Celt and Saxon. Complete

The captain’s cabin was the crown of his house-top, a builder’s addition to the roof, where the detestable deeds he revelled in, calling them liberty, could be practised, according to the convention, and no one save rosy Mary, in her sense of smell, when she came upon her morning business to clean and sweep, be any the wiser of them, because, as it is known to the whole world, smoke ascends, and he was up among the chimneys. Here, he would say to his friends and fellow-sinners, you can unfold, unbosom, explode, do all you like, except caper, and there ‘s a small square of lead between the tiles outside for that, if the spirit of the jig comes upon you with violence, as I have had it on me, and eased myself mightily there, to my own music; and the capital of the British Empire below me. Here we take our indemnity for subjection to the tyrannical female ear, and talk like copious rivers meandering at their own sweet will. Here we roll like dogs in carrion, and no one to sniff at our coats. Here we sing treason, here we flout reason, night is out season at half-past ten.

This introductory ode to Freedom was his throwing off of steam, the foretaste of what he contained. He rejoined his cousins, chirping variations on it, and attired in a green silken suit of airy Ottoman volume, full of incitement to the legs and arms to swing and set him up for a Sultan. ‘Now Phil, now Pat,’ he cried, after tenderly pulling the door to and making sure it was shut, ‘any tale you’ve a mind for—infamous and audacious! You’re licensed by the gods up here, and may laugh at them too, and their mothers and grandmothers, if the fit seizes ye, and the heartier it is the greater the exemption. We’re pots that knock the lid and must pour out or boil over and destroy the furniture. My praties are ready for peelin’, if ever they were in this world! Chuck wigs from sconces, and off with your buckram. Decency’s a dirty petticoat in the Garden of Innocence. Naked we stand, boys! we’re not afraid of nature. You’re in the annexe of Erin, Pat, and devil a constable at the keyhole; no rats; I’ll say that for the Government, though it’s a despotism with an iron bridle on the tongue outside to a foot of the door. Arctic to freeze the boldest bud of liberty! I’d like a French chanson from ye, Pat, to put us in tune, with a right revolutionary hurling chorus, that pitches Kings’ heads into the basket like autumn apples. Or one of your hymns in Gaelic sung ferociously to sound as horrid to the Saxon, the wretch. His reign ‘s not for ever; he can’t enter here. You’re in the stronghold defying him. And now cigars, boys, pipes; there are the boxes, there are the bowls. I can’t smoke till I have done steaming. I’ll sit awhile silently for the operation. Christendom hasn’t such a man as your cousin Con for feeling himself a pig-possessed all the blessed day, acting the part of somebody else, till it takes me a quarter of an hour of my enfranchisement and restoration of my natural man to know myself again. For the moment, I’m froth, scum, horrid boiling hissing dew of the agony of transformation; I am; I’m that pig disgorging the spirit of wickedness from his poor stomach.’

The captain drooped to represent the state of the self-relieving victim of the evil one; but fearful lest either of his cousins should usurp the chair and thwart his chance of delivering himself, he rattled away sympathetically with his posture in melancholy: ‘Ay, we’re poor creatures; pigs and prophets, princes and people, victors and vanquished, we ‘re waves of the sea, rolling over and over, and calling it life! There’s no life save the eternal. Father Boyle’s got the truth. Flesh is less than grass, my sons; ‘tis the shadow that crosses the grass. I love the grass. I could sit and watch grassblades for hours. I love an old turf mound, where the grey grass nods and seems to know the wind and have a whisper with it, of ancient times maybe and most like; about the big chief lying underneath in the last must of his bones that a breath of air would scatter. They just keep their skeleton shape as they are; for the turf mound protects them from troubles: ‘tis the nurse to that delicate old infant!—Waves of the sea, did I say? We’re wash in a hog-trough for Father Saturn to devour; big chief and suckling babe, we all go into it, calling it life! And what hope have we of reading the mystery? All we can see is the straining of the old fellow’s hams to push his old snout deeper into the gobble, and the ridiculous curl of a tail totally devoid of expression! You’ll observe that gluttons have no feature; they’re jaws and hindquarters; which is the beginning and end of ‘m; and so you may say to Time for his dealing with us: so let it be a lesson to you not to bother your wits, but leave the puzzle to the priest. He understands it, and why? because he was told. There ‘s harmony in his elocution, and there’s none in the modern drivel about where we’re going and what we came out of. No wonder they call it an age of despair, when you see the big wigs filing up and down the thoroughfares with a great advertisement board on their shoulders, proclaiming no information to the multitude, but a blank note of interrogation addressed to Providence, as if an answer from above would be vouchsafed to their impudence! They haven’t the first principles of good manners. And some of ‘m in a rage bawl the answer for themselves. Hear that! No, Phil; No, Pat, no: devotion’s good policy.—You’re not drinking! Are you both of ye asleep? why do ye leave me to drone away like this, when it ‘s conversation I want, as in the days of our first parents, before the fig-leaf?—and you might have that for scroll and figure on the social banner of the hypocritical Saxon, who’s a gormandising animal behind his decency, and nearer to the Arch-devourer Time than anything I can imagine: except that with a little exertion you can elude him. The whisky you’ve got between you ‘s virgin of the excise. I’ll pay double for freepeaty any day. Or are you for claret, my lads? No? I’m fortified up here to stand a siege in my old round tower, like the son of Eremon that I am. Lavra Con! Con speaks at last! I don’t ask you, Pat, whether you remember Maen, who was born dumb, and had for his tutors Ferkelne the bard and Crafting the harper, at pleasant Dinree: he was grandson of Leary Lore who was basely murdered by his brother Cova, and Cova spared the dumb boy, thinking a man without a tongue harmless, as fools do: being one of their savings-bank tricks, to be repaid them, their heirs, executors, administrators, and assigns at compound interest, have no fear. So one day Maen had an insult put on him; and ‘twas this for certain: a ruffian fellow of the Court swore he couldn’t mention the name of his father; and in a thundering fury Maen burst his tongue-tie, and the Court shouted Lavra Maen: and he had to go into exile, where he married in the middle of delicious love-adventures the beautiful Moira through the cunning of Craftine the harper. There’s been no harper in my instance but plenty of ruffians to swear I’m too comfortable to think of my country.’ The captain holloaed. ‘Do they hear that? Lord! but wouldn’t our old Celtic fill the world with poetry if only we were a free people to give our minds to ‘t, instead of to the itch on our backs from the Saxon horsehair shirt we’re forced to wear. For, Pat, as you know, we’re a loving people, we’re a loyal people, we burn to be enthusiastic, but when our skins are eternally irritated, how can we sing? In a freer Erin I’d be the bard of the land, never doubt it. What am I here but a discontented idle lout crooning over the empty glories of our isle of Saints! You feel them, Pat. Phil’s all for his British army, his capabilities of British light cavalry. Write me the history of the Enniskillens. I’ll read it. Aha, my boy, when they ‘re off at the charge! And you’ll oblige me with the tale of Fontenoy. Why, Phil has an opportunity stretching forth a hand to him now more than halfway that comes to a young Irishman but once in a century: backed by the entire body of the priesthood of Ireland too! and if only he was a quarter as full of the old country as you and I, his hair would stand up in fire for the splendid gallop at our head that’s proposed to him. His country’s gathered up like a crested billow to roll him into Parliament; and I say, let him be there, he ‘s the very man to hurl his gauntlet, and tell ‘m, Parliament, so long as you are parliamentary, which means the speaking of our minds, but if you won’t have it, then-and it ‘s on your heads before Europe and the two Americas. We’re dying like a nun that ‘d be out of her cloister, we’re panting like the wife who hears of her husband coming home to her from the field of honour, for that young man. And there he is; or there he seems to be; but he’s dead: and the fisherman off the west coast after dreaming of a magical haul, gets more fish than disappointment in comparison with us when we cast the net for Philip. Bring tears of vexation at the emptiness we pull back for our pains. Oh, Phil! and to think of your youth! We had you then. At least we had your heart. And we should have had the length and strength of you, only for a woman fatal to us as the daughter of Rhys ap Tudor, the beautiful Nesta:—and beautiful she was to match the mother of the curses trooping over to Ireland under Strongbow, that I’ll grant you. But she reined you in when you were a real warhorse ramping and snorting flame from your nostrils, challenging any other to a race for Ireland; ay, a Cuchullin you were, Philip, Culann’s chain-bound: but she unmanned you. She soaked the woman into you and squeezed the hero out of you. All for Adiante! or a country left to slavery! that’s the tale. And what are you now? A paltry captain of hussars on the General’s staff! One O’Donnell in a thousand! And what is she?—you needn’t frown, Phil; I’m her relative by marriage, and she ‘s a lady. More than that, she shot a dart or two into my breast in those days, she did, I’ll own it: I had the catch of the breath that warns us of convulsions. She was the morning star for beauty, between night and day, and the best colour of both. Welshmen and Irishmen and Englishmen tumbled into the pit, which seeing her was, and there we jostled for a glimpse quite companionably; we were too hungry for quarrelling; and to say, I was one of ‘m, is a title to subsequent friendship. True; only mark me, Philip, and you, Patrick: they say she has married a prince, and I say no; she’s took to herself a husband in her cradle; she’s married ambition. I tell you, and this prince of hers is only a step she has taken, and if he chases her first mate from her bosom, he’ll prove himself cleverer than she, and I dare him to the trial. For she’s that fiery dragon, a beautiful woman with brains—which Helen of Troy hadn’t, combustible as we know her to have been: but brains are bombshells in comparison with your old-fashioned pine-brands for kindling men and cities. Ambition’s the husband of Adiante Adister, and all who come nigh her are steps to her aim. She never consulted her father about Prince Nikolas; she had begun her march and she didn’t mean to be arrested. She simply announced her approaching union; and as she couldn’t have a scion of one of the Royal House of Europe, she put her foot on Prince Nikolas. And he ‘s not to fancy he ‘s in for a peaceful existence; he’s a stone in a sling, and probably mistaken the rocking that’s to launch him through the air for a condition of remarkable ease, perfectly remarkable in its lullaby motion; ha! well, and I’ve not heard of ambition that didn’t kill its votary: somehow it will; ‘tis sure to. There she lies!’

The prophetic captain pointed at the spot. He then said: ‘And now I’m for my pipe, and the blackest clay of the party, with your permission. I’ll just go to the window to see if the stars are out overhead. They’re my blessed guardian angels.’

There was a pause. Philip broke from a brown study to glance at his brother. Patrick made a queer face.

‘Fun and good-fellowship to-night, Con,’ said Philip, as the captain sadly reported no star visible.

‘Have I ever flown a signal to the contrary?’ retorted the captain.

‘No politics, and I ‘ll thank you,’ said Philip: ‘none of your early recollections. Be jovial.’

‘You should have seen me here the other night about a month ago; I smuggled up an old countrywoman of ours, with the connivance of rosy Mary,’ said Captain Con, suffused in the merriest of grins. ‘She sells apples at a stall at a corner of a street hard by, and I saw her sitting pulling at her old pipe in the cold October fog morning and evening for comfort, and was overwhelmed with compassion and fraternal sentiment; and so I invited her to be at the door of the house at half-past ten, just to have a roll with her in Irish mud, and mend her torn soul with a stitch or two of rejoicing. She told me stories; and one was pretty good, of a relative of hers, or somebody’s—I should say, a century old, but she told it with a becoming air of appropriation that made it family history, for she’s come down in the world, and this fellow had a stain of red upon him, and wanted cleaning; and, “What!” says the good father, “Mika! you did it in cold blood?” And says Mika, “Not I, your Riverence. I got myself into a passion ‘fore I let loose.” I believe she smoked this identical pipe. She acknowledged the merits of my whisky, as poets do hearing fine verses, never clapping hands, but with the expressiveness of grave absorption. That’s the way to make good things a part of you. She was a treat. I got her out and off at midnight, rosy Mary sneaking her down, and the old girl quiet as a mouse for the fun’s sake. The whole intrigue was exquisitely managed.’

‘You run great risks,’ Philip observed.

‘I do,’ said the captain.

He called on the brothers to admire the ‘martial and fumial’ decorations of his round tower, buzzing over the display of implements, while Patrick examined guns and Philip unsheathed swords. An ancient clay pipe from the bed of the Thames and one from the bed of the Boyne were laid side by side, and strange to relate, the Irish pipe and English immediately, by the mere fact of their being proximate, entered into rivalry; they all but leapt upon one another. The captain judicially decided the case against the English pipe, as a newer pipe of grosser manufacture, not so curious by any means.

‘This,’ Philip held up the reputed Irish pipe, and scanned as he twirled it on his thumb, ‘This was dropped in Boyne Water by one of William’s troopers. It is an Orange pipe. I take it to be of English make.’

‘If I thought that, I’d stamp my heel on the humbug the neighbour minute,’ said Captain Con. ‘Where’s the sign of English marks?’

‘The pipes resemble one another,’ said Philip, ‘like tails of Shannon-bred retrievers.’

‘Maybe they ‘re both Irish, then?’ the captain caught at analogy to rescue his favourite from reproach.

‘Both of them are Saxon.’

‘Not a bit of it!’

‘Look at the clay.’

‘I look, and I tell you, Philip, it’s of a piece with your lukewarmness for the country, or you wouldn’t talk like that.’

‘There is no record of pipe manufactories in Ireland at the period you name.’

‘There is: and the jealousy of rulers caused them to be destroyed by decrees, if you want historical evidence.’

‘Your opposition to the Saxon would rob him of his pipe, Con!’

‘Let him go to the deuce with as many pipes as he can carry; but he shan’t have this one.’

‘Not a toss-up of difference is to be seen in the pair.’

‘Use your eyes. The Irish bowl is broken, and the English has an inch longer stem!’

‘O the Irish bowl is broken!’ Philip sang.

‘You’ve the heart of a renegade-foreigner not to see it!’ cried the captain.

Patrick intervened saying: ‘I suspect they’re Dutch.’

‘Well, and that ‘s possible.’ Captain Con scrutinised them to calm his temper: ‘there’s a Dutchiness in the shape.’

He offered Philip the compromise of ‘Dutch’ rather plaintively, but it was not accepted, and the pipes would have mingled their fragments on the hearthstone if Patrick had not stayed his arm, saying: ‘Don’t hurt them.’

‘And I won’t,’ the captain shook his hand gratefully.

‘But will Philip O’Donnell tell me that Ireland should lie down with England on the terms of a traveller obliged to take a bedfellow? Come! He hasn’t an answer. Put it to him, and you pose him. But he ‘ll not stir, though he admits the antagonism. And Ireland is asked to lie down with England on a couch blessed by the priest! Not she. Wipe out our grievances, and then we’ll begin to talk of policy. Good Lord!—love? The love of Ireland for the conquering country will be the celebrated ceremony in the concluding chapter previous to the inauguration of the millennium. Thousands of us are in a starving state at home this winter, Patrick. And it’s not the fault of England?—landlordism ‘s not? Who caused the ruin of all Ireland’s industries? You might as well say that it ‘s the fault of the poor beggar to go limping and hungry because his cruel master struck him a blow to cripple him. We don’t want half and half doctoring, and it’s too late in the day for half and half oratory. We want freedom, and we’ll have it, and we won’t leave it to the Saxon to think about giving it. And if your brother Philip won’t accept this blazing fine offer, then I will, and you’ll behold me in a new attitude. The fellow yawns! You don’t know me yet, Philip. They tell us over here we ought to be satisfied. Fall upon our list of wrongs, and they set to work yawning. You can only move them by popping at them over hedges and roaring on platforms. They’re incapable of understanding a complaint a yard beyond their noses. The Englishman has an island mind, and when he’s out of it he’s at sea.’

‘Mad, you mean,’ said Philip.

‘I repeat my words, Captain Philip O’Donnell, late of the staff of the General commanding in Canada.’

‘The Irishman too has an island mind, and when he’s out of it he’s at sea, and unable to manage his craft,’ said Philip.

‘You’ll find more craft in him when he’s buffeted than you reckoned on,’ his cousin flung back. ‘And if that isn’t the speech of a traitor sold to the enemy, and now throwing off the mask, traitors never did mischief in Ireland! Why, what can you discover to admire in these people? Isn’t their army such a combination of colours in the uniforms, with their yellow facings on red jackets, I never saw out of a doll-shop, and never saw there. And their Horse Guards, weedy to a man! fit for a doll-shop they are, by my faith! And their Foot Guards: Have ye met the fellows marching? with their feet turned out, flat as my laundress’s irons, and the muscles of their calves depending on the joints to get ‘m along, for elasticity never gave those bones of theirs a springing touch; and their bearskins heeling behind on their polls; like pot-house churls daring the dursn’t to come on. Of course they can fight. Who said no? But they ‘re not the only ones: and they ‘ll miss their ranks before they can march like our Irish lads. The look of their men in line is for all the world to us what lack-lustre is to the eye. The drill they ‘ve had hasn’t driven Hodge out of them, it has only stiffened the dolt; and dolt won’t do any longer; the military machine requires intelligence in all ranks now. Ay, the time for the Celt is dawning: I see it, and I don’t often spy a spark where there isn’t soon a blaze. Solidity and stupidity have had their innings: a precious long innings it has been; and now they’re shoved aside like clods of earth from the risin flower. Off with our shackles! We’ve only to determine it to be free, and we’ll bloom again; and I’ll be the first to speak the word and mount the colours. Follow me! Will ye join in the toast to the emblem of Erin—the shamrock, Phil and Pat?’

‘Oh, certainly,’ said Philip. ‘What ‘s that row going on?’ Patrick also called attention to the singular noise in the room. ‘I fancy the time for the Celt is not dawning, but setting,’ said Philip, with a sharp smile; and Patrick wore an artful look.

A corner of the room was guilty of the incessant alarum. Captain Con gazed in that direction incredulously and with remonstrance. ‘The tinkler it is!’ he sighed. ‘But it can’t be midnight yet?’ Watches were examined. Time stood at half-past the midnight. He groaned: ‘I must go. I haven’t heard the tinkler for months. It signifies she’s cold in her bed. The thing called circulation’s unknown to her save by the aid of outward application, and I ‘m the warming pan, as legitimately I should be, I’m her husband and her Harvey in one. Goodbye to my hop and skip. I ought by rights to have been down beside her at midnight. She’s the worthiest woman alive, and I don’t shirk my duty. Be quiet!’ he bellowed at the alarum; ‘I ‘m coming. Don’t be in such a fright, my dear,’ he admonished it as his wife, politely. ‘Your hand’ll take an hour to warm if you keep it out on the spring that sets the creature going.’ He turned and informed his company: ‘Her hand’ll take an hour to warm. Dear! how she runs ahead: d’ ye hear? That’s the female tongue, and once off it won’t stop. And this contrivance for fetching me from my tower to her bed was my own suggestion, in a fit of generosity! Ireland all over! I must hurry and wash my hair, for she can’t bear a perfume to kill a stink; she carries her charitable heart that far. Good-night, I’ll be thinking of ye while I’m warming her. Sit still, I can’t wait; ‘tis the secret of my happiness.’ He fled. Patrick struck his knee on hearing the expected ballad-burden recur.