The Master’s song broke off. I waited a few seconds, in dread that he would start another. Then I suggested nervously that we might go on deck. He rose without a word, and we went out. The air was sweet, and the boundaries of the world rushed apart and receded to an infinity of fields and sky. The Master assumed a severe expression, retired into himself, and summoned one of the crew. I went forward, and looked out over the still fields. The broad, blunt bow advanced gently over the water, so gently as not to break it, but to push up a gleaming smooth roll that did not even bubble till it was forced farther away on either side by the stout wooden shoulders of the barge. Dim shapes appeared under the water, but, before I could see clearly what they were, the bow obliterated them. I watched and dreamed for maybe an hour, the dusk stealing over the fields, and sank into a trance, lulled by the peace of the evening and the steady, sleepy motion.
Presently I was recalled to realise that someone was standing beside me. It was the red-headed lad. He had been too tactful to rouse me, but just stood there till I came to myself.
“Me da says,” said he, “will ye go aft and bear him company.”
I went back gladly, with an inward smile at the formality that sent a messenger fifty feet where a hail would do. The Master waited till his son and the crew were well out of hearing. Then he cleared his throat, spat overboard, and plunged without preamble into a long yarn, which to the best of my recollection was a version of Jack the Giantkiller and all the other Jacks, mixed up in some mysterious way with a banshee. He had an astounding variety of these yarns, mythology, fairy tales, history, God knows what, all jumbled together after some recipe of his own, on the same principle as his views on time and space. I heard one at least for every night I spent with him. I can’t describe to you what a queer experience it was to hear those naïf farragos, with their echoes of the morning of European thought, told in expressionless, unfaltering monotone by this big bearded man, as he sat at the tiller with the deepening violet sky and the stars behind his shoulders. There was no moon that first night, and it became so dark that we could hardly see the canal banks. It seemed that we were sliding along in nothingness, between sky and earth, out of place and out of time, with not a sound to be heard but the steady clop clop of the horse, invisible somewhere ahead of us, startling an occasional frog and making him plop into the water, and setting spectral cows mooing in the fields.
The Master dropped his voice to a contemplative note, and began to talk about women.
“I’d been married above a year,” he confided, and broke off short. “Are you married?”
“I am.”
“Well. You’ll appreciate it.” I don’t know whether he meant marriage, or the story. “I’d been married above a year, and I got out and walked home along the bank—I live by the canal—and I walked home to see if my wife would be waiting for me. I was a hot young lad then, and I thought a deal of women. Well, I won’t deny I was a bit top-heavy, do ye see, and coming along in the moonlight, not far from my own door, what do I see only a woman standing up to her waist in the water. I couldn’t see the face on her, so I took a look closer, and it looked like my wife, so I waded in and led her all dripping to the bank, hard by my own door.” He stopped, and puffed at his pipe, as if the story was finished.
“And was it your wife?” I asked.
“Indeed and begod no.”
“Who was it, then?”
“It was my sister-in-law. Sister to my wife.”
“Yes?” I said: but he disregarded the inflection in my voice, and we sat smoking for maybe a quarter of an hour beneath the stars before he spoke again.
“My wife was being attended by the nurse at the time with the red lad ye see above there. After a bit, this one I was after fetching out of the canal, she threw up a bucket of water, and cried a bit, and what do ye think she said to me?”
“I’ve no idea.”
“She asked me to go away with her. Wasn’t that a conundrum now, and me married to her own sister? Maybe she had drink taken, but that’s what she said, and she standing there wet from the waist. A great strapping woman she was.”
He stopped again. My interest was fairly roused now, and I catechised him, to find out what had led to this watery drama, and how the situation developed. But that was all I could get out of him.
Then a thing happened which has happened to me so often —there are many instances of it in this story, but it has happened to me a hundred times for every one of them—that I suppose I must provoke it or contribute to it myself in some way. That is, when a person breaks in on my thought or says to me something dead apt to what I am going through or have been through. The Master did it now.
“Did you ever want to kill your wife?” he asked.
I thought I was going to faint, but I recovered in an instant.
“Yes,” I said. “But I didn’t do it.”
He nodded. “I wanted to kill mine once.”
“What did she do?”
“She aggravated me.”
“What did you do?”
“I took a walk by the canal and smoked till I was cool.”
I waited for him to question me, but he didn’t. He seemed to have no curiosity at all about people’s motives. In all the stories he told me, and they were of inexhaustible variety, he recorded the behaviour of the persons concerned with acceptance or with simple surprise, and never sought to go deeper.
A long silence followed his last utterance. At last he rose, knocked out his pipe, and to my complete astonishment began to dance upon the deck. For a man of his size and build, he was as neat on his feet as any I have seen.
While I was still staring, he stopped.
“That’s the curse of this life,” he said. “You don’t get exercise.” He performed another few steps, then looked all over the heavens.
“Well,” he said. “The world goes straight and crooked.” He sat down again beside me, and went on as if nothing had happened.
“She’s a good woman.” I gathered he meant his wife. “I’ve seen a good many in my time, but I never met her equal.”
He then detailed some of her intimate charms in a way that would have been positively coarse, if it had not been so simple and matter-of-fact.
“I tell you this,” he concluded. “I don’t want anyone to shut my eyes only herself. She’d steal the colours off a butterfly with the lightness of her hand, and she’s a martyr to fleas.”
I looked at him, but he was completely serious, staring straight ahead of him into the darkness.
“It’s a bad sign if there’s no fleas in a house. Fleas are healthy. Where folk have the falling sickness and the pox and the consumption, there’s ne’er a flea will go near them. But if you have a woman that draws fleas, she’ll keep herself healthy and you too.”
He got up again, and stretched.
“I’ll bid you good night now,” he said, with a return to formality.
He uttered a kind of bark, which set the crew stirring. We slid in imperceptibly to the bank, a soft stirring of rushes telling when we reached it. Things happened to the horse, and in less than ten minutes we were all quiet for the night. I was not long getting to sleep, but even so I heard the Master’s snores reverberating from below, and congratulated myself drowsily on my resolution to sleep on deck.
Five nights I spent on that trip, and each night the Master and I dined and yarned together. I wish I could recollect or give you an idea of the richness and the unexpectedness of his conversation. He kept it up till his death. I went to see him several times after he retired to a little cottage close to the canal, with a great wealth of geraniums and lobelia in window boxes and in small flower beds edged with round pebbles of various colours. He lived to nearly eighty, and kept up the same flow and the same mannerisms to the end. I met his wife too, and a fine woman she was—though I saw no trace of the fleas. She was a good twenty years younger than he. His wish was fulfilled, for he had her to shut his eyes for him when he died.
On the fifth
night on board—it was the second night it rained, and I had to sleep below—I was sitting on the deck, after the others had turned in, hugging my knees. A kind of restlessness was coming over me, and the past, which I had kept away, except for that one question of the Master, was becoming active again and drawing near to me. I had let my problems slide. I had not thought about Muriel. Soon I would have to face it all. The anaesthetic would not last much longer.
I began to drift away in my mind, and I think I must have fallen asleep, for, when I came to afterwards, my shoulders were leaning against the gunwale. Whether it was a dream or vision I don’t know, and I don’t care. It was real, and final. I sat there, hugging my knees, looking into the darkness, with no thought that I can remember beyond the feel and colour of the night, the cold smell of the water, and the soft distant cry of an owl. A train had gone by, far off, and the silence had slowly and timidly come back after it. All at once I knew there was a quiet light, as if the moon had risen but was not yet strong enough to throw a shadow. I looked up, and there was Mary. She was in an oval of soft radiance, and she stood on my right, looking at me. Whether she stood on the deck, or just above it, I cannot be sure. She looked at me steadily, her face alight with love and understanding. I cried out to her, and tried to get up. She smiled, and vanished: and I knew, with a perfection of certainty which eclipsed every other certainty in my life, that she understood all about why I had not come to her, and that all was well between us, to eternity. I knew it in the instant of waking, or of realising once more where I was, and I have known it ever since. I sat there, the tears running down my face, thanking God: and almost at once I fell into a deep sleep, and did not wake till it was time for breakfast.
I knew now exactly what I must do: and I was ready and anxious to begin. I would go back to Muriel, and devote the rest of my life to making her happy, as far as in me lay. It was what Mary would wish, and what Mary alone had made possible. That great blessing, that terrible wound had led to this good issue. By the grace of God, I had been given a second chance.
I remembered the train I had heard in the night. As soon as we had breakfasted, I told the Master I must go back. He asked no questions, nor showed surprise. He accepted my behaviour as he had accepted the behaviour of hundreds of other men and women. If I kept with them till the early afternoon, we would reach a point from which it would be eight miles’ walk only to a main-line station.
“I am very sorry to be leaving you,” I said. “I’ll come again, if you will have me. And I’ll look out for you in Dublin.”
“I don’t much care for the city,” he said. “But I will be glad to see you any time.”
Before I left, I had a few words with the red-headed lad. We only got them because the Master had to go on shore to confer with a man about some freight. Red-head was pleasant, but shy. He played the melodeon a bit, but was reluctant, and I found out that he didn’t like it because he had to do it often for his father to dance. He confided in me that he wanted to go to America.
“This canal boat business is a bloody poor tack,” he said.
I remember now—odd that it’s only come back to me from writing about him after all these years—that he used to whistle to himself at his work, and draw a look of reproof from the Master. I thought the old man was severe on him, as on the crew, more severe than he need have been. Perhaps he felt his authority beginning to slip, and needed to assert it.
Anyway, I never had to complain of him. We parted with great goodwill, and I trudged off in the hot afternoon, with my pack, making for the station. It would be an awkward time to travel, and I’d be all hours arriving in Dublin, but my resolve was growing steadily in me and I was all eagerness to be back and have everything clear between Muriel and me.
I walked for maybe two hours, and was still short of my goal. I began to suspect that the Master’s judgment of the distance was optimistic. My pack was heavy, and I was sweating. After all, where was the hurry? I wouldn’t be home till the morning anyway. I unslung my pack, and sat in the hedge, looking at the fields and at a small wooded hill which, after so much flat country, seemed a mountain. Away on my left was some sort of a village, hidden among trees, and from one of the roofs in it, unexpected sight on a summer’s day, a thin plume of smoke rose dead straight into the air. A few old crows kept circling lazily above the smoke. I wondered vaguely what it was, heard a slither of footsteps, and saw a most disreputable woman coming towards me. She had the cut of a tramper, but carried no parcel, nor anything but the rags on her back. She wore a man’s boots, badly broken, her hat was an old shapeless bit of stuff rescued from a dustbin, and her face, at the first glimpse I had of it, looked like the relic of many dead vices. As she came nearer, and I saw it plain under its sweat and dust, I felt a chill. The skin was seamed and yellow, with a horrible bluish tinge about the corners of the mouth, and the flesh of her neck was like that of a plucked hen. I put her down in my mind as a tinker’s whore gone to seed and unnaturally tenacious of life.
She hailed me confidently enough.
“How far do you think is it to Athlone?”
“I don’t know exactly, Ma’am,” I said. “But it must be all of forty miles.”
She was taken aback, and started humming to herself.
“Have you ere a cigarette?” she asked.
“I don’t carry them,” I said. “But I have some tobacco here, and some thin paper, and if you like I’ll roll you one. But I warn you, the tobacco will be strong.”
She squatted down beside me.
“Never mind about that,” she said. “It won’t be too strong for me.”
So, after a fashion, I made her a cigarette, and she smoked it, hard, with deep draws.
“Are you a sailor?” she asked.
I shook my head.
“What have you in the pack?”
“Only what I want for a few nights. Two or three books, washing things, socks, and so forth.”
She nodded. “Are you married?”
“I am.”
“What sort is she?”
“Too good for me,” I smiled.
She looked hard at me. “You’re no sailor,” she said.
“I told you I wasn’t.”
All the time I could feel that she wanted me to question her, but something held me back. She kept looking at me from her little ugly slits of eyes. I no longer felt any fear of her. In fact, I was taking less account of her than of the softness of the afternoon sun and the feathery green of the trees.
A waggon came along the road. She got up, and stood in its way. The driver stopped, not well pleased, and I heard her ask him for a lift. He shook his head, and whipped up his horses. She stepped away quite undismayed, and came back and sat down again.
“Were you ever in London?” she asked.
“No.”
“Were you ever in Scotland? In Cardiff? In Portsmouth? In Bristol?”
The row of negatives did not disconcert her. She just waited to think of some more questions.
Suddenly I said, “What part of the world are you from, Ma’am, if it isn’t any harm to ask?”
Then it all came out, in a deluge. She was born in England, in the pottery district. She married a hussar, and they lived in India, on the regiment. His horse was called Mick, and he had it ever since it was three years old. It could do everything but talk, and it had the same syce all the time to mind it. Then a corporal came along and made terrible love to her, and she ran away with him to Quetta. A great trouble arose, and by some means or other the regiment forced her back to her husband, who never said a word, nor beat her at all. She began to drink at that, and had drunk ever since. Her husband was the best of men, with no fault at all but that he was a gambler and often in debt. Then they were moved up country, to deal with some small tribal war, and she went up with them and washed clothes for the sergeants, and Mick got two sores on his back from the saddle. She and her husband tried all they could do to cure him, and the natives too, but the horse grew worse, and finall
y the regimental vet condemned him to death. She and her husband and the syce and a young soldier brought Mick out to a waste place and they all said good-bye to him, and the young soldier shot him through the head. The syce cried like a child, and they all cried, and her husband was never the same man after. He was killed six weeks later, in a hill skirmish, and she never even saw his body.
He left nothing but debts after him, so the major and the regiment made up a purse for her, and sent her home to England. There she drifted from one man to another—at one time she was partner in a laundry with a nigger gentleman in the Midlands— and came to Ireland ten years ago with a man who worked for a circus, and here she had been ever since.
“And what are you going to do at Athlone?” I asked her.
She looked full at me.
“I have the Indian pox and cancer of both breasts. I have a letter to the hospital, where I am to die.”
The chill I had felt when I saw her face came back with triple power. My neck and my stomach felt cold. Then a warm rush of pity displaced the shock, and my eyes filled with tears.
“Can I do anything for you, Ma’am? Would two or three shillings be of any use to you?”
“I have a few shillings,” she said, “and I’m near my journey’s end, so it doesn’t matter. Thank you all the same.”
The Bay Page 34
