Why Smithers Resigned
So you wish to know why Smithers resigned his position as head constable of Kilmacswiggin? Well, as the night’s young, and I’m not particularly busy, I don’t mind spending half an hour or so in telling you the story.
You see, during the time of the Land League troubles, some of the landlords round here, knowing that they had little reason to expect any overwhelming affection from their tenants, and finding their sources of income, if not castles in the air, at least rents in the clouds, for bad luck to the penny they could collect, began to get uneasy and scared, and thought it would be a wise thing to have a dozen or so more police in the parish, though it’s too many of the same streelers were quartered on us to begin with. The district, barring that the farmers kept their money in their own pockets and used strong language when the rent collector called on them, was quiet, and peaceable, and could have been easily managed without a peeler at all, but the landlords wanted bad to force their rents out of the poor peasantry or take their land from them, as they used to do in the cruel times before the League stepped in and put an extinguisher on their proceedings.
So, as the people couldn’t be tempted to make fools of themselves by playing into the land-grabbers’ hands by such frolics as popping at their agents with old blunderbusses from the back of a hedge, or setting fire to process servers’ hayricks, the landlords began to manufacture outrages on their own account. They wrote threatening letters to each other by the bushel, with skulls, and crossbones, and coffins for date lines, and blood, and blasphemy, and murder reeking in every sentence, and pikes, and guns, and pistols below the signature of “Captain Moonlight” or “Rory of the Hills,” to show how terribly in earnest they were. Oh, they constructed those epistles in the orthodox manner recognized by Mr. Trench in his “Recollections of an Irish Landlord,” and made familiar to the world by the regiments of English special correspondents that were then roaming and perambulating Ireland like journalistic ghouls or body-snatchers looking for corpses to be dissected in the columns of their respective organs. They wrote, too, blood-curdling, gruesome, harrowing narratives of the horrors of life in Kilmacswiggin for the London papers, till one of the Orange members from the North drew attention in the House to what he called the terrible state of affairs in that parish, and, though Healy and Biggar contradicted his assertions, and laughed at his lugubrious forebodings of massacre, rapine, blood, and flame if a whole corps d’armee and a part of the channel squadron wasn’t immediately sent to occupy the bogs and ditches there, the then chief secretary, Buckshot Forster, promised to see into the matter, and he wrote to the head inspector in Dublin, Col. Hillier, and Hillier sent a letter down to Smithers that made that head constable’s ears tingle. He as much as told Smithers that if he didn’t arrest somebody for something or other he might take out his walking papers. Of course Smithers was in a quandary. He’d willingly have arrested the whole parish, man, woman, and child, if he could have found the shadow of an excuse, but he couldn’t, poor fellow.
Just at this time it happened that Pat Moran, at the far end of the parish, was engaged in a little business speculation on his own account, in the shape of a brisk trade in the finest poteen that was ever distilled in these parts—and that’s a big word. The still was away somewhere in the mountains,—it may be there yet, so I shan’t go into geographical details,—and Pat was employed as a kind of messenger between the boys there and some of the hotel keepers and grocers in the towns and villages round who don’t believe in contributing any more to the British revenue than they can help. Maybe he visited me sometimes, and maybe he didn’t. That’s neither here nor there. I may just observe that I never pay taxes willingly. You can take what you like out of that.
Some of Pat’s neighbors grew envious of the good luck he was having, and one day some sleeveen—it was never found out who the stag was—came into the barracks and told Head Constable Smithers that Pat Moran had guns and powder and shot hid away in his old cabin. The sly rogue knew that if he complained to Smithers that it was merely illicit whiskey Pat had, the head constable wouldn’t give a thraneen about the matter, and as like as not would let Pat alone. But the mention of contraband material of war worked up Smithers like a touch of electricity. Why, if he could manage to seize a few rifles and a cartridge or two of dynamite, his fortune was made, his position assured. There was no position he might not attain. He would succeed Clifford Lloyd. He might be made a K. C. B. Dim visions of a peerage even floated through his brain.
In five minutes he was en route for Pat’s, with a dozen constabulary men at his back. How Pat found out he was coming I can’t say; but he did find out while Smithers was still half a mile away. Pat had a hurried consultation with his mother. He had no time to shift a keg of poteen which was in the house, but they hit upon a ruse which might succeed, and at any rate couldn’t make things worse. They wheeled the keg of whiskey under the bed in the back room, and in another minute Pat was lying on the bed with his head enveloped in a Tara hill of bandages, awaiting the crisis.
The crisis came. So did the police. In fact, they came together. The search began. The peelers explored the teapot and kettle for rifles, and seemed disappointed when they found no artillery in the skillet. They sounded the hearthstone, analyzed the cradle, held a sort of post-mortem examination on the furniture, and poked the roof so effectually with their bayonets that it resembled the lid of a pepper-box. The commander went so far as to make the youngest of the force ascend the chimney. He found nothing there but soot. However, he brought enough of that back with him to satisfy his most ardent desires.
Then Smithers prepared to enter the back room, but the old woman clung to his arm and tearfully beseeched him not to do so.
“Ha! ha!” cried the enterprising officer, bursting the door in with his foot, “I smell a rat,” and he rushed into the room, where the first object to meet his gaze was a head raised languidly from the pillow, and poulticed and bandaged to the size of a champion squash or watermelon.
“Oh, wirra! wirra!” sobbed the old woman; “you’ve kilt my boy. He’s very bad with small-pox, ochone! ochone! and the doctor said only this blissid mornin’ that he wasn’t to be wuck at all, at all. It only bruck on him last night, an’ it’s a beautiful pock you have, avick machree; and now—”
But that head constable had leaped ten feet backward clean out of the house, and was licking all previous racing records up the boreen, with his handkerchief to his nose, and his followers tearing after him like a pack of hungry fox-hounds. Talk of Myers, the great Yankee runner! He would have been left in the cold that day.
You may be sure it wasn’t long before the whole story of how Moran fooled the head constable went the rounds of the country. It came to Smithers’ own ears at last, and from that hour he was an altered man. He would retire into the woods to vent his feelings, and people who heard him sometimes say that his oaths would lift the hair on the scalp of an Egyptian mummy. The more he brooded, the more he cursed. There never was a curse, English, Irish, or American, that he didn’t get hold of, and he invented such a lot of brand-new, original, comic, pathetic, eccentric, square, round, oblong, elliptical, severely plain, and highly ornamented or convoluted profane pyrotechnics that a perfume of sulphur and brimstone seemed to hang around his conversation. The habit so crept upon him that when he wished at last to shake it off, he couldn’t. His tongue had grown so accustomed to decorative blasphemy that it could utter nothing else. It became a matter of anxious consideration to him how he was to eliminate from his conversation the picturesque adjectives it would under ordinary circumstances have taken him thirty years to accumulate. He consulted a friendly sub. “Smith,” said he, “I have a [powerful expletive not to be found in any polite guide to conversation] bad habit.”
“Only one,” said his brother official; “that’s nothing. A man who has been on the force ten years and has only acquired one bad habit, has wasted his opportunities.”
“Well, but this is one that is likely to get me into a blank blank [double-barrelled adjective] muss in society some fine day. You see I can’t speak ten words without cursing. If I can, —— my eyes!” [ophthalmic operation not recognized in modern surgery].
“Ah,” said Harvey Duff 2; “you must repress that custom. It’s low.”
“How the —— [distant region occasionally alluded to in sermons and theological disquisitions] can I?”
His colleague cogitated. When a policeman cogitates, there are enough scintillations of intellect flashing round to illuminate the interior of an Egyptian pyramid. The result of his meditation was his advice to Smithers to take a pocket-book, and every time he transgressed to take a note of the offence. In twelve hours he had filled up two three-hundred-page memorandum books, and used up a dozen and a half of pencils. It became irksome pottering round with a note-book in one hand and a stick of lead in the other entering everlasting ejaculations; he wore the skin off his fingers, and, besides, he couldn’t keep up with himself, and he missed cataloguing a few score emphatic expressions every five minutes. He adopted another plan. He arranged with his wife that every time he articulated forbidden sounds he should hand her over a penny. He provided himself with £5 in coppers the first day of the arrangement, but he hadn’t a red cent by noon, and in three days he had parted with all his ready cash, made over his next year’s income, and didn’t even own the boots he stood in. Then he agreed with his better half that she should pluck a hair out of his head every time he offended, and now if there’s a more bald-headed man to be found on this side the day of judgment, I’m willing to turn cannibal, and eat him.
His habit attracted the attention of his superiors at last, when his report began to resemble his verbal utterances, and they reprimanded him sharply. He replied in a letter that is preserved in the official archives as a sample of what the English language is capable of. The reading of it drove two Castle authorities mad, and sent the third into a galloping consumption. Well, that’s how Smithers left the force. Strange story, ain’t it?