Chapter I

When people go away from Clonmalroan, they go away, as a rule, very thoroughly. Their absence is an absence more complete than that of other persons from other places less out of the world and behind the times. Once any traveller’s departing form has been beheld pass round the turn in the deep-banked boreen, or watched dwindle into a speck on the straight road streaking the wide bog-land, the chances are that little news of him will reach his former neighbours, till some day that same speck is espied growing into human shape again along that same road, and acquaintances remark to each other in the course of conversation: “And so big Pat Byrne”--to put case--“is afther comin’ home wid himself.”

For Clonmalroan is but meagrely provided with the means of communication, and its inhabitants are mostly ill able to make use even of those which it possesses. It is as yet untouched by the wonderful thread of wire, which has put a running-string through the web of human lives--puckered up in a moment from Hong Kong to Cambridge--and the shining metals with their rush and roar, still halting many miles short of it, are lamely prolonged by the wheel tracks of the jiggeting side-car with a slenderly filled mail-bag on the well. The letters it brings are commonly brief and obscure, the difficult product of certainly no excessive ease in composition. They convey little more than an intimation of continued existence led among surroundings only mistily imagined by readers whose own journeying has lain within the radius of a day’s tramp. Beyond that limit everything is vague and dim, a mysterious region from whence the absentee seems not so very much more likely to reappear than do those who have been seen off with a wake and a keen. Not that such returns even as these are by any means unheard of at Clonmalroan. Would the friends of Michael Larissy, who duly waked and buried him three years ago, aver that they have never set eyes on him since? Or ask anybody, almost, in the parish, why he wouldn’t take half a crown to be crossing after nightfall that bridge over the Rosbride River near Sallinbeg, where a poor tinker-woman was swept away and drowned in a flood some few autumns back. Then, everybody knows that several of the Denny family have “walked.” Therefore the assertion: “It was himself or his ghost,” is not regarded as containing a very unequally balanced hypothesis, especially if “himself” has been supposed away sojourning in those unknown and imperfectly reported lands.

But there came one autumn when far and far away from Clonmalroan began to happen events which had such a heart-burning interest for many of its people that some news of them did penetrate the densest barriers of ignorant resourcelessness. Mere sparks, perhaps, as it were blown from some huge conflagration, whose distant flames make only a sullen glare behind a smothering smoke-fog. Yet a spark may blacken a body’s home over her head, or sear the sight out of her eyes. A great war was thundering and lightening across wide seas, under alien skies: a war which in no way behoved Clonmalroan, and which might have stormed itself out, little heeded there, had it not been for the circumstance that Pat and Micky and their brethren are “terrible lads for goin’ an’ listin’,” and that the regiment they had for the most part joined was understood to be “up at the forefront of everythin’.”

After a while, moreover, it was not those wild, irresponsible boys alone that this lurid cloud engulfed in threatening glooms. The reserves were called out, people said, at first without any clear notion of what the phrase might signify, but soon perceiving too plainly how it meant that men whose soldiering days were long past and nearly forgotten, except just the little pension, must now break the ties they had peaceably formed and once more set forth campaigning. Murtagh O’Connor, of Naracor, had to leave a wife and five children on his bit of a holding “in a quare distraction,” his friends reported, “for when he was killed, what could happen them but the Union?” And many another household on that countryside had to consider the same woeful question.

So all round and about Clonmalroan there came to be an intense craving for the latest war intelligence. Never had newspapers been in such request. At Donnelly’s bar the _Freeman_ and the _Independent_ were as badly tattered as strips of ill-preserved papyri by the end of an evening’s reading. The Widdy Gallaher “would be walkin’ wild about the country the len’th of the day,” folk said, “for the sight of a one. Be raison,” they added, “of her two sons.” And another illiterate and sceptical old Mrs Linders for similar reasons “was tormintin’ everybody to read her out every word there would be on the paper, even if they tould her ’twas only the market prices.” The elders, indeed, were often at a disadvantage in this way, owing to the inferior educational arrangements under which their generation had risen. Big Brian O’Flaherty, who had an independent and ambitious spirit, demeaned himself to set about learning the alphabet from that little spalpeen, Larry M‘Crilly, in hopes of subsequently reading his news “and no thanks to anybody.” But Larry was impatient and sarcastic, and Big Brian slow-witted and irascible, so the course of lessons one day ended abruptly with “a clout on the head” to the taunting teacher. With more modest aspirations old John Connellan got the schoolmaster to print for him, “the way it would be on the paper,” the name of Private Patrick Connellan; and he might be seen on many a cold day sitting out on the rimy grass bank before his dark door, for the sake of the light, and comparing with this scrap the unintelligible lines of the _Independent_. It was very slow, puzzling work, since the columns were many and lengthy, and his eyes none of the best. Old John seldom could retain the loan of the wide sheets long enough to assure himself completely that his grandson’s name was happily absent from them. For no news was certainly the best that could be looked for from the papers. What, indeed, was likely to happen a lad save one of those casualties which were so briefly recorded. “Och, woman dear, they’re sayin’ at Donnelly’s that there’s a terrible sight of officers kilt on the _Freeman_ to-day, so there’ll prisently be a cruel big list of the rank and file. God be good to us all, woman dear--and poor Micky and the rest. I’m wonderin’ will they be apt to print it to-morra.”

Thus the winter, always at Clonmalroan a season when cares and losses are rife, was beyond its wont harassed and haunted by fear and sorrow. The calling away on active service of the Captain from the Big House was one of its incidents that tended to deepen the general depression. His stalwart form and sturdy stride and off-hand greeting were missed going to and fro, and much commiseration was directed to “poor Lady Winifred, and she not so long married, the crathur, left all alone by herself up at the Big House.”