The Sea Wall thus offered excellent training to the novice, going far to equip him for more ambitious fishing, when he must put away childish things and take his place among men, fishing in deadly earnest for their families. Moreover, not all its game was on a small scale. Along its humble rocks, at the ends of its little channels, under its trees of weed, was to be found the most fearsome fish of the whole coast—the conger. Paddy and Dermot, looking intently on the patch of water before them, would often hiss an exclamation, and point simultaneously to a blue shadow waving among the weeds—losing itself—then emerging, a bar of purest azure, taking its lazy way, sometimes so near that they could see its little soulless eye ; watching it breathlessly till it disappeared under the gleam or ruffle upon the water. Paddy had begun to talk of making a line for conger, and getting leave for Dermot to sit up after dinner, since conger took best at night: and Dermot had gone so far as to purchase a huge conger hook, which he carried about in his pocket, king of the cork in which his hooks were muzzled, but as yet serving no more practical purpose. He did not dream in what circumstances, and how soon, he was to find a use for it.
Chapter XVIII
Meanwhile the friendship with Paddy grew steadily, and to it in due time were added Paddy’s friends. Of these two stood out, chiefly because they were most often there: one having nothing to do, and the other very little. Long Mike Hogan, a tall, seedily handsome man of about forty, clad always in a navy blue suit, a dirty yachting cap, and even dirtier white shoes, needed to pursue no calling, since his mother did a small but steady business in fried fish. The only work she ever laid on him was to attend and persecute the meetings of the Salvation Army. The opening of this sect’s Glasthule branch had given rise to lively scenes. Local zealots, incensed at what even Bessie termed “a street mock of our Blessed Lord,” had surrounded the premises and interrupted the singing by the projection of a large paving stone through the plate glass window. The Salvationists were rescued from the back of the building by the police: and ever since that date, a policeman followed the dreary exiguous band everywhere about the town, to protect them from further violence. It was never offered, nor did the meetings cause any disturbance. About the only attendant was Long Mike, who, keeping to the far side of the road, and with a wary eye on the policeman, repeated at intervals, “Hoormongers. Hoormongers. Hoormongers,” in low but penetrating tones, for so long as the group held together. He would follow them implacably from pitch to pitch, keeping up his monotonous chant, never so happy as when their leader crossed to remonstrate with him, or when the policeman told him to move on. The latter event happened seldom, the policeman maintaining, if the Salvationists invoked his aid, that Long Mike “had as good a right to his opinions ” as themselves. Only when Mike’s devotion showed signs of attracting a crowd, or when some high-up Protestant was taking note, the law stepped in. Vainly did the Salvationists change their evening, and their route: Mike always got wind of their plans, and they would convene secretly at some remote place, only to find the long, melancholy form of their critic leaning against the nearest wall awaiting them. Nothing shook him. Not even when the meeting, abandoning its general programme, prayed loudly for his personal salvation, did his expression change or his voice vary. He would return to the Sea Wall exhausted after his labours, lowering himself limply to the rock without a word.
“Have ye been after the mockers, Mike? ”
“I have.” Mike fumbled in his pocket, brought out some tobacco, and proceeded languidly to cut it in the palm of his hand. “Bad scran to them. The’ have me pretty near wore out. I believe it’s in Booterstown they’ll be meetin’ next, the b——.” He here received a vigorous nudge, followed by a jerk of Paddy’s thumb towards Dermot, who pretended not to listen. About to protest, he found the effort too much, and spat instead.
“Well,” said Paddy, “ye do be a great thorn in their side, and no mistake. A great thorn.”
Mike was understood to mutter through his quid that they were a worse thorn in his.
“Only for me Ma,” he said presently, “I’d give over, and leave them be.”
“Oh, sure, ye couldn’t do that.”
Paddy was shocked, for Mike’s activity had won him great renown as a defender of the faith. Many a soft job came his way, which could be attributed to no other cause. Mike did not like jobs, even of the softest: but he took one now and again, when his needs outpaced his pocket.
“You couldn’t leave them be,” continued Paddy, in the same shocked tone. “Sure, the’ couldn’t be let mock our Blessed Lord, and no one to say a word agen them.”
“Let someone else say the word,” replied Mike morosely: but even Dermot knew that the protest was only for form’s sake, and that, next evening, he would be found at his post.
Peg-leg, the second of Paddy’s friends—his real name was Dan O’Shea—was a different proposition. A little quick, furtive man, clean shaven, dark as a flue brush, with wide nostrils like sooty chimneys, he got his nickname from a stiffness in his right leg, which did not however incapacitate him from great activity. A fast walker by habit, he walked also in races, and had in his time won many prizes. His furtive air, and the quick nervous glances he darted from side to side as he scuttled along the street, were quite misleading: he was a mild, honest little man, with no worse vice than laziness. Peg-leg was a skilled carpenter, and could on a single day make enough money to last him for the week. He was a bachelor, living with his eldest sister, to whom he handed over three quarters of his earnings as a matter of course. Like Paddy and Long Mike, he desired nothing better than to sit in the sun, to smoke and spit and talk: and, as he had none of Mike’s fanaticism, he led a most enjoyable life. His few long spells of work occurred when the parish priest laid some carving or carpentering on him as a duty. Then he gave his labour freely, but grudged his time. If kept too long at work, he would turn sulky. No other circumstance bothered him, or elicited anything but harmless laughter, which his satanic appearance transformed into a villainous snigger. When he laughed, his nostrils, big enough already, were so drawn up that they seemed to turn inside out: his lips were pulled back from his yellow tobacco-stained teeth, his shoulders hunched up to his ears, and his whole frame convulsed with mean and ignoble spasms. Poor Peg-leg. He would be cast for First Murderer, for Spanish Traitor, for Poisoner, or Copper’s Nark, in any theatre in the world: and he was an inoffensive, kind, shrewd little man, generous and patient, and one of the best heel-and-toe walkers in Leinster.
Many a morning and afternoon dreamed its way along, with Dermot fishing by the water, and these three close above him. So still did he sit, so little attention did he seem to give them, that they soon came to forget him and talk as if he were not there. Thus, all the time, he was picking up rare and valuable knowledge. The poor as seen from Granny’s doorstep were one thing: the poor, overheard talking together, in their own territory, were another. He ceased to see their lives as the lives of animals on show. He ceased, at once, to pity them. Listening, he found himself at home in a world full as his own, but quite unlike it: a world of wonderful kindness and sympathy, narrowing down savagely to intolerance of anything outside its code or ken: a world on the defensive, enjoying its happinesses instantly and eagerly, as the good hours of an ague: a world united, just and unjust alike, in hatred of one enemy, the Law: a world which laid all its fatalism and belief upon the shoulders of one Power, and acknowledged the representative of that Power, the parish priest, as king. The parish priest, Paddy assured Dermot, could strike a man dead: and there was no doubt that he believed it. Interpreter of the God in Whom they trusted, medicineman, judge and law-giver, he ruled them with a despot’s power: pattern of the Hebrews’ Jahveh, mirror of a Father Who chastened those He loved. They were slaves, childlike, sinful, and uncomplaining. Half the time, they did not know from where their next meal was coming: nor did they care. “Sure, God won’t let us starve.” “The Lord won’t suffer the poor man and his children to die.” There was fear in the voice
s, but there was also a slave’s faith in his master: and there was submission. To realise, almost unconsciously, a way of life different from one’s own, is as salutary a lesson as can be learned. Dermot minded his fishing, but a part of him was drinking in all he heard, and learning not only to talk but to think in the second language.
Peg-leg was the most articulate and the most intelligent of the three, and it was he who explained such ethical and theoretical questions as arose between the new world and the old. Dermot sometimes gave Paddy small presents of his own money. When, one day, he had seemed to presume on one of these, and the threepenny bit had been flung on the rock at his feet, it was Peg-leg who gravely explained the source of offence and recommended the apology that put all straight again. When Bartley Grogan attempted to kill his wife in the dwellings, believing her to have been unfaithful, it was Peg-leg who contrived to explain the grievance without recourse to more worldly knowledge than that implied in the laws of possession: saving a situation which had turned Paddy brick red and moved Mike to hollow and derisive chuckles. A year later, when the worldly knowledge had been theoretically acquired, the trio sighed with relief, and permitted themselves a licence which much enriched their local gossip. Dermot’s innocence had been a restriction, loyally observed. Its removal was due to a fashionable preparatory school, not to three illiterate men whose normal vocabulary was so richly coarse that they spoke like foreigners without it. Of their personal morality, there was no doubt at all. One evening, when a goodlooking, blowsy girl in red laughed a remark to the three, Paddy threatened her with the back of his hand, Peg-leg spat on the ground, and Long Mike crossed himself and uttered a pious oath. One lesson at least their faith and their priest had taught them, a lesson Ireland knew well.
If Peg-leg was the most voluble, Paddy had a gift of phrase which enlivened many a story. He had once seen a small child decapitated by a tram.
“I seen the wheel go acrost the neck, and the blood bursted out, and the little head lepped on the pavement.”
In like mortuary vein was his tale of a disaster at the Forty Foot.
“He was only the week married, and he and she on their honeymoon. So he ups and off with him to the Forty Foot, and she goes up to this seat here, to look down and see how fine he could dive and swim. Out he comes presently, and the man at the Forty Foot tries to stop him, be reason of the waves, that was runnin’ big. Oh no, says me fine boyo, sure, that’s all right, says he. He wasn’t goin’ back on it, and his wife up there on the hill to watch him. So he dives in, bold and fine, off o’ the top board, and swam out to that rock—looka, that one there-wasn’t it, Peg-leg?-and stud up for to wave his hand.”
“Aye,” pronounced the dark one, after satanic consideration, “that was the rock, Paddy. The second one, there. That was the rock.”
“He stud up,” pursued the narrator, gesticulating in the air, “and wave his hand: and, with his head turned, he got the lick of a big wave, and she seen’m swep off o’ the rock and threw up agen that rock beside it, and go limps and g’down. She run down to try and save him, like a mad one, the poor thing. The roars of her was onmerciful.”
Such narratives, chosen from a wide store, whetted Dermot’s appetite for the morbid. When a man was drowned at the Forty Foot, and his body picked up fourteen days later, and stuck in the mortuary, he hovered near the place all day, eagerly questioning the boys of the Sea Wall, as they returned with gleaming eyes and bright wet lips from their view, but afraid to go in himself.
The pair, with occasional assistance from Mike and Peg-leg, dug their own bait ; but they could only get lug at certain tides. Sometimes it had to be bought. For this Dermot learned to seek out one Mrs. Ryan, who lived in the Fishbank, then one of the foulest slums in Ireland. It looked clean enough, from a little way off: row upon row of uneven, lopsided whitewashed cottages, some roofed, some thatched, spilling crazily about the hill between the tram-lines and the water. Some of them gave points to Paddy’s home, for they had, at least, stone floors: but the filth and degradation of the inhabitants needed to be seen and smelt. Children, clad in one garment, or in nothing at all, rolled and sprawled in the festering gutters. The first time Dermot went there alone, he saw a woman reach out over the half door of her house, to get a jug of milk. With one hand she was holding up a sack in front of herself. As she stooped, one great breast fell out and dangled. Straightening up, she caught the boy’s look of horror, leered and put out her tongue. When she turned round, he saw that she had no clothing but the sack.
Another time, there was a screech of laughter from one of the cottages, and a woman some fifty years old, quite naked, ran across from one cottage to another, jumping over a group of children to get by. Jeers and catcalls came from the men sitting in the gutter, which she answered from the depths with a screech like a jay. While Dermot stood transfixed, a man staggered to the door from which she had fled, grinning fatuously, and reaching out fumbling, amorous paws to detain her.
“Aw, aw, aw, c’m on,” he babbled, and stood swaying, holding on to the doorpost, toppling forward, as if a hinge were broken in his middle. “C’m on, c’m on,” and the spittle drooled down in ropes over his stubbly chin.
Clasping his tin of lug, Dermot fled.
“Paddy,” he gasped, when he joined his faithful comrade, “I can’t go there again. They’re awful people. I saw——”
He didn’t say what he saw: but Paddy was very matterof-fact and soothing. They were poor people, his explanation ran, who knew no better: Dermot was not to tell his grandparents. The caution was unnecessary. Dermot knew better than to imperil his own freedom. There were too many efforts to wean him from Paddy already. On three separate occasions Granny had found “Such a nice boy, Dermot darling, to play with you.” Each foredoomed occasion had been a failure. Two of the visitors had been prigs, and the third of so aggressive and violent a temper that the effort was given up as a bad job. He compelled Dermot to climb a tree, and hurt his arm, challenged him to wrestle, punched him in the chest, and tweaked him black and blue. Even Granny could not blink the unsuitability of such a companion.
“You’d better leave him as he is,” counselled Dermot’s father. “This Paddy seems a very decent sort of a fellow.”
“Oh, he’s decent enough,” said Granny with spirit, “or I wouldn’t have employed him. I was only thinking, was it bad for the boy, only to be with a poor ignorant creature… ”
Her voice died away, and she sighed.
“Dear old lady.” He laid a hand in her lap. “You want the best for all of us, don’t you? ”
“Well, Ernest, I do. Though I can’t often give it ye, I’m afraid.”
“Indeed, you spoil us,” declared her son-in-law. “You absolutely spoil us.”
“Ah, no, Ernest. I can’t content meself. I do often be ashamed… ”
… “But, seriously,” he was saying, a little later, “the boy will take no harm. He’s happy, and in the open air all day long. It does him a world of good—and he’s none too easy to content, either physically or mentally.”
So Paddy’s sway remained unchallenged, and Dermot went quietly on his path. Soon the Fishbank lost its terrors, and seeds of initiative grew in the timid spirit. No one can say when a quality is born. We can only record the first time it appears. The first time Dermot found it was on the occasion prophesied a few pages back: his first encounter with a conger eel.
Chapter XIX
Near the Newtown Smith end of the Sea Wall, a sewer ran out into the sea, built like a tiny pier. Paddy and his kind referred to it always as Kelly Shore. The end of it was a famous place for prawns, and Dermot, at low tide one afternoon, was busy catching them. Peg-leg, Paddy and Mike sat fifty yards further up, on the dry rock, smoking, spitting, and watching the mail boat glide swiftly in across the bay. The sun shone upon her white paint. She would be full: it was the start of Horse Show Week. There would be a power of high-up persons aboard of her. They gazed, spitting appreciatively.
The tide w
as a little high still for Dermot to reach his best point of vantage, a low, flat stone commanding a tiny bay. Opposite this was a big rock, hollow underneath. As the tide dropped, prawns in great numbers drifted from beneath this rock, across the little bay, and out through a passage which Dermot, standing on his flat stone, could command. Pulling up his trousers as far as they would go, he stood frowning, prepared for the leap across, but doubting its value, as the water was slightly ruffled, and still too deep. He would not be able to see what he was doing.
Deciding to wait till the mail boat rounded the pier, he controlled his impatience, and watched her, biting his underlip. Then, resolutely, he made the long stride, slipped half an inch, made a wild gesture, and regained his balance. He frowned, and looked quickly inshore, but Paddy and Co. were not visible. Then, bending down—it was still too deep to squat, without wetting his behind—he shaded his eyes, and peered into his hunting ground. Intent, careful, alert, he surveyed it over, inch by inch—then suddenly he stiffened.
Bang opposite him, a foot below the surface, projecting from under the hollow rock, half hidden by a streamer of weed, hung a motionless blue cylinder. Its blue was as virulent as the green of oxydised metal. It was solid and thick. It was close to him, in the same water as his bare shins. He knew exactly what it was.
At the first instant of recognition a thrill went all through him. His eyes clouded, and he began to tremble. He stood up abruptly, looking fascinated at the thick blue bar, which, with the laziest of motions, was beginning to slide slowly out. That movement decided him. Without pausing to think, he reversed his prawn net, and prodded the bar with the butt end of the long cane handle. He prodded gently at first, then harder. The bar gave a little, like solid india rubber: then, with a lazy wriggle, it withdrew under the hollow rock, giving him a glimpse of its long sloping snout and opaque, glassy eye.
The Garden Page 15
