I set my teeth, and bore it; forcing myself to see that she was sorry and was most generously saying so. But to hear any mention of Mary on her lips was torture. And when, presently, over supper, she began to ask me questions about Mary, what she looked like, was she very clever, and so on, it was all I could do not to smash my cup and leave the table. Muriel’s tact and reticence had limits, as I knew before the evening was out.
But she was insistent about my holiday, and, having once agreed, I had to go. I did not want to go anywhere. I wanted to be away, by myself, yet I was afraid to leave her. All energy, all initiative had been drained out of me. Muriel left me alone for a couple of days more; then she produced the doctor. I submitted to be pulled about and hammered and sounded. He told me I must get away, and certified me to the Department for three weeks’ sick leave, in addition to the days I had had. Before he left the house, he had exacted from me the promise that I would go in two days’ time.
I went out by myself that evening, and walked the quays till I was tired. Finally I turned into a nice-looking little pub I didn’t know, and sat gratefully down to a pint of porter. There was a man sitting opposite, of sixty-five or thereabouts, with a red face, a square frill of beard, and something vaguely nautical about his cut. He looked up from his newspaper, gave me a good day, and commented appropriately on the weather. I agreed, and for a while he did not say any more.
Suddenly he pushed his paper across to me, and pointed with a thick red forefinger.
“Look at that,” he commanded me. “There—the third down. Now then—did ye ever see the like of that?”
I looked obediently at the column he indicated—it was “Situations Vacant”—and read the third one down. I did not see anything very remarkable about it.
“Read it out aloud,” he urged me. “Give it the sound of your voice.”
“Canal Boat Master required,” I read: “sober, honest: with crew if possible: young man preferred”: and then the box number. I looked up, and found his eye fixed expectantly upon me.
“Well?” he enquired.
“What about it?” I asked.
“Did ye ever see the like?” And he laughed scornfully.
“What’s wrong with it exactly?”
“What’s wrong with it? Man, man. Take another look at it. Give yourself a chance. Exercise your faculties on it.”
I supposed him to be drunk, and, to please him, I looked solemnly once again at the advertisement.
“I’m sorry,” I said at last. “I must be very stupid; but I don’t see anything wrong.”
“Ye don’t. Well, well. I’m disappointed in ye.”
He wasn’t drunk, I decided. His eyes were friendly.
“Explain it to me,” I begged him.
“It’s a matter o’ deduction. A plain matter o’ deduction. First of all, the advertisement was inserted by a woman. That stares ye in the face.”
“How?”
“Look at what she’s asking. ‘Sober, honest.’ Sure no man would be such a fool as to put that. Who ever saw or imagined a sober Canal Boat Master—that is to say, a sane one? How would ye remain*at the wheel from Rialto Bridge to Hazelhatch, on a hot summer’s day, passing all the sleepy pubs on the canal banks with your friends hailing ye and asking ye ashore and waving tankards at ye and holding up the eels they caught, with maybe an odd pike —how would ye do that and retain your sanity? It’s impossible. Besides, what matter if the Master is drunk or sober on a canal?
“’Honest’, too! Sure how would any Master resist them white ducks that go swimming in front so exasperatingly? It must be a woman. No man with any knowledge at all would commit such a folly to print.
“Shall I tell ye what else I deduce from this advertisement?”
“Do,” I said.
“It’s the work of a widda woman. Do ye know how I get that? ‘With crew if possible.’ It’s a widda woman, left with her husband only a week under the grass. Either she’s a divil by nature, and so the old Master and crew cleared out at once on her: or, more likely, they started taking charge and tried to bully her, and she turned stubborn and independent and gave them the sack. That’s about the size of it. ‘Sober, honest, with crew if possible.’ Well, the poor woman, she’ll be a long time waiting.”
“You seem to know a lot about the subject,” I said.
He acknowledged the tribute with a wave of his pipe.
“Why wouldn’t I? I’ve conversed with Canal Boat Masters on many things, and found them a race apart. Mind ye, I’m talking of this country. I never spoke to a Saxon Canal Boat man, and have no sort of knowledge of them as a body. Personal observation has given me the idea that a man and a woman and a nondescript dog manage the canal boats which adorn England: and the boats are poor looking vessels. They haven’t that portly Dutch appearance which ours have, and I can’t imagine what the living quarters must be like—as regards accommodation, I mean. The English boats are narrow, unstable, and much too clean. Apart from observation, my knowledge of them is limited to two books, The Old Curiosity Shop and Our Mutual Friend. Did ye ever read them?”
“I did.”
“Well, then, you will confirm that in neither of these books do Canal Boat men appear in an amiable light. In fact, my recollection is they might well have been blood relations of W. Sikes, Esquire, or the more volatile Quilp.”
“You’re a well read man, I see.”
He waved his pipe again.
“But Irish Masters I do know, and, as I said, they are a race apart. They are a decent body of men, with little ambition, and seldom cruel to women. They like dogs and are not particular about the breed. Whoever saw a pure bred dog on an Irish canal boat? I tell ye, Mister, they are simple, these men, yet knowledgeable as hell, and know every string of passion, every shred of desire, as well as you or I or the Pope or Pierpoint Morgan. Oh, ye may laugh: but it’s true.”
“How do you get your great knowledge of these men?” I asked him.
“By association. I know a great many of them intimately.”
“Do you meet them here?”
“Ah no. That’s no way to know them. There’s but one way of knowing a Canal Boat Master intimately, and that’s to sail with him. The best holiday in the world, and the restfullest. Quiet motion, frequent stops, damn all to do, and a judge of human nature to converse with. What more could you want? Unless you’re one of the sort that’d go to the Isle of Man and kick up a racket. And ye don’t look that sort.”
“No,” I said. “I don’t want to kick up a racket. But look here. Tell me some more. I didn’t know you could sail on a canal boat. How do you persuade the Master to take you?”
“Simplicity itself, sir. You just get a docket from the owners. It helps, of course, if you make the acquaintance of the Master too.”
“You’re a good friend,” I said: and I told him I’d been sick, and had been ordered a holiday and didn’t know where to go.
He took me in charge at once. Let me leave the whole thing to him, and he would arrange it. Then, if I could meet him at the same place the following evening, he would introduce me to the Master he had selected.
Muriel looked rather blank when I told her, but she was glad to have me decided, and she was soon pretending to be enthusiastic about the plan.
I met my Dickensian friend the following evening. He wore an air of mystery, and put his finger to his lips, indicating a tall red-bearded man of dignified aspect, who was drinking in a markedly solitary fashion over in the corner.
“Not my first choice for ye,” he whispered to me. “That was Captain Shannon, but he left at four today, and couldn’t wait. Ye’d have had a grand time with him. But Captain O’Malley here is a great character. He’ll do you well. He’s a bit slow to open up, but he’ll do you well. He’s in drink at the minute, but never mind him. Wait now, till I select a favourable moment to present ye.”
To my consternation, he proceeded to stalk the Captain as if he were some sort of wild animal, tiptoeing up behind him and
making gestures of warning or encouragement to me with the expressiveness of a ballet dancer. There were only three other men in the pub, and they left off drinking and watched the performance open-mouthed.
Fortunately, Captain O’Malley appeared to be unaware of the approach. He sat staring rigidly in front of him, holding his glass as if someone would snatch it from him if he let go. My guide, of whose suitability I was becoming doubtful, stood poised for several seconds just behind his right shoulder, and then, judging the moment opportune, slid dexterously into a chair beside him, and smiled in his face with an air of arch surprise.
“Here I am, Jem,” he announced.
Captain O’Malley made the barest acknowledgment, a slight movement and a grunt.
“I have brought the gentleman”—here began a frantic pantomime to me—“who is to sail with you tomorrow.”
This stirred the Captain to even less enthusiasm. He fixed me with a piercing and bloodshot eye, and grunted again. My friend talked a good deal, referring to him all the time as the Master, and the Master presently allowed himself to be ordered a drink. At least, my friend ordered it and I paid for it, while the Master remained oblivious to the whole matter. I daresay he drank it, later on: but we did not wait to see.
My guide made signs. I interpreted them, and got up to go.
“Very well then, Jem. Mf. Mangan joins you tomorrow at the Rial to Bridge at eleven o’clock.”
The Master grunted: and we had to leave it at that.
“He’s not very communicative,” I said, as we walked away.
“A bit slow to open up,” my guide admitted. “But a wonderful man. A fountain of experience, once he starts.”
Well, I thought, it’s no great harm if he doesn’t start. I was resigned to any course that removed from me the need to make decisions. I had not the energy to make new plans. So, the next day, in brilliant, scorching sunlight, tempered with a breeze from the sea, I presented myself at the Rialto Bridge, armed with a letter from Messrs. Figgins Bros., of Rathangan, authorising the Master to carry me on the G 341 for the full extent of her voyage.
The G 341 was a fine big barge, cleaner than most, without the gaudy painting you see on so many an English barge, but very neat and in good repair. The Master was sitting gravely on an upturned bucket, with such dignity of manner as to make that homely seat appear a throne. He got up when I appeared, but gave me no sign of recognition. A young red-headed lad approached, took my bag, and led me aboard. I noticed that he avoided the space near the rudder as if it were poison. A dog came up, sniffed at me, wagged his tail briefly, and went away into the bows again.
It was neat and box-like below, but hot. I came out again at once, and was amazed to find myself infected by the red-headed lad’s care to avoid the space by the rudder. I went forward, and sat on a queer kind of a locker which jutted out conveniently in such a way that I could lean my elbow on the gunwale. A third man seemed to be in charge of the horse: he was doing something to the tow-rope. A fourth appeared with some parcels, which I took to be provisions. Preparations were made silently and quickly, the Master never once moving nor showing any awareness of them. Then the old horse started up, the rope jerked out of the water, spraying out a shower of glistening drops, tightened, and we began to move. The dog emerged from some lair, trotted aft, and sat beside the Master. He stayed there as long as we were in motion. When we stopped, or were in a lock, he went back to his lair, or trotted around the gunwale in the aimless way common to all barge dogs.
The Master did not relax an atom of his dignity as we slowly slid along. He smoked fiercely, and attended to the rudder with a concentration worthy of a pilot taking an ocean liner up the Clyde. It was powerfully hot. The sun came up off the boards, and dazzled on the water. I took off my coat—then, if you believe me, I looked round quickly and guiltily, to see would the Master disapprove.
This won’t do, I said to myself. You must get on human terms with the man, or the voyage will be a farce. I looked at him again after a few minutes, and saw that his brow was glistening with sweat: but he did not relax. The red-headed lad brushed by me once or twice, moving about on some obscure duties, but he would not let his eye be caught. Once the man in the bows said something to the horse, otherwise for about three hours I don’t think any of us uttered a word. Not till we were well out among the fields, and the last signs of town and suburbs had faded from our sight, did the Master unbend. As we drew into the sultry placidity of the seventh lock, I looked around, and saw with surprise that he had opened his coat and was mopping his forehead.
He met my eye. “Warm,” he said.
“You’re right.”
I got up, and stretched. Now or never, I thought; but he became grimly absorbed in the business of getting into the lock. The moment he relaxed, I edged up to him and offered him a drink.
He gave me a sideways glance under stiff eyebrows, made a gesture which I completely failed to interpret, and took hold of the rudder. Feeling rebuffed, and rather angry, I moved away. Damn it, if he won’t be friendly, I thought, let him do the other thing. But my heart was low. I needed people to be friendly to me.
He was very grave in the lock, and eyed severely the spectators who were lounging on the top and watching the men open the sluices. Then I saw that there was maybe a reason for his lack of response. As the tons and tons of angry water rose and surged about us, sending the G 341 higher and higher, he never budged an inch, but now and then gave the rudder a skilled jerk which kept the barge’s nose at the spot where the lock gates open.
At long last we came level with the upper waters, whereupon the Master with great dignity surrendered the rudder to the redheaded lad. Then, to my astonishment, he stepped over to me.
“Now,” he said mildly. “I’m ready if you are.”
My heart gave a leap of joy, and I scrambled to my feet. We stepped ashore, he waving me on first with great ceremony, and he drank three pints with ease and grace. He didn’t say much, but his manner was wholly friendly. I found out soon that his stiffness of demeanour was due to two things. The town galled him, he was in awe of it, and could not be natural till it was left behind: and he was shy of strangers. In any case, he was given to long silences, and never embarrassed by them: a characteristic I blessed many times on the voyage. You could be with him, companionably with him, and think your own thought: and that is high praise of any man.
My soul expanded under his friendliness, and before we resumed our voyage I had bought him several clay pipes and some tobacco, as well as laying in a few trifles to embellish our dinner. His pleasure at the attentions was obvious, though he said little. Isn’t it a queer thing, in parenthesis, that all my life I’ve never had difficulty with simple people, that even at my youngest and callowest I could approach them and could please them, whereas with people of higher station, or conventional people, I blundered for years, and can only meet them now because I don’t give a damn what they think of me?
Well—so was founded my friendship with that remarkable man, James O’Malley, Canal Boat Master, one of the soundest and strangest I’ve met in my life’s pilgrimage, and, I can tell you, I’ve met a few. I knew him for years, and many’s the voyage I had with him, and he never ceased to astonish me. He was indeed, as his friend in the pub claimed for him, a fountain of experience.
As soon as we got on board again, he bade me join him aft. The space round the rudder he regarded as a species of quarter deck, and he kept firm to his prerogatives. No one except the dog and myself was allowed there for the whole voyage, unless for the purpose of steering. And, as I soon learned to do that, in the open country, at least, and was willing, there was less and less need for anyone else.
At the time of our trip, the Master would have been about sixty years of age. He had the most surprising mind, and the oddest views I ever met in any man who could read. It was years before any mention of Einstein had reached us, much less Ouspensky, but to the Master, beyond all doubt, time was relative. Present, past, and remo
te past seemed to co-exist in his mind, and it played queer tricks with space as well. To hear him talk, you would think Dan O’Connell was still alive, and Cromwell only dead yesterday. He told me that Mick M’Quaid was a real man, and no myth, and that gunpowder was first made in Rathangan. A confusion in his mind telescoped and combined the achievements of Springheeled Jack, Jack Sheppard, and Jack the Ripper: he called the composite figure Jack. His sense of place was meticulous and map-like for places he knew, and fantastic for the far greater number he did not. He thought that Copenhagen was in America, and that the Golden Horn and Cape Horn were the same.
All these topics arose in conversation that first afternoon, and later on at dinner. We ate under cover, off a tiny table with collapsible legs, which the red-headed lad—I heard he was the Master’s son—dug out from some place in the nether gloom. Our table was half in darkness, with the evening sky glowing through the hatch-like opening behind the Master’s head. He wouldn’t have a lamp. He said it made the place too hot.
The Master ate a terrific meal, finishing up with vast quantities of tinned milk, which he poured out on his plate and larrupped up by the spoonful. He sucked his lips vigorously, and pulled out his tobacco tin.
“I’m a man of strange tastes,” he said, “and I’m not ashamed of them.”
He looked at me fixedly as he said it. I forget what I replied, but it satisfied him. He lit one of my clay pipes, puffed strongly, and asked me if I sang. I replied that it would give me great pleasure to hear him sing. He took out his pipe, and treated me to “The Glen of Aherlow” in such a variety of tunes and tones as to bewilder me altogether. His voice was strong, and in the confined space it roared in my ears till I felt I must get up and run out, or my head would burst. Every now and then, on this trip, some little thing happened, like that, to show me what a strain I had been through, and how far I was from normal. Usually my nerves are strong, and no amount of noise can disconcert me. Another thing, which must be due to the same reason: my memories of this trip are fragmentary. Whole pieces and aspects of it I have forgotten altogether. I can remember the man who looked after the horse, but only on the first day. There was another man, whom I can hardly remember at all. And a whole lot of details have gone too. I can’t tell you where they put the horse at night. I know that often we went on till very late. Every night except one, when the rain drove me in, I slept on deck, and to that I attribute the quick recovery in health I made. There’s no joy to be compared with sleeping out at night, with waking up and seeing the stars over your head. You must have comfortable lying, though, and I had it on that deck, with a whole heap of things between me and the boards, and very little above. Though a chill rose from the water, especially at dawn, the gunwale, against which I slept, seemed to keep it off me.
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