Green Shadows, White Whale Page 8

  And the old man wandered off upstairs.

  Leaving the men stunned and isolated in a mob in the hall below, watching him go away out of sight.

  “Casey,” said Blinky Watts, “has it crossed your small mind, if you’d remembered to bring the matches there would be no such long night of work as this ahead?”

  “Jesus, where’s your taste for the ass-thetics?” cried Riordan.

  “Shut up!” said Casey. “Okay, Flannery, you on one end of the Twilight of the Gods, you, Tuohy, on the far end where the maid is being given what’s good for her. Ha! Lift!”

  And the gods, soaring crazily, took to the air.

  By seven o’clock some of the paintings were out of the house and racked against each other in the snow, waiting to be taken off in various directions toward various huts. At seven-fifteen, Lord and Lady Kilgotten came out and drove away, and Casey quickly formed the mob in front of the stacked paintings so the nice old lady wouldn’t see what they were up to. The boys cheered as the car went down the drive. Lady Kilgotten waved frailly back.

  From seven-thirty until ten the rest of the Treasures walked out in ones and twos.

  When all the pictures were gone save one, Kelly stood in the dim alcove worrying over Lady Kilgotten’s Sunday painting of the old lord. He shuddered, decided on a supreme humanitarianism, and carried the portrait safely out into the night.

  At midnight. Lord and Lady Kilgotten, returning with guests, found only great shuffling tracks in the snow where Flannery and Tuohy had set off one way with the dear bacchanal; where Casey, grumbling, had led a parade of Van Dycks, Rembrandts, Bouchers, and Piranesis another; and where, last of all, Blinky Watts, kicking his heels, had trotted happily into the woods with his nude Re noirs.

  The dinner party was over by two. Lady Kilgotten went to bed satisfied that all the paintings had been sent out, en masse, to be cleaned.

  At three in the morning, Lord Kilgotten still sat sleepless in his library, alone among empty walls, before a tireless hearth, a muffler about his thin neck, a glass of brandy in his faintly trembling hand.

  About three-fifteen, there was a stealthy creaking of parquetry, a shift of shadows, and after a time, cap in hand, there stood Casey at the library door.

  “Hist!” he called softly.

  The lord, who had dozed somewhat, blinked his eyes wide. “Oh, dear me,” he said, “is it time for us to go?”

  “That’s tomorrow night,” said Casey. “And anyways, it’s not you that’s going, it’s them is coming back.”

  “Them? Your friends?”

  “No, yours.” And Casey beckoned.

  The old man let himself be led through the hall to look out the front door into a deep well of night.

  There, like Napoleon’s numbed dog army of foot-weary, undecided, and demoralized men, stood the shadowy but familiar mob, their hands full of pictures, pictures leaned against their legs, pictures on their backs, pictures stood upright and held by trembling, panic-whitened hands in the drifted snow. A terrible silence lay over and among the men. They seemed stranded, as if one enemy had gone off to fight far better wars while yet another enemy, as yet unnamed, nipped silent and trackless at their behinds. They kept glancing over their shoulders at the hills and the town as if at any moment Chaos herself might unleash her dogs from there. They alone, in the infiltering night, heard the far-off baying of dismays and despairs that cast a spell.

  “Is that you, Riordan?” called Casey nervously.

  “Ah, who the hell would it be!” cried a voice out beyond.

  “What do they want?” asked the old party.

  “It’s not so much what we want as what you now want from us,” called a voice.

  “You see,” said another, advancing until all could see it was Hannahan in the light, “considered in all its aspects, Your Honor, we’ve decided, you’re such a fine gent, we—”

  “We will not burn your house!” cried Blinky Watts.

  “Shut up and let the man talk!” said several voices.

  Hannahan nodded. “That’s it. We will not burn your house.”

  “But see here,” said the lord, “I’m quite prepared. Everything can easily be moved out.”

  “You’re taking the whole thing too lightly, begging your pardon, Your Honor,” said Kelly. “Easy for you is not easy for us.”

  “I see,” said the old man, not seeing at all.

  “It seems,” said Tuohy, “we have all of us, in just the last few hours, developed problems. Some to do with the home and some to do with transport and cartage, if you get my drift. Who’ll explain first? Kelly? No? Casey? Riordan?”

  Nobody spoke.

  At last, with a sigh, Flannery edged forward. “It’s this way …” he said.

  “Yes?” said the old man gently.

  “Well,” said Flannery, “me and Tuohy here got half through the woods, like damn fools, and was across two thirds of the bog with the large picture of the Twilight of the Gods, when we began to sink.”

  “Your strength failed?” inquired the lord kindly.

  “Sink, Your Honor, just plain sink, into the ground,” Tuohy put in.

  “Dear me,” said the lord.

  “You can say that again, Your Lordship,” said Tuohy. “Why, together, me and Flannery and the demon gods must have weighed close onto six hundred pounds, and that bog out there is infirm if it’s anything, and the more we walk the deeper we sink, and a cry strangled in me throat, for I’m thinking of those scenes in the old story where the Hound of the Baskervilles or some such fiend chases the heroine out in the moor, and down she goes in a watery pit, wishing she had kept at that diet, but it’s too late, and bubbles rise, to pop on the surface. All of this athrottling in me mind, Your Honor.”

  “And so?” the lord put in, seeing he was expected to ask.

  “And so,” said Flannery, “we just walked off and left the damn gods there in their twilight.”

  “In the middle of the bog?” asked the elderly man, just a trifle upset.

  “Ah, we covered them up; I mean, we put our mufflers over the scene. The gods will not die twice. Your Honor. Say, did you hear that, boys? The gods—”

  “Ah, shut up,” cried Kelly. “Ya dimwits. Why didn’t you bring the damn portrait in off the bog?”

  “We thought we would come get two more boys to help—”

  “Two more!” cried Nolan. “That’s four men, plus a parcel of gods. You’d all sink twice as fast, and the bubbles rising, ya nitwit!”

  “Ah!” said Tuohy. “I never thought of that.”

  “It has been thought of now,” said the old man. “And perhaps several of you will form a rescue team—”

  “It’s done, Your Honor,” said Casey. “Bob, you and Tim dash off and save the pagan deities.”

  “You won’t tell Father Leary?”

  “Father Leary, my behind. Get!” And Tim and Bob panted off.

  His Lordship turned now to Nolan and Kelly.

  “I see that you, too, have brought your rather large picture back.”

  “At least we made it within a hundred yards of the door, sir,” said Kelly. “I suppose you’re wondering why we have returned it, Your Honor?”

  “With the gathering in of coincidence upon coincidence,” said the old man, going back in to get his overcoat and putting on his tweed cap so he could stand out in the cold and finish what looked to be a long converse, “yes, I was given to speculate.”

  “It’s me back,” said Kelly. “It gave out not five hundred yards down the main road. The back has been springing out and in for five years now, and me suffering the agonies of Christ. I sneeze and fall to my knees, Your Honor.”

  “I have suffered the selfsame delinquency,” said the old man. “It is as if someone had driven a spike into one’s spine.” The old man touched his back, carefully, remembering, which brought a gasp from all, nodding.

  “The agonies of Christ, as I said,” said Kelly.

  “Most understandable, then, that yo
u could not finish your journey with that heavy frame,” said die old man, “and most commendable that you were able to struggle back this far with the dreadful weight.”

  Kelly stood taller immediately, as he heard his plight described. He beamed. “It was nothing. And I’d do it again, save for the string of bones above me ass. Begging pardon, Your Honor.”

  But already His Lordship had passed his kind if tremulous gray-blue, unfocused gaze toward Blinky Watts, who had, under either arm, like a dartful prancer, the two Renoir peach ladies.

  “Ah, God, there was no trouble with sinking into bogs or knocking my spine out of shape,” said Watts, treading the earth to demonstrate his passage home. “I made it back to the house in ten minutes flat, dashed into the wee cot, and began hanging the pictures on the wall, when my wife came up behind me. Have ya ever had your wife come up behind ya, Your Honor, and just stand there mum’s the word?”

  “I seem to recall a similar circumstance,” said the old man, trying to remember if he did, then nodding as indeed several memories flashed over his fitful baby mind.

  “Well, Your Lordship, there is no silence like a woman’s silence, do you agree? And no standing there like a woman’s standing there like a monument out of Stonehenge. The mean temperature dropped in the room so quick I suffered from the polar concussions, as we call it in our house. I did not dare turn to confront the Beast, or the daughter of the Beast, as I call her in deference to her mom. But finally I heard her suck in a great breath and let it out very cool and calm like a Prussian general. ‘That woman is naked as a jaybird’ and ‘That other woman is raw as the inside of a clam at low tide.’

  “ ‘But,’ said I, ‘these are studies of natural physique by a famous French artist.’

  “ ‘Jesus come after me French,’ she cried. ‘Skirts half up to your bum French. Dress half down to your navel French. And the gulping and smothering they do with their mouths in their dirty novels French. And now you come home and nail ‘French’ on the walls. Why don’t you, while you’re at it, put the crucifix down and nail one fat naked lady there?’

  “Well, Your Honor, I just shut up my eyes and wished my ears would fall off. ‘Is this what you want our boys to look at last thing at night as they go to sleep?’ she says. Next thing I know, I’m on the path, and here I am and here’s the raw-oyster nudes, Your Honor, beg your pardon, thanks, and much obliged.”

  “They do seem to be unclothed,” said the old man, looking at the two pictures, one in either hand, as if he wished to find all that this man’s wife said was in them. “I had always thought of summer, looking at them.”

  “From your seventieth birthday on, Your Lordship, perhaps. But before that?”

  “Uh, yes, yes,” said the old man, watching a speck of half-remembered lechery drift across one eye.

  When his eye stopped drifting, it found Bannock and Toolery on the edge of the far rim of the uneasy sheepfold crowd. Behind each, dwarfing them, stood a giant painting.

  Bannock had got his picture home, only to find he could not get the damn thing through the door, nor any window.

  Toolery had actually got his picture in the door, when his wife said what a laughingstock they’d be, the only family in the village with a Rubens worth half a million pounds and not even a cow to milk!

  So that was the sum, total, and substance of this long night. Each man had a similar chill, dread, and awful tale to tell, and all were told at last, and as they finished, a cold snow began to fall among these brave members of the local, hard-fighting IRA.

  The old man said nothing, for there was nothing really to say that wouldn’t be obvious as their pale breaths ghosting the wind. Then, very quietly, he opened wide the front door and had the decency not even to nod or point.

  Slowly and silently they began to file by, as past a familiar teacher in an old school, and then faster they moved. So in flowed the river returned, the Ark emptied out before, not after, the Flood, and the tide of animals and angels, nudes that flamed and smoked in the hands, noble gods that pranced on wings and hoofs, went by, and the old man’s eyes shifted gently, and his mouth silently named each, the Renoirs, the Van Dycks, the Lau tree, and so on, until Kelly, in passing, felt a touch at his arm.

  Surprised, Kelly looked over.

  And saw that the old man was staring at the small painting beneath Kelly’s arm.

  “My wife’s portrait of me?”

  “None other,” said Kelly.

  The old man stared at Kelly and at the painting beneath his arm and then out toward the snowing night.

  Kelly smiled.

  Walking soft as a burglar, he vanished out into the wilderness, carrying the picture. A moment later, you heard him laughing as he ran back, hands empty.

  The old man shook Kelly’s hand, once, tremblingly, and shut the door.

  Then he turned away, as if the event was already lost to his wandering child mind, and toddled down the hall with his scarf like a gentle weariness over his thin shoulders, and the mob followed him inside, where they found drinks in their great paws and saw that Lord Kilgotten was blinking at the picture over the fireplace as if trying to remember, was the Sack of Rome there in the years past? or was it the Fall of Troy? Then he felt their gaze and looked full on the encircled army and said:

  “Well now, what shall we drink to?”

  The men shuffled their feet.

  Then Flannery cried, “Why, to His Lordship, of course!”

  “His Lordship!” cried all eagerly, and drank, and coughed and choked and sneezed, while the old man felt a peculiar glistening about his eyes, and did not drink at all till the commotion stilled, and then said, “To our Ireland,” and drank, and all said Ah, God and amen to that, and the old man looked at the picture over the hearth and then at last shyly observed, “I do hate to mention it … that picture …”

  “Sir?”

  “It seems to me,” said the old man apologetically, “to be a trifle off center, on the tilt. I wonder if you might …”

  “Mightn’t we, boys!” cried Casey.

  And fourteen men rushed to put it right.

  “… put it right,” said Finn, at the end of his tale.

  There was silence.

  At almost the same moment, John and I leaned forward and said:

  “Is all that true?”

  “Well,” said Finn, “it is the skin of the apple, if not the core.”

  Chapter 13

  “A fool,” I said. “That’s what I am.”

  “Why?” asked John. “What for?”

  I brooded by my third-floor hotel window. On the Dublin street below, a man passed, his face to the lamplight.

  “Him,” I muttered. “Two days ago …”

  Two days ago, as I was walking along, someone had hissed at me from the hotel alley. “Sir, it’s important! Sir!”

  I turned into the shadow. This little man, in the direst tones, said, “I’ve a job in Belfast if I just had a pound for the train fare!” I hesitated.

  “A most important job!” he went on swiftly. “Pays well! I’ll— I’ll mail you back the loan! Just give me your name and hotel.”

  He knew me for a tourist. It was too late; his promise to pay had moved me. The pound note crackled in my hand, being worked free from several others.

  The man’s eye skimmed like a shadowing hawk.

  “And if I had two pounds, why, I could eat on the way.”

  I uncrumpled two bills.

  “And three pounds would bring the wife, not leave her here alone.”

  I unleafed a third.

  “Ah, hell!” cried the man. “Five, just five poor pounds, would find us a hotel in that brutal city, and let me get to the job, for sure!”

  What a dancing fighter he was, light on his toes, in and out, weaving, tapping with his hands, flicking with his eyes, smiling with his mouth, jabbing with his tongue.

  “Lord thank you, bless you, sir!”

  He ran, my five pounds with him.

  I was halfway
in the hotel before I realized that for all his vows, the man had not recorded my name.

  “Gah!” I cried then.

  “Gah!” I cried now, my director behind me, at the window.

  For there, passing below, was the very fellow who should have been in Belfast two nights before.

  “Oh, I know him,” said John. “He stopped me this noon. Wanted train fare to Galway”

  “Did you give it to him?”

  “No,” said John simply. “Well, a shilling maybe …”

  Then the worst thing happened. The demon far down on the sidewalk glanced up, saw us, and damn if he didn’t wave!

  I had to stop myself from waving back. A sickly grin played on my lips.

  “It’s got so I hate to leave the hotel,” I said.

  “It’s cold out, all right.” John was putting on his coat.

  “No,” I said. “Not the cold. Them.”

  And we looked again from the window.

  There was the cobbled Dublin street, with the night wind blowing in a fine soot along one way to Trinity College, another to St. Stephen’s Green. Across by the sweet shop, two men stood mummified in the shadows. On the corner, a single man, hands deep in his pockets, felt for his entombed bones, a muzzle of ice for a beard. Farther up, in a doorway, was a bundle of old newspapers that would stir like a pack of mice and wish you the time of evening if you walked by. Below, by the hotel entrance, stood a feverish hothouse rose of a woman, a force of nature.

  “Oh, the beggars,” said John.

  “No, not just Oh, the beggars,’ ” I said, “but oh, the people in the streets, who somehow became beggars.”

  “It looks like a motion picture. I could direct the lot,” said John. “All of them waiting down there in the dark for the hero to come out. Let’s go to dinner.”

  “The hero,” I said. “That’s me. Damn.”

  John peered at me. “You’re not afraid of them?”

  “Yes, no. Hell. It’s a big chess game for me now. All these months I’ve sat up here with my typewriter, studying their off hours and on. When they take a coffee break I take one, run for the sweet shop, the bookstore, the Olympia Theatre. If I time it right, there’s no handout, no my wanting to trot them into the barbershop or the kitchen. I know every secret exit in the hotel.”