The Best of Frank O'Connor Page 7

  All the evening she worried herself about Pa Kenefick and his friends – though to be sure they were good-natured, friendly boys. She was glad when Jumbo came in at tea-time; the great bulk of him stretched out in the corner gave her a feeling of security. He was almost in good humour again, and talked a little, telling her to shut up when her tongue wagged too much, or sourly abusing the ‘bummers’ who had soaked him the evening before. She had cleared away the supper things when a motor-car drove up the road and stopped at the end of Melancholy Lane. Her heart misgave her. She ran to the door and looked out; there were two men coming up the lane, one of them wearing a mask; when they saw her they broke into a trot. ‘Merciful Jesus!’ she screamed, and rushed in, banging and bolting the door behind her. Jumbo stood up slowly. ‘What is it?’ he asked. ‘That letter.’ ‘What letter?’ ‘I showed it to Pa Kenefick, that letter from the barrack.’ The blue veins rose on Jumbo’s forehead as though they would burst. He could barely speak but rushed to the fireplace and swept the poker above her head. ‘If it’s the last thing I ever do I’ll have your sacred life!’ he said in a hoarse whisper. ‘Let me alone! Let me alone!’ she shrieked. ‘They’re at the door!’ She leaned her back against the door, and felt against her spine the lurch of a man’s shoulder. Jumbo heard it; he watched her with narrowed, despairing eyes, and then beckoned her towards the back door. She went on before him on tiptoe and opened the door quietly for him. ‘Quick,’ he said, ‘name of Jasus, lift me up this.’ This was the back wall, which was fully twice his own height but had footholes by which he could clamber up. She held his feet in them, and puffing and growling, he scrambled painfully up, inch by inch, until his head was almost level with the top of the wall; then with a gigantic effort he slowly raised his huge body and laid it flat upon the spiny top. ‘Keep them back, you!’ he said. ‘Here,’ she called softly up to him, ‘take this,’ and he bent down and caught the poker.

  It was dark in the little kitchen. She crept to the door and listened, holding her breath. There was no sound. She was consumed with anxiety and impatience. Suddenly little Johnny sat up and began to howl. She grasped the key and turned it in the lock once; there was no sound; at last she opened the door slowly. There was no one to be seen in the lane. Night was setting in – maybe he would dodge them yet. She locked the screaming child in behind her and hurried down to the archway.

  The motor-car was standing where it had stopped and a man was leaning over the wheel smoking a cigarette. He looked up and smiled at her. ‘Didn’t they get him yet?’ he asked, ‘No,’ she said mechanically. ‘Ah, cripes!’ he swore, ‘with the help of God they’ll give him an awful end when they ketch him.’ She stood there looking up and down the road in the terrible stillness: there were lamps lighting behind every window but not a soul appeared. At last a strange young man in a trench-coat rushed down the lane towards them. ‘Watch out there,’ he cried. ‘He’s after giving us the slip. Guard this lane and the one below, don’t shoot unless you can get him.’ He doubled down the road and up the next laneway.

  The young man in the car topped his cigarette carefully, put the butt end in his waistcoat pocket and crossed to the other side of the road. He leaned nonchalantly against the wall and drew a heavy revolver. She crossed too and stood beside him. An old lamplighter came up one of the lanes from the city and went past them to the next gas-lamp, his torch upon his shoulder. ‘He’s a brute of a man,’ the driver said consolingly, ‘sure, I couldn’t but hit him in the dark itself. But it’s a shame now they wouldn’t have a gas-lamp at that end of the lane, huh!’ The old lamplighter disappeared up the road, leaving two or three pale specks of light behind him.

  They stood looking at the laneways each end of a little row of cottages, not speaking a word. Suddenly the young man drew himself up stiffly against the wall and raised his left hand towards the fading sky. ‘See that?’ he said gleefully. Beyond the row of cottages a figure rose slowly against a chimney-pot; they could barely see it in the twilight, but she could not doubt who it was. The man spat upon the barrel of his gun and raised it upon his crooked elbow; then the dark figure leaped out as it were upon the air and disappeared among the shadows of the houses. ‘Jasus!’ the young man swore softly, ‘wasn’t that a great pity?’ She came to her senses in a flash. ‘Jumbo!’ she shrieked, ‘me poor Jumbo! He’s kilt, he’s kilt!’ and began to weep and clap her hands. The man looked at her in comical bewilderment. ‘Well, well!’ he said, ‘to think of that! And are you his widda, ma’am?’ ‘God melt and wither you!’ she screamed and rushed away towards the spot where Jumbo’s figure had disappeared.

  At the top of the lane a young man with a revolver drove her back. ‘Is he kilt?’ she cried. ‘Too well you know he’s not kilt,’ the young man replied savagely. Another wearing a mask came out of a cottage and said ‘He’s dished us again. Don’t stir from this. I’m going round to Samson’s Lane.’ ‘How did he manage it?’ the first man asked. ‘Over the roofs. This place is a network, and the people won’t stir a finger to help us.’

  For hours that duel in the darkness went on, silently, without a shot being fired. What mercy the people of the lanes showed to Jumbo was a mercy they had never denied to any hunted thing. His distracted wife went back to the road. Leaving the driver standing alone by his car she tramped up and down staring up every tiny laneway. It did not enter her head to run for assistance. On the opposite side of the road another network of lanes, all steep-sloping, like the others, or stepped in cobbles, went down into the heart of the city. These were Jumbo’s only hope of escape, and that was why she watched there, glancing now and then at the maze of lights beneath her.

  Ten o’clock rang out from Shandon – shivering, she counted the chimes. Then down one of the lanes from the north she heard a heavy clatter of ironshod feet. Clatter, clatter, clatter; the feet drew nearer, and she heard other, lighter, feet pattering swiftly behind. A dark figure emerged through an archway, running with frantic speed. She rushed out into the middle of the road to meet it, sweeping her shawl out on either side of her head like a dancer’s sash. ‘Jumbo, me lovely Jumbo!’ she screamed. ‘Out of me way, y’ould crow!’ the wild quarry panted, flying past.

  She heard him take the first flight of steps in the southern laneway at a bound. A young man dashed out of the archway a moment after and gave a hasty look around him. Then he ran towards her and she stepped out into the lane to block his passage. Without swerving he rushed into her at full speed, sweeping her off her feet, but she drew the wide black shawl about his head as they fell and rolled together down the narrow sloping passage. They were at the top of the steps and he still struggled frantically to free himself from the filthy enveloping shawl. They rolled from step to step, to the bottom, he throttling her and cursing furiously at her strength; she still holding the shawl tight about his head and shoulders. Then the others came and dragged him off, leaving her choking and writhing upon the ground.

  But by this time Jumbo was well beyond their reach.

  III

  Next morning she walked dazedly about the town, stopping every policeman she met and asking for Jumbo. At the military barrack on the hill they told her she would find him in one of the city police barracks. She explained to the young English officer who spoke to her about Pa Kenefick, and how he could be captured, and for her pains was listened to in wide-eyed disgust. But what she could not understand in the young officer’s attitude to her, Jumbo, sitting over the fire in the barrack day-room, had already been made to understand, and she was shocked to see him so pale, so sullen, so broken. And this while she was panting with pride at his escape! He did not even fly at her as she had feared he would, nor indeed abuse her at all. He merely looked up and said with the bitterness of utter resignation, ‘There’s the one that brought me down!’ An old soldier, he was cut to the heart that the military would not take him in, but had handed him over to the police for protection. ‘I’m no use to them now,’ he said, ‘and there’s me thanks for all I done. They’d as soon
see me out of the way; they’d as soon see the poor old creature that served them out of the way.’ ‘It was all Pa Kenefick’s doings,’ his wife put in frantically, ‘it was no one else done it. Not that my poor slob of a man ever did him or his any harm.…’ At this the policemen round her chuckled and Jumbo angrily bade her be silent. ‘But I told the officer of the swaddies where he was to be found,’ she went on unheeding. ‘What was that?’ the policemen asked eagerly, and she told them of how she had found Pa Kenefick in the little cottage up the hill.

  Every day she went to see Jumbo. When the weather was fine they sat in the little garden behind the barrack, for it was only at dusk that Jumbo could venture out and then only with military or police patrols. There were very few on the road who would speak to her now, for on the night after Jumbo’s escape the little cottage where Pa Kenefick had stayed had been raided and smashed up by masked policemen. Of course, Pa and his friends were gone. She hated the neighbours, and dug into her mindwith the fear of what might happen to Jumbo was the desire to be quit of Pa Kenefick. Only then, she felt in her blind headlong way, would Jumbo be safe. And what divil’s notion took her to show him the letter? She’d swing for Pa, she said, sizing up to the policemen.

  And Jumbo grew worse and worse. His face had turned from brick-red to grey. He complained always of pain and spent whole days in bed. She had heard that there was a cure for his illness in red flannel, and had made him a nightshirt of red flannel in which he looked more than ever like a ghost, his hair grey, his face quite colourless, his fat paws growing skinny under the wide crimson sleeves. He applied for admission to the military hospital, which was within the area protected by the troops, and the request was met with a curt refusal. That broke his courage. To the military for whom he had risked his life he was only an informer, a common informer, to be left to the mercy of their enemy when his services were no longer of value. The policemen sympathized with him, for they too were despised by the ‘swaddies’ as makers of trouble, but they could do nothing for him. And when he went out walking under cover of darkness with two policemen for an escort the people turned and laughed at him. He heard them, and returned to the barrack consumed with a rage that expressed itself in long fits of utter silence or sudden murderous outbursts.

  She came in one summer evening when the fit was on him, to find him struggling in the day-room with three of the policemen. They were trying to wrest a loaded carbine from his hands. He wanted blood, he shouted, blood, and by Christ they wouldn’t stop him. They wouldn’t, they wouldn’t, he repeated, sending one of them flying against the hearth. He’d finish a few of the devils that were twitting him before he was plugged himself. He’d shoot everyone, man, woman, and child that came in his way. His frenzy was terrifying and the three policemen were swung this way and that, to right and left, as the struggle swept from wall to door and back. Then suddenly he collapsed and lay unconscious upon the floor. When they brought him round with whiskey he looked from one to the other, and drearily, with terrible anguish, he cursed all the powers about him, God, the King, the republicans, Ireland, and the country he had served.

  ‘Kimberley, Pietermaritzburg, Bethlem, Bloemfontein,’ he moaned. ‘Ah, you thing, many’s the hard day I put down for you! Devil’s cure to me for a crazy man! Devil’s cure to me, I say! With me cane and me busby and me scarlet coat – ’twas aisy you beguiled me!… The curse of God on you!… Tell them to pay me passage, d’you hear me? Tell them to pay me passage and I’ll go out to Inja and fight the blacks for you!’

  It was easy to see whom he was talking to.

  ‘Go the road resigned, Jim,’ his wife counselled timidly from above his head. Seeing him like this she could already believe him dying.

  ‘I will not.… I will not go the road resigned.’

  ‘… to His blessed and holy Will,’ she babbled.

  Lifting his two fists from the ground he thumped upon his chest like a drum.

  ‘ ’Tisn’t sickness that ails me, but a broken heart,’ he cried. ‘Tell them to pay me passage! Ah, why didn’t I stay with the lovely men we buried there, not to end me days as a public show.… They put the croolety of the world from them young, the creatures, they put the croolety of the world from them young!’

  The soldiers had again refused to admit him to the military hospital. Now the police had grown tired of him, and on their faces he saw relief, relief that they would soon be shut of him, when he entered some hospital in the city, where everyone would know him, and sooner or later his enemies would reach him. He no longer left the barrack. Disease had changed that face of his already; the only hope left to him now was to change it still further. He grew a beard.

  And all this time his wife lay in wait for Pa Kenefick. Long hours on end she watched for him over her half-door. Twice she saw him pass by the laneway, and each time snatched her shawl and rushed down to the barrack, but by the time a car of plainclothes men drove up to the Keneficks’ door Pa was gone. Then he ceased to come home at all, and she watched the movements of his sister and mother. She even trained little Johnny to follow them, but the child was too young and too easily outdistanced. When she came down the road in the direction of the city, all the women standing at their doors would walk in and shut them in her face.

  One day the policeman on duty at the barrack door told hergruffly that Jumbo was gone. He was in hospital somewhere; she would be told where if he was in any danger. And she knew by the tone in which he said it that the soldiers had not taken Jumbo in; that somewhere he was at the mercy of his changed appearance and assumed name, unless, as was likely, he was already too far gone to make it worth the ‘rebels’ ’ while to shoot him. Now that she could no longer see him there was a great emptiness in her life, an emptiness that she filled only with brooding and hatred. Everything within her had turned to bitterness against Pa Kenefick, the boy who had been the cause of it all, to whom she had foolishly shown the letter and who had brought the ‘dirty Shinners’ down on her, who alone had cause to strike at Jumbo now that he was a sick and helpless man.

  ‘God, give me strength!’ she prayed. ‘I’ll sober him, O God, I’ll put him in a quiet habitation!’

  She worked mechanically about the house. A neighbour’s averted face or the closing of a door in her path brought her to such a pitch of fury that she swept out into the road, her shawl stretched out behind her head, and tore up and down, screaming like a madwoman; sometimes leaping into the air with an obscene gesture; sometimes kneeling in the roadway and cursing those that had affronted her; sometimes tapping out a few dance steps, a skip to right and a skip to left, just to rouse herself. ‘I’m a bird alone!’ she shrieked, ‘a bird alone and the hawks about me! Good man, clever man, handsome man, I’m a bird alone!’ And ‘That they might rot and wither, root and branch, son and daughter, born and unborn; that every plague and pestilence might end them and theirs; that they might be called in their sins’ – this was what she prayed in the traditional formula, and the neighbours closed their doors softly and crossed themselves. For a week or more she was like a woman possessed.

  IV

  Then one day when she was standing by the archway she saw Pa Kenefick and another man come down the road. She stood back without being seen, and waited until they had gone by before she emerged and followed them. It was no easy thing to do upon the long open street that led to the quays, but she pulled her shawl well down over her eyes, and drew up her shoulders so that at a distance she might look like an old woman. She reached the foot of the hill without being observed, and after that, to follow them through the crowded, narrow side-streets of the city where every second woman wore a shawl was comparatively easy. But they walked so fast it was hard to keep up with them, and several times she had to take short-cuts that they did not know of, thus losing sight of them for the time being. Already they had crossed the bridge, and she was growing mystified; this was unfamiliar country and, besides, the pace was beginning to tell on her. They had been walking now for a good two miles and s
he knew that they would soon outdistance her. And all the time she had seen neither policeman nor soldier.

  Gasping she stood and leaned against a wall, drawing the shawl down about her shoulders for a breath of air. ‘Tell me, ma’am,’ she asked of a passer-by, ‘where do this road go to?’ ‘This is the Mallow Road, ma’am,’ the other said, and since Jumbo’s wife made no reply she asked was it any place she wanted. ‘No, indeed,’ Jumbo’s wife answered without conviction. The other lowered her voice and asked sympathetically, ‘Is it the hospital you’re looking for, poor woman?’ Jumbo’s wife stood for a moment until the question sank in. ‘The hospital?’ she whispered. ‘The hospital? Merciful God Almighty!’ Then she came to her senses. ‘Stop them!’ she screamed, rushing out into the roadway, ‘stop them! Murder! Murder! Stop them!’

  The two men who by this time were far ahead heard the shout and looked back. Then one of them stepped out into the middle of the road and signalled to a passing car. They leaped in and the car drove off. A little crowd had gathered upon the path, but when they understood what the woman’s screams signified they melted silently away. Only the woman to whom she had first spoken remained. ‘Come with me, ma’am,’ she said. ‘ ’Tis only as you might say a step from this.’