Land

by Liam O'Flaherty

  “I must know what you are going to do with that man.”

  “You needn’t worry about that,” said Raoul as he took a black hat from a peg. “The man is gone about his business, whatever that may be. An astounding fellow. At one moment he was lying unconscious on the table. At the next, practically speaking, he was bounding away into the mist with the speed of a greyhound. I’d give a great deal to possess his strength and his energy. It’s really remarkable.”

  “Do you mean to say that you have let him go?” said Elizabeth.

  Raoul put on his hat, picked up a silver-mounted cane, threw back a corner of his cloak jauntily over his left shoulder and then turned towards his sister. He now looked rather like an actor in a melodrama.

  “What did you expect me to do?” he said coldly. “Turn him over to the police? I’ve been here a month now. During that time, I’ve tried to let you know as gently as possible what my attitude towards society is going to be, here in County Mayo. Now you force me to be more definite. I regret that very much, because I really dislike being brutal to women. I inherited this property from my father. So I am master here. I intend to be master, in the full meaning of the word. I don’t want any sort of interference with my authority, either on your part or on the part of anybody else. During the past twenty odd years, you have been kind enough to live here. You looked after my mother during her last years. You also tended my brother Julian during his protracted illness. For that I am indebted to you, without being in the least conscience-stricken for not having done it myself. My feeling of indebtedness towards you is not going to influence my conduct in the least, in so far as the exercise of my authority is concerned. You wrote and asked me to return from France after Julian’s death last January. Otherwise, I probably would never have come back. Now that I am back I propose to behave exactly as I behaved abroad. I am what is called nowadays a free-thinker, for lack of a more fitting definition. That means that I adopt a purely personal attitude towards ideas and the phenomena of life. Dear Lizzie, don’t force me to be brutal by trying to interfere with my conduct in any way. You know how cruel and uncompromising men of our family can be, when they feel that their authority is being flouted.”

  He raised his hat, bowed, went to the hall door and opened it.

  “May God forgive you,” Elizabeth said fervently as he was going out the door.

  Raoul looked back at her, raised his hat once more and bowed.

  “Thank you,” he said, as he closed the door after him very gently.

  Lettice came along the hall as Elizabeth was returning to the living-room. They looked at one another in silence as they passed. Then Lettice ran upstairs.

  Elizabeth went into the living-room, closed the door, picked up her skirts and walked with great dignity to her desk in the far corner. She folded her little shawl neatly and draped it over the back of her chair. She sat down, took up her quill pen and bent low over the sheet of paper she had been reading when disturbed by the first reports of gunfire. The quill pen began to touch each word lightly as she read.

  She suddenly dropped the pen on to the paper, put her elbows on the edge of the desk, covered her face with her hands and burst into tears.

  Chapter II

  District Inspector James Fenton, of the Royal Irish Constabulary, arrived in Manister at three o’clock in the afternoon to investigate the attack on Captain Butcher. He brought a force of twenty men, including Head Constable Reilly and his clerk, from the district headquarters at Clash. The party came on five jaunting cars. The horses were all flecked with foam when they halted outside the police barracks in the village square. They had galloped the whole distance of four miles.

  The village looked beautiful in the brilliant sunshine to which the morning mist had given place. It faced the ocean above a beach of yellow sand. It was built around a square, along a gentle slope that stretched from the beach-head to the ivied wall of Captain Butcher’s demesne. The houses were all gaily painted in maroon, orange, red and yellow colours. Steep granite cliffs that jutted far out to sea on the north and a flat peninsula to the south made a snug harbour. There was a stone pier. The white tower of a lighthouse stood on a high rock at the far end of the peninsula.

  Sergeant Geraghty, commander of the local police garrison, stood outside the door of his barracks to greet the district inspector. A group of the principal inhabitants accompanied him. Other groups of people, most of them being women and children, watched the proceedings from remote corners of the square. The majority of the village men had gone into hiding, fearful of being questioned about the ambush.

  “Good day, sir,” Geraghty said, saluting smartly as his superior dismounted.

  “Well! Geraghty,” Fenton said, “you’ve been having a little trouble.”

  “I’m afraid so, sir,” Geraghty said.

  Fenton set his legs wide apart, leaned forward slightly from his hips and nodded briefly in the direction of the other people that were gathered there. He was a tall, handsome Englishman of thirty-six. He belonged to the lesser gentry of his country, like most officers of the Constabulary at that period. He looked quite a dandy in the tight-fitting, dark-green uniform of his corps. His hair and complexion were very fair. His features were well shaped and firm. He bore the arrogant and almost contemptuous expression that seems to be inseparable from a police official. His blue eyes, however, looked troubled behind the mask of arrogance.

  Father Cornelius Costigan, the parish priest, stepped forward and saluted. He was a tall and powerfully built man of sixty-two, with curly grey hair and white eyebrows. A high silk hat was perched rakishly on the side of his large skull. Leaning his hip against a heavy walking stick, he addressed Fenton in a tone of solemn dignity.

  “Mr. Fenton,” he said, as loudly as if he were addressing an enormous throng, “I want to apologise, in the name of my parish, for the outrage committed this morning on Captain Butcher, by a person or persons unknown.”

  Fenton nodded. He felt annoyed by the loud tone in which Father Costigan had spoken. He considered it insulting.

  “I appreciate your expression of loyalty, Father Costigan,” he said, deliberately raising his own voice a little, just as when talking to a servant. “I feel sure that your feelings are shared, as you say, by the vast majority of your parishioners.”

  Father Costigan bowed and said:

  “Thank you, Mr. Fenton. I confidently hope that no hasty action on the part of the police, arising from this isolated act of revolutionary folly, will cause my people to change their attitude of obedience to constituted authority.”

  He raised his hat, bowed once more, turned sharply and walked away. His abrupt and almost unfriendly departure explained why he had spoken so loudly. He wanted to make himself heard by all the people in the square. In this way, he let his parishioners understand that he profoundly disapproved of the ambush. At the same time, his cold and formal attitude towards the district inspector and his abrupt departure, after issuing a warning against reprisals of any sort, saved him from suspicion of being a collaborator with the foreign government.

  Fenton tipped his helmet angrily with his rolled gloves in answer to the priest’s parting salute. He realised that he had been outclassed in the diplomatic exchange. Then he turned to greet the doctor, who had stepped forward to pay his respects.

  “Too bad about this attack on Captain Butcher,” Dr. McCarthy said. “It’s a miracle that the man escaped with his life. Even so, two ribs broken, along with a heavy fall from his horse, is no joke for a man of his age.”

  “Just two ribs?” Fenton said as he looked down patronisingly at the little doctor.

  McCarthy was very short and fat. Small blue eyes, sunk behind bulging red cheeks, gave him the appropriate nickname of “Piggy.” Although not yet turned forty, he was almost completely bald.

  “That was all the damage done, thank God,” he said, “but sure it’s more than enough for a man of his age, as I said before. He was saved by his steel vest. Otherwise, the poor ma
n would be laid out now, ready for skinning. He is a hard man, all right. When I saw him first, I thought it was apoplexy. He was redder in the face than a boiled lobster and he could hardly breathe. It was more shock than the broken ribs that ailed him. I took him up to Manister House in my trap. It’s no joke getting a big bullet smack against the heart and then being thrown from the back of a tall hunter that’s trotting at the time.”

  Frank McMahon, proprietor of the village hotel, touched his cap and addressed Fenton. He was a lean man of sixty-nine, with a very melancholy face. He had lost his left eye in the Crimean War.

  “I was present when he collapsed,” McMahon said. “It was after he left Mr. St. George’s house. He was riding across the little bridge near the entrance to the Lodge. He nearly fell out of the saddle. The horse stopped dead by instinct. Then his men came to his rescue. They took him between hands to the barracks. The mist was so thick at the time that you could hardly see your outstretched hand.”

  “A heavy mist?” Fenton said. “There is always something to prevent any eyewitness account of what actually happened during an outrage of this sort. Always plenty of details of what happened afterwards, though. Never a word concerning the commission of the crime itself.”

  He glanced angrily in the direction of Bartly McNamara, the principal shopkeeper in the village.

  “What about you, McNamara?” he said in an offensive tone. “Did you happen to be present?”

  McNamara was a pale-faced little man of fifty-seven, of very delicate frame, with weak eyes and a long, pointed nose that was nearly always afflicted with a cold. Clasping and unclasping his hands nervously under the tails of his cutaway black coat, he lowered his head and peered at the District Inspector over the rims of his spectacles. Then he suddenly stretched out his neck and spat on the ground at Fenton’s feet.

  “That’s all I care for you and your police,” he snarled, “or for the whole power of Queen Victoria’s army.”

  He made off towards his shop, half-running and half-walking. His shop was at the lower end of the square, just above the pier. He turned back now and again as he descended the slope, to wave a menacing lean hand in Fenton’s direction.

  “That for you and Queen Victoria,” he cried every time he turned back.

  Even the slightest sign of hostility, on the part of those with whom he came in contact, acutely affected Fenton’s extremely sensitive nature. He felt deeply mortified by the shopkeeper’s childish gesture. In fact, there was a faint constriction at the base of his throat and a quivering of the skin between his shoulder blades.

  Accompanied by Head Constable Reilly, his clerk and Sergeant Geraghty, he entered the barracks and made a preliminary investigation of the facts connected with the outrage. It proved that very little was known. Beyond what was reported to the police by Captain Butcher and his three servants, there was only the discovery of some spent cartridges on the scene of the ambush and of a row-boat floating empty among the cluster of islets off the shore.

  “Captain Butcher asked me to remind you, sir,” Sergeant Geraghty concluded, “that he wishes to consult you before the police take any further measures.”

  “I see,” said Fenton. “Well! Geraghty, we don’t seem to have much first-hand evidence.”

  Geraghty, a red-faced man with protruding blue eyes, made his body very rigid and erect.

  “It’s as plain as the snout on a ferret who did it,” he said in a solemn tone. “But the mystery is how he could manage under the circumstances to be in two places at the one time.”

  “You mean Michael O’Dwyer?” Fenton said in a low voice.

  “I’d give my Gospel oath,” Geraghty said, “that he’s the culprit. Trouble is that he was nowhere near the place at the time, unless he has wings. Or else he’s enchanted entirely. He went out fishing this morning in his nobby. All the boats from the village went to Galway Bay with him for the spring mackerel. They’ll be gone from three weeks to a month. Constable Flannery was on patrol at the pier when he left. A crowd of people walked down the lane by the shore of the peninsula, as far as the lighthouse rock, same as always, to see the boats go out to sea. Flannery said that O’Dwyer’s boat, the Killuragh Lass, was in the lead. O’Dwyer himself was at the helm. Flannery is certain of that. He was nearly as near to him as I am to you, sir, when the boat left her moorings. He stayed down at the point until the last boat was clear and turned south, tacking in search of the miserable thimble-full of wind there was to be had at the time. It was nearly dead calm. All the boats had a few big oars out and the men were pulling at them. Even so, tacking this way and that, a big nobby like the Killuragh Lass would be a long way from the scene of the crime, from that time till noon. It was only just break of day when they left. Flannery said that you could barely see your hand. Just break of day.”

  Ordering Head Constable Reilly to take charge, Fenton mounted his car to visit Captain Butcher. There was an unpleasant incident as he drove up the square towards the arched gateway leading through the ivied wall to the demesne drive. A number of village dogs, led by an old spaniel bitch, ran to attack the jaunting car. Unseen men began to whistle on a loud and sustained note of derision. The whistling continued until the car had passed through the gateway. Then it ended suddenly, as if all obeyed a given signal. The dogs also came to a halt at the gateway. Some of them, as a final gesture of contempt, cocked their hind legs against the sides of the arch.

  “They are all a pack of rebels,” Fenton muttered angrily.

  He glanced at the driver, a civilian hired for the occasion at Clash. In spite of the mild spring weather, the man had the collar of his huge overcoat turned up to the brim of his tattered hat. He sat very rigid and silent, with his back turned, crouching low over the horse’s crupper, as if he were trying to dissociate himself completely from his unwelcome passenger.

  “He, too, is a rebel,” muttered Fenton. “He hates me. My God! How can I go on living like this?”

  Then he started. His cheeks flushed. A wild light came into his eyes. He sat erect on the side of the car and sniffed. The yellow wheels were now rolling smoothly over the well-kept drive that ran between two lines of robust and handsome trees. The sap of the budding trees gave forth a drunkening perfume. He sniffed at this perfume several times. Then he threw back his head, closed his eyes and drew in a deep breath.

  “What does it matter?” he whispered to himself softly. “In a few minutes I am going to see the woman I love. Nothing else matters. For the sake of being near her, I’d suffer anything. Anything at all.”

  The car debouched from the tree-lined drive on to a broad green lawn, in the centre of which stood a grey square house of three stories. He looked towards the house, swallowed a lump in his throat and began to tremble.

  “My love! My love!” he whispered passionately.

  Great naked uplands rose eastwards beyond the house to the curved summits of the dark blue hills. The sunlit air was loud with the music of running mountain water and of birds.

  Chapter III

  Fenton was admitted by a youngish butler, whose expression was very solemn in keeping with the occasion. After a short delay in front of the hall mirror, to adjust his uniform and restrain his agitation, he followed the servant to the drawing-room. He seemed to be in complete mastery over himself as he crossed the enormous room, over a black and yellow carpet, to greet his hostess. As he bowed over her hand, even the most shrewd observer would find it difficult to believe that he was madly in love with her.

  “I can’t tell you how sorry I am, Mrs. Butcher,” he said. “It must have been a frightful shock. How is your husband now?”

  “Thank you,” Barbara said. “He is resting by doctor’s orders, but feeling quite comfortable. He asked me to send you to him immediately. He is very anxious to see you.”

  Four other guests gathered around Fenton in a state of great agitation, hurling questions and even abuse at the District Inspector. They were the local parson and his wife, a landowner called Dorothy Pigg
ott and a retired army officer called George Fitzwilliam. They were having lunch at the parsonage, making plans for a forthcoming charitable function, when they got news of the ambush. They hurried at once to Manister House. Representative of the decaying feudal class, then being destroyed by the rising power of capitalism, they felt angry and perplexed owing to the strange apathy towards their interests of a government that had hitherto been completely at their service. In their bewilderment, they were inclined to blame Fenton for the inability of the London authorities to show the former severity towards rebellion on the part of the peasants.

  “When is the Government going to act?” cried Major Fitzwilliam, a choleric old man in a tight-fitting belted jacket. “When are these dastardly crimes going to be stamped out?”

  “My tenants are roaming around my house at night, armed with guns,” Miss Piggott said in a voice made harsh by whisky.

  “Come, come,” said the parson, rubbing his palms together. “We mustn’t be too hasty in our judgments. The excellent constabulary is doing its utmost. At the same time, even the most moderate feel alarmed, when they see convicts on ticket of leave, like the notorious Michael Davitt, being allowed to preach sedition from public platforms.”

  “Parnell, a renegade member of our own class,” cried Major Fitzwilliam, “is far more dangerous than Davitt.”

  “The House of Peers is to blame,” said Miss Piggott. “They have surrendered in a most abject fashion to Gladstone and his crew.”

  “I’ll take you to my husband,” Barbara said, coming to Fenton’s rescue.

  She walked down the long room in front of him. Tall and of voluptuous proportions, she was now in the flower of her sensual beauty at the age of thirty-one. She had a strong face like a man. Her face would look cruel and probably repulsive were it not for the expression of deep sadness in her large golden eyes, that turned up slightly at the outside corners. Her complexion was tawny. There was always a faint glow in her cheeks, as if she were permanently excited by some hidden emotion. She wore her nut-brown hair in thick plaits at the back of her poll. She had on a yellow dress with a deep flounce of black satin to the skirt and black lace frills about the throat.