Enchanting Cold Blood

by Petya Lehmann

  This time there really was something there, and something was tapping, he was not mistaken about that. It was a minute, an almost invisibly minute fragment of driftwood, which had somehow got caught and suspended to the wall by a string of bind-weed. Each time a gust came, it lifted it up and sent it lightly tapping against the wall; then it fell back again and hung there like a tiny pendulum. As Maelcho stood looking at it, another push came, and again the fragment of driftwood rose from the wall; again it tapped lightly twice, and again it fell.

  He remained staring at it, doggedly, unbelievingly; his eyes wide and bloodshot; his face, a minute before tender and expectant, becoming dangerous and ferocious looking, as the blood, congealing below the skin, stained it a dull purple. Suddenly, a fresh roar broke from his throat, a different one this time, a fierce hollow roar, almost like the bellow of some wounded bull. Hope and expectation seemed suddenly to give way. Raised to their highest possible point, they fled, leaving nothing behind them. Despair overtook him absolutely. It blackened his whole soul. It turned what a moment before had been a kindly harmless man into the semblance of some savage devouring beast. A desire for destruction came over him like a thirst. Flinging himself upon the hut, he tore the door of it away from its hinges with a single effort and tossed it, with an exultant shout, over amongst the gulls below. He did not pause there. With another shout, he flung himself upon the rest. Stone after stone he pulled them down and hurled them over into the sea, plucking the rafters from their places and the clumsy jambs and corner stones out of the earth. His hands were bleeding and gashed; the perspiration poured down his face; the wound on his head had reopened, but he never desisted from his task till of the whole fabric of the shanty nothing was left but a few logs and a shapeless and scattered heap of stones. Even those he continued to seize and to fling down one by one; savagely, exultingly, as he might have flung over some living foe; conscious only of a single desire, to destroy; blindly, senselessly, to destroy. At last, exhaustion overtook him suddenly, and he fell down upon the ground, on the top of the now nearly naked shelf.

  The evening closed in; night came on; the shore grew formless, full of vague shadows; the stars came out in their myriads; the sky overhead was stainless; the spell of night and of silence brooded over the face of the Atlantic. In the distance, the small red rows of volcanoes smouldered, flared and sank again into darkness, but Maelcho never stirred. He lay there amongst the scattered stones, only a shadow amongst the other shapeless shadows of the place.

  Chapter XXXV.

  The whole of Munster and the counties immediately adjoining it had become that year a sort of hell, a hell for all who belonged to it or had cast in their lot with its sons. The wail of the forests, the moans of the sea against the rocks along the coast seemed to be only a sort of chorus and accompaniment that year to the cries and moans that burst from every human throat. Why under the circumstances so many survived, is a far more perplexing problem than why so many died. A certain number of grains did manage to escape and did make shift to live till better times dawned; till the sickles were temporarily hung up upon the walls again, and till another growing and breathing period had returned.

  Maelcho the seanchaí was one of these doubtfully favoured grains. He continued to live on from week to week, and from month to month, though why he lived, or how he lived, neither he nor anyone else could have told. When, six or seven hours later, he had come back to himself upon the now naked shelf, at Smerwick, he had wandered away into the night, not knowing why or where. Next day, pushed by some unexplained instinct, he had turned his steps towards his own country, towards the big forests of the north-east of the province, those forests in which he and his master had fought so long, and in which that master had six months before perished.

  Like some friendly animal, grown savage by ill usage, he wandered along, day after day, dangerous to meet with. Day after day, he wandered, and night after night, he lay down to sleep in some leafy corner or sat crouched, his chin and his knees together, upon a stone, sleeping heavily, waking at early dawn and going on again he did not himself know where. Owls hooted at him from the tree tops, wolves howled, foxes barked, bats squeaked, the thick darkness of the woods encompassed him like the darkness of a grave. Sometimes — when the night was clear — a sudden ineffable shaft of moonlight would peer down at him from between the dividing branches, touching him with that mild distracting tenderness, which breaks the heart when other and nearer help or tenderness there is none. For everything, even his old touch with this outside world, had gone now from Maelcho. Nature was no longer his friend; the spell was broken, and he had become a mere waif, lost in an unfamiliar country; lost to a degree which no man whose mind is still his own can ever be said to be lost. An immense fog-filled abyss seemed to yawn eternally around him. He was as lonely as if no other human being had ever existed.

  In this way, turning often back upon his steps, but upon the whole keeping steadily to the north-east, he arrived, about a fortnight after he had left Smerwick, in that dense region of forest land which covered all the lower slopes of the Gaultee mountains. It was full just then of refugees, who had flocked to it from the more exposed country round about. The weather was atrociously bad; storms of wind and rain kept sweeping across the forest, scourging these roofless vagrants and saturating them to the very bone. As Maelcho made his way along the narrow paths, he encountered numbers of such homeless wanderers, many of them women with children, either on their backs or following in a little group at their heels. One — a young dark-eyed woman with two children — stopped and begged persistently of him as he passed; begged of him, the vagrant, the madman, the starved wanderer without a scrap of food or anything else for himself.

  Maelcho merely stared vacantly at her for a minute, then passed on, thrusting her aside, as something about which he knew and cared nothing. The woman, upon this repulse, fell back, but after a while, she followed him stealthily along the forest path.

  When the evening came, he looked about for some place to sleep in. He had got into a state of almost complete apathy about food; he had now been starving so long that it seemed to be the natural thing to do. Although compared to others his strength held out, it had ebbed to a point at which existence became little more than a mere confused dream. It was perhaps because he was not thinking of it, or because he had no wish upon the subject, that the means for holding out at least one day more fell unexpectedly into his hands. As he was entering a thicket, a rabbit bolted past him; then, scared at his nearness, shot into a low bank of stones hard by, entering at random into the first hole it came to.

  Mechanically, Maelcho thrust his hands into this opening and, feeling there a mass of fur, drew out the creature by its hind legs. So benumbed had grown his wits, so unreal had become everything that he touched or saw, that he was very near letting it go again. Some instinct of self-preservation came, however, to the rescue, but after having killed it with a quick blow across its neck, he laid it down on the grass beside him and presently fell afresh into an open-eyed trance, one which lasted this time a long while. All idea of food and everything else had utterly melted away.

  He was brought back to himself by a shrill voice, quite close to his ear, a voice seemed to be growing louder and louder, and which disturbed him with its jarring note. He roused himself and looked round to see what it was. It was the same woman he had seen before. She was standing close beside him, having come noiselessly up over the wet leaves; one of the children was in her arms, the other was clutching at her skirt, and she was staring at him with fierce wild eyes, such as an angry ghost might have set in a scared white face.

  “Christ save you, man! Christ save you! Christ save you!” she kept repeating over and over, running the words one on top of another and glaring at him the while like a creature possessed. “Christ save you, and it is a rabbit you have got? Yes, a rabbit! a rabbit! Oh my God, a rabbit, and it is a rabbit that might save them yet, might save my little children. Give it me, I say, this minute
, give it me that they may eat it. How dare you keep a rabbit, when a rabbit might save them? Give it to me, quick, quick. Is it a fire that you think I am wanting? It is no fire, and it is no cooking that it wants! It is the meat, the good red meat that my little children want, my little little children. Look at them, you man! look at her, look at my daughter! She is only three, my Dermot there, he is six. A little while ago, he was so strong, he had such round, stout legs, no woman ever had such a boy, it was killing me out of jealousy the other women were. Look at them now, you man! look at them now, I say! Oh my children, my little little children. Christ save you, Christ save you, dear man, only give me the rabbit!” Her rage changed suddenly to entreaty, and she fell down grovelling at his feet.

  Maelcho simply remained sitting where he was and staring fixedly at her. What did she want with him, he asked himself dully. Through the mist of his brain, her words had not as yet penetrated, but that her excitement was somehow or other in connection with the rabbit he did realise, and he turned and looked at it as it lay there at his feet.

  With the pounce of some fierce forest creature, the woman suddenly snatched up the rabbit from the ground. In a very few minutes, it was skinned, and fragments of it were being hastily crammed into the children's months. Seeing his supper fast disappearing, Maelcho mechanically put out his hand for a piece. She gave it to him, but grudgingly. In an incredibly short time, the rabbit had become a heap of red shreds, next, it had vanished, all but the bones, and even these were picked quite clean. She did not seem to want to eat herself, all her care was for the children. The little girl had to be coaxed, but the boy ate ravenously, falling upon the food and tearing it in pieces with his teeth, exactly as a starved puppy or young wolf cub might have done.

  The excessive violence of the woman, but still more the sight of the two children, and the boy's eagerness in eating, had a curiously stimulating effect upon Maelcho's brain, such as no other sight and no other incident would probably have had. It awakened him from that trance of imbecility, of sheer animal muteness into which he was rapidly lapsing. He looked at the two children now with a deliberate, almost a reasonable expression in his eyes. The boy was a handsome, large-limbed creature, with something bold and daring in his bearing, which even starvation could not efface. No one would have said that he was the child of a peasant, although his mother plainly was nothing else. The girl was a pretty, fragile, little child, waxen-faced and pitiful, with the peculiar pathos of a flower caught in the grip of some cruel and all-blighting frost.

  The seanchaí's starved heart suddenly opened and went out to these two children. He got up deliberately from where he was sitting, stretched his hand out to the little girl — her mother staring hard at him the while — lifted her carefully off her feet and placed her firmly and quite as a matter of course upon his shoulder.

  “Come!” he said, turning to the woman and speaking in a tone of authority. “It is not here that they must sleep. Come!”

  She took the other child by the hand and followed him obediently without a word.

  Chapter XXXVI.

  Thus at the very moment when he was most bereft, when he was naked of everything, including his own poor wits, Maelcho suddenly found himself provided with new objects and once more for a while with something beside him to love. The heart of the Child-man opened and took those two little starved wayfarers into it. It was not very much to fill it with, little more indeed than a mere temporary stopgap, still it was infinitely better than such a terrible aching void. It was a boon of Nature's own providing, and he took it without question or without even as much as realising that anything had been done for him.

  What would probably have struck a saner man — the additional risk, namely, incurred by linking himself to such a helpless little group — this he never so much as thought of. The belief in danger, not as a joke, but as something very real; the anticipation of death, as an actual and a grimly probable occurrence, had got deep into the very youngest souls that fateful Irish summer. But such considerations were not within Maelcho's ken. All he knew was that here were two children, and that for some reason or other, he had to look after them. From the moment when he put the little girl on his shoulder, he took complete charge of them, just as if he had been actually responsible for them, which perhaps he believed he was. Their mother seemed to understand this, for she also accepted the situation, quite as a matter of course. She was still young and even handsome, despite her emaciation, but to Maelcho she was simply the children's mother, just as Lady Fitzmaurice had been his lady-girls' mother, and nothing else. He hardly indeed took in the fact of her existence, save when he was absolutely forced to do so. If she spoke to him, he generally shook his head and muttered vaguely, whereas with the children, he quickly established a free-masonry, alike of words and signs.

  With that memory for places which, once implanted, even mental decay seems unable wholly to obliterate, he led them almost directly from the place where he had killed the rabbit to a spot which he had suddenly recalled as being fitter to sleep in than where they were, and, after about half an hour's walking, he stopped abruptly upon the brink of a steep green hollow.

  Below them lay one of those circular cups, sculptured by standing water, which abound all over Ireland. The water which once filled it had long gone, and the lower lip of the cup itself had partially melted, leaving a spoon-shaped cavity, grooved in all directions by tiny fugitive streamlets. Upon the steep green sides of this cup, tall beech trees rose sparsely, their polished trunks, whitened by lichen, rising one above the other, with something of the precision and symmetry of the pillars of a temple, or an amphitheatre.

  Down one of the steep sides of this cup Maelcho carried the little girl, threading his way in and out of the tree trunks till he reached a spot not far from the bottom. Here, upon a ledge a little way above the floor itself, a sort of human bird's nest, or rough wigwam of close growing osiers, had at some time or other been fashioned. Into this he carried the child, doubling himself in two in order to do so, and laid her upon the floor, which, though hollow, was at present fairly dry. The woman then followed with the boy. There was just room for her and the two little creatures to squat in it, sitting packed together, as closely as three hares in a single form. Leaving them there, Maelcho crept out backwards and settled himself outside in his usual attitude, his knees and his chin close together, and his back against the trunk of a tree; and so they passed the night.

  About ten o'clock, the moon began to creep out. As it slowly climbed above the cup, the beech trees seemed to grow taller and larger, till they became perfectly colossal, rising out of the darkness and towering up into the light, crossed, but not as yet roofed, by their thinly fledged upper branches. The worst of the place was that it seemed to be a perfect home and rendezvous of wolves. They did not, it is true, come down into the cup itself, but all the night through, they howled unceasingly about its lip, sweeping round and round in packs. Even when they were beyond the edges, and therefore quite invisible, fancy conjured up their long bristling backs, their red hungry jaws, their cruel devouring eyes and rough staring coats. It was not a visitation conducive to rest, even in the case of the most hardened of sleepers.

  Towards morning, the howling began to abate, as the evil brutes scented the coming daylight and began to crawl away to their lairs. Now and then however, a long blood-curdling howl would still rise, varied by the hooting of owls or the sharp metallic barking of a fox.

  Maelcho had passed the whole night in his favourite attitude, sometimes sleeping, but oftener staring at the trees or at the wolves, with moon-dilated eyes. Very early in the morning, while there was still only a mere wash of daylight, the woman crept out of her own bur and came and squatted down beside him, not at first speaking, but looking hard at him, with quick questioning eyes, as if she had been speculating in the night as to who he really was, and what his intentions were with regard to her and her children.

  The morning promised well. Birds were beginning to awake a
nd to dart lightly here and thither through the branches, with quick cheerful notes and a flutter of many wings. The evil creatures of the night were all fast disappearing, as the good things of daylight began to come forward and take up the realm.

  Satisfied apparently at last by what she saw in her companion's face, the woman began to babble. Her talk ran all upon herself and her own children; she repeated the same things over and over, always coming back to the children. Maelcho listened and tried to understand, but words had almost ceased to have any consecutive meaning to his mind. The only effect of her talk was that after a while it suggested vaguely to him his own troubles, so that he began to moan and to rock himself to and fro, like a man in bodily pain.

  The woman stopped and stared at him; then asked abruptly what ailed him, and whether he had understood what she had said.

  “I hear you, sister, I hear you,” he moaned; “I hear you, but I hear other things, too, and the other things speak louder than you do. I hear … voices … children's voices. They are … they are …”

  He opened his eyes widely and looked up at the green roof overhead, as if someone had spoken to him from the tree tops.

  “No, not there,” he went on, shaking his head. “No, no; only the trees there; only the poor silly green trees.” Again he shook his head; his lips quivered, and he locked his hands helplessly one in another.