The Storyteller

New Zealand Tablet, 5 August 1920, Page 3

The Story teller

(By William O'Brien.)

WHEN WE WERE BOYS

CHAPTER I.—{Continued.)

On they sped through the stony, wind-shorn gla-cier-polished mountains, by the shores of the great" Bay, past the coquettish evergreen groves and toy-like islets of Glengariff on as though Sheela also was feeling the intoxication of the gun-flashes and the' beat of drums. When Myles Rohan intimated that “they’d never catch the nine-o’clock,” he only meant that, give anybody else the reins, or put any other nag between the shafts, and the thing was not to be done; but Sheela, the jaunting-car, the reins, and the hand that held them being his own, he bowled along with as comfortable an assurance of being in time, as if he had a private understanding with the sun to halt in the heavens until Sheela should pass the Cross at Garrindinny. The miller was one of those hearty, positive men, whose whisper goes further with a horse than other men’s whips, and whom women like to have in a country house by night when there is somebody ill and the doctor at a distance. His son half-dreaded, whole-reverenced him, Sheela knew every turn of his wrist, the peasants doffed their hats to him as if iron manliness in one of their own blood and creed were a portent almost too good to be true; and, if such tributes made him as self-satisfied, good-natured, and affable as gratified vanity usually makes men, long may we have vanities with so sunshiny a gift of paying their way ! Why, that’s Hans Harman’s old shay amongst a thousand he cried, pointing his whip at a lumbering one-horse coach that was plodding along leisurely in front of them down Cooleeruch Hill. “What piece of roguery is bringing him over to Garrindinny this perishing morning, I wonder? Maybe it’s to evict old Meehul, up on the top of Cnocaunacurraghcooish ? 1 hear he’s “expecting the Sheriff” one of these days. But old Meehul is ‘expecting the Sheriff’” all his life as regular as he’s expecting his breakfastand the bieakfast don t always arrive for the poor nngish , no more than the Sheriff— Easy awhile ! —why, to be sure, this is Presentment Sessions’ Day at Clonard, and Hans is going across to carry his presentment. What, do you think, is his presentment?” V ith due diffidence in presence of superior wisdom. Ken hazarded the suggestion: “Something, I dare say, he wants the Grand Jury to do for him.” “And those who are not grand jurors to pay for exactly. A trifle of a thousand pounds or so to build a bridge into his own demesne,, on the ground that the pub ic use it as a short cut. So they do—as a short cut to the Workhouse, or, what’s the same thing, to the rent-office, for sorra another , thing ever ;brought a decent neighbor to his hungry door. Was there ever such a bare-faced job?” ■ ~ # -y , y:'; “A what, sir?”

“A brand-new bridge over nothing at all at the expense of the county. He’ll be putting in a presentment next for a river to run under it! Ken,” said the miller sternly, “we’ll throw out that presentment !” “I didn’t think you had a vote, sir?” “They take precious good care I’ve not, boy ; but they can’t strike a man’s wits off the Register as they did the Forty-Shilling Freeholders. Heeup, Sheela ! let’s see if we can’t manage a small Reform of the Grand Jury Laws on our own hook, old girl!” Sheela bounded forward with the enthusiasm of an old politician, and was quickly abreast of the chaise. Hallo, Rohan, so it’s youhope you’re well — glad to see you sang out a pleasant voice from the chaise. The voice came from the broad chest of a gentleman of massive andi well-proportioned frame, thin, but handsome, clear-cut features, flowing, mous-

taches and full black beard, powdered, here and there with greyall lighted by a smile of frankness and good humor, “Why it’s like a glimpse of the 'sun meet you on the road this chilly, morning." “Thank you, s-a-h-r!” said the miller, employing the “sir" as an uplifted sword which might descend, either to cleave a skull or to describe a ceremonious salute, at discretion.

“Not coming over to Sessions to-day? Tell you candidly*! hope not, if I’m to carry that little job of mine." ' ,

“Bless you, no, sir— likes of me may be as good as another, to pay for a job; what call should we have to go spoiling one?" returned the miller, with a twinkle of rebellion in the corners of his eyes. The gentleman in the chaise laughed the goodnatured laugh of a man who could give blows on occasion, but, on the whole, found it rarer fun to receive them. “Rohan, you’re a Radical monster-—devil a less. Well, well, you’ll have your joke and I’ll have my bridgewhat could be fairer or pleasanter? I know nothing f about politics myselfcouldn’t guess whether Brian Boru was a Whig or a Tory ; could you ? Ah! so this is your lad—taking him to school, I hear ?—How do do, sir ? Hope you will be a good boy. A youngster may be anything nowada3 7 s, if he minds his moods and tenses. Is it to be a marshal’s baton or a mitre, which? Fewer marshals’ batons going in our day, Rohan, eh ?’’ “True enough, sirthe people didn’t know half How hungry they were —they have education to tell ’em all about it now, and still the greedy fellows aren’t satisfied. Heeup, Sheela!” and Sheela sprang forward, as if chuckling like a Radical over her master’s rude pleasantry. “You’re in a deuce of a hurry, Rohan. Boohig is never particular to ten minutes," said Mr. Harman, with imperturbable good humor. , “.Thank you, sir. I find it more comfortable to be too soon than too late," shouted the miller, and he was gone.

That wildly romantic being, the British shareholder, was the author of the Garrindinny and Great Western Railway. The Bill, as it passed Standing Orders, was an epic poem lit by glimpses of a Glengariff picture-country sighing to be sliced into building-lots, lively with the siren-songs of innumerable shoals of mackerel willing to do all but swim ashore to be cooked and tragic here and there with the stern groan of some copper or barytes mine sick with desire to yield up its treasure to the first comer. The epic caught the soft Heart of the British Public like the poems of Mr. Robert Montgomery. The railway, like the poet, however, met its remorseless Macaulay. Before the line could get within a dozen long-legged Irish miles of Glengariff, its painted paradises, copper ores, or little fishes, the Company was in a state of liquidation in a mausoleum up four pair of stone stairs in King Street, Westminster. The first canto ended with the seizure of the first passenger-train (including the Board of Directors and the materials of the champagne luncheon by the Sheriff under a writ of fi. fa. on foot of certain transactions with a contractor who had no music in his soul; and there and then the railway came to an end in the midst of a moaning desert of black bog-mould, naked rocks, and shivery pools—like a story of adventure to be continued in a future number, or a promising young railway cut off in its bloom and buried at the cross-roads of Garrindinny in hopes of a happy resurrection. Traffic still went on upon the completed sections of the Garrindinny and Great Western by the aid of stingy and precarious subsidies from the Court, but in a spirit befitting the obsequies of a great design rather than with any ignoble ambition of scrambling for dividends. Mr. Hans Harman might well take his ease in his chaise. When, Sheela scoured up to the cross-roads at steeplechase pace, the oldfashioned engine, which wore most of its bowels on the outside, was puffing up and down about the turn-table, in a broken-hearted, undecided way, as if deliberating

whether the Court would allow it coals enough to make the journey, or whether it was really worth while stirring at all for so small cause: Though it was now .branded with the barbarous alias of “Erin-go-bragh," the venerable locomotive had : once been christened “Stephenson" amidst salvoes of champagne corks, and had screamed through Rugby for many a proud day with the commerce of a world at its back. Fancy the reflections of that iron veteran as it surveyed with a snort of contempt the rails turning carmine with the rust, and an invalided wagon like a lame beggar imploring an alms of cargo by way of starting it in business, and a goat peacefully making its breakfast over the grassgrowing siding ; and then to think of being obliged in its declining days to drag its old legs after it. all the way to Clonard for no other reason in life than that a wagon or two of empty porter-barrels and weeping emigrants might burlesque the uses of the steam-en-gine, and a policeman with a crease in his poll might graciously arrive to see them off! The “Erin-go-bragh” had really contracted a hollow, graveyard moan which gave it the air of contemplating felo de se by an explosion, since upon the Garrindinny and Great Western there was no possible hope of honorably ending its days by a collision with anything. The guard and the engine-driver were at this moment soothing themselves, in the spirit of Preference Shareholders, with certain palliatives, which the en-gine-driver, cleaning his brow with a dirtier .pockethandkerchief, called “Two raw rammers, ma’am,” at the bar of the adjacent Terminus Hotel. The Terminus Hotel had once formed a sounding strophe in the Garrindinny and Great Western Epic. It had figured in chromo-lithograph, depicting the nobility and gentry descending from crimson-and-gold barouches, and received at the door by a waiter of ancient lineage with a Louis Quatorze sweep of his napkin; but the barouches never came, and the waiter of the vielle ecole drifted away into a Cork oyster-cellar, with the threads of his black swallow-tail grown as white as his necktie was black, and all the blood in his body lodged in his nose in the last stages of despondency; and the very sign of the “Terminus Hotel” had disappeared like the rosy adjectives of the Prospectus under ■ a matter-of-fact blob of green paint, on which a rustic artist had blazoned forth, the golden legend: “Mick Brine Entertainment for Man and Horse"; and, to crown all, the “Coffee Room" windows had their two eyes punched into one, where, behind ranges of bottles of rare vintages more gloriously colored than the chromolithograph itself, Mrs. Brine, a buxom, sonsy-looking matron, with indifferently combed hair,,. was blushingly separating the guard’s change for the raw rammers from his compliments to the crowing baby in her arms (“Begob, ma’am, ’twas worth making the misfortunate railway, if ’twas only to see how thim babbies flock down out of the sky to you —God bless ’em ! I’ll engage that’s about your eleventh now, Mrs. Brine?” the guard was remarking, genially. “And two that’s in heaven, Mr. Boohig, plaze God “Amen, ma’am !” observed the guard, piously). “Now, Boohig—time’s up! How soon are we off?" cried Myles Rohan, bursting in with his cheery “God save all here !"

“Wisha, the day is young Misther.-Myles," was the leisurely answer of Boohig. (That was the guard’s name, Mick being the remainder of it.) “The world will be there afther us. We may just as well give the neighbors a chance.” “Divil a sounder principle as a general rule, my poor man; but listen!” The miller whispered something that made the guard slap the zinc counter till the raw rammer leaped in an ecstasy. “You don’t mane it, sir?—hungry Hans, is it? Ho, ho, by the bombshells of war, if all-the fun isn’t gone out of the country, we’ll lave him time enough to study the scenery ! _ ’Twas only the other day, being Christmas-time, he tipped me a tin-shilling piece in mistake for a sixpinny bit—’twas the only slip he ever med in his life—and what do you think he does but gets the ould Head-Constable, Muldudden, to report

to the Board that Boohig was out on a tear for the holidays? Honey isn’t -sweet enough for Hans Har-man—nor-hell isn’t hot enough, nayther.” “He’ll be down on us in five minutes at latest.”

■ “Not he, sirhe’s never in - a hurryhe thinks the train daarn’t budge while Lord Drumshaughlin’s agent is within a donkey’s screech of it. Daarn’t it, though?” chuckled Boohig, bolting the measure of hot whisky, and, for some obscure reason, stuffing a jujube into his mouth by way of second course. “Fifteen minutes past the hour— along, sir!” A party of emigrants and their friends were wailing in each other’s arms on the platform. At every southern and western railway station in those days you could hear that wild, heart-breaking ullage of the Irish Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted. The whole ghastly passenger traffic of the country seemed to consist in one long funeral of the population. The principal other passenger was a small nervous man, whose individuality seemed to be stored in a long, obtrusive, and yet deprecating, muddy-grey beard, behind which an insignificant face appeared to be apologising for being in anybody’s way; and a pair of long arms terminating in long skinny fingers pawed the air at either side as if stuck on as after-thoughts by a schoolboy caricaturist. •

“What, Humphrey! going across to help Harman to his bridge, eh?” cried the miller, slapping him on the shoulder with a thwack , that made the beard and its appurtenances jump like a frog under the knife of a vivisector. “Eli, bless us and seeve us ! You do come upon an old fellow in such ways and say such thingsand quite welcome, too, I’m sure, from an old neebor, Mr. Rohan, sir.” “So isn’t Hans Harman’s haul out of the Countv Cess.” J Ha, ha, that’s your pleasant way of putting itbut humble people in a small way must live, Mr. Rohan, six-—people that has no pretinsions to figuring in the peepers, so to say—and I do assure you, Mr. Rohan, sir, I find his lordship’s agent a most eemiable, public-sperrited gentleman. But goodness gracious ! how unfortunate ! ” he started off, glancing excitedly at his watch, and then along the Drjjmshaughlin Road, as the guard came tearing along the train, shouting: “In with ye! All for Clonard !’ ’ and ringing the bell with a fury that raised the wail of the emigrants’ friends an octave higher. ° “Going to start, —look out for your leg I” cried Boohig, banging the door. . bless my soul!” cried the electric little man, saving his limb with the spring of an automaton toy: but his eyes still ranged desperately up the road. Was there ever anything so unlucky ? But you don’t understand, guardyou don’t, reelly. It’s Mr. Harman that’s coming over to Sessions. Just think if he should be left behind ! You couldn’t do it, guard —no, reelly!” b . Quarter of an hour late, sircomplaints in the papers, sir as much as my place is worth, sir. —Now then old woman out with your ticket!— ls that handful of turkeys all right in the van, Mr. Draddy ? Where as Ito drop Mrs. Deloohery’s handbox 1 4t the , junction, is it All right. Here he’s down the road, sir—divvel such head (music) ever was heard whispered Boohig, springing into his van behind' the third-class carriage in which Myles Rohan travelled tor the time-honored Radical reason that they would not accommodate him with a fourth.

(To be continued.)