took such
+quietness in. Her firm white hands moving rhythmically, her body steady,
+her eyes a-dream. It was hard ever to think that she was--what she was.
+It was hard for him to think the word now, knowing her. She looked up
+and smiled.
+
+"No, Shane, not like this. It's cold, very cold. But very beautiful. By
+day the country-side is quiet, white, ascetic, like some young nun. And
+at night there are lights and jollity. It is like a child's idea of
+fairy-land. One wishes one were further north, where the reindeer are.
+One is not enemy to the cold, as you are here. One accepts it. It has
+dignity. Here it is naked, malevolent. That's the difference."
+
+"Naked, with awful hands.... A cold that seizes...."
+
+"Yes, Shane." She took up her work again. "Sometimes I think long until
+I get back to Sweden."
+
+"You--you are going back?"
+
+"Of course, Shane."
+
+"When?"
+
+"Five, six, seven years, unless I die, or am killed. Certainly I shall
+go back."
+
+"Yes, but in five, six--hum!"
+
+"But what, Shane?"
+
+"I once knew a woman, Hedda. She was--as you are. Just having friends.
+And she was as handsome as you are, too. She didn't have your head, your
+poise. She liked beauty, as you do. But this woman looked forward, as I
+don't think you do. She saw herself always going down. She saw herself
+in the end like the helmet-maker's daughter, in some archway of the
+city, seeking a couple of pence.... And she was afraid, horribly
+afraid...."
+
+"She was a silly woman."
+
+"How, Hedda?"
+
+"She didn't know two things. That luck changes; destiny is sometimes as
+kind as it is cruel. And also, when you are old, the money of the
+archway will bring you as much joy, a drink, a bed, a meal for the
+morrow, as do the diamonds of youth. The old don't need much, Shane.
+They haven't far to go."
+
+"But you, Hedda. Aren't you afraid of--the archway, and the few pence--"
+
+"No, Shane. That will not be my way." The broidery dropped to her lap.
+Her eyes, blue as winter, looked away, away. "I shall survive it all,
+barring death of course, and in seven, eight, ten years, I shall drop
+all this and go back, and be a lady in the land of my birth, a quiet,
+soft-voiced woman in a little house that has glinting brass in winter
+and flowers around it in summer. And I shall be very kind to the poor,
+Shane.... And all young things that are baffled or hurt can come to me,
+and tell their troubles, and I shall understand. And oftentimes, sitting
+in the long Northern twilights, I shall think: Is this Froken Hagen, who
+is all the world's friend, the girl who was once despised in Buenos
+Aires?... And I shall choke a little, and think: 'God is good!'"
+
+"You are very sure of yourself, Hedda."
+
+"Yes, Shane. I know my own capabilities. I know, too, my own
+limitations. I know I can always be of service. But I know, too, that
+there will be no love ever for me, nor any little children of my body,
+nor any big man to protect me and my house ..."
+
+"This other woman--I killed her to save her from the archway--she
+dreaded so much ..."
+
+"You were very silly, Shane," she snipped off a thread with the
+scissors. "People outgrow fear, and it may only have been a passing
+mood, that would have gone with the moon or the season. You know very
+little about women, Shane."
+
+He laughed bitterly. "I have been married twice, and once I loved a
+woman greatly."
+
+"From what you tell me," her voice was calm, "you have never been
+married. You made a mistake as a boy. And once again you bought a woman,
+as you might a fine dog, admired her, as you might admire a fine dog,
+and gave her a little passion, which comes and goes, knocks, passes
+on--but no trust. And once you were infatuated with a hysterical woman,
+and it all ended hysterically. No, Shane. I don't think you know much
+about women."
+
+"You know so many things." He was irritated. "Perhaps you know what is
+wrong with me."
+
+"Of course I do, Shane. Anybody would know. You are so important to
+yourself. All the world is in relation to you, not you in relation to
+the world. And people are not very important, Shane ... I know.... You
+look for things. You don't make them. You want everything. You give
+nothing. You haven't a wife, a house. Your father gave poems. But you
+haven't a house, a child, a wife, a book. You only have a trading-ship."
+
+"But I trade. I do my share of the world's work."
+
+"Any shop-keeper!"
+
+"I handle my ship."
+
+"Any mathematician...."
+
+"I brave all the perils of the sea."
+
+"Are you afraid of death?"
+
+"Of course not."
+
+"Well?"
+
+"Hedda, I handle men."
+
+"Any little braggadocio lieutenant...."
+
+His anger rose in hot waves. "So I am not worth anything in life, Hedda.
+How much are you?"
+
+"O, Shane," she stood up and looked at him seriously, "my calling is the
+oldest in the world, they say, but to me it's not the least honorable.
+It is sordid or not just as one makes it. I want you to think of men
+going to sea, and weary of the voyage, and from me somehow they get a
+glimpse of home. Are this house and myself more evil than the dram-shop
+and the gambling-hell? And aren't there women in England and France who
+would rather have their menfolk with me than leaning on some sodden
+counter? They might hate the choice, but it's better.... Shane, if you
+knew how weary men have talked to me of families abroad, their hearts
+burdened. They cannot talk to men ... and sometimes I exorcise devils,
+Shane, that young girls may walk safely in the dark.... And sometimes a
+man is athirst for a flash of beauty.... Think, Shane--you are not
+small.... Even yourself, Shane, I have helped you. There were times this
+month when you were close to the river, terribly, terribly close.... I
+said nothing, but I knew. And I held you. I willed. I prayed even ...
+Shane, Shane, _amigo_, when the time came that I had to work I chose
+this with my eyes open."
+
+"I'm sorry," Campbell lowered his head. "I can only say I'm sorry I
+said--hinted.... But Hedda, weren't there other things you could have
+done?"
+
+"A sempstress, maybe. But I think it's more important to ease a man's
+mind than to cover his back."
+
+"But children. You love children, Hedda. You know so much. Couldn't you
+have been a governess in some great house?"
+
+"O Shane, Shane _mio_, when will you understand?" Her calm voice had a
+note of distress in it. "None can judge of another's life. None can
+tell. None direct. What do you know of what passed before--I came to a
+mean house in a mean town? I once opened a door I shouldn't have, and
+left the lighted room ... for a warm blue darkness.... And I closed the
+door behind me.... And daylight came. I am not of a breed that sues for
+mercy. So I went ahead ... through the world. And I never look back,
+Shane. I am no Lot's wife, to become a pillar of her own salt tears...."
+
+"But Hedda, you are good. And this life--"
+
+"Of course I am good, Shane. There is no man can say I did him wrong in
+mind or body, or heart, either. And I am a comfort to many.... All I
+have done is to outrage a convention of property that I don't believe
+... Shane, do you know people cover greed with sentimentality and call
+it virtue?"
+
+"But, Hedda, the women don't see. They scorn you--"
+
+"Do they? Poor souls. Let them! _Amigo mio_, I have a life. I have to
+think, gage, act, concentrate. And when I want time of my own, Shane, I
+have it. The housewife with her frowsy duties, being kissed
+perfunctorily on the mat, the man who wears a stilted mask to the world,
+and before her--lets go.... Ugh! And the _mondaine_ with her boredom ...
+the hatred in wide houses.... Oh, I know. Sometimes I think it's so
+wonderful, being free....
+
+"O Shane, please don't be absurd, sentimental ... please, I know my way,
+and find yours.... Tell me, do you know yet what day you sail?"
+
+
+Section 8
+
+A sailor in a jersey and reefer caught his arm in the Avenida de
+Mayo....
+
+"All filled up." Campbell uttered brusquely.
+
+"It was no' that."
+
+Campbell put his hand in his pocket looking for a coin.
+
+"You'll be forgetting the Antrim glens, Shane Campbell." Shane flushed.
+The coin in his fingers burned him.
+
+"How did I know you were fro' the Antrim glens?"
+
+"You've seen me a few times, though you'd hardly know me. Simon Fraser
+of Ballycastle. You would no' recognize me, if you knew me, on account
+of my hair being white. I was lost on the coast of Borneo for four
+years. When I was lost my hair was black--maybe a wee sprinkle o'
+gray--but what you might call black; and when I was picked up, and saw
+myself in a looking-glass, it was white. They did no' know me when I got
+back to Ballycastle."
+
+"Would you care for a drink, Simon?"
+
+"I don't care much either way, Shane Campbell. And if I wanted a drink
+bad, I always have the silver for 't. I would no' have you think I
+stopped you for to cadge a drink. I'm no' that kind of man. But I was
+wi' your uncle Alan when he died. Or to be exact, I saw him just before
+he died. I was visiting in Cushendun. I have a half-brither there you
+might know, Tamas McNeil, Red Tam they ca' him. And whiles I was there,
+I saw Alan Donn go down."
+
+"My uncle Alan dead! Why, man, you're crazy--"
+
+"Your uncle Alan's a dead man."
+
+"You're mistaken, man. It's some one else."
+
+"Your uncle Alan's a dead man. And what's more: I have a word from him
+for ye."
+
+"But I'd have heard."
+
+"I cam' out in steam. It went against the grain a bit, but I cam' out in
+steam. From Belfast.... With a new boat out of Queen's Island ... Alan
+Donn's a dead man. That's why I stopped you. For to tell you your uncle
+Alan's gone...."
+
+"Come in, here," Shane said dazedly. He pulled the man into a bar, and
+sat down in a snug. "Tell me."
+
+"It was about nine in the morning, and an awful gray day it was, wi' a
+heavy sea running and a nor'easter, and this schooner was getting the
+timbers pounded out o' her. Her upper gear was gone entirely, and we
+could no' see how she was below, on account of the high seaway. She was
+a Frenchman, or a Portuguese. And she was gone. And we were all on
+shore, wondering why she had no' put into Greenock or Stranraer, or what
+kind of sailors they were at all, at all.
+
+"Up comes your uncle Alan; and he says: 'Has anybody put out to give
+those poor bastards a hand?' says he.
+
+"'There's no chance, Alan Donn,' says we.
+
+"And he says: 'How the hell do you know?' says he.
+
+"And we say: 'Can't you see for youself, Alan Donn, wi' the sea that's
+in it, and the wind that's in it, and the currents, there's no chance to
+help them?'
+
+"'So you're not going,' says he.
+
+"'Och, Alan Donn, have sense,' says we.
+
+"'If you aren't, then by Jesus, I am.'
+
+"He turns to one of the men there, a fisherman by the name of Rafferty,
+and he says: 'Hughie, get ready that wee boat o' yours, wi' the spitfire
+foresail, and the wee trisail.'
+
+"Then we said: 'You're not going, Alan Donn.'
+
+"'Who's to stop me?' says he. All this time we had to shout on account
+of the great wind was in it.
+
+"'We think too much of you, Alan Donn, to let you go.'
+
+"'If one o' you stinking badgers lays a finger on me to stop me, I'll
+break his God-damned neck.'
+
+"Says Hughie Rafferty to us--you know Hughie Rafferty, a silent man, a
+wise man--says he: 'He'll get out fifty yards, a hundred yards from
+shore and be stuck. And he'll say: "Well, I've done my best. Good-by and
+to hell with ye, and die like men!" And he'll come back. And if the boat
+turns over,' says Hughie Rafferty, 'he can swim like a rat, and he'll
+be back among us cursing, like his ain kind sel', within a wheen o'
+minutes.'
+
+"Says Hughie Rafferty, says he: 'I'll go wi' your Honor's Lordship, Alan
+Donn.'
+
+"'You will like hell,' says Alan Donn. 'You'll stay here wi' your
+childer and the mother o' your childer.'
+
+"Then a wee old man, that was a piper, speaks up. He was bent in two
+over an ash plant was in his right hand, and his left hand held his
+back.
+
+"'It's a foolish thing you are doing, Alan Donn,' says he. 'How can you
+bring off the poor people?'
+
+"'I don't want to bring off the poor people, Shamus-a-Feeba, James of
+the Pipes. But there's not a rock, a wind, a current, a wave itself of
+Struth na-Maoile that I don't know. I'm figuring on rigging up some kind
+of sea-anchor,' says Alan Donn, says he, 'and getting the ignorant
+foreigners to chop their gear overboard, and riding the storm out. Don't
+worry yourself, Shamus-a-Feeba.'
+
+"That was the way of your uncle, Alan Donn Campbell. He was very rough
+with the strong, but he was ay considerate of the old and over-young.
+He'd be rough with the king of England but he'd be awfu' polite to an
+ould man."
+
+"God, is Alan Donn dead?" Shane was near tears. "Do people like Alan
+Donn die?"
+
+"Aye, they die, too," said Simon Fraser. "And rogues live. It's queer.
+
+"The boat was a'ready to be put into the sea, when your uncle sees
+mysel' on the edge o' the gathering. He comes straight to me. You mind
+how Alan Donn used to go through a crowd.
+
+"'Are you the sailing man,' says he, 'wha's a half-brither to Red Tam
+McNeil of the Ten-Acre?'"
+
+"'I am, sir, Alan Donn.'
+
+"'Is it go wi' ye in the boat?' says I. 'I'll go.'
+
+"'No, no,' quo' he. 'It's no' that. So'thin' different. You ken my
+brither's son, Shane Oge Campbell, wha's a master on the seas?'
+
+"'I've met him once or twice, and I've heard tell.'
+
+"'If you see him, gi'e him a message. I'm sure you'll see him. I'm
+sure,' says Alan Donn, 'this morn I'm fey.'
+
+"'Tell him,' says Alan Donn, and he puts his hand on my shoulder. 'Tell
+him this: I've been intending to write him this long time. There's a
+thought in my head,' says he, 'that all's not well with him.
+
+"'Tell him this: I've been thinking and I've thought: There's great
+virtue to the place you're born in. Tell him he ought no' stay so long
+frae the braes o' Ulster. Tell him: The sea's not good for the head. A
+man's alone wi' himself too long, wi' his ain heid. Tell him that's not
+good.
+
+"'Tell him,' says he, 'there's great virtue and grand soothin' to the
+yellow whins and the purple heather. That's a deep fey thing. Tell him
+to try.'
+
+"'Is that all, sir, Alan Donn,' says I?
+
+"'You might tell him,' says he, 'aye, you might tell him: "'Your uncle
+Alan was not a coward, and he was a wise man."'
+
+"At that I was puzzled--I tell you without, offense meant--it sounded
+like boasting. And it was no' like Alan Donn to boast.
+
+"'Can I come along wi' you, sir, Alan Donn?' says I.
+
+"With that he gies me a look would knock you down. 'Did na I tell you to
+do so'thin' for me?' says he.
+
+"Then I kent he was na coming back.
+
+"'Aye, aye, sir,' said I.
+
+"He goes to the boat on the edge of the water. You could hardly keep
+your footing with the wind, nor hear your neighbor with the sea. And
+Alan Donn laughs: 'By Christ, 't is myself that must be fond o'
+boating,' says he. 'And to-day is the grand day for it, surely. _Hi
+horo_, push her off,' says he. '_Horo eile! Horo_, heroes, _horo eile!_'
+We pushed with the water up to our waists. The keel ground. The sand
+sucked. We pushed with the water up to our shoulders. Then the trisail
+caught the wind. And Alan Donn was off.
+
+"And Hughie Rafferty was wrong: Not at fifty, not at a hundred did he
+turn. Not at half a mile. He must have had the arms of Finn McCool, Alan
+Donn, and the hands of a woman. He'd take the high waves like a hunter
+taking a wall. Then you could nearly feel him easing her to the pitch.
+Apart from the waves themselves you could see the wee fountain of water
+when the bows slapped. Then he'd come up again. The trisail would belly
+and again he'd dive.
+
+"And then he came to the ninth wave--_tonn a' bhaidhte_, the drowning
+wave. Even away off you could see it rise like a wall, and curl at the
+top. We were watching. There was the crippled schooner, and Alan Donn,
+and the great sea. And the wave curled and broke. And then was only the
+schooner and the great sea....
+
+"And we waited for a minute, although we knew there was no call.
+
+"And after a while an ould one falls to her knees and raises the keening
+cry:
+
+"'_Mavrone!_ my sorrow! _Mavrone dhu!_ my black sorrow! _Mo chead vrone
+dhu! my_ hundred black sorrows.
+
+"'Is it gone you are, Alan Donn? Is it gone you are in the cruel sea? My
+black curse on it. It is between you and the people of your heart,
+between you and the land of your desire. Och, sea, isn't it cruel you
+are? Ruined Ireland is this day. The star of Ulster is out. And the
+little moon of Antrim shines no more. Och, _a 'airrge!_ My sorrow, O
+sea!
+
+"'Who will be good to us, now, Alan Donn? You were good to the poor.
+God's gain and our loss. Who will make the young maids flush, and the
+young men throw back their shoulders, from pride at your having talked
+to them? _Avourneen dherelish, mur nAlan Donn_, our Alan! Who will make
+the men of the South stand back, and you not striding through a
+gathering, ever, any more? And the dealing men of Scotland will miss
+you, you they could never get the better of in any fair, night noon or
+morning. _Peader agas Pol, Muire. Padraig agas Brighid!_ Peter and Paul,
+Mary, Patrick and St. Bride, let you be coming quickly now, and take up
+Alan Donn Campbell from the cold sea!
+
+"'Your horse in the stable will miss you, Alan Donn. Poor beastie, he'll
+miss you sore. Your servant boys will miss you, they that would jump if
+you but dropped your pipe. The green fairways of Portrush will miss you
+when spring comes, and you not hitting the ball against the champions of
+the world. The lambs will miss you, wee lambs of the fields, and the
+colts. They'll be missing you, but't will be nothing to our missing you.
+This night your dogs will be crying, and we'll be crying too.
+
+"'Young woman look back of you, and see if the nine glens of Antrim are
+there. I wouldn't be surprised if they were gone, now Alan Donn's in the
+bitter sea.'
+
+"Then up comes this woman, and she had a great cloak on--"
+
+"What woman, Simon Fraser?"
+
+"The woman there was talk of Alan Donn marrying. The woman from over the
+sea."
+
+"'Has anybody seen Mr. Campbell?' And we don't understand.
+
+"It's Alan Donn she means,' says Hughie Rafferty.
+
+"Then the ould one on her knees takes up her keening. And this woman
+understands. Her face goes white. She sees the schooner being battered
+by the Moyle.
+
+"'Did he go out to that?' she asks.
+
+"'Yes, ma'am, your Ladyship's Honor.'
+
+"'He didn't get there?'
+
+"'The drowning wave caught Alan Donn,' says Hughie Rafferty.
+
+"For a moment you'd think she hadn't heard. Then--a strange thing--a wee
+smile came on her face, and suddenly it changed to a queer twist, all
+over the face of her. Then she stood up proudly and looked out to sea
+... and two tears came to the eyes of her and she raised her head higher
+still.... The tears came in spite of her ... and suddenly she gave a wee
+gulp like a person who's sick.... And she turned and began to stumble
+away in the sand.... A couple of the young ones went as if to help her,
+but she turned.
+
+"'Please,' was all she said. And she went off on her lee lone.
+
+"And then says Hughie Rafferty: 'The tide will bring him to Cushendall.'
+
+"And at Cushendall next day we found the corp. There wasn't a mark on
+him. Even the things of the deep water had respect for Alan Doon."
+
+"What was this woman like, Simon Fraser? This woman there was talk of
+Alan Donn marrying?"
+
+"This woman was not a woman of Alan Donn's age. An' she was not a young
+woman. Her face was showing not the face of a girl but the face of
+herself. She had a proud face and a brave face. This woman would be
+around twenty-five.
+
+"She was a brown woman: she had brown eyes and brown hair. She was not
+an Irishwoman. She was an Englishwoman. She had no Gaelic. And her
+English was not our English. This woman could ride a horse, though not
+too well. She would put a horse at a jump, though she was afeared of it.
+
+"This woman had money. She was a niece of the admiral's, and she was on
+a long visit to the admiral's house.
+
+"I've heard tell a queer thing about this woman. She would play at the
+piano for hours on a stretch, reading from a book. For hours she would
+play, all by herself. The people passing the road and the servant girls
+of the house couldn't make head or tail of her music. But our folk ken
+nothing of the piano. The pipes, the melodeon, the fiddle, they know
+that--and a few ould ones have heard the harp. They couldn't tell
+whether it was good music or bad music was in it.
+
+"There's another queer thing about this woman. When she walked you'd
+think she was dancing. Not our reels or hornpipes, but queer ould dances
+you'd be walking to, not stepping. She had wee feet, though she was not
+a small woman.
+
+"Your uncle Alan's dogs took to this woman, and you ken how Alan's
+terriers had little liking for any but his ain sel'. I was told also to
+tell you that she had the dogs, and that they were comfortable, and
+would be well looked after. So that you need not be worritin' about your
+uncle Alan's dogs....
+
+"I'm afeared I've given you a poor picture of this woman, Shane
+Campbell: but it's a queer thing, you'd feel this woman more nor you'd
+see her. In a great deal of people, you wouldn't note her at all. But
+were you coming along the road, and a fey feeling come over you, and you
+say: Around the next corner is something kindly, something brave,
+something fine; as you turned the corner you'd meet this woman.
+
+"Your uncle Alan liked this woman, liked her fine, but this woman was
+sick with love for your uncle Alan.
+
+"You'll blame me sore, Shane Campbell, and rightly too; it was very
+careless of me, me who's got a careful name--it didn't seem to matter,
+though! The name of this woman is not at me ..."
+
+All the tears in Shane's eyes, all the emptiness in his heart was gone
+now. A sudden elation seized him. He understood. Alan Donn had done a
+fine brave thing; Alan Donn had done the strong thing, the right thing,
+as Alan always did.
+
+He thought: Alan was in love with this woman and this woman with Alan,
+and Alan had looked ahead sanely, seen, decided. Thirty years difference
+of age. Dignified strong wisdom and beautiful brave youth, one firm as a
+great firm rock, the other with the light wings of birds; spiritually
+never could they mate. Youth spiritual is like a gosling of yellow down,
+age spiritual is an eagle of great wings.... If the spirit has not
+died.... Alan would never be an irritated, jealous, paretic old man, nor
+would he see "this woman" grow stern with repression and ache, and
+loneliness of heart and spirit....
+
+Ah, he had done it well! A line of Froissart's came to Shane: "They were
+very noble; they cared nothing for their lives!" He had given her no
+shattered marriage, no empty explanation that breeds only bitterness and
+perhaps contempt. He had given her a very gallant memory that would
+exalt her in the coming days.... The world, the flesh, and the devil had
+played at cards with Alan Donn, and Alan had won....
+
+He thought: Were it I now, I should have drifted into this, and come to
+ancient tortured days, and not having strength maybe, should have ended,
+not before as Alan Donn did, gallantly, but afterward, meanly, leaving
+bitterness and desolation.... Ah, wise Alan.
+
+And it occurred to him suddenly, wise Alan, fey on the threshold of
+death, remembering him: There is virtue in the yellow gorse of Ulster,
+in the purple Ulster heather. Come back to where you were born, and
+rest, and get strength.... This is a deep thing.... Alan knew
+something.... The rain and the mist and the wind among the rushes had
+taught him natural secrets.... Maybe from the ground man drew strength,
+and maybe strange ground was alien to other than its own ... a
+motherland--why did they call a place a motherland ...? Antaeus, the
+Libyan wrestler, was invincible so long as his feet were on mother
+earth, and Heracles had lifted him into the air and the air had crushed
+him.... What did the Greek parable mean ...? It meant something ... the
+purple hills ... the purple heather.... The Moyle purple in the setting
+sun....
+
+"I'll go back," he decided. Scots superstition welled up in him. "A man
+seeing death sees more than death. Sees life. The Keepers of the Door
+maybe anoint his eyes, and if he looks back for an instant, God knows
+what he sees ... I'll go."
+
+"Can I give you a lift back to Ballycastle, Simon Fraser? Or a lift
+anywhere you want. It's the least I can do and you coming this long way
+to tell me news."
+
+"I'm very thankful to you, Shane Campbell, very thankful indeed. It's
+just the way of you to ask a poor sailor man does he want a lift halfway
+across the world. But I'll never again see Ballycastle with living
+eyes."
+
+"And why not, man Simon?"
+
+"It's this way, Shane Campbell. It's this way. When I came back after
+six years--four years lost on the coast of Borneo--my three fine sons
+were gone--twenty and nineteen and seventeen they were. Gone they were
+following the trade of the sea. And herself the woman of the house was
+gone, too. I didn't mind the childer, for 't is the way of the young to
+be roving. But herself went off with another man. A great gift of making
+a home she had, so there was many would have her, in spite of her forty
+year. Into the dim City of Glasgow she went, and there was no word of
+her. And she might have waited, Shane Campbell; she might so. Four years
+lost on the coast of Borneo to come and find your childer scattered, and
+your wife putting shame on you. That's a hard thing."
+
+"You're a young man, Simon Fraser. You're as young as I am, forty-two.
+There's a quarter-century ahead of you. Put the past by and begin again.
+There'd be love at many a young woman for you. And a house, and new
+bairns."
+
+"I'm a back-thinking man, Alan's kinsman, a long back-thinking man. And
+I'd always be putting the new beside the old and the new would not seem
+good to me. The new bairns would never be like the old bairns, and it
+would na be fair. And as for women, I've had my bellyful of women after
+her I was kind to, and was true to for one and twenty years, going off
+with some sweating landsman to a dingy town.... I was ay a good sailor,
+Shane Oge....
+
+"It's by now, nearly by.... So I'll be going up and down the sea on the
+chance of meeting one of my new braw bairns. And maybe I'll come across
+one of them on the water-front, and him needing me most.... And maybe
+I'll sign articles wi' the one aboard the same ship, and it's the grand
+cracks we'll have in the horse latitudes.... Or maybe I'll find one of
+them a young buck officer aboard a ship I'm on; and he'll come for'a'd
+and say: 'Lay aloft, old-timer, with the rest and be pretty God-damned
+quick about it.' And I'll say: 'Aye, aye, sir.' And thinks: Wait till
+you get ashore, and I'll tell you who I am, and give you a tip about
+your seamanship, too, my grand young fello'.... Life has queerer things
+nor that, Shane Oge, as maybe you know.... The only thing that bothers
+me is that I'll never see Ballycastle any more."
+
+"Is there nothing I can do for you, Simon Fraser?"
+
+"There's a wee thing, Shane Campbell; just a wee thing?"
+
+"What is it, man Simon?"
+
+"Maybe you'd think me crazy--"
+
+"Of course not, Simon."
+
+"Well then, when you're home, and looking around you at the whins and
+purple heather, and the wee gray towns, maybe you'll say: 'Glens of
+Antrim, I ken a man of Antrim, and he'll never see you again, but he'll
+never forget you.' Will you do that?"
+
+"I'll do that."
+
+"Maybe you'll be looking at Ballycastle, the town where I was born in."
+
+"Yes, Simon."
+
+"You don't have to say it out loud. You can stop and say it low in
+yourself, so as nobody'll hear you, barring the gray stones of the town.
+Just remember: 'Ballycastle, Simon Fraser's thinking long ...'"
+
+
+Section 9
+
+A cold southerly drove northward from the pole, chopping the muddy waves
+of the river. Around the floating _camolotes_, islands of weeds, were
+little swirls. The poplars and willows of the banks grew more distant,
+as _Maid of the Isles_ cut eastward under all sail. As he tramped fore
+and aft, Buenos Aires dropped, dropped, dropped behind her counter,
+dropped ... became a blur....
+
+_Maid of the Isles_ was only going home, as she had gone home a hundred
+times before, from different ports, as she had gone home a dozen times
+from this one. But never before had it seemed significant to Shane....
+Back, back the city faded.... If the wind lasted, and Shane thought it
+would last, by to-morrow they would have left the Plate and be in the
+open sea. Back, back the city dropped.... It couldn't drop too fast....
+It was like a prison from which he was escaping, fleeing.... A great
+yearning come on him to have it out of sight ... definitely, forever.
+Once it was gone, he would know for a certain thing, he was free....
+
+He was surprised to be free. As surprised as an all but beaten wrestler
+is when his opponent's lock weakens unexpectedly, and dazedly he knows
+he can get up again and spar. A fog had lifted suddenly, as at sea. And
+he had thought the mist of the Valley of the Black Pig could never lift,
+would remain, dank and cold and hollow, covering all things like a
+cerecloth, binding all as chains bind ... and that he must remain with
+the weeping population, until the Boar without Bristles came ... forever
+and forever and forever....
+
+But the nearest and dearest had died gallantly, and somehow the fog had
+lifted. And then he was dazed and weak, but free. Where was he going?
+What to do? He didn't know, but hope, life itself had come again, like a
+long awaited moon.
+
+Buenos Aires faded.... Faded the Valley of the Black Pig.... Buenos
+Aires its symbol ... Buenos Aires with bleak squares, its hovels, its
+painted trees--_timbo_ and _tipa_ and _palo barracho_....
+
+He stood aft of the steersman, and suddenly raised his head.
+
+  _Mo mhallacht go deo leat, a bhaile nan gcrann!
+  'S mo shlan do gach baile raibh me riamh ann._
+
+"My curse forever on you, O town of the trees," an old song came to him,
+"and my farewell to every town I was ever in--"
+
+A great nostalgia for Ulster, for the whins and heather, choked him:
+
+"_S iomaidh bealach fliuch salach agas boithrin cam_--
+
+"There's many a wet muddy highways and crooked half-road, _eader mise_,
+between _me_, _eader mise_, _eader mise_--" He had forgotten.
+
+"Between me and the townland that my desire is in," the Oran steersman
+prompted. "_Eader mise agas an baile bhfuil mo dhuil ann!_"
+
+"Mind your bloody wheel," Shane warned. "This is a ship, not a poetry
+society. Look at the way you're letting her come up, you Highland
+bastard. Keep her off--and lam her!"
+
+"Lam her it is, sir," the steersman grinned....
+
+
+
+
+PART SIX
+
+THE BOLD FENIAN MEN
+
+
+Section 1
+
+The worst of it all, Campbell smiled, was this: that life was so
+immensely healthy now, immensely peaceful, immensely sane. Here he was
+in the house of his fathers, built from the angle of a turret of King
+John's time. Here he was by the purple hills, by the purple Moyle. Five
+springs had come since he had given up the sea. Five times he had seen
+the little mountain streams swell with the import of the season,
+hurrying from the summit of the eagles, carrying water on nature's
+business. Five times had the primrose come, and the cuckoo. The faint
+delicate blue of early grass turned to green. The heat haze of summer on
+the silent glens. The Moyle thick with fish. Then autumn, a deep-bosomed
+grave woman moving through the reddening woods, the turf-cutters with
+their spades, the pillars of blue smoke from the cottages in the stilly
+September sky. And the three great moons of autumn, silver as sixpence.
+Five times the distant trumpeting of the wild swans and winter came, in
+great galloping winds, and sweeping sheets of sea-rain. And Moyle tossed
+like a giant troubled in his sleep. And on the mountain-sides the rowan
+stood up like a proud enemy, and the ash bent humbly, and the dwarf oak
+crouched under fury. And the wind whistled in the frozen reeds. And with
+the snow came out the hunted ones unafraid, the red fox, and the badger
+of dark ways, and the cantering hare.
+
+Without, the wind might roar like cannon, and the sea rise in great
+engulfing waves. Within the old house with its corner dating from King
+John's time--so long ago!--was comfort. Here was the library where Robin
+More--God rest his soul!--had puzzled over the round towers of Ireland
+and written his monograph on the Phenician colony of the County Down,
+and bothered about strange quaint old things, comparing the Celtic cross
+to the sistrum of Egypt, and wondering whether the round towers of
+Ireland had aught to do with worship of the sun, and writing of Gaelic
+occultism to Bulwer Lytton, and dreaming of the friend of his youth,
+Goethe, in the dusk. And down in the gun-room were the cups of Alan
+Donn, cups for sailing and cups for golf, and ribbons that horses won.
+And in the drawing-room was the needlework of his mother, the precise
+beautiful broidery ... so like herself, minute, mathematical, not
+significant.... And in the kitchen was the red turf, and the flitches of
+bacon in the eaves, and the thick servant girls hustling impatiently,
+and the servant boys in their corduroy trousers bound with rushes at the
+knee ... their heavy brogues, their honest jests of Rabelais ... and in
+the fold the silent sheep, and great solemn cows warm in their
+manger....
+
+Five years, going on six now, since he had left the sea, and invested
+his fortune in a Belfast shipyard, and taken over the homestead of Clan
+Campbell to run as it had always been run, wisely, sanely, healthily....
+There were the servant boys and girls, with a comfortable roof above
+them. There were the cotter tenants, satisfied, certain of justice. At
+the shows his shorthorns took ribbons. For local charities, his duty was
+done.... But there was something, something lacking....
+
+It wasn't peace. Peace he had in plenty. The spring of the heather, the
+tang of the sea brought peace. The bats of twilight, and the sallow
+branches, and the trout leaping in the river at the close of day. And
+the twilight itself, like some shy girl.... Out of all these came an
+emanation, a cradle-song, that lulled like the song of little waves....
+And as for pleasure, there was pleasure in listening to the birds among
+the trees, to seeing the stooking of barley, to watching the blue banner
+of the flax, to walking on frosty roads on great nights of stars.... To
+riding with the hunt, clumsily, as a sailor does, but getting in at the
+death, as pleased as the huntsman, or the master himself.... To the whir
+of the reel as the great blue salmon rushed ... Pleasure, and peace, and
+yet not satisfaction.
+
+He thought, for a while, that what he missed was the ships, and that,
+subconsciously, there was some nostalgia for the sea on him. He had gone
+to Belfast thinking that with live timbers beneath his feet, the--the
+vacuum within him would be filled, but the thought of a ship somehow,
+when he was there, failed to exalt him. He loved them always, the long
+live ships, the canvas white as a gull, the delicacy of spars--all the
+beautiful economy.... But to command one again, to go about the world,
+aimlessly but for the bartering of cargo, and to return at the voyage's
+end, with a sum of money--no! no! not enough!
+
+And so he came back to the peace and pleasure of the glens, the purple
+heather, and the red berries, the chink of pebbles on the strand. To
+the hunts on frosty mornings, to the salmon-fishing, to the showing of
+cattle. To peace: to pleasure....
+
+And he suddenly asked himself what had he done to deserve this peace,
+these pleasant days? What right had he to them? What had he given to
+life, what achieved for the world, that he should have sanctuary?
+
+The answer put him in a shiver of panic. Nothing!
+
+He had no right, no title to it. Here he was drawing on to fifty, close
+on forty-eight; and he had done, achieved, nothing. He had no wife, no
+child; had achieved no valorous unselfish deed. Had not--not even--not
+even a little song.
+
+
+Section 2
+
+Strange thing--it hadn't occurred to him at first; but it did now when
+he thought over it in the winter evenings--was this: that Alan Donn
+Campbell, for all that he was dead these six years and more, existed
+still, was bigger now than he had ever been in life....
+
+Because Shane had hated to see the fine boat drawn up, he had put _Righ
+nam Bradan_, the _Salmon King_, Alan Donn's great thirty-footer, into
+commission, and raced her at Ballycastle and Kingstown, losing both
+times. He had ascribed it to sailing luck, the dying of a breeze, the
+setting of a tide, a lucky tack of an opposing boat. But at Cowes he
+should have won. Everything was with him. He came in fifth.
+
+"I can't understand," he told one of Alan's old crew.
+
+"Man," the Antrim sailor told him bluntly, "ye have na' the gift."
+
+"But, Feardoracha, I'm a sailor."
+
+"Aye, Shane Campbell, you're that. For five times seven years you've
+sailed the seven seas. But for racing ye have na' the gift. Alan Donn
+had it. And 'twas Alan Donn had the gift for the golf, and the gift for
+the horses. Just the gift. You must not blame yourself, _Shane na
+fairrge_, there's few Alan Donns."
+
+And thinking to himself in the lamp-lit room, Shane found what the old
+man meant. Beneath the bronzed face, the roaring manner of Alan Donn,
+there was a secret of alchemy. Rhythm, and concentration like white
+fire. To the most acute tick of the stars he could get a boat over the
+line with the gun. Something told him where breezes were. By will-power
+he forced out the knowledge of a better tack. As to horses, where was
+his equal at putting one over a jump? At the exact hair's-breadth of
+time, he had changed from human being to spirit. It was no longer Alan
+Donn and his horse when he dropped his hands on the neck. There was
+fusion. A centaur sprang.... On the links he remembered him, the smiling
+mask, the stance, the waggle, the white ball. The face set, the eyes
+gleamed.... The terrific explosion.... Not a man and a stick and a piece
+of gutta-percha, but the mind and will performing a miracle with
+matter.... And Alan Donn was dead six years ... and yet he lived....
+
+He lived because he had been of great use. He was a standard, a great
+ideal. Children who had seen him would remember him forever, and seek to
+emulate the fire and strength of him, having him to measure by as the
+mariner has the star.... In foreign countries they would tell tales of
+him: There was once a great sportsman in the North of Ireland, Alan Donn
+Campbell by name....
+
+His father, too, who had been dead so long--mortality had not conquered
+him. Once in Ballycastle Shane had seen a shawled girl look out to sea
+with great staring eyes and a wry mouth, and, half whispered, staccato,
+not quite sung, her fingers twisting her shawl, came a song from her
+white mouth:
+
+  _Tiocfaidh an samhradh agas fasfaidh an fear;
+  Agas tiocfaidh an duilleabhar glas do bharr nan gcraobh.
+  Tiocfaidh mo chead gradhle banaghadh an lae,
+  Agas bvailfidh se port ciuin le cumhaidh 'mo dhiaidh._
+
+  The summer will come, and the little grass will grow;
+  And there will come a green thickness to the tops of the trees.
+  And my hundred loves will arise with the dawning of the day,
+  And he will strike a soft tune out of loneliness after me.
+
+A queer stitch came in Shane's heart--a song his father made! And
+following the stitch came a surge of pride. Those songs of his father!
+The light minor he had heard, and the others--the surge of _An Oig-bhean
+Ruaddh_, the Pretty Red Maiden:
+
+"_Se, do bheatha is an tir seo"_.... A welcome before you into this
+country, O sea-gull more lovely than the queen, than the woman of the
+West, whom Naesi, son of Usnach, held in the harbor. I could destroy all
+Ireland, as far as the Southern sea, but in the end I would be destroyed
+myself, when my eyes would alight on the white swan with the golden
+crown....
+
+Or the despairing cry of his poem _Ig Cathair nan g Ceo_: "In the City
+of the Fogs"--he meant London--
+
+"_A athair nan gras tabhair spas o'n eag domh_--O Father of the Graces,
+give me a little respite from death. Let the ax not yet strike my
+forehead, the way a goat or a pig or a sheep is slain, until I make my
+humility and my last repentance."
+
+Shane wished to God he had known his father, that the man had been
+spared a little until he could have loved him.... He had the only
+picture of him left.... Great throat and pale, liquor-harried face,
+burning eyes, and black tossing hair.... The bald-headed bankers might
+shake their heads and say: He was no good ... he was a rake ... he drank
+... his relations with women were not reputable.... And old maids purse
+their thin-blooded lips.... But when the little money of the bankers was
+scattered through the world, and even their little chapels had forgotten
+them, and the stiff bones of old maids were crumbling into an
+unnecessary dust, his father's songs would be sung in Ireland, in Man,
+in the Scottish Highlands, in the battered Hebrides. So long as sweet
+Gaelic was spoken and men's hearts surged with feeling, there would be a
+song of his father's to translate the effervescence into words of
+cadenced beauty.... He had an irreverent vision of God smiling and
+talking comfortably to his father while the bald-headed bankers cooled
+their fat heels and glared at one another outside the picket-gates of
+heaven.... The world had gained something with the last Gaelic bard....
+
+And he had found out, too, that his other uncle, Robin More, had a great
+importance in a certain circle. In Dublin he met an old professor, a
+Jesuit priest, who seemed intensely excited that a nephew of Robin More
+Campbell's should be present.
+
+"Do you know, by any chance, what your uncle was working on when he
+died?"
+
+"I'm afraid I do not, sir."
+
+"You know his manuscripts."
+
+"Just casually, sentimentally."
+
+"You don't know much about your uncle's work, then?"
+
+"Not very much."
+
+"Did you know," the old priest said--and his urbanity disappeared; there
+was pique in his tones--"that your uncle was the man who definitely
+decided for us that the Highlanders of Scotland migrated from Ireland to
+Scotland? Did you know that?"
+
+"No, sir, I did not."
+
+"I don't suppose," the old man was sarcastic, "that seems important to
+you."
+
+"To confess, Dr. Hegan, it does not. Is it?"
+
+"My child," the old priest smiled--it was so queer to be called "my
+child" at forty-seven--"all knowledge is important. All details of
+knowledge. We come we know not whence, and we go we hope we know
+whither. Our history, our motives, our all, is vague. All we have is
+faith, a great broad river, but knowledge is the little piers ..."
+
+They had all been significant: Alan Donn, his father, even Uncle Robin,
+whom he had thought only a bookworm in the fading sunshine. The world
+was better, more mature, for their having lived....
+
+And he had nothing. Here he was, drawing on to fifty, close on
+forty-eight. And he had done, achieved nothing. He had no wife, no
+child; had achieved no valorous unselfish deed. Had not--not even--not
+even a little song....
+
+
+Section 3
+
+And then he said to himself: "I am too sensitive. I have always been too
+sensitive. The stature of my family has dwarfed me in my own esteem.
+Haven't I got as much right as others to the quiet of the glens?" And
+again he said: "I sit here and I think. And my thought grows into a
+maze. And I wander in it, as a man might wander through some old
+gardener's fancy, having stumbled on it inadvertently, and now being in
+it, now knowing the secret of exit." But a maze was nonexistent, did a
+person regard it so, and if one were to walk on nonchalantly a little
+turn would come, and he find himself in the wide sunshine and smiling
+flowers. And he said: "Damn the subtleties! A person is born, lives,
+dies. And what he does is a matter for himself alone." But some inner
+antagonist said: "You are wrong."
+
+And he said: "Look at the people around me. What more right have they
+than I to this quiet Ulster dusk?" And the antagonist smiled: "Well,
+look."
+
+First were the farmers and the fisherfolk. Well, they didn't count. They
+were natural to the soil, as grass was. They grew there, as the white
+bog flower grew. An institution of God, like rain. And then there were
+the summer visitors, honest folk from the cities. Well, they had a
+right. They spent their winters and autumns and springs in mills and
+counting-houses, clearing away the commercial garbage of the world. And
+when the graciousness of summer came, they emerged, blind as moles,
+peak-faced. And before them stretched the Moyle, a blue miracle. The
+crisp heather, the thick rushes, the yellow of the buttercups, the black
+bog waters. And when clouds came before the sun the mountains drew great
+purple cloths over them. And in the twilight the cricket chirruped. And
+at night the plover cried out against the vast silence of the moon. And
+the hearts of the selling people turned from thoughts of who owed them
+money and who was harrying them for money. And the tight souls opened,
+just a little perhaps, but even that--Poor garbage men of the world, who
+would begrudge them a little beauty?
+
+Then there were the country people, the landlords, the owners of the
+soil. Red-faced, sportsmen, connoisseurs of cattle, a sort of
+super-farmer, they were as natural to the soil as the fisherfolk or the
+tillers. Their stock remained from ancient tides of battle, centuries
+before. The founders of the families had been Norman barons, Highland
+chiefs, English squires; but the blood had adapted itself, as a plant
+adapts itself in a strange country. And now they were Ulster squires.
+Smiling, shy, independent. They had a great feeling for a horse, and a
+powerful sense of fair play. They were very honest folk. A station had
+been set them and they lived in it, honestly, uncomplainingly, quite
+happily. But a meadow was a piece of land to them and a river a place
+where trout could be caught, and snow was a good thing, because it kept
+the ground warm. They were a folk whom Shane respected a great deal, and
+who respected him--but they weren't his folk.
+
+Above all these of his neighbors towered three figures, and the first of
+these was the admiral.
+
+He had a name. He had a title, too--Baron Fraser of Onabega. But to
+everybody he was the admiral, and in speech plain "sir." A purple-faced
+and terrible old man, with bushy white eyebrows and eagle's eyes. Very
+tall, four inches over six feet, very erect for all his ninety years,
+with his presence there thundered the guns of Drake, there came to the
+mind the slash of old Benbow.... He had been a midshipman with Nelson at
+Cape Trafalgar.
+
+Silent and fierce, about his head clouds of majesty, all his life had
+been spent with pursed lips and hooded eyes, keeping watch for England
+... And never a great battle where he could prove himself the peer of
+Benbow and Drake and Nelson ... Never a dawn when the fleet rolled down
+to battle with polished guns and whipping flags ... And a day came when
+he was too old ... So here he was in the Antrim glens ...
+
+A great life, his, a great and serviceable life, frustrated of glory ...
+And well he deserved the quiet of Ulster, where he sat and wrote his
+long letters to archaeological papers, proving, he thought, that the
+Irish were a lost tribe of Israel and that the Ark of the Covenant was
+buried on Tara Hill ... And there were none to laugh at him ... All
+spirit he was; watchful, dogged, indomitable spirit with a little husk
+of body ... Soon, as he had directed, his old bearded sailormen would
+take his flag-covered casket out to sea in the night, and the guns would
+thunder: A British admiral sails by ...
+
+And there was Simon Fowler in his little cottage, who was dying by
+inches from some tropical malady ... A small chunky man with white hair
+and wide blue eyes ... He had been a missionary in Africa, in China, in
+India--not the missionary of sentimental books, but a prophet whose calm
+voice, whose intrepid eyes, had gained him a hearing everywhere ...
+"Put fear away," he had preached in Africa; "let darkness flee. I come
+to tell of the light of the world ... After me will come the sellers of
+gin and of guns. But I shall give you a great magic against them ...
+Little children love one another ..." In China his fire had shamed
+philosophers: "I know your alms-giving. I know your benevolence. It is
+selfishness. Though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I
+deliver my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me
+nothing. Unless ye become as little children ..." And in the sensuous
+Indian lands, his voice rose in a great shout: "Subtle Greece is dead,"
+he proclaimed, "and razed are the fanes of Ephesus. And the Unknown God
+slinks only through the midnight streets ..." "Blessed are the pure in
+heart ..." He had gone like a flame through the pagan places of the
+world, and here he was dying in the Antrim glens, with the quiet of
+Christ about him, the droning of God's little bees, and the lowing of
+the cattle of Bethlehem ... He was a great man. He had only one
+contempt: for hired clergymen.
+
+There were three folk of heroic stature around him: the admiral, and
+Simon Fowler, and the woman of Tusa hErin.
+
+
+Section 4
+
+A very small townland is Tusa hErin, the smallest in Ireland, it is
+said. And a very strange name on it: Tusa hErin, the beginning of
+Ireland. Why it is so called, none know. Possibly because some
+Highlanders named it this on landing there. Probably because it was a
+division between the Scottish and Irish clans. So it was called when the
+Bruce fled to Ireland. So it is called to this day.
+
+Twenty acres or so are in it--a wind and sea lashed little estate, a
+great gray house and a garden of yew-trees. For ten years it had been
+untenanted, until a Miss O'Malley had bought it, and opened the great
+oak doors, and let the sea-air blow through the windows of it, and
+clipped the garden of the yews. The country people knew little of her,
+except that she had a great reserve. To the glensmen she was _Bean Tusig
+Erin_, the woman of Tusa hErin.
+
+"What kind of a person is she?" Shane asked.
+
+"A strange woman is in it, your Honor; a strange and dark woman."
+
+"An old lady?"
+
+"If she was one of us, she would be an old woman, your Honor, what with
+the bitter work and the hard ways. But being what she is, she is a young
+woman, your Honor. I heard tell she said she was thirty-four."
+
+"Is she good-looking?"
+
+"Well, now, your Honor, that would surely be a hard thing to say. A
+great dark face she has on her, and her head high, the like of a grand
+horse. Barring her eyes, you might call her a fine woman."
+
+"What's wrong with her eyes?"
+
+"Hard eyes she has, your Honor, hating eyes. She's always looking at you
+to see if it is an enemy is in it. A queer woman, your Honor; the like
+of her was never known."
+
+"But how?"
+
+"The talk that's at her, your Honor. The great hatred she bes having of
+England, and the talk of old Irish times."
+
+"And she a lady?"
+
+"You'd think it was a queen was in it, with the high head of her, and
+the proud step of a racing horse. You would, your Honor, you would so."
+
+He asked the admiral about her.
+
+"Do you know this Miss O'Malley, sir, of Tusa hErin?"
+
+"I had the honor to meet her twice, Campbell. A very great woman. A
+great loss, Campbell, a great loss."
+
+"Who is she, sir?"
+
+"Good God! Do you mean to tell me you don't know who Grace O'Malley is?"
+
+"No, sir, I don't."
+
+"One of the greatest Shaksperian actresses, possibly, the English stage
+ever knew--and you never heard of her. Good God! How abominably ignorant
+you merchant marine men are!"
+
+"Abominably so, sir ... But please tell me, sir, why does she hate
+England so much?"
+
+"Oh, these geniuses, Campbell! They must hate something, or love
+something to excess ... Depths of feeling, I suppose ... Campbell, do
+you know anything about Ogham writing?"
+
+"Only that it's straight lines on the corners of stones, sir!"
+
+"Well, now, I think I've discovered something important, most terribly
+important ... You may have heard of the Babylonian cuneiform script ..."
+and the old gentleman was off full gallop on his hobby ...
+
+From Simon Fowler he extracted a little more information.
+
+"Fowler, do you know Miss O'Malley of Tusa hErin?"
+
+"I do, poor lady."
+
+"Why poor lady?"
+
+"Wouldn't you call any one poor lady who had just been widowed, then
+lost her two children? Poor lady, I wish I could say something to
+comfort her."
+
+"You! Fowler! You couldn't say anything?"
+
+"The wisdom of God, Shane, is sometimes very hard to see. Our physical
+eyes can only see a little horizon, and yet the whole world is behind
+it. Miss O'Malley is not a case for any of the ministers of God ... but
+for Himself ..."
+
+"You exaggerate, Fowler. Surely you are wrong ... They say she is young
+and proud and beautiful."
+
+"I don't know. I never noticed ... She may be young and proud and
+beautiful ... I only thought of the dark harassed thing--inside all the
+youth and pride and beauty ..."
+
+
+Section 5
+
+He met her for the first time at a neighboring fair ...
+
+Eleven on a hot June morning, and the little town was crowded, like some
+old-time immigrant ship. Women in plaid shawls and frilled caps, men in
+somber black as befitted a monthly occasion. Squawking of ducks and
+hens, trudging of donkeys, creaking of carts, unbelievably stubborn
+bullocks and heifers being whacked by ash-plants, colts frisking. Girls
+with baskets of eggs and butter; great carts of hay and straw.
+Apple-women with bonnets of cabbage-leaves against the sun. Herring-men
+bawling like auctioneers. Squealing of young pigs. An old clothes dealer
+hoarse with effort. A ballad singer split the air with an English
+translation of _Bean an Fhir Ruaidh_, "The Red-haired Man's Wife."
+
+  Ye Muses Nine,
+      Combine, and lend me your aid,
+  Until I raise
+      the praise of a beautiful maid--
+
+The crash of a drover driving home a bargain:
+
+"Hold out your hand now, by God! till I be after making you an offer.
+Seven pound ten, now. Hell to my soul if I give you another ha' penny.
+Wait now. I 'll make it seven pound fifteen."
+
+"Is it insulting the fine decent beast you are?"
+
+"Eight pounds five and ten shillings back for a luck-penny?"
+
+"Is it crazy you've gone all of a sudden, dealing man. If the gentle
+creature was in Dublin town, sure they'd be hanging blue ribbons around
+her neck until she wilted with the weight of them."
+
+"It's hanging their hats on the bones of her they'd be, and them
+sticking out the like of branches from a bush."
+
+"Yerra Jasus! Do you hear the man, and her round as a bottle from the
+fine filling feeding. You could walk your shin-bones off to the knee,
+and you'd not find a cow as has had the treatment of this cow. Let you
+be on our way now."
+
+"Look, honest man. Put out your hand, and wait till I spit on my fist--"
+
+Through the doors of Michael Doyle's public house a young farmer walked
+uncertainly. He gently swung a woman's woolen stocking in his right
+hand, and in the foot of the stocking was a large round stone:
+
+"I am young Packy McGee of Ballymoyle," he announced, "the son of old
+Packy McGee of Ballymoyle, a great man in his day, but never the equal
+of young Packy McGee. I have gone through Scotland and Ireland, Wales,
+the harvest fields of England, and I have never yet found the equal for
+murder and riot of young Packy McGee. I am young Packy McGee. I am young
+Packy McGee of Ballymore, and I don't care who knows it. Is there any
+decent man in this fair that considers himself the equal of young Packy
+McGee?" And he walked through the fair, chanting his litany and gently
+swinging the woman's woolen stocking with the large round stone in the
+foot of it ...
+
+The penny poet changed from the high grace notes of "The Red-Haired
+Man's Wife" to the surge of a come-all-ye. There was the undercurrent of
+a pipe drone to his voice:
+
+  Fare-you-well, Enniskillen, fare-you-well for a while,
+  All round the borders of Erin's green isle
+  And when the war 's over return I shall soon,
+  And your arms will be o-o-open for your Enniskillen Dragoon.
+
+In the intervals between verses a black-bearded man with blue spectacles
+announced solemnly that he was Professor Handley direct from English and
+German universities, empowered by the Rosicrucian order to distribute a
+remarkable panacea at the nominal sum of sixpence a bottle ...
+
+Forests of cows' horns and drovers' sticks, clamor of frightened cattle,
+emphatic slapping of palms. Clouds of dust where the horse fair was
+carried on. Stands of fruit and cakes. Stalls of religious ornaments,
+prayer-books, and rosary beads ... A shooting gallery ... A three-card
+trickster, white and pimpled of face ... A trick-of-the-loop man, with
+soap-box and greasy string ... A man who sold a gold watch, a
+sovereign, and some silver for the sum of fifteen shillings ... An old
+man with the Irish bagpipes, bellows strapped to arm, playing "The Birds
+Among the Trees," "The Swallow-tail Coat," "The Green Fields of America"
+... small boys regarding him curiously ... later young farmers and girls
+would be dancing sets to his piping ... At the end of the street a
+ballad-monger declaiming, not singing--his head thrown back, his voice
+issuing in a measured chant ... "The Lament for the Earl of Lucan":
+
+  Patrick Sarsfield, Ireland's wonder!
+  Fought in the field like bolts of thunder!
+  One of Ireland's best commanders!
+  Now is food for the crows of Flanders!
+              Och! Ochone!
+
+A knot of older people had gathered around him, white-headed farmers,
+bent turf-cutters of the glens, a girl-child with eyes like saucers. A
+priest stopped to listen ... The crude English of the ballad faded out,
+until there was nothing but disheveled agony ... rhythm ... a wail ...
+Somewhere a leaping current of feeling ... There was a woman on the edge
+of the crowd, a lady ... She came nearer, as though hypnotized ...
+
+The country bard stopped suddenly, exalted, and swung dramatically into
+Gaelic ... Dropping the alien tongue he seemed to have dropped
+fetters.... His voice rose to a paean ... he took on stature ... he
+looked straight in the eye of the sun ... And for Shane the clamor of
+the drovers ceased ... And there was the plucked note of harpers ... And
+fires of ancient oak ... and wolf-dogs sleeping on skins of elk ... And
+there was a wasted place in the twilight, and grass through a split
+hearthstone ... And a warrior-poet, beaten, thinking bitter under the
+stars ...
+
+  _Do threasgar an saoghal agas do thainic an gaoth mar smal--
+  Alastrom, Caesar, 's an mead do bhi da bpairt;
+  Ta an Teamhair na fear agas feach an Traoi mar ta!
+  'S na Sasanaigh fein, do b' fheidir go bhfaigh dis bas!_
+
+A voice spoke excitedly, imperiously to Shane:
+
+"What is he saying? Do you know Gaelic?"
+
+"I'm afraid I've forgotten my Gaelic, but I know this song."
+
+"Then what is it? Please tell me. I must know."
+
+"He says:
+
+  "The world conquers them all. The wind whirls like dust.
+  Alexander, Caesar, and the companies whom they led.
+  Tara is grass, and see how Troy is now!
+  And the English themselves, even they may die."
+
+"How great!" she said. "How very great!" She turned to Shane, and as he
+saw the dark imperious face, he knew intuitively he was speaking to the
+Woman of Tusa hErin. She seemed puzzled for an instant. Something in
+Shane's clothes, his carriage ...
+
+"You don't look as if you understood Gaelic? How is it you can translate
+this poem?"
+
+"I knew it as a boy. My father was a Gaelic poet."
+
+"Then you are Shane Campbell."
+
+"And you are the woman of Tusa hErin!"
+
+"You know Tusa hErin?"
+
+"I know every blade of grass in the glens."
+
+"If you are ever near Tusa hErin, come and see me."
+
+"I should like to."
+
+"Will you really?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+She left him as abruptly as she spoke to him, going over to the
+ballad-monger. She left him a little dazed ... He was aware of vitality
+... He was like a man on a wintry day who experiences a sudden shaft of
+warm sun, or somebody in quiet darkness whose eye is caught by the
+rising of the moon.
+
+
+Section 6
+
+As in a story from some old unsubtle book, in passing the gates of Tusa
+hErin, he had gone into another world, a grave and courteous world, not
+antique--that was not the word, but just older ... A change of tempo ...
+A change of atmosphere ... The _Bois Dormant_, the Sleeping Wood of the
+French fairy-tale?... Not that, for the Sleeping Wood should be a gray
+wood, a wood of twilight, with the birds a-drowse in their nests ... And
+here were clipped rich yew-trees, and turf firm as a putting-green's,
+and rows of dignified flowers, like pretty gracious ladies; and a little
+lake where a swan moved, as to music; and the sunshine was rich as wine
+here ... all golden and green ... But the atmosphere? He thought of the
+cave of Gearod Oge, the Wizard Earl in the Rath of Mullaghmast, and the
+story of it ... A farmer man had noticed a light from the old fort, and
+creeping in he had seen men in armor sleeping with their horses beside
+them ... And he examined the armor and the saddlery, and cautiously half
+drew a sword from its sheath ... And the soldier's head rose and:
+"_Bhfuil an trath ann?_" his voice cried ... "Has the time come?" "It is
+not, your Honor," the farmer said in terror, and shoved the sword back
+and fled ... An old man said for a surety that had the farmer drawn the
+blade from the scabbard, the Wizard Earl would have awakened, and
+Ireland been free ... There was great beauty and great Irishness to that
+story, but there was terror to it, and there was no terror on this sweet
+place ...
+
+He said: It is a trick of my head, an illusion that this is different.
+Some shading that comes from the yews, some phenomenon of cliff and
+water ... But even that did not circumscribe the rich grave look of
+grounds and house. A song from "The Tempest" came to him:
+
+  Full fathom five thy father lies;
+    Of his bones are coral made;
+  Those are pearls that were his eyes:
+   Nothing of him that doth fade
+  But doth suffer a sea-change
+  Into something rich and strange ...
+
+That was it, something rich and strange, like some old cloister into
+which one might turn from an inquiet and hubbubby street ... A knock at
+an oaken wicket; a peering shy brother, and one was on green lawns and
+the shadows of a gabled monastery. Cowled, meditative friars, and the
+quiet of Christ like spread wings ... But there was a reason for the
+cloister's glamour: cool thoughts and the rhythm of quiet praying, and
+the ringing of the little bell of mass, and the cadenced sacramental.
+All these were sympathetic magic ... But whence came the glamour of Tusa
+hErin?
+
+
+Section 7
+
+And she said: "I am glad you came. I knew somehow you would."
+
+"I am glad, too. I knew Tusa hErin as a boy. It was then a weird old
+place. The yew-trees were unclipped, the turf riotous, the little lake
+ungraveled ... It had an eeriness. But now--it is very different."
+
+"Any place is different for being loved, tended."
+
+"I suppose so. One loves but one gets careless toward ... I know Antrim
+has always had an immense attraction for me ..."
+
+"Antrim--alone?"
+
+"Yes, of course, Antrim."
+
+"Not all Ireland, then?"
+
+"I never thought of Ireland as all Ireland."
+
+"O Shane Campbell, you've sailed so much and seen so much--China, they
+tell me, and South America, and the Levant. And in the North, Archangel.
+I'll warrant you don't know Ireland."
+
+"I never saw much, though, in any place outside Antrim."
+
+"You never saw much in the little towns of the Pale, or gray Dublin,
+with the Parliament where Grattan spoke now a money-changer's business
+house, and the bulk of Trinity of Goldsmith and Burke--or the great wide
+streets where four-in-hands used to go. And Three-Rock Mountain. And
+Bray. And the beauty of the Boyne Valley. And the little safe harbors of
+the South. And the mountains of Kerry. And all the kingdom of Connacht.
+And the great winds of Donegal."
+
+"But it's so eery, deserted, a dead country. All like Tusa hErin was
+before you took it."
+
+"If one could take it all, and do to it as I've done to Tusa hErin. By
+the way," she asked suddenly, "is Tusa hErin haunted?"
+
+"No, I never heard. Did you see anything?"
+
+"I think I heard something a few times. A piper piping when the storms
+rose. A queer little tune--like that thing about McCrimmon."
+
+"_Cha till, cha till, cha till McCrimmon._"
+
+"Are there words to it?"
+
+  "_Le cogadh mo sidhe cha till McCrimmon._"
+  Never, never, never, will return McCrimmon.
+  With war or peace never will come McCrimmon.
+  For money or spoil never will return McCrimmon.
+  He will come no more till the Day of the Gathering.
+
+"A lamenting tune like that, I heard."
+
+"The drone was just the grinding of the waves, the air the wind among
+the yews."
+
+"That's possible. But isn't a phantom piper possible, too, in a land of
+ghosts?"
+
+
+Section 8
+
+"A land of ghosts"; the phrase remained with him. And the lighted lamp
+and the burning peat fire seemed to invoke like some necromantic ritual.
+How often, and he a young boy, had the names trumpeted through his
+being. Brian Boru at Clontarf, and the routed red Danes. And with the
+routing of the Danes, Ireland had come to peaceful days, and gentle
+white-clothed saints arose and monasteries with tolling bells, and great
+Celtic crosses.... And gone were the Druids, their cursing stones, their
+Ogham script.... Gone old Celtic divinities, Angus of the Boyne, and
+Manannan, son of Lir, god of the sea ... and the peace of Galilee came
+over the joyous hunting land.... The little people of the hills, with
+their pygmy horses, their pygmy pipes, cowered, went into exile, under
+the thunder of Rome.... And the land was meek that it might inherit the
+kingdom of heaven.... And the English came.... The Earls of Ulster fled
+into Spain.... And only here and there was a memory of old-time heroes,
+of Cuchulain of the Red Branch; of Maeve, queen of Connacht, in her
+fighting chariot, her great red cloak; of Dermot, who abducted Grania
+from the king of Ireland's camp, and knew nine ways of throwing the
+spear.... The O'Neils remembered Shane, who brought Queen Elizabeth to
+her knees with love and terror.... And Owen Roe, the Red.... And the
+younger Hugh O'Neil, with his hardbitten Ulstermen at Benburb.... They
+had to bring the greatest general of Europe, Cromwell, the lord
+protector, to subdue the Ulster clans.... Sullen peace, and the Stuarts
+came back, and again Ireland was lulled with their suave manners, the
+scent of the white rose.... The crash of the Boyne Water, and King James
+running for his life.... And Limerick's siege, and the Treaty, and
+Patrick Sarsfield and the Wild Geese setting wing for France.... France
+knew them, Germany, Sweden, even Russia.... Ramillies and the
+Spaniard knew Lord Clare's Dragoons.... And Fontenoy and the thunder of
+the Irish Brigade.... And Patrick Sarsfield, Earl of Lucan, dead at the
+end of the day.... Even to-day Europe knew them: O'Donnel, Duke of
+Tetuan and grandee of Spain; and Patrice McMahon, Duke of Magenta, who
+had been made president of the Republic of France--they were of the
+strain of Lucan's wild Geese....
+
+[Illustration]
+
+And again a sullen peace, and Ulster rang to the trumpet of American
+freedom, and the United Irishmen arose in Belfast.... And Napper Tandy
+at Napoleon's court, and Hoche with his ships in Bantry Bay.... Wolfe
+Tone's mangled throat, and Lord Edward Fitzgerald murdered by his
+captors....
+
+What had made these men, sane men--Ulstermen mostly--risk life and face
+death so gallantly? What brought out the men of '48 and the men of '67?
+What was making little Bigger fight so savagely in Parliament, blocking
+the legislation of the empire? What had got under their skins, into
+their blood? Surely not for a gray half-deserted city? Surely not for
+little bays and purple mountains? Surely not for an illiterate
+peasantry, half crazed by the fear of hell?
+
+He tried to see Ireland as a personality, as one sees England, like the
+great Britannia on a copper penny, helmeted, full-breasted,
+great-hipped, with sword and shield, a bourgeois concept of majesty, a
+ponderous, self-conscious personality:
+
+  When Britain first, at Heaven's command
+  Arose from out the azure main,--
+
+Just like that!
+
+And Scotland he could see as a young woman, in kilt and plaid and
+Glengarry cap, a shrewd young woman though, with a very decisive
+personality, clinching a bargain as the best of dealers might, a little
+forward. He could think of her as the young girl whose hand Charles the
+Young Pretender kissed, and who had said to him directly: "I'd liefer
+hae a buss for my mou'." "I'd rather have a kiss on my mouth." Scotland
+knew what she wanted and got it, a pert, a solid, a likable girl.
+
+But Ireland, Ireland of the gray mists, the gray towns. How to see her?
+The country ballad came to him. The "Shan Van Vocht," the poor old
+woman, gray, shawled, pitiable, whom her children were seeking to
+reinstate in her home with many fields:
+
+  And where will they have their camp?
+    Says the Shan Van Vocht.
+  And where will they have their camp?
+      Says the Shan Van Vocht.
+    In the Curragh of Klidare,
+      The boys will all be there.
+    With their pikes in good repair,
+      Says the Shan Van Vocht.
+        To the Curragh of Kildare
+          The boys they will repair,
+  And Lord Edward will be there,
+    Says the Shan Van Vocht.
+
+No! Not enough. One might work, sacrifice money, for the Shan Van
+Vocht--but life, no! He thought again. Poor Mangan's poem flashed into
+his mind and heart....
+
+  O my Dark Rosaleen,
+    Do not sigh, do not weep!
+  The priests are on the ocean green
+    They march along the deep.
+  There's wine from the royal pope
+    Upon the ocean green.
+  And Spanish ale shall give you hope,
+      My dark Rosaleen!
+      My own Rosaleen!
+  Shall glad your heart, shall give you hope,
+  Shall give you health, and help, and hope,
+      My dark Rosaleen!
+
+Ah, that was it! Not pity, but gallant, fiery love. Modern ideals and
+ancient chivalry.... A young dark woman with a quivering mouth, with
+eyes bright in tears.... There was an old favorite print that portrayed
+her, a slim wistful figure resting a pale hand on a mute harp, a great
+elk-hound at her feet on guard, and back of her the rising sun shone on
+the antique round tower.... A pretty picture, but was it enough? He
+tried to envisage her close, concentrated.... There the dog, there the
+harp, there the slim form.... But the face.... It seemed to elude him.
+And suddenly it flashed at him with abrupt dark beauty ... the face of
+the woman of Tusa hErin....
+
+
+Section 9
+
+The long Ulster twilight had set in, the twilight of bats, gray-blue,
+utterly peaceful ... the little chiming of the sea.... Even the wind was
+still.... All things drowsed, like a dog before the fire, relaxed but
+not asleep.... Beneath her feet the turf was firm ... beneath that the
+hush-een-husho of the purple Moyle.... Soon there would be a moon and
+her servants would saddle Shane's horse for him and he would ride home
+in the Antrim moonlight, eighteen miles of grim road with the friendly
+moon above him, and the singing Moyle on his left hand, and on his
+right the purple glens.... And the shadows ... the delicate tracery of
+the ash-tree, and the tall rowans, and the massive blue shadows of the
+cliffs ... a golden and silver land.... A very sweet silence had fallen
+between them, as if music had ceased and become restful color.... They
+watched the quiet swan....
+
+"I am a little afraid to leave Tusa hErin," she said suddenly and
+softly, as though thinking aloud.... "I am like a nun who has been in a
+convent.... She is lost in the open world.... Will I ever again find a
+place like Tusa hErin?"
+
+"Granya, are you selling Tusa hErin?"
+
+"I have sold it, Shane."
+
+"I am sorry," was all he could say. A little silence, and he could feel
+her smiling through the dusk.
+
+"You never ask any questions, Shane?"
+
+"It never occurs to me to ask them, Granya. If any one wants to tell me
+a thing, I know they will, and if they don't why should I intrude?"
+
+"I should like to tell you why I sold Tusa hErin. But I cannot. It is my
+own secret."
+
+He nodded in the dusk: "I understand."
+
+She turned to him slowly. Her sweet dark head was like some fragrant
+shrub.... Her low soft voice had so much life to it....
+
+"I wonder if you know what a friend you are, Shane? If you understand
+how peaceful it is to have you here? You are such a sweet fact, Shane,
+like the moon."
+
+"I am a friend, Granya...."
+
+"You are, yes.... And you know so little about me, Shane. And I know all
+about you.... I know the adventures of your youth.... And of the hard
+girl of Louth, and the poor harassed woman of Marseilles.... And of the
+little Syrian wife whom you didn't know you loved until you lost her ...
+and the gray voyages to the cruel country.... At times I see you like a
+little boy hunting the leprechawn.... And then I see your face, your
+eyes, and understand how you commanded men in ships.... You are like
+some beautiful play, Shane.... I wonder what is the ending?"
+
+"It is already ended, Granya."
+
+"No, Shane. I know, the end hasn't come.... I know you, Shane," she
+asked abruptly; "what do you know about me?"
+
+"Nothing much, Granya, except that you are you. I heard you were a great
+actress ... and that you had two babies ... who died...."
+
+"Not a great actress, Shane, a very good one, perhaps. I might have been
+great one day ... and again, I mighn't. I shall never know.... And I
+had two babies.... They were very nice little people, Shane. I was very
+fond of them.... But a physical life is a little thing, I have come to
+believe, and there is another life, a life of thought and emotion. And
+that one is so long.... It seems ages since I was an actress and had two
+pretty babies. It seems in another life.... Shane, I don't think I was
+alive until my babies died...."
+
+"I don't understand, Granya."
+
+"I mean this, Shane, that things were so casual to me. They came and
+they went, and I was what I was, and that was all.... When you were a
+boy, Shane, you had what I never had--wonder. I was the child of actors,
+Shane, brought up to a mechanical tradition, knowing the business
+thoroughly--a part was words and directions, and a salary.... That
+things were mimic meant nothing ... do you see? That there was a life
+that was unreal, and another life that was real, and then a further
+life, too subtle, too profound for the value of words ... one sees
+glimpses ... one feels ... and when you try to fix it, it eludes you. Do
+you understand? Like your mirage, a little.... That is only a symbol....
+Am I talking nonsense, Shane? Anyway, I took things, well, just
+casually....
+
+"See the moon rising, Shane?" she paused. She turned again.
+
+"I got married, just got married; he was a good man, Shane. But I didn't
+love him. I loved nobody. I got married because he was a suitable and
+every one got married. And just the same way I accepted marriage.... And
+when he died, I was very sorry, but impersonally sorry ... as if
+something nice in the world had been gone ... a swan shot....
+
+"And my little people, Shane, they were very nice little people.... I
+was fond of them, but as I might be fond of some terrier dogs.... I was
+good to them.... Often I sit here and wonder: Was I good enough? And,
+Shane, God is my witness and this garden, and the moon above, there is
+nothing I could give them I held back....
+
+"You know how they died, Shane?... I was playing and my house went on
+fire, and the servants fled.... When I came back from the theater a
+policeman said: 'We got everything all right, Miss O'Malley. Your dogs,
+your piano.' ... 'Where did you put the babies?' I asked.... They said:
+'What babies?'
+
+"Shane, I knew after a little while that I cried too easily ... a little
+sweet rain of affection ... April ... I didn't forget them.... I
+wouldn't let myself.... And then I thought: God! if I had loved my
+husband my heart would have been like a cracked cup when he died.... And
+when my babies died, I could not have lived.... And all I shed of tears
+was a little shower of April.... O Shane, one isn't like that when one
+is hurt.... Do you remember David, Shane, when he went up to the chamber
+over the gate ... and as he went thus he said, 'O my son Absalom, my son
+Absalom! would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son!' ...
+And he was only a man, Shane....
+
+"Am I bothering you, Shane? No? I am just thinking aloud, with you
+there.... I never thought I could, with any human being....
+
+"And then I knew, Shane.... Part of me was not alive.... That was
+terrible to know, like finding out a horrible deformity, or knowing you
+are insane.... And I began to watch people.... I could say: There is a
+woman who knows she is loved, Shane.... There is a radiance in her face,
+an indescribable something.... You remember the Bible word 'Shechinah,'
+the glory of the Lord!... And there were women with children ... that
+had lost themselves in the joy of giving ... would always have that joy
+of giving.... And it made me feel strange, shameful ... as though I had
+no breasts....
+
+"I must have been a little insane then, Shane. I would go along the
+streets, looking at people, and saying: 'That person looks as if they
+would understand,' and thinking of stopping them with: 'Please, a
+moment, there is something wrong with me!' But I knew they wouldn't
+understand ... wouldn't believe it real.... Even if they were kind, all
+they would say was: 'It's all imagination ... as if imagination were not
+the most terrible thing in the world.... All that is wrong with the poor
+mad people is imagination.... Shane, I was like some poor cripple
+holding out his deformity to the passers-by, asking for help.... All he
+would want was money, but I wanted ... oh, I don't know what I
+wanted....
+
+"And, then, Shane, I would go into a church, and pray, and wait,
+kneeling there, for something to happen.... It never happened.... Then I
+would laugh. People used to turn and look at me.... I began to hate
+them. I grew proud. I hated them more and more....
+
+"I said I'd get back to work, and forget it all.... I was made as I was
+made.... Accept it.... I thought I could.... I was to play _Lady
+Macbeth_ in Nottingham.
+
+"You know how she enters, Shane. She comes in reading a letter. She is
+alone on the stage, in _Macbeth's_ castle of Inverness: '"They met me in
+the day of success,"' she reads--_Macbeth_ is writing of the witches in
+the desert place: '"and I have learned by the perfectest report, they
+have more in them than mortal knowledge."' I came on as I always came
+on.... And the moment I left the wings, Shane, saw the audience, a
+strange thing happened.... Illusion died, not died ... but was dead....
+And there I was supposed to be reading a letter that had never been
+written by people who had never possibly an existence, before an
+audience who had paid a little money to be amused.... I couldn't read
+it. I just couldn't....
+
+"Behind me in the wings they were prompting, whispering fiercely.... But
+I couldn't.... I stood there.... Then I said: I'll go off the stage. But
+I couldn't do that even.... My feet were shackled to the ground.... I
+seemed to have been charmed.... My hand fell to my side.... And then a
+panic came. My knees hit one another. My teeth chattered ... awful,
+awful....
+
+"There was such a silence. The audience stirred, whispered.... Then some
+one laughed.... Never laugh, Shane, suddenly, with me.... I crumpled up.
+They rang the curtain down ... I stole away to Ireland.... Whenever I
+am not hating--enough, the thought of that laugh comes to me...." She
+shivered on her seat.
+
+"That was only nervousness, Granya. Somebody got nervous and laughed."
+
+"No, Shane, no."
+
+"They talk of people laughing in the face of death. It's just a nervous
+action, Granya."
+
+"I tell you, no, Shane." She grew vehement. "It's a cruel country,
+England. And Shane, they hate us Irish. As long as we are pleasant,
+witty, as long as we are buffoons ... but let us be human beings, Shane,
+and they hate us."
+
+"Don't be silly, Granya!"
+
+"I'm not silly, Shane. I know. They hate us because we have something
+they have not. The starved Irish peasant is higher than the English
+peer. He has a song in his heart, a gay song or a sad song, and his eyes
+see wonders...."
+
+"But, Granya, we are only a little people, and they all but rule the
+world.... You are wrong. They don't hate us."
+
+"Do you remember Haman, Shane; Haman who had everything:
+
+"'And Haman told them of ... all the things wherein the king had
+promoted'; and he said: 'Yet all this availeth me nothing so long as I
+see Mordecai the Jew sitting at the king's gate.'"
+
+"Shane, do you remember how Haman died?"
+
+"Granya!"
+
+She rose. Her hands stretched out to the Irish hills. Her voice took on
+the throbbing of drums:
+
+  "Oh! the Erne shall run red
+    With redundance of blood,
+  The earth shall rock beneath our tread,
+    And flame wrap hill and wood,
+  And gun-peal and slogan-cry
+    Make many a glen serene,
+  Ere you shall fade, ere you shall die,
+      My dark Rosaleen!
+      My own Rosaleen!"
+
+"Poor Granya!" he said. He caught and kissed her hand.
+
+She let her other fall on his shoulder for an instant.
+
+"Good night, Shane!" she said abruptly. She moved swiftly toward the
+house through the yew-trees. In her pale dress against the moonlit turf,
+between the dark trees, she was like some old, heart-wringing ghost....
+
+
+Section 10
+
+He brought back from Tusa hErin that night a sense of dread. What in
+God's name had Granya done? To what committed herself? There were rumors
+abroad that the men of '67 were not dead yet.... In America, in the
+hills of Kerry, in Galway, there was plotting ... not glorious, but
+sinister plotting.... God! had they enmeshed her?
+
+He had three times heard her sing the old Ulster ballad of General
+Munro:
+
+  Up came Munro's sister, she was well dressed in green,
+  And his sword by her side that was once bright and keen.
+  And she said to the brave men who with her did go,
+  "Come, we'll have revenge for my brother Munro!"
+
+He had looked on that as only a queer romantic gesture, but with what
+she said last night, it occurred to him that there was a deeper motif to
+it all.... She was often in Dublin these days.... Did they? Had they?...
+
+If it had been the Jacobite times, or '98 or even '48, he would not have
+minded. The Irish might call these Irish rebellions, but in reality
+they were world affairs. James and the Prince of Orange were the clash
+of the ideal of courtliness and tradition worn to a thin blade and of
+the stubborn progress of pulsing thought. And '98 was the echo of the
+surge for liberty--the frenzy of France and the stubborn Yankee
+steel.... And '48 was another breathing of the world.... Even '67 he
+would not have minded. Sixty-seven was a gallant romantic rally, a dream
+of pikes amid green banners, and men drilling by moonlit rivers....
+
+But to-day was different.... Revenge was in the air, and revenge was no
+wild justice, as an old writer had said. Revenge was an evil
+possession.... An exhausting, sinister mood.... The men who would fight
+this modern battle, if battle there was to be one, were dark scowling
+men.... The amenities of battle, the gallantry of flags meant nothing to
+them. They would shoot from behind ditches in the dark.... In America
+was talk of dynamite--an idealist using a burglar's trick.... There was
+no gallantry that way....
+
+And besides, it wasn't an Irish war. It was a matter of agriculture....
+A war of peasants against careless landlords, Irish themselves in the
+main, who had fled to England to avoid the suicidal monotony of Irish
+country life, and lost their money in the pot-houses and gambling-dens
+of London, and turned to their tenants for more, forgetting in the
+glamour of London the poverty of the Irish bogs.... It was contemptible
+to squeeze the peasants as a money-lender squeezes his victims, but the
+peasants' redress, the furtive musket and horrible dynamite, that was
+terrible. God, what a mess!... And had Granya been caught into that evil
+problem, a kingfisher among cormorants?
+
+And if she had what was he going to do about it?
+
+What could he do? What right had he to meddle with her destiny? Friendly
+they had become, close sweet friends--the thought of her was like the
+thought of the hills purple with heather,--but friendship and destiny
+are a sweet curling wave and a gaunt cliff. They were two different
+people, independent. Shane Campbell and the Woman of Tusa hErin.
+
+
+Section 11
+
+She had been distraught all the evening. Merry, feverishly merry at
+times, and again silent, her eyes far off, her mouth set. She rose
+suddenly from the piano she was playing, and looked at him. Standing,
+above the light of the candles, her face and head were like some dark
+soft flower.
+
+"Shane, you are a very true friend of mine, aren't you?"
+
+"Yes, Granya."
+
+"If I wanted a very great favor, would you consider it?"
+
+"Not consider, but do it."
+
+"Yes, but the risk," she faltered. "I hardly dare--"
+
+"What risk? What are you talking about, Granya?" A thought struck him.
+"Is it money? Don't be silly and talk about risk! Anything I can give
+you is yours, and welcome!"
+
+"It's not money, Shane. And thank you! It's--it's this--"
+
+"Yes, Granya."
+
+"It's this, Shane. Would you--would you bring a ship for me from St.
+Petersburg to Lough Foyle, very quietly?"
+
+"What kind of a ship?"
+
+"A ship, just a ship, a sailing-ship."
+
+"What's in the ship?"
+
+She paused. "Guns, Shane."
+
+"No, Granya. I won't."
+
+"Oh, well," she sat down, "I shouldn't have asked."
+
+"Granya," he walked over and caught her shoulder, "don't be foolish."
+
+"I'm not foolish, Shane. If I am, it's done now." She smiled.... The air
+crashed out beneath her fingers. Her voice rang:
+
+  In came the captain's daughter--the captain of the Yeos--
+  Saying, "Brave United Irishmen, we'll ne'er again be foes.
+  One thousand pounds I'll give to you, and go across the sea;
+  And dress myself in man's attire and fight for liberty!"
+
+"You'll not move one foot from Tusa hErin!"
+
+"O Shane, Tusa hErin's no longer mine, and I've got to go."
+
+"Because the ship and the guns are mine, Shane," she smiled quietly; "my
+present."
+
+With a terrific smash of the fist he broke in the top of the piano. The
+wires jangled in pandemonium. The candles fell to the floor.
+
+"Hell's fire and God's damnation!" He swore at her. "You fool!"
+
+She rose, her breasts heaving. Her eyes flashed.
+
+"You've no right to speak to me like that, Shane Campbell."
+
+"Oh, yes, I have. Every damned right! Do you think I'd let any woman go
+cruising around the North Seas, with a crew of foreigners, and a
+shipmaster she doesn't know.... I'll bring the bi--the boat in...."
+
+
+Section 12
+
+They left the city of strange ugly women, with great spirit in their
+faces, and great bearing to the body of them, and of slim cat-like men,
+who had great power in their eyes.... A very beautiful city of churches
+and hammered brass ... a place of high rarefied thinking and savage
+animal passion.... They left it on a July morning with the sun high....
+And they sailed east, sou'east down the Gulf of Finland, until Dago
+Island was on their port quarter....
+
+And they rolled down the Baltic Sea, sailing sou'-sou'west, until they
+passed Gotland, and they edged west again, leaving Bornholm to port....
+And they sailed past Malmoe into the Sound, heading north for the
+Cattegat.... They turned the Skaw and swung her into the Skage-Rack....
+And the wind held....
+
+And once out of there, they pointed her nose nor'west by nor' as though
+Iceland were only a buoy in a yacht-race.... And the wind held.... The
+summer nights of the North were on them, the unearthly beauty of the
+light.... There was no world.... They were sailing on the Milky Way....
+Only the gurgle of the water at the bows, the _whush_ of the wake
+beneath the counter, held them as by a thin umbilical cord to the world
+of men.... The _whap-whap-whap_ of the cordage.... The _ting-ting-ting_
+of the helmsman's bell.... The cry for'a'd: "The lights are burning
+bright, sir!" ...
+
+
+Section 13
+
+The gaunt Shetlands were on their starboard beam now, the dun Orkneys
+off the port bow. Sumburgh Head dropped away, and they headed due
+west.... The waves were laughing, the sun rose in a great explosion
+abaft of them.... The world was a very small place.... The universe so
+large.... At dawn the gulls chattered and whined, and screamed until
+they felt immense loneliness.... One seemed to be intruding in a world
+of white feathers and cold inimical eyes, and complaints in a language
+one could not understand.... So lonely ... so undefiled ... the home of
+the great whale.... Here was the world as God first made it ... clean
+and beautiful and absolute.... Up here steam engines seemed ridiculous
+toys.... In winter the sleek seal and the great white bear.... And the
+great crying of the gulls.... One thought of Adelina Patti's great
+singing and wondered did it matter a lot.
+
+And they swung sou'west by sou' to leave the Hebrides to port. They were
+on the last leg of the voyage, and the wind still held....
+
+"O Shane, it's wonderful...." She had come on deck in her man's
+clothing.... She was so tall, so slim, her legs so long, it seemed some
+pleasant feminine fancy of hers, not a material adaptation of the life
+on board ship. "The wind will hold until we get there."
+
+"I don't like it," Shane grumbled.
+
+"Why, Shane? Why don't you like it?"
+
+"We're too lucky."
+
+"It isn't luck, Shane. It's the will of God."
+
+"Hmm!"
+
+"Granya!"
+
+"Yes, Shane."
+
+"I've just been thinking. Why couldn't you conspirators have chosen a
+better time of the year than August for landing your arms? There's only
+about two hours of night."
+
+"Because, Shane, the arms must be ready for autumn, when the harvest is
+in. That's the best time for a revolution. And the arms must be
+distributed. And the men must drill a little. Now is our only time."
+
+"Hmm."
+
+"O Shane, I wish you would be a little enthusiastic."
+
+"Enthusiastic? At forty-nine!"
+
+"Are you forty-nine, Shane? You don't seem thirty-nine. None could tell
+but for the little gray in your hair.... And Shane...."
+
+"Yes!"
+
+"I like your hair rumpled a little with the sea-air ... much better than
+when it is sleek in Antrim.... Shane, you don't know how well you look
+on board ship."
+
+"Ooh, be damned to that.... Mr. Janseen, get them to lay aft, and see if
+you can't get a little more out of that mizzen.... A little more pocket
+in the luff." ...
+
+
+Section 14
+
+They passed the Butt of Lewis, sailing due sou'west.... To port they
+left the Seven Hunters, changing the course to sou'west by sou'.... The
+Hebrides passed them like islands in a dream, purple, gleaming strangely
+in the sunlight, now a black shower whipping over them, now sunshine
+pouring in great floods.... Lewis went by, and then Harris.... North
+Uist where the winds blow so hard they have an old word: _Is traugh fear
+na droiche air mhachair Uistibh_: 'Tis a pity of the slut's husband on
+the plains of Uist.... You'll be needing buttons on your coat there....
+They passed Rona of the Seals, and Benbecula.... They passed South Uist
+and Eriskay.... They passed the Ponboy Isles.... The islands of the Cat
+they called them in Gaelic.... Faintly they saw the mists of Hecla ...
+heard the curlews.... They saw fishing-boats with great brown sails....
+
+Honk-honk of wild ganders in the distance, and occasionally the _chugh_
+of a diving bird.... The wind blew from the nor'west.... The foam
+snarled beneath the bows....
+
+"I don't like it.... I don't like it...."
+
+"Shane, it is wonderful.... God is with us."
+
+"Hunh...." He saw the weather leaches flick.... "Don't let her come up,"
+he roared at the helmsman. "Steer her, you Swede bastard.... Where the
+hell did you ever steer before? On a canal?"
+
+"Shane!"
+
+"What is it, Granya?"
+
+"Your language, Shane!"
+
+"Listen, Granya.... I'm not playing a comedy.... I'm sailing a ship ...
+that's on an errand I don't like.... If you don't like my language, get
+below...."
+
+"Sorry, Shane!" She said with a meek courtesy. She stayed....
+
+They passed Skerryvore.... They passed Dhu Heartach, Colonsay, Islay of
+McCrimmin.... Iristrahull was on the weather beam.... They swung
+eastward.... Irishowen Head showed off the port bow.... On an August
+afternoon, they slipped into Lough Foyle....
+
+
+Section 15
+
+The soft luminosity of a summer night was in it ... and a little moon,
+which Shane damned.... Before them rose the outline of Donegal.... On
+each beam they could see faintly the outlines of the bay's arms.... The
+schooner moved under jibs and mizzen.... From the bow was the splash of
+the lead....
+
+"By the mark, fine!"
+
+"Luff her a little, a little more ... steady!"
+
+"Four fathoms, no bottom!"
+
+"Keep her off a point!"
+
+"By the deep, four!"
+
+"How's the bottom?"
+
+"Clean and sandy, sir!"
+
+"No bottom at three!"
+
+"Ready for'a'd to let go?"
+
+"All ready, sir!"
+
+"The mark three, no bottom!"
+
+"Lee--o!... Hold her!"
+
+The long swish of oars, the rattle of oar-locks.... A voice rapping out:
+
+"Rest on the oars!" And then: "Schooner ahoy!"
+
+Shane's heart sank. He gave no answer.
+
+"What ship is that?" The voice rang over the little bay ... found a
+grotesque echo in some cliff....
+
+"Who are you?"
+
+"His Majesty's coast-guards. Stand by. Coming aboard. Lay on your oars,
+men!"
+
+And then ... a long instant.... "Toss oars!"
+
+"Bring her into the wind!" Shane ordered....
+
+A scramble alongside, and some one was coming over the waist rail.... A
+firm step on deck.... Some one was smiling....
+
+"My name's Flannagan, Lieutenant Flannagan.... Sorry, Mr. Campbell, we
+can't let you land ... your cargo or your passenger...."
+
+"I don't understand."
+
+"Well, sir, we know what your cargo is, and my orders are not to let you
+land. And I was to tell you, sir, that you couldn't land anywhere."
+
+"By God! I knew it would end like this.... Are we under arrest?"
+
+"No, sir.... You are just not to land. I'm sorry, sir, but.... Orders!"
+
+"Then what the blazes am I going to do?"
+
+"Jove, I don't know. Can't you bring the cargo back where you got it?"
+
+"I suppose I'll have to do that. But my passenger.... I can put her
+ashore."
+
+"I'm sorry, sir. But your passenger can't go ashore, anywhere, any time,
+in her Majesty's dominions."
+
+"Hmm!"
+
+He heard her quick step on the companionway.
+
+"Shane."
+
+"Shane, are you there?"
+
+"Shane, Shane, what's wrong?" She came into the shrouded light of the
+binnacle. "Shane, who--who is this?"
+
+"My name's Flannagan, Miss O'Malley--royal navy--I'm sorry; you can't
+land."
+
+"What does it mean, Shane?"
+
+"You're beaten, Granya."
+
+"Are we prisoners?"
+
+"No, Miss O'Malley, just you can't land. And I'm very distressed to tell
+you.... You may not land anywhere, any time, in her Majesty's
+dominions."
+
+"That doesn't shut out Mr. Campbell, does it?"
+
+"I've no orders against him, Miss O'Malley, barring his landing his
+cargo or you...."
+
+She laid her hand on Shane's arm....
+
+"I'm sorry, Shane.... I'm very sorry, my dear--dear friend.... You were
+so good.... There are few--would have sacrificed their time and
+profession, and everything--to help a woman on a wild-goose ideal!--like
+mine was.... So please forgive me!"
+
+"There's nothing to forgive, Granya...."
+
+"I want to do this ..." she leaned forward and kissed him.... The
+lieutenant turned away. "And now good-by."
+
+"Why good-by? I'm not going ashore. I'll stick."
+
+"Dear Shane, you would." She caught his hand, pressed, dropped it. Her
+voice rang out: "But I'm going ashore...." She had swung over the
+taffrail and dropped into the water with the soft splash of a fish....
+
+"My God ...!" Shane swore with rage. "Wait. I'll get her. Will you stand
+by with your boat?"
+
+"Right-o!" Flannagan answered cheerily.
+
+Shane kicked off his shoes, slipped out of his coat.... "This damned
+woman!" he thought as he dropped astern, came out, began to cast for
+direction like an otter-hound.... He heard her soft rhythmical strokes
+ahead.... He tore after her ... caught up ... reached her shoulder....
+
+"Come back, Granya!"
+
+"No, Shane."
+
+He had decided, once he reached her, to turn her back by force, but the
+strange gentle voice restrained him. All this matter of Ireland, all
+this expedition of opera bouffe, took on again a strange dimension when
+she spoke.... All the time he had been foolish, he knew, and, worse,
+looked like a fool, but some strange magic of her voice made it seem
+natural ... the naive brave gestures.... One levitated above common
+ground.... Even this moon-madness did not seem trivial and a thing for
+laughter.... A dignity of ancient stories was on it.... The blue Irish
+hills, soft as down, the little moon, and the tide hurrying out of the
+lough to the great Atlantic.... A wrench of the will and he gripped her
+shoulder:
+
+"Shane, please don't!"
+
+"You're coming back, Granya."
+
+"I'm not, Shane, and please don't hold me. I'm getting weak."
+
+"You'll never make it, Granya. And if you did, where would you go on the
+Donegal hills?"
+
+"I don't know, Shane. But please let me go, I implore you.... Even if I
+do go down.... Don't you see? There is nothing for me but this, or
+death.... My life.... O Shane, let me go!"
+
+"Quiet, Granya!" He caught her wrist.
+
+"Please, Shane. Please. I pray of you...." She began to twist.... "O
+Shane, you hurt."
+
+"Quiet, Granya. Boat--o!"
+
+The lantern of the coast-guards' cutter came nearer.... The measured
+swish of the oars ... the creak.... She began to struggle fiercely....
+
+"Granya, if you don't keep quiet, I'll have to hit you...."
+
+"O Shane!" she whimpered....
+
+"All right Get her on board. Steady, there. Trim a little. Good!"
+Flannagan and a great bearded coast-guard had her.... The silence was
+broken with her little sobs.... He helped her over the waist of the
+schooner....
+
+"Go below, Granya, and get into some dry clothes.... Mr. Flannagan, I'll
+take the boat back to St. Petersburg.... If Miss O'Malley doesn't land
+neither do I. May I send a letter ashore? It's only about business, and
+the place in the glens...."
+
+"I'll take it and have it sent."
+
+"Another thing; we want to get some provisions and water."
+
+"Of course, sir.... That's all right."
+
+"Do you think one of the country girls could be persuaded to come on
+board as Miss O'Malley's maid?"
+
+"I think so. We'll ask the local priest."
+
+"Oh, yes, the priest.... Another thing: do you think you could dig out a
+parson around here somewhere and bring him on board?"
+
+"O Shane, what do you want that for?" She hadn't gone below, but waited
+in the companionway.
+
+"You don't think you're going wandering around with me, casually, like
+this?"
+
+"But it's only to St. Petersburg, Shane!"
+
+"And then where do you go? What do you do?"
+
+"I--I--I don't know."
+
+"Better get the parson, Mr. Flannagan."
+
+"Oh, but Shane--" she protested.
+
+"Go below, Granya, and get those wet things off.... And get into women's
+clothes.... Granya!"
+
+"Yes, Shane.... Very well, Shane...."
+
+
+
+
+PART SEVEN
+
+THE KINGDOM AND THE POWER AND THE GLORY
+
+
+Section 1
+
+He felt a little ashamed, a little shy, what with his gray hairs, his
+paternity, that there should still be a thrill in his heart, a sense of
+flight in him. At fifty-eight to feel like a schoolboy going home, it
+seemed--well, not indecent, indecorous. This thing of returning to
+Antrim had been a matter of pure reason, and then suddenly his heart had
+spread forgotten wings.
+
+Without, the sound of Broadway had changed subtly, with the coming of
+the September dusk. The quick-pacing people had given way to the
+_clop-clop-clop_ of hansom-cabs, and the tram-cars with their tired
+horses came less frequently now. One felt that a giant had been at work
+all day, and was now stretching himself, not lazily, but a little
+relaxingly. Soon the great lamps would flare, and the crowds would be
+going to the playhouses: to Tony Pastor's to see the new play, "Dreams,"
+or to Harrigan & Hart's to see "Investigation," or to Mr. Bartley
+Campbell's latest, "Separation," at the Grand Opera-house. He would miss
+all this in Antrim, but Antrim called him.... Antrim, our mother....
+
+And three months ago he had never thought this possible. He had drilled
+himself into a mature philosophy, saying: "It doesn't matter that I
+never see Ireland again. I am happy here with Granya and young Alan and
+Robin Beg, little Robin. All the folks are kindly and the country is a
+great country, and when my time comes to die there are sweet little
+places on Long Island where they can lay me within sound of the sea, and
+the gentle snow will come and cover me in winter and in summer somewhere
+about me the dogwood will blow, and the very green grass come. And
+perhaps some young children will come and play around my grave, and I
+shall hear their little gurgling laughter, sweet as the voices of
+pigeons.... And one day Granya will come.... Nothing is more certain
+than that, that Granya will come...."
+
+But all the philosophy in the world could not shut from his ears the
+little piping of Antrim. He would say: "'Tis little thought I gave to
+Antrim and I a young man! And what is a town or so to me, who have seen
+all great cities?" And again he said: "Didn't you give up Antrim gladly
+when you got Granya? Wasn't she worth a hundred Antrims?" And his heart
+and mind answered: "Yes, a thousand Antrims!" But, a very queer thing,
+the little haunting melody of the glens would not be stilled.
+
+And it came to him thus: I am no longer a young man. For all I look
+forty-five, as they tell me, yet I am fifty-eight. The life of the body
+is over now. That had passed, as a mood passes. And the mind is fixed.
+In what remains of life to me, I must think, divine, weigh. One
+prepares.... And thoughts must not be disturbed. To grow old in a city
+that is ever young, that is in its twenties itself as it were--it makes
+an old man cold and afraid. Old buildings he has known to go down, old
+streets are obliterated. It is a very terrible thing to be lonely when
+old, and to feel everything passes, dies.... All I have loved is thrown
+away, is of no use.... Everything old is in the way, and I am old....
+The hawk-eyed commercial men go about so that the streets are filled
+with them.... And all the sweet things that were said in Galilee seem
+only a casual all-but-forgotten melody, and no revelation.... And then
+comes a horrible memory of stark Ecclesiastes: "The dead know not
+anything, neither have they any more a reward; for the memory of them is
+forgotten. Also their love, and their hatred, and their envy, is now
+perished; neither have they any more a portion for ever in any thing
+that is done under the sun." And old men remember the sorrowful things
+of their life, and how little happiness measured up to the misery and
+toil of life, and they had hoped.... But there were the words of the
+preacher: "Neither have they any more a reward".... And secretly and
+quietly old men weep....
+
+But to grow old with the mountains and the eternal sea, and to watch the
+delicate bells of the heather, to know the quiet companionship of
+dogs--there is a revelation in it. No, nothing dies. And the moon rises
+and the mountains nod: Yes, I remember you when you were a schoolboy,
+running to be on time. And the green waves make a pleasant laughter: We
+are here. When you arise in the morning you may be certain we are here.
+The friends of one's young days die, scatter, are lost. But the
+mountains and the water are friends forever. One can speak to them. One
+can speak to ancient trees. And the leaves rustle....
+
+And Granya had sensed it.... He might have known she would. Conceal it
+as he might try, a mysterious telepathy was between them.... She
+knew....
+
+It was she who had gone to the British embassy in Washington, telling
+Shane nothing. He had heard of it afterward. She hadn't pleaded or given
+any promises. She had just flared in to the startled envoy.
+
+"I wish to go back to Ireland."
+
+"Unfortunately, the privy council had the matter of Miss O'Malley--"
+
+"I am not Miss O'Malley. I am Shane Campbell's wife."
+
+"But you are a dangerous enemy to the empire!"
+
+"Am I? I had forgotten completely about the empire."
+
+"There was a little matter of a shipload of rifles--"
+
+"And now it is a matter of a husband and two children."
+
+"Sure, Miss O'Malley?"
+
+"I am not Miss O'Malley. I am Shane Campbell's wife. And I'm absolutely
+sure."
+
+It had been so easy after all.
+
+And now when it was true, it was hard to credit. Within two weeks the
+ship would swing to port around Donegal, and they would enter the bay
+they had entered seven years ago, seven years and a month ago, to be
+exact. He wondered whether it would be a foggy morning, or a great
+golden afternoon. It was a pity it had to be on board a steamship,
+though. He would liefer have luffed in on board a boat of his own, a
+great suit of snowy canvas drawing joyously the Irish wind.
+
+
+Section 2
+
+Upstairs he could hear and distinguish the feet in the nursery. There
+was the patter of little Alan's feet, and the stumble of Robin Beg's.
+There was the shuffle of the nurse-maid, and the firm light tread of
+Granya. Soon she would come down, after the children were safely to bed,
+and little Alan's prayers were heard. And they would go out to dinner in
+New York for the last time. It was a little pang to leave New York....
+Ah, but Antrim!
+
+He picked up his paper and read while waiting.... It was queer how he
+could hardly focus his attention on it, impatient for her as a schoolboy
+for his first love.... Always when she entered a room came beauty....
+Well, she would come.... The type took form beneath his eyes.... The
+races at Sheepshead Bay: Tom Martin had captured the Twin City
+Handicap.... In Ireland they would go to the Curragh and Baldoyle to
+see the horses, and the Dublin horse-show, and the hunts on a frosty
+morning.... What was this? Heavy bets laid that Cleveland would be next
+President. The Irish wouldn't like that. They were all for Blaine. It
+was only the other night that Mrs. Delia Parnell, Parnell's mother, had
+attended the great Irish rally in the Academy of Music.... That was a
+mistake, mixing up Irish politics with American statesmanship. There
+would be folk to resent that, and rightly, too.... Too much talk of
+dynamite, and that horrible thing in Phoenix Park.... What an
+involved, emotional affair all this Irish matter was!... To understand
+Ireland one must understand Irishmen, that either hatred or love rule
+them.... Parnell, though, looked hopeful. No emotion, all brains and
+will.... He could not be side-tracked by preferment, or religion, or
+love for women. There was a man whose head was firm on his shoulders; he
+would never be wrecked.... Ah, here was something Granya would be glad
+to hear: Margaret Mather got a splendid reception in Pittsburg with her
+_Lady Macbeth_.... Whew! Cholera at Naples. That was serious! Not an
+over-clean people, the Italians.... Li Hung Chang degraded of his
+titles. Who the blazes was Li Hung Chang anyway, and what titles did he
+have?... And Major Kitchener disperses the Berber tribes.... How
+unimportant! Ah, here was something. Great gambling reported on the
+_City of Rome_. Ah, there was what he always contended, that steam would
+ruin everything. The great sea a resort for gamblers! In the old days,
+in sail, when a captain was a captain, he'd have had none of that on
+board clean timbers.... He was a little afraid the world was going to
+the dogs!
+
+Och! Was that woman never coming down at all, at all?
+
+He smiled to himself at how the Ulster speech came back to him at the
+thought of Ulster.... He turned to the paper with an effort of will....
+An Indian outbreak feared in western Montana.... Stanley going to
+Egypt.... Policeman beaten up in Brooklyn; a tough place, Brooklyn!...
+American schooner arrested by Russian corvette for selling rum to Bering
+Strait natives: a very strict modern people, the Russians.... Picnics on
+Staten Island blamed for ruin of young girls.... And Bismarck and the
+pope still sparring. Did that poor German think he could ever get the
+better of the subtle Romans ...? Och, what was keeping that woman?
+
+The light had become so dim that he could hardly read. The tempo
+without quickened. People were hurrying now, on their way to the
+restaurants for the evening meal. From the restaurants to the theater.
+Home to sleep. And a new day with the old work facing them. There was a
+fascination, a hypnosis to New York. He felt a pang at leaving it. It
+had been very friendly to him. And he would never see it again.... Ah,
+but he would remember it!
+
+
+Section 3
+
+It came to him with a sense of revelation that all his life he had been
+looking forward: always the new thing. And now he would be looking back.
+Always before guessing. Looking back now, knowing, or not quite knowing,
+but having before him material from which to draw wisdom, truth. All his
+life it seemed he had been gathering something. Now was the time to sort
+it, make it.... And then, what was he to do with whatever he had made?
+Toward what end? The paper he had in his hands dropped to his knees. His
+eyes fixed on the windows where the lights of the city began to shine,
+saw a haze, saw nothing. His ears, listening to the _clop-clop-clop_ of
+the hansoms, heard only rhythm, then a faint harmony, then nothing....
+Himself, within him, seemed to see old scenes, to be in old scenes. The
+little boy going down to the sea in ships, seeking an island he had seen
+in a mirage ... a mood of wonder.... There were feet, there was the
+world. Every tree was an emerald miracle, every house a mystery, all
+people were riddles.... Come, little boy, come and look! The instinct of
+the salmon for the sea. The river where he was spawned hurries to the
+sea, and his instinct is to go with it, not against it.... It deepens
+and broadens, and ahead is always a clearer pool, a more shadowy rock, a
+softer water-fern. It is pleasant to swim under the sallow-branches, and
+rapids whip.... And there is the lull of an estuary, and the
+_chush-chush_ of little waves, and he is in the sea.... And now he must
+lay his own course.... The lure of the river has brought him so far.
+
+And Shane thought: I was born a salmon in a river. The stupid pretty
+trout remained in the river, and the secretive eels.... And the perch
+and the roach and the ponderous bream, and the pike that is long of
+snout, they remained by the grassy waters.... But those that are born
+salmon must go down to the sea....
+
+A little shadow came into his face, and his breath was caught sharp. He
+was remembering Moyra, the wife he had, and he no older than a boy....
+Like some strange fascination, ugly dream that came to him.... And
+queerly enough, the picture of Moyra's mother, the old wife of Louth,
+was clearer in his mind than his wife.... Moyra was like some troubled
+cloud, a thing that blotted out sunshine for a while, through no fault
+of its own, but the mother was sinister. An old woman keening, and the
+breath of whisky on her, and her eyes sobering in a bitter greed.... Why
+should Moyra have died? Fate: the act of God: whatever you care to call
+it. Why should he have been dragged into it, Shane wondered. If he
+hadn't, what would have happened? He didn't know. But he knew this, that
+in the marriage to Moyra he had been gripped by the shoulder, and looked
+in the eyes, and a voice had said: "Wait. All is not wonder and mystery.
+Life is not a child's toy. You must learn."
+
+Poor Moyra, he could hardly remember anything but her pleading,
+half-inimical eyes, her mouth that twisted easily to anger, her shame
+that her hands and feet were uncouth. And now she had loved him. And now
+hated him. He remembered one May evening when suddenly she had caught
+his hand and kissed it, and pressed it to her heart. And later that
+night she had cursed bitterly at him, saying black was the day she had
+set eyes on him, and black the day she married him, and her face was
+twisted into agonized ugliness. And when he went to sea a few days later
+he had found a symbol of her religion, an _Agnus Dei_, sewed into his
+coat to protect him against the terrors of the deep waters.
+
+And she had died, poor tortured Moyra, suddenly. Why? Had What had
+fashioned her thought: That's not rightly done? No. That's poor. Wait.
+I'll do it over....
+
+Ah, well, God give her peace, wherever she wandered! How many years had
+it taken to get over, not her death, but their being married? A long
+time. Seven bitter years. He might have turned into a bitter, fierce old
+man, hating all things. The whole thing had been like a cruelty to a
+happy wondering child. And he had closed his heart, resentful,
+afraid.... And then had come Claire-Anne.
+
+Once he had been a child with wondering gray eyes, and life had made him
+blind as a mole, secretive as a badger, timid of the world as the owl is
+timid of daylight. The shock of Claire-Anne, and he was cognizant of
+great enveloping currents of life. Wonder he had known, and bitterness
+he had known, but the immense forces that wind the stars as a clock is
+wound he had not known.... And with Claire-Anne they had burst about him
+like thunder. They had played around him as the corposant flickers
+around the mast-head of a ship.... Poor Claire-Anne! The miracle of her.
+She was like some flowering bush in an arctic waste.... Her wonderful
+scared eyes, her tortured self.... It was a very strange thing that her
+end did not bother him.... A gesture of youth, that sudden snap of the
+wrist with the poor dead prince's dagger.... He had been very honest
+about it, and it did not bother him, any more than it would have been on
+his conscience to have shot a crippled horse.... Once it had seemed to
+him unnecessarily histrionic, but now he knew it was merciful.... Her
+spirit had gone too far ever to return to normal life....
+
+But the little woman of the East, that did bother him. In boyhood he had
+known the wonder of life. In youth he had known there existed sordid
+tragedy. In young manhood passion had crashed like lightning.... And
+then he had thought he knew all. He had considered himself the master of
+life and said: "I will do such and such a thing and be happy. Enjoy
+this, because I know how to enjoy it. To the wise man, all is a
+pleasant hedonism." It struck, him at the time how terribly foolish and
+piteous great men were.... Jesus dead on a crucifix; Socrates and the
+hemlock bowl; the earnest Paul beheaded at Rome.... A little wisdom, a
+little callousness would have avoided all this.... How satisfied he was,
+how damned petty! His little bourgeois life, his harem of one pretty
+girl, his nice ship ... smug as a shop-keeper ... and then life, fate,
+whatever you call it, had tripped him up, abashed, beaten, through the
+medium of a mountebank wrestler whom he had conquered in a street
+brawl....
+
+[Illustration]
+
+And after seven years of blackness, and despair. The long reach to
+Buenos Aires, and the querulous sea-birds mocking him: On the land is
+desolation and pettiness and disappointment.... And what is there on the
+sea? The great whale is dying; the monster who ranged the deep must go
+because men must have oil to cast up their accounts by the light of it,
+and women must have whalebone for stays.... The sleek seal with brown
+gentle eyes must die that harlots shall wear furs.... And there never
+was a Neptune or a Mannanan mac Lir.... There were only stories from a
+foolish old book.... The sun shines for a moment on the green waters,
+and your heart rises.... But remember the blackness of the typhoon,
+and how the cold left-hand wind rages round the Horn.... And the coral
+islands have great reefs like knives, and the golden tropics lure to
+black lethal snakes.... Fool! Fool! We have ranged the clouds, and there
+is no good-willing God.... There is only coldness and malignant
+things.... So cried the querulous sea voices, and they tempted him: "All
+you have known is desolation and vanity. Better to have died a boy while
+the meadows they were green.... All before you is emptiness," they
+mocked. And they came nearer: "Behold, the night is black, the ocean is
+of great depth, immeasurable, the ship plows onward under a quartering
+breeze. A little step, a little step leeward, a vault over the taffrail
+as over a little ditch, and there will be peace and rest. Look at the
+water flow past. No problems there.... God! how close he had been to it,
+in the seven black years, the long voyage from Liverpool, and the sordid
+town at the end.... How close! And then Alan Donn, God rest him! had
+died, and he had gone back to Ireland, and met Granya, and been foolish
+as a boy in his teens. A shipload of rifles to free Ireland! What a
+damned fool he had felt when they had simply shooed him away!"
+
+He thought to himself with a little smile that out of the wisdom of his
+life had always come sorrow, and out of his foolishness had come joy....
+Granya, and peace, and meaning to his life.... A very foolish thing it
+had been, that expedition.... But he wouldn't have it laughed at, nor
+laugh at it himself.... Over the mists of the past the thing took
+glamour.... He had been more moved than he had allowed himself to
+believe then. And here in his New York drawing-room, remembering the old
+heroic-comic gesture, and remembering tragedies of material that were
+glorification of spirit, he thought for an instant he had solved the
+mystery of Ireland, ... Ireland was a drug.... Out of the gray sweeping
+stones, and the bogs of red moss and purple water, and from the proud
+brooding mountains, and the fields green as a green banner, there
+exhaled some subtle thing that made men lose sense of worldly
+proportion.... It was in their mothers' milk, a subtle poison. It crept
+into their veins, and though they might leave Ireland, yet for
+generations would it persist.... It gave them the gift of laughter, and
+contempt for physical pain, and an egregious sensitiveness.... So that
+the world wondered ... their wars were merry wars, and their poetry
+sobbed, like a bereaved woman.... They threw their lives away
+recklessly, and a phrase meant much to them.... Perhaps they knew that
+action counted nothing, and emotion all.... Ah, there he was losing
+himself!
+
+At any rate, Ulster Scot though he was, he didn't regret it--apart even
+from its bringing him Granya. Perhaps at the news of it, some hard
+English official might feel a twitch at his heart-strings, and
+remembering that the Irish were as little children, be kind to some
+reprobate Celt.... An action had so many antennae. One never knew where
+its effects stopped, if ever....
+
+A foolish thing that had brought him joy where wisdom brought him
+sorrow! Strange. Until then he had been existent, sentient, but never
+until then alive. Wonder, disillusionment, passion, tragedy, despair. In
+each of these moods he had had a glimpse, now and then, of an immense
+universal design, as a bird may have it, and its throat quivering with
+song, or as a salmon may have it, and he flinging himself tremendously
+over a weir. He knew it, as a tree knows when the gentle rains of April
+come. But that he existed, as an entity apart from trees, from salmon,
+and from birds, he had not known until Granya, broken, had crept weeping
+into his arms....
+
+"Give me strength, Shane, for God's sake. Give me strength, or I die!"
+
+And somewhere, out of something, some esoteric, where he had plucked
+strength and given it to her, and he knew it wasn't from his body, or
+from his mind, or his spirit even, he had given it. He had, from some
+tremendous storehouse, got life for her, got peace, so that she
+fluttered like a pigeon and sighed and grew calm.... And in that moment
+he knew he was alive.
+
+He tried to figure it to himself in terms of concrete things, and he
+said: "If I were a racing-boat now, I would decide how to make a certain
+buoy, and my mind would figure how to get there, what tack to make, the
+exact moment of breaking out the spinnaker rounding the mark. Perhaps my
+mind is nothing, something I use just now, as I use my body. For the
+hand on the rudder is not I. It is something I am using to hold that
+rudder. As I might lash it with a rope, if I were so minded. And my eyes
+are just something I use. They are just like the indicators on the
+stays; they and the indicators are one, to tell me how the wind shifts.
+All that is not I. It is something I use. Perhaps even my mind is
+something I use, as I use my hands. But somewhere, somewhere within me,
+is I."
+
+And a great sense of exaltation and wonder and dignity swept through
+every fiber of him at the thought of this: new-born he was, clean as a
+trout, naked as a knife, strong as the sea. He was one of the lords of
+the kindly trees, masters of the pretty flowers: the little animals of
+God were given him, it being known he would not abuse the gift.... And
+though lightning should strike him yet he would not die, but put off his
+body like a rent garment.... And though he were to meet the savage bear
+in the forest, and have no means of conquering it, yet were he to become
+aware of this entity of life in him, he would smile at the thought of
+physical danger, and the great furry thing would recognize that dignity
+and be abashed.... And there was no more wonder, or mystery, or fear,
+only beauty.... The moon was not any more a mystery, but a place to be
+trodden one day, were his place to be there.... And the furthest star
+was no further than the further island on terrestrial seas; one day he
+would reach that star, somehow, as now he could the furthest island with
+head and hand.... Though death should smite his body he would not die.
+
+
+Section 4
+
+A strange thing was this, that Granya had always known this life. It was
+so certain to her that it was no more a wonder than rain is, or
+sunshine, or the rising of the moon....
+
+He had spoken of it to her one evening in the dusk. She had smiled, her
+grave beautiful smile.
+
+"Of course I know, Shane. I always knew."
+
+"But how did you know, Granya?"
+
+"I think," she said, "I think all good women know, Shane. Men are so
+complete, so welded. Mind and body seem to be themselves; the body and
+mind function so that one doesn't see that there is anything within that
+directs them. They are compact. But a woman is diffuse, Shane. Her mind
+is not a man's mind; it is a thing she can use when she wants to and
+then forget.... When women sit and think, you know, they aren't
+thinking. They are feeling, Shane. It comes like a little wind. There
+may be a place by the sea-shore, sparse heather and sandy dunes, and the
+little waves come chiming, and the curlew calls. And you sit. And a very
+strange peace comes to you, so that in a low soft voice you sing a verse
+of song.... Or it may come on the cold winds of winter, through the
+ascetic trees.... But women are always cognizant of God.... Even bad
+women, Shane, who mistake the Unknown God for the true.... And a woman
+is very much apart from her body. It is just a nuisance at times, or at
+times a thing of beauty, or at times a thing one expresses something
+with, something that is too deep for words, as with a violin. And to
+some it is a curse.... But a body is always apart from one, and a mind
+is, too.... Shane, you have seen very beautiful old women.... Women with
+a beauty that is like a flame that does not burn, that have a light
+within them somewhere ... that is not of the mind or of the body ...
+that is of these things worn thin so that they themselves show.... See,
+heart?"
+
+"But Granya, why must a man find out, and a woman know?"
+
+"Shane of my heart, because it is necessary to women that they may live.
+A man can live without knowing God, as blind men live without ever
+seeing the moon. For they have minds, Shane, pursuits--the amassing of
+money, the little light of fame, that is only a vanity--not real.... But
+Shane, no matter how hard a man has to work, a woman has more terrible
+things.... There is no man on earth can understand the bearing of
+children.... And there is no man, were he to think of it, try to know,
+but would rather die than submit to what he thinks that terror.... And
+yet, Shane, it is not so much.... After a little agony, when one goes
+into the dark, olive valley, and strength seems to go from you in great
+waves, until you are robbed of strength as a man may be robbed of
+blood.... Then one goes out of one's self and gets it.... The beauty in
+the face of young mothers, of brides. That is not body or mind, Shane,
+that is their selves. This was the Eleusinian mystery, Shane, that women
+know that God lives, and that they cannot die....
+
+"See, Shane, the stars are out. The dew is falling. And on the morrow
+you must be afoot early. Shall we go in?"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Once, before Alan Oge was born, a wave of panic swept over him, and he
+caught her hand and looked at her:
+
+"What is it, Shane?"
+
+"If--if you should die--"
+
+"I shall not die, Shane. I know. I shall not die."
+
+"But how do you know?"
+
+"I just know, Shane. That's all."
+
+"O Granya, it seems very terrible, that one day one of us should die."
+
+"Dear Shane, it is not very terrible. If I should die, my heart, I
+should know I would not have long to wait. And I should be with you,
+Shane, even dead, when I could.... And after days of trouble suddenly
+one morning you would know you had had a good night's sleep, and that
+would be because I had come to you in the night and had kissed you, and
+laid a dim hand on you.... And sometimes, in difficulties, you would
+feel a sudden rush of strength, and that would be because I was beside
+you ... dear heart, dear Shane."
+
+"I am so much older, Granya. I shall be the first to die."
+
+"If you are the first to go, Shane, I shall be like some wife of the
+Crusades, of an old time when a dream meant more than a pocketful of
+money ... and men were glad to go, and women glad to send them. I shall
+sit by my fire, and when you come I shall talk to you in my heart ...
+saying little foolish sweet things.... And when I need you, I shall go
+out into the soft night, and call, and you will hear my voice in the
+Milky Way ... and God will let you come ... my darling...."
+
+"Granya!"
+
+"And maybe--sweet, sweet thought--He will let us go together...."
+
+
+Section 5
+
+Here was a great fact, that he lived, but with the fact came a problem:
+Why? If within him there existed this sentient, supple, strong thing,
+and it did exist, for what end was it designed? It was not enough to
+have faith, to know one lived to save one's soul.... That was selfish,
+and selfishness was an unpardonable thing, the sin against the Holy
+Spirit. That has ordained there should be one occult purpose.... No,
+everything had a reason.... The sheltering trees, the ocean from whose
+womb came the great clouds that nurtured the green grass: the winds that
+were like gigantic brooms. The wise and the good labored, and never
+shirked.... Each man must give according to his station, the strong man
+of strength, the wise one of wisdom; the one who knew beauty must give
+it somehow, not huddle it like a miser's hoard.... All men must work;
+that was as natural an instinct as the law that men must eat: and work
+did not mean grinding, but justifying one's existence fully.... None may
+hold back, for that is ignoble, and all that is ignoble dies, dies and
+is used again.... The murderer's dead body may nurture a green bay-tree,
+such beautiful economy nature has.... And it seemed to him that the
+souls of dark men were used, too, but used as negations, and that was
+death.... Perhaps they provided the sinister thunderstorms, the terrible
+typhoon, the cold polar breezes, the storms off the Horn.... They might
+be the counterpoint of nature's harmony.... But this was going past
+knowledge, and past knowledge of heart and head one must not go.... But
+of one thing he was certain; all that is ignoble dies....
+
+He had always known from the time he was a young boy that man must do
+something.... It was not sufficient to make a little money and sit down
+and spend it, as a dog finds a bone and gnaws it, or buries it, in a
+solitary place.... For a long time he had thought it sufficient to do
+the little commerce of the world.... But that was not sufficient.... In
+Buenos Aires he had felt ridiculous, as a giant might feel ridiculous
+carrying little stones for the making of a grocer's house.... Ashamed, a
+little resentful! He was like a dumb paralytic with flaming words in his
+heart and brain, and he could not write them, not even speak them
+aloud....
+
+But all his life this had worried him, the getting of work to do. And
+when he came to America with Granya he had come with great plans. Ships
+and ship-building were the only things he knew, and he had thought with
+others that the great clipper days might be revived. Iron steamships
+were grasping the swift commerce of the world, but there were errands
+great wooden ships under skysails might yet be supreme in, the grain
+trade of San Francisco, for instance. And it might be possible, so he
+had dreamed, that once more the great pre-war clippers should be the
+pride of the new idealistic commonwealth ... and what had come from his
+hand? A half-dozen three-masted schooners, and not very good schooners
+either, being too long in the hull for strength.... And nobody seemed to
+care.... From Belfast and the Clyde, iron boats swarmed like flies....
+And people were impatient.... They did not care to wait if a ship were
+blown from her course.... They wanted ships on time.... People had
+laughed at him, calling him crazy, and saying he was trying to stem
+progress.... And then they had done worse.... They had smiled and said
+it was a hobby of his.... He knew it was no use. He quit.... And Granya
+had been very tender.
+
+"You mustn't mind, Shane. It was very lovely of you to dream and act....
+But it is not intended. Don't take it to heart, dearest."
+
+"All my life, Granya, I have been trying to do something, and I always
+fail."
+
+"Dear Shane, you never fail. The success is in yourself, not outside of
+yourself. That is all."
+
+"Ah, yes, Granya, but that is not enough. That seems so selfish. So many
+men have done so much for the world, and I have done nothing. Even the
+old charwoman on her knees scrubbing floors has done more. She has given
+her best, and her best has been useful."
+
+"But, Shane, you must wait. Have patience."
+
+"I am old, Granya, and have done nothing."
+
+"Wait, Shane, wait. I am going to dim the light, and blur all these
+things around us, and tell you a secret thought has been deep in my
+heart for years. There will be we two just in the room--absolute. And
+come nearer the fire, dear Shane, where I can just see where your hand
+is, and put my hand on it when the thought makes me feel like a child in
+a great wood.... Shane....
+
+"You know your charts, the charts you use and you at sea, the charts of
+the heavens, where what stars we know are marked, the sun and the moon
+and Venus and Jupiter, and Sirius the dog star, and Saturn, and the star
+you steer your ship by, the polar star.... And all the constellations,
+the Milky Way, and the belt of Orion, and the Plow and the Great Bear
+and the great glory you see when you pass the line, the Southern Cross
+... and the little stars you have no names for, but mark them on your
+chart with quaint Greek letters.... Our little world is so little, so
+pathetically little in this immensity.... It is as though we were living
+on the smallest of islands, like some of the islands you have known and
+you on board ship following the moon down the West--Saba, where the
+Dutch are in the Caribbean, or Grenada, the very little island.... And
+on that island they know only vaguely that such great lands as Africa
+and Europe and Asia are.... They don't know it from experience.... But
+Peking of the bells exists, and stately Madrid, and Paris that is a
+blaze of light, and London where the fog rolls inland from the sea....
+Heart of my heart, how terrible it is that cannot, will not see,
+understand.... And they say: Well, we don't see it. Here we were born
+and here we die.... And they say: Show us somebody who has been
+there.... They forget how long is the journey and how a man may have
+affairs in the crowning cities.... Dearest, I am losing myself, but I
+know.
+
+"And this is what I want to tell you, Shane, that when you die--oh,
+such an ugly word that is, Shane, for the bud bursting into flower--when
+it is your time to leave here, Shane, there will be a place for you, not
+idleness at all.... All the stars, Shane, the valleys of the moon....
+There is work, Shane dear. Nothing is perfect, else there should be no
+reason for life. There must be stars that are old, as Dublin is old, and
+need vitality.... There must be stars that are young and cruel, as this
+city is young and cruel, and need sweet strength.... But I am very
+presumptuous, Shane, to try and fathom the Great Master's plan.... It is
+so colorless--oh, there is no word or symbol for it, Shane.... But there
+is a Great Master and there is a Plan....
+
+"Heart, I tell you this, showing all my weakness of thought. You know it
+is the truth, too.... But I tell you I know, so that our two selves'
+knowing may make it a little stronger in us....
+
+"O Shane, I have no logic, but I know.... And all the logicians in the
+world could not shame me to myself. All the reason in the world could
+not shake me. It would be artillery shot against the wind.... A star is
+a promise to me, Shane, and the wind a token, and the new moon just a
+pleasant occurrence, like the coming of spring....
+
+"Shane, I know all this. I know it not for myself but for you.... I
+know three things: I know God lives, I know I love you, I know we shall
+not die.... I love you, Shane, and there is no shame on me telling it to
+you, for you are as my heart and I am as yours.... When I see you at
+times there comes over me a sweetness from head to foot, and at times
+when I see you, a great dignity comes to me, because you love me, and
+your love is good.... I know there is a place in the coming days, and I
+know I shall be with you, wherever you go....
+
+"Here in this dim room, Shane, I know these things. Outside is the
+world, that is forgetting or that doesn't care, or will not see. Here in
+this dim room, with the red of the fire turning to a gentle yellow, I
+know it better than the people in churches, that kindly God lives, that
+I love you, Shane, and that we shall not die...."
+
+
+Section 6
+
+It seemed to him that he must have been in reverie for ages, so much had
+he thought sitting there, so much felt.... He had been like a gull
+poised on the wing, and now he dropped gently to the calm waters.... New
+York to-day, and in two weeks Antrim, and then a rest.... And then
+wider spaces than he had ever known, greater adventure.... A day would
+come when he would be called, as though some one had said: Shane
+Campbell! and then a gesture that made a horse stumble, or a flaw of
+wind that would turn over a boat.... Click!...
+
+And it seemed to him that it would be not only sweeter, but wiser to die
+in Antrim.... New York was no place for a man like him to die. For an
+old man, weary with life's work, there would be gentle hands, and soft
+caring, and guidance for tired eyes.... But for a man young spiritually,
+strong, there would be no coddling.... He would be expected to jump
+forward at the call.... And to go through the maze of smoke and dust,
+and the evil jungles of the air one sensed in a great city would
+be--waste of time and energy.... In Antrim when the call would come
+there would be the clear high air, the friendly glens, the great
+encouraging mountains, and the Moyle laughing in the moonlight: Don't be
+embarrassed! Don't be afraid!
+
+Above, he heard a door shut. There was no longer the patter of the boys'
+feet on the floor, nor the drag of the maid's shoes, but Granya's firm
+light step he could sense somehow, and then came a little sound to him,
+that he knew was her dropping to her knees by Alan Beg's bed, while she
+recited for him, taught him, the great prayer.... Shane bowed his head
+in reverence.... He could see the dim beauty of her face, her great
+trusting eyes, her sweet hands.... Almost could he hear her voice, so
+close was she in his heart....
+
+
+Section 7
+
+"Our Father, ..."
+
+He could see the symbols that were in her mind, because they were in his
+too, the gentle pictures that translated the thought these words evoked:
+the great majestic figure with the strong hands and gentle eyes, the
+eyes that smiled when colts gamboled, or a rabbit flashed across the
+grass, that loved the beauty of the garden when He walked in it at the
+close of day. One felt Him now and then as He went through His smallest
+world, perhaps in the evening when the crickets sang, perhaps over the
+moonlit waters, or with the little winds of dawn.... Such strength and
+kindliness, and the majestic eyes were troubled; for, sympathetic toward
+the wayward, the bothered, the weak.... They only hardened with the
+promise of terror for the hypocrite, the traitor, for those who devoured
+widows' houses....
+
+"Who art in heaven, ..."
+
+He smiled to himself at the thought of heaven. There was where one's
+fancy was free, to realize all the sweet desires of what was good in
+one.... To those who deserved it God would not begrudge His heaven.... A
+quiet place, Shane thought, a hushed place, a place of rest.... Whither
+one might go to realize again all the beauty one had ever known.... All
+that one had held sweet and wonderful would be there--they had not
+died.... A white magic would bring back the laughter of babies, and
+kisses gently given ... and all estrangements of friends and lovers
+would be eased there, and they would be brought together in a magical
+trysting-place, and there would be no unharmony.... All the horses one
+had ever loved would take shape in the air, with necks stretched and
+whinnying recognition.... All the great ships one had wondered at would
+appear when called, their spread of snowy canvas, their tapering
+spars.... All the dogs one had had would be there ... their yelps of
+joy, their sweet brown eyes, their ears up, their tails wagging ... all
+the dogs would be there!
+
+"Hallowed be Thy name ..."
+
+The head must bow there. The name evoked a thought, and the thought was
+ineffable, such glory and sweetness and strength it had.... Names
+brought pictures. When the word "Helen" was uttered, one saw the burned
+towers of Troy.... And "Venice," massive shadows and great moonlit
+waters.... And Genghis Khan brought the riot of galloping horses and the
+Tartar blades a-flash.... Such power great words had, and this was the
+greatest word, so great as to be terrible, and not to be mentioned by
+petty men, who cheapen with their grudging tongues.... No picture there,
+but some great anthem of the stars.... Not as yet could our ears hear
+it.... Nor would they ever hear it, if we had not reverence.
+
+"Thy kingdom come ..."
+
+Some immense plan existed, which human mind could never see. No
+practical wisdom could ever grasp. Were all the sum of practical wisdom
+gathered in a little room, and infused with spirit until it burst the
+four walls of the world, yet it might not grasp it.... Yet all things
+worked that this plan should come to fruition. The stars rolled in their
+courses. The great winds came. There fell the rain of April and the soft
+December snow.... And the kingdom was a good kingdom, for nothing evil
+conquered ever.... It died and was eliminated, and when it was all as
+nothing then might the kingdom come ... no arbitrary blowing of
+Gabriel's trumpet, but that foremost sweetness that comes from the west
+wind....
+
+"Thy will be done on earth ..."
+
+It was always done on earth, but the ignoble, the inglorious, the small
+put their petty obstacles in its way, and delayed the coming of the
+kingdom.... Men grew engrossed in their affairs, grew self-sufficient. A
+little money in their pockets, and God was forgotten. A little more and
+they despised their fellow-men, and hatred arose. And evil wars came,
+and years were lost.... Cunning men put the emotions, the ideals, the
+actions of glorious men up for barter.... And the men who were tricked
+brooded.... And the cunning men took the land and the waters and the
+light, and worked tortuously until they could sell them at a price....
+And the things God had made for his people were the means to procure
+these dark folk wine and mistresses and the state of kings.... Such was
+not the doing of the Will.... But one day it would be worked out by men
+how these things could not ever again be.... The slow certain coming of
+the kingdom....
+
+"As it is in heaven ..."
+
+From the green resting-place came all that was sweet and harmonious, the
+shape of clouds, the high spirit of horses, the loyalty of dogs, the
+graceful movement swans have, and the song of the lesser birds. From
+that green resting-place came the gold of the gorse, and the sweet line
+of trees, and the purple the heather has--the loved heather. Thence came
+the word that set the friendly moon on high, and put out the white
+beauty of the young and alternated sunshine with the rains of spring.
+All was done there according to wisdom and beauty.
+
+"Give us this day our daily bread ..."
+
+That was no whine for the prisoner's dole. That was the simplicity of
+asking that the moon and the sun still rise. Give beauty to women, and
+grace to children, and songs for poets to sing. Let not the green tree
+wither, but send it rain. And give a little softness to the hearts of
+callous men. And remind us that widows live, and that there are
+fatherless. Teach us how to heal sickly children, and be easy on horses.
+And give us gentleness. And when roses grow on the walls in June, put a
+bud in our hearts....
+
+"And forgive us our trespasses ..."
+
+The picture that came into Shane's mind then was not the picture of an
+abased man beating his breast, but the thought of a mature man clanging
+through the halls of heaven past every guard until he came where wisdom
+and beauty was, and standing and throwing back his head: "I have done
+wrong," he would say, "rotten wrong, and I'm wretched about it." And
+there would be an answer: "You did right to come."
+
+"As we forgive those who trespass against us ..."
+
+Ah! That was hard! That was the most difficult thing in the world, the
+Celt in Shane knew. The horripilation of the skin, the twitching
+nostrils, the feeling for the knife in the armpit.... When one was
+young, the careless word, the savage blow, the brooding feud.... But men
+grew better with the increase of the years, and with maturity came the
+sense that not every one could insult or hurt a man. The jibes and
+trespasses of petty people meant so little, and one sensed the Destiny,
+the strange veiled One, balanced in His own wise time the evil done a
+man with unexpected good.... One grew wiser even yet with the years and
+knew that a great wrong was outside one's personal jurisdiction.... One
+had to leave that to the broad justice of the High God.... One could
+appeal there, as with the old _cri de haro_ of Norman low.... _Haro!
+haro! A l'aide, mon prince. On me fait tort!_ Hither! Hither! Help me,
+my king; one dropped on one's knees in the market-place: I am being
+injured overmuch! And it was the prince's duty to help feal men.... To
+forgive trespasses--only one understood in maturity, one grew to it....
+The strong and wise were the meek, not the weaklings ... the men who
+knew that justice was absolute ... the men with the calm eyes and the
+grim smile, they were the terrible meek....
+
+"And lead us not into temptation ..."
+
+A little cry of humility that was, a very human reminder to the Only
+Perfect One that we in this very small world were weak. Work we had to
+do, destinies to fulfil, but under weakness, or from false strength, one
+might wander from our appointed path.... The power of office, let it
+breed arrogance ... the sense of money, let it not bring smug
+callousness.... And the singers of the world be proud only of the trust,
+but humble in themselves as the birds are among the trees.... And let
+not strength have contempt, but gentleness....
+
+"But deliver us from all evil ..."
+
+There were dark places in the world, and one needed guidance there,
+protection.... From Satan, who is not a spirit, but a horrible miasma,
+that floats in little vapors here and there, when the clean winds are
+resting ... from the warm inviting and evil jungle where one might seek
+relief in distress, or having been over-long in the high air ... from
+the twisted souls of dark men and women who seek to sully as with
+writhing piteous hands ... from deep sinister pools we know are thick
+with horror but feel charmed toward, as one feels like plunging to death
+from the summit of some building terribly high.... From these, Lord God,
+deliver us!
+
+"For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory,
+
+"For ever and ever."
+
++-----------------------------------------------------------------------+
+|Transcriber's note: The 'o' in 'Froken' has a circle over it. It is not|
+|represented in this text.                                              |
++-----------------------------------------------------------------------+
+
+
+
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