THE FIRST BOOK OF THE FOOLISH LOVERS

THE FIRST BOOK OF THE FOOLISH LOVERS

Why, 'tis an office of discovery, love!
The Merchant of Venice.

Love unpaid does soon disband.
ANDREW MARVELL

THE FIRST CHAPTER

I

If you were to say to an Ulster man, "Who are the proudest people in Ireland?" he would first of all stare at you as if he had difficulty in believing that any intelligent person could ask a question with so obvious an answer, and then he would reply, "Why, the Ulster people, of course!" And if you were to say to a Ballyards man, "Who are the proudest people in Ulster?" he would reply ... if he deigned to reply at all ... "A child would know that! The Ballyards people, of course!"

It is difficult for anyone who is not a native of the town, to understand why the inhabitants of Ballyards should possess so great a pride in their birthplace. It is not a large town ... it is not even the largest town in the county ... nor has it any notable features to distinguish it from a dozen other towns of similar size in that part of Ireland. Millreagh, although it is now a poor, scattered sort of place, was once of great importance: for the mail-boats sailed from its harbour to Port Michael until the steamship owners agreed that Port Michael was too much exposed to the severities of rough weather, and chose another harbour elsewhere. Millreagh mourns over its lost glory, attributable in no way to the fault of Millreagh, but entirely to the inscrutable design of Providence which arranged that Port Michael, and not Kirkmull, should lie on the opposite side of the Irish Sea; and every Sunday morning, after church, and sometimes on Sunday afternoon, the people walk along the breakwater to the lighthouse and remind each other of the days when their town was of consequence. "We spent a hundred and fifty thousand pounds on our harbour," they say to each other, "and then the Scotch went and did the like of that!"—the like of that being their stupidity in living in an exposed situation. Millreagh does not admit that it has suffered any more than a temporary diminishment of its greatness, and it makes optimistic and boastful prophecies of the fortune and repute that will come to it when the engineers make a tunnel between Scotland and Ireland. Sometimes an article on the Channel Tunnel will appear in the Newsletter or the Whig, and for weeks afterwards Millreagh lives in a fever of expectancy; for whatever else may be said about the Tunnel, this is certain to be said of it, that it will start, in Ireland, from Millreagh. On that brilliant hope, Millreagh, tightening its belt, lives in a fair degree of happiness, eking out its present poverty by fishing and by letting lodgings in the summer.

Pickie, too, has much reputation, more, perhaps, than Millreagh, for it is a popular holiday town and was once described in the Evening Telegraph as "the Blackpool of Ireland." This description, although it was apt enough, offended the more pretentious people in Pickie who were only mollified when the innocent reporter, in a later article, altered the description to, "the Brighton of Ireland." With consummate understanding of human character, he added, remembering the Yacht Club, that perhaps the most accurate description of Pickie would be "the Cowes of Ireland." In this way, the reporter, who subsequently became a member of parliament and made much money, pleased the harmless vanity of the lower, the middle and the upper classes of Pickie; and for a time they were "ill to thole" on account of the swollen condition of their heads, and it became necessary to utter sneers at "ham-and-egg parades" and "the tripper element" and to speak loudly and frequently of the superior merits of Portrush, "a really nice place," before they could be persuaded to believe that Pickie, like other towns, is inhabited by common human beings.

Ballyards never yielded an inch of its pride of place to Millreagh or to Pickie. "What's an oul' harbour when there's no boat in it?" Ballyards said to Millreagh; and, "Sure, the man makes his livin' sellin' sausages!" it said to Pickie when Pickie bragged of the great grocer who had joined the Yacht Club in order that he might issue a challenge for the Atlantic Cup. Tunnels and attractive seaboards were extraneous things that might bring fortune, but could not bring merit, to those lucky enough to possess them; but Ballyards had character ... its men were meritable men ... and Ballyards would not exchange the least of its inhabitants for ten tunnels. Nor did Ballyards abate any of its pride before the ancient and indisputable renown of Dunbar, which distils a whiskey that has soothed the gullets of millions of men throughout the world. When Patrickstown bragged of its long history ... it was once the home of the kings of Ulster ... and tried to make the world believe that St. Patrick was buried in its cathedral, Ballyards, magnificently imperturbed, murmured: "Your population is goin' down!"; nor does it manifest any respect for Greenry, which has a member of parliament to itself and has twice the population of Ballyards. "It's an ugly hole," says Ballyards, "an' it's full of Papishes!"

Millreagh and Pickie openly sneer at Ballyards, and Greenry affects to be unaware of it, but the pride of Ballyards remains unaltered, incapable of being diminished, incapable even of being increased ... for pride cannot go to greater lengths than the pride of Ballyards has already gone ... and in spite of contention and denial, it asserts, invincibly persistent, that it is the finest and most meritabie town in Ireland. When sceptics ask for proofs, Ballyards replies, "We don't need proofs!" A drunken man said, on a particularly hearty Saturday night, that Ballyards was the finest town in the world, but the general opinion of his fellow-townsmen was that this claim, while very human, was excessively expressed. London, for example, was bigger than Ballyards. So was New York!.... The drunken man, when he had recovered his sobriety, admitted that this was true, but he contended, and was well supported in his contention, that while London and New York might be bigger than Ballyards, neither of these cities were inhabited by men of such independent spirit as the men of Ballyards. A Ballyards man, he asserted, was beholden to no one. Once, and once only, a Millreagh man said that a Ballyards man thought he was being independent when he was being ill-bred; but Ballyards people would have none of this talk, and, after they had severely assaulted him, they drove the Millreagh man back to his "stinkin' wee town" and forbade him ever to put his foot in Ballyards again. "You know what you'll get if you do. Your head in your hands!" was the threat they shouted after him. And surely the wide world knows the story ... falsely credited to other places ... which every Ballyards child learns in its cradle, of the man who, on being rebuked in a foreign city for spitting, said to those who rebuked him, "I come from the town of Ballyards, an' I'll spit where I like!"

II

It was his pride in his birthplace which sometimes made John MacDermott hesitate to accept the advice of his Uncle Matthew and listen leniently to the advice of his Uncle William. Uncle Matthew urged him to seek his fortune in foreign parts, but Uncle William said, "Bedam to foreign parts when you can live in Ballyards!" Uncle Matthew, who had never been out of Ireland in his life, had much knowledge of the works of English writers, and from these works, he had drawn a romantic picture of London. The English city, in his imagination, was a place of marvellous adventures, far mere wonderful than the ancient city of Bagdad or the still more ancient city of Damascus, wherein anything might happen to a man who kept his eyes open or, for the matter of that, shut. He never tired of reading Mr. Andrew Lang's Historical Mysteries, and he liked to think of himself suddenly being accosted in the street by some dark stranger demanding to know whether he had a taste for adventure. Uncle Matthew was not quite certain what he would do if such a thing were to happen to him: whether to proclaim himself as eager for anything that was odd and queer or to threaten the stranger with the police. "You might think a man was going to lead you to a hidden place, mebbe, where there'd be a lovely woman waiting to receive you, and you blindfolded 'til you were shown into the room where she was ... and mebbe you'd be queerly disappointed, for it mightn't be that sort of a thing at all, but only some lad trying to steal your watch and chain!"

He had heard very unpleasant stories of what he called the Confidence Trick, whereby innocent persons were beguiled by seemingly amiable men into parting with all their possessions!...

"Of course," he would admit, "you'd never have no adventures at all, if you never ran no risks, and mebbe in the end, you do well to chance things. It's a queer pity a man never has any adventures in this place. Many's and many's a time I've walked the roads, thinking mebbe I'd meet someone with a turn that way, but I never in all my born days met anything queer or unusual, and I don't suppose I ever will now!"

Uncle Matthew had spoken so sadly and so longingly that John had deeply pitied him. "Did you never fall in love with no one, Uncle Matthew?" he asked.

"Och, indeed I did, John!" Uncle Matthew replied. "Many's and many's the time! Your Uncle William used to make fun of me and sing 'Shilly-shally with the wee girls, ha, ha, ha!' at me when I was a wee lad because I was always running after the young girls and sweethearting with them. He never ran after any himself: he was always looking for birds' nests or tormenting people with his tricks. He was a daft wee fellow for devilment, was your Uncle William, and yet he's sobered down remarkably. Sometimes, I think he got more romance out of his tormenting and nesting than I got out of my courting, though love's a grand thing, John, when you can get it. I was always falling in love, but sure what was the good? I never could be content with the way the girls talked about furniture and us setting up house together, when all the time I was wanting hard to be rescuing them from something. No wonder they wouldn't have me in the end, for, of course, it's very important to get good furniture and to set up a house somewhere nice and snug ... but I never was one for scringing and scrounging ... my money always melted away from the minute I got it ... and I couldn't bear the look of the furniture-men when you asked them how much it would cost to furnish a house on the hire-system!"

He paused for a moment, reflecting perhaps on the pleasures that had been missed by him because of his inability to save money and his dislike of practical concerns. Then in a brisker tone, as if he were consoling himself for his losses, he said, "Oh, well, there's consolation for everyone somewhere if they'll only take the trouble to look for it, and after all I've had a queer good time reading books!"

"Mebbe, Uncle Matthew," John suggested, "if you'd left Ballyards and gone to London, you'd have had a whole lot of adventures!"

"Mebbe I would," Uncle Matthew replied. "Though sometimes I think I'm not the sort that has adventures, for there's men in the world would find something romantic wherever they went, and I daresay if Lord Byron were living here in Ballyards, he'd have the women crying their eyes out for him. That was a terrible romantic man, John! Lord Byron! A terrible man for falling in love, God bless him!..."

It was Uncle Matthew who urged John to read Shakespeare—"a very plain-spoken, knowledgable man, Shakespeare!"—and Lord Byron—"a terrible bad lord, John, but a fine courter of girls and a grand poet!"—and Herrick—"a queer sort of minister, that man Herrick, but a good poet all the same!"—and Dickens. Dickens was the incomparable one who filled dull streets with vital figures: Sam Weller and Mr. Pickwick and Mr. Micawber and Mrs. Nickleby and Mr. Mantalini and Steerforth and David Copperfield and Barkis; and terrible figures: Fagan and Bill Sykes and Uriah Heap and Squeers and Mr. Murdstone and that fearful man who drank so much that he died of spontaneous combustion; and pathetic figures: Sidney Carton and Little Nell and Oliver Twist and Nancy and Dora and Little Dorritt and the Little Marchioness.

"You'd meet the like of them any minute of the day in London," said Uncle Matthew. "You'd mebbe be walking up a street, the Strand, mebbe, or in Hyde Park or Whitechapel, and in next to no time at all, you'd run into the whole jam-boiling of them. London's the queer place for seeing queer people. Never be content, John, when you're a man, to stay on in this place where nothing ever happens to anyone, but quit off out of it and see the world. There's all sorts in London, black men and yellow men, and I wouldn't be surprised but there's a wheen of Red Indians, too, with, feathers in their head!...."

"I'd be afeard of them fellows," said John. "They'd scalp you, mebbe!"

"Ah, sure, the peelers wouldn't let them," said Uncle Matthew. "And anyway you needn't go near them. They keep that sort down by the Docks and never let them near the places where the fine, lovely women live. London's the place to see the lovely women, John, all dressed up in silk dresses, for that's where the high-up women go ... in the Season, they call it ... and they take their young, lovely daughters with them, grand wee girls with nice hair and fine complexions and a grand way of talking ... to get them married, of course. I read in a book one time, there was a young fellow, come of a poor family, was walking in one of the parks where the quality-women take their horses every day, and a young and lovely girl was riding up and down as nice as you like, when all of a sudden her horse ran away with her. The young fellow never hesitated for a minute, but jumped over the railings and stopped the horse, and the girl was that thankful and pleased, him and her was married after. And she was a lord's daughter, John! A very high-up lord! She belonged to a queer proud family, but she wasn't too proud to fall in love with him, and they had a grand time together!"

"Were they rich?" said John.

Uncle Matthew nodded his head. "It would be a great thing now," he said, "if a lord's daughter was to take a fancy to you!..."

"I'd have to be queer and adventurous for the like of that to happen to me, Uncle Matthew," John exclaimed. He had never seen a lord's daughter, but he had seen Lady Castlederry, a proud and beautiful woman, who seemed to be totally unaware of his existence when he passed by her on the road.

"Well, and aren't you as fond of adventure as anybody in the wide world?" Uncle Matthew retorted.

"Indeed, that's true," John admitted, "but then I never had any adventures in my born days, and you yourself would like to have one, but you've never had any!"

Uncle Matthew sat quietly in his chair for a few moments. Then he drew his nephew close to him and stroked his hair.

"Come here 'til I whisper to you," he said. "D'you know why I never had any adventures, John?"

"No, Uncle Matthew, I do not!'

"Well, I'll tell you then, though I never admitted it to anyone else in the world, and I'll mebbe never admit it again. I never had any because I was afraid to have them!"

"Afeard, Uncle Matthew?" John exclaimed. He had net yet trimmed his tongue to say "afraid."

"Aye, son, heart-afraid. There's many a fine woman I'd have run away with, only I was afraid mebbe I'd be caught. You'll never have no adventures if you're afraid to have them, that's a sure and certain thing!"

John struggled out of his Uncle's embrace and turned squarely to face him.

"I'm not afeard, Uncle Matthew," he asserted.

"Are you not, son?"

"I'm not afeard of anything. I'd give anybody their cowardy-blow!..."

"There's few people in the world can say that, John!" Uncle Matthew said.

III

People often said of Uncle Matthew that he was "quare in the head," but John had never noticed anything queer about him. Mrs. MacDermott, finding her son in the attic where Uncle Matthew kept his books, reading an old, torn copy of Smollett's translation of Gil Blas, had said to him, "Son, dear, quit reading them oul' books, do, or you'll have your mind moidhered like your Uncle Matthew!"

And Willie Logan, tormenting him once because he had refused to acknowledge his leadership, had called after him that his Uncle Matthew was astray in the mind. It was a very great satisfaction to John that just as Willie Logan uttered his taunt, Uncle William came round McCracken's corner and heard it. Uncle William, a hasty, robust man, had clouted Willie Logon's head for him and sent him home howling.

"Go home and learn your manners," he had shouted at the blubbering boy. "Go home and learn your manners, you ill-bred brat, you!"

Uncle William had spoken very gravely and tenderly to John after that affair, as they walked home together. "Never let anyone make little of your Uncle Matthew!" he had said to his nephew. "He's a well-read man, for all his queer talk, and many's a wise thing he says when you're not expecting it. I never was much of a one for trusting to books myself.... I couldn't give my mind to them somehow ... but I have a great respect for books, all the same. It isn't every man can spare the time for learning or has the inclination for it, but we can all pay respect to them that has, whatever sort of an upbringing we've got!"

It was then that John MacDermott learned to love his Uncle William almost as much as he loved his Uncle Matthew. He had always liked Uncle William ... for he was his uncle, of course, and a kind man in spite of his rough, quick ways and sharp words ... but Uncle Matthew had commanded his love. There had been times when he almost disliked Uncle William ... the times when Uncle William made fun of Uncle Matthew's romantic talk. John would be sitting in front of the kitchen fire, before the lamp was lit, listening while his Uncle Matthew told him stories of high, romantical things, of adventures in aid of beautiful women, and of life freely given for noble purposes, until he was wrought up into an ecstasy of selflessness and longing ... and then Uncle William would come into the kitchen from the shop, stumbling, perhaps, in the dark, and swear because the lamp was not lit.

Once, after he had listened for a few moments to one of Uncle Matthew's tales, he had laughed bitterly and said, "I declare to my good God, but you'd be in a queer way, the whole pack of you, if I was to quit the shop and run up and down the world looking for adventures and women in distress. I tell you, the pair of you, it's a queer adventure taking care of a shop and making it prosper and earning the keep of the house. There's no lovely woman hiding behind the counter 'til the young lord comes and delivers her, but by the Holy Smoke, there's a terrible lot of hard work!"

It had seemed to John then, as he contemplated his Uncle Matthew's doleful face and listened to his plaintive admission, "I know I'm no help to you!" that his Uncle William was a cruel-hearted man, and in his anger he could have struck him. But now, after the affair with Willie Logan and the talk about Uncle Matthew, and remembering, too, that Uncle William was always very gentle with Uncle Matthew, even though his words were sometimes rough, he felt that his heart had ample room inside it for this rough, bearded man who made so few demands on the affection of his family, and deserved so much.

John knew that his Uncle William and his mother shared the common belief that Uncle Matthew was "quare," but, although he had often thought about the matter, he could not understand why people held this opinion. It was true that Uncle Matthew had been dismissed from the Ballyards National School, in which he had been an assistant teacher, but when John considered the circumstances in which Uncle Matthew had been dismissed, he felt satisfied that his uncle, so far from having behaved foolishly, had behaved with great courage and chivalry. Uncle Matthew, so the story went, had been in Belfast a few days after the day on which Queen Victoria had died, and had stopped in Royal Avenue for a few moments to read an advertisement which was exhibited in the window of a haberdasher's shop. These are the words which he read in the advertisement:

* * * * *
WE MOURN
OUR
DEPARTED QUEEN
* * * * *
MOURNING ORDERS PROMPTLY
EXECUTED
* * * * *

When he had read through the advertisement twice, Uncle Matthew broke the haberdasher's window!

He was seized by a policeman, and in due time was brought before the magistrates who, in addition to fining him and compelling him to pay for the damage he had done, caused the Resident Magistrate to admonish him not merely for breaking the window and interfering with the business of a respectable merchant, but also for offering a frivolous excuse for his behaviour. Uncle Matthew had said that he broke the window as a protest against a counterjumper's traffic in a nation's grief. "I loved the Queen, sir," he said, "and I couldn't bear to see her death treated like that!" This was more than the Magistrates could endure, and the Resident Magistrate made an impatient gesture and said, "Tch, tch, tch!" with his tongue against his palate. He went on to say that Uncle Matthew's loyalty to the Throne was very touching, very touching, indeed, especially in these days when a lot of people seemed to have very little respect for the Royal Family. He thought that his brother-magistrates would agree with him. ("Hear, hear!" and "Oh, yes, yes!" and an "Ulster was always noted for its loyalty to the Queen!" from his brother-magistrates.) But all the same, there had to be moderation and reason in everything. It would never do if people were to go about the country breaking other people's windows in the name of patriotism. It was bad enough to have a pack of Nationalists and Papists going about the country, singing disloyal songs and terrorising peaceable, lawabiding loyalists, without members of respected Protestant and Unionist families like the prisoner ... for Uncle Matthew was in the dock of the Custody Court and had spent the night in a cell ... imitating their behaviour in the name of loyalty. He had taken into the consideration the fact that the prisoner had acted from the best motives and not from any feeling of disaffection to the Throne, and also the fact that he belongs to a respectable family, and so he would not send him to gaol. He gave him the option of paying a fine, together with costs and the bill for repairing the window, or of going to prison for one calendar month; and he warned the public that any other person who broke a window, however loyal he might be, would be sent to gaol without the option of a fine.

Uncle Matthew had turned to where Uncle William was sitting with the family solicitor in the well of the court, and Uncle William had nodded his head comfortingly. Then the warder had opened the door in the side of the dock, and Uncle Matthew had stepped out of the place of shame into the company of the general public. The solicitor had attended to the payment of the fine and the cost of repairing the fractured glass, and then Uncle William had led Uncle Matthew away. Someone had tittered at Uncle Matthew as they passed up the steps of the court towards the door, and Uncle William, disregarding the fact that he was in a court of law, had turned on him very fiercely, and had said "Damn your sowl!..." but a policeman, saying "S-s-sh!", had bustled him out of the court before he could complete his threat. And an old woman, with a shawl happed about her head, had gazed after Uncle Matthew and said, "The poor creature! Sure, he's not right!"

The arrest and trial of Uncle Matthew had created a great scandal in Ballyards, and responsible people went about saying that he had always been "quare" and was getting "quarer." Willie Logan's father had even talked of the asylum. Whose windows, he demanded, were safe when, a fellow like that was let loose on the town? Uncle William had gone to see Mr. Logan ... no one knew quite what he said to that merchant ... but it was evident ever after that he had accepted Uncle William's advice to keep a civil tongue in his head. The Reverend Mr. McCaughan, who was manager of the Ballyards National School, went specially to the house of Mr. Cairnduff, the headmaster of the school, to consult him on the subject. He said that something would have to be done about the matter. The MacDermotts, he said, were a highly-respected family ... a MacDermott had been an elder of the church for generations past... and he would be very sorry, very sorry, indeed to do anything to upset them, but it was neither right nor reasonable to expect parents to rest content while their children were taught their lessons by a man who was both queer in his manner and very nearly a criminal ... for after all, he had spent a night in a prison-cell and had stood in the dock where thieves and forgers and wife-beaters and even murderers had stood!

Mr. Cairnduff was in complete agreement with Mr. McCaughan. He, too, had the greatest respect for the MacDermotts ... no man could help having respect for them ... and he might add that he had the greatest possible respect for Matthew MacDermott himself ... a well-read and a kindly man, though a wee bit, just a wee bit unbalanced mebbe!...

"Aye, but it's that wee bit that makes all the difference, Mr. Cairnduff!" said the minister, interrupting the schoolmaster.

"It is," Mr. Cairnduff agreed. "You're right there, Mr. McCaughan. You are, indeed. All the same, though, I would not like to be a party to anything that would hurt the feelings of a MacDermott, and if it could be arranged in some way that Matthew should retire from the profession through ill-health or something, with a wee bit of a pension, mebbe, to take the bad look off the thing... well, I for one would not be against it!"

"You've taken the words out of my mouth," said the minister. "I had it in my mind that if something of the kind could be arranged!..."

"It would be the best for all concerned," said Mr. Cairnduff.

But it had not been possible to arrange something of the kind. The member for the Division was not willing to use his influence with the National Board of Education in Uncle Matthew's behalf. He remembered that Uncle Matthew, during an election, had interrupted him in a recital of his services to the Queen, by a reminder that he was only a militia man, and that rough, irreverent lads, who treated an election as an opportunity for skylarking instead of improving their minds, had followed him about his constituency, jeering at him for "a mileeshy man." Uncle Matthew, too, had publicly declared that Parnell was the greatest man that had ever lived in Ireland and was worth more than the whole of the Ulster Unionist members of parliament put together... which was, of course, very queer doctrine to come from a member of an Ulster Unionist and Protestant family. The member for the Division could not agree with Mr. McCaughan and Mr. Cairnduff that the MacDermotts were a bulwark of the Constitution. Matthew MacDermott's brother... the one who was dead... had been a queer sort of a fellow. Lady Castlederry had complained of him more than once!... No, he was sorry that, much as he should like to oblige Mr. McCaughan and Mr. Cairnduff, he could not consent to use his influence to get the Board to pension Matthew MacDermott....

"That man's a blether!" said the minister, as he and the schoolmaster came away from the member's house. "He won't use his influence with the Board because he hasn't got any. We'd have done better, mebbe, to go to a Nationalist M.P. Those fellows have more power in their wee fingers than our men have in their whole bodies. I wonder, now, could we persuade Matthew to send in his resignation. I can't bear to think of the Board dismissing him!"

Uncle William solved their problem for them. "Don't bother your heads about him," he said when they informed him of their trouble. "I'll provide for him right enough. He'll send in his resignation to you the night, Mr. McCaughan. I'm sure, we're all queer and obliged to you for the trouble you have taken in the matter."

"Ah, not at all, not at all," they said together.

"And I'll not forget it to either of you, you can depend on that. I daresay Matthew'll be a help to me in the shop!..."

Thus it was that, unpensioned and in the shadow of disgrace, Uncle Matthew left the service of the National Board of Education.

John admitted to himself, though he would hardly have admitted it to anyone else, that his Uncle Matthew's behaviour had been very unusual. He could not, when invited to do so, imagine either Mr. McCaughan or Mr. Cairnduff breaking the windows of a haberdasher's shop because of an advertisement which showed, in the opinion of some reputable people, both feeling and enterprise. Nevertheless, he did not consider that Uncle Matthew, on that occasion, had proved himself to be lacking in mental balance. He said that it was a pity that people were not more ready than they were to break windows, and he was inclined to think that Uncle Matthew, instead of being forcibly retired from the school, ought to have been promoted to a better position.

"If you go on talking that way," his mother said to him, "people'll think you're demented mad!"

"I wouldn't change my Uncle Matthew for the whole world," John stoutly replied.

"No one's asking you to change him," Mrs. MacDermott retorted. "All we're asking you to do, is not to go about imitating him with his romantic talk!"

IV

John did not wish to imitate his Uncle Matthew ... he did not wish to imitate anyone ... for, although he could not discover that "quareness" in him which other people professed to discover, yet when he saw how inactive Uncle Matthew was, how dependent he was on Uncle William and, to a less extent, on Mrs. MacDermott, and how he seemed to shrink from things in life, which, when he read about them in books, enthralled him, John felt that if he were to model his behaviour on that of anyone else, it must not be on the behaviour of Uncle Matthew. Uncle William had a quick, decided manner ... he knew exactly what he wanted and often contrived to get what he wanted. John remembered that his Uncle William had said to him once, "John, boy, if I want a thing and I can't get it, I give up wanting it!"

"But you can't help wanting things, Uncle William," John had protested.

"No, boy, you can't" Uncle William had retorted, "but the Almighty God's given you the sense to understand the difference between wanting things you can get and wanting things you can't get, and He leaves it to you to use your sense. Do you never suppose that I want something strange and wonderful to happen to me the same as your Uncle Matthew there, that sits dreaming half the day over books? What would become of you all, your ma and your Uncle Matthew and you, if I was to do the like of that I? Where would your Uncle Matthew get the money to buy books to dream over if it wasn't for me giving up my dreams?..."

John's heart had suddenly filled with pity for his Uncle William whom he saw as a thwarted man, an angel expelled from heaven, reduced from a proud position in a splendid society to the dull work of one who maintains others by small, but prolonged, efforts. He felt ashamed of himself and of Uncle Matthew ... even, for a few moments, of his mother. Here was Uncle William, working from dawn until dark, denying himself this pleasure and that, refusing to go to the "shore" with them in the summer on the assertion that he was a strong man and did not need holidays ... doing all this in order that he might maintain three people in comfort and ... yes, idleness! Mrs. MacDermott might be excluded from the latter charge, for she attended to the house and the cooking, but how could Uncle Matthew and himself expect to escape from it? Uncle Matthew had more hope than he had, for Uncle Matthew sometimes balanced the books for Uncle William, and did odds and ends about the shop. He would write out the accounts in a very neat hand and would deliver them, too. But John made no efforts at all. He was the complete idler, living on his Uncle's bounty, and making no return for it.

He was now in his second year of monitorship at the school where his Uncle Matthew had been a teacher, and was in receipt of a few pounds per annum to indicate that he was more than a pupil; but the few pounds were insufficient to maintain him ... he knew that ... and even if they had been sufficient, he was well aware of the fact that his Uncle William had insisted that the whole of his salary should be placed in the Post Office Savings Bank for use when he had reached manhood.... He made a swift resolve, when this consciousness came upon him: he would quit the school and enter the business, so that he could be of help to his Uncle William.

"Will you let me leave the school, Uncle?" he said. "I'm tired of the teaching, and I'd like well to go into the shop with you!"

Uncle William did not answer for a little while. He was adding up a column of figures in the day-book, and John could hear him counting quietly to himself. "And six makes fifty-four... six and carry four!" he said entering the figures in pencil at the foot of the column.

"What's that you say, John, boy?"

"I want to leave school and come into the shop and help you," John answered.

"God love you, son, what put that notion into your head?"

"I don't want to be a burden to you, Uncle William!"

"A burden to me!" Uncle William swung round on the high office stool and regarded his nephew intently. "Man, dear, you're no burden to me! Look at the strength of me! Feel them muscles, will you?" He held out his tightened arm as he spoke. "Do you think a wee fellow like you could be a burden to a man with muscles like them, as hard as iron?"

But John was not to be put off by talk of that sort. "You know rightly what I mean," he said. "You never get no rest at all, and here's me still at the school!..."

"Ah, wheesht with you, boy!" Uncle William interrupted. "What sort of talk is this? You will not leave the school, young man! The learning you're getting will do you a world of benefit, even if you never go on with the teachering. You're a lucky wee lad, so you are, to be getting paid to go to school. There was no free learning when I was a child, I can tell you. Your grandda had to pay heavy for your da and your Uncle Matthew and me. Every Monday morning, we had to carry our fees to the master. Aye, and bring money for coal in the winter or else carry a few sods of turf with us if we hadn't the money for it. That was what children had to do when I was your age, John. I tell you there's a queer differs these times between schooling from what there was when I was a scholar, and you'd be the great gumph if you didn't take advantage of your good fortune!"

"But I'd like to help you, Uncle William. Do you not understand me? I want to be doing something for you!" John insisted.

"I understand you well enough, son. You've been moidhering your mind about me, but sure there's no call for you to do that. No call at all! Now, not another word out of your head! I've said my say on that subject, and I'll say no more. Go on with your learning, and when you've had your fill of it, we'll see what's to be done with you. How much is twelve and nine?"

"Twenty-one, Uncle William!"

"Twenty-one!" said Uncle William, at his day-book again. "Nine and carry one!..."

In this way Uncle William settled John's offer to serve in the shop, and restored learning and literature to his affection and esteem. John had not given in so easily as the reader may imagine. He had insisted that his Uncle William worked much too hard, had even hinted that Uncle Matthew spent more time over books than he spent over "the books," the day-book and the ledger; but his Uncle William had firmly over-ruled him.

"Books are of more account to your Uncle Matthew than an oul' ledger any day," he said, "and it'll never be said that I prevented him from reading them. We all get our happiness in different ways, John, and it would be a poor thing to prevent a man from getting his happiness in his way just because it didn't happen to be your way. Books are your Uncle Matthew's heart's-idol, and I wouldn't stop him from them for the wide world!"

"But he does nothing, Uncle William," John said, intent on justice, even when it reflected on his beloved Uncle.

"I know, but sure the heart was taken out of him that time when he was arrested for breaking the man's window. It was a terrible shock to him, that, and he never overed it. You must just let things go on as they're going. I don't believe you'll foe content to be a teacher. Not for one minute do I believe that. But whatever you turn out to be, it'll be no harm to have had the extra schooling you're getting, so you'll stay on a monitor for a while longer. And now quit talking, do, or you'll have me deafened with your clatter!"

Uncle William always put down attempts to combat his will by assertions of that sort.

"Are you angry with me, Uncle William?" John anxiously asked.

"Angry with you, son?" He swung round again on the high stool. "Come here 'til I show you whether I am or not!"

And then Uncle William gathered him up in his arms and crushed the boy's face into his beard. "God love you, John," he said, "how could I be angry with you, and you your da's son!"

"I love you queer and well, Uncle," John murmured shyly.

"Do you, son? I'm glad to hear that."

"Aye. And I love my Uncle Matthew, too!..."

"That's right. Always love your Uncle Matthew whatever you do or whatever happens. He's a man that has more need of love nor most of us. Your da loved him well, John!"

"Did he?"

"Aye, he did, indeed!" Uncle William put his pen down on the desk, and leaning against the ledger, rested his head in the cup of his hand. "Your da was a strange man, John," he said, "a queer, strange man, with a powerful amount of knowledge in his head. That man could write Latin and Greek and French and German, and he was the first man in Ballyards to write the Irish language ... and them was the days when people said Irish was a Papist language, and would have nothing to do with it. Your da never paid no heed to anyone... he just did what he wanted to do, no matter what anyone said or who was against him. Many's the time I've heard him give the minister his answer, and the high-up people, too. When Lord Castlederry came bouncing into the town, ordering people to do this or to do that, just because the Queen's grandson was coming to the place, your da stood up fornenst him and said, as bold as brass, 'The people of this town are not Englishmen, my lord, to be ordered about like dogs! They're Ballyards men, and a Ballyards man never bent the knee to no one!' That was what your da said to him, and Lord Castlederry never forgot it and never forgave it neither, but he could do no harm to us, for the MacDermotts owned land and houses in Ballyards before ever a Castlederry put his foot in the place. He was a proud man your da, with a terrible quick temper, but as kindly-natured a man as ever drew breath. Your ma thinks long for him many's a time, though I think there were whiles he frightened her. Your Uncle Matthew and me is poor company for her after living with a man like that."

"Am I like my da, Uncle William! My ma says sometimes I am ... when she's angry with me!"

"Sometimes you're like him and sometimes you're like her. You'll be a great fellow, John, if you turn out to be like your da. I tell you, boy, he was a man, and there's few men these times ... only a lot of oul' Jinny-joes, stroking their beards and looking terrible wise over ha'penny bargains!"

"And then he died, Uncle William!"

"Aye, son, he died. You were just two years old when he died, a little, wee child just able to walk and talk. I mind it well. He called me into the bedroom where he was lying, and he bid the others leave me alone with him. Your ma didn't want to go, but he wouldn't let her stay, and so she went, too. 'William,' he said, when the door was shut behind them, 'I depend on you to look after them all!' Them was his very words, John, 'I depend on you to look after them all!' I couldn't answer him, so I just nodded my head. He didn't say anything more for a wee while, but lay back in the bed and breathed hard, for he was in pain, and couldn't breathe easy. Then, after a wee while, he looked round at me, and he said, 'I'm only thirty-one, William, and I'm dying. And oul' Peter Clancy up the street, that's been away in the head since he was a child, is over sixty years of age!... I thought he was going to spring out of the bed when he said that, the temper come over him so quick and sudden, but I held him down and begged him to control himself, and he quietened himself. I heard him saying, half under his breath, 'And God thinks He knows how to rule the world!' He died that night, rebellious to the end!... He said he depended on me to look after you all, and I've tried hard, John, as hard as I could!"

His voice quavered, and he turned away from his nephew. "Your da was my hero," he said. "I'd have shed my heart's blood for him. It was hard that him that was the best of us should be the first to go!"

John stood by his uncle's side, very moved by his distress, but not knowing what to do to comfort him.

"My da would be queer and proud of you, Uncle William," he said at last, "queer and proud if he could see you!"

But Uncle William did not answer nor did he look round.

V

It was understood, after that conversation between John and his Uncle William, that the boy should remain at school for a year or two longer, working as a monitor, not in order that he might become a schoolmaster, but so that he might equip his mind with knowledge. Mrs. MacDermott wished her son to become a minister. It would be the proudest day of her life, she said, if she could see John standing in a pulpit, preaching a sermon. Who knew but that he might be one day be the minister of the Ballyards First Presbyterian Church itself, the very church in which his family had worshipped their God for generations.

John, however, had no wish to be a minister.

"You have to be queer and good to be one," he said, "and I'm not as good as all that!"

"Well, mebbe, you'll get better as you get older," Mrs. MacDermott insisted.

"I might get worse," he replied. "It would be a fearful thing to be a minister, and then find out you wanted to commit a sin!"

"Ministers is like ourselves, John," Mrs. MacDermott said, "and I daresay Mr. McCaughan sometimes wants to do wicked things, for all he's such a good man, and has to pray to God many's a while for the strength to resist temptation. That doesn't prove he's not fit to be a minister. It only shows he understands our nature all the more because he has temptations himself!"

But John would not be convinced by her arguments. "I don't know, ma!" he said. "If I wanted to be wicked, I'm afraid I'd be it, so don't ask me to be a minister for I'd mebbe disgrace you with my carryings-on!"

Mrs. MacDermott had been deeply hurt by his refusal to consider the ministry.

"Anybody'd think to hear you," she said, "that you'd made up your mind to lead a sinful life. As if a MacDermott couldn't conquer his sins better nor anybody else!"

His mother, he often observed, spoke more boastfully of the MacDermotts than either his Uncle William or his Uncle Matthew.

John's final, overwhelming retort to her was this: "Would my da have liked me to be a minister?"

"I never knew what your da liked," she retorted; "I only knew what he did!..."

"Do you think he would have liked me to be a minister?" John persisted.

"Mebbe he wouldn't, but he's not here now!..."

"You wouldn't do behind his back what you'd be afraid to do fornenst his face, would you?"

"You've no right to talk to me that way. I'm your mother!..."

"You knew rightly he wouldn't have liked it," John continued, inexorably.

And then Mrs. MacDermott yielded.

"You're your da over again," she complained. "He always had his way in the end, whatever was against him. What do you want to be, then, when you grow up?"

"I don't know yet, ma. I only know the things I don't want to be, and teaching is one of them. And a minister's another! Mebbe I'll know in a wee while!"

He did not like to tell her that in his heart he wished to go in search of adventures. His Uncle Matthew's imaginings had filled his mind with romantic desires, and he longed to leave Ballyards and go somewhere ... anywhere, so long as it was a difficult and distant place ... where he would have to contend with dangers. There were times when he felt that he must instantly pack a bundle of clothes into a red handkerchief ... he could buy one at Conn's, the draper's ... and run away from home and stow himself in the hold of a big ship bound for America or Australia or some place like that ... and was only prevented from doing so by his fear that his mother and uncles would be deeply grieved by his flight. "It would look as if they hadn't been kind to me," he said in remonstrance to himself, "and that wouldn't be fair to them!" But although he did not run away from home, he still kept the strong desire in his heart to go out into a dangerous and bewildering world and seek fortune and adventures. "I want to fight things," he said to himself. "I want to fight things and, ... and win!"

Mixed up with his desire for adventure was a vision of a beautiful girl to whom he should offer his love and service. He could not picture her clearly to himself ... none of the girls in Ballyards bore the slightest resemblance to her. Sometimes, indeed, he thought that this beautiful girl was like Lady Castlederry ... only Lady Castlederry, somehow, although she was so very lovely, had a cold stupid look in her eyes, and he was very certain that this beautiful girl had bright, alert eyes.

There had been a passage of love-making between Aggie Logan and him, conducted entirely by Aggie Logan. She had taken him aside one day, in the middle of a game of "I spy," and had said to him "Will you court me, Johnnie?"

"No," he had replied.

"Do you not love me then?" she enquired.

"No," he said again.

"But I want you to court me," she persisted.

"I don't care what you want," he retorted. "I won't court you because I don't want to court you. I don't like you. You're too much of a girner for me!"

"I'm not a girner," she protested.

"You are. You start crying the minute anything happens to you or if people won't do what you want them to do. I wouldn't marry a girner for the wide world!"

"I won't girn any more if you'll court me," she promised.

"I daresay," he replied skeptically.

She considered for a moment or two. "Well, if you won't court me," she said, "I'll let Andy Cairnduff court me!"

"He can have you," said John, undismayed by the prospect of the schoolmaster's son as a rival.

She stood before him for a little while, without speaking. Then she turned and walked a little distance from him. She stopped, with her back turned towards him, and he knew by the way her head was bent, that she was thinking out a way of retaliating on him. The end of her pinafore was in her mouth!... She turned to him sharply, letting the pinafore fall from her lips, and pointing at him with her finger, she began to laugh shrilly.

"Ha, ha, ha!" she said. "I have you quarely gunked!"

"Gunked!" he exclaimed, unable to see how he had been hoaxed.

"Yes," she answered. "I gunked you nicely. You thought I wanted you to court me, but I was only having you on. Ha, ha, ha!"

He burst out laughing. "I that consoles you," he said; "you're welcome to it!"

Then she ran away and would not play "I spy" or "Tig" any more.

He had not told his mother of that passage of love with Aggie Logan. It did not occur to him to tell anything to his mother. His instinct, indeed, was not to tell things to her, to conceal them from her.

VI

If anyone had said to him that he did not love his mother as much as he loved his Uncle Matthew and his Uncle William, he would have been very angry. Not love his mother more than anyone else on earth!... Only a blow could make a proper answer to such a charge. Nevertheless his mother was associated in his mind with acts of repression, with forbidding and restraint. She seemed always to be telling him not to do things. When he wanted to go to the Lough with Willie Logan to play Robinson Crusoe and his Man Friday or to light a bonfire in Teeshie McBratney's field with shavings from Galpin's mill in the pretence that he was a Red Indian preparing for a war-dance, it was his mother who said that he was not to do it. He might fall into the water and get drowned, she said, or, he might fall into the fire and get roasted to death. As if he were not capable of controlling a raft or a bonfire!...

He felt, too, that sometimes she punished him unjustly. When the Logans and he had played Buffalo Bill and the Red Indians attacking the defenceless pale-face woman, he had had a fierce argument with Willie Logan about the part of Buffalo Bill. Willie, being older, had claimed the part for himself, and, when denied the right to it, had declared that neither Aggie nor he would play in the game. Then a compromise had been arranged: Willie was allowed to play the part of Buffalo Bill and to slay the Red Indian on condition that John, before being slain, should be allowed to scalp the helpless pale-face woman. He scalped her so severely, by tugging tightly at her long hair, that she began to cry, and Willie, more conscious of the fact that he was Aggie's brother than that he was Buffalo Bill, bore down upon John and gave him his "cowardy-blow." They fought a fierce and bitter fight, and in the end, Willie went home with a bleeding nose, and John went home with a black eye.

Willie had not played the man over that affair. He went to his mother and complained of John's selfish and brutal behaviour, alleging that he had suffered terrible punishment in a chivalrous effort to protect his sister from ruffianly assault; and his mother, a thin, acidulous woman, whose voice was half snarl and half whine, carried her son's complaint to Mrs. MacDermott.

Mrs. MacDermott had not stopped to enquire into the truth of the charge against John beyond asking if it were true that he had pulled Aggie Logan's hair and fought with Willie Logan. John had replied "Yes, ma!" That was sufficient for Mrs. MacDermott, that and the testimony of John's discoloured eye, and she had beaten him with the leather tawse that was kept hanging from a nail at the side of the fireplace. "That my son should do the like of that!" she said over and over again until a cold fury of resentment against her had formed in his heart. It was true that he had pulled Aggie's hair much harder than he ought to have done, but he had not intended to hurt her. What he had done, had been done, not out of malice, but in the excitement of the game; and it was not fair to beat him so severely for so little a thing as that. He would not cry ... he would not give his mother the satisfaction of hearing him cry, although the lashing he was receiving was hurting his bare pelt very sorely. She could keep on saying, "That my son should do the like of that!" but he would not mind her....

Then, as if she understood his thoughts and perceived that he was unmoved by her outraged feelings, she had changed her complaint against him. Glancing up at the portrait of her husband which was hanging over the fireplace, she said, "That your father's son should do the like of that!" Compunction came to him then. He, too, looked up at the portrait of his father, and suddenly he wanted to cry. The pale face, made more pale in appearance by the thick, black beard, and having the faded look which photographs of the dead seem always to have, appeared to him to be alive and full of reproach, and the big burning eyes, aflame, they looked, with the consuming thing that took his life, had anger in them, anger against him!...

He had not any regret for hurting Aggie Logan ... he did not believe that he had hurt her any more severely than was necessary for the purposes of the game, and even if he had hurt her, she ought to have borne it as part of the pretence ... he did not care whether he had hurt her or not, for she was a "cry-ba" at all times, ready to "girn" at anything ... but he had sorrow at the thought that he had done something of which his father might have disapproved. Mrs. MacDermott, with that penetration which is part of the nature of people who are accustomed to yield to stronger personalities had discovered that she could win John to her obedience by reminding him of his father; and she used her power without pity. "What would your father think of you, if he knew!" she would say.

She was not a hard or a cruel woman ... she was very kind and loved her son with a long clutching love ... but her life with her husband had contained so many disturbances of comfortable courses, thrilling enough at the time, but terrifying when viewed in retrospect, that her nature, inclined to quiet, fixed ways and to acceptance, with slight resistance, of whatever came to her, made all the efforts that were possible to it to keep her life and her son's life in peace. She hated change of any sort, whether of circumstances or of friends, and she loved old, familiar things. The tradition of the MacDermotts, their life in one place for generations and the respect with which they were greeted by their townsmen, gave immense pleasure to her, and her dearest dream was that John should continue in the place where his forefathers had lived, and that his son and his son's son should continue there, too!

And so it was that she was always telling John not to do things. She loathed Uncle Matthew's romances and his talk of adventures in foreign parts, and she insisted that he was "away in the mind" when her son spoke of him to her. She tried to make the boy walk inconspicuously, to keep, always, in the background, to do only those things that were generally approved of. His quick temper, his haste with his fists, his habit of contradicting even those who were older than he was, his unwillingness to admit that he was in the wrong ... all these disturbed and frightened her. They would lead him into disputes and set him up in opposition to other people. His delight in the story of his father's encounter with Lord Castlederry troubled her, and she tried to convince her son that Lord Castlederry was a well-meaning man, but, as she knew, without success. She had delighted in her husband's great courage and self-sufficiency, his sureness, his strong decision and his unconquerable pride and independence ... but now, in contemplation, these things frightened her ... she wondered sometimes why it was that they had not frightened her in his lifetime ... and the thought that she might have to live again in contention and opposition roused all her strength to resist that fate. She had lived down much of the dislike that her husband had aroused. It was not necessary now to pretend that she did not see people, that she might escape from the mortification of being stared at, without a sign of recognition; and she would not lightly yield up her comfortable situation. If only she could only persuade John to become a minister! There was nothing in that to frighten her: there was everything to make her feel content and proud.

When she took John to Belfast, she made the holiday, so eagerly anticipated, a mortification to him. While they were in the train, she would tell him not to climb on to the seat of the carriage to look out of the window at the telegraph-poles flying past and the telegraph-wires rising and falling like birds ... she would tell him not to stand at the door in case it should fly open and he should fall out and be killed ... she would tell him, when the train reached the terminus in Belfast, to take tight hold of her hand and not to budge from her side ... she would refuse to cross the Lagan in the steam ferry-boat and insist on going round by tram-car across the Queen's Bridge ... she would tell him not to wander about in Forster Green's when he edged away from her to look at the coffee-mills in which the richly-smelling berries were being roasted. When she took him to Linden's to tea ... Linden's which made cakes for the Queen and had the Royal Arms over the door of the shop! ... she spoiled the treat for him by refusing to let him sit on one of the stools at the counter and eat his "cookies" like a man: she made him sit by her side at a table ... an ordinary table such as anyone could sit on anywhere ... at home, even!

His Uncle William had taken him up to Belfast one market-day, and that Friday was made memorable to him forever because his Uncle had said to him, "Well, boy, what would you like to do?" and had consented, without demur, to cross the Lagan in the ferry-boat. Uncle William had not clutched at him all the time in fear lest he should fall into the river and be drowned, and had allowed him to stand at the end of the boat and watch the swirl of the water against the ferry-steps when they reached the Antrim side. He had said to him, too, "I've a wee bit of business to attend to, boy, that'll not interest you much. Would you like to stay here in the market for an hour by yourself while I go and do it?"

Would he like?...

And not one word about taking great care of himself or of not doing this or doing that ... of keeping away from the horse-fair, and not going too near the cattle. Uncle William trusted him, took it for granted that he was capable of looking after himself....

"Very well, then," Uncle William said, "I'll meet you here in an hour's time. No later, mind you, for I've a deal to do the day!"

And for a whole hour, John had wandered about the market, not holding anyone's hand and free to go wherever he liked! He had walked through the old market where the horses were bought and sold ... had even stroked a mare's muzzle while some men bargained over it ... and then had crossed the road to the new market where he smelt the odour of flowers and fruit and listened to the country-women chaffering over their butter and eggs. He spent a penny without direction!... He bought a large, rosy American apple ... without being asked whether he would like to have that or an orange, or being told that he could not have an orange, but must have an apple because an apple in the morning was good for him...

When he told his mother that night of the splendid time he had had by himself, she said, "You might have lost yourself!..." That chilled him, and he did not tell her of the gallant way in which he had rubbed his hand on a horse's side. He knew very well that she would say, "It might have kicked you!..."

VII

It was she who was most particular about the dyeing of his Easter eggs and the ritual of hanging up his stocking on Christmas Eve. She had wanted to go on dyeing eggs for him at Easter and hanging up his stocking on Christmas Eve, even when he was twelve years of age and could not be expected to tolerate such things any longer. He liked the Easter ceremonial better, perhaps, than that of Christmas. His mother would bid Uncle Matthew take him out of the town to the fields to gather whin-blossoms so that she could dye the eggs to a pretty brown colour. Tea-leaves could be used to dye the eggs to a deeper brown than that of the whin-blossoms, but there was not so much pleasure in taking tea-leaves from the caddy as there was in plucking whin-blossoms from the furze-bushes. The Logans bought their Easter eggs, already dyed, from old Mrs. Dobbs, the dulce-woman, but John disliked the look of her eggs, apart from the fact that his mother would not permit him to buy them. Mrs. Dobbs used some artificial dyes which stained the eggshells a horrible purple or a less horrible red, and John had a feeling of sickness when he looked at them. Mrs. MacDermott said that if the eggs were to crack during the process of boiling, the dye would penetrate the meat and might poison anyone who ate it; and even if the shells remained uncracked, the dye would soil the fingers and perhaps soil the clothes. She wondered at Mrs. Logan!...

And on Easter Monday, she and Uncle Matthew and Uncle William would go to Bryson's field where there was a low mound covered with short grass, and from the top of this mound, he would trundle his Easter egg down the slope to the level ground until the shell was broken. Then he would sit beside his mother and uncles, and eat the hard-boiled meat of the egg while Uncle Matthew explained to him that he was celebrating an ancient Druidical rite.

VIII

But he loved his mother very dearly when she came to him at night to put him to bed and listen to his prayers. He would kneel down in front of her, in the warmth of the kitchen so that he might not catch cold in the unheated bedroom, and would shut his eyes very tightly because God did not like to see little boys peeping through their distended fingers at Him, and would say his verse:

I lay my body down to sleep....
I pray the Lord my soul to keep,
And if I die before I wake,
I pray the Lord my soul to take.

and having said that, he would add a general prayer for his family. "God bless my Mother" ... he always said "Mother" in his prayers, although he said "Ma" in ordinary talk ... "and my Uncle William and my Uncle Matthew and all my friends and relations, and make me a good boy for Jesus' sake, Amen. Our Father which art...." Then he would scamper up the stairs to bed, and his mother would hap the clothes about him and tell him to go to sleep soon. She would bend over him and kiss him very tightly, and he would put his arms about her, too. "Son, dear!" she would say.

THE SECOND CHAPTER

I

When John MacDermott was seventeen years of age and entering into his fourth year of monitorship, his Uncle William said to him, "John, boy, you're getting on to be a man now, and it's high time you began to think of what you're going to do with yourself when you are one!"

"You're mebbe right," said John.

"The next year'll be your last one at the monitoring, won't it?" Uncle William continued.

John nodded his head.

"Well, if I were you I'd make a plan of some sort during the next year or two, for it would never do for you to come to the years of discretion, and have to take to the teachering because you couldn't think of anything else to do. I can see well your heart's not in that trade."

"It is not, indeed!" John said vigorously. "It's a terrible tiring job, teaching children, and some of them are that stupid you feel provoked enough to slap the hands off them! I'm nearly afraid of myself sometimes with the stupid ones, for fear I'd lose my temper with them and hurt them hard. Mr. Cairnduff says no one should be a teacher that has a bad temper, and dear knows, Uncle William, I've a fearful temper! He's a quare wise man, Mr. Cairnduff: he doesn't let any of his monitors use the cane, for he says it's an awful temptation to be cruel, especially if you're young and impatient the way I am!"

"Is that so now?" said Uncle William.

"Oh, it is, right enough. I know well there's times when a child's provoked me, that I want to be cruel to it ... and I'd hate to be cruel to any child. There's a wee girl in my class now.... Lizzie Turley's her name!..."

"John Turley's child?"

"Yes. God knows she's the stupidest child in the world!"

"Her da's a match, for her, then, for he's the stupidest man I've ever known. That fellow ought not to have been let have children!..."

"It's not her fault, I know," John continued, "but you forget that when you're provoked. I've tried hard to teach that child ... vowed to myself I'd teach her ... to add up, but I'm afraid she's beaten me. She can subtract well enough ... that's the queer part about her ... but she cannot add up. You'll mebbe not believe me. Uncle William, but that child can't put two and one together and be sure of getting the right answer. At first she couldn't add two and one together at all. She'd put down twelve for the answer as likely as not. But I worked hard with her, and I got her to add up to two and six make eight ... and there she stuck. I couldn't get her past that: she couldn't add two and seven together and get nine for the answer. But if you asked her to subtract two from nine, she'd say "seven" all right! That's a queer thing, now! Isn't it?"

"Aye, it's queer enough!"

"There's been times when I've wanted to hit that wee girl ... hit her with my shut fists ... and I don't like to feel that way about a child that's not all there ... or any child! I'm afraid I'm not fit to be a teacher, Uncle William. You have to be very good and patient... and it's no use pretending you haven't. Mr. Cairnduff says it's more important for a teacher to be good than it is for a minister, and he's right, too. He says a child should never be slapped by the teacher that's offended with it, but by another teacher that knows nothing about the bother. He doesn't use the cane much himself, but there's some teachers likes using it. Miss Gebbie does... she carries a big bamboo about with her, and gives you a good hard welt across the hand with it, if you annoy her. I wouldn't like to be in that woman's grip, I can tell you. Some women are fearful hard, Uncle William!"

"Worse nor men, some of them," Uncle William agreed.

"Mr. Cairnduff told me one time of a teacher he knew that got to like the cane so much that he used to try and trip the children into making mistakes so's he could slap them for it. Isn't it fearful, that?"

"Terrible, John!"

"I'd be ashamed to death if I got that way. Oh, I couldn't go on with the teaching, Uncle William. I wouldn't be near fit for it."

"Well, never mind, John. There's one thing, the extra schooling you've had has done you no harm, and I daresay it's done you a lot of good. But you'll have to think of something to do!..."

"Yes, I will!"

"Do you never think of anything? Is there any particular thing you'd like to do?"

"There's a whole lot of things I've fancied I'd like to be, but after a wee while I always change my mind. The first time I went to Belfast, I thought it would be lovely to be a tram-driver 'til I saw a navvy tearing up the street ... and then I thought a navvy had the best job in the world. You know, Uncle William, it takes me a long while to find out what it is I want, but when I do find it out, I take to it queer and quick. I'll mebbe go footering about the world like a lost thing, and then all of a sudden I'll know what I want to do ... and I'll just do it!"

"Hmmm!" said Uncle William.

"It sounds queer and foolish, doesn't it?"

"Oh, I don't know, John. Many's a thing sounds silly, but isn't."

"It's true, anyway. I've noticed things like that about myself. It's ... it's like a man getting converted. One minute he's a guilty, hell-deserving sinner, the way John Hutton says he was, footering about the world, drinking and guzzling and leading a rotten life ... and then all of a sudden, he's hauled up and made to give his testimony and do God's will for the rest of his life! I daresay I'll drift from one thing to another ... and then I'll know, just like a flash of lightning ... and I'll go and do it!"

"That's a dangerous kind of a doctrine," said Uncle William. "It's easier to get into the way of drifting nor it is to get out of it again. And you're a young lad to be thinking strange thoughts like that!"

"I'm seventeen," John replied. "That's not young!"

"It's not oul' anyway. Anybody'd think to hear you, you had the years of Methuselah. I suppose, now, you never thought of coming into the shop?"

"I did think of it one time, but you wouldn't let me!..."

"That was when you wanted to help me. But did you never think of it for your own sake? You see, John, you're the last of us, and this shop has been in our family for a long while ... it's a good trade, too, and you'll have no fear of hardship as long as you look after it, although the big firms in Belfast are opening branches here. The MacDermotts can hold their heads up against any big firm in the world, I'm thinking ... in this place, anyway. Did you never feel you'd like to come into the shop?"

John glanced about the shop, at the assistants who were serving customers with tea and groceries....

"No," he said, shaking his head, "I don't think I'd like it!"

Uncle William considered for a few moments. Then he said, "No, I thought you wouldn't care for it. Your da felt that way too. The shop wasn't big enough for him. All the same, there has to be shops, and there has to be people to look after that!"

"Oh, I know that right enough, Uncle William. I'm not saying anything against them. They're all right for them that likes them!..."

He paused for a while, and his Uncle waited for him to proceed. "Sometimes," he said at last, "I'm near in the mind to go and be a soldier!..."

"For dear sake!" said Uncle William impatiently.

"Or a sailor. I went down to the Post Office once and got a bill about the Navy!..."

"Well, I would think you were demented mad to go and do the like of that," said Uncle William. "You might as well be a peeler!"

II

His mind turned now very frequently to the consideration of work other than that of teaching. He made a mental catalogue of the things that were immediately possible to him: teaching, the ministry of the Presbyterian Church, the shop ... and ruled them all out of his list. The thought of soldiering or of going to sea lingered in his mind for a long time ... because he associated soldiering and sailoring with travel in strange places ... but he abandoned that thought when he balanced the tradition of his class against the Army, and Navy. All the men of his acquaintance who had joined the Army or the Navy had done so, either because they were in disgrace or because they were unhappy at home. It was generally considered that in joining either of the Services, they had brought shame upon their families, less, perhaps in the case of the Navy than in the case of the Army. In any event, his Uncle William's statement that a MacDermott could not endure to be ordered about by any one settled his mind for him on that subject. He would have to get his adventures in other ways. He might emigrate to America. He had a cousin in New York and one in Chicago. He might go to Canada or Australia or South Africa ... digging for gold or diamonds! There was nothing in Ireland that attracted him ... all the desirable things were in distant places. Farming in Canada or Australia had a romantic attraction that was not to be found in farming in Ireland. He had seen farmers in Ireland ... and he did not wish to be like them!

But, no matter how much he considered the question, he came no nearer to a solution of it.

He would go out to the fields that lay on the shores of the Lough, going one day to this side, and another day to that, and lie down in the sunshine and dream of a brilliant career. He might go into parliament and become a great statesman, like that man, Lord Salisbury, who had come to Belfast once during the Home Rule agitation. Or he might turn Nationalist and divert himself by roaring in the House of Commons against the English! He wished that he could write poetry ... if he could write poetry, he might become famous. There was an old exercise book at home, full of poems that he had made up when he was much younger, about Ireland and the Pope and Love and Ballyards ... but they were poor things, he knew, although Mr. Cairnduff, to whom he had shown them, had said that, considering the age John was when he wrote them, they might have been a great deal worse. Mr. Cairnduff had given generous praise to a long poem on the election of a Nationalist for the city of Derry, beginning with this wail:

Oh, Derry, Derry, what have you done?
Sold your freedom to Home Rule's son!

but neither Uncle William nor Uncle Matthew had had much to say for it. Uncle William said that his father would not have liked to think of his son writing a poem full of sentiments of that sort, and Uncle Matthew went upstairs to the attic and brought down, a copy of Romeo and Juliet and presented it to him. But Mrs. MacDermott was pleased in a queer way. She hoped he was not going to take up politics, but she was glad that he was not a Home Ruler!

Sometimes, when he had been much younger than he now was ... John always thought of himself as a man of great age ... he had resolved that he would become a writer; but although he began many stories and solemn books ... there was one called, The Errors of Rome in which the Papists were to be finally and conclusively exposed ... none of them were ever finished. Then had come a phase of preaching. His mother read the Christian Herald every week, and John would get a table cloth, and wrap it round himself to represent a surplice ... for the Church of Ireland was more decorative than the Presbyterian Church ... and deliver the sermons of Dr. Talmage and Mr. Spurgeon in a loud sing-song voice that greatly delighted Mrs. MacDermott. That, too, had passed, very swiftly indeed, because of the alarming discovery that he was an atheist! He would never forget the sensation he had created in school when he had suddenly turned to Willie Logan and said, "Willie, I don't believe there's a God at all. It's all a catch!..."

Willie, partly out of fright, but chiefly because of his incorrigible tendency to "clash," immediately reported him to Miss Gebbie, who had been a teacher even then ... it seemed to him sometimes that Miss Gebbie had always been a teacher and would never cease to be one ... and she had converted him to a belief in God's existence at the point of her bamboo....

Then came a time of mere dreaming of a future in which some beautiful girl would capture all his mind and heart and service. He would rescue her from a dire situation ... he would invent some wonderful thing that would bring fame and fortune to him ... and he would offer all his fame and fortune to her. His visions of this girl, constantly recurring, prevented him from falling in love with any girl in Ballyards. When he contrasted the girl of his dream with the girls he saw about him, he could not understand how anyone could possibly love a Ballyards girl. Aggie Logan!...

He would come away from the fields, pleased with his dreams, but still as far from a solution of his problem as ever.

III

One evening, his Uncle William came into the kitchen where John was reading John Halifax, Gentleman to his mother.

"I ought to go to Belfast the morrow," he said, "but Saturday's an awkward day for me. I was wondering whether to send John instead. He's nothing to do on Saturdays, and it would be a great help to me!"

John closed the book, "Of course, I'll go, Uncle William!" he said.

Mrs. MacDermott coldly regarded them both. "You know rightly," she said, "that I'm as busy on Saturday as you are, William. How can he go up to Belfast when I can't go with him?"

"I never said nothing about you going with him," Uncle William retorted. "He's well able to go by himself!" "Go by himself!" Mrs. MacDermott almost shouted the words at her brother-in-law. "A lad that never was out of the town by his lone in his life before!"

"He'll have to go by his lone some day, won't he? And he's a big lump of a lad now, and well able to look after himself!"

"He'll not stir an inch from the door without me," Mrs. MacDermott declared in a determined voice. "Think shame to yourself, William, to be putting such thoughts into a lad's head ... suggesting that he should be sent out in the world by himself at his age!..."

Uncle William shifted uneasily in his seat. "I'm not suggesting that he should be sent out into the world," he said. "I'm only suggesting that he should be sent to Belfast for the day!..."

"And what sort of a place is Belfast on a Saturday afternoon with a lot of drunk footballers flying about? He will not go, William. You can send Matthew!..."

Uncle William made a gesture of impatience. "You know rightly, Matthew's no good for a job of this sort!"

"Well, then, you'll have to go yourself. I'll keep an eye to the shop, forby my own work!..."

John got up and put John Halifax, Gentleman on the window-ledge.

"You needn't bother yourself, ma," he said. "I'm going to Belfast the morrow. What is it you want me to do, Uncle William?"

Mrs. MacDermott stared at him for a moment, then she got up and hurried out of the kitchen. They could hear her mounting the stairs, and then they heard the sound of her bedroom door being violently slammed.

"Women are queer, John," said Uncle William, "but the queerest women of all are the women that are mothers. Anybody'd think I was proposing to send you to the bad place, and dear knows, Belfast's not that!"

"What's the job you want me to do?"

"Come into the shop and I'll tell you!"

John followed his Uncle into the shop and they sat down together in the little Counting House.

"There's really nothing that a postcard couldn't do," Uncle William said. "That was the excuse. I've been thinking about you, John, and I thought it was a terrible pity you should never get out and about by yourself a bit ... out of Ballyards, I mean ... to look round you. It's no good to a lad to be always running about with his ma!"

"You're a terrible schemer, Uncle William," said John.

"Ah, g'long with you," his Uncle answered. "Here, pay heed to me now, while I tell you. This is what I want you to do!..."

He showed a business letter to John and invited him to read it. Then he explained the nature of the small commission he wished him to execute.

"It'll not take you long," he said, "and then you can look about yourself in Belfast. You'll want a few coppers in your pocket!" He put a coin into John's hand and then closed the lad's fingers over it. "It's great value to go down the quays and have a look at the ships," he went on, "and mebbe you could get a look over the shipyard! ... And perhaps when you're knocking about Belfast, you'll see something you'd like to do!"

IV

In this way, his Saturday trips to Belfast began. He found them much less exhilarating then he had imagined they would be. He inspected the City Hall in the company of a beadle and was informed, with great preciseness, of the cost of the building and of the price paid to each artist for the portraits of the Lord Mayors which were suspended from the walls of the Council Chamber. The beadle seemed to think that the portraits represented a waste of ratepayers' money, and he considered that if the Corporation had given a contract to one artist for all the pictures, a great reduction in price could have been obtained.... The Museum and the Free Library depressed him, precisely in the way in which Museums and Free Libraries always depress people; but he found pleasure in the Botanic Gardens and the Ormeau Park. He devised an excellent scheme of walking, which enabled him to go through the Botanic Gardens, then, by side streets, to the Lagan, where a ferryman rowed him across to the opposite bank and landed him in the Ormeau Park. He would walk briskly through the Park, and then, when he had emerged from it, would cross the Albert Bridge, hurry along the Sand Quay, and stand at the Queen's Bridge to watch the crowds of workmen hurrying home from the shipyards. He never tired of watching the "Islandmen," grimy from their labour, as they passed over the bridge in a thick, dusky stream to their homes. Thousands and thousands of men and boys seemed to make an endless procession of shipbuilders, designers and rivetters and heater-boys. But it never occurred to him that there was something romantic in the enterprise and labours of these men, that out of their energies, great ships grew and far lands were brought near to each other. He liked to witness the dispersal of the shipyard's energies, but he did not think of the miracle which their assembled energies performed every day. By this narrow, shallow river Lagan, a great company of men and boys and women met daily to make the means whereby races reached out to each other; and their ships sailed the seas of the world, carrying merchandise from one land to another, binding the East to the West and the South to the North, and making chains of friendship and kindliness between diverse peoples. It was an adventure to sail in a ship, in John's mind, but he did not know, had never thought or been told, that it is also an adventure to build a ship. The pleasure which he found in watching the "Islandmen" crossing the Queen's Bridge was not related to their work: it was found in the spectacle of a great crowd. Any crowd passing over the Bridge would have pleased John equally well....

But the crowd of "Islandmen" was soon dispersed; and John found that there was very little to do in Belfast. He did not care for football matches, he had no wish to enter the City Hall again, he could not walk through the Botanic Gardens and the Ormeau Park all day long, and he certainly did not wish to visit the Museum or the Free Library again. He became tired of walking aimlessly about the streets. There was a wet Saturday when, as he stood under the shelter of an awning in Royal Avenue, he resolved that he would return to Ballyards by an early train. "It's an awful town, this, on a wet day!" he said to himself, unaware that any town in which a man is a stranger is unpleasant on a wet day ... and sometimes on a fine day. "Somehow," he went on, "there seems to be more to do in Ballyards on a wet day than there is in Belfast on a wet day!" A sense of loneliness descended upon him as he gazed at the grey, dribbling skies and the damp pavements. The trams were full of moist, huddled men and women; the foot-passengers hurried homewards, their heads bent against the wind and rain; the bleak-looking newspaper boys, barefooted, pinched, hungry and cold, stood shivering in doorways, with wet, sticky papers under their arms; and wherever he looked, John saw only unfriendliness, haste and discomfort. There would not be a train to Ballyards until late in the afternoon, and as he stood there, growing less cheerful each moment, he wondered how he could occupy the time of waiting. The wind blew down the street, sending the rain scudding in front of it, and chilling him, and, half unconsciously, he hurried across the road to take shelter in a side street where, it seemed to him, he would be less exposed. He walked along the street, keeping in the shadow of the houses, and presently he found himself before the old market of Smithfield.

"Amn't I the fool," he said to himself, "not to have come here before?"

For here, indeed, was entertainment for any man or woman or child. In this ancient market for the sale of discarded things, a lonely person could pass away the dull hours very agreeably. The auctioneers, wheedling and joking and bullying, could be trusted to amuse any reasonable man for a while, and when their entertainment was exhausted there were the stalls to visit and explore. He stood to listen to a loud-voiced man who was selling secondhand clothes, and then, turning away, found himself standing before a bookstall. Piles of books, of all sizes and shapes and colours, lay on a long shutter that rested on trestles; and in the shop, behind the trestles, were great stacks of books reaching to the ceiling. He fingered the books with the affection with which he had seen his Uncle Matthew finger those in the attic at home. Some of them had the dreary, dull look observable in books that have long passed out of favour and have lain disregarded in some dark and dusty corner; and some, though they were old, looked bright and pleasant as if they were confident that the affection which had been theirs for years would be continued to them by new owners. He picked up old volumes and spent much time in contemplating the inscriptions inside them ... fading inscriptions in a thin, genteel handwriting that had the careful look of writing done by people who were anxious that the record should not offend a schoolmaster's eye ... and as he read these inscriptions, a queer dejection settled on him. These books, dusty and disregarded, he told himself, represented love and thought that had perished. Doubt and damp pessimism clutched hold of him. At the end of every brave adventure was Smithfield Market. He put down a book which contained an inscription to "Charles Dunwoody from his affectionate Mother," and looked about him. Everywhere, secondhand, rejected things were for sale: clothes, furniture, books, pictures ... The market was a mortuary of ambition and hope, the burial ground of little enterprises, confidently begun and miserably ended. Here were the signs of disruption and dispersal, of things attempted but not achieved, of misfortune and failure, of things used and abandoned for more coveted things. John had imagined himself performing great feats to win the love and favour of some beautiful woman ... but now he saw his adventure in love ending in a loud-voiced auctioneer mouthing jokes over a ruined home. Behind these piles of books and pictures and clothes and furniture, one might see young couples bravely setting out on their little ships of love to seek their fortunes, light-heartedly facing perils and dangers because of the high hope in their hearts ... and coming to wreck on a rough coast where their small cargoes were seized by creditors and brought to this place for sale, and they were left bare and hurt and discouraged...

"Oh, well!" said John, shrugging his shoulders and picking up a newer book.

That would not happen to him. If he failed in one enterprise he would start off on another. If he made a fortune and lost it, he would make another one. If the things he built were to be destroyed ... well, he would start building again....

But the mood of pessimism still held him and he could not bear to look at the books any longer. An unhappy ghost hid behind the covers of each one of them. He hurried out of the market into the street. The rain had ceased to fall, but the streets were wet and dirty, and the air struck at him coldly. He glanced at his watch, and saw that he could not now catch the train by which he had intended to return to Ballyards.

"I'll go and get my tea somewhere," he said, and then, "I don't think I'll come to Belfast again. I'm tired of the town!"

He turned into Royal Avenue and passed across Castle Junction into Donegall Place where there was a shop in which new books were sold. The shop was closed now, but he was able to see books with handsome covers in the window and he stayed for a time reading the titles of them. There was a bustle of people about him, of newspaper boys and flower girls, bedraggled and cheerless-looking, and of young men and women tempted to the Saturday evening parade in the chief street of the city in spite of the rain. The sound of voices in argument and barter and bright talk mingled with laughter and the noise of the tram-cars and carts clattering over the stony street. John liked the sound of Belfast on a Saturday night, the pleased sound of released people intent on enjoyment and with the knowledge that on the morrow there would still be freedom from labour, and as he stood in front of the bookshop, half intent on the books in the window and half intent on the crowd that moved about him, the gloom which had seized hold of him in Smithfield began to relax its grip: and when two girls, jostled against him by the disordered movement of the crowd on the pavement, smiled at him in apology, he smiled back at them.

He thrust himself through the crowd, breaking into a group of excited newspaper boys who were thrusting copies of the Evening Telegraph and Ireland's Saturday Night at possible purchasers, and walked towards the City Hall, but, changing his mind unaccountably, he turned down Castle Lane and presently found himself by the Theatre Royal. He had never been to a theatre in his life, but Uncle Matthew and Uncle William, when they were young men, used frequently to come to Belfast from Ballyards to see a play, and they had told him of the great pleasure they had had at the "old Royal."

"I've a good mind to go there to-night," he said to himself, as he crossed the street to examine the playbills which were posted on the walls of the theatre. Mr. F.R. Benson's Shakespearean Company, he read on the bill by the stage-door, would perform The Merchant of Venice that evening. The Company would remain in Belfast during the following week and would produce other plays by Shakespeare.

"I will go," he said to himself. "I'll go somewhere now and have my tea, and then I'll hurry back!"

He remembered that he had seen a volume of Shakespeare's plays in the bookshop in Donegall Place and that Uncle Matthew had each of the plays in a separate volume in the attic at home. He had read The Merchant of Venice a long time ago, but had only a vague recollection of it. In one of the school-books, Portia's speech on mercy was printed, and he could say that piece off by heart. The Jew had snarled at Portia when she had said "Then must the Jew be merciful!" "On what compulsion must I?" he had demanded, and she had replied, "The quality of mercy is not strained...." The school-book did not print Portia's statement that the Jew must be merciful or the Jew's snarling demand, "On what compulsion must I?"; but Mr. Cairnduff had explained the story of the play to the class and had told them of these two speeches, and John, interested by the story, had gone home and searched through the attic for the play, and there had read it through.

His mind went back to the bookshop. "It must be fine to work in a place like that, with all the books you can want to read all round you," he said to himself while he hurried through Corn Market on his way to a restaurant. He stopped for a moment or two, as an idea suddenly presented itself to him. "I know what I'll do," he said aloud. "I'll start a bookshop myself. New books ... not old ones. That sort of life would suit me fine!"

V

He ate his meal in great haste, and then hurried back to the theatre where a queue of people had already formed outside the entrance to the pit. Soon after he joined the queue, the doors were opened, and in a little while he found himself sitting at the end of the second row. He had chosen this seat so that he might be able to hurry out of the theatre quickly, without disturbing anyone, if he should have to leave before the play was ended to catch the last train to Ballyards.

A boy about his own age was sitting next to him, and this boy asked John to let him have a look at his programme.

"Did you ever see this piece before?" John said to him, as he passed the programme to him.

"I did not," he replied. "I'm not much of a one for plays. I generally go to the 'Lhambra on a Saturday, but somehow I didn't go there the night!"

"That's a terrible place, that 'Lhambra," said John.

"What's terrible about it?" his neighbour replied.

"I don't know. I was never there. This is the first time I've ever been in a theatre. But I've heard fearful things about that place, about women coming out and dancing with hardly any clothes on, and then kicking up their legs and all. I have an uncle went there once, and when the woman began kicking up her legs and showing off her clothes, he got up and stood with his back to the stage 'til she was done, he was that disgusted."

John remembered how shocked Uncle William had been when he told that story of himself.

"Your uncle must be very easy shocked," said the boy. "I can look at women kicking up their legs, and I don't think nothing of it at all. I like a good song and dance myself. I don't like plays much. Gimme a woman that's nice-looking and can sing and dance a bit, and I wouldn't ask you for nothing nicer. Is there any dancin' in this bit, do you know?"

"I don't think so," said John. "I've never seen the piece before, but I've read it. I don't think there's any dancing in it!"

"And no comic songs?..."

"Sure, you'll see for yourself in a wee minute!"

John's neighbour considered. "I wonder would they give me my money back if I was to go to the pay-box and let on I was sick!"

"They'd never do that," said John. "They'd know rightly you weren't sick by the look of you!"

The boy returned the programme to John. "Well, I wish they'd hurry up and begin," he murmured.

The members of the orchestra came through a door beneath the stage and took their places, and the sound of fiddles being tuned was heard for a while. Then the leader of the orchestra came to his place, and after a pause, the music began.

"A fiddle's great value," John's neighbour whispered to him. "I'm a great hand at the Jew's harp myself!..."

The music ceased, the lights were lowered in the theatre and the footlights were raised, throwing a great soft yellow glow on the picture of the Lakes of Killarney which decorated the drop-curtain. Then, the curtain was rolled up, and the performance began.

He had been interested by the play when he read it, but now he was enthralled by it. He wished that the boy sitting next to him would not keep on asking for the programme every time a fresh character appeared on the stage and would refrain from making comments on the play while it was being performed. "Them people wore quare clothes in them days!" he had whispered to John soon after the play began, and when Shylock made his first entrance, he said, "Ah, for Jase' sake, look at the oul' Sheeny!"

"Ssh!" said John. "Don't talk!..."

"Sure, why?..."

"Ah, shut up," said John.

He did not wish to talk during the intervals between the acts. He wished to sit still in his seat and perform the play over again in his mind. He tried to remember Bassanio's description of Portia:

In Belmont is a lady richly left,
And she is fair, and fairer than that word,
Of wondrous virtues....

He could not think of the words that came after that ... except one sentence:

...And her sunny locks
Hang on her temples like a golden fleece.

He repeated this sentence to himself many times, as if he were tasting each word with his tongue and with his mind, and once he said it aloud in a low voice.

"Eh?" said his neighbour.

"I was just reciting a piece from the play," he explained.

"What were you reciting?"

"Do you remember that piece: and her sunny locks hang on her temples like a golden fleece?"

"No!"

"In the first act? When the young fellow, Bassanio, was telling Antonio about his girl in Belmont?"

His neighbour turned to him eagerly. "I wonder did they just put that bit in about Belmont," he said. "There's a place near Belfast called Belmont ... just beyond the Hollywood Arches there! Do you know it?" John shook his head. "I wouldn't be surprised but they just put that bit in to make it look more like the thing. What was the piece you were reciting?" John repeated it to him again. "What's the sense of that?" the boy exclaimed.

"Oh, don't you see? It's ... it's ..." He did not know how to explain the speech. "It's poetry," he said lamely.

"Oh" said the boy. "Portry. I see now. Ah, well, I suppose they have to fill up the piece some way! Do you think that woman, what's her name again?..."

"Portia?"

"Aye. D'you think she did live at Belmont? Some of them stories is true, you know, and there was quare things happened in the oul' ancient days in this neighbourhood, I can tell you. I wouldn't be surprised now!..."

But before he could say any more, the lights were lowered again, and there was a hushing sound, and then the play proceeded.

"Oh, isn't it grand?" John said to his neighbour when the trial scene was over.

But his neighbour remained unmoved. "D'you mean to tell me," he said, "that man didn't know his wife when he saw her in the Coort?"

"What man?"

"That fellow what-you-may-call-him? The man that was married on the girl with the red dress on her!..."

"Bassanio?"

"Aye. D'you mean to tell me that fellow didn't know her again, and him only just after leaving her!..."

John tried to explain. "It's a play," he said. "He's not supposed to recognize her!..."

"Och, what's the good of supposing a thing that couldn't be!" said John's neighbour. "Any man with half an eye in his head could have seen who she was. I wish I'd gone to the 'Lhambra. This is a damn silly play, this!"

John was horrified. "Silly," he said. "It's by Shakespeare!"

"I don't care who it's by," was the reply. "It's damn silly to let on a man doesn't know his own wife when he sees her. I suppose that's portry!" he sneered.

John did not answer, and his neighbour went on. "Well, if it is portry ... God help it, that's all!"

But John did not care whether Bassanio had recognized Portia in the court scene or not. He left the theatre in an exalted mood in which he had little thought for the realities. Next week he told himself, he would visit the Royal again. He would see two plays on the following Saturday, one in the afternoon and one in the evening. The bills for the following week's programme were already pasted on the walls of the theatre when he came out, and he risked the loss of his train by stopping to read one of them. Romeo and Juliet was to be performed in the afternoon, and Julius Caesar in the evening.

He hurried down Ann Street and across the Queen's Bridge, and reached the railway station just in time to catch his train; and all the way across the bridge and all the way home in the train, one sentence passed continually through his mind:

...And her sunny locks
Hang on her temples like a golden fleece.

VI

While he ate his supper, he spoke to his mother and his uncles of his intention to open a bookshop.

"I'm going to start a bookshop," he said. "I made up my mind in Belfast to-day!"

"A what?" Mrs. MacDermott demanded.

"A bookshop, ma. I'll have every book you can think of in it!..."

"In the name of God," his mother exclaimed, "who do you think buys books in this place?"

"Plenty of people, ma. Mr. McCaughan!..."

"Mr. McCaughan never buys a book from one year's end to another," she interrupted. "And if he did, you can't support a shop on one man's custom. The people of this town doesn't waste their time on reading: they do their work!"

John turned angrily on her. "It's not a waste of time to read books, ma. Is it, Uncle Matthew?"

"You may well ask him," she said before Uncle Matthew could answer.

"What do you think, Uncle William?" John went on.

Uncle William thought for a few moments. "I don't know what to think," he said. "It's not a trade I know much about, John, but I doubt whether there's a living in it in Ballyards."

"There's no living in it," Mrs. MacDermott exclaimed passionately, "and if there was, you shouldn't earn your living by it!"

John gazed at her in astonishment. Her eyes were shining, not with tears, though tears were not far from them, but with resentment and anger.

"Why, ma?" he said.

"Because books are the ruin of people's minds," she replied. "Your da was always reading books, wild books that disturbed him. He was never done reading The Rights of Man. And look at your Uncle Matthew!..."

She stopped suddenly as if she realised that she had said too much. Uncle Matthew did not speak. He looked at her mournfully, and then he turned away.

"I don't want to say one word to hurt anyone's feelings," she continued in a lower tone, "but my life's been made miserable by books, and I don't want to see my son made miserable, too. And you know well, Matthew," she added, turning to her brother-in-law, "that all your reading has done you no good, but a great deal of harm. And what's the use of books, anyway? Will they help a man to make a better life for himself?"

Uncle Matthew turned to her quickly. "They will, they will," he said, and his voice trembled with emotion. "People can take your work from you and make little of you in the street because you did what your heart told you to do, but you'll get your comfort in a book, so you will. I know what you're hinting at, Hannah, but I'm not ashamed of what I did for the oul' Queen, and I'd do it again, gaol or no gaol, if I was to be hanged for it the day after!"

He turned to John.

"I don't know what sort of a living you'll make out of selling books," he said, "and I don't care either, but if you do start a shop to sell them, let me tell you this, you'll never prosper in it if it doesn't hurt you sore to part with a book, for books is like nothing else on God's earth. You have to love them ... you have to love them!..."

"You're daft," said Mrs. MacDermott.

"Mebbe I am," Uncle Matthew replied wearily. "But that's the way I feel, and no man can help the way he feels!"

He sat down at the table, resting his head in his hands, and gazed hungrily at his nephew.

"You can help putting notions into a person's head," said Mrs. MacDermott. "John might as well try to write books as try to sell them in this town!"

"Write books!" John exclaimed.

"Aye, write them!..."

But Uncle Matthew would not let her finish her sentence. "And why shouldn't he write books if he has a mind to it?" he demanded. "Wasn't he always the wee lad for scribbling bits of stories in penny exercise books?..."

"He was ... 'til I beat him for it," she replied. "Why can't you settle down here in the shop with your Uncle William?" she said to her son. "It's a comfortable, quiet sort of a life, and it's sure and steady, and when we're all gone, it'll be yours for yourself. Won't it, William?"

"Oh, aye!" said Uncle William. "Everything we have'll be John's right enough, but I doubt he's not fond of the shop!..."

"What's wrong with the shop? It's as good as any in the town!" She coaxed John with her voice. "You can marry some nice, respectable girl and bring her here," she said, "and I'll gladly give place to her when she comes!" She rocked herself gently to and fro in the rocking-chair. "I'd like well to have the nursing of your children in the house that you yourself were born in!..."

"Och, ma, I'm not in the way of marrying!..."

"You'll marry some time, won't you? And there's plenty would be glad to have you. Aggie Logan, though I can't bear the sight of her, would give the two eyes out of her head for you. Of course you'll marry, and I'd be thankful glad to think of your son being born in this house. You were born in it, and your da, too, and his da, and his da's da. Four generations of you in one house to be pleased and proud of, and I pray to God he'll let me live to see the fifth generation of the MacDermotts born here, too. I'm a great woman for clinging to my home, and I love to think of the generations coming one after the other in the same house that the family's always lived in. How many people in this town can say they've always lived in the one house like the MacDermotts?"

"Not very many," Uncle William proudly replied.

"No, indeed there's not, I tell you, John, son, the MacDermotts are someone in this town, as grand in their way and as proud as Lord Castlederry himself. That's something to live up to, isn't it! The good name of your family! But if you go tramping the world for adventures and romances, the way your Uncle Matthew would have you do, you'll lose it all, and there'll be strangers in the house that your family's lived in all these generations. And mebbe you'll come here, when you're an oul' man and we're all dead and buried, and no one in the place'll have any mind of you at all, and you'll be lonelier here nor anywhere else. Oh, it would be terrible to be treated like a stranger in your own town! And if you did start a bookshop and it failed on you, and you lost all your money, wouldn't it be worse disgrace than any not to be able to pay your debts in a place where everyone knows you ... to be made a bankrupt mebbe?"

"Ah, but, ma, the world would never move at all if everybody stopped in the one place!" John said.

"The world'll move well enough," she answered. "God moves it, not you."

John got up from the table and went, and sat on a low stool by the fire. "I don't know so much," he said. "I read in a book one time!..."

"In a book!" Mrs. MacDermott sneered.

"Aye, ma, in a book!" John stoutly answered. "After all, you know the Bible's a book!" Mrs. MacDermott had not got a retort to that statement, and John, aware that he had scored a point, hurriedly proceeded, "I was reading one time that all the work in the world was started by men that wrote books. There never was any change or progress 'til someone started to think and write!..."

Mrs. MacDermott recovered her wits. "Were they happy and contented men?" she demanded.

"I don't know, ma," John replied. "The book didn't say that. I suppose not, or they wouldn't have wanted to make any alterations!"

"Let them that wants to make changes, make them," said Mrs. MacDermott. "There's no need for you to go about altering the world when you can stay at home here happy and content!"

Uncle Matthew rose from the table and came towards Mrs. MacDermott. "What does it matter whether you're happy and contented or not, so long as things are happening to you?" he exclaimed.

Mrs. MacDermott burst into bitter laughter. "You have little wit," she said, "to be talking that daft way. Eh, William?" she added, turning to her other brother-in-law. "What do you think about it?"

Uncle William had lit his pipe, and was sitting in a listening attitude, slowly puffing smoke. "I'm wondering," he said, "whether it's more fun to be writing about things nor it is to be doing things!"

John turned to him and tapped him on the knee. "I've thought of that, Uncle William," he said, "and I tell you what! I'll go and do something, and then I'll write a book about it!"

"What'll you do?" Mrs. MacDermott asked.

"Something," said John. "I can easily do something!"

"And what about the bookshop?" said Uncle Matthew.

"Och, that was only a notion that came into my head," John answered. "I won't bother myself selling books: I'll write them instead!" He glanced about the kitchen. "I've a good mind to start writing something now!" he said.

His mother sprang to her feet. "You'll do no such thing at this hour," she said. "It's nearly Sunday morning. Would you begin your career by desecrating God's Day!"

"If you start doing things," said Uncle, reverting to John's declaration of work, "you'll mebbe have no time to write about them!"

"Oh, I'll have the time right enough. I'll make the time," John said.

Uncle William got up and walked towards the staircase. "Where are you going, William?" Mrs. MacDermott asked.

"To my bed," said Uncle William.

VII

Suddenly the itch to write came to John, and he began to rummage among the papers and books on the shelves for writing-paper.

"What are you looking for?" his mother enquired.

"Paper to write on," he said.

"You'll not write one word the night!..."

"Ah, quit, ma!" he said. "I must put down an idea that's come in my head. I'd mebbe forget it in the morning!"

"The greatest writers in the world have sat up all night, writing out their thoughts," Uncle Matthew murmured.

John did not pay any heed to his mother's scowls and remonstrances. He found sheets of writing-paper and placed them neatly on the table, together with a pen and ink. He looked at the materials critically. There was paper, there was ink and there was a pen with a new nib in it, and blotting paper!...

He drew a chair up to the table and sat down in front of the writing paper. He contemplated it for a long time while Mrs. MacDermott put away the remnants of his supper, and his Uncle Matthew sat by the fire watching him.

"What are you waiting for, John?" his Uncle Matthew asked.

"Inspiration," John replied.

He sat still, scarcely moving even for ease in his chair, staring at the white paper until it began to dance in front of his eyes, but he did not begin to write on it.

"Are you still waiting for inspiration, John?" his Uncle asked.

"Aye," he answered.

"You don't seem to be getting any," Mrs. MacDermott said.

He got up and put the writing materials away. "I'll wait 'til the morning," he replied.

THE THIRD CHAPTER

I

John wrote his first story during the following week, and when he had completed it, he made a copy of it on large sheets of foolscap in a shapely hand, and sewed the pages together with green thread. Uncle Matthew had purchased brass fasteners to bind the pages together, but Uncle William said that a man might easily tear his fingers with "them things" and contract blood-poisoning.

"And that would give him a scunner against your story, mebbe!" he added.

John accepted Uncle William's advice, not so much in the interests of humanity, as because he liked the look of the green thread. He had read the story to his uncles, after the shop was closed. They had drawn their chairs up to the fire, in which sods of turf and coal were burning, and the agreeable odour of the turf soothed their senses while they listened to John's sharp voice. Mrs. MacDermott would not join the circle before the fire. She declared that she had too much work to do to waste her time on trash, and she wondered that her brothers-in-law could find nothing better to do than to encourage a headstrong lad in a foolish business. She went about her work with much bustle and clatter, which, however, diminished considerably as John began to read the story, and ended altogether soon afterwards.

"D'you like it, Uncle William?" John said, when he had read the story to them.

"Aye," said Uncle William.

"I'm glad," John answered. "And you, do you like it, Uncle Matthew?"

"I like it queer and well," Uncle Matthew murmured, "only!..." He hesitated as if he were reluctant to make any adverse comment on the story.

"Only what?" John demanded with some impatience. He had asked for the opinions of his uncles, indeed, but it had not occurred to him that they would not think as highly of the story as he thought of it himself.

"Well ... there's no love in it!" Uncle Matthew went on.

"Love!"

"Aye," Uncle Matthew said. "There's no mention of a woman in it from start to finish. I think there ought to be a woman in it!"

Mrs. MacDermott, who had been silent now for some time, made a noise with a dish on the table. "Och, sure, what does he know about love?" she exclaimed angrily. "A child that's not long left his mother's arms would know as much. Mebbe, now you've read your oul' story, John, the whole of yous will sit up to the table and take your tea!"

John, disregarding his mother, sat back in his chair and contemplated his Uncle Matthew.

"I wonder now, are you right?" he exclaimed.

"I am," Uncle Matthew replied. "The best stories in the world have women in them, and love-making! I never could take any interest in Robinson Crusoe because he hadn't got a girl on that island with him, and I thought to myself many's a time, it was a queer mistake not to make Friday a woman. He could have fallen in love with her then!"

Uncle William said up sharply. "Aye, and had a wheen of black babies!" he said. "Man, dear, Matthew, think what you're saying! What sort of romance would there be in the like of that? I never read much, as you know, but I always had a great fancy for Robinson Crusoe. The way that man turned to and did things for himself ... I tell you my heart warmed to him. I like your story, John, women or no women. Sure, love isn't the only thing that men make!..."

"It's the most important," said Uncle Matthew.

"And why shouldn't a story be written about any other thing nor a lot of love?" Uncle William continued, ignoring the interruption. "I daresay you'll get a mint of money for that story, John. I've heard tell that some of these writers gets big pay for their stories. Pounds and pounds!"

John crinkled his manuscript in his hand and regarded it with a modest look. "I don't suppose I'll get much for the first one," he said. "In fact, if they'll print it, I'll be willing to let them have it for nothing ... just for the satisfaction!"

"That would be a foolish thing to do," Uncle William retorted. "Sure, if it's worth printing, it's worth paying for. That's the way I look at it, anyhow!"

"I daresay I'll make more, when I know the way of it better!" John answered. "What paper will I send it to, do you think?"

"Send it to the best one," said Uncle William.

Mrs. MacDermott took a plate of toast from the fender where it had been put to keep warm. "Send it to the one that pays the most," she suggested.

"I thought you weren't listening, ma!" John exclaimed, laughing at her.

"A body can't help hearing when people are talking at the top of their voices," she said tartly. "Come on, for dear sake, and have your teas, the whole of yous!"

II

It was Uncle William who advised John to send the story to Blackwood's Magazine. He said that in his young days, people said Blackwood's Magazine was the best magazine in the world. Uncle Matthew had demurred to this. "I'm not saying it's not a good one," he said, "but it's terribly bitter against Ireland. The man that writes that magazine must have a bitter, blasting tongue in his head!"

"Never mind what it says about Ireland," Uncle William retorted. "Sure, they're only against the Papishes, anyway!..."

"The Papishes are as good as the Protestants," Uncle Matthew exclaimed.

"I daresay they are," Uncle William admitted, "but I'm only saying that Blackwood's Magazine is against them: it's not against us; and I don't see why John shouldn't send his story to it. He's a Protestant!"

"If I wrote a story," Uncle Matthew went on, "I wouldn't send it to any paper that made little of my country, Protestant or Papish, no matter how good a paper it was nor how much it paid me for my story. Ireland is as good as England any day!..."

"It's better," said Uncle William complacently. "Sure, God Himself knows the English would be on the dung-heap if it wasn't for us and the Scotchmen. But that's no reason why John shouldn't send his story to Blackwood's Magazine. In one way, it's a good reason why he should send it there, for sure, if he does nothing else, he'll improve the tone of the thing. You do what I tell you, John!..."

And so, accepting his Uncle William's advice, John sent the manuscript of his story to the editor of Blackwood's Magazine; and each morning, after he had done so, he eagerly awaited the advent of the postman. But the postman, more often than not, went past their door. When he did deliver a letter to them, it was usually a trading letter for Uncle William.

"Them people get a queer lot of stories to read," Uncle William said to console his nephew, disappointed because he had not received a letter of acceptance from the editor by Saturday morning, four days after he had posted the manuscript. "It'll mebbe take them a week or two to reach yours!..."

"They could have sent a postcard to say they'd got it all right," John replied ruefully. "That's the civil thing to do, anyway!"

He remembered that the Benson Shakespearean Company was still in Belfast and that Romeo and Juliet was to be performed in the afternoon, and Julius Caesar in the evening; and he went up to the city by an earlier train than usual so that he might be certain of getting to the theatre in time to secure an end seat near the front of the pit. He had proposed to his Uncle Matthew that he should go to Belfast, too, to see the plays, but Uncle Matthew shook his head and murmured that he was not feeling well. He had been listless lately, they had noticed, and Uncle William, regarding him one afternoon as he stood at the door of the shop, had turned to John and said that he would be glad when the summer weather came in again, so that Uncle Matthew could go down to the shore and lie in the sun.

"He's not a robust man, your Uncle Matthew!" he said. "I don't think he tholes the winter well!"

"Och, he's mebbe only a wee bit out of sorts," John answered. "I wish, he'd come to Belfast with me!..."

"He'll never go next or near that place again," Uncle William replied. "He's never been there since that affair!..."

"You'd wonder at a man letting a thing of that sort affect his mind the way Uncle Matthew let it affect his," John murmured.

"When a man believes in a thing as deeply as he believed in the oul' Queen," said Uncle William, "it's a terrible shock to him to find out that other people doesn't believe in it half as much as he does ... or mebbe doesn't believe in it at all!"

"I suppose you're right," said John.

"I am," said Uncle William.

John was the first person to reach the door of the pit that afternoon. The morning had been rough and blusterous, and although the streets were dry, the cold wind blowing down from the hills made people reluctant to stand outside a theatre door. John, who was hardy and indifferent to cold, stood inside the shelter of the door and read the copy of Romeo and Juliet which he had borrowed from his Uncle Matthew; and while he read the play he remembered his uncle's criticism of the story he had written for Blackwood's Magazine: that it ought to have had a woman in it! This play was full of love. Romeo, sighing and groaning because his lady will not look kindly upon him, runs from his friends who "jest at scars that never felt a wound" ... and finds Juliet! In The Merchant of Venice, Bassanio and Portia, Lorenzo and Jessica, Gratiano and Nerissa had all made love. Even young Gobbo, in a coarse, philandering way, had made love, too! In all the books he had read, women were prominent. Queer and distressing things happened to the heroes; they were constantly in trouble and under suspicion of wrong-doing; poverty and persecution were common to them; frequently, they were misunderstood; but in the end, they had their consolations and their rights and rewards. Love was the great predominating element in all these stories, the support and inspiration and reward of the troubled and tortured hero; and Woman was the symbol of victory, of achievement. At the end of every journey, at the finish of every fight, there was a Woman. Uncle Matthew had spoken wisely, John thought, when he said that you cannot leave women out of your schemes and plans.

John had not thought of leaving women out of his schemes and plans. In all his romantic imaginings, a woman of superb beauty had figured in a dim way; but the woman had been a dream woman only, bearing no resemblance whatever to the visible women about him. He had so much regard for this woman of his imagined adventures ... she changed her looks as frequently as he changed the scene of his romances ... that he had no regard left for the women of his acquaintance. He nodded to the girls he knew when he met them in the street, but he had never felt any desire to "go up the road" with one of them. Willie Logan, as John knew, was "coortin' hard" and laying up trouble for himself by his diverse affections; and Aggie Logan, forgetful, perhaps, of the rebuff that John had given to her childish offers of love, had lately taken to hanging about the street when John was due to pass along it. She would pretend not to see him until he was close to her. Then she would start and giggle and say, "Oh, John, is that you? You're a terrible stranger these days!..." Once while he was listening to her as she made some such remark as that, Lady Castlederry drove by in her carriage, and his eyes wandered from the sallow, giggling girl in front of him to the beautiful woman in the carriage; and Aggie suffered severely by the comparison. And yet Aggie had a quicker and more intelligent look than Lady Castlederry. The beautiful, arrogant woman was like the dream-woman of his romances ... and again, she was not like her; for the dream-women had not got Lady Castlederry's look of settled stupidity in her eyes.

John had hurriedly quitted Aggie's company on that occasion. He knew why Aggie always contrived to meet him in the street, and he thought that she was a poor fool of a girl to do it. And her brother Willie was a "great gumph of a fellow," to go capering up and down the road in the evenings after any girl that would say a civil word to him or laugh when he laughed!...

All the same, women mattered to men. Uncle Matthew had said so, and Uncle Matthew was in the right of it. In the story-books, women surged into the hero's life, good women and bad women and even indifferent women. And, now, in these plays, he could see for himself that women mattered enormously. Yet he had never been in love with a girl! He was not even in love with the dream-woman of his romances. She was his reward for honourable and arduous service ... that was all. He was not in love with her any more than he was in love with a Sunday School prize. It was a reward for regular attendance and for accurate answers to Biblical questions, and he was glad to have it. It rested on the bookshelf in the drawing-room, and sometimes, when there were visitors in the house, his mother would request him to take it down and show it to them. They would read the inscription and make remarks on the oddness of Mr. McCaughan's signature and turn over the pages of the book ... and then they would hand it back to him and he would replace it on the shelf ... and no more was said about it. Really, his dream-woman had not meant much more to him than that. She would be given to him when he had won his fight, and he would take her and be glad to get her ... he would be very proud of her and would exhibit her to his friends and say, "This is my beautiful wife!" and then!... oh, well, there did not appear to be anything else after that. The book always came to an end when the hero married the heroine. Probably she and he had children ... but, beyond the fact that they lived happily ever afterwards, there did not appear to be much more to say about them....

Somehow, it seemed to him now, as he stood in the shelter of the Pit Entrance to the Theatre Royal, reading Romeo and Juliet, that the heroine was different from his dream-woman. His dream-woman had always been very insubstantial and remote, but Juliet was a real woman, alive and passionate, with a real father and a real mother. The odd thing about his dream-woman was that she did not appear to have any relatives ... at least he had never heard of any. She had not even got a name. She never spoke to him. Always, when the adventure was ended, he went up to the dream-woman, waiting for him in a misty manner, and he took hold of her hand and led her away ... and while he was leading her away, the adventure seemed to come to an end ... the picture dissolved ... and he could not see any more. Once, indeed, he had kissed his dream-woman ... he had kissed her exactly as he had kissed his great-aunt, Miss Clotworthy, who was famous for the fact that she had attended a Sunday School in Belfast as pupil and teacher for fifty-seven years without a break ... and the dream-woman had taken the kiss in the unemotional manner in which she took hold of his hand when he led her away ... and lost her!...

There was something wrong with his dream-woman, he told himself. This man Shakespeare, so everybody said, was the greatest poet England had produced ... perhaps the greatest poet the world had produced ... and he ought to know something of what women were like. Whatever else Juliet might be, she certainly was not like John's dream-woman. She did not stand at the end of the road waiting for Romeo to come to her. She did not wait until the fight was fought and won. She did not offer a cold hand or cold lips to Romeo. Her behaviour was really more like that of Aggie Logan than that of the dream-woman!...

Aggie Logan! That "girner" with the sallow look and the giggle! He could see her now, standing in the street waiting for him, dabbing at her mouth with the foolish handkerchief she always carried in her hand. What did she want to keep on dabbing at her mouth with her handkerchief for! Men didn't dab at their mouths.... Nor did the dream-woman dab at hers.... But it was just possible ... indeed, it was very likely, that Juliet dabbed at hers!...

At that moment, the Pit Door opened, and John, having paid his shilling, passed into the theatre.

III

He came away from the play in a disturbed and exalted state. Suddenly and compellingly, he had become aware of the fact of Women. While he sat in the front row of the pit, listening with his whole body to the play, something stirred in him and he became aware of Women. The actress who played the part of Juliet had turned towards the audience for a few moments during the performance and, so it seemed to him, had looked straight into his eyes. She did not avert her gaze immediately, nor did he avert his. He imagined that she was appealing to him ... he forgot that he was sitting in the pit of a theatre listening to a play written by a man who had died three hundred years ago ... and remembered only that he was a young man with aspirations and romantic longings, and that a young woman, in a pitiable plight, was gazing into his eyes ... and his heart reached out to her. He drew in his breath quickly, murmuring a soft "Oh," and as he did so, his dream-woman fell dead and he did not even turn to look at her.

When the play was over, he had sat still in his seat, more deeply moved than he had ever been before, overwhelmed by the disaster which had come upon the young lovers through the foolish brawls of their foolish elders; and it was not until an impatient woman had prodded him in the side that he returned to reality.

"I beg your pardon, ma'am!" he said and got up and hurried out of the theatre into the street.

He went along High Street towards Castle Place, and as he walked along, he regarded each woman and girl that approached him with interest.

"That one's nice-looking!" he said of a girl, and "That one's ugly!" he said of another. He wondered why it was that all the older women of the working-class were so misshapen and lacking in good looks, when so many of the girls of the working-class were shapely and pretty. Mr. Cairnduff had told him that Belfast girls were prettier than London girls. "London girls aren't pretty at all," Mr. Cairnduff had said. "You'd walk miles in London before you'd see a pretty girl, but you wouldn't walk ten yards in Belfast before you'd meet dozens!" And yet, all those pretty working-girls grew into dull, misshapen, displeasing women. "It's getting married that does it, I suppose," he said to himself. "They were all nice once, but they married and grew ugly!"

He did not look long at the ugly and misshapen women. His eyes quickly searched through the crowds of passers-by for the pretty girls, and at them he looked with eagerness.

"There's no doubt about it," he said to himself, "girls are nice to look at!"

He found a restaurant in the street off High Street. He climbed up some stairs, and then, pushing a door open, entered a large room, at the back of which was a smaller room. A girl was standing at a window, looking out on to the street, but she turned her head when she heard him entering. She smiled pleasantly as he sat down, and came forward to take his order.

"It's turned out a brave day after all," she said.

He said "Aye" and smiled at her in return. She had thick, fair hair, and he remembered Bassanio's description of Portia:

And her sunny locks
Hang on her temples like a golden fleece.

He had a curious desire to talk to the girl about the play he had just seen, and before he gave his order, he glanced about the room. She and he were the only persons in it.

"You don't seem to be very busy," he said.

"Och, indeed, we're not," she replied. "We seldom are on a Saturday. Mrs. Bothwall ... her that owns the place ... thought mebbe some football fellows might come here for their tea after the matches so's they needn't go home before starting for the Empire or the Alhambra: but, sure, none of them ever comes. We might as well be shut for the custom we get!"

He ordered his tea, and she went to the small room at the back of the large room to prepare it. He thought it would be a good plan to ask the girl if she would care to have her tea with him, but a sudden shyness prevented him from doing so, and he was unable to say more than "Thank you" when she put the teapot by his side. There was plenty for two on the table, he said to himself: a loaf and a bap and some soda-farls and a potato cake and the half of a barn-brack and butter and raspberry jam. He looked across the room to where the girl was again looking out of the window. He liked the way she stood, with one hand resting on her hip and the other on her cheek. He could see that she had small feet and slender ankles, and while he looked at her, she rubbed her foot against her leg and he saw for a moment or two the flash of a white petticoat....

"I was at the Royal the day!" he called to her.

She turned round quickly. "Were you?" she said. "Was it good?"

"It was grand. I enjoyed it the best," he answered.

She came towards him and sat down at a table near to his. "What piece was it you saw?" she asked. "It's Benson's Company, isn't it?"

"Yes. I saw Romeo and Juliet."

"Oh, that's an awful sad piece. I cried my eyes out one year when I saw it!"

"It's a great play," John said.

"I suppose you often go?" she went on.

"Last Saturday was the first time I ever went to a theatre. I saw The Merchant of Venice. I'll go every Saturday after this, when there's a good piece on. I'm going again to-night to see Julius Caesar!"

"I'd love to see that piece!"

"Would you?"

"Aye, indeed I would. I'm just doting on the theatre. The last piece I saw was The Lights of London. It was lovely."

"I never saw that bit," John answered. "You see I live in Ballyards and I only come up to town on Saturdays."

"By your lone?" she asked.

He nodded his head. He poured out his tea, and then began to spread butter on a piece of soda-farl.

"I'd be awful dull walking the streets by myself," she said, watching him as he did so. "I'm a terrible one for company. I can't bear being by myself!"

"Company's good," he said. "Have you had your tea yet?"

"I'll be having it in a wee while!"

"I wish you'd have it with me!" He spoke hesitatingly.

"Oh, I couldn't!" she exclaimed.

"Sure, what's to hinder you?" His voice became bolder.

"Oh, I couldn't. I couldn't really!..."

"You might as well have it with me as have it by yourself. And there's nobody'll see you. Where's Mrs. Bothwell?"

"She's away home with a headache!..."

"Then you're all by yourself here!" She nodded her head. "What time do you shut?" he went on.

"Half-six generally, but Mrs. Bothwell said I'd better shut at six the night!"

He took a cup and saucer and a knife and plate from an adjoining table and put them down opposite his own.

"Come on," he said, "and have your tea!"

"Och, I couldn't," she protested weakly.

He poured out some of the tea for her, "I suppose you take milk and sugar?" he said.

"You're a terrible fellow," she murmured admiringly, and he could see that her eyes were shining with pleasure.

"Draw up to the table," he replied.

She hesitated for a little while, and then she sat down. "This is not very like the thing," she murmured.

"It doesn't matter whether it is or not," he replied. "What'll you have ... bread or soda-farl?"

She helped herself.

"You know," he said, "I was thinking it would be a good plan for the two of us to go to the theatre to-night!"

"The two of us," she exclaimed. "Me and you!"

"Aye! Why not?"

She put down her cup and laughed. "I never met anybody in my life that made so much progress in a short time as you do," she said. "What in the earthly world put that notion into your head?"

"There's no notion about it," he exclaimed. "I'm asking you plump and plain will you come to the theatre with me to-night!..."

"But it wouldn't be like the thing at all to go to the theatre with a boy that I never saw before and never heard tell of 'til this minute. I don't even know your name!..."

"John MacDermott," he said.

"Are you a Catholic?"

"No. I'm a Presbyterian."

"It's a Catholic name," she mused. "I know a family by the name of MacDermott, and they're desperate Catholics. They live over in Ballymacarrett. Do you know them?"

"I do not. There never was a person in our family was a Catholic ... not that we have mind of. Will you come with me?"

"Ooh, I couldn't!"

"I'll not take 'No' for an answer!" he said, "and I'll not put another bite in my mouth 'til you say 'Yes.' D'you hear me?"

"You've an awful abrupt way of talking," she replied.

"What's abrupt about it?" he demanded.

"Well, queer then!" she said.

"I see nothing abrupt or queer about it. Are you coming or are you not?"

"As if you were used to getting what you wanted, the minute you wanted it," she went on, disregarding his question and intent on explaining the queerness of his speech. "I'd be afeard to be your wife, you'd be such a bossy man!"

"Ah, quit!" he said. "Will you come?"

"I might!..."

"Will you?"

"Well, perhaps!..."

"Will you or will you not?"

"You're an awful man," she protested.

"Will you come?"

"All right, then," she replied, "but!..."

"I'll have some more tea," said John. He looked round the room while she poured the tea into his cup. "Are there any more cakes or buns?" he asked.

"Yes, would you like some?"

"Bring a plate full," he said. "Bring some with sugar on the top and jam in the middle!"

"Florence cakes?"

"Aye!"

"You've a sweet tongue in your head!" She went to the small room as she spoke.

"I have," he exclaimed. "And I daresay you have, too!"

IV

"You never told me your name," he said, when she returned with the plate of cakes.

"Give a guess!" she teased.

He looked at her for a moment. "Maggie!" he said.

"How did you know?"

"I didn't know," he answered. "You look like a Maggie. What's your other name?"

"Carmichael!"

"Maggie Carmichael!" he exclaimed. "It's a nice name!"

"I'm glad you like it," she said.

V

He sat back in his chair while she went to prepare for the theatre. How lucky it was that he had asked his Uncle William for more money that morning "in case I need it!" If he had not done so, he would not have been able to offer to take Maggie to the theatre.... They would go in by the Early Door. There was certain to be a crowd outside the ordinary door on a Saturday night. What a piece of luck it was that he had chosen to take his tea in this place instead of the restaurant to which he usually went. Mrs. Bothwell's headache, too, that was a piece of luck, for him, although not, perhaps, for her. He liked the look of Maggie. He liked her bright face and her laugh and her beautiful, golden hair. What was that bit again?

In Belmont is a lady richly left,
And she is fair and fairer than that word
Of wondrous virtue....

and then again:

...and her sunny locks
Hang on her temples like a golden fleece.

Maggie came out of the small room, ready for the street, and he sat and watched her as she shut the door behind her.

"I believe I'm in love," he said to himself. "I believe I am!"

"Are you ready?" he said aloud.

"I've only to draw the blinds and then lock the door!" she replied.

"I'll draw them for you," he said, going over to the windows and drawing down the blinds as he spoke. "Did you ever see The Merchant of Venice?" he asked when he had done so.

"No," she said.

"There's a bit in it that makes me think of you," he went on.

"Oh, now, don't start plastering me," she exclaimed gaily.

"I mean it," he said, and he quoted the lines about Portia's sunny locks.

"That's poetry." she said.

"It is!" he replied.

"It's queer and nice!"

She opened the door leading to the stairs, and then went back to the room to turn out the light. The room was in semi-darkness, save where a splash of yellow light from the staircase fell at the doorway.

He turned towards her as she made her way to the door, and put out his hand to her. She took hold of it, and as she did so, he caught her quickly to him and drew her into his arms and kissed her soft, warm lips.

"You're an awful wee fellow," she said, freeing herself from his embrace and smiling at him.

He did not answer her, but his heart was singing inside him. I love her. I know I love her. I love her. I love her. I know I love her.

They went down the stairs together, and as they emerged into the street, he put his arm in hers and drew, her close to him. Almost he wished that they were not going to the theatre, that they might walk like this, arm in arm, for the remainder of the evening. He could still feel the warmth of her lips on his, and he wished that they could go to some quiet place so that he might kiss her again. But he had asked her to go to the theatre, and he did not wish to disappoint her. They entered the theatre by the Early Door, and sat in the middle of the front row of the pit. There was a queer silence in the theatre, for the ordinary doors had not yet opened, and the occasional murmur of a voice echoed oddly. John put his arm in Maggie's and wound his fingers in hers, and felt the pressure of her hand against his hand. When the ordinary doors of the theatre were opened and the crowd came pouring in, he hardly seemed aware of the people searching for good seats. Maggie had tried to withdraw her hand from his when she heard the noise of the people hurrying down the stone steps, but he had not released her, and she had remained content. And so they sat while the theatre quickly filled. Presently an attendant with programmes and chocolates came towards them, and he purchased a box of chocolates for her.

"You shouldn't have done that," she said, making the polite protest.

"I've always heard girls are fond of sweeties," he replied.

He put the box of chocolates in her lap, and opened the programme and handed it to her.

"It's a long piece," she said, "with a whole lot of acts and scenes in it. That's the sort of piece I like ... with a whole lot of changes in it!"

"Do you?" he said.

"Yes. I came here one time to see a piece that was greatly praised in the Whig and the Newsletter, and do you know they used the same scene in every act! I thought it was a poor miserly sort of a play. The bills said it was a London company, but I don't believe that was true. They were just letting on to be from London. They couldn't have had much money behind them when they couldn't afford more nor the one scene, could they!"

"Mebbe you're right," he answered.

The members of the orchestra came into the theatre, and after a while the music began. The lights in the theatre were diminished and then were extinguished, and the curtain went up. John snuggled closer to Maggie.

VI

He was scarcely aware of the performance on the stage, so aware was he of the nearness of Maggie. He heard applause, but he did not greatly heed it. He was in love. He had never been in love before, and he had always thought of it as something very different from this, something cold and austere and aloof, and very dignified ... not at all like this warm, intimate, careless thing. He slipped his hand from Maggie's and slowly put his arm round her waist. She did not resist him, and when he drew her more closely to him so that their heads were nearly touching, she yielded to him without demur. He could feel her heart beating where his hand pressed against her side, and he heard the slow rise and fall of her breath as she inhaled and exhaled. He could not get near enough to her. He wanted to draw her head down on to his shoulder, to put both his arms about her, to feel again his lips on her lips....

He started suddenly. Someone was tapping him, on the shoulder. He turned round to meet the gaze of an elderly, indignant woman who was seated immediately behind him.

"Sit still," she said in a loud whisper. "I can't see the stage for you two ducking your heads together!"

VII

He took his arm away from Maggie's waist, and edged a little away from her. He felt angry and humiliated. He told himself that he did not care who saw him putting his arm about Maggie's waist, but was aware that this was not true, that he deeply resented being overlooked in his love-making. He did not wish anyone to behold him in this intimate relationship with Maggie, and he was full of fury against the woman behind him because she had seen him fondling her. For of course the woman knew that he had his arm about Maggie ... and now her neighbours would know, too. The whole theatre would know that he had been embracing the girl!... Well, what if they did know? Let them know! There was no harm in a fellow putting his arm round a girl's waist. It was a natural thing for a fellow to do, particularly if the girl were so pretty and warm and loving as Maggie Carmichael. The woman herself had no doubt had a man's arm round her waist once upon a time. He did not care who knew!... All the same!... No, he did not care!... He slipped his hand into Maggie's hand again, and then quickly withdrew it. She was holding a sticky chocolate in her fingers!...

He lost all interest in the play now. It would be truer, perhaps, to say that he had not begun to be interested in it, and now that he tried to follow it, he could not do so. His mind constantly reverted to the indignant woman behind him. He imagined her looking, first this way and then that, in her efforts to see the stage, getting angrier and more angry as she was thwarted in her desire, and then, in her final indignation, leaning forward to tap on his shoulder and beg him to keep his head apart from Maggie's so that she might conveniently see the stage. His sense of violated privacy became stronger. His love for Maggie, for he accepted it now as a settled fact, was not a thing for prying eyes to witness: it was a secret, intimate thing in which she and he alone were concerned. He hated the thought that anyone else in the theatre should know that Maggie and he were sweethearts, newly in love and warm with the glow of their first affection. And then, when he had slipped his hand back into hers, he had encountered a sticky chocolate! While he was burning with feeling for her and with resentment against the old woman's intrusion into their love affair, Maggie had been chewing chocolate quite unconcernedly. In that crisis of their love, she had remained unmoved. When he had released her hand, she had simply put it into the box of chocolates and taken out a sticky sweet and had eaten it with as little emotion as if he had not been present at all, as if his ardent, pressing arm had not been suddenly withdrawn from her waist because of that angry intruder into their happiness. She had taken his hand when he gave it to her, and had released it again when he withdrew it, without any appearance of desire or reluctance. He had imagined that she would take his hand eagerly and yield it up unwillingly, that she would try to restrain him when he endeavoured to take his hand away from hers ... but she had not done so.

Perhaps she did not love him as he loved her. Perhaps she did not love him at all. After all, he had met her for the first time about three hours earlier in the evening. Only three hours ago! It was hard to believe that he had not loved her for centuries, had not often felt her heart beating beneath the pressure of his hand, had not frequently put his lips to her lips and been enchanted by her kisses. Why, he had only kissed her once. Only once! Once only!... He looked at her as she sat by his side, gazing intently at the stage. He could see a protuberance in her cheek, made by a piece of chocolate, and as he looked at her, it seemed to him to be a terrible thing that this girl did not love him. His love had gone out to her, quickly, insurgently and fully, and perhaps she thought no more of him than she might think of any chance friend who offered to take her to see a play. She might have spent many evenings in this very theatre with other men. Had she not told him that afternoon that she hated to be alone! He had put his arm about her waist in a public place and had been humiliated for doing so, but nothing of this had meant much to Maggie. She was quite willing to let him embrace her ... perhaps she thought that she ought to allow him to hug her as a return for the treat at the theatre ... or perhaps she liked to feel a man's arm about her waist and did not much care who the man might be. Some girls were like that. Willie Logan had told him that Carrie Furlong was the girl of any fellow who liked to walk up the road with her. She did not care with whom she went; all that she cared about was that she should have some boy in her company. She would kiss anybody.

Was Maggie Carmichael like that? Would she kiss this one or that one, just as the mood took her?... Oh, no, she could not be like that. It was impossible for him to fall in love with a girl who distributed kisses as carelessly and impassionately as a boy distributes handbills. He felt certain that he could not fall in love with a girl of that sort, that some instinct in him would prevent him from going so. Other fellows might make a mistake of that kind ... Willie Logan, for example ... but a MacDermott could not make one. Maggie must be in love with him ... she must have fallen in love with him as suddenly as he had fallen in love with her ... otherwise she could not have consented so readily to accompany him to the theatre. When he had taken her in his arms and kissed her, she had yielded to him so naturally, as if she had been in his arms many times before!... Perhaps, though, the ease with which she had yielded to him denoted that she had had much experience!... Oh, no, no! No, no! She was his girl, not anybody else's girl. He could not have her for a sweetheart, if she shared her love with other men. He must have her entirely to himself!...

Oh, what a torturing, doubt-raising, perplexing thing this Love was! A few hours ago he had known nothing whatever of it ... had merely imagined cold, austere, wrong things about it ... and now it had hold of him and was hurting him. Every particle of his mind was concentrated on this girl by his side ... a stranger to him. He knew nothing of her except her name and that she was employed as a waitress in a restaurant. She was a stranger to him ... and yet a fierce, unquenchable love for her was raging in his heart. Each moment, the flames of his passion increased in strength. When he looked away from her, he could see her in his mind's eye. Each of the players on the stage looked like Maggie.... And there she was, all unaware of this strong emotion in him, placidly sitting in her seat, gazing at the actors! Do women feel love as strongly as men do? he asked himself as he looked at her, and as he did so she turned, her head to him, conscious perhaps of his stare, and when her eyes met his in the glowing dusk of the theatre, she smiled, and, seeing her smile, he forgot his doubt and remembered only the great joy of loving her.

VIII

He insisted on taking her to her home, although she stoutly declared that this was unnecessary. She lived at Stranmillis, she said, and the journey there and back would make him miss his train; but he swore that he had plenty of time, and would not listen to her dissuasions. When they reached the terminus at the Botanic Gardens, she tried to insist that he should return to town in the tram by which they had come out, but he said that he must walk with her for a while. She would not let him accompany her to the door of her home ... he must leave her at a good distance from it ... and to this he agreed, for he knew what the etiquette of these matters is. He put his arm in hers, again drawing her close to him, and, listening to her laughter, he walked in gladness by her side. It was she who stopped. "I'll say 'Good-night' to you here," she said.

"Not yet," he replied.

"You'll miss your train," she warned him.

He did not heed her warning, but drew her into the shadow and held her tightly to him.

"Don't!" she stammered, but could not speak any more because of the strength of his kisses.

Very long he held her thus, his arms tightly round her and her lips closebound to his, and then with a great sigh of pleasure, he released her.

"You're a desperate fellow," she said, half scared, and she laughed a little.

She glanced about her for a moment. "I must run now," she said, holding out her hand.

"Not yet," he said again.

"Oh, but I must. I must!" she insisted. "Good-night!"

He took her hand. "Good-night," he replied, but did not let her hand go.

She laughed nervously. "What's wrong with you?" she said.

"I ... I'm in love with you, Maggie!" he murmured, almost inarticulately.

Her laughter lost its nervousness. "You're a boy in a hurry and a half!" she said.

"I know. Kiss me, Maggie!"

She held up her face to him. "There, then!" she said.

He kissed her again, and then again, and yet again.

"You're hurting me," she exclaimed ruefully.

"It's because I love you so much, Maggie!" he said.

"Well, let me go now!..." She stood away from him. "You have me all crumpled up," she said. "I'll be a terrible sight when I get in! Anybody'd think you'd never kissed a girl before in your life!"

"I haven't," he replied.

"You what?"

"I haven't. I've never kissed any other girl but you!"

"You don't expect me to believe a yarn like that?" she said.

"It's the God's truth," he answered.

"Well, nobody'd think it from the way you behave!"

He regarded her in silence for a few moments. Then he said, "Have you ever kissed anyone before?"

"I'm twenty-two." she replied.

He had not thought of her age, but if he had done so, he would not have imagined that she was more than nineteen.

"What's that got to do with it?" he asked.

"A lot," she replied. "You don't think a girl as nice-looking as me has reached my age without having kissed a fellow, do you?"

"Then you have kissed someone else?"

"I've kissed dozens," she said. "Good-night, John!"

She turned and ran swiftly from him, laughing lightly as she ran, and for a second or two, he stood blankly looking after her. Then he called to her, "Wait, Maggie, wait a minute!" and ran after her.

She stopped when she heard him calling, and waited for him to come up to her.

"When'll I see you again?" he said.

"Oh, dear knows!" she replied.

"Will you come to the theatre with me next Saturday?"

"I might!"

"Will you get the day off, and we'll go in the afternoon and evening, too!"

"I mightn't be let," she said. "Mrs. Bothwell mightn't agree to it!"

"Ask her anyway!..."

"I will, then. Good-night, John!"

He snatched at her hand. "Listen, Maggie," he said.

"What?" she answered.

"Do you ... do you like me?"

"Ummm ... mebbe I do!"

"I love you, Maggie!"

"Aye, so you say!" she said.

"Do you not believe me?..."

She shrugged her shoulders.

"It's true," he affirmed. "I love you!..."

"Good-night," she said.

"Good-night, Maggie!"

He released her hand, but she did not go immediately. She came close to him, and put her arms about his neck and drew his face down to hers, and kissed him.

"You're a nice wee fellow," she said. "I like you queer and well!"

Then she withdrew her arms, and this time he did not try to detain her.

IX

He missed the last train to Ballyards, but he did not mind that. He set out bravely to walk from Belfast. The silence of the streets, the deeper silence of the country roads, accorded with the pleasure in his heart. He sang to himself, and sometimes he sang aloud. He was in love with Maggie Carmichael, and she ... she liked him queer and well. He could hardly feel the ground beneath his feet. The road ran away from him. The moon and the stars shared his exultation, and the trees gaily waved their branches to him, and the leaves of the trees beat their hands together in applause. "And her sunny locks Hang on her temples like a golden fleece," he said aloud...

It was very late when he reached the door of the shop in Ballyards. His Uncle William was standing in the shade of the doorway, peering anxiously into the street.

"Is that you, John?" he called out, while John was still some distance away from the shop.

"Aye, Uncle William," John called out in reply.

Uncle William came to meet him. "Oh, whatever kept you, boy?" he said when they met.

"I missed the train," John answered.

"Your Uncle Matthew, John!..."

Anxiety came into John's mind. "Yes, Uncle?" he said.

"He's bad, John. Desperate bad! We had to send for Dr. Dobbs an hour ago, and he's still with him. I thought you'd never reach home!"

All the joy fell straight out of John's heart. He did not speak. He walked swiftly to the house, and passing through the shop, entered the kitchen, followed by his Uncle William.

THE FOURTH CHAPTER

I

"Your ma's upstairs with the doctor and him," said Uncle William, closing the kitchen door behind him.

"Is he very bad?" John asked in an anxious voice.

"I'm afeard so," Uncle William replied.

John went towards the staircase, but his uncle called him back. "Better not go up yet awhile," he said. "The doctor'll be down soon, mebbe, and he'll tell you whether you can go up or not."

"Very well," John murmured, coming back into the kitchen and sitting down beside the fire.

"It come on all of a sudden just before bedtime," Uncle William went on, "He wasn't looking too grand all the morning, as you know, but we never thought much of it. He never was strong, and he hasn't the strength to fight against his disease. If he dies, I'll be the last of the three brothers. Death's a strange thing, John. Your da was the cleverest and the wisest of us all, and he was the first to go; and now your Uncle Matthew, that's wise in his way, and has a great amount of knowledge in his head, is going too ... the second of us ... and I'm left, the one that could be easiest spared. It's queer to take the best one first and leave the worst 'til the last. You'd near think God had a grudge against the world!... What were you doing in Belfast the day?"

"I went to the theatre."

"Aye. What did you see?"

"I saw Romeo and Juliet in the middle of the day, and Julius Caesar at night!" John answered. "Is my Uncle Matthew unconscious?"

"No. He has all his senses about him. He knows well he's dying. Did he never speak to you about that?"

John shook his head. "I couldn't bear it if he did. Does he mind, d'you think?"

"No, he does not. Why should he mind? It's us that's left behind that's to be pitied, not them that goes. I can't make out the people of these days, the way they pity the dead and dying, when it's the living's to be pitied. Did you like the plays, John?"

John roused himself to answer. "Aye," he said, "they were grand. What happened when he took bad?"

"We had just had our supper, and he started to go up the stairs, and all of a sudden he called out for your ma, and we both ran to him together, her and me, and the look on his face frightened me. I didn't stop to hear what was wrong. I went off to fetch Dr. Dobbs as quick as I could move. I never saw Julius Caesar myself, but I mind well the time I saw Romeo and Juliet. It was an awful long time ago, when the oul' Theatre Royal ... not this one, but the one before it, that was burnt down ... and we saw Romeo and Juliet. That's a tremendous piece, John! It gripped a hold of my heart, I can tell you, and I came away from the theatre with the tears streaming down my face. I always was a soft one, anyway. That poor young boy and his lovely wee girl tormented and tortured by people that was older nor them, but hadn't half the sense! It grips you, that play!"

"Aye," said John.

"You'll hardly believe me, John, but the play was so real to me that when they talked about getting married, I said to myself I'd go and see the wedding. I did by my troth!"

"Eh?" said John abstractedly.

"I was talking about the play!..."

"Oh, aye, aye! Aye!"

"It sounds silly, I know," Uncle William continued, "but it's the God's own truth, as sure as I'm sitting here. And whenever I pass 'The Royal,' I always think of Romeo and Juliet, and I see that poor boy and girl stretched dead, and them ought to have been happy together and having fine, strong childher!"

"I wonder how he is now. Do you think I should go up now?" John said.

"Wait 'til the doctor comes down. I have great faith in Dr. Dobbs. He never humbugs you, that man, but tells you plump and plain what's wrong with you!" He sat back in his chair, and for a while there was no sound in the kitchen, but the noise of the clock and the small drooping noise made by the dying fire. There was no sound from overhead.

Uncle William glanced at the clock. He got up and stopped the pendulum. "I can't bear the sound of it," he said to John as he sat down again. They remained in silence for a while longer, and then Uncle William got up and started the clock again. "Mebbe ... mebbe, it's better for it to be going." he said.

He searched for his pipe on the mantel-shelf and, when he had found it, lit it with a coal which he picked out of the fire with the tongs.

"Your Uncle Matthew was terribly upset by it," he said, reverting to the play. "It was a wild and wet night, we had to walk every inch, of the way, for there was no late trains in them days, John, and we were drenched to the skin. Your Uncle Matthew never said one word to me the whole road home. He just held his head high and stared straight in front of him, and when I looked at him, though the night was dark, I could see that his fists were clenched and his lips were moving, though he didn't speak. You never see no plays like that, these days, John. The last piece I saw in Belfast was a fearful foolish piece, with a lot of love and villainy in it. The girl was near drowned in real water, and then the villain tied her on to a circular saw, and if it hadn't been for the hero coming in the nick of time, she'd have been cut in two. No man would treat a woman that way, tying her on to a saw! I'm afeard some of these pieces nowadays are terribly foolish, John, so I never want to go now!"

II

There was a sound of footsteps on the stairs, and presently Dr. Dobbs, a lean, stooping man, came into the kitchen, followed by Mrs. MacDermott. The Doctor nodded to John, and Mrs. MacDermott said, "You're back!" and then went into the scullery from which she soon returned, carrying a glass with which she hurried upstairs again.

"Your Uncle's been asking for you, John," said the doctor, drawing on his gloves.

"Can I go up and see him, sir?" John asked.

"In a minute or two. Your mother'll call for you when he's ready. I'm afraid there's not much hope, William!" the doctor said.

John leant against the mantel-shelf, waiting to hear more. He listened in a dazed way to what the doctor was saying, but hardly comprehended it, for in his mind the words, "I'm afraid there's not much hope!" made echoes and re-echoes. Uncle Matthew was dying, might, in a little while, be dead. Dear, simple, honest, kindly Uncle Matthew who had loved literature and good faith too well, and had suffered for his simple loyalty.

"He's easier now than he was," the doctor continued, "and he may last a good while ... and he may not. I think he'll last a while yet, but he might die before the morning. I want you to be prepared for the worst. You know where to find me if you want me, William!"

"Yes, doctor!"

"I've left him in good hands. Your mother's a great nurse, John," he said, turning to the boy.

"Can I go up to him now, doctor?"

"Yes, I think perhaps ... oh, yes, I think you may. But go up quietly, will you, in case he's dozed off!..."

John did not wait to hear any more, but, walking on tiptoe, went up the stairs to his uncle's room.

Uncle Matthew turned to greet him as he entered the room.

"Is that you, John?" he said.

"Yes, Uncle Matthew," John answered, tiptoeing to the side of the bed. "I'm sorry I wasn't here earlier. I never thought!..."

Uncle Matthew smiled at him. "Sure, son, it doesn't matter. You couldn't know ... none of us did. Well, was the play good?"

But John did not wish to speak about the play. He wished only to sit by his Uncle's bed and hold his Uncle's hand.

"I'll go downstairs now for a wee while," Mrs. MacDermott said. "I have a few things to do, and John can call me if you need me, Matt!"

"Aye, Hannah!" said Uncle Matthew.

John looked up at his mother, but she had turned to leave the room, and he could not see her face.

He had never heard her call his Uncle by the name of "Matt" before, nor had he often heard Uncle Matthew use her Christian name in addressing her. He avoided it, John had observed, as much as possible, and it had seemed to him that his Uncle did so because of his mother's antagonism to him.

"What are you staring at, John?" Uncle Matthew said feebly.

"She called you 'Matt', Uncle!"

"That's my name," Uncle Matthew replied, smiling at his nephew.

"Aye, but!..."

"She used to call me 'Matt' before she was married, and for a wee while afterwards, when we were all friends together. Your da's death was a fearful blow to her, and she never overed it. And she thought I was a bad influence on you, filling your head with stuff out of books. You see, John, women are not like men ... they don't value things the way we do ... and things that seem important to us, aren't worth a flip of your hand to them. And the other way round, I suppose. But a woman can't be bitter against a sick man, no matter how much she hated him when he had his health. That's where we have the whiphand of them, John. They can't stand against us when we're sick, but we can stand up against anything, well or sick!..."

John remembered his mother's caution that he was not to let his Uncle talk much.

"You ought to lie still, Uncle Matthew," he said, but Uncle Matthew would not heed him.

"I'm as well as I'll ever be." he said. "I know rightly I'll never leave this bed 'til I'm carried out of it for good and all. And I'm not going to deny myself the pleasure of a talk for the sake of an extra day or two!..."

"Wheesht, Uncle Matthew!" John begged.

"Why, son, what's there to cry about? I'm not afeard to die. No MacDermott was ever afeard to die, and I won't be the first to give in. Oh, dear, no!"

"But you'll get better, Uncle Matthew, you will, if you'll only take care of yourself!..."

"Ah, quit blethering John. I won't get better!... What were we saying? Something about your ma!..."

"Yes. Her calling you 'Matt'!"

"Oh, aye. You'd be surprised, mebbe, to hear that your Uncle William and me both had a notion of her before your da stepped in and took her from us? We had no chance against him. That man could have lifted a queen from a king's bed!..."

"You ought not to be talking so much, Uncle Matthew!"

"Ah, let me talk, John. It's the only comfort I have, and I'll get all the rest I want by and bye. Was it a girl kept you late the night?"

"How did you know, Uncle Matthew?"

"How did I know!" Uncle Matthew said with raillery. "How would anyone know anything but by using the bit of wit the Almighty God's put in his head. What is it makes any lad lose his train, and walk miles in the dark? It's either women or drink ... and you're no drinker, John. Tell me about her. I'd like to be the first to know!"

"I only met her the day!..."

"Aye?"

"I hardly know her yet ... but she's lovely!"

"Go on ... go on!"

"I took her to the theatre with me to see Julius Caesar and then I left her home. She lives up near the Lagan ... out Stranmillis way!..."

"I know it well," said Uncle Matthew. "Is she a fair girl or a dark girl?"

"She has the loveliest golden hair you ever clapped your eyes on. It was that made me fall in love with her!..."

"You're in love with her then! You're not just going with her?"

"Of course I'm in love with her. I never was in the habit of just going with girls. That's all right, mebbe, for Willie Logan, but I'm not fond of it," said John indignantly.

"You fell in love with her in a terrible great hurry," Uncle Matthew exclaimed.

"Aye," said John laughing. "It was queer and comic the way I fell in love with her, for I had no notion of such a thing when I went in the shop to have my tea. She's in a restaurant off High Street. I'd been to the Royal to see Romeo and Juliet, and I was full of the play and just wandering about, not thinking of what I was doing, when all of a sudden I saw this place fornent my eyes, and I just went in, and she was there by her lone. The woman that keeps the place had gone home with a sore head, and left her to look after it!"

"What's her name?"

"Maggie Carmichael. It's a nice name. They don't do much trade on a Saturday, and her and me were alone in the shop by ourselves so I asked her to have tea with me, and then I asked her to go to the Royal, and she agreed after a while, and when it was over, I took her home, and that's why I missed the train and had to tramp it the whole way home. She's older nor I am. She says she's twenty-two. She was codding me for never having kissed any other girl but her!..."

"You got that length, did you?"

"Aye," said John in confusion.

"You're like your da. Take what you want, the minute you want it. She'll think you're in earnest, John!"

"I am in earnest. I couldn't be any other way. How could a man feel about a woman, the way I feel about her, and not be in earnest?"

"As easy as winking," said Uncle Matthew. "You'll mebbe be in love a hundred times before you marry, and every time you'll think it's the right one at last. There's no law in love, John. You can't say about it, that you've got to know a woman well before you're safe in marrying her, nor you can't just shut your eyes and grab hold of the first one that comes to your hand. There's no law, John ... none at all. It's an adventure, love. That's what it is. You don't know what lies at the end of your journey ... and you can't know ... and mebbe when you reach the end, you don't know. You just have to take your chance, and trust to God it'll be all right! Is she in love with you?"

"I don't know. I don't suppose so. She made fun of me, so I suppose she can't be. But she said she liked me."

"Making fun of you is nothing to go by. Some women would make fun of God Almighty, and think no harm of it. You'll soon know whether she's in love with you or not, my son!"

"How will I, Uncle Matthew?"

"When she begins to treat you as if you were her property. That's a sure and certain sign. The minute a woman looks at a man as much as to say, 'That fellow belongs to me,' she's in love with him, as sure as death. Anyway, she's going to marry him! Boys-a-boys, John, but you're the lucky lad with all your youth and health in front of you, and you setting out in the world. Many's the time I've longed at nights to be lying snug and comfortable and quiet in a woman's arms, but I never had that pleasure. Whatever you do, John, don't die an unmarried man like your Uncle William and me. It's better to live with a cross sour-natured woman nor it is to live with no woman at all; for even the worst woman in the world has given a wee while of happiness to her man, and he always has that in his mind to comfort him however bad she turns out after. And if she is bad, sure you can run away from her!"

"Run away from her! You'd never advocate the like of that, Uncle Matthew?"

"I would. I'm a dying man, John, and mebbe I'll be dead by the morrow's morn, so you may be sure I'm saying things now that I mean with all my heart, for no man wants to go before his God with lies on his lips. And I tell you now, boy, that if a man and woman are not happy together, they ought to separate and go away from each other as far as they can get, no matter what the cost is. Them's my solemn words, John. I'd like well to see this girl you're after, but I'll mebbe not be able. No matter for that. Pay heed to me now, for fear I don't get the opportunity to say it to you again. Whatever adventures you set out on, never forget they're only adventures, and if one turns out to be bad, another'll mebbe turn out to be good. Don't be like me, don't let one thing affect your life for ever!..." He lay back on his pillow for a few moments and did not speak. John waited a little while, and then he leant forward. "Will I fetch my ma?" he asked.

Uncle Matthew shook his head and waved feebly with his hand, and John sat back again in his chair.

"Life's just balancing one adventure against another," Uncle Matthew said at last, without raising his head from the pillow. "The good against the bad. And the happy man is him that can set off a lot of good adventures against bad ones, and have a balance of good ones in his favour. But it takes courage to have a lot, John. The Jenny-joes of the world never try again after the first bad one. I ... I was staggered that time ... I ... I never got my foothold again. The balance is against me, John!..."

Mrs. MacDermott came into the room.

"It's time you went to your bed, son," she said, "and your Uncle'll want to get to sleep, mebbe. Are you all right, Matt?"

"I'm nicely, thank you, Hannah!"

John got up from his seat and said "Good-night!" to his Uncle.

"Good-night, John. Mind well what I've said to you!"

"I will, Uncle Matthew!"

"Good-night, son, dear!" said Uncle Matthew, smiling at him.

III

In the morning, Uncle Matthew was better than he had been during the night, and Dr. Dobbs, when he called to see him, thought that he would live for several weeks more. John went down to the kitchen from his Uncle's room, happy at the thought that his Uncle might recover in spite of the doctor's statement that death was inevitable within a short time. Doctors, he told himself, had made many mistakes, and perhaps Dr. Dobbs was making a mistake about Uncle Matthew.

He had lain late, heavy with fatigue, for Mrs. MacDermott had not called him at his usual hour and so the morning was well advanced when he came down.

"There's a letter for you," said Uncle William, pointing to the mantel-shelf, where a foolscap envelope rested against the clock. "It'll be about the story, I'm thinking!"

John took the letter in his trembling fingers and tore it open.

"They've sent it back," he said in a low tone.

"There'll be a note with it," Uncle William murmured.

"Yes!..." He straightened out the printed note and read it. "They've declined it," he said.

"They've what?" Uncle William exclaimed, taking the printed slip from John's hands. He read the note of rejection through several times.

"What does it say?" Mrs. MacDermott asked.

"It's a queer kind of a note, this!" said Uncle William. "You'd think the man was breaking his heart at the idea of not printing the story. He doesn't say anything about it, whether it's good or bad. He just thanks John for sending it to him and says he's sorry he can't accept it. If he's so sorry as all that, why the hell doesn't he print it?"

"William!" said Mrs. MacDermott sharply. "This is Sunday!"

"Well, dear knows I don't want to desecrate God's Day," Uncle William answered, accepting the rebuke, "but that is a lamentable letter to get. I must say!"

Mrs. MacDermott held her hand out for the letter. "Give it to me," she said, and she took it from Uncle William.

"This is his way of saying your story's no good, John," she said, when she had read through the note. "No man would refuse a thing if he thought it was worth printing!"

Her words hurt John very sorely. He looked at her, but he did not speak, and then, after a moment or two, he turned away.

"Now, now, that's not right at all," Uncle William said comfortingly. "There might be a thousand things to prevent the man from printing the story. Mebbe he doesn't know a good story when he sees it. Sure, half these papers nowadays print stories that would turn a child's stomach, and a thing's not bad just because one paper won't take it. There's other magazines besides Blackwood's, John, as good, too, and mebbe better!" He went over to his nephew and put his hand on the boy's shoulder. "There, there, now, don't let this upset you! Your Uncle Matthew was telling me the other day that some of the greatest writers in the world had their best stories refused time after time. Don't lose heart over a thing like that!"

"I haven't lost heart, Uncle William. I daresay it isn't as good as I thought it was, but I'll improve. It wasn't to be expected I'd succeed the first time!"

"That's the spirit, boy. That's the spirit!"

"Only I'm disappointed all the same. It's likely I don't know enough yet!"

"Oh, that's very likely," said Uncle William. "You're only a young fellow yet, you know!"

"Mebbe that story of mine is full of ignorant mistakes I wouldn't have made if I'd been about the world a bit and seen more!"

"I daresay you're right! I daresay you're right!..."

Mrs. MacDermott came between them. "What are you leading up to?" she demanded.

"I must travel a bit before I start writing things," John answered. "I must know more and see more. My Uncle Matthew's right. You have to go out into the world to get adventure and romance!..."

"Can't you get all the adventure and romance you need in this place, and not go tramping among strangers and foreigners for it?" Mrs. MacDermott retorted angrily.

"How can I get adventure and romance in a place where I know everybody?" John rejoined.

"Are you proposing to leave home, John!" Uncle William asked.

"Aye! For a while anyway," John answered, "I'll go to London!..."

"You'll not go to no London," Mrs. MacDermott retorted, "and your Uncle, Matthew lying on his deathbed!..."

"I'm not proposing to go this minute, ma!..."

"You'll not go at all," she insisted.

"I will!"

"You will not, I tell you. What would a lump of a lad like you do in a place of that sort, where there's temptation and sin at every corner! Doesn't everyone know that the Devil's roaming up and down the streets of London day and night, luring young men to their ruin? There's bad women in London!..."

"There's bad women everywhere," John replied. "You don't need to be your age to know that!"

She listened angrily while John explained his point of view to his Uncle William. Travel and new experiences were necessary to the development of his mind.

"Don't you go up to Belfast every week!" Mrs. MacDermott interrupted.

"I was in Belfast yesterday," John retorted, "but there wasn't a thing happened to me, romantic or anything else!..." He stopped abruptly, smitten by the recollection of his meeting with Maggie Carmichael. After all, that was a romantic adventure! Most strange that he had not thought of his love affair in that way before! Of course, it was a romantic adventure! He had walked straight out of a dull street, you might say, into an enchanted café ... and had found Maggie in captivity, waiting for him to deliver her from it. She had been lonely ... and he had come to comfort her. He had taken her from that dull, cheerless ... prison ... you could call it that!... and had taken her to a pleasant place and made love to her! Oh, but of course it was a romantic adventure, with love and a beautiful golden-haired girl at the end of it. And here he was, moping over the misadventure of a manuscript and talking of travel in distant places in search of exciting experiences as if he had not already had the most thrilling and wonderful adventure that is possible to a man! Why, if he were to leave Ballyards and go to London, he would lose Maggie ... would not see her again!... By the Holy O, his mother was right after all! Women were right sometimes! There was plenty of romance and adventure lying at your hand, if you only took the trouble to look for it. Mebbe... mebbe a thing was romantic or not romantic, just according to the way you looked at it. One man could see romance in a grocer's shop, and another man could not see romance anywhere but in places where he had never been!...

"Mebbe you're right, ma," he said.

Mrs. MacDermott looked suspiciously at him. "You changed your mind very quick," she said.

"I always change my mind quick," he replied.

They heard the noise of tapping overhead.

"That's your Uncle Matthew," said Mrs. MacDermott, rising from her chair.

"I'll go," John exclaimed hastily. "It's mebbe me he wants!"

He ran quickly up the stairs and entered his Uncle's room.

"Yes, Uncle Matthew?" he said.

"I heard you all talking together," Uncle Matthew answered. "What's happened?"

"Oh, nothing! My story's been refused. That's all."

Uncle Matthew put out his hand and took hold of John's. "Are you very disappointed?" he said.

"Yes, I am. I made sure they'd take it!"

"There ought to have been a woman in it. You know, John, I told you that. There was no love in that story, and people like to read about love. That's natural. Sure, it's the beginning of everything!"

"I didn't know anything about it then, Uncle!..."

"No, but you do now ... a wee bit ... and you might have imagined it. You'd never be your father's son, if you hadn't a heart brimful of love. What else were you talking about?"

John told his Uncle of his proposal to go to London in search of experience.

"Aye, you'll have to do that some day," his Uncle replied, "but there's no hurry yet awhile. You'd better finish your schooling first, and you could go on writing here 'til you get more mastery of it. You might try to write a book, and then when it's done, you could go to London or somewhere. I'd be sorry if you went just now!..."

"I'm not meaning to go yet, Uncle!"

"Very good, son. I'd like you to be here when I ... when!..."

He did not finish his sentence, but the pressure of his hand on John's increased.

"Eh, John?" he said.

"Yes, Uncle Matthew!" John replied. He quickly changed the conversation. "You're looking a lot better," he said.

Uncle Matthew smiled. "Oh, aye," he replied, "I feel a lot better, too. I'll mebbe beat the doctor yet. He thinks I'm done for, but mebbe I'll teach him different!"

"You will, indeed. And why wouldn't you? You're young yet!"

Uncle Matthew did not reply to this. He turned on his pillow and glanced towards the dressing-table.

"Are you looking for anything?" John asked.

"Is there a book there?"

"No," John said. "Do you want one?"

"Your ma read a wee bit to me in the night, after you went to bed. I thought mebbe you'd read a wee bit more to me. Willie Reilly, it was."

"I'll get it for you," John replied, going to the door. He called to his mother, and she told him that she had brought the book downstairs with her.

"Wait a minute and I'll fetch it," she said.

She returned in a moment or two, carrying the book in her hand, and mounted half-way up the staircase to meet him. She pointed to a place in the book. "I read up to there to him in the night," she said. John looked at his mother, as he took the book from her hands, and saw how tired she looked.

"Did you not get any sleep at all, ma?" he asked with concern.

"I'm all right, son," she answered.

"No, you're not," he insisted. "You'll just go to your bed this minute and lie down for a while!..."

"And the dinner to cook and all," she interrupted.

"Well, after your dinner then. You'll lie down the whole afternoon. Uncle William and me'll get the tea ready, and we'll take it in turns to look after Uncle Matthew!"

She stood on the step beneath him, looking at him with dark, tired eyes, and then she put out her hand and touched him on the shoulder. "You'll not leave me, John?" she pleaded.

"No, ma," he answered. "Not for a long while yet!"

She turned away from him and went down the stairs again.

John returned to his Uncle's room, and sat down by the side of the bed. He opened the book and began to read of Willie Reilly and his Colleen Bawn. Now and then he glanced at his Uncle and wondered at the childlike and innocent look on his face. There was a strange simplicity in his eyes ... not the simplicity of those who have not got understanding, but of those who have a deep and unchangeable knowledge that is very different from the knowledge of other men; and once again John assured himself that while Uncle Matthew's behaviour might be "quare" when compared with that of other people, yet it was not foolish behaviour nor the behaviour of the feeble-minded: it was the conduct of a man who responded immediately to simple and honest emotions, who did not stop to consider questions of discretion or interest, but did the thing which seemed to him to be right.

"What are you thinking of, Uncle Matthew?" he said suddenly, putting down the book, for it seemed to him that his Uncle was no longer listening.

"I was thinking I wouldn't have missed my life for the wide world!" Uncle Matthew replied.

"After everything?" John asked.

"Aye, in spite of everything," said Uncle Matthew. "There's great value in life ... great value!"

John picked up the book again, but he did not begin to read, nor did Uncle Matthew show any signs that he wished the reading to be resumed.

"Our minds go this way and that way," Uncle Matthew went on, "and some of us are not happy 'til we're away here and there!..."

"You were always wanting to be off after adventures yourself, Uncle Matthew!"

"Aye, John, I was, and I never went. I've oftentimes thought little of myself for that, but I'm wondering now, lying here, whether it wasn't a great adventure to stop at home. I don't know! I don't know! But I'll know in a wee while! John!"

"Yes, Uncle!"

"I wouldn't change places with the King of England, at this minute, not for all the money in the mint and my weight in gold!"

"Why, Uncle Matthew?"

"Do you know why? Because in a wee while, I'll know all there is to know, and he'll be left here knowing no more nor the rest of you. God is good, John. He shares out his knowledge without favour to anyone. The like of us'll know as much in the next world as the like of them!..."

IV

When the sharper anxieties concerning Uncle Matthew had subsided, John's mind was filled with thoughts of Maggie Carmichael. It seemed to him to be impossible that any seven days in the history of the world had been so long in passing as the seven days which separated him from his next meeting with her. His work at the Ballyards National School lost any interest it ever had for him: the pupils seemed to be at once the stupidest and laziest and most aggravating children on earth. Lizzie Turley completely lost her power to add two and one together and make three of them. Strive as he might, he could not make her comprehend or remember that two and one, when added together, did not amount to five. There was even a dreadful day when she lost her power to subtract.... Miss Gebbie, the teacher to whom he was most often monitor, had always had hard, uncouth manners, but they became almost intolerable before the seven days had passed by ... and it seemed certain that there must be a crisis in her life and in his before the clock struck three on Friday afternoon! If she complained again, he said to himself, about the way in which he marked the children's exercise books, he would tell her in very plain language what he thought of her and her big bamboo-cane. When she slapped the children, the corners of her mouth went down and her large lips tightened and a cruel glint came into her eyes!...

It was only during the reading half-hour that his mind was at ease in school that week, for then he could let his thoughts roam from Ballyards to Belfast, and fill his eyes with visions of Maggie. The droning voices of the children, reading "Jack has got a cart and can draw sand and clay in it," were almost soothing, and it was sufficient for supervision, if now and then, he would call out, "Next!" The child who was reading would instantly stop, and the child next to her would instantly begin....

It seemed to him that he had the clearest impressions of Maggie Carmichael, and yet had also the vaguest impressions of her. He remembered very distinctly that she had bright, laughing eyes, and that her hair was fair, and that she had pretty teeth: white and even. He had often read in books of the beauty of a woman's teeth, but he had never paid much attention to them. After all, what was the purpose of teeth? To bite. It was ridiculous, he had told himself, to talk and write of beauty in teeth when all that mattered was whether they could bite well or not.... But now, remembering the beauty of Maggie Carmichael's mouth, he saw that the writers had done well when they insisted on the beauty of teeth. Any sort of a good tooth would do for biting and chewing, but there was something more than that to be said for good, white, even teeth. If teeth were of no value otherwise than for biting and chewing, false teeth were better than natural teeth!... And false teeth were so hideous to look at; so smug, so self-conscious. Aggie Logan had false teeth. So had Teeshie McBratney and Sadie Cochrane. Things with pale gums!...

He had wanted to kiss Maggie Carmichael's teeth, so beautiful were they. Just her teeth. It had been splendid to kiss her lips, but then one always kissed lips. Men, according to the books, even kissed hair and ears and eyes. He had read recently of a man who kissed a woman on the neck, just behind the ear; and at the time he had thought that this was a very queer thing to do. Love, he supposed, was responsible for a thing like that. He could not account for it in any other way. He understood now, of course. When a man loved a woman, every part of her was very dear and beautiful to him, and to kiss her neck just behind the ear was as exquisite as to kiss her lips. No one, in any of the books he had read, had wished to kiss a woman's teeth. There were still hidden joys in kissing ... and he had discovered one of them. He would kiss Maggie's teeth on Saturday. He would kiss her lips, too, of course, and her hair and her eyes and ears and the part of her neck that was just behind her ear, but most of all he would kiss her teeth!...

He thought that it was very strange that he should think so ardently of kissing Maggie. He could have kissed Aggie Logan dozens of times, but he had never had the slightest desire to kiss her. He remembered how foolish he had thought her that night at the soiree when someone proposed that they should play Postman's Knock. Aggie Logan had called him out to the lobby. There was a letter for him, she said, with three stamps on it. Three stamps! Did anyone ever hear the like of that? And he was to go into the lobby and give her three kisses, one after the other ... peck, peck, peck ... and then it would be his turn to call for someone, and Aggie would expect him to call for her! ... Willie Logan had called for a girl. He had a letter for her with fifty stamps on it ... A great roar of laughter had gone up from the others when they heard of the amount of the postage, and Willie was thought to be a daring, desperate fellow ... until the superintendent of the Sunday School said that there must be reason in all things and proposed a limit of three stamps on each letter ... no person to be called for more than twice in succession. Willie, boisterous and very amorous, whispered to John that he did not care what limit they made ... no one could tell how many extra stamps you put on your letter out in the lobby....

John had not answered Aggie's call. He had contrived to get out of the school-room without being observed, and Aggie had been obliged to call for someone else. Kissing!... Kiss her!... Three stamps!... Peck, peck, peck!...

V

Wednesday dragged itself out slowly and very reluctantly; Thursday was worse than Wednesday; and Friday was only saved from being as bad as Thursday by its nearness to Saturday. On the morrow, he would see Maggie again. Many times during the week, he had debated with himself as to whether he should write to her or not, but the difficulty of knowing what to say to her, except that he loved her and was longing for the advent of Saturday, prevented him front doing so. In any case, it would be difficult to write to her without questions from his mother, and if Maggie were to reply to him, there would be no end to the talk from her. After all, a week was only a week. On Monday, a week had seemed to be an interminable period of time, but on Friday, it had resumed the normal aspect of a week, a thing with a definite and reachable end. It was odd to observe how, as the week drew to its close, the intolerable things became tolerable. Miss Gebbie seemed to be a little less inhuman on Friday than she had been on Monday, and Lizzie Turley marvellously recovered her power to add two and one together and get the correct result. Beyond all doubt, he was in love. There could not be any other explanation of his behaviour and his peculiar impatience. That any man should conduct himself as he had done during the week now ending, for any other reason than that he was in love, was impossible. Why, he woke up in the morning, thinking of Maggie, and he went to sleep at night, thinking of Maggie. He thought of her when he was at school, and he thought of her in the street, in the shop, in the kitchen, even in his Uncle Matthew's room. When it was his turn to sit by Uncle Matthew's side, his mind, for more than half the time, was in Belfast with Maggie. He had read more than a hundred pages of Willie Reilly to his Uncle, but he had not comprehended one of them. He had been thinking exclusively of Maggie.

He wondered whether he would always be in this state of absorption. Other people fell in love, as he knew, but they seemed to be able to think of other things besides their love. Perhaps they were not so much in love as he was! He began to see difficulties arising from this great devotion of his to Maggie. It would be very hard to concentrate his mind on a story if it were full of thoughts of her. He would probably spoil any work he attempted to do, because his mind would not be on it, but away with Maggie. In none of the books he had read, had he seen any account of the length of time a pair of lovers took in which to get used to each other and to adjust their affections to the ordinary needs of life. He would never cease to love Maggie, of course, but he wondered how long it would be before his mind would become capable of thinking of Maggie and of something else at the same time ... or even of thinking of something else without thinking of Maggie at all....

VI

His mother had looked dubiously at him when he talked of going to Belfast on Saturday. She said that he ought not to leave home while his Uncle Matthew was so ill, but Dr. Dobbs had given a more optimistic opinion on the sick man's condition, and so, after they had argued over the matter, she withdrew her objection. Uncle William had insisted that John ought to go up to the city for the sake of the change. The lad had had a hard week, what with his school work and his writing and his attention to Uncle Matthew, and the change would be good for him. "Only don't miss the train this time," he added to John.

Maggie met him outside the theatre. He had not long to wait for her, and his heart thrilled at the sight of her as she came round Arthur's Corner.

"So you have come," she said to him, as she shook hands with him.

"Did you think I wouldn't?" he answered.

"Oh, well," she replied, "you never know with fellows! Some of them makes an appointment to meet you, and you'd think from the way they talk about it that they were dying to meet you; and then when the time comes, you might stand at the corner 'til your feet were frozen to the ground, but not a bit of them would turn up. I'd never forgive a boy that treated me that way!"

"I'm not the sort that treats a girl that way," said John.

"Oh, indeed you could break your word as well as the next! Many's a time I've give my word to a fellow and broke it myself, just because I didn't feel like keeping it. But it's different for a girl nor it is for a fellow. There's no harm in a girl disappointing a fellow. I hear this piece at the Royal is awfully good this week. It's about a girl that nearly gets torn to pieces by a mad lion. I don't know whether I like that sort of piece or not. It seems terrible silly, and it would be awful if the hero come on a minute or two late and the girl was ate up fornent your eyes!"

John laughed. "There's not much danger of that," he replied.

There were very few people waiting outside the Pit Door, and so they were able to secure good seats with ease. "The best of coming in the daytime," John said, "is you have a better chance of the front row than you have at night!"

She nodded her head. "But it's better at night," she answered. "A piece never seems real to me in the daylight."

"Where'll we go to-night?" he said to her.

"Oh, I can't go with you to-night again," she exclaimed, taking a chocolate from the box which he had bought for her.

"Why?"

"I have another appointment!..."

"Break it," he commanded.

"I couldn't do that!..."

"Oh, yes, you could," he insisted. "You told me yourself you'd disappointed fellows many's a time!"

"I daresay I did, but I can't break this one," she retorted.

Suspicion entered his mind. "Is it with another fellow?" he asked.

"Ask me no questions and I'll tell you no lies," she said.

"Is it?" he demanded.

"And what if it is?"

"I don't want you to go out with anybody else but me!"

She ate another chocolate. "Have one?" she said, passing the box to him. He shook his head moodily. "Are you going to do what I ask or are you not?" he said.

"Don't be childish," she replied. "I've promised a friend to go to a concert to-night, and I'll have to go. That's all about it!"

"Is it a fellow?"

"Mebbe it is and mebbe it's not!" she teased.

"You know I'm in love with you!" She laughed lightly, and he bent his head closer to her. "Listen, Maggie," he went on, "I know I only met you for the first time last Saturday, but I'm terrible in love with you. Listen! I want to marry you, Maggie!..."

She burst out laughing.

"Don't make a mock of me," he pleaded.

She turned to look at him. "What age are you?" she demanded.

"I'm near nineteen," he answered.

"And I'm twenty-two," she retorted. "Twenty-two past, I am. Four years older nor you!..."

"That doesn't matter," he insisted.

"It wouldn't if the ages was the other way round ... you twenty-two and me nineteen!"

"It doesn't matter what way they are. It's not age that matters: it's feeling!"

"You'll feel different, mebbe, when you're a bit older. What would people say if I was to marry you now, after meeting you a couple of times, and you four years younger nor me?"

"It doesn't matter what they'd say," he replied. "Sure, people are always saying something!"

She ruminated! "I like going out with you well enough, and you're a queer, nice wee fellow, but it's foolish talk to be talking of getting married. What trade are you at?"

"I'm a monitor," he answered. "I'm in my last year!..."

"You're still at the school," she said.

"I'm a monitor," he replied, insisting on his status.

"Och, sure that's only learning. When in the earthly world would you be able to keep a wife?"

"I'm going to write books!..."

"What sort of books?"

"Story books," he said.

"Have you writ any yet?"

"No, but I wrote a short story once!"

She looked at him admiringly. "How much did you get for it?" she asked.

"I didn't get anything for it," he replied. "They wouldn't take it!"

She remained silent for a few moments. Then she said, "Your prospects aren't very bright!"

"But they'll get brighter," he said. "They will. I tell you they will!"

"When?" she asked.

"Some day," he answered.

"Some day may be a long day in coming," she went on. "I might have to wait a good while before you were able to marry me. Five or six years, mebbe, and then I'd be getting on to thirty, John. You'd better be looking out for a younger girl nor me!"

"I don't want anybody else but you," he replied.

VII

When the play was over, they walked arm in arm towards the restaurant where she was employed. "I promised Mrs. Bothwell we'd have our tea there," Maggie said to John. "It put her in a sweet temper, the thought of having two customers for certain. She'll mebbe give up that place. It's not paying her well. She wasn't going to give me the time off at first, but I told you were my cousin up from the country for the day!..."

"But I'm not your cousin," John objected.

"That doesn't matter. Sure, you have to tell a wee bit of a lie now and again, or you'd never get your way at all. And it saves bother and explaining!"

They crossed High Street and were soon at the foot of the stairs leading up to Bothwell's Restaurant. "Mind," said Maggie in a whisper, "you're my cousin!"

He did not speak, but followed her up the stairs and into the restaurant where she introduced him to a plain, stoutly-built, but cheerless woman who came from the small room into the large one as they entered it. There was one customer in the room, but he finished his tea and departed soon after Maggie and John arrived. In a little while, she and he were eating their meal. John politely asked Mrs. Bothwell to join them, but she declined.

She sat at a neighbouring table and talked to them of the play.

"I don't know when I was last at a theatre," she said, "and I don't know when I'll go again. I always say to myself when I come away, 'Well, that's over and my money's spent and what satisfaction have I got for it?' And when I think it all out, there doesn't seem to be any satisfaction. You've spent your money, and the play's over, and that's all. It seems a poor sort of return!'"

"You might say that about anything," John said. "A football match or ... or one of these nice wee cookies of yours!"

"Oh, indeed, you might," Mrs. Bothwell admitted. "Sure, there's no pleasure in the world that's lasting, and mebbe if there were we wouldn't like it. You pay your good money for a thing, and you have it a wee while, and then it's all over, and you have to pay more money for something else. Or mebbe you have it a long while, only you're not content with it. That's the way it always is. There's very little satisfaction to be got out of anything. Look at the Albert Memorial! That looks solid enough, but there's people says it'll tumble to the ground one of these days with the running water that's beneath it!"

Maggie took a big bite from a cookie. "Oh, now, there's satisfaction in everything," she said, "if you only go the right way about getting it and don't expect too much. I always say you get as much in this world as you're able to take ... and it's true enough. I know I take all in the way of enjoyment that I can put my two hands on. There's no use in being miserable, and it's nicer to be happy!"

"You're mebbe right." said Mrs. Bothwell. "But you can't just be miserable or happy when you like. I can't anyway!"

"You should try," said Maggie.

Mrs. Bothwell went to the small room and did not return. John was glad that her dissatisfaction with the universe did not make her oblivious of the fact that Maggie and he were content enough with each other's company and did not require the presence of a third party.

He leant across the table and took hold of one of Maggie's hands. "You've not answered my question yet?" he said.

"What question?" she said.

"About going out with me," he replied.

"I'll go to the Royal with you next Saturday," she said.

"Ah, but for good! I mean it when I say I want to marry you!..."

"You're an awful wee fool," she exclaimed, drawing her hand from his and slapping him playfully.

"Fool!"

"Yes. I thought at first you were having me on, but I think now you're only a wee fool. But I like you all the same!"

"Am I a fool for loving you?" he demanded.

"Oh, no, not for that, but for knowing so little!"

"Marry me, Maggie," he pleaded.

"Wheesht," she said, "Mrs. Bothwell will hear you!..."

"I don't care who hears!..."

"But I do," she interrupted. "You're an awful one for not caring. You've said that more nor once to-day!" She glanced at the clock. "I'll have to be going soon," she said.

"No, not yet awhile!..."

"But I will. I'll be late if I stop!..."

She began to draw on her gloves as she spoke.

"Well, when will I see you again?" he asked.

"Next Saturday if you like!..."

"Can I not see you before? I could come up to Belfast on Wednesday!..."

"I'm engaged on Wednesday," she said.

"But!"

"Och, quit butting," she retorted. "I'll see you on Saturday and no sooner. Pay Mrs. Bothwell and come on!..."

VIII

She insisted on leaving him at the Junction, and he moodily watched her climbing into a tram. She waved her hand to him as the tram drove off, and he waved his in reply. And then she was gone, and he had a sense of loss and depression. He stared gloomily about him. What should he do now? He might go to the Opera House or to one of the music-halls or he might just walk about the streets....

He thought of what Mrs. Bothwell had said earlier in the day. "There's very little satisfaction in anything!"

"There's a lot in that," he said to himself. "I'll go home," he continued. "There's no pleasure in mouching round the town by yourself!"

He got into a tram and was soon at the railway station. On the platform, a little way in front of him, he saw Willie Logan, flushed and excited, with two girls, one on either side of him. Willie had an arm round each girl's waist.

"That fellow's getting plenty of fun anyway," John said, as he climbed into an empty carriage. He did not wish to join Willie's party. He knew too well what Willie was like: a noisy, demonstrative fellow, indiscriminately amorous. "Nearly every girl's worth kissing," Willie had said to him on one occasion. "If you can't get your bit of fun with one woman, sure you can get it with another!"

Willie, in the carriage, would kiss one girl, John knew, and then would turn and kiss the other, "just to show there's no ill will." He might even invite John to kiss them in turn ... so that John might not feel uncomfortable and "out of it." He would lie back in the carriage, his big face flushed and his eyes bright with pleasure, an arm round each of his companions, and when he was not kissing them, he would be bawling out some song, or, at stations, hanging half out of the window to chaff the porters and the station-master. "Get all you can," he would say, "and do without the rest!"

But John was not a promiscuist: he was a monopolist. He put the whole of his strength into his love for one woman, and he demanded a similar singleness of devotion from her. His mind was full of Maggie, but he felt that she had cast him out of her mind the moment that the tram bore her out of his sight.

"I'll make her want me," he said, tightening his fists. "I'll make her want me 'til she's heartsore with wanting!"

THE FIFTH CHAPTER

I

Uncle Matthew died three days later. He slipped out of life without ostentation or murmur. "The MacDermotts are not afeard to die," he had said to John at the beginning of his illness, and in that spirit he had died. In the morning, he had asked Mrs. MacDermott to look for Don Quixote in the attic and bring it to him, and she had done so. He had tried to read the book, but it was too heavy for him—his strength was swiftly going from him—and it had fallen from his hands on to the quilt and then had rolled on to the floor.

"I can't hold it," he murmured.

"Will I read it to you?" she said to him.

"Yes, if you please!" he said.

It was a badly-bound book, printed in small, eye-tormenting type, and it was difficult to hold; but she made no complaint of these things, and for an hour or so, she read to Uncle Matthew. She put the book down when his breathing denoted that he was asleep, but she did not immediately go from the room. She sat for a time, looking at the delicate face on the pillow, and then she picked the book up again and began to examine it, turning the pages over slowly, reading here and reading there, and examining the illustrations closely. There was a puzzled look on her face, and the flesh, between her eyebrows was puckered and deeply lined. She put the book down on her lap and looked intently in front of her, as if she were considering some problem. She picked the book up again, and once more turned over the pages and examined the pictures; but she did not appear to find any solution of her problem as she did so, for she put the book down on the dressing-table and left it there. She bent over the sleeping man for a few moments, listening to his breathing, and then she went out of the room leaving the door ajar.

And while she was downstairs, Uncle Matthew died. He had not wakened from his sleep. He seemed to be exactly in the same position as he was when she left the room. He was not breathing ... that was all. She called to Uncle William, and he came quickly up the stairs.

"Is anything wrong?" he said anxiously.

"Matt's dead!" she replied.

He stood still.

"Shut the shop," she said, "and send for John and the doctor!"

He did not move.

She touched him on the shoulder. "Do you hear me, William?"

He started. "Aye," he said, "I hear you right enough!"

But he still remained in the room, gazing blindly at his brother. Then he went over to the bed and sat down and cried.

"Poor William!" said Mrs. MacDermott, putting her arms around him.

II

John wrote to Maggie Carmichael to tell her of his Uncle's death. It would not be possible for him to keep his engagement with her on the following Saturday. She sent a thinly-written note of sympathy to him, telling him that she would not expect to see him for a while because of his bereavement. "You'll not be in the mood for enjoying yourself at present," she wrote, "and I daresay you would prefer to stay at home at present. I expect you'll miss your Uncle terribly!—"

Indeed, he did miss his Uncle terribly!

There was a strange quietness in the house before the day of the burial, which was natural, but it was maintained after Uncle Matthew had been put in the grave where John's father lay. Uncle William's quick, loud voice became hushed and slow and sometimes inaudible, and Mrs. MacDermott went about her work with few words to anyone. John had come on her, an hour or two before the coffin lid was screwed down, putting a book in Uncle Matthew's hands. He saw the title of it ... Don Quixote ... and he said to her, "What are you doing, ma?" She looked up quickly and hesitated. "Nothing!" she answered, and suddenly aware that she did not wish to be observed, he went away and left her alone. It seemed to him afterwards that she resented his knowledge of what she had done ... that she looked at him sometimes as if she were forbidding him ever to speak of it ... but she did not talk of it. She spoke as seldom as Uncle William did, and it seemed to John that the voice had been carried out of the house when Uncle Matthew had been carried to the graveyard. He felt that he could not endure the oppression of this silence any longer, that he must, speak to someone, and, in his search for comfort, his mind wandered in search of Maggie Carmichael with intenser devotion than he had ever experienced before. If only Uncle Matthew were alive, John could talk to him of Maggie. Uncle Matthew would listen to him. Uncle Matthew always had listened to him. He had never shown any impatience when John had talked to him of this scheme and that scheme, and he would not have mocked his love for Maggie. How queer a thing it was that Uncle Matthew who had seemed to be the least important person in the house should have so ... so stifled the rest of them by his death!

Uncle William, who bore the whole burden of maintaining the family, mourned for Uncle Matthew as if he had lost his support; and Mrs. MacDermott began to talk, when she talked at all, of the things that Matt had liked. Matt liked this and Matt liked that ... and yet she had seemed not merely to disregard Uncle Matthew when he was alive, but actually to dislike him. Uncle Matthew must have had a stronger place in the house than any of them had imagined. John could not bear to go to the attic now, although he wished to turn over the books which were now his. It was in the attic that Uncle Matthew had found most of his happiness, in the company of uncomplaining, unreproachful books, and the memory of that happiness had drawn John to the attic one day when he most missed his Uncle. He had handled the books very fondly, turning over pages and pausing now and then to read a passage or two ... and while he had turned the pages of an old book with faded, yellow leaves, he had found a cutting from a Belfast newspaper. It contained a report of the police proceedings against Uncle Matthew, and it was headed, STRANGE BEHAVIOUR OF A BALLYARDS MAN!... John hurriedly put the book down and went out of the room. He had not shed a tear over Uncle Matthew. He did not wish to cry over him. He felt that Uncle Matthew would like his mourners to have dry eyes ... but it was hard not to cry when one read that bare, uncomprehending account of Uncle Matthew's chivalrous act. Strange behaviour, the reporter named it, when every instinct in John demanded that it should be called noble behaviour. Was a man to be called a fool because his heart compelled him to perform an act of simple loyalty?... Strange behaviour! John seized the cutting and crumpled it in his hand. Then he straightened it out again and tore it in pieces. Were people so poor in faith and devotion that they could not recognise the nobility of what Uncle Matthew had done? And for that act of goodness, Uncle Matthew had gone to his grave under stigma. "Poor sowl," they said in Ballyards, "it's a merciful release for him. He was always quare in the head!"

John could not stay in the house with his memories of Uncle Matthew, and so he went for walks along the shores of the Lough, to Cubbinferry and Kirklea or turning coastwards, towards Millreagh and Holmesport; but there was no comfort to be found in these walks. He returned from them, tired in body, but unrested in mind. He tried to write another story, but he had to put the pen and ink and paper away again, and he told himself that he had no ability to write a story. Wherever he went and whatever he did, the loss of Uncle Matthew pressed upon him and left him with a sense of impotence, until at last, his nature, weary of its own dejection, turned and demanded relief. And so he set his thoughts again on Maggie Carmichael, and each day he found himself, more and more, thinking of her until, after a while, he began to think only of her. He had written to her a second time, but she had not answered his letter. He remembered that she had protested against her incompetence as a correspondent. "I'm a poor hand at letter-writing," she had said laughingly. She could talk easily enough, but she never knew what to put in a letter, and anyhow it was a terrible bother to write one. A letter would be a poor substitute for her, he told himself. He must see her soon. Mourning or no mourning, he would go to Belfast on the next Saturday and would see her. It would not be possible for him to take her to a theatre, but she and he could go for a long walk or they could sit together in the restaurant and talk to each other. This loneliness and silence was becoming unendurable: he must get away from the atmosphere of loss and mourning into an atmosphere of life and love. Uncle Matthew would wish him to do that. He felt certain that Uncle Matthew would wish him to do that. Uncle Matthew would hate to think of his nephew prowling along the roads in misery and suffering when his whole desire had been that he should have opportunity and satisfaction. He had bequeathed his property and his money "to my beloved nephew John MacDermott," and John had been deeply moved by the affection that glowed through the legal phraseology of the will. It was not yet known how much money there would be, for Mr. McGonigal, the solicitor, had not completed his account of Uncle Matthew's affairs; but the amount of it could not be very large. That was immaterial to John. What mattered to him was that his Uncle's love for him had never flickered for a moment, but had shone steadily and surely until the day of his death.

"I never told anyone but him about Maggie," John thought. "I'm glad I told him ... and I know he'd want me to go to her now!"

And so, late on Friday evening, he resolved that he would go to Belfast on the following day. He sent a short note to Maggie, addressing it to the restaurant, in which he told her that he would call for her on Saturday. He begged that she would go for a walk with him. "We might go to the Cave Hill," he wrote, "and be back in plenty of time for tea!"

III

He crossed the Lagan in the ferry-boat, so impatient was he to get quickly to Maggie, but when he reached the restaurant, Maggie was not there. He stood in the doorway, looking about the large room, but there was no one present, for it was too early yet for mid-day meals. Maggie was probably engaged in the small room at the back of the restaurant and would presently appear. It was Mrs. Bothwell who came to answer his call.

"Oh, good morning!" he said, trying to keep the note of disappointment out of his voice.

"Good morning," she answered.

"It's a brave day!"

"It's not so bad," she grudgingly admitted.

"Is ... is Maggie in?" he asked.

"In!" she exclaimed, looking at him with astonishment plain on her face.

"Yes. Isn't she in? She's not sick or anything, is she?" he replied anxiously.

"Oh, dear bless you, no! She's not sick," Mrs. Bothwell said. "Do you mean to say you don't know where she is?"

"No, I ... I don't, Mrs. Bothwell!" There was a note of apprehension in his voice. "I thought, she'd be here!"

"But haven't you been to the house?"

"No," he answered. "I've just arrived from Ballyards this minute. What's wrong, Mrs. Bothwell!"

"There's nothing wrong that I know of. Only I don't understand you not knowing about it. Why aren't you at the church?"

"Church!"

"Aye. Sure, I'd be there myself only I can't leave the shop. I'm glad she's getting a fine day for it anyway!"

John touched her on the arm. "I don't understand what you're talking about, Mrs. Bothwell," he said. "What's happening!"

"Didn't you know she's being married the day on a policeman?..."

"Married!" he exclaimed incredulously.

"Aye. She's been going with him this long while back, and now that he's been promoted ... they've made him a sergeant ... they've got married. She's done well for herself. How is it you didn't know about it, and you and her such chums together?"

"Did I hear you saying she's getting married the day?" he murmured, gazing at her in a stupefied fashion.

"That's what. I keep on telling you," she replied, "only you don't pay no heed to me. I thought you were her cousin!..."

"No, I'm not her cousin," he answered. "I was ... I was going with her. That's all. I'm sorry to have bothered you, Mrs. Bothwell!"

"Oh, it's no bother at all. She must have been having you on, for the banns was up at St. George's this three weeks!..."

"St. George's!" he repeated.

"Aye, these three weeks. She had a fancy to be married in St. George's Church, for all it's a ritualistic place, and people says they're going fast to Popery there. But I don't wonder at her, for it's quare and nice to see the wee boys in their surplices, singing the hymns!..."

He interrupted her. "Three weeks ago," he said, as if calculating. "That must have been soon after I met her for the first time. I met her here in this room, Mrs. Bothwell. I'd been to the Royal to see a play, and I came in here for my tea, and I struck up to her for I liked her look!..."

"Oh, she's a nice enough looking girl is Maggie, though looks is not everything," Mrs. Bothwell interjected.

"She never told me!..."

"Oh, well, if it comes to that, you never told her anything about yourself, did you?" Mrs. Bothwell demanded. "I suppose she thought you were just a fellow out for a bit of fun, and she might as well have a bit of fun, too!"

"But I wasn't out for fun," he exclaimed. "I was in earnest!"

"That's where you made your mistake," said Mrs. Bothwell. "I'm sorry for you, but sure you're young enough not to take a thing like that to heart, and she's not the only girl in the world by a long chalk. By the time you're her age, she'll have a child or two, and'll mebbe be feeling very sorry for herself ... and you'll have the world fornent you still! A young fellow like you isn't going to let a wee thing like that upset you?"

"It isn't a wee thing, Mrs. Bothwell. It's a big thing," he insisted.

"Och, sure, everything's big looking 'til you see something bigger. One of these days you'll be wondering what in the earthly world made you think twice about her!"

He turned away from her and moved towards the door, but suddenly he remembered the letter which he had written to Maggie on the previous evening.

"Did a letter for her come this morning?" he said, turning again to Mrs. Bothwell. "I wrote to her last night to tell her I was coming up the day!"

"One did come," she answered. "I put it in the kitchen, intending to re-address it when I had a minute to spare. I'll go and get it. I suppose you don't want it sent on to her now?"

"No, I don't. It was only to tell her I'd meet her here!"

"Well, I'll bring it to you then." She went into the kitchen and presently returned, carrying John's letter in her hand. "Is this it?" she said. "It's got the Ballyards postmark on it."

He took it from her. "Yes, that's it," he replied, tearing it in pieces. "Could I trouble you to put it in the fire," he said, handing the torn paper to her.

"It's no trouble at all," she answered, taking the pieces from him.

"Good morning, Mrs. Bothwell!" he said.

"Well, good morning to you!"

He opened the door and was about to pass out of the restaurant when she spoke to him again.

"I wouldn't let a thing like that upset me if I was you," she said. "Sure, what's one girl more nor another girl! You'll get your pick and choice before long. A fine fellow like you'll not go begging for nothing!"

"I'm not letting it upset me," he said, "but it'll be the queer girl that'll make a fool of me in a hurry!"

"That's the spirit,'"' said Mrs. Bothwell.

IV

He walked down the stairs and into the street in a state of fury. He had been treated as if he were a corner-boy.

Willie Logan, who was any girl's boy, could not have been treated so contemptuously as he, who had never cared for any other girl, had been treated. She had married a policeman ... a peeler! She might as well have married a soldier or a militia-man. A MacDermott had been rejected in favour of a peeler! She had gone straight from his embraces to the embraces of a policeman ... a common policeman. She had refused to meet him on a Wednesday, he remembered, because, probably, she had engaged to meet the peeler on that evening. He would be off duty then! While she was yielding her lips to John, she was actually engaged to be married to ... to a policeman! By heaven!...

What a good and fortunate thing it was that he had not spoken of her to anyone except to Uncle Matthew! If anyone were to know that a MacDermott had fallen in love with a girl who had preferred to marry a peeler ... a peeler, mind you! ... they would split their sides laughing. What a humiliation! What an insufferable thing to have happened to him! That was your love for you! That was your romance for you! ... Och! Och, och!! This was a lesson for him, indeed. No more love or romance for him. Willie Logan could run after girls until the soles dropped off his boots, but John MacDermott would let the girls do the running after him in future. No girl would ever get the chance again to throw him over for ... for a peeler! If that was their love, they could keep their love!...

He walked about the town until, after a while, he found himself at the Theatre Royal. Still raging against Maggie, he paid for a seat in the pit. He had forgotten that he was in mourning, and he remembered only that he was a jilted lover, a MacDermott cast aside for a policeman. He sat through the first act of the play, without much comprehension of its theme. Then in the middle of the second act, he heard the heroine vowing that she loved the hero, and he got up and walked out of the theatre.

"I could write a better play than that with one hand tied behind my back," he said to himself. "Her and her love!"

He walked rapidly from the theatre, conscious of hunger, for he had omitted to get a meal before going into the theatre, but he was unwilling to forego the pleasure of starving himself as a sign of his humiliation. He made his way towards Smithfield and stopped in front of a bookstall. A couple of loutish lads were fingering a red-bound book as he approached the stall, and he heard them tittering in a sneaky, furtive fashion as he drew near. The owner of the stall emerged from the back of his premises, and when they saw him, they hurriedly put the book down and walked away. John glanced at it and read the title on the cover: The Art of Love by Ovid.

"Love!" he exclaimed aloud. "Ooo-oo-oo!"

The streets were full of young men and women intent on an evening's pleasure, and as he hurried away from Smithfield Market towards the railway station, he received bright glances from girls who were willing to make friends with him. He scowled heavily at them, and when they looked away to other men, he filled his mind with sneers and bitter thoughts. A few hours before, these young girls would have seemed to him to be very beautiful and innocent, but now they appeared to him to be deceitful and wicked. Each evening, he told himself, these girls came out of their houses in search of "boys" whom they lured into love-making, teasing and tormenting them, until at last they tired of them and sent them empty away. That was your love for you! Uncle Matthew had dreamed of romantic love, and John had set out to find it, and behold, what was it! A girl's frolic, a piece of feminine sport, in which the girl had the fun and the boy had the humiliation and pain. Maggie could go from him, her lips still warm with his kisses, to her policeman ... and take kisses from him! There might be other hoaxed lovers ... if she had one, why not have two or three or four ... and his kisses might have meant no more to her than the kisses of half-a-dozen other men. Well, he had learned his lesson! No more love for him....

He crossed the Queen's Bridge, and when he reached the station, he came upon Willie Logan, moodily gazing at the barriers which were not yet open. John, undesirous of society, nodded to him and would have gone away, but Willie suddenly caught hold of his arm.

"I want to speak to you a minute, John!" he said thickly.

The smell of drink drifted from him.

"What about?" John answered sourly.

"Come over here 'til a quiet place," Willie said, still holding John's arm, and drawing him to a seat at the other end of the station. "Sit here 'til the gates is open," he added, as he sat down.

"Is there anything up?" John demanded.

"Aye," Willie replied in a bewildered voice. "John, man, I'm in terrible trouble!"

"Oh!"

"Sore disgrace, John. I don't know what my da and ma'll say to me at all when they hear about it. Such a thing!..."

"Well, what is it?"

"Do you know a wee girl called Jennie Roak?" John shook his head. "Her aunt lives in Ballyards ... Mrs. Cleeland!..."

"Oh, yes. Is that her aunt?"

"Aye. Well, me an' her has been going out together for a wee while past, and she says now she's goin' to have a child!"

John burst into laughter.

"What the hell are you laughing at?" Willie demanded angrily.

"I was thinking it doesn't matter whether it's one girl or a dozen you're after, you'll get into bother just the same!"

"Aye, but what am I to do, John? I'll have to tell the oul' fella, and he'll be raging mad when he hears about it. He's terrible against that sort of thing, and dear knows I'm an awful one for slipping into trouble. I can not keep away from girls, John, and that's the God's truth of it. And I've been brought up as respectable as anybody. Jennie's in an awful state about it!"

"I daresay," said John.

"She says I'll have to marry her over the head of it, but sure I don't want to get married at all ... not yet, anyway. I don't know what to do. I'll have to tell the oul' lad and he'll have me scalded with his tongue. I suppose I'll have to marry her. It's a quare thing a fella can't go out with a girl without getting into bother. I wish to my goodness I had as much control over myself as you have!"

"Control!" said John.

"Aye. You'll never get into no bother!"

"Huh!" said John.

The barriers were opened, and Willie and John passed through on to the platform, and presently seated themselves in a carriage.

"This'll be a lesson to me," said Willie, lying back against the cushions of the carriage. "Not to be running after so many girls in future!"

John did not make any answer to him. He let his thoughts wander out of the carriage. He had loved Maggie Carmichael deeply, and she had served him badly; and Willie Logan, who treated girls in a light fashion, was complaining now because one girl had loved him too well. And that was your love for you! That was the high romantical thing of which Uncle Matthew had so often spoken and dreamed...

He came out of his thoughts suddenly, for Willie Logan was shaking him.

There was a glint in Willie Logan's eye!...

"I say, John," he said, "come on into the next carriage! There's two quare nice wee girls just got in!"

"No," said John.

"Ah, come on," Willie coaxed.

"No," John almost shouted.

"Well, stay behind then. I'll have the two to myself," Willie exclaimed, climbing out of the carriage as he spoke.

"That lad deserves all he gets," John thought.

V

His mother called to him as he passed through the kitchen on his way to the attic where his Uncle Matthew's books were stored.

"Your Uncle William's wanting a talk with you," she said. "Mr. McGonigal's been here about the will!"

"I'll be down in a wee while," John replied as he climbed the stairs. He wished to sit in some quiet place until he had composed his mind which was still disturbed. He had hoped to have the railway compartment to himself after Willie Logan had left it, but two drovers had hurriedly entered it as the train was moving out of the station, and their noisy half-drunken talk had prevented him from thinking with composure. Willie Logan's loud laughter, accompanied by giggles and the sound of scuffling, penetrated from the next compartment....

In the attic, there would be quietness.

He entered the room and stood among the disordered piles of books that lay about the floor. A mania for rearrangement had seized hold of him one day, but he had done no more than take the books from their shelves and leave them in confused heaps. He had promised that he would make the attic tidy again, when his mother complained of the room's disarray. His mind would become quiet, perhaps, if he were to spend a little time now in replacing the books on the shelves in the order in which he wished them to be. He sat down on the floor and contemplated them. Most of these volumes, new and old, were concerned with the love of men for women. It seemed impossible to escape from the knowledge of this passion in any book that one might read. Love made intrusions even into the history books, and bloody wars had been fought and many men had been slain because of a woman's beauty or to gratify her whim. Even in the Bible!...

He remembered that Uncle Matthew had told him that the Song of Solomon was a real love song or series of songs, and not, as the headlines to the chapters insisted, an allegorical description of Christ's love for the Church. There was a Bible lying near to his hand, and he picked it up and turned the pages until he reached the Song of Songs which is called Solomon's, and he hurriedly read through it as if he were searching for sentences.

I am my beloved's, and my beloved is mine: he feedeth among the lilies. Thou art beautiful, O my love, as Tirzah, comely as Jerusalem, terrible as an army with banners!

So the woman sang. Then the man, less abstract than the woman, sang in his turn.

How beautiful are thy feet with shoes, O Prince's daughter: the joints of thy thighs are like jewels, the work of the hands of a cunning workman. Thy navel is like a round goblet which wanted not liquor: thy belly is like an heap of wheat set about with lilies. Thy two breasts are like two young roes that are twins!...

John glanced at the headline to this song. "It's a queer thing to call that 'a further description of the church's graces'," he said to himself, and then his eye searched through the verses of the song until he reached the line,

How fair and how pleasant art thou, O love, for delights!...

"I daresay," he murmured to himself. "I daresay! But there's a terrible lot of misery in it, too!"

He read the whole of the last song.

Set me as a seal upon thine heart, as a seal upon thine arm: for love is strong as death: jealousy is cruel as the grave: the coals thereof are coals of fire, which hath a most vehement flame. Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it....

"That's true," he said. "That's very true! I love her just the same, for all she's treated me so bad! Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it. Oh, I wish to my God I could forget things as easy as Willie Logan forgets them!"

He closed the Bible and put it down on the floor beside him, and sat with his hands clutching hold of his ankles. He would have to go away from Ballyards. He would not be able to rest contentedly near Belfast where Maggie lived ... with her peeler! He must go away from home, and the further away he went, the better it would be. Then he might forget about her. Perhaps, after all, it was not true that "many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it." Poets had a terrible habit of exaggerating things, and perhaps he would forget his love for Maggie in some distant place!...

There was a copy of Romeo and Juliet perched on top of a pile of books. "That was the cause of all my trouble," he said, pushing it so that it fell off the pile on to the floor at his feet. He picked it up and opened it, and as he did so, his eyes rested on Mercutio's speech, If love be rough with you, be rough with love.

Comfort instantly came into his mind.

"I will," he said, rising from the floor.

VI

His Uncle William was in the kitchen when he descended the stairs from the attic.

"Mr. McGonigal was here this morning after you went up to Belfast," he said, as John entered the kitchen. "Everything's settled up. Your Uncle Matthew left you £180 and his books. It's more nor I imagined he had, though I knew well he hardly spent a copper on himself, beyond the books he bought. He was inclined to be an extravagant man like the rest of us before that bother he got into in Belfast over the head of the oul' Queen, but he changed greatly after. The money'll be useful to you, boy, when you start off in life!"

"I'll come into the shop with you, Uncle William," John said, glancing towards the scullery where his mother was. "I want to have a word or two with you!"

"Very good," Uncle William replied, leading the way into the shop.

They sat down together in the little counting-house while John told his Uncle of his desire to go away from home.

"And where in the earthly world do you want to go to?" Uncle William demanded.

"Anywhere. London, mebbe! I'm near in the mind to go to America. Mebbe, I'll just travel the world!"

"A hundred and eighty pounds'll not carry you far," Uncle William exclaimed.

"It'll take me a good piece of the way, and if I can't earn enough to take me the rest of it, sure, what good am I?"

Uncle William shrugged his shoulders. "You must do as you please, I suppose, but I'll miss you sore when you do go. It'll be poor pleasure for me to live on here, with you gone and your Uncle Matthew dead!"

"I'll come back every now and then to see you," John promised. "I'm not going to cut myself off from you altogether. You know that rightly. I just want to see a bit of the world. I ... I want to find out things!"

"What things, John?"

"Oh ... everything! Whatever there is to find out!"

"I sometimes think," said Uncle William, "you can find out all there is to find out at home, if you have enough gumption in you to find out anything at all. Have you told your ma yet?"

John shook his head.

"It'll want a bit of telling," Uncle William prophesied.

"I daresay, but she'll have plenty of time to get used to it. I'm not going this minute. I'm going to try and do some writing at home first, 'til I get my hand in. Then when I think I know something about the job, I'll go and see what I can make out of it."

Uncle William sat in silence for a few moments, tapping noiselessly on the desk with his fingers.

"It's a pity you've no notion of the grocery," he said. "This shop'll be yours one of these days!"

"I haven't any fancy for it," John replied.

"I know you haven't. It's a pity all the same. I suppose, when I'm dead, you'll sell the shop!"

"You're in no notion of dying yet awhile, Uncle William. A hearty man like you'll outlive us all!"

"Mebbe, but that's not the point, John. The MacDermotts have owned this shop a powerful while, as your ma tells you many's a time. When I'm dead, you'll be the last of us ... and you'll want to give up the shop. That's what I think's a pity. I'm with your ma over that. I suppose, though, the whole history of the world is just one record of change and alteration, and it's no use complaining. The shop'll have to go, and the MacDermotts, too!..." He did not speak for a few moments, and then, in a brisker tone, he said, "Mebbe, one of the assistants'll buy it from you. Henry Blackwood has money saved, I know, and by the time you want to sell it, he'll mebbe have a good bit past him. I'll drop a wee hint to him that you'll be wanting to sell, so's to prepare him!"

"Very well, Uncle!" John said.

"If you do sell the shop, make whoever buys it change the name over the door. If the MacDermott family is not to be in control of it, then I'd like well for the name to be painted out altogether and the new name put in its place. I'd hate to think of anyone pretending the MacDermotts was still here, carrying on their old trade, and them mebbe not giving as good value as we gave. The MacDermotts have queer pride, John!"

"I know they have, Uncle William. I have, too!"

"And they wouldn't lie content in their graves if they thought their names was associated with bad value!"

"You're taking it for granted, Uncle, I'll want to sell the shop. Mebbe, I won't. I'll mebbe not be good at anything else but the grocery. I'm talking big now about writing books, but who knows whether I'll ever write one!"

"Oh, you'll write one, John. You'll write plenty. You'll do it because you want to do it. You've got your da's nature. When he wanted a thing, he got it, no matter who had it!"

"There was one thing he wanted, Uncle William, and wanted bad, but couldn't get!"

"What was that, son?" Uncle William demanded.

"He wanted to live, but he wasn't let," John answered.

Uncle William considered for a few moments. "Of course," he said, "there's some things that even a MacDermott can't do!"

VII

John left his Uncle in the shop and went into the kitchen to tell his mother of his decision. He felt certain that she would oppose him, and he braced himself to resist her appeals that he should change his mind.

But she took his announcement very quietly.

"I've made up my mind to go to London, ma!" he said to her.

She did not look up immediately. Then she turned towards him, and said, "Oh, yes, John!"

He paused, nonplussed by her manner, as if he were waiting for her to proceed, but finding that she did not say any more, he continued. "I daresay it'll upset you," he said.

"I'm used to being upset," she replied, "and I expected it. When will you be going?"

"I don't know yet. In a wee while. I'll have to speak to Mr. Cairnduff first about quitting the school, and then I'll stay at home for a bit, writing 'til I'm the master of it. After that I'll go to London ... or mebbe to America!"

She sat quite still in the armchair beneath the window that overlooked the yard. He felt that he ought to say more to her, that she ought to say more to him, but he could not think of anything to say to her, because she had said so little to him.

"I hope you're not upset about it," he said.

"Upset!" she exclaimed, with a sound of bitterness in her tone.

"Yes. I know you never approved of the idea!"

"It doesn't make any difference whether I approve or not, does it?..."

"That's not a fair way to put it, ma!"

"But it amounts to that all the same," she retorted. "No, John, I'm not upset. What would be the good? I had other hopes for you, but they weren't your hopes, and I daresay you're right. I daresay you are. After all, we ... we have to ... to do the best we can for ourselves ... haven't we?"

"Yes, ma!"

"And if you think you can do better in London ... or America nor you can in Ballyards ... well, you're right to ... to go, aren't you?"

"That's what I think, ma!" John answered.

She did not say any more, and he sat at the table, tapping on it with a pencil. There was no sound in the kitchen but the ticking of the clock and the noise of the water boiling in the kettle and the little tap, tap ... tap, tap ... tap, tap, tap ... of his pencil on the table. Mrs. MacDermott had been hemming a handkerchief when John entered the kitchen, and as he glanced at her now, he saw that her head was bent over it again. He looked at her for a long while, it seemed to him, but she did not raise her head to return his look. If she would only rebuke him for wishing to go ... but this awful silence!...

He looked about the kitchen, as if he were assuring himself that the old, familiar things were still in their places. He would be glad, of course, to go away from home, because he wished to adventure into bigger things ... but he would be sorry to go, too. There was something very dear and friendly about the house. He had experienced much love and care in it, and had had much happiness here. Nevertheless, he would be glad to go. He needed a change, he wished to have things happening to him. He remembered very vividly something that his Uncle Matthew had said to him in this very room. "Sure, what does it matter whether you're happy and contented or not, so long as things are happening to you!"

That was the right spirit. Uncle Matthew had known all the time what was the right life for a man to lead, even although he had never gone out into the world himself. What if Maggie Carmichael had treated him badly? If love be rough with you, be rough with love! Who was Maggie Carmichael anyway? One woman in a world full of women! She was only Maggie Carmichael ... or Maggie whatever the policeman's name was! If love be rough with you, be rough with love! ... Oh, he would, he would! There were finer women in the world than Maggie Carmichael, and what was to prevent him from getting the finest woman amongst them if he wanted her. Had it not been said of his father that he could have taken a queen from a king's bed, lifted her clean out of a palace in face of the whole court and taken her to his home, a happy and contented woman?... Well, then, what one MacDermott could do, another MacDermott could do....

His mother got up from her chair and, putting down her hemmed handkerchief, said, "It's time I wet the tea!"

VIII

He watched her as she went about the kitchen, making preparations for the meal, and he wondered why it was that she did not look at him. Very carefully she averted her eyes from him as she passed from the fireplace to the scullery; and when she had to approach the place where he was sitting, she did so with downcast gaze. Suddenly he knew why she would not look at him. He knew that if she were to do so, she would cry, and as the knowledge came to him, a great tenderness for her arose in his heart, and he stood up and putting out his hands drew her to him and kissed her. And then she cried. Her body shook with sobs as she clung to him, her face thrust tightly against his breast. But she did not speak. Uncle William, coming from the shop, looked into the kitchen for a moment, but, observing his sister's grief, went hurriedly back to the shop.

"Don't, ma!" John pleaded, holding her as if she were a distressed child.

"I can't help it, John," she cried. "I'll be all right in a wee while, but I can't help it yet!"

After a time, she gained control of herself, and gradually her sobs subsided, and then they ceased.

"I didn't mean to cry," she said.

"No, ma!"

"But I couldn't control myself any longer. I'll not give way again, John!"

She went to the scullery and returned with cups and saucers which she put on the table.

"Would you like some soda-bread or wheaten farls?" she asked.

"I'll have them both," he answered. He paused for a moment, and then, before she had time to go to the pantry, he went on. "You know, ma, I ... I have to go. I mean I ... I have to go!"

"Have to go, John?"

"Yes. I ... I have to go. I was friends with a girl!..."

She came quickly to his side, and put her arms round his neck. The misery had suddenly gone from her face, and there was a look of anxiety, mingled with gratification, in her eyes.

"That's it, is it?" she said. "Oh, I thought you were tired of your home. Poor son, poor son, did she not treat you well?"

"She was married this morning on a peeler, ma!"

"And you in love with her?" she exclaimed indignantly.

"Aye, ma!"

"The woman's a fool," said Mrs. MacDermott. "You're well rid of her!..."

He saw now that there would be no further objection made by his mother against his going from home. As clearly as if she had said so, he understood that she now regarded his departure from home as a pilgrimage from which in due time he would return, purged of his grief. And she was content.

"A woman that would marry a peeler when she might marry a MacDermott, is not fit to marry a MacDermott," she said, almost to herself.

IX

And so, when three months later, he decided to go to London, she did not try to hold him back. He had worked hard on a bitter novel that would, he imagined, fill men with amazement and women with shame, and when he had completed it, he bound the long, loose sheets of foolscap together and announced that he was now ready to go to London. Mr. Cairnduff told him of lodgings in Brixton, where an old friend of his, an Ulsterman and a journalist, was living, and Mr. McCaughan gave him a very vivid account of the perils of London life. "Bad women!" he said, ominously, "are a terrible temptation to a young fellow all by himself in a big town!" and then, brightening a little, he remarked that he need not tell so sensible a lad as John how to take care of himself. John had only to remember that he was a MacDermott!...

But Mrs. MacDermott did not offer any advice to him. She packed his trunk and his bag on the day he was to leave Ballyards, taking care to put a Bible at the bottom of the trunk, and told him that they were ready for him. He was to travel by the night boat from Belfast to Liverpool, and it was not necessary for him to leave Ballyards until the evening, nor did he wish to spend more time in Belfast than was absolutely necessary. His Uncle and his mother were to accompany him to the boat: Mr. McCaughan and Mr. Cairnduff would say good-bye to him at Ballyards station. Willie Logan, now safely married to his Jennie and a little dashed in consequence of the limitations imposed upon him by marriage, had volunteered to come to the station "and see the last of" him. There was to be a gathering of friends on the platform ... but he wished in his heart they would allow him to go away in peace and quietness.

It was strange, he thought, that his mother did not talk to him about his journey to London. He had imagined that she would have a great deal to say about it, but it was not until the day of his departure that she spoke of it to him.

She came to him, after she had packed his trunk and bag, and said, "Come into the return room a wee minute!" and, obediently, he followed her.

"I want to show you something," she said in explanation. "Shut the door behind you!"

"Is there anything wrong, ma?" he asked, puzzled by the mystery in her manner.

"No," she answered, "only I don't want the whole world to see us!"

She went to the cupboard and took out a bottle of whiskey.

"Sit down," she said.

"Is that whiskey?" he asked as he seated himself.

She nodded her head and returned to the table.

"You're not thinking of giving me a drop, are you?" he exclaimed laughingly.

There was a look in her eyes that checked laughter.

"If I had my way," she said with great bitterness, "I'd take the men that make this stuff and I'd drown them in it. I'd pour it down their throats 'til they choked!..." She poured a little of the whiskey into a saucer. "Give me a light," she demanded.

He went to the mantel-shelf and brought the box of matches from it.

"Strike one," she said, and added when he had done so, "Set fire to the whiskey!"

He succeeded in making the spirit burn, and for a little while she and he stood by the table while the cold blue flames curled out of the saucer, wavering and spurting, until the spirit was consumed and the flame flickered and expired.

"That's what a drunkard's inside is like," said Mrs. MacDermott, picking up the saucer and carrying it downstairs to the scullery to be washed. He heard the water splashing in the sink, and when he had put the bottle of whiskey back in the cupboard, he went downstairs and waited until she had finished. She returned to the kitchen, carrying the washed saucer, and when she had placed it on the dresser, she took up a Bible and brought it to him.

"I want you to swear to me," she said, "that you'll never taste a drop of drink as long as you live!"

"That's easy enough," he answered. "I don't like it!"

She looked up at him in alarm. "Have you tasted it already, then?" she asked.

"Yes. How would I know I didn't like it if I hadn't tasted it? The smell of it is enough to knock you down!"

She put the Bible back on the dresser. "It doesn't matter," she said when he held out his hand for it. "Mebbe you have enough strength of your own to resist it. I ... I don't always understand you, John, and I'm fearful sometimes to see you so sure of yourself." She came to him suddenly and swiftly, and clasped him close to her. "I love you with the whole of my heart, son," she said, "and I'm desperate anxious about you!"

"You needn't be anxious about me, ma!" he answered. "I'm all right!"

X

The minister said, "God bless you, boy!" and patted him on the shoulder, and the schoolmaster wished him well and begged that now and then John would write to him. Willie Logan, hot and in a hurry, entered the station, eager to say good-bye to him, but the stern and disapproving eye of the minister caused him to keep in the background until John, understanding what was in his mind, went up to him.

"I'm sure I wish you all you can wish yourself," Willie said very heartily. "I wish to my God I was going with you, but sure, I'm one of the unlucky ones. Aggie sent her love to you, but I couldn't persuade her to come and give it to you herself!"

"Thank you, Willie. You might tell her I'm obliged to her."

"You never had no notion of her, John?"

"I had not, Willie. How's Jennie keeping?"

"Och, she's well enough," he answered sulkily, "Look at the minister there, glaring at me as I was dirt. Sure, didn't I marry the girl, and got intil a hell of a row over it with the oul' fella! And what's he got to glare at? There's no need to be giving you good advice about weemen, John, for you're well able to take care of yourself as far as I can see, but all the same, mind what you're doing when you get into their company or you'll mebbe get landed the same as me!..."

"Don't you like being married, then?"

"Ah, quit codding," said Willie.

* * * * *