Part III
Dotted at intervals throughout society are the people endowed with the faculty for “getting up things”. They are dauntless people, filled with the power of driving lesser and deeper reluctant spirits before them; remorseless to the timid, carneying to the stubborn.
Of such was Mrs. Carteret, with powers matured in hill-stations in India, mellowed by much voyaging in P. and O. steamers. Not even an environment as unpromising as that of Enniscar in its winter torpor had power to dismay her. A public whose artistic tastes had hitherto been nourished upon travelling circuses, Nationalist meetings, and missionary magic lanterns in the Wesleyan schoolhouse, was, she argued, practically virgin soil, and would ecstatically respond to any form of cultivation.
“I know there’s not much talent to be had,” she said combatively to her husband, “but we’ll just black our faces, and call ourselves the Green Coons or something, and it will be all right!”
“Dashed if I’ll black my face again,” said Captain Carteret; “I call it rot trying to get up anything here. There’s no one to do anything.”
“Well, there’s ourselves and little Taylour” (“little Taylour,” it may be explained, was Captain Carteret’s subaltern), “that’s two banjoes and a bones anyhow; and Freddy Alexander, and there’s your dear friend Fanny Fitz—she’ll be home in a few days, and these two big Hamilton girls—”
“Oh, Lord!” ejaculated Captain Carteret.
“Oh, yes!” continued Mrs. Carteret, unheedingly, “and there’s Mr. Gunning; he’ll come if Fanny Fitz does.”
“He’ll not be much advantage when he does come,” said Captain Carteret spitefully.
“Oh, he sings,” said Mrs. Carteret, arranging her neat small fringe at the glass—“rather a good voice. You needn’t be afraid, my dear, I’ll arrange that the fascinating Fanny shall sit next you!”
Upon this somewhat unstable basis the formation of the troupe of Green Coons was undertaken. Mrs. Carteret took off her coat to the work, or rather, to be accurate, she put on a fur-lined one, and attended a Nationalist meeting in the Town Hall to judge for herself how the voices carried. She returned rejoicing—she had sat at the back of the hall, and had not lost a syllable of the oratory, even during sundry heated episodes, discreetly summarised by the local paper as “interruption”. The Town Hall was chartered, superficially cleansed, and in the space of a week the posters had gone forth.
By what means it was accomplished that Rupert Gunning should attend the first rehearsal he did not exactly understand; he found himself enmeshed in a promise to meet every one else at the Town Hall with tea at the Carterets’ afterwards. Up to this point the fact that he was to appear before the public with a blackened face had been diplomatically withheld from him, and an equal diplomacy was shown on his arrival in the deputing of Miss Fitzroy to break the news to him.
“Mrs. Carteret says it’s really awfully becoming,” said Fanny, breathless and brilliant from assiduous practice of a hornpipe under Captain Carteret’s tuition, “and as for trouble! We might as well make a virtue of necessity in this incredibly dirty place; my hands are black already, and I’ve only swept the stage!”
She was standing at the edge of the platform that was to serve as the stage, looking down at him, and it may be taken as a sufficient guide to his mental condition that his abhorrence of the prospect for himself was swallowed up by fury at the thought of it for her.
“Are you—do you mean to tell me you are going to dance with a black face?” he demanded in bitter and incongruous wrath.
“No, I’m going to dance with Captain Carteret!” replied Fanny frivolously, “and so can you if you like!”
She was maddeningly pretty as she smiled down at him, with her bright hair roughened, and the afterglow of the dance alight in her eyes and cheeks. Nevertheless, for one whirling moment, the old Adam, an Adam blissfully unaware of the existence of Eve, asserted himself in Rupert. He picked up his cap and stick without a word, and turned towards the door. There, however, he was confronted by Mrs. Carteret, tugging at a line of chairs attached to a plank, like a very small bird with a very large twig. To refuse the aid that she immediately demanded was impossible, and even before the future back row of the sixpennies had been towed to its moorings, he realised that hateful as it would be to stay and join in these distasteful revels, it would be better than going home and thinking about them.
From this the intelligent observer may gather that absence had had its traditional, but by no means invariable, effect upon the heart of Mr. Gunning, and, had any further stimulant been needed, it had been supplied in the last few minutes by the aggressive and possessive manner of Captain Carteret.
The rehearsal progressed after the manner of amateur rehearsals. The troupe, with the exception of Mr. Gunning, who remained wrapped in silence, talked irrepressibly, and quite inappropriately to their rôle as Green Coons. Freddy Alexander and Mr. Taylour bear-fought untiringly for possession of the bones and the position of Corner Man; Mrs. Carteret alone had a copy of the music that was to be practised, and in consequence, the company hung heavily over her at the piano in a deafening and discordant swarm. The two tall Hamiltons, hitherto speechless by nature and by practice, became suddenly exhilarated at finding themselves in the inner circle of the soldiery, and bubbled with impotent suggestions and reverential laughter at the witticisms of Mr. Taylour. Fanny Fitz and Captain Carteret finally removed themselves to a grimy corner behind the proscenium, and there practised, sotto voce, the song with banjo accompaniment that was to culminate in the hornpipe. Freddy Alexander had gone forth to purchase a pack of cards, in the futile hope that he could prevail upon Mrs. Carteret to allow him to inflict conjuring tricks upon the audience.
“As if there were anything on earth that bored people as much as card tricks!” said that experienced lady to Rupert Gunning. “Look here, would you mind reading over these riddles, to see which you’d like to have to answer. Now, here’s a local one. I’ll ask it—‘Why am dis room like de Enniscar Demesne?’—and then you’ll say, ‘Because dere am so many pretty little deers in it’!”
“Oh, I couldn’t possibly do that!” said Rupert hastily, alarmed as well as indignant; “I’m afraid I really must go now—”
He had to pass by Fanny Fitz on his way out of the hall. There was something vexed and forlorn about him, and, being sympathetic, she perceived it, though not its cause.
“You’re deserting us!” she said, looking up at him.
“I have an appointment,” he said stiffly, his glance evading hers, and resting on Captain Carteret’s well-clipped little black head.
Some of Fanny’s worst scrapes had been brought about by her incapacity to allow any one to part from her on bad terms, and, moreover, she liked Rupert Gunning. She cast about in her mind for something conciliatory to say to him.
“When are you going to show me the cob that you bought at the Horse Show?”
The olive branch thus confidently tendered had a somewhat withering reception.
“The cob I bought at the Horse Show?” Mr. Gunning repeated with an increase of rigidity, “Oh, yes—I got rid of it.”
He paused; the twanging of Captain Carteret’s banjo bridged the interval imperturbably.
“Why had you to get rid of it?” asked Fanny, still sympathetic.
“She was a failure!” said Rupert vindictively; “I made a fool of myself in buying her!”
Fanny looked at him sideways from under her lashes.
“And I had counted on your giving me a mount on her now and then!”
Rupert forgot his wrath, forgot even the twanging banjo.
“I’ve just got another cob,” he said quickly; “she jumps very well, and if you’d like to hunt her next Tuesday—”
“Oh, thanks awfully, but Captain Carteret has promised me a mount for next Tuesday!” said the perfidious Fanny.
Mrs. Carteret, on her knees by a refractory footlight, watched with anxiety Mr. Gunning’s abrupt departure from the room.
“Fanny!” she said severely, “what have you been doing to that man?”
“Oh, nothing!” said Fanny.
“If you’ve put him off singing I’ll never forgive you!” continued Mrs. Carteret, advancing on her knees to the next footlight.
“I tell you I’ve done nothing to him,” said Fanny Fitz guiltily.
“Give me the hammer!” said Mrs. Carteret. “Have I eyes, or have I not?”
“He’s awfully keen about her!” Mrs. Carteret said that evening to her husband. “Bad temper is one of the worst signs. Men in love are always cross.”
“Oh, he’s a rotter!” said Captain Carteret conclusively.
In the meantime the object of this condemnation was driving his ten Irish miles home, by the light of a frosty full moon. Between the shafts of his cart a trim-looking mare of about fifteen hands trotted lazily, forging, shying, and generally comporting herself in a way only possible to a grass-fed animal who has been in the hands of such as Mr. William Fennessy. The thick and dingy mane that had hung impartially on each side of her neck, now, together with the major portion of her voluminous tail, adorned the manure heap in the rear of the Fennessy public-house. The pallid fleece in which she had been muffled had given place to a polished coat of iron-grey, that looked black in the moonlight. A week of over-abundant oats had made her opinionated, but had not, so far, restored to her the fine lady nervousness that had landed her in the window of the hat shop.
Rupert laid the whip along her fat sides with bitter disfavour. She was a brute in harness, he said to himself, her blemished fetlock was uglier than he had at first thought, and even though she had yesterday schooled over two miles of country like an old stager, she was too small to carry him, and she was not, apparently, wanted to carry any one else. Here the purchase received a very disagreeable cut on the neck that interrupted her speculations as to the nature of the shadows of telegraph-posts. To have bought two useless horses in four months was pretty average bad luck. It was also pretty bad luck to have been born a fool. Reflection here became merged in the shapeless and futile fumings of a man badly in love and preposterously jealous.
Known only to the elect among entertainment promoters are the methods employed by Mrs. Carteret to float the company of The Green Coons. The fact remains that on the appointed night the chosen troupe, approximately word-perfect, and with spirits something chastened by stage fright, were assembled in the clerk’s room of the Enniscar Town Hall, round a large basin filled horribly with a compound of burnt cork and water.
“It’s not as bad as it looks!” said Mrs. Carteret, plunging in her hands and heroically smearing her face with a mass of black oozy matter believed to be a sponge. “It’s quite becoming if you do it thoroughly. Mind, all of you, get it well into your ears and the roots of your hair!”
The Hamiltons, giggling wildly, submitted themselves to the ministrations of Freddy Alexander, and Mrs. Carteret, appallingly transformed into a little West Indian coolie woman, applied the sponge to the shrinking Fanny Fitz.
“Will you do Mr. Gunning, Fanny?” she whispered into one of the ears that she had conscientiously blackened. “I think he’d bear it better from you!”
“I shall do nothing of the kind!” replied Fanny, with a dignity somewhat impaired by her ebon countenance and monstrous green turban.
“Why not?”
Mrs. Carteret’s small neat features seemed unnaturally sharpened, and her eyes and teeth glittered in her excitement.
“For goodness’ sake, take your awful little black face away, Mabel!” exclaimed Fanny hysterically. “It quite frightens me! I’m very angry with Mr. Gunning! I’ll tell you why some other time.”
“Well, don’t forget you’ve got to say ‘Buck up, Sambo!’ to him after he’s sung his song, and you may fight with him as much as you like afterwards,” said Mrs. Carteret, hurrying off to paint glaring vermilion mouths upon the loudly protesting Hamiltons.
During these vicissitudes, Rupert Gunning, arrayed in a green swallow-tailed calico coat, short white cotton trousers, and a skimpy nigger wig, presented a pitiful example of the humiliations which the allied forces of love and jealousy can bring upon the just. Fanny Fitz has since admitted that, in spite of the wrath that burned within her, the sight of Mr. Gunning morosely dabbing his long nose with the repulsive sponge that was shared by the troupe, almost moved her to compassion.
A pleasing impatience was already betraying itself in cat-calls and stampings from the sixpenny places, and Mrs. Carteret, flitting like a sheep dog round her flock, arranged them in couples and drove them before her on to the stage, singing in chorus, with a fair assumption of hilarity, “As we go marching through Georgia”.
For Fanny Fitz the subsequent proceedings became merged in a nightmare of blinding heat and glare, made actual only by poignant anxiety as to the length of her green skirt. The hope that she might be unrecognisable was shattered by the yell of “More power, Miss Fanny!” that crested the thunderous encore evoked by her hornpipe with Captain Carteret, and the question of the skirt was decided by the fact that her aunts, in the front row, firmly perused their programmes from the beginning of her dance to its conclusion.
The entertainment went with varying success after the manner of its kind. The local hits and personal allusions, toilfully compiled and ardently believed in, were received in damping silence, while Rupert Gunning’s song, of the truculent order dedicated to basses, and sung by him with a face that would have done credit to Othello, received an ovation that confirmed Captain Carteret in his contempt for country audiences. The performance raged to its close in a “Cake Walk,” to the inspiring strains of “Razors a-flying through the air,” and the curtain fell on what the Enniscar Independent described cryptically as “a tout ensemble à la conversazione that was refreshingly unique”.
“Five minutes more and I should have had heat apoplexy!” said Mrs. Carteret, hurling her turban across the clerk’s room, “but it all went splendidly! Empty that basin out of the window, somebody, and give me the vaseline. The last time I blacked my face it was covered with red spots for a week afterwards because I used soap instead of vaseline!”
Rupert Gunning approached Fanny with an open note in his hand.
“I’ve had this from your aunt,” he said, handing it to her; it was decorated with sooty thumb marks, to which Fanny’s black claw contributed a fresh batch as she took it, but she read it without a smile.
It was to the effect that the heat of the room had been too much for the elder Misses Fitzroy, and they had therefore gone home, but as Mr. Gunning had to pass their gate perhaps he would be kind enough to drive their niece home.
“Oh—” said Fanny, in tones from which dismay was by no means eliminated. “How stupid of Aunt Rachel!”
“I’m afraid there seems no way out of it for you,” said Rupert offendedly.
A glimpse of their two wrathful black faces in the glass abruptly checked Fanny’s desire to say something crushing. At this juncture she would rather have died than laughed.
Burnt cork is not lightly to be removed at the first essay, and when, half an hour later, Fanny Fitz, with a pale and dirty face, stood under the dismal light of the lamp outside the Town Hall, waiting for Mr. Gunning’s trap, she had the pleasure of hearing a woman among the loiterers say compassionately:—
“God help her, the crayture! She looks like a servant that’d be bate out with work!”
Mr. Gunning’s new cob stood hearkening with flickering ears to the various commotions of the street—she understood them all perfectly well, but her soul being unlifted by reason of oats, she chose to resent them as impertinences. Having tolerated with difficulty the instalment of Miss Fitzroy in the trap, she started with a flourish, and pulled hard until clear of the town and its flaring public-houses. On the open road, with nothing more enlivening than the dark hills, half-seen in the light of the rising moon, she settled down. Rupert turned to his silent companion. He had become aware during the evening that something was wrong, and his own sense of injury was frightened into the background.
“What do you think of my new buy?” he said pacifically, “she’s a good goer, isn’t she?”
“Very,” replied Fanny.
Silence again reigned. One or two further attempts at conversation met with equal discouragement. The miles passed by. At length, as the mare slackened to walk up a long hill, Rupert said with a voice that had the shake of pent-up injury:—
“I’ve been wondering what I’ve done to be put into Coventry like this!”
“I thought you probably wouldn’t care to speak to me!” was Fanny’s astonishing reply, delivered in tones of ice.
“I!” he stammered, “not care to speak to you! You ought to know—”
“Yes, indeed, I do know!” broke in Fanny, passing from the frigid to the torrid zone with characteristic speed, “I know what a failure your horse-dealing at the Dublin Show was! I’ve heard how you bought my mare, and had her shot the same night, because you wouldn’t take the trouble even to go and look at her after the poor little thing was hurt! Oh! I can’t bear even to think of it!”
Rupert Gunning remained abjectly and dumfoundedly silent.
“And then,” continued Fanny, whirling on to the final point of her indictment, “you pretended to Captain Carteret and me that the horse you had bought was ‘a common brute,’ a cob for carting, and you said the other night that you had made a fool of yourself over it! I didn’t know then all about it, but I do now. Captain Carteret heard about it from the dealer in Dublin. Even the dealer said it was a pity you hadn’t given the mare a chance!”
“It’s all perfectly true,” said Rupert, in a low voice.
A soft answer, so far from turning away wrath, frequently inflames it.
“Then I think there’s no more to be said!” said Fanny hotly.
There was silence. They had reached the top of the hill, and the grey mare began to trot.
“Well, there’s just one thing I should like to say,” said Rupert awkwardly, his breath coming very short, “I couldn’t help everything going wrong about the mare. It was just my bad luck. I only bought her to please you. They told me she couldn’t get right after the accident. What was the good of my going to look at her? I wanted to cross in the boat with you. Whatever I did I did for you. I would do anything in the world for you—”
It was at this crucial moment that there arose suddenly from the dim grey road in front of them a slightly greyer shadow, a shadow that limped amid the clanking of chains. The Connemara mare, now masquerading as a County Cork cob, asked for nothing better. If it were a ghost, she was legitimately entitled to flee from it; if, as was indeed the case, it was a donkey, she made a point of shying at donkeys. She realised that, by a singular stroke of good fortune, the reins were lying in loops on her back.
A snort, a sideways bound, a couple of gleeful kicks on the dashboard, and she was away at full gallop, with one rein under her tail, and a pleasant open road before her.
“It’s all right!” said Rupert, recovering his balance by a hair-breadth, and feeling in his heart that it was all wrong, “the Craffroe Hill will stop her. Hold on to the rail.”
Fanny said nothing. It was, indeed, all that she could do to keep her seat in the trap, with which the rushing road was playing cup and ball; she was, besides, not one of the people who are conversational in emergencies. When an animal, as active and artful as the Connemara mare, is going at some twenty miles an hour, with one of the reins under its tail, endeavours to detach the rein are not much avail, and when the tail is still tender from recent docking, they are a good deal worse than useless. Having twice nearly fallen on his head, Rupert abandoned the attempt and prayed for the long stiff ascent of the Craffroe Hill.
It came swiftly out of the grey moonlight. At its foot another road forked to the right; instead of facing the hill that led to home and stable, the mare swung into the side road, with one wheel up on the grass, and the cushions slipping from the seat, and Rupert, just saving the situation with the left rein that remained to him, said to himself that they were in for a bad business.
For a mile they swung and clattered along it, with the wind striking and splitting against their faces like a cold and tearing stream of water; a light wavered and disappeared across the pallid fields to the left, a group of starveling trees on a hill slid up into the skyline behind them, and at last it seemed as if some touch of self-control, some suggestion of having had enough of the joke, was shortening the mare’s grasping stride. The trap pitched more than ever as she came up into the shafts and back into her harness; she twisted suddenly to the left into a narrow lane, cleared the corner by an impossible fluke, and Fanny Fitz was hurled ignominiously on to Rupert Gunning’s lap. Long briars and twigs struck them from either side, the trap bumped in craggy ruts and slashed through wide puddles, then reeled irretrievably over a heap of stones and tilted against the low bank to the right.
Without any exact knowledge of how she got there, Fanny found herself on her hands and knees in a clump of bracken on top of the bank; Rupert was already picking himself out of rugs and other jetsam in the field below her, and the mare was proceeding up the lane at a disorderly trot, having jerked the trap on to its legs again from its reclining position.
Fanny was lifted down into the lane; she told him that she was not hurt, but her knees shook, her hands trembled, and the arm that was round her tightened its clasp in silence. When a man is strongly moved by tenderness and anxiety and relief, he can say little to make it known; he need not—it is known beyond all telling by the one other person whom it concerns. She felt suddenly that she was safe, that his heart was torn for her sake, and that the tension of the last ten minutes had been great. It went through her with a pang, and her head swayed against his arm. In a moment she felt his lips on her hair, on her temple, and the oldest, the most familiar of all words of endearment was spoken at her ear. She recovered herself, but in a new world. She tried to walk on up the lane, but stumbled in the deep ruts and found the supporting arm again ready at need. She did not resist it.
A shrill neigh arose in front of them. The mare had pulled up at a closed gate, and was apparently apostrophising some low farm buildings beyond it. A dog barked hysterically, the door of a cowshed burst open, and a man came out with a lantern.
“Oh, I know now where we are!” cried Fanny wildly, “it’s Johnny Connolly’s! Oh, Johnny, Johnny Connolly, we’ve been run away with!”
“For God’s sake!” responded Johnny Connolly, standing stock still in his amazement, “is that Miss Fanny?”
“Get hold of the mare,” shouted Rupert, “or she’ll jump the gate!”
Johnny Connolly advanced, still calling upon his God, and the mare uttered a low but vehement neigh.
“Ye’re deshtroyed, Miss Fanny! And Mr. Gunning, the Lord save us! Ye’re killed the two o’ ye! What happened ye at all? Woa, gerr’l, woa, gerrlie! Ye’d say she knew me, the crayture.”
The mare was rubbing her dripping face and neck against the farmer’s shoulder, with hoarse whispering snorts of recognition and pleasure. He held his lantern high to look at her.
“Musha, why wouldn’t she know me!” he roared, “sure it’s yer own mare, Miss Fanny! ’Tis the Connemara mare I thrained for ye! And may the divil sweep and roast thim that has it told through all the counthry that she was killed!”