A Sandy Row Skirmish
Sandy row, as everybody knows, is the Mecca and Medina of Orangeism in Belfast, the sacred shrine of its votaries, the land of promise of its true-blue tramps, the camp of its generals, the temple of its apostles, the sanctuary and haven of its political refugees, when fleeing from prospective fines of forty shillings and costs for holy war-cries of “To h—with the Pope.” If a Papist foot should dare pollute its consecrated—whiskey consecrated—shore, that Papist foot would be carrying a head that was in danger of having what little brains it contained undergo a process of amalgamation with the oleaginous slush of the desecrated pavement.
In that home of Hobah has resided for many years and seasons one Green—Billy Green, so called after the hero of glorious, pious, and immortal memory, in whose saintly footsteps he has endeavored to tread as far as his post of grand master of L. O. L. 1111, “Spartan Schomberg,” would permit. But, alas! brave Billy has been wounded in more numerous and more tender portions of his constantly constitutional anatomy than was ever his regal namesake in the course of all his campaigns; and, worst of all, his fate excites no charitable commiseration or solacing sympathy in his lodge or among his neighbors, but only provokes tantalizing titters and lacerating laughter. He has suffered, he still suffers, he is likely to continue suffering for half a century or so, but not, oh, not for the cause.
In his ardent devotion to his principles and his lodge, and also in consideration of a certain weekly honorarium, Billy fitted up in his back yard an outhouse in which he allowed to be stored their sashes, banners, and regalia for processions, and their bludgeons, blunderbusses, and pokers intended for political arguments with National League invaders.
For three months in this shanty L. O. L. 1111 guarded its sacred banners and kept its powder dry. However, during the past few weeks, an assemblage of peace disturbers, who paid no rent, subscribed to no loyal principles, marched in no patriotic processions, and joined in no salubrious Tory scrimmages, have had illegal possession of that cabin.
During that time its roof has borne the erring feet of all the cats of Sandy Row. There has been a convocation, a conference, a mass meeting, a howling congregation of cats there from midnight to dawn, who have given musical entertainments of excruciating variety and such persistent continuity that they have never indulged in even ten minutes’ interval for refreshments. About ten minutes to twelve a tortoise-shell tenor gives the signal for devotions by a prolonged squeal in G sharp. Then a short-tailed Persian soprano joins in, and there is a five minutes’ duet, to which a Highland bagpipes, a Savoyard hurdy-gurdy, or Red Shirt’s war-whoop is the music of the spheres. When they have reached the most horrifying part of this performance a black demon with the influenza throws in a basso-profundo remonstrance, and a gray tabby with the catarrh serenades the moon in an agonizing solo, with scales and variations. Then the midnight feline wanderers lift up their voices in scores (numerically and vocally), and a competitive chorus begins, into which each cat seems to throw its very vitals, and the air trembles with heart-rending screeches, and yells, and spits, and growls, and hisses, and whistles, and cries for help, and moans, and groans, and raspings; and the twins in Jones’s, next door, waken up and join in the medley, and Mr. and Mrs. Jones try to soothe them to slumber with soul-sickening lullabies; and the lodgers put their heads out of the window, and swear at the cats in baritone and a North of Ireland accent; and all the dogs in the street join in with diversified barks and carefully assorted yelps, from the shrill treble of the parson’s Skye terrier to the thundering tones of the grocer’s mastiff, while the milkman’s jackass kicks the panel out of his stable door, and, putting his head through, ejaculates a hoarse demand for thistles in such a diabolical bray that you think chaos has come again, and Pandemonium reigns supreme.
From beginning to end, from the initial bar to the final cadenza, there isn’t a pianissimo movement in the whole operatic celebration, or symphony, or overture, or musical festival, or whatever you like to call it. It’s all fortissimo, awfully fortissimo, say about four-hundred-and-forty-four tissimo.
The good men and true of Sandy Row determined that they would submit to this invasion of their rights, this outrage upon their dignity, this systematic suppression of their slumbers, no longer. The amount of old boots, stray bottles, broken candlesticks, and used-up culinary utensils with which those cats had been bombarded would have established a flourishing marine store business, but these munitions of war had been exhausted without disabling a single cat. It was evident that desperate measures were necessary to restore law and order in Green’s back yard. They were adopted.
Unfortunately for Green, his neighbors acted in skirmishing order—each man on his own account; no general plan of organization; no commander—a kind of guerilla warfare, in fact, was to be waged on the melodiously maddening marauders!
Jones got a blunderbuss and loaded it to the muzzle with broken glass, rusty nails, buckshot, and darning needles.
Tomlinson, the tailor, carted in a load of half-bricks and paving stones, and piled them up in his bedroom for action.
The grocer laid a three-inch hose on to the pipe in his scullery, and completed scientific arrangements for a powerful pressure.
Poor Green himself, whose repeated failures from the back window as a marksman had disgusted him with that method of attack, got a long cavalry sword, and determined to tackle the enemy with cold steel.
Alas! there was no preliminary consultation. Why, oh, why, was not Lord Rossmore there to direct the strategy of these noble defenders of homes and altars, civil and religious liberty, and uninterrupted snores?
About 11.30 on New-Year’s night, the quadrupedal Pattis and Nicolinis commenced their usual grand concert. Green waited patiently until they had got through the preliminary solos, but when they commenced some Wagnerian horror in chorus, he slipped out silently, in wrath and his night-shirt, and crept, sword in hand, towards the fatal shed.
Almost at the same moment three neighboring windows were noiselessly raised, and preparations for three terrific onslaughts were rapidly perfected.
It was dark,—so dark that the gleaming orbits of the phosphorescent choristers could scarcely be discerned, and the artillerists and rifle rangers had little but the mortifying music to direct their deadly aim.
Suddenly that ceased. The videttes of the caterwauling corps had caught a glimpse of Green’s nightgown as it was floating and fluttering gracefully in the winter breeze. In an instant, however, mounting a step-ladder, he was amongst them; and as the sabre of his sire whirled round him in vengeful sweeps, stabs, slashes, and scintillations, a hundred expressions of feline astonishment, fear, pain, expostulation, and rage burst like a tornado from the lungs of a hundred different cats, and the concentrated essence of their three months’ lyrical training surged through their teeth in one stupendous, ear-splitting, paralyzing, five-hundred-dollar prize screech.
Victory irradiated the manly brow of Green with a mystic halo; but alas, like Wolfe at Quebec, or Nelson at Trafalgar, he was fated to fall in the hour of his triumph, for just then a jagged brick, hurled by Tomlinson with the velocity of a bombshell, caught him in the small of the back, a washing-mug, donated to the general good by the Roman matron spirit of Mrs. T., was splintered into fragments on his head, a shower of sharp-pointed paving-stones rattled about his ribs, and when he turned round to scream “Cease Firing,” a three-inch Niagara from the grocery caught him square in the mouth, and tumbled him head over heels off the shed. As he was wheeling in an insane somersault through the air, bang! went Jones’s blunderbuss, and it seemed to Green as if all the cats had suddenly combined in a ferocious and fiendish charge upon his person, and were clawing him in about ten million directions.
The doctors have been exploring his carcass ever since, and striking new veins of scrap-iron and lead at every excavation. The nurses at the Northern Hospital say that no such thrilling sight has ever been witnessed in that institution in their experience as is afforded by the spectacle of one surgeon taking nails out of his legs with a pair of pincers, while another operates on his shoulder with a screw-driver, and the third man threads the eyes of protruding needles and draws them out by the gross. It is the general opinion among these professional men that to clear him out thoroughly they want a laborer or two with pickaxes and shovels.
Green himself vows that, if he ever recovers, he will quit L. O. L. 1111 forever. When the rank and file can’t tell the difference between a tom-cat and a grand master, it’s time to vacate the latter post. He thinks the government is very remiss in allowing the Orangemen to retain their weapons. If Jones don’t get three years under the Crimes Act for carrying arms in a proclaimed district and perforating a loyal hide with the contents of a tinker’s budget—why, he’ll join the Fenians, that’s all. They have one motto he appreciates:—
WHETHER on the scaffold high,
Or in the battle’s van,
The fittest place for man to die
Is where he dies for man.
That’s decent. It sounds a great deal better than dying on the top of an old shed in a dirty back yard for a lot of confounded cats. But he’s not going to die if he knows it. He don’t want the poet laureate of L. O. L. 1111 to let himself loose on his tombstone in this fashion:—
Here lies the body of Billy Green,
As true a grand master as ever was seen,
But although he was green and decidedly fat,
He was shot with tenpenny nails, pellets, broken glass,
false teeth, pipe-shanks, darning needles, and a
lot of undiscovered ironmongery, in mistake for a
measly, mangy, stumpy-tailed skeleton of a tortoise-shell
cat.