The Silent People, page 6
‘Yes, I do,’ said Dualta. ‘You are mixing me up with my friend. He did not understand English. I do.’
‘Why didn’t you answer the gentleman?’ the policeman asked.
‘I am not a dog,’ said Dualta. ‘He beckoned as if he was calling his dog.’
‘You are for hire, aren’t you?’ the young gentleman asked angrily.
‘Yes,’ said Dualta.
‘Well, then,’ he said, as if this was the end of the argument.
‘I have to like the looks of the people I will hire myself to,’ said Dualta. ‘I don’t like your looks.’
The young man’s face became suffused with anger. Dualta’s face was white under the sun-colour and his eyes were sparking. The young man suddenly looked around him and was upset by what he saw. They were deeply surrounded by a ring of countrymen. It seemed to have happened in a moment. Tall men and short men and young men, with impassive faces, just looking at him. They were completely hemmed in. The ring around them was at least five men deep. At the outer ring some of the rough-and-ready boys were trying to force their way into the centre, but were unable to make their way through the solid mass of bodies.
‘If you desire to hit me with that whip, just do so,’ said Dualta.
The policeman looked around him.
‘Now, now,’ he said. ‘No need for that tone, I’m sure. The gentleman had no intention of hitting you.’
‘Certainly not,’ said the gentleman. ‘Why should I soil my whip?’ He was brave enough. He started to walk through the crowd of men as if they weren’t there. They opened a lane for him. He reached his horse. He mounted. He sat looking down at them. They all stared back at him impassively. He was daunted, you could see that. He would like to make a gesture but he couldn’t think of one. So he brought the whip down viciously on the flank of the horse. The horse whinnied and reared and then galloped.
The policeman said to Dualta, ‘You are a lucky young man.’
Dualta said, ‘Why do you say that?’
‘Many reasons,’ said the policeman. Then he turned to the crowd. ‘Go on now! Go about your business. Break up this crowd. It’s against the law.’
Gradually the mass moved, drifting away until Dualta was left with the policeman and the three or four rough-and-ready boys ruefully regarding the sergeant.
‘You could be a dead young man now,’ said the policeman. ‘Watch yourself. Keep out of trouble. It’s possible that the young gentleman will be back with friends. I would advise you to change your position.’
‘I will stay where I am,’ said Dualta.
‘I told you,’ said the policeman and walked away. The others followed him, looking like mongrels trailing a greyhound.
Dualta was looking after him when a voice said, ‘Has no man hired you?’
Automatically, as if he had read it, Dualta said: ‘No man, Lord.’
Then he turned to look at the voice. He was looking at a tall man with a deeply lined face. He wore no hat. He had white hair that looked too old for his face. It was a strong face, with two lines of bitterness cutting between his nose and his chin. His eyes were a very pale blue and his eyebrows were black. A strange interesting-looking countenance.
‘You are a young man of learning,’ he said.
‘I have some,’ said Dualta. He noticed they were talking Irish. Sometimes he found it hard to understand the Irish of the south. They put the emphasis on different parts of the words and almost sang some of the vowels, elided more, thinned others. But this man spoke very clearly.
‘Do you seek trouble deliberately?’ he asked. ‘ Do you wish to embrace it?’
‘No,’ said Dualta. ‘He reminded me of somebody. My good sense deserted me.’
‘You are not without courage,’ said the man.
‘What is courage?’ Dualta asked.
‘Facing your oppressors with a straight back,’ said the man.
‘That is courage. But it must be done at an opportune time. You are free to be hired. Will you hire yourself to me?’
‘What is the rate?’ Dualta asked.
The man laughed.
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Whatever you are worth. Maybe nothing. You will get opportunities to fight oppression. You will be able to hit back. Does the thought of that please you?’
‘It does,’ said Dualta.
The man held out his hand. ‘ My name is Cuan McCarthy,’ he said. ‘You will have to trust me.’
Dualta felt the hard hand that firmly grasped his own. The look of the man was open and direct, and held promise. Of what? Dualta didn’t know, but his pulse tingled.
‘I am your man,’ he said.
‘Come with me,’ said Cuan. ‘I have a spare horse which I purchased today. That will be your first job, to ride it, without a saddle,’ he added.
‘My seat would not know the feel of a saddle,’ said Dualta. ‘It was educated to the bare back of a pony.’
The man smiled.
‘We will go the back way,’ he said. ‘ Because the policeman was right. Your antagonist will return. We will leave him to weep.’
He turned abruptly and walked away.
Dualta hefted his spade and followed him and his heart was beating faster than usual.
Chapter Seven
THE WOMAN said: ‘Are you ready?’
‘Yes,’ said Dualta, dipping his quill in the inkhorn.
‘The first one to Tooley,’ she said. ‘ Write that he has only hours to withdraw his bid on the land of the Ryans. You know how to say it.’
Dualta wrote:
‘Tooley: You have been warned.
You have only hours left.
Go now, and withdraw your bid.
You know the consequences.
Captain Right.’
Nothing disturbed the silence but the scratching of the quill on the paper. Dualta considered it. He decided to leave it bare without any flourishes. He rose from the table and carried it over to her. Before he handed it to her he held it in front of the fire to dry, careful that the thin ink didn’t run. She took it. She was sitting beside the fire. Her head bent over the letter. Her hair was uncovered. She was an enormous fat woman. Her hair was still black. It was parted in the centre and pulled back. It gleamed. She had a good forehead. From below her forehead her face started to swell. Then her body, all the way down to her ankles. She had small feet. They were encased in boots that would barely fasten around her ankles. He watched her as she read. Her face didn’t register anything.
‘Now the other,’ she said as she folded the letter carefully. He went back to the table. He thought, tickling his lips with the
goosequill. This one would have to be different.
He crossed a cross with a cross three times on the head of the
paper. That looked spiky. Then he wrote:
‘Hanley: This is the last warning.
Go, or you will sleep in the
Embrace of the Briars.
Captain Rock.’
He smiled as he read that. He thought of Hanley, Wilcocks’ bailiff, a white-skinned man, with soft hands and a comfortable stomach. He thought of him being stripped naked, of the six-foot hole being dug in the earth, filled around with briars, and the soft body of Hartley being forced into this bed. He had a bald head. It would be gleaming whitely in the light of the torches. He would undoubtedly scream as the briars tore his soft flesh. He would be terrified at the thought of the briar-bed. Dualta thought he could afford to smile. Because it had never been done to anyone around here yet. The threat of it was sufficient as soon as the word of its having been done to someone somewhere else, sometime, percolated into the valley. He wondered if anyone had ever slept in the briar-bed. He was assured that they had done so in other places. But as far as Dualta was concerned it was a game. He loved writing these threatening letters.
He went and handed it to her. She read it and laughed.
‘That will frighten Hanley,’ she said. ‘He is soft. It would do him no harm to get a few briar thorns into his softness. We will add to the letter with a bit of action. He is already afeard. I would say that he is ready to go.’
He was glad that she was pleased. She was a formidable woman. Perhaps it was the fatness of her that never allowed an expression to move the heaviness of her countenance. The small hands, the small feet looked innocuous, Missis Annie, widow woman who ran a small shop at the cross-roads in the valley. She had small even teeth and when she smiled she looked so jolly.
‘How long have you been here now?’ she asked.
‘Say six months,’ said Dualta.
‘We will have to get another writer,’ she said.
‘Why so?’ he asked. ‘Am I not satisfactory?’
‘Oh, yes, dear,’ she said. ‘But they get to know. You can tell a man from his hand. If it is too well known, some day you will write and somebody will see and recognise, and they will say, ‘‘Oh, that is the hand of the young Connachtman that works for Annie.’’ You see?’
‘Yes,’ said Dualta.
‘But you will advise,’ she said. ‘Some of your imaginations would chill the blood of an eel. Go see if there is any sign of McCarthy.’
Dualta went to the door.
It was a good sheltered valley, covered off by the Knockmealdown mountains, and if you were high enough you looked left and saw the Galtees away off, and when you looked right you could see the Monevalaghs, with the Comeraghs behind them. He supposed that was why the people were fighters. The men all seemed to have long jaws that could clamp shut like the grip of a vice. The valley itself was rich and lush, cultivated almost to the peak of the hills, a thing Dualta could never get used to. But if you looked closely you realised that all the houses were pressed back up into the high ground. The river that bisected the valley had rich fields on either side of it, and these rich fields seemed as if they had inexorably pushed back the houses and the smaller fields, pressed them and forced them back up the hills, while on the far side of the river a three-storey stone house, with pillars at its great front door, lay snug in the middle of a park-field of thirty acres. The sun was shining on it now. The river was gleaming, the fresh leaves were peeping on the great trees in the parkland. Behind the house he could see the carriage-houses and the haybarns and the horse stalls. He thought: if the little houses and fields had been pushed back over the years, they were now reaching out and bit by bit trying to embrace part of what they had been deprived of, and the rich lands were shivering.
‘You are looking at your future home,’ said the voice behind him.
‘What’s that?’ said Dualta. He turned and saw Cuan. ‘I never saw you coming although I was on the watch for you. What do you mean, my future home?’
‘You are going to live there,’ said Cuan.
‘I am?’ asked Dualta. ‘I suppose I’m going to marry Wilcock’s daughter?’
McCarthy laughed.
‘Don’t be that ambitious,’ he said. ‘No, we have been gradually reducing his workmen as you know. So we are going to send you to work for him. He will be pleased to have you. He would be pleased to have a cripple, not to mind a strong man.’
‘Do you wish to make me a Trojan horse?’ Dualta asked.
‘The very thing,’ said McCarthy, ‘the very thing. Come in and we will talk to Annie.’
They went towards the house. Then Cuan’s eye was caught by the movement in the valley. ‘Stop,’ he said. They turned and looked. On the road behind the big house there was a cavalcade of men moving. The dark-clothed ones were on horseback. They were armed. There were other horsemen and walking men with implements on their shoulders. Cuan walked quickly to the door. ‘Come out, Annie,’ he called. ‘They are going to knock Morogh Ryan.’ He came back and stood beside Dualta. His fists were clenched, Dualta saw, and the jaw muscles were bulging on his face. His eyes were slitted as he watched. The bitter lines near his mouth were very deep.
‘He is for eviction?’ Dualta asked.
‘He is,’ said Cuan. ‘He is for eviction.’
‘He is a weak man,’ said Dualta. ‘He was bound to go to the wall some day.’
Cuan turned on him. ‘Whose fault?’ he asked. ‘Whose fault? Because he is weak all the more reason that he should find true justice. A strong man can look after himself. Your day will come! You talk like that and your day will come too, then you will look around you and you will find no pity.’
Dualta remained silent. Morogh Ryan bid for land at a very high price. He had five acres. He paid a rent of five pounds an acre. That was twenty-five pounds. Even with his potatoes and his bit of oats and his cows and his pig, it was not enough to pay the rent. Because he was a lazy man anyhow, and he grew weeds. You didn’t need to be a prophet to know that he would one day fall. It was part of life. He wasn’t a good man with land. He should never have bid for what he couldn’t afford.
‘You can’t understand,’ said Cuan. ‘You are young. You dismiss men like straws. It’s not the men. It’s the system. Morogh has five children. What will become of them? He will go into a town and at the outskirts he will build a wretched shelter. He will beg and look for odd jobs and he will scour rubbish-heaps. Unless God is better to him than now, he will have to sell the small bodies of his daughters, for a stone of potatoes. Yes, he is a weak man, is Morogh.’
Annie was standing beside them. Her arms were folded. They watched it all enacted. The people converging on the house. There was no wall around it. Just a rough yard in front with the manure-heap piled high near the door. There was smoke rising from the thatch. The sun didn’t glint off the windows because they held no glass. They saw the figure of Morogh at the door, and then his wife, and the children emerging like rabbits out of a burrow. They saw the hands waving. It didn’t take long. They saw the hooks tied to ropes thrown over the thatch and the men straining, like the rope-pulling teams at the harvest sports, and then there was a crack, audible even to them watching, and the roof collapsed. It was a one-roomed cottage. The supports of the thatch were gone, just one or two blackened beams crooked and exposed and the marks of the fire on the inside of one gable. That was all. Smoke started to rise from the ruins as the fallen thatch fell on the still burning turf fire. It smouldered and burst into flame. Dualta’s heart stopped at the sight. It brought back to him the sight of the death of the house of his Uncle Marcus. But that was free. That was done by a free man. This was different.
They remained.
‘We are not men,’ Cuan was saying. ‘We should be all over there, every man of us with pikes and pitchforks and sleans, all in one mass to prevent them from doing this.’
‘What good would it do for everyone to die?’ Annie asked. ‘That would please them. They could clean out the valley at one stroke. No. It is better to repay.’
Then after a pause she said, ‘Well, Tooley will pay for this. Tooley will pay!’
‘Tonight, Dualta,’ said Cuan. ‘ You will come. It’s about time you saw the result of your letters. It might restore some of our pity for the poor.’
‘I’m not wanting in pity,’ said Dualta.
‘We’ll see,’ said Cuan. ‘ We’ll see!’
They took soot from the chimney of Cuan’s house and they rubbed it on their faces. Then they took the prepared rush torches, unlighted, and went into the night. The horses were tied at the back of the house. They mounted them and gave them their heads, because it was the dark of the moon. The stars were obscured by clouds.
Dualta was excited. These were the sort of actions he had wanted. Mounted men in the night, soot, torches, the sound of a shod hoof hitting a stone. The horses seemed to know where they were going. They left the rough road and descended the hill. The bushes blocking the gaps into the fields had all been removed. The horses seemed to find their way to the gaps as if it was broad daylight.
There was a sheen on the river, hardly perceptible. You could hear the gentle rustling of the dead rushes, and the scamper of a frightened water-hen. The horses bent their heads, widened their nostrils and scented the water before they crossed. It was quite deep but the ford was hard underfoot. Dualta felt the water kissing his shoes. They laboured up the other bank and trotted to the fields on the far side. In about ten minutes they came to the grove of willow trees. They couldn’t see but they heard the movement of horses pacing and being quietened; the slap of a hard palm on the neck of a horse; uneasy horses whinnying and being gently shushed.
They stopped there. Cuan spoke: ‘Are we all here?’
‘We are all here,’ a voice answered him. ‘Don’t light the torches until we are about the house,’ he said. ‘Did men bring the kettles?’ ‘They will be at the place,’ he was answered. ‘The police are all gone,’ said Cuan. ‘They had to escort that dangerous criminal Morogh Ryan out of the valley.’ There was a snort of laughter. ‘When the flames go up, flee, and let the horses loose on the hills. Go to bed. We move. Now!’
Dualta felt the excitement now. The fact that you could not see added to it. Hearing voices out of the darkness. The smell of the horses. Being surrounded by men you knew but couldn’t recognise. He thought: Maybe I should have stayed at home and organised something like this for the Half-Sir, but at least now I know. Now I know how it is done. It all gave you a feeling of power. That you were hitting back; that you were concealed and free from discovery. You were an anonymous freedom-fighter under the soft spring cloak of darkness.
First the horses walked and then when they had negotiated the fields and felt their hooves on the rough road they trotted, and then somebody shouted and they ran. The sound of twenty horsemen on the road was exhilarating. It was dangerous. Men and horses all around you. Tossing manes and squeals and shouts. One or two dogs started to bark.
Then they were there, just when his blood was being warmed. There were other horsemen waiting.
‘Spread around,’ said the voice of Cuan. Dualta stayed where he was, facing the house. He saw the horsemen moving out on either side. There was a faint reflection from the whitewashed walls of Tooley’s house. ‘Light up!’ said the voice of Cuan. On the left there was the splutter of an expensive match-stick and then a torch flared and from the one torch others were lighted until a ring of flaming torches lit up the house in an unnatural glow. Inside the kitchen of the house a dog started to bark.
