Irish Portraits

by Liam O'Flaherty

  It was a very fraudulent arrangement, because Maloney was absolutely penniless, half-starved, and living in deplorable conditions. But the crowd looked upon it as a very trivial affair. They laughed.. Tight was the only one who became enraged.

  “Well, what did I say?” he cried. “Look at this barefaced robbery. Christians! Oh! Lord! Ough!”

  He spat and walked away, swinging his arms ferociously. Mr. Mullally walked up to his shop with Tameen Maloney. The crowd dispersed, in order to warn their wives that fresh mackerel were to be on sale at Mullally’s. The square became quite still.

  Presently Mr. Mullally hung up a notice on a piece of cardboard outside his shop. On it was written in scrawling letters: “Mackerel for Sale. A Penny each. Fine fresh Mackerel.”

  Women came rushing from all sides towards the shop to buy the mackerel. The town came to life in an extraordinary fashion. People were running in all directions. The demand was so great that after ten minutes Mr. Mullally came out and changed “A Penny” to “Tuppence.” After twenty minutes, when there were only twenty mackerel left, he came out and changed “Tuppence” to “Three Pence.” The townspeople began to grumble, but such was the demand for the fish that they paid three pence each for them.

  All this time Bartly Tight roamed about his own yard cursing violently. But at last his desire for fresh mackerel got the better of his principles, and he sent his young son down to the shop to buy six mackerel. The little boy got the last six of the fish.

  The whole town was frying mackerel. A delicious odour permeated the silent air. Not a soul moved about. Everything was perfectly still. Mr. Mullally was again sitting in his doorway, cutting cheese sandwiches for himself with a large clasp knife. That was his lunch. He was smiling. He had bought the mackerel for two shillings, and he had sold them for nineteen shillings and three pence.

  Half an hour passed. Then a stream of sated men strolled into the square once more, their faces red, their stomachs thrust out. They had dined deliciously. They sank wearily to the base of the monument. The same lean man with a black wart on his face sat on the edge of the horse trough and allowed the tail of his ragged coat to become immersed in the water once more. Even Bartly Tight appeared, tamed somewhat by his healthy meal. He also sat down. Nobody spoke. Some closed their eyes and fell asleep. Not a sound was heard, except an occasional grunt and an occasional snore. Mr. Mullally had finished his cheese sandwiches, and he was wearily reading the piece of newspaper in which he had held them.

  Then suddenly an extraordinary noise was heard. It came from within Mr. Mullally’s public-house. It was almost an inhuman sound, a loud, piercing yell. Strangely enough the crowd of idlers round the monument took very little interest in it. They just glanced towards the shop and smiled. Mr. Mullally himself struggled to his feet and entered his shop, rather hurriedly but not very hurriedly.

  “Now ye divil ye,” said a man who was stretched at the base of the monument, “ye’ll see some fun or I’m a liar.”

  “Ah!” growled Bartly Tight, staring into the white, still sea, savagely, “is there such a thing as pity or are the cannibals right after all? Eh? Are we all cannibals only we don’t…”

  “Ug-ug-g-g… r.r.r.r…. ya-ah-ah.”

  The piercing yell came again and the body of Tameen Maloney was hurled into the yard of Mr. Mullally’s public-house. Tameen fell on the yard and writhed there. Mr. Mullally appeared at his door, rubbing one palm against the other.

  “He’s got em again, the devil,” laughed a man near the monument.

  Bartly Tight shuddered, and got to his feet. He spat.

  “Blast it,” he said. “I can’t stick this.”

  He strode down towards the shore, savagely swinging his arms. It was very hot and still.

  Tameen Maloney suddenly jumped to his feet, and began to dance wildly round in a circle, jabbering inarticulately. He had the delirium tremens. He had swallowed two shillingsworth of illicit whisky in the public-house, and then fallen into a stupor. When he awoke from the stupor he was quite mad, temporarily insane. This was quite a usual thing with him. The people laughed.

  “Be off now!” shouted Mr. Mullally,

  Tameen suddenly frothed at the mouth and ripped a large stone from the coping of the fence. Mr. Mullally rushed out. Tameen dropped the stone and rushed away. He dived into a little shed farther down. The people got excited. They had never seen him as bad as this. The tremendous heat of the day had evidently intensified his madness. Mr. Mullally got nervous. He retreated hurriedly to his door, shouting as he did so:

  “Go for the Civic Guards, Mary Ellen,”

  He entered the house and closed the door. The crowd moved over rapidly in the direction in which Tameen had gone. They heard another yell and Tameen appeared with a boat-hook in his hands. He was frothing at the mouth.

  “The … the … the … r-r-robber,” he cried. “Uh-uh-I’ll… uh …”

  He rushed at the door and began to batter at it with the boat-hook. The crowd watched, in silence.

  In a few seconds two Civic Guards came rushing down the road. They seized Tameen and dragged him up the road to the police barracks. Then the crowd moved away again towards the monument, talking in low voices. The shop door opened again and Mr. Mullally came out to sit on his threshold. For a while there was loud murmuring in various parts of the town. Then the murmuring died down. It was very still and hot.

  Down at the point of the long wall that ran into the sea on the western side of the bay, Bartly Tight was sitting, with his bare feet immersed in the smoothly-rolling white waves,

  The white water of the bay was spotless and perfectly still.

  The Inquisition

  There was perfect silence in the study. Twenty-seven postulants were stooping over their high desk, writing and reading, their pens moving over the exercise books with the cumbersome stupidity of boyhood, their heads held between their hands as they repeated over and over again the conjugation of some Latin or Greek noun and tried to retain it in their racked memories. In the rear desk, three auxiliary prefects wearing black soutanes worked and conversed in whispers, disobeying the law of silence which they imposed on the younger postulants. For, even in religious orders, officials disobey their own laws.

  It was past six o’clock. The angelus had been said. It was still an hour before the first auxiliary would bang his desk. Then they would all go on their knees and recite the prayer before leaving the study for the refectory and supper.

  A terrible hour, thought Francis Cleary. He sat in the second desk to the left of the passage, and although he had his Euripides open on his desk, he was not reading it. He was listening to every sound with beating heart, thinking that the very next moment there would be a heavy step outside the door. Then the door would open slowly and the father director’s large red melancholy face would appear. Holding his biretta in his hand, he would advance slowly down the study, picking his steps, with difficulty on account of his corns. He would pause at Cleary’s desk and he would tip Cleary’s right shoulder gently, Then without a word he would go back again to the door and Cleary would have to follow him.

  Cleary kept going over this routine of movement in his mind, and every time he came to the gentle tip on the shoulder, he started and a flow of blood went to his head that made him flush and tremble. It was terrible waiting like this. He had expected the priest every moment since five o’clock, when they had entered the study from the recreation ground. Why had he not come? Why was he torturing him like this?

  There were three other boys guilty and they also were waiting, but they all knew Cleary would be first. Why? Just with that instinct of boyhood and the peculiar cunning that life in a religious seminary engenders, where life is so closely scrutinized and public that each knows the others better than brothers and sisters know one another in a large family. So Cleary was known to be the most religious and devout boy in the scholasticate. The father director paid most attention to him. There were great hopes of his ultimate sanctity. Ther
efore he would be first. It would be through him that the guilt of the others would be made known or concealed. The others knew that. Cleary knew it and he trembled, because he felt that he would never have the courage to hold back information from Fr. Harty. Already he heard the boys hissing “spy” at him.

  At last the ominous sound came. The auxiliaries stopped whispering. Cleary became absolutely numb with terror. The door opened. Cleary did not look up. He heard the slow irregular heavy footsteps approach. He felt the gentle tip on his shoulder and he heard the priest’s asthmatic breathing over him. He rose immediately, and as he followed the priest’s broad black back, he cast a hurried glance around him. The three faces were watching him, with terror in their eyes, but also with a peculiar warning look, as much as to say: “You know what you’re going to get if you tell.”

  The father director’s room was across the passage. Cleary was always terrified of that dark door that seemed to lead to a tunnel. On Saturday nights they all waited outside the door and entered into its lamplit gloom to kneel at the little prayer stool beside which Fr. Harty sat, hidden in darkness, hearing their confessions. Now it would be another sort of confession, a more terrible one.

  Fr. Harty never spoke until he had lit the lamp and sunk into his easy chair by the fire. Then he put his head between his hands and rubbed his face from the temples to the chin with the peculiar melancholy movement that was customary with him. Cleary standing erect by the door felt pity and love for him. He was tender and kind to him, that priest. Why was he now afraid of hirn? But it seemed now that some other being was sitting in the chair instead of the good priest, who had once been a great athlete and a heavy drinker. This middle-aged man with the red face and the terrible mental suffering stamped on his red face was like an extraordinary and terrible being, merciless, insane, overpowered by a monstrous fanaticism that licked all tenderness and understanding out of his consciousness like a devilish flame licking up the tender moisture of humanity, leaving only the crusted charred bones of the dogmas that had brought that constant suffering into his face. This was not Fr. Harty but a terrible fanatic.

  Cleary was only sixteen. He had not yet begun to think out his own experience. Until now he had assimilated without question all the precepts that were offered to his mind, in. the lecture rooms, in the chapel and in the study, where Fr. Harty gave sermons on personal conduct and the lives of the saints. Cleary’s mind was hitherto just a receptacle for all these precepts and he had shrunk away in terror from any personal thought, lest it might lead him into doubt and sin. But now his consciousness had been completely roused by his terror and this first questioning of the justice of the situation in which he was placed. His superiors were not just, something suggested to him. And almost immediately his mind had begun to think independently and he doubted the wisdom of his superiors. And then a little wall had thrust itself in front of his own personality, and for the first time in his life he found himself standing behind this wall, ready to fight his superior. This was an enemy sitting in that chair. Not Fr. Harty whom he loved but this embodiment of the terrible dogmas that made men do such cruel things, as this terrible torture of a youth, this fanatic. That was his enemy. With the extraordinary instinct of youthful persons whose judgments are not deflected and obscured by elaborate reasonings he could see this difference as clearly as if there were two people sitting in the chair instead of one. And from that moment, when this difference became manifest to him, Cleary had ceased to believe in God with his whole soul as he had hitherto done. He no longer loved God as an omnipotent friend and father. He now feared him.

  “Well,” said the priest heavily, without looking at Cleary, “this is terrible.”

  There was a short silence. Cleary’s legs trembled and his head seemed to go round and round. The sacred pictures on the walls, the gleaming gilt backs of the books on the shelves, the dark polished wainscotting, the oilcloth on the floor, all seemed occult and terrifying, to his eyes wandering about, seeking some point to which to attach themselves instead of to the recumbent heavy figure of the priest.

  “How did this happen?” continued the priest sadly. “How did this terrible craze grow within you? If you had been lukewarm and … and casual in your devotions I could perhaps understand your giving way to this temptation. But I had placed such faith in your purity. I had such hopes of you. Perhaps I encouraged you too much. Conceit is a terrible danger. Francis, tell me everything.”

  Cleary’s lips began to tremble and tears came to his eyes, but he could not speak. The gentle sadness of the priest’s voice knocked down that wall of defence at one blow and Cleary felt himself an utter miscreant. The enormity of his sin appeared so frightful that he abandoned all hope and he was ready to do anything, anything, in order to lighten the grief of the priest. And yet, at the same time, his overwhelmed mind simmered with revolt against this appeal to his heart. He could not speak and he was glad that he could not speak.

  “Tell me, Francis. Open your mind to me. Then this demon of temptation will be overcome. I am certain that you have been led astray by your companions. I have no doubt of it. I could not be so mistaken in your character. Others older and less pure in mind than yourself have been the cause of this. Speak, Francis.”

  “I can’t speak, Father,” blubbered Cleary, bursting into tears. “I have done nothing. I have done nothing.”

  “But, my child, I have just spent an hour with the Fr. Superior. An hour. And I tell you it was very hard on me. Very hard. You went to the dentist this morning to the town and Fr. Moran saw you coming out of a tobacconist’s shop. He stopped you to ask what you had bought and found a packet of cigarettes in your pocket. Do you call that nothing?”

  Cleary wept, and weeping he found relief from the load of grief and terror that oppressed his heart. It seemed, too, that all his pity for the priest had been washed away with the tears. And when the father director mentioned Fr. Moran the superior, Cleary knew immediately that he loathed the Fr. Superior with a terrible loathing, his paunch, his fat hands, his fat red neck, his little ferret-like eyes and the syrupy tone of his voice, like the soft loathsome voice of some reptile, hissing and snakelike. And this terrible hatred, so new to his soul, made him hard and cold, so that his mind became clear and active again.

  “They were not for myself,” he said. “I don’t smoke.”

  “I am glad, Francis,” said the priest. “I am very glad. But you must tell me now who they were for. It is your duty to tell me.”

  The priest sat up erect suddenly and his face hardened.

  “That would not be honourable,” muttered Cleary.

  “Honourable!” cried the priest. “My God! Where have you been hearing these words? In religious life there is nothing honourable but the love of God and obedience to his holy rules. Do you think it’s honourable to shield the sinful acts of your fellow-postulants? My child, I command you to tell me who those cigarettes were for. As your director, I command you. You know what disobedience of my order means to your soul.”

  The priest had stood up suddenly. Standing he looked enormous in the gloom. Cleary shrank away in terror. In his terror he thought that the priest was God himself, the terrible avenging God of the Old Testament, who cried: “Spare neither women nor children.” His terror had become physical and he thought that he would be immediately struck dead if he did not speak. But even in that moment of terror when his lips were going to utter the words that would kill all love in his soul, his mind exulted, for it had become relieved of fear. Henceforth it would be free to exult in thought, free and hidden from observation, with a wall around it, formed by cunning and deceit, to protect it from these terrible exponents of dogmas that were now its enemies.

  “They were for Michael O’Connor and John Hourigan and Paddy O’Kelly,” cried Cleary, almost in a scream.

  “Michael O’Connor, John Hourigan and Paddy O’Kelly,” repeated the priest slowly, as he sat down again in his chair, groaning as he sat.

  Then he placed his hands
again on his temples and rubbed them slowly down over his face, as if he were erasing some picture from his memory. A phantom.

  Cleary’s eyes now shone wildly. His body was rigid and he was ready to jump, he thought. His face twitched. But he felt a great relief. He had come to a decision. Nothing mattered to him now. He felt a great strength in his jaws where they joined the muscles of his neck and he didn’t have to blink his eyes, as he was in the habit of doing. His eyes remained wide open without effort and the lids seemed to be very cold and rigid.

  The priest’s attitude changed again. He began to lecture.

  Cleary thoughtlessly repeated the words of the lecture to himself after the priest, while his newly functioning mind planned other things.

  “In the first place, it’s against the rules to go into a shop. Secondly, it’s a grave sin to procure the means of sin for another soul. Thirdly, ’tis a …”

  And his mind exulted, ravenously devouring all sorts of new ideas, let loose into the whole cosmos of things without restraint. Free now and cunning and deceitful and securely hidden behind a thick wall of deceit, through which nothing could pierce. Free and alone and hating everything. Free to found a new cosmos, to fashion a new order of thought and a new God. Through hatred to a new love. Through terrible suffering in loneliness to a new light. Through agony to a new peace. The man was growing in him.

  The priest ceased. Then he said:

  “Send Michael O’Connor in to me. I will speak to you later about your penance.”

  Cleary bowed and left the room. He was no longer afraid entering the study. He went to the auxiliary desk and asked permission to speak to Michael O’Connor. He went to O’Connor and said: “Fr. Harty wants you.” He paid no heed to the threat that O’Connor uttered, He went to his desk and, covering his face with his hands, he smiled.

  In the morning he would run away, he thought.