Irish Portraits

by Liam O'Flaherty

  “Well,” said Michael, “what do you think of them?”

  The jobber shook his head, took his pipe from his pocket and stuck his finger down the bowl. Then he tapped the ground three times with his stick and then leaned on it.

  It was a habit he had.

  “There is no fall to their flank,” he said.

  “No fall to their flank!” cried Michael, curling his nether lip outwards and wrinkling his forehead.

  “Why, where did you ever see a flank like that? And look at their thighs. Why, man, you could take shelter on a rainy day under their thighs. Look at that clear skin. Did you ever see an ear like that, as transparent as running water. There’s a snout for you, as well moulded as a blood mare’s nostrils. Why, man, they are -”

  “Now don’t be talking,” interrupted the jobber. “A pig is a pig and weight is weight. Where is their weight, will ye tell me?”

  “Is it their weight that’s troubling ye? Well, now, I am surprised that a knowledgeable man like yerself would talk that way. Sure ye’re not thinking that a sloppy, grease-swilling pig would weigh as heavy as a tight, well-balanced pig that’s fed with the hand on the cleanest sour milk and the best of potatoes and the best bran that could be bought for money. Listen to what I’m going to tell ye. There isn’t a loose inch in one of them three pigs. Their flesh is so packed that you couldn’t drive a spear through it What man? Is it out of your senses you are?”

  “Oh, hold yer whist, will ye, Michael Derrane,” said the jobber, moving out towards the door of the yard.

  “Don’t try to tell me anything about a pig.” He rushed back and hit one of the pigs on the hind hoof with his stick. “D’ye see that hoof?” he cried. “But ye’re young yet. Ye’re young, and ye have a lot to learn.”

  “What’s the matter with that hoof?” cried Michael and Mary together.

  “That’s the surest sign of a pig’s weight,” said the jobber, leaning learnedly on his stick with his crooked leg thrust out. “If a hoof is not spread, there is no weight in the pig.”

  “Arrah, go away with ye,” said Michael.

  “If he doesn’t like them, why doesn’t he leave them?” cried Mary. “I hope ye’re not thinking of selling them, Michael. Take care, would you. The bran will last another month.”

  “Listen here,” said Michael, striking his right fist into his left palm, “listen here.”

  “Now, wait a minute,” said the jobber, seizing his beard in his hand and looking at Michael, “I am a man of one word. Is fifteen pounds the price of the pigs as they stand or is it not?”

  “It isn’t,” said Michael shortly. “I wouldn’t sell them for a penny less than sixteen pounds, if I were so long without bread that I’d mistake a dogfish for a wheaten loaf.”

  “Well, now, that settles it,” said the jobber, spitting on the crutch of his stick and setting off out of the yard in an awful hurry

  Mary and Michael followed him out of the yard, and as they were shutting the door Mary whispered to Michael: “Don’t let him go.” Michael looked at her and smiled. The jobber paused half-way down the yard and turned about.

  “I’m telling ye, Michael Derrane,” he said, “you’ll be sorry to turn down my offer. There isn’t another jobber in the county will give ye within one pound of the money a week from today. And yer pigs show no signs that they are going to improve.”

  “There is nothing in that but fool’s talk,” Michael called out. “Why not be a man and give the sixteen pounds?”

  The jobber walked back hurriedly. He spat on his right hand and held it out to Michael

  “Are you going to break a gentleman’s word?” he said loudly. “Say fifteen pounds -”

  Michael turned away from the outstretched hand and shook his head. The jobber waved his stick and turned to Mary.

  “My good woman,” he said, “I have done my best, what more can I do? Although I would hate to think I would leave your mother’s daughter’s house without buying them.”

  “Oh, wait now,” said Mary, smiling coquettishly, “sure, as the men can’t arrange the bargain, maybe a woman could step in and settle the difference. Don’t go back on a woman’s word and split the difference.”

  “Spoken like a woman,” cried the jobber, stamping on the ground with his foot. “I was never a man to go against a word from the lips of a beautiful woman. Split it is as far as I am concerned. Are you satisfied, Michael?”

  “Put it there,” cried Michael, holding out his hand.

  “The bargain is made. Fifteen pound ten it is.”

  The three of them went into the pigsty again and the jobber put his mark on the pigs’ backs with his scissors. Then he hurried away waving his stick, glad he had got the pigs for ten shillings less than he had intended to give. Michael and Mary entered the cabin.

  “Oh, Michael,” said Mary, “now we can go to town on Thursday and I’ll get everything we want and we’ll have a great time, won’t we? Now what’s the matter, Michael? What is it you’re thinking about?”

  Michael was looking at the ground with his hands behind his back. He was scowling at the floor.

  “It’s nothing,” he said, shrugging his shoulders. “I was wondering whether Peter Mullen would have given another ten shillings if I had held out a little longer. I’d hate to have it said that he bested me. But, sure, the ten shillings won’t matter, Mary. Give me ten kisses instead.”

  The Fireman’s Death

  Eight bells tolled slowly in the engine room. He marched down the iron ladder into the stokehold. The others marched rapidly in front of him, their light-shod feet pattering, their covered left hands rushing along the hot rails with a slipping sound. His feet stumbled heavily down. His hand trembled on the rail.

  He was sick. He should be in bed. But he had been a fireman for twelve years without missing a watch. His pride said: “Die before your fires rather than let a fellow-worker shed his body’s sweat for you.”

  When he landed in the stokehold the hot fumes struck him in the chest. He gasped, caught his eyes with his fists and staggered. His stomach muscles contracted. They crowded around him in pity, urging him to go back to his bunk. He straightened himself fiercely and thrust them away with a swinging movement of his arms. “I’d die sooner than that,” he growled.

  He marched to the fires. His thin outward-curving calves were visible passing the bright glow from the ashpits of the furnaces. His tall, slim body and his bony head were hidden in the gloom.

  The retiring watch went up the ladder to the deck. Their faces were black. Their eyes were white. Their sodden trousers clung to their sweating thighs. They went up the ladder groaning curses on the sea, the fires, God, and the rich men who make slaves toil in the bowels of ships.

  It was very dark. Ashes and coal-dust floated in a thick mass through the sluggish air. The electric lights glimmered like dim candles. The bulky forms of the boilers loomed out of the darkness. The engines thudded. A dull volcanic murmur came from the hidden fires.

  He stripped before his fires and put his sweat-rag in his belt. Then he seized the long swaying rake to clean his low fire. He opened his furnace door. His body flashed into the firelight. He was naked to the waist. The ribs rose in ridges on his fleshless breast. The skin lay taut along his protruding jaws. His eye sockets were black. His biceps were rugged knots interlaced with sickly blue veins.

  He stooped forward and thrust in the rake. A wave of heat emerged, striking him in the face. He reeled before it for a moment. Then he made a great effort and stood erect. A cold sweat poured out all over his body. That terrified him. Had the others seen? He looked cautiously. They were working furiously. They had not seen. Good.

  He swore a blasphemous oath and muttered to himself: “I am not going to give in.” He hauled out the red-hot ashes and the jagged cakes of spent coal that clung like glue to the fire-bars. He finished one side. He changed over the live coals from the other side. He cleaned the other side. All finished. He handed the shovel to the trimmer to coal the
bars. Then he walked stiffly to the ventilator.

  God! Not a breath of wind came down the dusty gaping tube from the sun-baked deck. His lungs strained like inflated bladders to catch the hot air that struggled down his parched throat slowly.

  And there was a great inward heaving of his sides like the panting of a tired horse.

  His whole body murmured: “Water, water, water.” But his fierce mind would not listen to the cry. He must feed the fires.

  Suddenly his head seemed to swirl round and round. Madness seized him. He wrinkled up his mouth and nose. Then he laughed harshly. Rasping sounds filled the stokehold, furnace doors opening, shovels grating along the iron deck, black coal being shot in among the licking flames. It was the madness of conflict. His weakness vanished. He dashed at his shovel, seized it, spat and opened the door of his right-hand fire. “Give it to her, boys,” yelled the potbellied engineer, as he rushed into the stokehold, “Steam is falling. Steam is falling. Give her a shake.”

  The great fires roared and shot out whirling shafts of yellow flame to meet each shovelful of black coal that was hurled into them. He talked wildly to the fires as he hurled in the coal. He called them foul names and put out his tongue at them. He glared at them and hurled himself at them savagely. They had been his enemies for twelve years. He piled coal on them, more, more, until he smothered them under a black glistening mound. Their vast roar was submerged beneath the already reddening black mound. Then he dropped his shovel again and stepped away.

  Ha! There was strength in him still.

  But what was this? He could not hear. Not a sound. And everything was dim. Somebody was standing in front of him making a noise. He gripped his eyes and peered. He saw a mouth wide open and moving, spitting black coal-dust from its blood-red tongue as it spoke. That was the bloody Irishman from the starboard boiler. Telling him he looked like a corpse and should go on deck. By the slippery heels of the bald-headed Chilian deck-swabber! He ground his teeth and mustered all his strength. “Leave me alone,” he yelled. “I’m a Glasgow fireman and I never give in. And I NEVER will. Leave me alone.”

  His voice ended in a shriek.

  He groped for the slice. His hands clawed at it blindly, for he could see nothing in the gloom. The long thick iron bar swung towards him as he pulled at it. It pushed against his shoulder and he staggered back three paces. “Steady on,” he muttered. He crouched and raised it, trembling all over. Then he groped to the fires. He opened the door and thrust the wedge-shaped point of the slice at the base of the mound. He ran it along the bars to the very end. Then he drew himself together. He must lift that mound and break it in the middle, in order to give air to the flames. He jumped with a loud gasp and landed crosswise, face downwards, on the slice, his two hands clenching the slice against his hollowed stomach. He almost lost consciousness. A terrific pain ran from his stomach to his head, making all his body numb. But his brain still thought of the fire and the mound that must be broken. It was not broken. The slice had not left the bars. It had merely bent slightly downwards from the middle to the end, under the impact of his body. His feet reached for the deck. He stood erect. He moved backwards two paces slowly, crouching low, all his sinews rigid, his eyeballs protruding.

  Then uttering a savage yell, he jumped again on the slice. He landed once more upon it crosswise, his two hands clenching it against his hollowed stomach. The slice rose by the head. The mound broke. A huge scar appeared. Then flames shot out. With a roar they covered the mound and whirled about the door, licking the air and darting out along the slice towards the hanging body of the fireman.

  He did not move. His body hung limply across the slice. His toes almost tipped the deck. His eyes were fixed. His lips were white. He was dead.

  The Doctor’s Visit

  Maurice Dowling lay flat on his back in his little narrow bed. He gripped the bedclothes in his two hands and held his hands up under his chin. He lay so flat and he was so slim that his figure was barely outlined against the bedclothes. But his feet stuck up at the end of the bed because the blankets were too short. His feet, covered by a rather soiled white cotton sheet, pressed against the black iron support. A yellow quilt lay sideways across his body, all crumpled up in the middle. The hospital attendant had arranged it several times during the night and warned Dowling each time not to touch it again, but Dowling always kicked it away from his chest. He wouldn’t touch it with his hands to throw it away and he wouldn’t endure having it near his mouth. He had an idea that the quilt was full of fleas.

  His head, half buried in the white pillow, was very thin. His hair was black and cropped close. But even though it was cropped close, it was not stiff and bristly as close-cropped hair usually is. It lay matted on his skull in little ringletty waves. His face was deadly pale and his high cheekbones protruded in an ugly fashion from his hollow cheeks. His large blue eyes kept darting hither and thither restlessly, never stopping for a moment. And his large mouth also moved restlessly.

  Dowling was terribly afraid of the patients who were with him in the hospital ward. He had just come in the previous midnight. This was his first morning in the ward. All the patients were awake now waiting for the doctor’s visit at ten o’clock. Ever since it became light and he could see their faces he became seized with a great horror of them. During the night he had heard queer sounds, wild laughter, whisperings and bestial articulations, but he thought he was merely suffering from the usual nightmares and noises in his head. Now, however, that he could see them he knew that it could not be a freak of the imagination. There were about forty of them there. His own bed was in the centre of the ward, near a large black stove that was surrounded by wire netting on all sides. Then both sides of the ward were lined with low iron bedsteads, little narrow beds with yellow quilts on them. All the beds were occupied except two by the glass door in the middle of the left-hand side of the ward, the door leading on to the recreation lawn. And the two patients who slept in those two beds were sitting in their grey dressing gowns at a little bamboo table playing chess. At one end of the ward there was a large folding door and the other end was covered by a window through which the sun was shining brightly. Through the window, trees and the roofs of houses could be seen. Beyond that again, against the blue sky line, there were mountain tops.

  Suddenly a patient began to cough and a silence fell on all the other patients. Tim Delaney had begun his usual bout of coughing preparatory to the doctor’s visit. He did it every morning. The other patients enjoyed the performance. But Dowling was horrified by it. It gave him a nauseous feeling in his bowels, listening to the coughing. Tim Delaney was sitting up in bed, his spine propped against the pillow and all the bedclothes gathered up around his huddled body. He wore a white nightshirt with a square yellow patch between the shoulder-blades. His bed was only five yards away from Dowling on the right-hand side and Dowling could see his face distinctly. The face skin was yellow. The skull was perfectly bald. The eyes were blue and red around the rims on the insides. The whole head was square and bony like a bust of Julius Caesar’s head. When he coughed he contorted and made a movement as if he were trying to hurl himself forward and downward by the mouth. His cough was hard and dry. Delaney had an idea that he was a cow and that he had picked up a piece of glass while eating a bunch of clover. According to himself the piece of glass had stuck in his throat and he could not swallow any solid food on that account. “That fellow must be mad,” thought Dowling, as he looked at the queer way Delaney opened his jaws and bared his yellow teeth when he coughed. Dowling experienced the sensation of being gradually surrounded by black waves that presently crowded up over his head and shut out everything. A buzzing sound started in his ears and he forgot Delaney. He stared at his upright feet without blinking. A fixed resolution came into his head to tell the doctor everything. He decided that it was positively no use trying any longer to keep up the pretence of being ill. He was better off outside even if he died of starvation. He could not possibly endure the horror of being i
n such an environment. He had schemed to get into hospital in order to get something to eat and now that he was in hospital he could not eat. But then he had not expected to get into such a hospital, among these terrible wild-eyed people, these narrow sordid-looking beds, this dreary bare ward, with a big fat man in a blue uniform and a peaked laced cap, continually walking up and down, shaking a bunch of keys behind his back and curling his black moustache. And the food was so coarse. He had been given a tin mug full of sickly half-cold tea and a hunk of coarse bread without butter for breakfast. Naturally he couldn’t touch it, desperate as his circumstances had been for the past six months. Instead of that he had expected to get into a hospital where there were pretty nurses, who smiled at a man and whose touch was soothing and gentle. He had expected quiet, rest, sleep, delicate food, treatment for the heaviness behind his eyes and his insomnia and the noises he heard in his ears. It was cruel torture to suffer from hunger, to starve in his tenement room, alone and without anybody to whom he could talk when he felt ill at night. But anything was better than this. He would endure anything if he could only be alone again. So he thought, looking at his feet.

  Then the attendant came up to Delaney’s bed and shook his keys in Delaney’s face. Delaney stopped coughing. The attendant clasped his hands behind his back and marched slowly up the ward towards the folding door through which the doctor would enter at any moment. All the patients cast suspicious and lowering glances at the attendant as he passed them. The attendant examined each bed with a melancholy and fierce expression in his blue eyes. He seemed to be totally unconscious of the malicious glances directed towards him. In silence he would point a finger at a tousled sheet or a blanket or a piece of paper lying on a coverlet. The patient in question would tidy the place pointed at with jerky eagerness. Not a word was spoken. A deadly silence reigned in the ward. There was an air of suspense.

  Suddenly the silence was broken by the sound of loud laughter coming from the outside of the folding door through which the doctor was to enter. Then the two wings of the door swung open simultaneously. The doctor and his attendant nurse appeared, each inviting the other to enter first. The nurse, a tall, slim, pretty, red-haired young woman of twenty-six, with a devilishly merry twinkle in her blue eyes, held her case sheets in a bundle under her right arm, while she held the door open with her left hand. The doctor, Francis O’Connor, was a middle-sized, middle-aged fat man, dressed in a grey tweed suit, with a gold watch-chain across the top button of his waistcoat. He waved his stethoscope at the nurse with his left hand, while the short fat white fingers of his right hand pushed back his side of the door. His jovial fat face was creased with laughter and little tears glistened in his grey eyes.