IN CLAY 
 AND IN BRONZE 
 
 BRINSLEY MAcNAMARA
 
 IN CLAY AND IN BRONZE
 
 IN CLAY AND IN 
 BRONZE 
 
 A STUDY IN PERSONALITY 
 
 BY 
 
 BRINSLEY MACNAMARA 
 
 NEW YORK 
 BRENTANO'S 
 
 PUBLISHERS
 
 Copyright, 1920, by 
 BRENTANO'S 
 
 All rights reserved 
 
 MADE IN I). S. A.
 
 TO THE MEMORY 
 OF M. 
 
 2057979
 
 BOOK I. THE PEASANT
 
 IN CLAY AND IN BRONZE 
 
 BOOK I 
 THE PEASANT 
 
 THE gloom of the March evening was beginning to 
 creep in over the land as Martin Duignan unyoked 
 his horses from the plough and, coming out through a 
 narrow gap where the mud slushed up about his boots, 
 entered the long boreen which led to his mother's 
 house. He walked with head downcast like the horses 
 who pounded along doggedly, the dirty hair of their 
 fetlocks falling down over their clay-encrusted hoofs. 
 The two horses and the man were beating a broken re- 
 treat before the forces of the Earth. This was the life of 
 the horses and the life of him who had to work like a 
 horse their sudden, brave effort of the morning, the 
 long furrows and the sun in their faces and the rise 
 of the hill. Then the ending to stumble home like 
 this when the night was falling down and creeping in 
 over Glannanea. 
 
 Yet upon this very evening it might be that there 
 was some kind of a dream shining in the mind of Martin 
 Duignan. There seemed to be something in him that 
 the clay had not yet subdued and it came thus to life 
 when the labour of the fields was done. As he took his 
 way so quietly now by the old churchyard of Glannanea 
 a little shudder passed through his frame. He could
 
 2 IN CLAY AND IN BRONZE 
 
 never forget when as a boy he had passed there after 
 the great storm of 1903 and seen where even the graves 
 of the dead had been broken, for the fallen trees Jiad 
 uprooted the yellow skulls of some long dead kinsmen, 
 and that near by a frightened ewe had died in giving 
 birth to her two lambs. . . The place had always 
 looked so lonely in the fading light. He was past the 
 age when the tales of old cronies could have effect and 
 make him suddenly fearful, but for him there had 
 always lingered something of terror in the aspect of 
 the tombstones. For often, while he was in the fields, 
 the chapel bell of Glannidan would ring out and a little 
 later down this way he would see the poor coffin 
 borne. . . It was the funeral of some old man whose 
 existence people had scarcely noticed, some ancient, 
 maybe, who had died as he leaned upon his stick looking 
 into the forge fire of an evening. . . At such times 
 and as now a passage from a poem would come into 
 his mind: 
 
 "Where heaves the turf in many a mouldering heap 
 The rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep." 
 
 It was something he remembered clearly from his 
 scanty schooldays. That and Goldsmith's poem of 
 The Deserted Village. Sometimes he would see the 
 churchyard of Glannanea enlarged beyond the little 
 stir of beauty the lines of the poem would cause in his 
 mind. Then a curious regret and a dumb longing to 
 know more would come to him, and he would pause, 
 whether at his labour in the fields or on his way home 
 down the boreen, to wonder, the horses looking at him 
 pityingly with their big eyes. . . 
 
 Now after a few lapses of this kind Martin came
 
 THE PEASANT 3 
 
 into the wide untidy yard before the long, low thatched 
 house where he lived with his mother and sister. Mary 
 Duignan came out of the house to look proudly upon 
 her horses. It was not every woman in the townland 
 who could say she was mistress of two horses, although 
 it was only quite recently that they had been able to 
 purchase the second. She was a fine woman, remark- 
 able with pride in the possession of land. This was 
 how she would strike one as she came out of her own 
 house, her bosom great before her in the twilight. . . 
 From beneath her apron she took a bottle of holy 
 water with which it was her evident intention to be- 
 sprinkle the horses' drink and feed and bedding, so that 
 they might remain alive and strong to labour on the 
 morrow. This was a precaution taken in the hope of 
 averting a calamity which sometimes happened in the 
 townland of Glannanea, a scourge which sometimes 
 came and swept away a man's cattle and horses and 
 sheep. Many years before a curse had been put upon 
 the place by a holy priest who was here scandalised 
 and silenced. It seemed a very terrible thing that the 
 poor, dumb, patient beasts should be made to suffer 
 from generation to generation for something that had 
 once been said about a holy man to satisfy the hunger 
 of lying tongues. It was a great punishment. The 
 death of one of their Christian selves did not appear 
 half so terrible since their inherent belief in their own 
 holiness vouchsafed eternal glory to the dear departed. 
 But the death of one of their beasts smote them with a 
 sickening, awful feeling of loss. It was an event which 
 denied them even the satisfaction of a certain mournful, 
 morbid pride that was the constant comfort of hearing 
 the priest reading out during the interval at Mass
 
 4 IN CLAY AND IN BRONZE 
 
 "Your prayers are requested for the repose of the soul 
 
 of ." There was something which always stirred 
 
 them in the public announcement of the deceased's 
 name. And there might also be the accompanying 
 satisfaction of bragging about the cost of the solid, 
 brass-mounted coffin or the amount of whiskey that 
 the mourners had drunk at the wake. . . Even nothing 
 like this as the outcome of the curse, but just the dead 
 beast in the field or stable with the dew of death upon 
 its eyes and a few men muttering something about 
 "the will of God." The digging of the grave in a 
 lonely quarter of the bit of land and the journey to 
 Glannidan for a sup of drink to help them forget. . . 
 Later the thick, enclosing gloom as they sat in some 
 dark corner of the widow Kelly's pub, drinking a pint 
 or two while people were whispering all round: 
 
 "The poor, unfortunate crew, sure they're after 
 burying their grand mare this evening, bad luck to the 
 lie in it." 
 
 In the light of all this it did not seem strange that 
 Mary Duignan should be anxious about her horses. 
 She was troubled by a double annoyance now since 
 they had purchased the second. . . She bent down and 
 felt their hard, sinewy forelegs in turn; then rising 
 drew her hand alternately along their sweaty, shiny 
 flanks. 
 
 "The poor things!" she said. 
 
 Martin felt hurt. The horses were more to his mother 
 than her only son. . . Such moments were frequent 
 in his life. They reached his flicker of emotion always 
 as he passed the churchyard of Glannanea and seemed 
 to tell that there existed in his breast some subtle 
 quality which separated him from the clay. And yet
 
 THE PEASANT 5 
 
 how very obediently he had taken to the land upon the 
 death of his father? He had been doing the will of 
 the household since he was sixteen, ploughing, mucking 
 daily in the clay, tending cattle, mowing, tramping to 
 distant fairs. They had prospered as a result of his 
 industry. Yet he had stood in a somewhat 
 different relation to life. His father, Arthur Duignan 
 had had a certain amount of enlightenment beyond 
 his station. When in his cups, which was often, he 
 would speak of the fine future he had planned for his 
 boy, Martin, of education and position and the fine 
 life of cities . . . and, after all, this was the result 
 of that ambition and just now his life had narrowed 
 down, a smattering of National Education that was 
 of no use to him even as a farmer, the eternal clay 
 and his poor life in a thatched house with crooked 
 walls and little windows near the village of Glannidan. 
 
 His head was bent low over his plate as he went on 
 with the half cold supper of potatoes and milk he had 
 taken from the ashes. There was little attendance 
 or consideration for him in this house. But his attention 
 was now all for the meal before him. He must be just 
 like the horses, he thought, who were now rapidly 
 munching their hay while his own mother patted their 
 necks and whispered affectionately into their ears. . . 
 At last she came in. 
 
 "Is Brigid in Glannidan this evening?" he inquired, 
 without lifting his head. 
 
 "She is then." 
 
 "She's getting to be damnable flighty, that one." 
 
 "Musha sure she only went for a few wants. She'll 
 be back in no time for she brought the bicycle." 
 
 "Aye, the bicycle!"
 
 6 IN CLAY AND IN BRONZE 
 
 "Aye, indeed!" 
 
 "A bicycle and fine dresses and an accent, I thank 
 ye, when she meets some jackeen in Glannidan. But 
 what about me, mother dear? I'm only able to 
 show myself there after dark. But I'm not much of a 
 character don't ye know? Brigid, of course, is a great 
 beauty and has to be abroad in the daylight." 
 
 "Well, and sure hasn't a poor girl to make the most 
 of herself just like a man? Sure you make the most of 
 yourself out there in the fields!" 
 
 "Aye!" 
 
 "You're a hard son, Martin. Just as your father 
 was a hard husband. A very reckless man who spent 
 the most of his time in the widow Kelly's. Ah, dear- 
 a-dear, sure he left little provision for any of us, only 
 the bit of land. Your poor little sister that looks so 
 elegant when she's dressed up. God only knows but 
 it's to Austin Fagan, the Clerk of the Union, she'll be 
 getting married to yet, your little sister." 
 
 "My little sister! I'm thinking of my end of the 
 story." 
 
 "Well, give her her fortune and she won't be bothering 
 you here." 
 
 "And where would I get a fortune for her in the name 
 of God?" 
 
 "Now if you were to get married, Martin! I'm sure 
 you'd be well able to command a fine gerrl with a nice 
 penny, and not a lassie like Lucy Flynn, the one you 
 do be after." 
 
 "You're a smart woman, mother." . . . 
 
 It was only after such a talk with his mother that 
 Martin began to feel the dumb stirrings of his 
 own will and a kind of craving flow into his heart
 
 THE PEASANT 7 
 
 and brain. Such were times when he felt some touch 
 of another ability, something that already raised him 
 beyond the tillers of the soil. . . 
 
 This diversion of his thought was interrupted by the 
 entry of Brigid. She came into the smoky kitchen 
 wheeling her bright bicycle and a look of disdain sped 
 across her face as she observed the loutish figure of 
 Martin, sitting there with his head bowed upon his bent 
 arm, as he began to brood so sullenly upon the purpose 
 of his life. She had just been speaking with Austin 
 Fagan and the immediate sense of contrast between 
 her brother and the Clerk of the Union was still present 
 in her mind. 
 
 Austin Fagan was a constant figure of admiration 
 in Glannidan. He was before all else a ladies' man, 
 a fellow who wore kid gloves, smoked expensive cigar- 
 ettes and patronized dogs and horses. He was vastly 
 contemptuous of such as Martin Duignan. He spoke 
 with a sneer of their corduroy breeches, although they 
 paid the rates out of which he was paid. Often in the 
 long, heavy period of the day a motor bicycle would 
 dash down the road from Glannidan and fervent curses 
 would rise out of the fields. 
 
 "There's Austin Fagan; the curse of hell on him! 
 He must have a quare laugh at the likes of us working 
 like this to make a gentleman of the likes of him!" 
 
 And one night Martin had seen him giggling with 
 Brian Doyle, the reporter for the Ballycidlen Gazette 
 outside Whelehan's public house. They were looking 
 over a packet of postcards. Just a short while before 
 Martin had seen them talking to his sister Brigid a 
 little way up the street. . . As the two grand young 
 men passed off into the dusk still grinning, Martin
 
 8 IN CLAY AND IN BRONZE 
 
 saw that one of the postcards had slipped from the 
 packet and looked filthy there upon the lamplit gutter 
 of the street. He picked it up and remained a long 
 time gazing upon it. . . 
 
 Just now his mother came rushing down from the 
 bedroom where she had gone to speak a word to Brigid. 
 She appeared excited. 
 
 "D'ye know what, Martin? Brigid is after being 
 invited to the St. Patrick's night dance in Glannidan 
 by no less than two young men! " 
 
 "Begad I" 
 
 "By William Moore and Austin Fagan. Of course 
 you know William is the makings of a great match for 
 any girl. His ould father is rotten with money. But 
 me bould Brigid is doing the right thing when its with 
 Austin she intends to go. There's no use in letting 
 William think too soon that I'm going to put her after 
 his money. Musha, won't it be the great night entirely 
 she'll have and isn't it the grand comfort to me to think 
 that I have a daughter so accomplished and so lucky 
 and so wise! Arrah, sure, you never could know the 
 grand piece of good fortune she'd be bringing in here 
 upon this very floor some day!" 
 
 "The devil a know you know," said Martin doggedly, 
 as he rose from his chair and lurched awkwardly out 
 of the house.
 
 THE PEASANT 
 
 II 
 
 MARTIN had been thinking of a smoke with the 
 little comfort that it brought and a curious turn 
 of reserve here manifested itself. It was part of the 
 usual attitude of a son to a parent in this part of the 
 world. A young man might come home drunk from 
 a fair and use primitive language in the hearing of his 
 mother. But he would never dare to smoke his pipe 
 in her presence. The same young man might take 
 drink for drink with his father in a public house and 
 enter into the general blasphemy of the place, but he 
 would go out into the yard to light his pipe. 
 
 Now, therefore, that Martin had moved out of the 
 presence of his mother he leaned across the boreen 
 gate pulling at his pipe in keen enjoyment and listening. 
 He could hear the sound of men coming from their 
 labour down all the distant boreens, but this sound 
 came to be replaced gradually by the heavy tramp, 
 tramp of nailed brogues down all the road into Glan- 
 nidan. There was an eager look upon the faces that 
 went by, burning out through the dusk as they went 
 down the road. It was no portion of Martin's existence 
 yet, somehow, it appeared as a comfort to the others 
 as they went on to the pubs at the end of the day. 
 They were not like him, despondent, weary, but men 
 with a purpose in life hurrying erectly along the road. 
 Their pipes too were alight, and left a dense fog of smoke 
 behind them. They seemed to be smoking in ecstasy 
 as if to produce that very thirst which was burning 
 from their tongues down into their very hearts. Soon
 
 io IN CLAY AND IN BRONZE 
 
 they would be drinking and talking as they stood by 
 the wet counters in the stinking pubs of Glannidan 
 while a great forgetfulness came upon them, a horrible 
 prelude to swinish sleep. 
 
 "There must be something in it after all," he would 
 say, but a few hours later he would be convinced of 
 its emptiness as he listened to them stuttering homeward 
 in utter degradation, bawling songs which shuddered 
 away beneath the moon into the dark stillness of the 
 bog. And as he listened to these sounds of their return 
 he would have just spent the evening with Lucy Flynn. 
 
 Lucy represented the bit of excitement which kept 
 him from Glannidan in the evenings. Step by step 
 they had been driven inevitably into this comradeship 
 of one another. His father, Arthur Duignan, had made 
 Glannidan a place of dread in the household, and one 
 to which his steps should not turn. Her father, 
 Henry Flynn, angry with his wife that she had not 
 borne him a son, had turned to warp the mind of his 
 daughter towards a mannish love for the land pro- 
 ducing something unnatural in a body that had some 
 show of comeliness, a girl who talked about cattle and 
 the crops and went through the fields like no female 
 to observe the fruiting of the earth. Even about 
 Glannidan it was as natural for a man to be a drunkard 
 as for a girl to be vain of her skin and hair and anxious 
 to buy pretty, flowered hats to adorn herself from 
 Esther Gilligan, the milliner. But the mind of Lucy 
 Flynn was all upon land and upon Martin Duignan, 
 because he had a bit of land. Continually their con- 
 versation turned curiously: 
 
 "How much did yous get for the black heifer at 
 Ballycullen fair?"
 
 THE PEASANT n 
 
 "Twenty-four ten was what my father held out for 
 and got." 
 
 "By hell, I wouldn't doubt you!" 
 
 "She was a fine baste to grow up from a bit of a 
 calf that was bought from a dealer." 
 
 "How's the turnips doing with yous this season?" 
 
 "Middling, middling, the devil a more!" 
 
 "But the praties is doing well, I suppose." 
 
 "Now d'ye know what I'm going to tell you, there's 
 nothing like the new seed!" 
 
 "The devil a thing. . . Come out here across the 
 hedge, Lucy, and give me a court!" 
 
 "Indeed then I won't. I have a pig's pot to boil 
 yet, and then mebbe I'd have to stay up a part of the 
 night for the white cow's time was up a week ago." 
 
 They would often part there and then without another 
 word beyond this outburst of agricultural tenderness, 
 and Martin would take another way through Glannidan 
 while the night was still young. Sometimes he would 
 peer in through the windows at the men drinking by 
 the wet counters. . . He would guess from the looks 
 on their faces that they were talking of the land. It 
 was the crude magic of the land that held them all 
 through the day and even now, in their hour of lesiure, 
 they could not let it out of their minds. But, as Martin 
 glimpsed those looks beyond the windows, his mind 
 would return to the comfort of Lucy Flynn. She too 
 was always talking of the land, but one night he had 
 crossed a gate between their fields and kissed her 
 fiercely upon the wet, red lips. Then he had looked 
 quietly upon her face and had felt a kind of gladness 
 from gazing upon it so soft and white amid the green 
 fields. .
 
 12 IN CLAY AND IN BRONZE 
 
 This was the little dream which lit his mean life in 
 Glannanea, but he had never a thought that his dream 
 might merge into reality. Sometimes this sense of 
 impossibility would crush in upon him with such strength 
 that he would turn away from the windows of Glannidan 
 in search of other comfort. He found it generally in 
 the little crowd of girls who passed after nightfall down 
 the secluded ways leading out of Glannidan, with their 
 hair down their backs in rich, shining plaits. They 
 would smile up into his face as they went by or across 
 their shoulders after they had gone past him. He would 
 steal after them, often for long distances down the 
 roads, yet always without speaking to them or entering 
 into their company. Their rich young bodies moving 
 gladly on their shapely limbs, the velvet whiteness 
 of their skin against the velvet darkness of the night; 
 the music of their young, pleasant voices when they 
 sang snatches of old songs, the cloudy impression which 
 their moist red lips made upon him when they smiled, 
 the wounding magic of their eyes; all these seemed to 
 melt his very being into a helpless wonder. . .
 
 THE PEASANT 13 
 
 III 
 
 IF there was little change in Martin's condition 
 from day to day his sister moving towards the 
 realisation of her beauty seemed to represent an advance 
 in the adventures of the household. The Spring was 
 flowing in over Glannanea, and as he went his way now 
 the boreen down to the tillage fields was arched loftily 
 by the morning sky and the world was always a great, 
 windy mass of illumination. There was a hush, as if 
 of wonder, upon the gray stone walls that stretched 
 away into the sleeping fields. A new day was rising 
 into strength like a giant coming out of his bed with 
 long, balmy yawns. . . To Martin there always 
 appeared a fine feeling of pleasure in leaving the house 
 when the fresh, blue smoke was like a pencil mark 
 against the fleecy sky. There was something of per- 
 petual wonder in thus hurrying forth to meet the day. 
 He was heavy of gait and heavy of look, and to all 
 outward seeming he had no great stir of thought in 
 his mind as he went down to the fields. Through a 
 break in the trees he could always see where the newly 
 turned earth was fresh and red. . . At intervals he 
 would meet people upon the way, drovers, tramps and 
 men of pride and substance. The men of cattle did 
 not seem to dislike this young man who wore the appear- 
 ance of a farmer. They would stop to talk with Martin 
 of their cattle and the prospect of the prices at Bally- 
 cullen fair, while about them stretched far away the 
 level, lifeless fields. 
 "Well, begad, 'tis a grand day!"
 
 i 4 IN CLAY AND IN BRONZE 
 
 "Begad, 'tis a grand day!" 
 
 Now and again he would meet a girl going to the well, 
 the sunlight catching the tin of her can like a mirror 
 and making a little bright dancing spot before her. 
 At this hour of the morning her hair would be loosely 
 pinned. The lack of a corset would show in the hang 
 of her cotton dress as it fell around her like a Greek 
 garment. She was surely a farmer's daughter and 
 the wife of a farmer in the making, and later on some 
 quiet evening in the winter she would be sold into 
 slavery from her father's house. The word would 
 have gone abroad that she was a "great worker" 
 this going to the well so ostentatiously was part of her 
 endeavour for a reputation. So also was the feeding 
 of pigs outside her father's door on the morning of a 
 fair in Ballycullen or when people would be passing 
 the road in throngs. Then the old women who went 
 the rounds of the houses would drop an observation 
 like this in many a place: 
 
 "Begad, she's a great worker!" 
 
 "Is that so, begad?" 
 
 "She'd make a bloody fine wife for a man!" 
 
 "She's up at six in the morning and feeds a power 
 of pigs. Why she'd be nearly as good as a man in the 
 house. D'ye know what I'm going to tell you now? 
 Sure a lassie like that'd make up a man in a couple of 
 year." 
 
 Then the inevitable sequel to this talk the girl 
 herself hearing that a match for her was coming along 
 in a week or two betaking herself to her room to dream 
 over the beauty of her body and to read the letters 
 that had once been sent her by a good-looking shop- 
 boy in Dublin. And then, her thought upon the mar-
 
 THE PEASANT 15 
 
 riage that was coming, so disgusting and loveless. 
 When she had done many a thing that had gone to 
 build up her reputation of being a "great worker" 
 there had been a queer pain in her heart. . . Then there 
 was the visit to the house of the man to whom she was 
 to give her life; that dark dramatic coming in the winter 
 evening, somewhat drunk and bringing a bottle of 
 whiskey as the passport. . . There would be tea or 
 the drinking of the whiskey in the musty, unfrequented 
 parlour. After a satisfactory discussion of the fortune 
 her father and mother would be sure to excuse them- 
 selves and leave her alone with "himself" to be. . . 
 And then the little vision of her life would narrow down 
 so quickly just as she broke from the room. In a mad 
 moment of rebellion she thought of herself, not as the 
 girl with the great reputation as a worker, but as the 
 girl who had once seen her own beauty in the fact 
 that she had been sent love-letters by a shop-boy in 
 Dublin, broken ere her time with the labour of the fields 
 and the labour of child-bearing, her husband maybe 
 turned to beating her when he had brought about the 
 desolation of all she had once possessed the children 
 born of lust and not of love springing up around them. 
 
 It was strange that in these occasional glimpses 
 Martin should be meeting a certain heavy gloom of 
 life upon the morning road. In the turn of his imagina- 
 tion there lingered a thought of Lucy Flynn. It was 
 queer to think if he would not bring her some lovely 
 years before the end. But what might he ever be but 
 a great, big clod of a farmer? Already was he beginning 
 to hang the jowl of one, and Lucy had won the reputa- 
 tion of being a "great worker," although many a time 
 he had seen her with a dark weariness about her eyes.
 
 1 6 IN CLAY AND IN BRONZE 
 
 But there was his sister, Brigid. She seemed to be 
 going down a different road, but it too was a road of 
 morning. She had more beauty than most other 
 girls of Glannidan or Glannanea, but she had no fortune 
 and had not even made her reputation as a worker. 
 But there were wise women who said that they had 
 known of the like of her making a good match, even 
 marrying, I thank ye, beyond her class. This was 
 viewed as an enormous social offence in the locality, 
 but the sufferings of Mary Duignan during the lifetime 
 of her husband somewhat excused her ambition although 
 it had brought about this clash between her son and 
 her daughter. Yet she could never help feeling a flame 
 of pride leap through her, its glow lighting up her pale 
 cheeks, when she saw Brigid setting forth upon her 
 shining bicycle to idle away the evening in Glannidan. 
 She would have spent the whole forenoon adorning 
 herself, never so much as lifting a hand to help in the pre- 
 paration of Martin's dinner when he came in sweating 
 from the fields. Her selfish attitude had once put 
 him into such a rage that he had broken the looking- 
 glass before which he had found her tittivating herself. 
 He had been sorry a second later, and his mother had 
 said so mournfully: 
 
 "Now isn't that a shame for you, Martin, to go do 
 that to your little sister Brigid, and she so fond of you. 
 To go break a looking-glass, why you'll have no luck 
 for seven years, and that's as sure as you're there." 
 
 She appeared a fine lady coming into Glannidan 
 round the sweep of the hill past the door of the forge, 
 the grimy blacksmiths running out to look at her as 
 she went by and saying: 
 
 "Indeed I don't wonder at Austin Fagan taking
 
 THE PEASANT 17 
 
 a fancy to her. Damn it, but she's a sweet cut of a 
 lassie!" 
 
 Into Corrigan's she would go, for the paper probably, 
 buying a novelette, not that she intended to read it, 
 but just for the excuse of buying something. Miss 
 Agnes Corrigan would come out of the mouldy room 
 where she spent the time reading the novelettes, which 
 she sold later for a penny or threepence each, and as she 
 came out to attend a customer there would seem to 
 linger about her a subtle aroma of romance, a fragrant 
 essence, the scent of the conversation lozenges she had 
 just been chewing with her decayed teeth mingling 
 with the scent of the "parma-de-violets" she sold at a 
 penny a bottle. As she stood there gabbing, her 
 pince-nez hung upon her breast by a gold chain, she 
 would be speaking the nicest words out of books in the 
 broad accent of county Meath. . . She was one of the 
 few people in Glannidan who were possessed of a definite 
 purpose in life, and girls flocked to her as to some 
 mistress of an art. She initiated them into the ways 
 of courtship and flirtation. Whenever she heard of 
 such and such a girl having anything to do with a certain 
 man she became eloquent in her advice. She told the 
 girl things about men, queer things that were not to 
 be found in books. . . 
 
 For Brigid, after her visit to Miss Corrigan, there 
 were a few words to be passed with Esther Gilligan, 
 the milliner, who lived behind a wide window in the 
 very middle of Glannidan. She had grown old and 
 loveless but she still took a great interest in the romance 
 of the neighbourhood. She could give a "quare cut" 
 to any girl if she became aware of her settled designs 
 on any man, and out of the bitterness of her disappointed
 
 1 8 IN CLAY AND IN BRONZE 
 
 heart she would speak with an impassioned bluntness. 
 Then there was the visit to the Post Office, the old woman 
 there exercising a kind of lure or fascination towards 
 the persecution of her presence. 
 
 And later some lout of Glannidan shouting some 
 absurd piece of slang as she swung homeward into the 
 shadows of the evening only to find on 'reaching the 
 house her brother looking at her so sullenly across the 
 table, the crude mess of his evening meal broken roughly 
 before him.
 
 THE PEASANT 19 
 
 IV 
 
 was something very notable about a dance 
 in Glannidan. It was at once a concentration 
 of life and an opportunity to express criticism of life. 
 People were drawn to it by their love of talk merely that 
 they might be the better tormented by the talk that 
 came out of it. Seeing that a dance was something 
 to which each person contributed, it was only natural to 
 think that each person would partake to some degree 
 of its results, and so it was always. 
 
 Even old Anastasia Hennessy, who never did a hand's 
 turn before God but tramping from one house to another 
 and prating about Glannidan, would say as a young 
 girl passed her door next day: 
 
 "There she is now, and wasn't she the great little 
 swell last night with all her fine gee-gaws and her nice 
 little clothes upon her, and will you look at her now, 
 the dirty little faggot, with the holes in the heels of 
 her dirty stockings!" 
 
 This was portion of the jubilant talk expressing 
 reality of vision which succeeded the dance, but the 
 beginning of the dance in a murmur of talk was like 
 the beginning of a dream. And here was a fact that 
 was sometimes announced in a mood of prophecy and 
 doom. There never was a dance yet but something 
 happened at it or after it, something "quare." 
 
 Brigid Duignan was going to the St. Patrick's Day 
 dance in Glannidan and her mother was anxious now 
 with a great anxiety for the future of her daughter. 
 Martin was growing more and more morose. Some-
 
 20 IN CLAY AND IN BRONZE 
 
 thing that had been hidden in him was creeping fuller 
 and fuller into life. It reminded Mary Duignan of her 
 dead husband, Arthur Duignan, and so she was begin- 
 ning to be troubled even as she had been troubled 
 during the lifetime of Arthur. There were evenings 
 now when he came home from the tillage field before 
 the ringing of the Angelus and sat long before the fire 
 without a word coming from him. . . Arthur Duignan 
 in pursuit of his general uselessness had filled many 
 of the small rooms of the house with books. Long ago, 
 when they had been prosperous, when she had just 
 come to Glannanea with her fine fortune, Arthur had 
 had business then on Thursdays in the cattle market 
 at Dublin. . . She could still picture his setting out 
 to that place, with his wide tie of rich silk wound about 
 his collar and his half-tall hat, starting for the railway 
 station at Tubbermoyle or Ballycullen, promising her 
 that he would not touch a drop this time, and she 
 standing at the door viewing him go down the road 
 a fine figure of a man walking erectly behind his cattle. 
 Then the bad word coming back to her through the 
 mouth of someone who had just been in Dublin. 
 "Did you see himself at all and you in the city?" 
 "Indeed, then, I did, ma'am. He was driving speech- 
 less through the streets on an outside car, and sure 
 I nearly fell out of my standing when I saw the quare 
 direction he was taking. It was towards no good 
 part of the city he was going, but I'll say no more. . ." 
 Then she would move very quietly into the house 
 at the very time maybe that the anxiety of Martin or 
 Brigid was upon her and wondering why her man 
 wanted to be driving like that through the streets of 
 Dublin and she the way she was. . . Then there was
 
 THE PEASANT 21 
 
 his home-coming, half drunk and with a queer look 
 in his eyes. . . This was the Arthur that always came 
 home to her, unchanged and without a sign of improve- 
 ment in his ways, but a big hole made in the price of 
 the few beasts he had brought with him to Dublin. . . 
 There was always a couple of parcels in the back of the 
 high trap which she would examine after she had put 
 him snoring to bed. It seemed curious that the parcels 
 never varied a big band-box for her holding a new hat 
 all gaudy with flowers and ribbons . . . she would be 
 a grand-looking exhibition if she went to Mass in 
 that with all the people jumping in their seats to look 
 at her as she went by. It was curious beyond all that 
 he should wish to see her decked out in such a way. 
 She who had come to him of a respectable family and 
 with a fine fortune. It was the quare things they must 
 wear in Dublin and the quare women they must be 
 altogether. Yet she was not wholly displeased that 
 he should think of her in this way, but it was a wicked 
 waste of money ... yet the other parcel always 
 pained her more books. Such nonsense for anyone 
 to buy! Things, musha, that could be put to no use 
 at all. The hats, queer as they were, were good to 
 look at from time to time. . . They brought her such 
 pretty thoughts now that her days were approaching. . . 
 And when Arthur returned to even passable sobriety 
 after one of these Dublin visits and lingered for a clear 
 day or two from the widow Kelly's she saw with amaze- 
 ment how he took to the books and seemed to find 
 comfort in them. For her own part she had never 
 read a book and could not possibly guess what might 
 be in them. But Arthur, her man, came daily out of 
 the room where he wasted precious hours, and went
 
 22 IN CLAY AND IN BRONZE 
 
 walking around his dwindling bit of land, a queer, 
 grandiose smile upon his face but with no meaning 
 in it that anyone could see. . . Then she would see him 
 as suddenly passing back into the grey mood and re- 
 turning again to the widow Kelly's. A few months 
 later came the sale of a few more cattle in Dublin and 
 a repetition of the same circumstances surrounding 
 their sale. . . 
 
 That had made the sad life of Mary Duignan all the 
 while Martin had been rising into manhood and Brigid 
 towards beauty. Sometimes she laughed sadly, but 
 not without some stir of kindly remembrance for Arthur 
 as she saw Brigid looking over the collection of hats 
 in all the queer fashions through which they had 
 descended. It was the nature of a girl to be letting 
 her mind dwell upon such things, but she had felt a 
 queer turn of disgust the day she had first seen Martin 
 taking a liking for the books. She had listened to all 
 of Arthur's fancies for the future of the boy, but well 
 had she endeavoured to turn his mind from such foolish- 
 ness and towards the land. She had succeeded until 
 now, when this feeling of antagonism for his sister had 
 begun to manifest itself, this clash of will which seemed 
 to foreshadow dark happening in this house. . . She 
 saw the figure of Arthur Duignan again moving gloomily 
 about the house, she saw it in the face of her son bent 
 over a big book at the fire reading foolishness while 
 already people were beginning to talk of his neglect 
 of the land. The steadiness of Martin had always been 
 her proud boast among the women of the boreens. 
 
 "Oh not a sup of drink ever he took, not even if he 
 went into Glannidan forty times a day the sorra drop 
 he'd takel"
 
 THE PEASANT 23 
 
 But to her there had always appeared a subtle corres- 
 pondence between Arthur's drinking and the books he 
 brought home in the big parcels from Dublin. So now 
 what feelings of gladness she might have experienced 
 from watching the decking out of Brigid for the great 
 dance were dissipated by the sad spectacle of Martin 
 already wasting his time in exact imitation of his father. 
 Even if he had indulged in a more full-blooded foolish- 
 ness she might have excused him, but this was such 
 nonsense as she could make no attempt to understand.
 
 24 IN CLAY AND IN BRONZE 
 
 THROUGH the various excitements of preparation 
 the night of the dance had at last come. It was 
 to be held in the riding-school of Glannidan, or as it 
 was called by some "The Folly" of Glannidan. It 
 was a great circular building which had been erected by 
 St. John Murray, a local aristocrat, a good many years 
 before. Soon after its erection, St. John Murray who 
 had also been one of the most notable gentlemen riders 
 of his generation had broken his neck at Epsom. Then 
 the riding-school had fallen into disuse with Murray 
 Hall, and its existence was never even thought of except 
 on an occasion of this kind. Ancient politicians saw 
 in such a change of occupation a triumph for the forces 
 of the people and said one to the other: 
 
 "Now d'ye see that only St. John broke his bloody 
 neck beyant in England he might have turned out the 
 worst pill of all the Murray breed. But we're able to 
 have our sons and daughters to a dance in his riding- 
 school now if we only have the price of the tickets. 
 Arrah, man, d'ye know what I'm going to tell ye? The 
 times is changed." 
 
 "Elite." This was a word that had crept unaccount- 
 ably into the parlance of Glannidan. It here denoted 
 a class much further apart than its meaning in French. 
 "Swank" was another word which as used in Glannidan 
 seemed to be synonymous with "Elite," a translation 
 less of the word than of the mode of life. Yet it was 
 not possible to be "Elite" without being "Swanky," 
 while it was possible to be "Swanky" without being
 
 THE PEASANT 25 
 
 at all "Elite" or considered so by those who had attained 
 to that condition. 
 
 Even at Mass on Sundays the "Elite" made a display 
 of their uplifted condition. They came in late for the 
 service with silver-mounted umbrellas and other apparel 
 of glorified existence, and went up to the very front 
 seats as if to assert their right to be nearer God. They 
 did not believe in vulgarly mixing themselves even in 
 religious circumstances. They sometimes coincided with 
 the handful which formed the Protestant congregation 
 of Glannidan coming down the street from morning 
 prayers. Often they would commingle with these to 
 such an extent that people were driven to say: 
 
 "There now, sure the devil a much differ it makes 
 what religion you are so long as you have money enough 
 to 'swank' it!" 
 
 All Protestants were "elite," and the highest up and 
 best connected Catholics sniffed audibly when a lousey 
 peasant went in beside them on the seat. . . yet this 
 was accepted as the prerogative of certain families. 
 
 "People, don't ye know, like the Connors and the 
 Culligans," a man would say without having any definite 
 idea in his mind as to the exact worth of the Connors 
 and the Culligans, but the very sound of the words 
 as he said them would seem to communicate some kind 
 of idea to his mind. Every event, even to a dance, 
 seemed to be arranged with due respect to the feelings 
 of such families. Hence the man, who springing from 
 the "commonality," attempted to bridge the social 
 gulf and become one of them exercised a disturbing 
 influence and made himself a person to be distrusted 
 and hated both by one group and the other. And such 
 a man was Austin Fagan.
 
 26 IN CLAY AND IN BRONZE 
 
 The people of the lower orders remembered Jeremiah 
 Fagan as one of themselves, a big, drunken old fellow, 
 who although semi-illiterate, managed to scribble out 
 the accounts of the Glannidan Union, drawing his 
 salary regularly, and finally a pension. Although he 
 had managed to lift himself into a soft job he had re- 
 mained one of themselves, and so they had not been 
 given much reason to hate him, but this fellow, Austin, 
 had blossomed out, my word! As he went daily to the 
 post office about eleven he was a constant figure of 
 surprise. People would turn and look after him and 
 say: "Why there's Austin Fagan!" and the remainder 
 of his reputation consisted in that he had been connected 
 with various scandals which had taken place in the 
 workhouse from time to time. He was no longer the 
 mere clerk of his father's day, but an official of local 
 government who went loudly about Glannidan and 
 whose name was on every lip. Not alone had he 
 increased the splendour of his position but he had also 
 increased his salary. He had been careful that those 
 he used, both men and women, were such as could be 
 silenced with a few pounds; but there was a fire of 
 hatred for him smouldering. The hum of his motor 
 bicycle as he careered idly down the summer roads 
 had raised up a feeling of anger which might not be 
 easily quenched. 
 
 It was at a dance, beyond all other places, that 
 Austin was most loudly in evidence. As he came into 
 the room where the first dance would have begun to 
 whirl, his accent could always be heard above the 
 hum of the talk and the flow of the music, laughing, 
 saying courteous and gallant words to the girl he had 
 brought with him. Then, as he glided in, his round face
 
 THE PEASANT 27 
 
 shining and his thin hair brushed sleekly down upon 
 his small head above his low narrow forehead it was 
 at once easy and difficult to realise why he had become 
 so captivating. Later his exquisite philandering, and, 
 towards morning, a withdrawal with one particular girl 
 to a secluded part of the room, whispering and giggling 
 and telling queer stories. 
 
 The behaviour of Austin at this St. Patrick's night 
 dance in Glannidan was not so different. Yet there 
 were some well versed in his ways, who said that it was. 
 To them it appeared as if he had taken a genuine liking 
 for Brigid Duignan. Even so, thought William Moore, 
 who, as his rival, was forced to be observant. As the 
 night extended into morning they thought that, after 
 all, it might be a case of genuine love, and at once 
 began to envy Brigid. Austin Fagan had a nice soft 
 job. Wasn't she lucky now, and she never to do a 
 hand's turn, the idle strap? Her mother had been 
 ambitious too, but Arthur Duignan, God be good to him, 
 was the man had kept her down well, and it would be a 
 terrible thing if she got a lift by such a marriage now. . . 
 
 While wise heads were already being put together 
 over this Austin Fagan was walking down the avenue 
 from the riding-school with Brigid Duignan as the day 
 was breaking beyond Murray Hall. They still retained 
 some of the splendour through which they had just 
 moved, but in the dawn all things look mean. The 
 trees by the avenue were dripping in a sudden wind 
 as he drew her into the shelter of a great beech. . . 
 
 As they moved away down the avenue and out of 
 sight of Murray Hall Brigid felt a wave of dread rush 
 in to envelop her. He left her at a gate which was not 
 very far from the house in the boreens. . .
 
 28 IN CLAY AND IN BRONZE 
 
 "I hope you had the grand, lovely night, child," 
 said her mother, who had awaited this home-coming 
 so anxiously. Brigid seemed on the point of tears as 
 she hurried past her mother and into her room. Martin 
 glanced up with a scowl but did not speak. He had 
 a book beneath his elbow and was noisily taking his 
 breakfast. She threw herself upon the bed without 
 removing the grand dress she had worn at the dance. 
 She covered her head with the bed-clothes to keep 
 herself from hearing the muttered curses of her 
 brother. .
 
 THE PEASANT 29 
 
 VI 
 
 THE books had begun to exercise an influence over 
 Martin; morning or evening he was scarcely ever 
 without a book in his hand now. It was queer, right 
 enough, said the people of the boreens. If he had beer 
 a girl they might have understood and excused him 
 vaguely that it was only "human nature." But this 
 present lapse on Martin's part was more in the nature 
 of a calamity like drink. It was worse than drink, 
 for that too could be excused. "A good man's case," 
 they were in the habit of saying of one who would 
 occasionally take a drop too much. But that a young 
 fellow should suddenly and for no reason show a distaste 
 for the beloved land it was a shocking queer thing. 
 
 He who had once been so regular in his morning 
 journey down the boreens was now the very last to come, 
 and without any trace at all of his former enthusiasm. 
 And often during the day men would creep over to the 
 ditch to watch him as he stood like a madman in the 
 middle of the field, now looking up at the sun, now 
 looking in a dull way at the earth. . . They used 
 to marvel what he could be about. Later, if the 
 evening happened to be fine, as they went towards 
 Glannidan they would see him leaning across the road 
 gate his eyes intently fixed upon the printed page of a 
 book. 
 
 "Musha, it's not the same way everyone goes mad!" 
 they would say with a loud smirk as they went by. 
 
 Day by day his father, Arthur Duignan, struggled 
 further to life in him. There was no stint of books
 
 30 IN CLAY AND IN BRONZE 
 
 in the house, for his father had brought home a great 
 many from time to time. 
 
 "Arrah, musha, where did you get them?" Mary 
 Duignan had often said by way of giving vent to her 
 annoyance upon the appearance of an unusually large 
 parcel. 
 
 "Down the Quays." 
 
 "I suppose them cost a good penny now!" 
 
 "Oh, only a few shillings." 
 
 "Well, imagine that now! Selling books, begad ! The 
 Quays well! well!" 
 
 Martin had remembrance of such words passing 
 between his parents. He was very small when he had 
 heard them, but now, with his discovery of the books, 
 he began to have some sympathy with and under- 
 standing of his father. He too, poor man, had found 
 some comfort amid their pages and in their strange 
 tales of love and passion. The mind of his father 
 must have dwelt upon these things and Martin often 
 felt himself thinking how he could have married this 
 woman, his mother, so different must she have been 
 always, so wedded to the land. The books were already 
 beginning to separate him more and more from his 
 mother, but not to such an extent as had existed surely 
 in the case of his father. 
 
 He had little for which to thank his father unless 
 perhaps this hereditary love for the printed page which 
 now lifted him up from the dusty tumult of the clay 
 to a little comfort. Yet he could not quite forgive 
 his father for the way he had neglected the land and thus 
 brought him to the muck and torment of his early 
 years. And their farm, too, might have been made 
 the most comfortable of all the farms of the boreens.
 
 THE PEASANT 31 
 
 He felt this almost insensibly for he had still the agrarian 
 eye. Thus, distinct from the clash that had arisen 
 in the circumstances of his family just now, there was 
 a clash also between the elements of his soul; and this 
 was further extended by the influence of the books. 
 There arose out of his reading a figure of beauty, an 
 ideal figure. He grew to have a love of woman that 
 found no response amid the passionless fields. 
 
 The river of romance had already begun to flood his 
 soul. The "made match" already suggested by his 
 mother was alien and remote from the books left him 
 by his dead father. There was Lucy Flynn. If he 
 should marry her it might not be altogether a case of 
 this kind. She might bring him a fortune, and possibly 
 the farm of her father to be amalgamated with his. 
 Now the very fact that his mother had mentioned 
 marriage to him had created a kind of shy reserve 
 about his thought of Lucy, a certain diffidence of 
 intention. No doubt people had already begun to 
 talk about the eye he had on Henry Flynn's farm. . . 
 So now his thought of girls had most to do with those 
 he had seen passing off into the twilight with their 
 shapely figures and their brown plaits swinging richly 
 . . . and yet, with strangely greater continuity, his 
 own figure of beauty would be dancing before him 
 wildly above the pool of beauty that was the books. 
 Already it had lured him to thought of the bigger world 
 beyond the boreens. 
 
 He was changing daily in his relations to his mother, 
 and, in the blindness of inevitability, it was not given 
 her to realise the cause. It was very little that she 
 knew only of this mean life in Glannanea. The Bally- 
 cullen Gazette, whose local correspondent was Brian
 
 32 IN CLAY AND IN BRONZE 
 
 Doyle, was the only thing she ever read; a queer, 
 muddy rag which was distinguished only by fearsome 
 grammar and exhibited the varying degrees of spite 
 which Brian felt for those who had the misfortune to 
 incur his illiterate censure. Mary Duignan gloated over 
 it when it contained as it often did some particularly 
 long account of some local "case." She would sit 
 by the fire reading it with difficulty, and then turning 
 her eyes from it she would allow a certain wistfulness 
 to creep into them as she began to plan for the future 
 of her daughter, who was never likely to meet with a 
 misfortune like that of which she had just been reading. 
 . . . Often, too, Martin turned to the Ballycullen 
 Gazette after his day's work and struggled through the 
 columns of the dirty rag. The "style" of Brian Doyle 
 was always a cold-blooded attack upon the English lan- 
 guage. Of course he was merely a bosthoon who, through 
 a certain amount of cheek earned a few pounds a year 
 in doing this kind of thing for the local paper. Often, 
 as he saw his mother reading the Ballycullen Gazette, 
 Martin would leave aside his book and write down with 
 a stub of pencil his own version of some scene or incident 
 that had struck his fancy. He found great pleasure in 
 writing such exercises and many a time he would read 
 them aloud in the fields, his ear taking pleasure in the 
 musical swing of the words. 
 
 His father had been a miscellaneous reader. His 
 books had been got together carelessly. There were 
 scientific books by the side of poetry books, novels by 
 the side of religious volumes. It was a remarkable 
 feeling this of the mind responding rapidly to the 
 accumulation of a vast deal of knowledge, of groping 
 beyond the rim of broken clay. . . And yet there were
 
 THE PEASANT 33 
 
 moments when the knowledge he had just acquired 
 would surge, a burning whirl, in his brain, until at last 
 he went for comfort down the clean, green ways of the 
 boreens. There were the homely comforts of his mother's 
 house in the evenings while the world of the books 
 was vague with an eternal wonder. Around him surged 
 the life of the fields all blind and stupid while, from day 
 to day, he was growing to see more clearly the mistake 
 and the mess that all men make of their lives, the dis- 
 tance they continually endeavour to set between them- 
 selves and the beauty that he saw. . . 
 
 Now that the summer was about them again he often 
 thought of Lucy Flynn. He often went across the 
 ripening meadows to speak to her by the old gate at 
 the close of a lovely day. But their talk was always 
 sordidly upon things of the land. What this was worth 
 and what that was worth, what her father had just 
 said about the value of such and such a thing and so on. 
 Her mind never once rose above the realism of the land. 
 She had heard her father speak of Martin and of the 
 way he was letting his grand farm go to the bad, and 
 now she counselled him upon diligence and attention to 
 such a splendid way of living. 
 
 "I wouldn't mind, Martin, if you were a drunkard, 
 but to be getting like this, a kind of foolish about books 
 and idling away your time. Why sure no one ever 
 heard tell of the like of it. And sure what would I do 
 if ever you turned against me through that way of going 
 on, or made me turn against you by your getting to be 
 like your father, who was a common idiot by all 
 accounts ! " 
 
 They were all very keen on insulting the memory of 
 his father, even Lucy now. Through his own love for
 
 34 IN CLAY AND IN BRONZE 
 
 the books he was rapidly inviting the very same distrust 
 and hatred. . . He went across the gate and bending 
 his head down to Lucy spoke to her for a long time. 
 Then she put her arms about his shoulders and whispered 
 passionately as , her hot cheek burned: 
 
 "Martin, I love you. God's truth, I love you, 
 Martin!" 
 
 It was a phrase out of the books, given the colour of 
 the peasant speech, and it fell upon his soul like rain 
 upon a parched thing. If only she had ever read any- 
 thing she might be like him, was the flash of his thought 
 which lit up all the darkness of the fields.
 
 THE PEASANT 35 
 
 VII 
 
 THE Summer had swung in and the beauty of this 
 time in Ireland had some of the pain that was 
 passing in the house of the Duignans. But, inevitably, 
 was it closing in towards the sorrow of some ending. 
 In spite of the sneers that had risen against him, Martin's 
 hard work of early spring was proven in the fields which 
 were now waving green and high. He had not yet lost 
 all the curious, dogged pride the farmer takes in his 
 poor assistance of God's handiwork. He could still feel 
 the something in him which called him to the clay 
 and he knew that he did not yet come winging 
 from out the books as his father must have done when 
 he went driving in his half-tall hat through the streets 
 of Dublin. There was surely some part of him which 
 was still stuck in the little nest of fields behind the 
 boreens, and he felt that it was through his mother that 
 this bondage had come. 
 
 There was still his sister Brigid. She was certainly 
 a pretty girl comely in the possession of qualities which 
 in him were differently expressed, qualities which 
 likened both of them to their father. Many a time he 
 could not help an attempt to realise the way in which his 
 father must have regarded her. . . He pictured him, if 
 he had lived to see her spring so fine, fancying a marriage 
 for her with some gorgeous young man out of a story, 
 but merely dreaming all the while, a big windy man 
 talking in his cups about the fine daughter he had, doing 
 nothing for her either but merely dragging her name 
 down among the dirty drunkards in the widow Kelly's
 
 36 IN CLAY AND IN BRONZE 
 
 pub in Glannidan. . . Turning in disgust from all this 
 sorry hopelessness his mind had begun to struggle into 
 admiration for the realism of his mother. After all 
 the gropings of her ambition were bound to leave some 
 solid result behind them. And this regard lit up other 
 ways of understanding. Suddenly it had appeared to 
 Mary Duignan that she had something to thank the 
 books for after all. They had helped her son to exhibit 
 some quality to which she had once turned with affec- 
 tion in Arthur Duignan. "Refinement" had been the 
 word used to describe it by old Roger Gowney who 
 had settled the match so long ago. It was the thing 
 that had made her "cotton to" her husband to be. Now 
 its reappearance had effected this miracle of reconcilia- 
 tion between her son and herself and between her son 
 and his sister. 
 
 A change had come upon Brigid too, since the St. 
 Patrick's night dance in Glannidan. It was now her 
 mother's turn to be angry with her. She went seldom 
 to Glannidan in the evenings, and so did not seem to 
 make the best of her chance of catching William Moore, 
 who was nothing short of a good match, by letting him 
 see Austin Pagan's interest in her. At twilight time 
 she would sit mooning there in the bedroom, looking 
 at herself in the big mirror and binding and unbinding 
 her hair. . . To lose the chance of a good match! 
 Indeed it was nothing short of a flight in the face of 
 Heaven to let her dream of such things. . . But the 
 matter was brought to a head by Brigid herself who 
 fainted before the mirror one evening after she had 
 cycled home from Glannidan. 
 
 "What is it, child; what's the matter with you?" 
 "Oh, mother! It's Austin Fagan. I thought he was
 
 THE PEASANT 37 
 
 going to marry me. Now he says he won't, and he 
 after 
 
 "What's that, after what? After ruining you, is it?" 
 
 "Oh, mother, I thought he would be such a grand 
 match, and I knew how much you wanted me to get 
 a good match. Sure I thought he'd be better than any 
 farmer with the grand sit he has and all the grandeur 
 he'd give me. He said he'd get a side-car for the motor 
 bike and drive me down by the boreens the way they'd 
 all see me looking so grand." 
 
 "It happened at the dance, I suppose?" 
 
 "Yes, mother!" 
 
 "Oh, God bless us and save us! Why didn't I let 
 you go there with William Moore!" 
 
 Martin came in now. From the expression on his 
 face it might seem that the clay had somehow succeeded 
 in subduing him. The spiritual look the books had 
 brought him seemed momentarily quenched. He looked 
 sweaty and tired standing there in the doorway. 
 
 "What's this now?" he said, as he saw the huddled 
 body of his sister and his mother crying. 
 
 No answer, only his sister sobbing and his mother 
 saying: "Dear-a-dear!" 
 
 "Is it Austin Pagan?" 
 
 Still no answer from either of the women, and then 
 Martin knew. . . He swore no word but went into his 
 room and put on his Sunday clothes. There was nothing 
 very elaborate in this outfit just a suit of rough tweed 
 from the factory in Ballycullen, a pair of nailed brogues, 
 slightly lighter than the ones he wore on week days, and 
 a bright tweed cap pulled down in his eyes. These suited 
 his figure as he slouched along. 
 
 It was his intention, as he left the house to see his
 
 38 IN CLAY AND IN BRONZE 
 
 parish priest and to tell him the whole story. Then 
 he must seek Austin Fagan, and there might be red 
 murder this very evening in the office of the Union. 
 
 Father Clarke sat in a luxurious chair in his dining room. 
 Martin entered shyly and very soon felt his temper cool in 
 the presence of this big, comfortable man of the world. 
 Austin Fagan was a man of position and reputation in the 
 parish, while he was only a struggling clod of a farmer. 
 The Clerk of the Union was a bit of a blackguard to be 
 sure, but he could afford to be a blackguard, and so 
 Father Clarke never even mentally included him among 
 the ruffians who sometimes disgraced the parish. Martin, 
 as he began to speak, felt himself being still further awed 
 by the holy pictures which hung all around the walls. 
 
 "My sister is after being destroyed, Father!" 
 
 "Well, and who's the scoundrel?" 
 
 "Austin Fagan." 
 
 "This is terrible. What are you going to do?" 
 
 "That's just what I called to ask you, Father. 
 Wouldn't you think now that it's him should do some- 
 thing after he destroying her and us that belong to her!" 
 
 Martin was momentarily surprised by his bravery in 
 speaking thus to his parish priest. . . But he could 
 feel no triumph. . . 
 
 "Well, well! I'm surprised to hear this of such a 
 promising young man as Austin. But I wish to good- 
 ness people would not be flying in my face by getting 
 up dances. Do you know what I'm going to tell you? 
 The devil does be always lurking in the shadows around 
 a dance no matter how "elite" or how "swanky" it may 
 be. So come on down with me to the workhouse now 
 and mebbe the grace of God would enable us to see the 
 silver lining to the darkest cloud."
 
 THE PEASANT 39 
 
 VIII 
 
 UP through the main street of Glannidan they went 
 together, Martin walking shyly. Everyone in the 
 shops and on the street knew what had happened, and 
 exclamations of jubilation immediately leaped up 
 among them: 
 
 "There's the dance for you, there now!" "And 
 what '11 Austin do now?" "And d'ye think will he lose 
 his job?" "The devil a fear of him!" "Is it 
 Austin?" "Man alive, it won't take a feather out of 
 him!" 
 
 Father Clarke as he walked, talked continuously to 
 himself, but not in a way, however, which betokened 
 great worry or pre-occupation, for this was merely a 
 habit of his and a stage of his merely theatrical rage 
 when a matter of this kind was brought before him. . . 
 He closed one eye every few minutes and took a side 
 glance at the lout trotting by his side. 
 
 They were now on the road which led from the village 
 to the workhouse. Down the same way were going 
 the itinerant tramps for a night's shelter and up to the 
 village for their pints were coming the established 
 tramps, the men who got a continuous and comfortable 
 living in the workhouse. First came Kerrigan, the 
 father of them, scratching his beard, which was great 
 and white like a prophet's. He ran messages for the 
 nurses and was paid at the rate of a pint a time. Four- 
 teen times a day he came thus scratching his beard 
 into Glannidan. Even fairly snug farmers envied hinl 
 greatly. If ever they came into Glannidan In the day
 
 40 IN CLAY AND IN BRONZE 
 
 time and gulped down a few pints, half ashamed of 
 themselves, they were sure to meet Kerrigan running 
 out of the widow Kelly's, the brown froth of the porter 
 on his beard and spitting out at every few yards. 
 
 "Well be jaises it's not fair to see that fellow with 
 such times. It's bad enough to be keeping Austin Fagan 
 and his like in idleness, but it bates hell to be keeping 
 him an idle, lousey ould cur!" 
 
 This would be the burden of their soliloquy as they 
 went cantering along in their high traps, men without 
 an atom of joy to ease the ugly burden of their lives, 
 while Kerrigan, the pauper, whistled gaily as a bird. He 
 had lost what land he had once possessed and had come 
 into Glannidan Workhouse to end his days. He had a 
 happy life and looked a very distinguished pauper indeed 
 as he went in and out of Glannidan in his hard hat over 
 his black frieze coat and corduroy trousers. 
 
 "Good evening, Father!" said Kerrigan, saluting 
 grandly. 
 
 "Good evening, Kerrigan!" said Father Clarke. 
 
 A little further on they met Keogan, the defective 
 pauper, whose mind like his face had an unaccountable 
 twist towards the comic. He indulged his idiocy in 
 satire through ludicrous mimicry which occasionally ap- 
 peared gruesome. 
 
 There was a horrible leer on his face when he moved 
 in exaggeration of his own natural limp and stroked the 
 air under his bare chin in imitation of Kerrigan stroking 
 his beard. . . when he walked with his cap adjusted at 
 an exciting angle, and smoked a butt of a fag while he 
 attempted to transform his hideous gibberish into a 
 polished accent he was making a pathetic attempt to 
 imitate Austin Fagan.
 
 THE PEASANT v 41 
 
 The third established pauper whom they now met 
 was an elderly quiet man of decided sanity whose 
 mentality was advertised in his quiet bearing. His 
 beard was trimmed very tidily, his dark, little 
 eyes far sunken in his head and his face white 
 like a woman's. His voice came from a sorrowful 
 depth and he maintained his mournfulness even 
 while drinking a pint. And it was well-known 
 that he could drink more than Kerrigan, and without 
 turning a hair. . . 
 
 They moved up a short avenue to the workhouse 
 gate. On either side a few old pauper women were 
 weeding. They did not even lift their eyes to look 
 at the passers-by. . . As they went into the yard they 
 saw a minor official of the workhouse gather the skirts 
 of his coat under his arm and hurry across the yard. 
 But one or two of the dozen of stout he was carrying 
 slashed out and the necks were broken of them against 
 the trodden gravel of the yard. One of the bottles 
 rolled towards them and struck against the toe of 
 Father Clarke's boot. He turned a woe-begone face to 
 Martin: 
 
 "One of the ruinations of poor Ireland. I pray you 
 avoid it, young man, and let it never contaminate your 
 lips." 
 
 Drink! The idea struck queerly upon Martin r s mood. 
 Beyond the torment through which his mind was passing 
 he could understand this thing now. . . He had a 
 momentary glimpse of men drinking away their sorrow 
 in the widow Kelly's. . . It was curious that the power 
 of drink should have been suggested to him so ironically. 
 He felt like doing something now which might help 
 him to forget. And this was worse than the death of
 
 42 IN CLAY AND IN BRONZE 
 
 a beast, because it was worse than the death of a Chris- 
 tian. . . 
 
 But already they had walked into the Clerk's office. 
 It was the evening of a Board Day and Brian Doyle 
 had remained behind to help the Clerk in his work 
 upon the minutes of the meeting. This was a customary 
 performance, somewhat sacred to Brian and Austin. 
 Austin permitted Brian to ape his accent and person- 
 ality for being so obliging in permitting him to censor 
 his reports of the meetings of the Glannidan Union, 
 which appeared every second Thursday in the Bally- 
 cullen Gazette. It was not everything that happened 
 at a meeting was fit to be put into a paper. . . Conse- 
 quently here were these two now with their heads 
 together whispering and writing. Austin was writing the 
 official minutes of the meeting on a form which was to 
 be sent to the Local Government Board that very 
 evening: Brian was writing his report for the Bally- 
 cidlen Gazette. From time to time they compared notes 
 to make sure that in the more important points their 
 accounts were identical. It was amusing to see the way 
 that Brian threw down his pen at exactly the same 
 moment as Austin yawned, and when Austin extended 
 the slit of his thin lips in a smile Brian showed his big 
 teeth simultaneously. 
 
 They now said "Good evening, Father!" at exactly 
 the same moment and gave a skit of a laugh in unison. 
 Immediately Austin was telling a funny story of Local 
 Government Board and Father Clarke was laughing 
 great big laughs which shook the office. Brian re- 
 mained fiddling with his pencil and his notebook, 
 dutifully echoing the merriment of these two men 
 whom he admired in the very depths of his feeble
 
 THE PEASANT 43 
 
 imitative soul. . . All three were still unmindful of the 
 man who had walked down to the workhouse with 
 Father Clarke and who now stood in the passage be- 
 tween the workhouse and the board-room twisting his 
 cap and tearing little bits out of it while a great rage 
 rent his soul.
 
 IN CLAY AND IN BRONZE 
 
 IX 
 
 AT the end of their joke Father Clarke called Austin 
 out of the office by a jerk of his head. He came 
 out, and the three men now stood in the passage. An 
 immediate and sharp contrast was apparent. The 
 Clerk of the Union looked so sleek and summery in his 
 oiled hair and flannel suit by the side of this man of 
 the clay. 
 
 "Good evening, Duignan!" said Austin. 
 
 "Good evening, Mr. Fagan," said Martin. 
 
 Austin sprang open his silver cigarette case and put 
 a fag pendulously between his lips. He had the reputa- 
 tion of being the one man in Glannidan who could smoke 
 a cigarette properly, and this was a fact he did not seem 
 to forget even now. . . Father Clarke spoke after an 
 awkward moment: 
 
 "Martin here was making a kind of suggestion and 
 we coming down the road, that it might be as well, 
 maybe, if you were to think of getting married, 
 Austin." 
 
 There was a twinkle in his eye as he said this, as if 
 he still felt inclined to be jocular at the expense of Martin 
 and his sister. The blood of Martin was beginning to 
 boil. 
 
 "Are you going to marry Brigid?" he jerked out. The 
 words seemed to ring with clear finality in the little 
 passage. 
 
 "Marry Brigid, what?" For the moment Austin 
 appeared stunned, but there was a show of calmness 
 in his grin as he raised his yellow fingers to his head
 
 THE PEASANT 45 
 
 and patted his sleek hair. Father Clarke took out a 
 big red handkerchief and blew his nose with a great blast 
 of sound. 
 
 "Easy now, Martin! Your mother " 
 
 "Ah, this is no woman's job." 
 
 "Quietly now, we don't want any nonsense." 
 
 There was a red mist before the eyes of Martin; he 
 lashed out and struck Austin between the eyes and blood 
 pumped out of the Clerk's nostrils. 
 
 "What d'ye medn to go strike Mr. Fagan like that 
 and he not in an attitude of defence! I'm ashamed of 
 you as one of my parishioners!" 
 
 Brian Doyle rushed out of the office. 
 
 "You bloody cur!" he said to Martin. The bogman 
 had momentarily asserted himself in the devoted follower 
 of the Clerk of the Union. 
 
 "That'll do now!" said Father Clarke. "The fact 
 that your sister has been misfortunate gives you no 
 license to behave in this high-handed way. D'ye know 
 what it is now, I'd nearly feel justified in washing my 
 hands of the whole affair!" 
 
 With extraordinary suddenness a change had come 
 upon the workings of Martin's mind. Where was the 
 result now of all his reading of romance? Here in 
 this first crucial moment of his life it was the brutal 
 and passionate peasant that had appeared and not 
 any removal of himself from the peasant by any artifice 
 of refinement. The artifice of education had certainly 
 done something for this big man they called Father 
 Clarke, making him subtle, far-seeing, capable of com- 
 promise, cunning, powerful. . . Austin was gasping and 
 looking out stupidly through a haze of pain. Brian's 
 face was as big as the moon. . . Into Martin's heart
 
 46 IN CLAY AND IN BRONZE 
 
 was beginning to creep a great feeling of abasement. 
 Nothing from the others could lower him further than 
 he had been just lowered by his own conduct. 
 
 "By God, Pagan, I'll kill you if you don't marry 
 her!" The words had merely struggled out of his 
 feelings of defeat, but they had a swift effect upon the 
 others. They came together and began to speak in 
 whispers. He drifted to the yard door out of earshot, 
 and stood there as one who has been suddenly snatched 
 away from life. He did not seem to feel that the others 
 were adjusting his fate. 
 
 "It would be best to get him away from here." 
 
 "It would indeed, Father!" The little mean voice 
 of Brian Doyle could just barely suppress a haw! haw! of 
 a laugh at the expense of Martin as he felt that an ad- 
 justment was about to be made in favour of Austin Fagan. 
 
 "God knows I don't want to see any bad work, and 
 that's what'll happen surely if this young fellow is 
 allowed to remain here. He'll brood to himself and 
 he'll drink, and the child'll be growing up before his 
 two eyes every day." 
 
 Father Clarke looked long at Austin, and immediately 
 the light of realisation was bright between them. . . 
 
 "A lump sum of say a 100 to do for this young 
 fellow. It'll be cheap at the price, for a high spirited 
 public young man like you wouldn't like to see himself 
 made a show of in a compulsory job of this kind. Don't 
 you know the influence I have with the solid, respectable 
 men of the Board and a rise of twenty pounds a year 
 or so that I could manoeuvre to recompense you would 
 be nothing to sneeze at." 
 
 Brian Doyle's big face was glistening in expectation. 
 He could already see where he would come in.
 
 THE PEASANT 47 
 
 "Of course you'll use your influence, Brian, through, 
 your job on the Ballycullen Gazette to help poor Austin 
 through this troublesome business. You'll get his photo 
 printed on the front page and a whole article about the 
 imaginary examinations he's after passing, and a brilliant 
 account of the great man he is entirely, and how Glan- 
 nidan should be so proud of him. It'll make grand 
 reading for the ratepayers, and they'll forget the kind of 
 man he is exactly I mean about this kind of thing and 
 the like. It's what they read in the Ballycullen Gazette, 
 and not what happens in reality that counts. I often 
 think it a blessing that we have that paper, for it helps 
 us all out of many a hole." 
 
 "Oh, you may depend on me to do that, Father. 
 It's not the first time," said Brian with a smirk of pride 
 in remembrance of this, his most notable accomplish- 
 ment. 
 
 "And then, mebbe, when you're well out of the busi- 
 ness, Austin, you'll have an idea that you're a finer type 
 of man than ever you were before." 
 
 "But when will this move about the rise in my salary 
 begin?" said Austin, now almost fully recovered. 
 
 "Oh, just as soon as you can manage the 100, don't 
 you know!" said Father Clarke moving out to accost 
 Martin once more.
 
 48 IN CLAY AND IN BRONZE 
 
 IT would mean some scraping to get the 100 together, 
 for it took a good deal to keep up his brilliant 
 appearance as Clerk of the Union before the public, al- 
 though he made a decent income out of the ratepayers 
 between his salary and his "chances." These 
 "chances" were curious things. They consisted for 
 the most part in bribes from those who contracted for 
 small jobs in the gift of the Board, from the putting 
 of a sucker in a pump to the building of a labourer's 
 cottage. These contracts were supposed to be set by 
 tender, the lowest tender consistent with the best in- 
 terests of the ratepayers to get the job. But to defeat 
 this possible exercise of fair play was a very easy opera- 
 tion. It consisted only in slipping the tender of the 
 contractor who had given the biggest bribe to the Chair- 
 man of the meeting at the proper moment and in de- 
 stroying those which might afford awkward evidence 
 should they remain to be seen. Any little "scenes" which 
 occurred at meetings of the Board as a result of this 
 "chancing" were never included in the reports of 
 the meetings of the Board which Brian Doyle 
 sent to the Ballycullen Gazette. And Brian did all this 
 for nothing, beyond the privilege of being allowed to 
 make himself the dirt which Austin continually wiped 
 off his boots. 
 
 But Austin was compelled to do something now 
 which he had never to do before. He had to run around 
 all the contractors of the Union fishing for small sums 
 with vague suggestions. No feeling of regret for the
 
 THE PEASANT 49 
 
 girl stirred in him, but he cursed her and his luck as 
 he came home from the last of these expeditions, having 
 risen the wind to a much lesser extent than he had 
 expected. He would have to sell the motor bicycle, 
 which had been his proudest appendage of distinction. 
 But he would yet make the bally ratepayers pay through 
 the nose for this. 
 
 So a few days later Father Clarke came down the 
 boreens and into the house of Mary Duignan, which was 
 a changed house since this blow had fallen. 
 
 "Good day to you, Mrs. Duignan!" he said; "this 
 is the sorry business. Why didn't you keep better cor- 
 rection upon this daughter of yours?" 
 
 "Oh, Father, sure it wasn't my fault, nor it wasn't 
 her fault. And what are you going to do to that black- 
 guard, Austin Fagan, if he doesn't marry her?" 
 
 " 'Tis the hand of God and the will of God, Mrs. 
 Duignan, that determines these things, and mebbe what's 
 going to happen is all for the best. Your son, Martin, 
 is going away!" 
 
 She was just in the act of filling out the port wine 
 for him as he said this, and she stopped while her hand 
 trembled and the big tears came rolling into her eyes. . . 
 Now if it had been her daughter, Brigid, who was going 
 away, and very quietly too, after what had happened, 
 it would not have mattered so greatly. Martin might 
 have married and brought in a daughter-in-law suffi- 
 ciently fortuned to fulfil her ambition. This of course 
 when she had finally succeeded in putting between him 
 and Lucy Flynn. . . There was a kind of drumming 
 in her ears now which kept her from hearing clearly 
 what Father Clarke was saying. 
 
 "I'm going to do for him, so I am!"
 
 50 IN CLAY AND IN BRONZE 
 
 "Yes, Father." 
 
 "He's a fine, unusual type of young fellow, with a 
 taste for the books, I hear, like his father before him." 
 
 "That's true, Father, that's true!" 
 
 "I'm going to put him on for the Excise, and it'll be 
 a proud moment for you, Mrs. Duignan, to see him 
 coming home to you with the broadcloth suit on him and 
 the white cuffs down to his fingers. 
 
 "A gauger, no less, the gauger Duignan!" 
 
 "That's what he might eventually rise to." 
 
 "I'm in dread he might turn to the drink, the same 
 as his father before him." 
 
 "Time enough having that dread, Mrs. Duignan, until 
 he is a gauger." 
 
 "Indeed, I knew he was always too talented for the 
 clay, and wouldn't everything be grand now only for this 
 misfortune to B rigid?" 
 
 "All the same we might be able to do something for 
 Brigid, to settle her like. You have a grand bit of farm, 
 and 'it will be nice and empty when Martin goes off to 
 Dublin to go on for the Excise. There might be a young 
 fellow in a distant part of the country looking for a place 
 to put in his head." 
 
 Father Clarke was a man who never made a suggestion 
 out of his imagination, and he now had such a young 
 man in his mind, a half-witted farmer from Mucklin 
 named Jamesey Cassels who had been left a few hundred 
 pounds by an aunt who had just died in America. 
 He had been looking everywhere for a wife, but no one 
 would marry the omadhaun. He was at the fair of 
 Glannidan on this very day. So that very evening 
 after his dinner Father Clarke brought Jamesey Cassels 
 out from Glannidan to see the place and to see Brigid.
 
 THE PEASANT 51 
 
 . . . For half an hour the young man from Mucklin 
 remained, grinning foolishly at Brigid in the kitchen, 
 while her mother and the priest arranged for the future 
 of the couple inside in the room. She was attacked 
 by a huge feeling of physical disgust as she sat and 
 looked at the man with whom she would have to live. 
 She who had worn dainty clothes and longed to be the 
 wife of a man who did not have to soil his hands. It 
 was her brother, Martin, who was going to have the best 
 of it now, while she was to be stuck in the face of the clay 
 with this thing who was now grinning at her foolishly 
 as he sat there upon the other stool. . . 
 
 " 'Tis a grand place, ma'am, and a fine daughter, 
 and the son you have must be an awful idiot to be 
 hikeing off to the city," said Jamesey Cassels as he stood 
 in the room a little later showing the sheaves of notes, 
 which were his credentials. There and then the marriage 
 was arranged for an early date. 
 
 Mary Duignan went quietly about her preparations 
 for the departure of Martin. She bought him a new 
 suit of clothes, which were made by Lowry Pigeon the 
 tailor, and socks and shirts, which she packed into a 
 little imitation portmanteau. There appeared very 
 little that was admirable about this going away. It 
 was something that had been forced upon him by some 
 power outside himself, and it was hard to think that it 
 might ever bring him any great distinction amongst his 
 fellow men. 
 
 Now, suddenly, too, his poor surroundings were re- 
 appearing to him quite differently. The roads were 
 like white silk ribbons about the bright green of the 
 fields. It was truly beautiful now at midsummer in 
 Glannidan and Glannanea. These places seemed
 
 52 IN CLAY AND IN BRONZE 
 
 lightly curtained by a haze of beauty, beauty upon field 
 and tree and upon all glad growing things, a strange, 
 quiet beauty too about the white thatched houses and 
 the blue-hazed bog which stretched away to Ballycullen. 
 It was grand to stand now at the end of the day amid 
 the great diminuendo of the soundless land, to feel the 
 evening shadows creeping in and to sense some of the 
 passionate secrets of the red heart of the clay. His 
 lonely vigils at twilight time made him curiously afraid, 
 and he retreated from them once more to the consolation 
 of Lucy Flynn. . . She appeared strangely intimate now 
 for no other reason, perhaps, than because she was slip- 
 ping out of his life. Their ways in this place had been 
 wedded to the quality of their lives, and now these ways 
 were about to part ... yet he kissed her long at the 
 gate when they met one evening and a new tenderness 
 sprang into his heart as he heard her say: 
 
 "And sure, I thought, Martin, that you'd never go 
 away from Glannanea. Sure I thought the two farms 
 would grow into one, just naturally. Now you're going 
 to the city where you'll be meeting grand, refined girls, 
 and it's not of me you'll be thinking at all." 
 
 "Maybe the city is not my place in life, after all; 
 but I'm in doubt, sure, if this is my place either. Since 
 I began to read and think for myself I've had the queerest 
 thoughts." 
 
 "Musha, sure, I think it was the books that done for 
 you. Everyone said it was unlucky for you to be giving 
 up your time to them and you ordained to be a 
 farmer." 
 
 He caught her in his arms and kissed her warmly 
 again, but they parted without any words of greater 
 tenderness. . . He thought of her all the way home
 
 THE PEASANT 53 
 
 across the dew- wet fields. . . When he went into the 
 room where all his father's books were he knew a mo- 
 ment of deeper sadness than had marked his parting 
 with Lucy The books seemed suddenly more real to 
 him. But as he glanced through a few of them vacantly 
 in turn the image of her would continue to gleam before 
 his eyes. . . 
 
 END OF BOOK I
 
 BOOK II 
 THE DREAMER
 
 THE DREAMER 57 
 
 BOOK II 
 THE DREAMER 
 
 AS Martin went down the boreens on his way to 
 Dublin next morning the feeling uppermost in 
 his breast was one of emancipation. He was going 
 away from the clay, but even as he went he could not 
 keep his eyes from wandering to the beauty of his 
 tillage field. His corn was standing high and green, 
 and beside it his crop of potatoes made a low waving 
 forest of green. Here lay the result of his labour in 
 quiet days. . . Some power beyond him had turned 
 him away from all these things, and as he stood 
 there gazing wistfully in his new clothes and shiny, 
 fine boots, he was quite unlike the one who had per- 
 formed all this labour. . . The morning sunlight was 
 sweeping the world in rich waves and he could not 
 resist the impulse that had come upon him. He went 
 out into the field and his eye roamed up and down the 
 grand growth here springing from the clay. . . His 
 brow had been wetted and his body bent in this labour, 
 and now Jamesey Cassels from Mucklin was to know the 
 joy of the harvesting while he was far away in Dublin. 
 He knelt down in a furrow and his head fell among the 
 green leaves of the crop he had sown. For a long time 
 he remained there crying silently, and here surely was
 
 58 IN CLAY AND IN BRONZE 
 
 no common sorrow but the sublime dignity of a primal 
 grief. . . His mother had gone to great pains to fit 
 him out for the journey, but now his clothes were soiled 
 by the moist clay and the shine of his boots had been 
 dimmed by the dew-wet grass of the headland. . . He 
 rose up and wiped his eyes with the new silk handker- 
 chief which was Brigid's gift to him at parting, for all 
 the dark feeling of misunderstanding that had always 
 been between them. 
 
 He left the field, and again hurried down the boreen. 
 He could hear the "creak, creak" of a cart coming 
 towards him. He raised his eyes suddenly and saw that 
 it was Lucy Flynn in a high creel cart making her way 
 to the bog. She stopped the horse, and bent down to 
 speak to him. She was wearing a rush hat with a broad 
 black ribbon round it, and a white apron with the 
 bands of it passing over her shoulders. 
 
 "I thought, mebbe, that I might meet you, Martin, 
 and that's what has me going this way so early." 
 
 "Well, good-bye again, Lucy!" 
 
 He raised his hand, while hers had gone to fumble in 
 the pocket of her apron. . . But she drew it out and 
 shook his hand warmly. . . He did not hear any move- 
 ment of the cart going away from him as he went. . . 
 Then she came pattering beside him, a little packet held 
 out in her hand. 
 
 "Your little present. Sure I was nearly forgetting." 
 
 He tore it open as he hurried on. It was the tra- 
 ditional gift of a maid to a man a couple of silk ties. 
 
 He was driven from the priest's house in Glannidan 
 to the station in Ballycullen by Dickeen the priest, 
 which was the name by which Father Clarke's general 
 man was known. The six peelers of Glannidan were
 
 THE DREAMER 59 
 
 lounging about the barrack as they drove out of the 
 village. 
 
 At BallycuHen he was met by Peter O'Brien, the 
 "Marquis of Clonlough," in whose care he was being 
 sent to Dublin by Father Clarke. Peter, as Chairman 
 of the Glannidan Guardians, just happened to be going 
 to Dublin to attend a Convention of the United Irish 
 League, which was then in its hey day. He was a man 
 who could be relied on to finish off this little job for 
 Father Clarke and Austin Fagan. He looked very big 
 and important and patriotic as he stood there propped 
 up with his. silk umbrella on the platform of BallycuHen 
 station. 
 
 Now suddenly was Martin coming into contact with 
 the official class. Hitherto this class had been connoted 
 to his mind by Austin Fagan, but now, suddenly, 
 it was appearing that there were other people in the 
 world with soft jobs also. It seemed destined that he 
 might enter this class now. Anyone apart from the 
 land, the stationmaster, the porters, the very stoker and 
 engine-driver, whom he caught a glimpse of with their 
 blackened faces, were all essential figures in the scheme 
 of soft occupations, 
 
 Peter O'Brien spoke little in the train. His attention 
 seemed to be altogether concentrated upon his efforts 
 to appear notable and dignified before the other pas- 
 sengers. He had purchased The Freeman's Journal 
 at BallycuHen and kept crackling it in his hand all the 
 way to Dublin. He kept closing and unclosing his lips, 
 also his eyes, as he mentally rehearsed the great speech 
 he was going to make at this Convention of Joe Devlin's 
 in Dublin. . . The wandering eyes of Martin were upon 
 the fields now receding rapidly from the train. Quite
 
 60 IN CLAY AND IN BRONZE 
 
 unconsciously he was reckoning the quality and value 
 per acre of this piece of land and of that. He saw men 
 moving about their fields in these places, also their 
 eyes bent down affectionately to the clay. . . So this 
 love for the land was no local passion, and all men must 
 feel it as he had felt it. . . 
 
 At Broadstone station they stepped from the train 
 and took a hackney car down through the city. The 
 jarvey sat on one side and Peter O'Brien and Martin 
 on the other. The loud powerful voice of ''The Mar- 
 quis" sounded above the boom of the traffic, describing 
 this thing and that, pointing out such and such an hotel 
 where he had stopped with Mr. John Redmond, I thank 
 ye, at such and such a time. . . Great and ever greater 
 Dublin boomed around him. He had known it dis- 
 tantly all his life as the place from which everything 
 came to Glannidan. Now the reality of it was suddenly 
 mysterious, enormous, conspiring in all its constituents 
 to crush him. The streets looked monstrous with their 
 big houses and teeming life, the monuments, the tram- 
 cars and the Liffey appeared also as mute though power- 
 ful members of the tremendous conspiracy. There was 
 a queer, wide stillness in his mind, and in the midst of it 
 room for but one realization. He was wondering would 
 it be ever possible for him to become part of this life, . . 
 His mind and his heart were still back in the fields where 
 he had cried this morning. 
 
 They went up Grafton Street, and "the Marquis" 
 said loudly: "The most stylish thoroughfare in 
 Dublin!" 
 
 "This is St. Stephen's Green which we will now 
 examine," he said, momentarily dropping into the 
 phraseology and manner of the guide-book. He paid
 
 THE DREAMER 61 
 
 the jarvey and Martin took down his imitation leather 
 portmanteau from the car. Together they went into the 
 Green by the Fusiliers' Arch, and Martin felt relieved 
 when he saw the green plots and the flowers; "the 
 Marquis" saying ostentatiously at every moment, 
 "A lovely place, a lovely place!" . . . There was a 
 red-faced, beefy man walking about with an air of au- 
 thority. He carried a blackthorn and wore a high, hard 
 hat with gilt band tied round it. He looked like one 
 of the six peelers of Glannidan as he went his rounds. 
 He was probably an ex-peeler, and momentarily it ap- 
 peared curious that this solitary link with Glannidan 
 should have arisen. 
 
 Soon they were walking up steps to a grand hall 
 door in a quiet street on the other side of St. Stephen's 
 Green. A second later they were standing in a spacious 
 office where there were several girls working at clicking 
 typewriters. A little man with a dark business-like 
 beard now appeared. His eyes had a fiery look behind 
 his gold-rimmed glasses, and his gaze upon Martin was 
 that of a beast of prey upon another victim. He was 
 Mr. Cullen, the head grinder of this "Grinding Estab- 
 lishment." Immediately he fell into conversation with 
 "the Marquis of Clonlough." . . Distantly the sound 
 of their chat came to Martin as he sat there so stiffly 
 upon his seat, feeling very uncomfortable in his new 
 suit and high collar. He became dimly aware that his 
 eyes were wandering across the office to where a girl 
 above her typewriter was gazing at him steadily. 
 Hitherto he had never looked like this into the eyes of 
 any girl save perhaps those of Lucy Flynn, who, how- 
 ever, had never looked so pretty nor with any bright 
 ribbon in her hair. . . Now there were coming into the
 
 62 IN CLAY AND IN BRONZE 
 
 office, every second or so, pale, anaemic young men 
 with big sheaves of papers in their hands. One by one 
 Martin saw Mr. Cullen introduce them to Peter O'Brien 
 as the tutors, and at intervals he saw, hurrying down 
 the stairs from the upper rooms, young men dressed 
 up in sporting clothes even as he had seen Austin Fagan 
 dressed up. . . This was the kind of life he was pre- 
 paring to enter, he who had rough hands and a sunburnt, 
 freckled face. It seemed queer, and the girl at the 
 typewriter was still looking at him. He had heard 
 "the Marquis" use such phrases as "a National 
 School education," "a taste for reading," "rather an 
 unusual type of young fellow for a farmer." Then the 
 suave "very well, sir, our best attention,'^ of Mr, 
 Cullen. . . 
 
 Now came the weary journey on foot through the 
 hard, warm streets with Peter O'Brien, who neld his 
 head high as he hummed, exceedingly pleased with 
 himself that at least portion of Father Clarke's enormous 
 trust in him had been faithfully discharged. He was 
 now conducting Martin to the place at which he was to 
 lodge while attending "the Grinders." They entered 
 Cuffe Street, with its confusion of smells, in the heat 
 of noontide. It was this way that the lodging-house 
 lay. 
 
 "Aye, this is Mrs. McQuestion's!" said Peter O'Brien 
 as they stopped a little further on outside the window 
 of a grimy lodging house. Through the murky glass 
 they could see a great swarm of flies buzzing around 
 a piece of meat in the window. . . They went in, the 
 door-bell giving a harsh, little clang as they entered. 
 Martin saw a woman, not unlike his mother in appear- 
 ance, but she did not possess the clean tidiness of hb
 
 THE DREAMER 63 
 
 mother. . . The performance, as with Mr. Cullen, was 
 here repeated, and Martin felt a little turn of annoyance 
 sweep in on him. He was being arranged for, but with- 
 out the slightest regard for what his own wishes might 
 be. . . Then Mrs. McQuestion shook hands with Peter 
 O'Brien and some money passed between them. . . 
 Later, as he sat down to a curious looking dinner in 
 the little, smelly kitchen, Martin was forced to remember 
 that "the Marquis" had gone to one of the hotels to 
 partake of a bigger, better feed with some of the most 
 notable Irishmen of his time!
 
 64 IN CLAY AND IN BRONZE 
 
 II 
 
 AS Martin sat there eating, Mrs. McOuestion enter- 
 tained him with an autobiographical account. . . 
 Now and then he felt his eyes wandering from accom- 
 panying concentration upon the narrative to a girl in 
 bare feet, with a torn dress and dishevelled hair, who was 
 washing plates in a dirty scullery off the kitchen. . . 
 Mrs. McQuestion went on to describe the grand-man- 
 nered, lovely girl she herself had been a good many 
 years before, and of how she had been the faithful 
 servant of a crippled lady. 
 
 "She left me a few hundred, but, sure, God knows, 
 I had it well earned, slaving for the peevish old thing, 
 night, noon and morning. Then I married himself, 
 A time-keeper in Jacob's he was, and he could drink 
 like a fish, and begad, what d'ye think, but his failing 
 soon began to make big inroads on my little fortune. 
 Then I had to take this little place and keep boarders. 
 Indeed, between struggling one way and another, it was 
 hard enough to keep himself in drink until he died. 
 After he went I never thought of marrying again, for 
 there's only the one marriage. Ah, there's only the one 
 marriage!" 
 
 Martin went up to the room that had been 
 allotted to him. It was far up the stairs, and a musty 
 smell seemed to linger about it. Here he opened his 
 little imitation leather portmanteau, and taking his few 
 belongings from it spread them out upon the bed. . . 
 His mother would seem to have expressed a confession
 
 THE DREAMER 65 
 
 of her love and tenderness in all these little things. . . 
 At the bottom of the bag he found a packet of notes 
 which were evidently intended to be used as pocket 
 money. The sight of the money made him feel very 
 lonely. . . 
 
 The summer dusk was beginning to creep in around 
 Dublin as he sat there in a trance of thought. He went 
 to the window and saw where the coppery gloom was 
 falling down about the houses. It was that hour 
 wherein the great strength of a city fails and falls down 
 to rest. The wild noises of the day were being replaced 
 by other sounds which denoted a different purpose. 
 A little way down this street was a theatre, and as 
 Martin saw the laughing crowds moving thither there 
 grew upon him a desire to be mingling with his kind 
 upon the street below. At home in Glannanea this 
 need for human companionship had not attacked him 
 to any great extent; he could have remained for ever 
 lonely by the gate watching people pass into Glannidan 
 in the evenings. But now this feeling was different, 
 it was a longing which he could not attempt to deny. . . 
 He tied up the notes in his handkerchief and stuck them 
 deep down in his trousers pocket. Then he went 
 downstairs. . . 
 
 There was a number of men now greedily munching 
 their tea in the kitchen, men who were speaking in the 
 jargon of the city and expressing little spiritual kinship 
 with him. He surprised Mrs. McQuestion in her 
 description of the "new studio" who had come to 
 her to-day. She was evidently disconcerted by his 
 sudden appearance now, for he did not look at all like 
 the grand young man she had just described. In the 
 immediate opinion of the men at the table he was
 
 66 IN CLAY AND IN BRONZE 
 
 merely "a country mug." As he went to the door she 
 came after him and said: 
 
 "Now, Mr. Duignan, I hope you'll be back early and 
 that you won't be minding any of the bad flirts you'll 
 be meeting in the street." 
 
 "The what?" 
 
 "The bad girls that do be prowling about for to ruin 
 fine young fellows with grand futures before them like 
 you." 
 
 He felt puzzled by her words as he moved out among 
 the hurrying excited throngs of people. He drifted 
 sullenly along, and now and then was he uplifted almost 
 by a sense of combat. Although it was a week-day 
 everybody appeared to be dressed in Sunday clothes. He 
 saw a great many men who were like the shop-boys who 
 sometimes came to Glannidan from Dublin. They 
 hurried along giggling cant words between them. 
 There were groups of girls, too, who reminded him of 
 those who went walking out of Glannidan in the evenings. 
 . . . But a darker magic seemed to flash from 
 their eyes. 
 
 He inquired his whereabouts from a heavy policeman, 
 who told him that he was standing on O'Connell Bridge. 
 . . . As he stood wondering, his hand on the parapet, 
 his eyes were caught by the splendour of the lights 
 reflected in the water. It seemed as if someone had 
 been washing golden vessels in the Liffey. . . The tone- 
 less voice of an old woman with a wide face rang 
 monotonously on his ears: "Wax matches, a penny, wax 
 matches, a penny!" . . . There were great crowds about 
 him and many coloured lights upon the water, and gold 
 and silver spilling out to sea. . . 
 
 Now he was standing before a little theatre whose
 
 THE DREAMER 67 
 
 name was vaguely familiar. Then he remembered 
 there had been books of the plays that had been per- 
 formed here among the batches of books his father 
 had brought home with him from Dublin from time 
 to time. Yet were these almost the only books he had 
 been unable to read. In fact they had puzzled him 
 exceedingly. Their characters were peasants like him- 
 self, whose woes and torments were his daily round. 
 However could a man bring himself to write of such 
 when he could be thinking instead of the beauty of 
 the world and of dark-eyed girls with ribbons in their 
 hair? . . . Yet, as he stood watching now, he saw rich 
 and grand-looking people drive up to the door of this 
 place. He saw women with bare, gleaming shoulders, 
 and men in evening dress with stiff white fronts which 
 shone beneath the lamps at the entrance to the theatre. 
 Martin went around the corner and entered the pit 
 His eyes were immediately held by the continual move- 
 ment of well-dressed people coming into the stalls of 
 the theatre. . . Dublin was certainly a place of wonder. 
 The lights were suddenly switched off, after the orchestra 
 had played the overture, and he was looking at a scene 
 out of the life he knew. He felt a sudden interest. 
 The words of the characters in the play came to him as 
 had the words of his mother and sister in his own home. 
 And there was a girl in the play who, through the situ- 
 ation in which she was placed, grew to have a certain 
 nobility in keeping with that of the heroines in some 
 of the books he had read. And yet as she stood there, 
 personified by a great actress, on the centre of the stage 
 in her white apron with the bands across her shoulders, 
 she was not at all unlike Lucy Flynn. And the man was 
 like himself, but he did not marry the girl^ and. this
 
 68 IN CLAY AND IN BRONZE 
 
 was the first time he had seen such an ending to any 
 piece of writing. 
 
 He did not seem to feel the same crush of power in 
 the crowds as he went home. Mrs. McQuestion was 
 waiting anxiously at the door. . .
 
 THE DREAMER 69 
 
 III 
 
 IN the morning he met Mr. Cullen in the office. He 
 felt the words tripping queerly on his tongue as he 
 spoke, for the little typist was looking at him with her 
 dark eyes . . . yet at the same moment he felt her 
 slipping out of his mind and he had a notion that she 
 would not return. 
 
 Mr. Cullen took his arm and together they moved up 
 a wide staircase. They went into a small class-room 
 near the top of the house. 
 
 "Now you are to try these examination tests," said 
 Mr. Cullen; "we want to find out what class you are 
 suited for." 
 
 After giving a few further directions he went out 
 of the room and Martin was left alone with all the 
 desks and the maps. It was not at all unlike the little 
 schoolroom of Glannidan. . . There were the papers 
 on the desk before him containing tests in the subjects 
 usually set for the examination for assistants of Excise: 
 arithmetic, geography, history, handwriting, English 
 composition, mathematics. As he turned them over 
 idly he seemed unable to draw any meaning from them, 
 all seemed to mean the same thing, and to mean nothing 
 when all was told. He had only got a smattering of 
 knowledge from a semi-illiterate National teacher, 
 and his schooldays had been short and blanched by the 
 anxiety of the land . . . yet the dogged spirit he had 
 developed from the clay told him it would be a queer 
 thing if he did not make some kind of a show now. 
 Yet it was a fancy that had come out of the books
 
 70 IN CLAY AND IN BRONZE 
 
 which arose immediately to sustain him; he began to 
 jot down his thoughts upon one of the subjects which 
 were named for composition, and it was very surprising 
 to see how rapidly they grew into the clear expression 
 of ideas. It seemed curious that in the midst of his 
 inability he should possess this gift. But the writing 
 was laborious for his hand was more used to the plough. 
 
 Then one of the white-faced tutors came in to gather 
 up the papers, and Martin gave him a woe-begone look 
 as if in apology for his lack of effort. 
 
 "Of course these God-damned things don't matter in 
 the least," said this white-faced young man, "they are 
 only more of Cullen's codology. Young fellow, you'll 
 be sorry you came here, for so far as I can see you'll 
 never, to use a vulgar expression, warm your backside 
 in the Excise." 
 
 It was the perfect frankness of this expression of 
 opinion which caused Martin to immediately like this 
 young man. In the office some minutes later the little 
 dark-eyed girl handed him a parcel. 
 
 "Your books!" she said. 
 
 He took them from her without a word, indeed 
 without even looking at hen 
 
 Now began his life in Dublin, this daily passing to 
 and from the Grinder's to the mean lodging-house in 
 the dim region behind Cuffe Street. A curious contrast 
 was immediately to be observed as existing between the 
 regard for him at each place. 
 
 In the "College," as he liked to call it, he was meeting 
 men far above him socially, sons of the official class 
 who might some day become district inspectors of 
 police or Indian civil servants. They went in and out 
 of the same class-rooms; they were lectured by the
 
 THE DREAMER 71 
 
 same tutors; their goal was the goal of the uplifted 
 young man. They nodded to him even when he met 
 them outside the class-rooms. They addressed him 
 as "Duignan" and the tutors addressed him as "Mr. 
 Duignan," He listened to the lectures and found them 
 interesting because they were an unusual experience, 
 He found himself imbibing knowledge rapidly, and could 
 give very creditable answers to any questions which 
 were sprung upon him. Thus was an extravagant 
 estimate formed of his capabilities, and he was credited 
 with qualities which did not rest on any solid foundation. 
 He had made special progress in the subject wherein the 
 fancy had come to him that he could do better than 
 Brian Doyle. His compositions were sometimes read as 
 models of what Mr. Cullen and his labourers, the tutors, 
 could do, to the wondering classes. 
 
 But back in his lodgings at Mrs. McQuestion's Martin 
 knew for a certainty the limitations of his own person- 
 ality. It was the sharp contrast he formed with the 
 other boarders that endowed him with this note of re- 
 ality, He was descended from a long line of men and 
 women who had drawn their living out of the land, and 
 at home in the clay the fact that he had attempted to 
 question his hereditary destiny had only made him a 
 cockshy for ignorant hatred and scorn. And yet because 
 of all that his residence here had somehow happened, 
 and even here was he the victim of the very same feelings 
 of distrust, especially when he came in from the College, 
 when the little bell above the door clangee^ and he left 
 his books down on the greasy counter. 
 
 "There's the studio!" Mrs. McQuestiori would say, 
 and some of the men, bent low over their dinners, would 
 look up at him with a glower, speaking no word. They
 
 72 IN CLAY AND IN BRONZE 
 
 were queer, morose men who spoke little to one another 
 or to Martin. It was difficult to make a guess at their 
 occupations, because it was at all times that they went 
 in and out. They formed varying examples of failure 
 in life from a young fellow who spent the time between 
 coughing, reading the sporting newspapers, spitting and 
 smoking "Woodbines," to a very old, quiet man who 
 had that look of wisdom which a man puts on immedi- 
 ately before the end of a long, misspent life. These two 
 would be always sitting in the place that was called the 
 "dining-room," and it was to them that his entrance 
 always afforded the most acute annoyance. 
 
 "Where do they be digging them out of?" the old 
 man would say with a laboured asthmatic sneer. 
 
 "I dunno the bloody hell!" the younger would reply 
 between his coughs. 
 
 "Somebody or another that left a lot of money, and 
 his people not knowing what to do with it they put him 
 on for this job after taking all the other brothers 
 he had from the plough and sending them to Maynooth 
 or AllHallowes!" 
 
 Such an expression of opinion to enlighten the wonder- 
 ing couple would often fall from Garrig, a tall, elderly 
 man with a military moustache and a Limerick accent, 
 who sometimes gave a humorous turn to the conversation, 
 not that he was a humorist at all, for he would often 
 say a thing like this: 
 
 "May the curse of God alight seventeen times upon 
 the saintly employers of labour in this city, and, further- 
 more, I'll frighten the life out of you by saying: may 
 the curse of God alight upon the curse of God!" 
 
 "Old curse-of-God Garrig, the Socialist," they called 
 him in Mrs. McQuestion's.
 
 THE DREAMER 73 
 
 Then there was Montgomery, the carpenter, who 
 never worked and was always borrowing "tuppences," 
 which he immediately spent upon pints in Lorcan 
 Murphy's pub across the way. There were two or three 
 bookmaker's clerks who occasionally came home 
 raging drunk from Baldoyle or the Curragh. During 
 periods of prosperity these would spend the day drinking 
 in Lorcan Murphy's pub, and the nights in making 
 furtive attempts to introduce certain ladies into Mrs. 
 McQuestion's house. But she was always too smart 
 for them. 
 
 She used to tell, with great gusto, a story of Heidseick, 
 a German baker, who had also tried the same game once 
 upon a time. 
 
 "He was the best boarder ever I had, but I caught 
 them in the middle of the night and slung them out on 
 the street, so I did." 
 
 Yet, in spite of this vigilance, and the fact that Mrs. 
 McQuestion went to Mass every morning in the Car- 
 melite Church in Aungier Street, life in her house seemed 
 to be a kind of continuous attack upon the decencies. 
 There were times when Martin felt himself slipping so 
 far down into the degradation of it that he longed pas-, 
 sionately for the clean, sweet perfume of the bog which 
 stretched away from Glannanea to Ballycullen. . . 
 
 Now the days were growing shorter, and the lamps 
 in the streets were lighted earlier. This was a glad 
 time for Martin. He would leave aside his book and 
 his pipe and go to the long window to look down upon 
 the people moving about in the warm lamp-lit haze 
 below. . . His mind would become a blank as he 
 remained there gazing. Unmoved by any impulse, 
 he would feel it moving into harbours of great quiet. . .
 
 74 IN CLAY AND IN BRONZE 
 
 This was the hour when Mrs. McQuestion went to the 
 Carmelite Church for evening devotions, and the hour 
 when her boarders had mostly dispersed into the pubs. 
 Yet this was the hour also when the servant girl always 
 employed by Mrs. McQuestion came in to tidy his room. 
 She was a wild half-clad creature, who spoke in the 
 terrible accent of lowest Dublin. Her eyes were always 
 upon Martin, whether she was washing the plates after 
 dinner or making up the beds of an evening. 
 
 One evening her eyes were more piercingly upon him 
 as she handled the sheets and pillows. His eyes 
 wandered to the street outside and were upon three 
 girls passing down to the theatre. They were beautiful 
 girlsf richly clad. They passed out of sight, and he 
 turned around to look at the girl in the room behind 
 him. There were only the two of them in the quiet room 
 and her lips were richly red. . . Suddenly he turned 
 away from her again to contemplate the street, but now 
 his eyes were clouded. . . He heard her slipping from 
 the room and the patter of her bare feet down the stairs. 
 Something had kept him from her. He turned to the 
 looking-glass and saw himself. Somehow he was not 
 the man who had come away from Glannanea so 
 recently. His appearance was certainly still that of the 
 peasant but the city had changed it. He was shaven 
 now, and spruce as any young man in the city, and he 
 wore a suit of Sunday clothes every day. Yet was it 
 some part of the man who had come away from the clay 
 that had saved him from the penalty of what might have 
 happened just now. . . He had suddenly remembered 
 his sister, Brigid. 
 
 He hurried from the house and was soon in a well-lit 
 street where there were numbers of young pretty women
 
 THE DREAMER 75 
 
 moving about or standing in little groups. They looked 
 at him with soft eyes and some dropped love words which 
 came to his ear. He was not blind to their beauty, but 
 he hurried on in fear. 
 
 Soon he was standing before two high-domed buildings 
 with a group of vulgar statuary between them. He saw 
 people move in and out of one of the buildings with 
 bundles of books in their hands. He saw a couple of 
 fellows from "the College" going in and he followed 
 them timidly. This was the National Library of Ireland, 
 they told him, where one might come and read at 
 pleasure. When he entered he saw the bright lights and 
 all the people reading, and the shelves of books and the 
 assistants busy giving out books. He felt very glad that 
 he had discovered this place.
 
 76 IN CLAY AND IN BRONZE 
 
 IV 
 
 EVERY evening now, about the hour when Mrs. 
 McQuestion went out to do her devotions, 
 Martin gathered up his note-books and went across to 
 the National Library. There surely was a solace which 
 blotted out the combined torture of the College and of 
 Mrs. McQuestion's house. It was very pleasant to 
 go there and to feel himself being gradually carried 
 away by the dream that came out of all the books. 
 He read every book which struck his fancy, without any 
 regard for any connection they might have with his 
 studies. True he found an increase of intellectual 
 energy through his visits to the Library, and he came 
 to be looked upon as something in the nature of a 
 prodigy by Mr. Cullen and his men. He was a very 
 well-known figure coming into the reading room and 
 passing by the people who assembled in their usual 
 places by the tables every evening. The somewhat 
 ungainly figure of him had already begun to de- 
 velop the thoughtful stoop of literature. He was 
 fond of sitting down by the side of those whose 
 names he soon learned, by Thomas McDonagh and 
 Padraic Colum, and Sheehy Skeffington and Padraic 
 Pearse. 
 
 It was here he entered into the friendship of Sean 
 O'Hanlon. It began one evening that he had asked 
 at the counter for a copy of Mr. Yeats's Poems. 
 O'Hanlon immediately sprang into spiritual friendship 
 with him. 
 
 "I do a bit of writing myself," he said in a burst
 
 THE DREAMER 77 
 
 of confidence; "come with me on Sunday and I'll show 
 you a few manuscripts." 
 
 Their talks and meetings both inside and outside 
 the Library became frequent, and they went together 
 every Thursday evening to the Tower Theatre, which, 
 strangely enough, Martin had discovered for himself on 
 his very first evening in Dublin. They worked 
 themselves into heated discussions of the plays which 
 were produced there, and O'Hanlon told Martin of the 
 play which he had himself written. It seemed that 
 there was scarcely a young man of their age in Dublin 
 who had not written at least one play of some kind. 
 To Martin it appeared that O'Hanlon's biggest handi- 
 caps as a dramatist were his lack of humour and the 
 fact that he knew nothing at all of the Irish peasant. 
 But his enthusiasm was powerful. He had followed 
 the Irish Theatre all round the town, from one small 
 hall to another until it had at last found a permanent 
 habitation in the Tower Theatre. Thus was Martin 
 dragged further and further into the net of literature. 
 Where eventually it might lead him seemed impossible 
 to tell. 
 
 He grew critical of the acting at the Tower Theatre. 
 There he saw men work their artistic medium to a 
 nicety as a means of creating laughter or gloom. He 
 listened to the character in each succeeding play, and 
 knew that theirs surely was not the speech of the peasant. 
 It had the ring of the peasant's speech, and retained its 
 turn of beauty, but it was not the speech of the men 
 who went into Glannidan every evening and remained 
 drinking in the gloom of the pubs. . . He listened to 
 their humour, but it was the humour which comes from 
 flights of the mind and the humour he had known in
 
 78 IN CLAY AND IN BRONZE 
 
 Glannanea was something which came most often from 
 a petty satisfaction of some low spite when one man 
 got the better of another through the exercise of a 
 little animal cunning. It was seldom that anyone 
 laughed in Glannidan, but they were always grinning. 
 He saw the tragedies wherein one man or woman was 
 made to possess a little nobility of soul and he felt that 
 this was really a lie for in that part of Ireland that he 
 knew he had never experienced such a thing. In one 
 of their walks from the theatre, after which they usually 
 remained far into the night wandering up and down 
 Grafton Street among the groups of soft-eyed women, 
 he spoke of this to O'Hanlon, who sought to uplift his 
 mind from such sordid realities by the creation of ro- 
 mantic visions for the enjoyment of his mind. . . 
 He laughed loudly when O'Hanlon told him that there 
 were people who believed that the Tower has been too 
 hard on Ireland. 
 
 He began to seek JJie reflex of his dreams of beauty 
 in the life around him. He sought it on his walks across 
 St. Stephen's Green in the mornings, when the water 
 was still clean beneath the ducks and the dew still 
 bright upon the flowers. He sought it in the picture 
 galleries of Dublin, where he would often remain gazing 
 for a long time upon a picture of nude beauty. . . But 
 turning frorn^ these things which were half lifeless, half 
 meaningless, his unquiet soul sought it in the reality 
 of the half wild girl who came every evening at dusk to 
 tidy his room. 
 
 More than ever did he seek it in the Library where 
 at the behest of O'Hanlon he read the poetry of Oscar 
 Wilde and Ernest Dowson and studied the art of 
 Aubrey Beardsley. . . He grew to have a longing to
 
 THE DREAMER 79 
 
 write something, and more often was he occupied now 
 in the Library of evenings with a sheet of foolscap, 
 not always the same sheet, however, to which he was 
 endeavouring to transfer his vision of life. . . He 
 dreamt of being some day of the company of those 
 Irish writers of his own time whom he often saw so 
 busily engaged over sheets of manuscript. . . He had 
 begun in rivalry of Brian Doyle, the fellow who was 
 looked upon as a writer in Glannidan. Sean O'Hanlon 
 sometimes laughed at his efforts now, more often was 
 he held by the power of some striking and original 
 phrase: . . . 
 
 "You have the roots of the matter in you, Duignan," 
 he said one evening, "but these little snatches are but 
 the filaments of the dream. They are distinguished 
 by an attempt to attain beauty through a certain coarse- 
 ness of thought. You would have to live the peasant 
 out of yourself, I fancy, before you could hope to be 
 remembered among the elect of these shelves. However 
 you have life before you, and your handling of life 
 might make a writer of you in the end. Yet, it might 
 be better on the whole if you did not permit the dream 
 to spoil your life." 
 
 However, it was the dream that had taken possession 
 of Martin's soul. As he moved in and out of the College 
 he was no part at all of the business of that place. 
 He was one whose eyes were fixed upon the distant 
 summits. He had used what pocket money remained 
 in his possession to still further correct the peasant 
 in his appearance until now, in his neat grey suit, he 
 looked not at all unlike a city-bred young man. . . 
 Then something happened. They held a general class 
 examination at the College, and Martin cut a sorry
 
 8o IN CLAY AND IN BRONZE 
 
 figure when the results came out. Mr. Cullen came up 
 to him, his little red eyes aflame behind his glasses and 
 his beard looking remarkably fierce. 
 
 "What the hell have you been doing with your time 
 or is this a damned piece of tomfoolery?" he said, rustling 
 the papers in Martin's eyes. 
 
 "I thought you knew, that being your business," said 
 Martin, quietly. 
 
 "Well, Mr. Duignan, avic, wait till you see what will 
 happen when your guardian, Father Clarke, hears of 
 this idleness or villainy, or whatever it is. I have already 
 written him." 
 
 So far had Martin advanced in the mood of the 
 dreamer that he hardly seemed to hear the words 
 which were being addressed to him, but this connection 
 of Father Clarke with this circumstance of his life 
 recalled him to remembrance of Glannidan. . . That 
 evening when he went to the National Library he piled 
 his table with those books which usually brought him 
 interest and excitement, but soon found that neither 
 feeling would descend upon him. There was no per- 
 formance at the Tower Theatre this evening to which 
 he might go and fall to thinking as he sat looking 
 vacantly at some peasant play wherein some effeminate 
 actor was endeavouring to impersonate some character 
 he knew well in the flesh in Glannidan and Glannanea, 
 how he would like to jump upon the stage and, better 
 suited as he was in knowledge, temperament, and build 
 of body, give the character its perfect interpretation. 
 So he returned to Mrs. McQuestion's and fell into chat 
 with Montgomery, the carpenter, and Garrig, the 
 Socialist, who were standing just inside the window, 
 their heads bent low upon their chests, looking out at
 
 THE DREAMER 81 
 
 a smoky drizzle which hung gloomily over the muddy 
 street. Not a word was passing between them. Like 
 statues so immovable were they, each sunk to the chin 
 in his own separate hell. He went into the kitchen 
 where the smell of the miscellaneous cheap food was 
 heavy in the air. It was a curious stink in which he 
 felt himself unconsciously searching for what constituent 
 was uppermost. The half clad girl was in the scullery 
 washing up the tea things. He sank down wearily on 
 the old, springless sofa behind the table, and she gave 
 him a burning smile as she wrung the dish cloth. . . 
 But his mind was back again this evening among the 
 boreens and by the old gate with Lucy Flynn. . . Curi- 
 ous, he thought, what an enormous change the city had 
 already effected in him. . . 
 
 The girl put on her shawl and moved close to him 
 as she went to pass out. He looked up from his thinking 
 and their eyes met. She dallied about the kitchen 
 as he yawned and moved towards the door which led 
 upstairs. 
 
 "Where's Mrs. McQuestion?" he said. 
 
 "She's away over doing the indulgence, sir; you know, 
 sir, this is the last evening; she won't be in for ages yet, 
 for she's awful fond of praying." 
 
 It was the first time that either had spoken so many 
 words to the other, and both seemed to feel relieved 
 that the dumbness of desire had at last been ended. 
 
 In the morning there was a letter awaiting him on the 
 greasy table from Father Clarke. It told, with its 
 laboured periods almost of a parish priest's letter to 
 the papers, how in accordance with a communication 
 from Mr. Cullen it had been decided to withdraw him
 
 82 IN CLAY AND IN BRONZE 
 
 from the College, or at least to withdraw the money that 
 was keeping him there. 
 
 "And all the money that is after being spent on you," 
 the letter went on, "and your poor mother and all, and 
 your sister after being married to Jamesey Cassels and 
 she in a delicate state of health already. Indeed you 
 ought to be ashamed of yourself and you nearly three 
 months in college." 
 
 After moping about in a condition of empty bewilder- 
 ment all day he turned that night towards the Tower 
 Theatre.
 
 THE DREAMER 83 
 
 FROM his enthusiasm for the Tower Theatre and 
 its plays the present expedition had emerged. 
 He had made a careful study of the way in which Irish 
 peasants were portrayed at the Tower until the fancy 
 had grown on him that he could play such parts prob- 
 ably better than these actors. And seeing that they 
 relied upon their very lack of technical accomplishment 
 for the best part of their reputation his lack of working 
 knowledge of the theatre could not prove a very serious 
 handicap. So, just as the darkness was beginning to 
 creep in around Dublin, he turned his steps towards 
 the Tower Theatre. By the circuitous way of various 
 dirty back streets did he go until he found himself at 
 length standing outside the stage door. As he drew 
 near he saw that the fanlight was illuminated, and this 
 fact told him that although it was a night upon which 
 no performance was taking place the theatre was in- 
 habited. For about twenty minutes he walked and 
 re-walked the narrow footpath by the door with extraor- 
 dinary feelings of uncertainty jumping through his 
 mind. . . Then, urged by a fateful impulse, he pushed 
 the bell. 
 
 The stage door was opened by a lady who might be 
 one of the actresses, he thought, so nervous did her 
 imperious manner make him. Martin was left to close 
 the door. Half afraid he moved very slowly down a 
 short stairway. The darkness of the place seemed to 
 hold gloomy foreshadowings of this new and mysterious 
 kind of life into which he was deliberately walking.
 
 84 IN CLAY AND IN BRONZE 
 
 His nostrils were assailed by a cave-like smell, and he 
 saw what he took to be stage properties suspended from 
 the roof, and miscellaneous things which made attempts 
 to reach them from the ground like stalagmites and 
 stalactities. 
 
 Martin made an enquiry for the stage manager, whom 
 he considered to be the proper man to see, and soon 
 that person appeared switching on the light as he came. 
 In the sudden light he appeared spectral. His head was 
 little and oldish, but he had the light body of a boy. 
 He began to evince a kind of mechanical stage smile as 
 Martin set out to recognise in him the stage manager of 
 the Tower Theatre. He said his name was Mr. Lawlor. 
 There was a kind of condescension in his tones as he 
 chose certain moments in which to speak. 
 
 "So you wish to become a member of the Tower 
 Company?" 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 "Well, then, you must see Mr. Leonard Thompson, 
 who has all to do with the artistic side of the manage- 
 ment. Come this way!" 
 
 Together they ascended the steep, straight stairs to 
 the office. The mind of Martin was really agitated 
 so near was he now to the presence of one whom he had 
 always taken to be a very great man. Mr. Leonard 
 Thompson, playwright and manager of the Tower 
 Theatre, was seated at his desk. To Martin he appeared 
 as another young, old man. When he rose from his 
 chair he looked most wondrously tall and spare of 
 build. His eyebrows grew in a peculiar way which 
 seemed to give him an expression of constant and intense 
 surprise. This, combined with a certain delicate and 
 apologetic method of movement, communicated the
 
 THE DREAMER 85 
 
 impression that he was surprised by the very fact of 
 his own existence. Mr. Lawlor introduced Martin to 
 Mr. Leonard Thompson and then very silently slipped 
 out of the office upon his rubber heels, and Mr. Thomp- 
 son displayed an air of excessive boredom as he waited 
 for Martin to make known his business. 
 
 "I have called to know if you could find a job for 
 me in the Tower Theatre." 
 
 Mr. Thompson continued remote as he glanced over 
 some typewritten sheets in his hand. 
 
 "A job!" he at last plucked up courage to question, 
 "a job as an actor?" 
 
 "Yes, a job as an actor," affirmed Martin. 
 
 By way of comment or reply Mr. Thompson made an 
 unaccountable noise which Martin imagined must be 
 his clever although curious conception of laughter. 
 Then he said: 
 
 "You are probably aware that we here are different 
 from other theatres." 
 
 Martin nodded and said that he was aware of this. 
 
 "Our players," proceeded the manager, "fit so per- 
 fectly into our plays. As a matter of fact they are 
 specially constructed for the plays and the plays specially 
 constructed for them. Take the case of a certain 
 person for example, who writes by far the most of the 
 plays we produce here. He is quite unable to write 
 a line of his lines without a constant manipulation in 
 his mind of the character who is destined to deliver 
 it I mean the line. From the very moment of its 
 conception the dramatically contrived personality of 
 the character is identified with the established person- 
 ality of the player. Furthermore, a physical corres- 
 pondence is instituted. If the player possesses a lisp
 
 S6 IN CLAY AND IN BRONZE 
 
 it must be shown that as a result of a black curse or 
 some other piece of fatalism the corresponding character 
 in the play was born lisping; if he be small the stature 
 of the character must be reduced to correspond. You 
 may probably marvel at the detail of this person for 
 he is marvellously attentive to detail. The most in- 
 teresting arrangement, invented by him and perfected by 
 me is one of the secrets of our phenomenal success as an 
 Art Theatre. I assure you we have gone one better than 
 the Greeks. They were frightfully keen on the unities 
 of place and time: we pin our faith to the unity of 
 identity. This is, as I have already explained, the artistic 
 mergence of the player's personality in the personality of 
 the character he is supposed to embody." 
 
 This quiet flow of persuasive eloquence was fast 
 convincing Martin in the opinion he had always held 
 of this great young man. But Mr. Thompson had not 
 yet concluded. 
 
 "Now, Duignan" (the sudden familiarity was amazing) 
 "I look upon you as splendid material for a peasant 
 player. That Irish face of yours with the addition 
 of some artificial side-whiskers would make you in 
 London or anywhere the typical Irishman the Irish 
 Paddy so dear to the political cartoonist of my child- 
 hood days. Also you have the agricultural, uncouth 
 swing, and the rich, melancholy Celtic voice changing 
 to a perfectly natural and vulgar brogue. In fact, so 
 far as the Tower Theatre is concerned, you are 'the 
 business.' " 
 
 Martin felt almost confused by these compliments. He 
 had found it so very easy after all his foolish fears to 
 become a member of the Tower Company. 
 
 "We have here the manuscript of a new play which
 
 THE DREAMER 87 
 
 we intend to produce in a few weeks' time. It is a 
 Cork play, and you know what Cork plays are." 
 
 Martin said he knew. 
 
 "Well, in this play, The End of Edward Corrigan, 
 a certain part occurs, that of a heavy, loutish drunkard, 
 which would suit you better than any man I ever 
 knew." 
 
 Martin smiled because of the compliment and the 
 anticipation. 
 
 "I admire your eagerness to take up this part, but 
 we observe a certain slight formality here in the Tower. 
 It is an examination in the reading of this test as we 
 call it, about which a certain person is most particular." 
 
 Martin looked at the typewritten sheet which Mr. 
 Thompson handed to him. It appeared just like the 
 well-known "Advice to Playwrights submitting plays to 
 the Tower Theatre," and was a list of phrases prevalent 
 in Tower Theatre plays. 
 
 "Now you must read these phrases aloud for me, 
 giving particular attention to the intonation" said Mr. 
 Thompson, with a kind of aged concern strangely alien 
 in so young a man. 
 
 Martin, in his eagerness, at once began to read: 
 
 "And she a woman with a big tongue on her a yard 
 long, that does be always prattling." 
 
 "It's what I do be always thinking, lady of the house, 
 if only you'd let a man in to stop along with you." 
 
 "It's a quare world, and a dark night, surely. God 
 help us all!" 
 
 "It's what I do be thinking, and it's what I do be 
 saying." 
 
 "Would you say him now to be in any way cracked 
 or wrong in the head?"
 
 88 IN CLAY AND IN BRONZE 
 
 "No bloody fear!" 
 
 "Ah indade I'm not. A'm going for a wee dandher 
 down Sandy Row." 
 
 "For I have sucked its sorrows' sap out of the moon." 
 
 "Say, kid, this is a rotten town." 
 
 "All those gods whom their swarthy servant, Time, 
 hath not yet slain." 
 
 "That will do," said the manager. "Your rendering 
 is in every way uniquely perfect. Allow me to congratu- 
 late you already as a worker in our midst." 
 
 "I may, then, consider myself engaged," ventured 
 Martin. 
 
 "You may begin to congratulate yourself on the 
 honour that is about to be conferred upon you the 
 honour of permission to appear in the public performance 
 of a Tower Play with our famous players. Of course, 
 I would have you know that jobs with their detest- 
 able pecuniary rewards as understood in the world 
 of business are quite unknown amongst us. We're 
 artists." 
 
 The last word of his speech seemed to hold a peculiar 
 fascination as it fell from the thin lips of the manager, 
 who stood there drooped artistically above his desk 
 like some wan flower at the close of the day. Martin 
 took the square, crackling sheets, which constituted 
 his part in The End of Edward Corrigan. It was 
 a longish, difficult-looking part. . . The manager must 
 have been strongly convinced by his rendering of the 
 test lines. . . But of a sudden the peasant had come 
 back to life in him. What was an artist? Was he a 
 strange being, different from the human species who did 
 not feed or clothe himself or need a place whereon 
 to lay his head. . . The subtle, psychological manager
 
 THE DREAMER 89 
 
 seemed to glimpse what was passing through his mind 
 so he spoke abruptly: 
 
 "The call is for eleven in the morning when you must 
 attend to be formally introduced to your future col- 
 leagues. Also we then start work upon rehearsals of The 
 End of Edward Corrigan." 
 
 So saying he put on his great hat of literature and 
 moved towards the door of the office. Martin followed 
 respectfully behind, and they went down the steep stairs. 
 As they went past the open door of the Green Room 
 the new actor of the Tower Theatre had a momentary 
 impression of long-haired, brilliant men and vain, splen- 
 did women. Their gay chatter flowed out and beat upon 
 the quiet stillness which reigned amid the stalag- 
 mites and stalactites. . . Mr. Leonard Thompson led 
 the way into the clear night air. They spoke little, and 
 in a few minutes were in O'Connell Street. It was de- 
 serted, and they parted amid its silence. Martin glanced 
 back just once and had a quick glimpse of the manager 
 of the Tower Theatre, darkly silhouetted against the 
 lamp-light. The spare figure of him grew more and 
 more shadowy as he went swinging his stick across the 
 bridge and down Westmoreland Street.
 
 90 IN CLAY AND IN BRONZE 
 
 VI 
 
 A FEW mornings later, as he went out without his 
 accustomed bundle of books, Mrs. McQuestion 
 called to him and said: 
 
 "Is it true that you've got a job?" 
 
 "Yes," he said, very quietly. 
 
 "Look at that, now!" went on the landlady. "Sure 
 and I always knew you'd have luck. I used to say 
 a little prayer for you every evening in the chapel." 
 
 He turned away from the grime of his dwelling-place 
 and was soon in Grafton Street. He had already 
 purchased a cane with which he tapped nonchalantly 
 upon the edge of the sidewalk in imitation of a man- 
 nerism of Albert Donohoe, the leading actor of the 
 Tower. 
 
 It was certainly a curious experience for him who 
 had for so long been a part of God's reality among 
 the ploughed fields with the sun and the wide sky over 
 them to be coming into this place of artificiality every 
 morning to be trained how to act the part of a peasant, 
 which he really was. Mr. Leonard Thompson spent much 
 time in telling him just exactly how to speak this speech 
 and that in the most approved Tower fashion, and Mr. 
 Leonard Thompson, with his thin, spidery figure and 
 pale romantic face always appeared very remote from 
 the clay. 
 
 The End of Edward Corrigan gave scope for a 
 certain amount of forcible impersonation on his part. 
 Many an evening in Glannanea as he had leaned across 
 the road gate lifting his eye occasionally to look at the
 
 THE DREAMER 91 
 
 drunkards hurrying into Glannidan he had to a certain 
 extent entered into their longing, although he had 
 never really become one of them. For he knew 
 the tortures which drove them to blot from their 
 minds in the black flow of porter the blind agony which 
 came out of the clay. His sister and Austin Fagan! 
 It was the curious extension of that sad thing that had 
 brought him to the Tower Theatre. Now it was the 
 remembrance of his passion on that day in Glannidan 
 Board-room that was enabling him to interpret this part 
 in this play. Thus had he already begun to make art 
 out of his life after the fashion that had been partially 
 suggested to him by Sean O'Hanlon. He was rapidly 
 surprising even Mr. Leonard Thompson. 
 
 "I say, Duignan, the way you let these 'blasts' and 
 'bloodys' out of your mouth is simply magnificent. Your 
 performance as a porter drunkard is unique. Hitherto 
 the drunkards of the stage were supposed to have pro- 
 duced their condition with wine or whiskey, but you are 
 the first porter drunkard. That's right, allow yourself 
 to dribble a little, as if you were about to vomit, and 
 as you make your big exit lurch forward a little so as 
 to communicate to the audience the effect of vomit which 
 takes place just outside the door. That will be awfully 
 good, and ought to please a certain person immensely. 
 For a writer of peasant romance he has a surprising grasp 
 of the essentials of realism. Do you know what he said 
 to me the other day?" 
 
 Mr. Leonard Thompson here laughed one of his long, 
 peculiar laughs. 
 
 "We were rehearsing Barney Shaw's cowboy play, you 
 know," when he said: 
 
 "I don't doubt but that Albert Donohoe and
 
 92 IN CLAY AND IN BRONZE 
 
 the rest of them will make up all right in this 
 curious little lapse of poor old Shaw's. They will be 
 gotten-up according to the best ideas of the cinema 
 in the togs that are supposed to be fashionable with 
 those supposed cowboys in those supposed parts of 
 America. Of course no such thing really exists, and 
 I don't see why we should make this move to emulate 
 the picture palace. We who have maintained a con- 
 tinuous procession of strange peasants across this stage 
 should endeavour to give an unique reading. The 
 cowboy represents the romance of America; the Tower 
 peasant is our romance. To institute a combination 
 of both might well be considered a stroke of genius. 
 What would you say now to making our cinema-clad 
 actors spit out as they take their places in the jury 
 box?" 
 
 A burst of his queer merriment again took possession 
 of Mr. Leonard Thompson, but Martin remained blinking 
 stupidly in quest of the point of the joke. . . He had 
 a sudden glimpse of the dirty evening crowd in the 
 widow Kelly's pub. . . 
 
 "But in the girls' face?" he said, hopelessly, 
 snatching at a scruple which might remove from his 
 imagination this pictured indignity to a lady. Mr. 
 Leonard Thompson now became completely excruciated. 
 
 It was even thus that many a morning would pass, 
 and there were moments when Martin had qualms 
 as to the loss of time which all this stupid rehearsing 
 seemed. The salary he got for playing the part of 
 the peasant at the Tower was very little by the side of 
 what he might make by playing the part of the peasant 
 in reality. His reading of the part that had been given 
 him in The End of Edward Corrigan was the in-
 
 THE DREAMER 93 
 
 evitable outcome of certain circumstances in his life 
 and was successful beyond even his own expectations. 
 . . . Yet did there seem to be some mighty power 
 sneering at him just as they sneered in Glannidan 
 whenever one attempted to do anything which placed 
 him beyond them. He could always imagine that the 
 crowd who loafed outside the widow Kelly's after 
 closing time would sneer at him in this way if they saw 
 him now. . . 
 
 But in these days Sean O'Hanlon proved a good friend. 
 He kept alive in Martin that rich and fine enthusiasm 
 which might otherwise have perished in these circum- 
 stances. He spoke in lofty words of the nobility of the 
 drama: he induced him to read Ibsen, Strindberg 
 and Maeterlinck, and strove to surround him even in the 
 Library with an atmosphere of the theatre and of 
 art. Yet in spite of all this attention the interest 
 of Martin was gradually waning. This was not life, 
 and the strength of the clay would be continually surging 
 up in his veins urging him to primitive combat. 
 Often on Sundays when he went walking up to the 
 hills with O'Hanlon he could feel himself descending 
 from his dream to talk quite naturally of the land, often 
 falling dangerously near the level which was continually 
 maintained by those who went along the boreens of an 
 evening and into Glannidan. O'Hanlon would be de- 
 pressed by this change in his friend and not a word would 
 pass between them as they came back into Dublin by 
 way of Dundrum. 
 
 It was the night of the first production of The 
 End of Edward Corrlgan, and Martin was playing 
 his part. It might be more truly said that he was
 
 94 IN CLAY AND IN BRONZE 
 
 appearing as himself, the self that might have emerged 
 eventually had he fallen into the life of Glannidan. . . 
 He was already filled by the joyous comfort of applause. 
 He could feel that he had made a success of his first 
 part in the Tower Theatre, and when the play was over 
 he saw the author come up to speak to him. . . But 
 the applause which greeted his appearance in response 
 to the call of "Author! Author!" had left the young 
 man speechless. His hand was limp as he shook 
 Martin's hand. . . 
 
 A little later as he went up the stairway to his dressing- 
 room he met Ellen O'Connor, a girl who had joined the 
 Tower Company even as he had joined it, only a day 
 or two before. For a few minutes she stood there com- 
 plimenting him in the dusk of the stairway. There 
 seemed to be a blessed tenderness in her words as she 
 praised his playing.
 
 THE DREAMER 95 
 
 VII 
 
 THE players had all gone to their dressing-rooms 
 to remove their make-up. From the office one 
 could hear the jingle of the counters as the manager 
 ran them out of the long, tin box in which they had 
 been collected. The little noise was continuous and 
 exciting, but it soon subsided or was lost in a milder 
 kind of noise the counting of money. Then the office 
 door was closed with a business-like slam. By this 
 time Martin had removed his stage appearance and, 
 coming out of his dressing-room, he collided with the 
 stage carpenter, who was also electrician and night- 
 watchman, now going about ostentatiously, closing all 
 the doors and putting out all the lights in the Tower 
 Theatre. 
 
 Now into the room they called the Green Room, 
 where a gas stove gave an air of comfort and homeliness, 
 came all the gods of the Tower Theatre Mrs. Comasky, 
 the charwoman, was getting tea for them down at 
 another gas stove in the scene-dock. First came Mr. 
 Leonard Thompson. He threw himself with an air 
 of extreme weariness into a comfortable chair by the 
 fire and his long legs sprawled menacingly over half 
 the floor. The others, the girls and the rest, crowded 
 in from the dressing-rooms. Mr. Leonard Thompson 
 allowed his gaze to wander away and remain fixed upon 
 some matter in his mind which he saw reflected in the 
 odorous flame. . . His excessive remoteness would 
 seem to proclaim the possession of personality. Around 
 him arose the gabble of the others. They talked of
 
 96 IN CLAY AND IN BRONZE 
 
 where they had got their laughs and how, the bits of 
 the play that had "gone" and the bits that had not 
 "gone." . . . They had seen Sir Horace Plunkett 
 and George Russell in the first row of the stalls. . . 
 
 Then the conversation suddenly put on an aspect 
 of brilliance. One of the actors, out of his talk, began 
 to develop his favourite theory of stage production. 
 It was in turn attacked and commended by those around 
 and so the conversation ran rapidly down many a 
 bye-way of cleverness. . . There was a girl who laughed, 
 now and then; a girl with dark eyes and hair the colour 
 of oak-bark who had often played the part of a queen. 
 . . . Her laughter was like that of no other woman 
 that Martin had ever heard. It was mirthful certainly, 
 seeing that it sprang out of her enjoyment of the chat, 
 yet it seemed, somehow, to hold a tragic ring as if the 
 dead queens who had been hurried through great dooms 
 had given some of themselves to her personality even 
 as she played them. . . In this place she was possessed 
 of a certain majesty which was in such rich contrast 
 to the poor, timid figure that Ellen O'Connor cut as 
 she sat like a little hunted bird upon the chintz-covered 
 sofa furthest from the gas stove. . . The sudden 
 brilliance of this place would seem to have crushed her, 
 and besides she had merely "come on" with the crowd 
 in The End of Edward Corrigan. . . 
 
 Yet, even in this moment Martin felt that it was 
 through the misty veil of the impression already made 
 upon him by this girl that he would see the Tower in 
 the reality it stood for in his own life and in the life of 
 the Ireland of his time. His mind must gradually 
 move to a vision very different from that of Mr. George 
 Moore although there were bits of Ave, Salve, Vale
 
 THE DREAMER 97 
 
 which already appeared to him, in the light of the ex- 
 perience he was rapidly gathering, very brilliant and very 
 true. . . 
 
 But there was Ellen, a small personality very prob- 
 ably, to think of as lighting any man's life towards a 
 lofty regard. Yet, why was she here and why was he 
 here? Why only because this movement which had 
 sprung like a magic flame around a great personality 
 was something powerful and compelling in the life of 
 their country, and both she and he had answered to fts 
 impulse. Here surely was a thing of beauty and of per- 
 manence which would endure past the petty tumults and 
 the ignoble dooms of successive political parties, no 
 matter how greatly clamorous they might be in mean 
 moments of violent triumph. It was queer to think how 
 each of them in turn claimed to be the representatives of 
 Ireland, and the very cleanest products of their nation- 
 ality. Yet here was something more nobly repre- 
 sentative, cleaner, more intense and spiritual, whose 
 idols were not of clay but of bronze. . . And out of all 
 their prate no solid achievement like this had come. 
 In a brilliant, ironic moment it seemed particularly 
 meet to Martin that a theatre, a place for play-acting, 
 was the only reality that had come out of all the play- 
 acting of Ireland. . . They had never reached the old 
 house in College Green wherein they might express 
 themselves in eloquent periods for the admiration of 
 a wondering world. It was in this place after all that 
 they had been truly expressed, the roots of them heroi- 
 cally in the old Gaelic civilization and the poor seed 
 they had run to to-day in a once lovely garden that 
 had gone back to the wild. Here in tragedy, 
 comedy, farce, through all these variations of a noble
 
 98 IN CLAY AND IN BRONZE 
 
 art the breed of them had been shown at the bidding 
 of a master hand. And it might be that it was through 
 this commingled exemplification a perfect form of 
 National life would come to be at length determined 
 and that all the other attempts would collectively make 
 the subject for a tremendous farce to be played here, 
 all Ireland, intellectually emancipated, its enthusiastic 
 audience. . . That would be a great play and a great 
 night, surely, God help us all! 
 
 Martin felt himself wondering for a moment whether 
 Ellen O'Connor's movement with the impulse that had 
 gathered him to its wild breast had been coloured by 
 any of these thoughts. . . But there was the manager 
 merely bored amid the smoke from his cigarette. . . 
 
 Just then the door of the Green Room opened and 
 a tall, dark man came into the midst of the little crowd. 
 He surveyed the accustomed scene, with a lifted, almost 
 grandiose expression. . . His hands were solemnly 
 knotted behind him. No one moved excepting the man- 
 ager, who seemed to stir out of his trance. A few words 
 upon a matter of business passed quietly between the 
 two tall men. 
 
 Then entered the others whom George Moore might 
 have written about very cleverly in Hail and Fare- 
 well. First came a certain person followed eagerly by 
 a member of the Bureaucracy in Ireland, a minor 
 poet and an American journalist. The fame of his 
 plays was manifest in the appearance of a certain 
 person. The member of the Bureaucracy as an inter- 
 national figure needed no description. The minor poet 
 was a mere caricature in his verse as in his person of 
 the tall, dark man. He now began to read a scrap of 
 verse he had recently written on the back of an envelope,
 
 THE DREAMER 99 
 
 and the other considering all Dublin verse to be a sincere 
 flattery of himself listened passively, the noise of the 
 thing sounding in the mystical distance. . . The minor 
 poet's lines had the effect of lifting him out of his dark 
 humour and he laughed heartily as the American 
 journalist manifested himself, note-book in hand. He 
 was one of the almost innumerable Americans who had 
 written books on the Tower Theatre. This was how 
 such books came to be written. A little hard-faced, 
 insignificant-looking man occurred like this in the most 
 inoffensive, apologetic way. He went prying about 
 with a note-book in his hand, listening as it were at 
 keyholes with the note-book in his hand. One scarcely 
 noticed the little man at it until in his surprising 
 American way he came into the possession of more 
 knowledge of the institution than anybody connected 
 with the Tower Theatre. Then the book appeared, 
 a detailed compendium giving the inner history of every 
 single play. It threw a powerful searchlight upon the 
 activities of everyone connected with literature in 
 Ireland, and the funny little man made a lot of 
 money out of it. The literary people liked the 
 compilers of such books immensely for they would 
 seem to have been sent into the world for no other 
 reason than that no man might ever be able to 
 escape the knowledge that there were "great writers" 
 in Ireland. 
 
 The member of the Bureaucracy and the minor poet 
 drifted back to a certain person. The poet began to 
 beg of him to accept a play for the Tower. He put the 
 poet off with a joke, but it was not so funny although 
 the reasons for the subconscious rivalry were perfectly 
 obvious. Both were peasant romancists. He might
 
 ioo IN CLAY AND IN BRONZE 
 
 have been successful had he been a Cork realist or 
 Bernard Shaw. 
 
 The actors and the rest had sunk into insignificance. 
 It all appeared very futile as a part of life suddenly 
 leaping up to overshadow Martin's vision of the Tower, 
 futilities flowed in upon futilities until all the people in 
 the Green Room were enveloped. Their heads were bob- 
 bing up and down like corks upon the sea of futility 
 that life had caused to flow in around them. . . 
 
 So it appeared to Ellen O'Connor and Martin Duignan, 
 who sat apart, she very timid and very silent, he rebel- 
 lious, passionate, wildly wrathful that life should always 
 show its immediate strength even as in Glannidan and 
 Glannanea. 
 
 Her eyes sought his. Until to-night they had never 
 spoken, when she had stopped on the stair to congratu- 
 late him, and now their minds were working into the most 
 wonderful sympathy with one another. Perhaps both 
 had dreamt of Art as a way of breaking the mean bonds 
 of Life, but in this place of Art they now felt bonds 
 which cut deeper into the mind. Life seemed a hard 
 thing to be rid of without the doom of the grave. 
 
 Upon the wall, just by the telephone, was a pencil 
 sketch of a writer, a really great writer who had given 
 of himself to all the power and beauty the Tower had 
 created. Ellen glanced from the portrait of the man who 
 had written the wild sweet words to the face of Martin. 
 He had the same strong face, the same dark hair. Both 
 men had affinities with the peasant. 
 
 Even though their chat upon the stairs had been a 
 short one he had managed to tell her how he dreamt 
 of writing truly of the peasant some day. "I shall be 
 the first real peasant author," he had said. After her
 
 THE DREAMER 101 
 
 hard day of toil in that wretched drapery establishment 
 in George's Street she had read a great deal, and so had 
 fine sympathy now with this young man who had spoken 
 of writing. She had always fancied an author as a man 
 apart from life a kind of God-like man. It was such 
 a brave thing too to think of catching the crooked, 
 grinning fabric of life and remoulding it nearer to the 
 heart's plan. . . Her eyes sought his again. . . She be- 
 gan to have the most extraordinary fancies. . . 
 
 Now there seemed to be just only the two of them 
 in this room of art and beauty, of mirth and loveliness 
 in the Tower Theatre, while slowly beyond the misty out- 
 lines of the others, sheer from the clay, seemed to rise 
 the figure of a tall, dark man in bronze who had written 
 great lines of love for Kathleen-ni-Houlihan.
 
 IN CLAY AND IN BRONZE 
 
 VIII 
 
 HE loved to hear Ellen murmur her praise of his 
 ideas as they went walking together across Dublin 
 after their nights at the Tower. In her company he 
 began to hear the definite voice of that ambition which 
 had already come to him only dumbly. It grew to seem 
 more curious to his own mind that his thought should 
 have shaped itself so definitely; he who had so recently 
 come away from the clay had already uplifted himself. 
 There were many nights when Dublin seemed to hold 
 a hundred glimpses of Fairyland. . . 
 
 Then he wandered into the acquaintance of Phelim 
 O'Brien, the poet. Having mistaken him, as well anyone 
 might, for the bronze figure of the Tower, he went up 
 to speak to him upon some matter of business in the 
 vestibule of the theatre. The poet did not appear quite 
 flattered by the mistake that Martin had made. Later 
 in the evening they met just outside the theatre and 
 walked into O'Connell Street together. Phelim O'Brien 
 would seem to have carefully copied the appearance of 
 the great poet, the soft, wavy hat of black, the green, 
 romantic overcoat, and all the personal glamour of the 
 other man. Even before they reached O'Connell Street 
 he had withered with contemptuous criticism both a cer- 
 tain person as a dramatist and the great poet as a poet. 
 Then he began to speak of himself and of his own work. 
 
 "Come in here!" he said, stopping suddenly outside 
 the door of a rather dilapidated public-house. "This 
 is the Daffodils." Martin had a glimpse of lacquered 
 vases with daffodils in them filling all the window.
 
 THE DREAMER 103 
 
 "It was I who discovered this pub. One day as I 
 moped here in search of the last line of a sonnet, 
 I spotted the daffodils, but then only a dirty pint 
 tumblerful of them in the window. It was a windy 
 day in April, with a lofty, rolling sky! Wordsworth! 
 I shouted in sheer delight; then the last line of my 
 sonnet came to me and I went into the pub to celebrate. 
 I made a suggestion to the proprietor. He seemed 
 flattered. A Parisian cafe of a dirty Dublin public- 
 house! It was an amazing conception. But here you 
 are, the result, little marble-topped tables and daffodils 
 always in the window, artificial daffodils, of course, for 
 no natural flower I ever heard of could bloom in this 
 atmosphere." 
 
 The reek of porter assailed them as they entered. 
 It seemed a queer place for a poet to be going. The 
 drink he called for had a queer name, but as it did not 
 sound like any of the drinks Martin had ever heard in 
 Glannidan he thought that necessarily it must be 
 harmless. Although he knew no French, he thought 
 that it had a French sound somehow. Phelim O'Brien 
 looked around and appeared disappointed to see the 
 place so deserted. But immediately he revived his own 
 interest in himself. 
 
 "This is where I have written most of my books. 
 Of course, now that I think of it, it's too many bloody 
 books I have written. I have flooded the market 
 against myself." 
 
 Martin smiled, for now it seemed that a book was 
 only a small thing, a kind of effort that a man might 
 throw off every week or two. It did not now appear 
 as a solid and great achievement. . . It might be very 
 humble too, for, as they parted some hours later, after
 
 104 IN CLAY AND IN BRONZE 
 
 they had passed and re-passed through the groups in 
 Grafton Street, Phelim O'Brien spoke with a kind of 
 wistful intimacy of a mean street. . . . Martin remem- 
 bered all he had read of impecunious authors. He too 
 was of the same condition, and although he could not 
 as yet be described as an author, he lived not far from 
 this very street. He made an appointment with O'Brien 
 at "The Daffodils" next day. 
 
 "You'll meet me there," said O'Brien at parting, "and 
 I'll introduce you to some of the choicest spirits of the 
 age. I may be able to put you in the way of getting a 
 bit of copy, that is, if you're engaged upon a novel or 
 anything. By the look of you I should say that it is a 
 novel. You may as well know now that no man is 
 allowed into our circle unless he has written a book or 
 has a book in 'the making.' " 
 
 Next day in the afternoon they met in "The Daffo- 
 dils." The dark pub was full of queer-looking men, 
 sitting around the greasy, marble-topped tables drinking 
 bottled stout. Phelim O'Brien described them in 
 whispers to Martin. . . Their talk as it came to him, 
 in almost blasphemous snatches, was of books and 
 books. 
 
 "This kind of thing goes on all day in 'The Daffo- 
 dils,' and when these are not here their places are taken 
 by brothers of the craft of criticism. Criticism was 
 almost a lost art in Dublin until they arose. Now any 
 day and all day you may here hear a valuation and a 
 transvaluation of the literature of our time. Not a man 
 amongst them but has a book in the making, verse, a 
 novel, a critical study, a play. I am the only published 
 author, consequently they have a kind of mingled envy 
 and respect for me."
 
 THE DREAMER 105 
 
 Phelim and Martin soon joined the crowd, and 
 immediately what might have emerged as Martin's 
 estimate of "The Daffodils" was made shapeless by 
 talk. One by one they attacked every writer of the 
 day, the great poet of the Tower coming in for a most 
 determined disembowelling on all sides. . . The sym- 
 posium rose and fell upon successive waves of bottled 
 stout. Phelim O'Brien grew more silent as he grew 
 more pleased. The annihilation of all other authors 
 stood for his magnification. He seemed to sit very 
 still. . . Then he fell down off the high stool and there 
 was loud lamenting as to whether he had killed 
 himself. . . One by one these men who had spent the 
 brightness of the day in criticism of those who sought 
 to find the beauty of the world passed out drunkenly 
 into the dusk. . . And as each pilgrim passed there 
 was a momentary silhouette of a nodding plume beside 
 a bobbing head upon the frosted window glass of "The 
 Daffodils."
 
 106 IN CLAY AND IN BRONZE 
 
 IX 
 
 TO this queer place now came Martin as often as 
 he had money to spare, for money was a necessity 
 even among the Olympian Fields of "The Daffodils." 
 The "writers" of this Dublin decadence were none of 
 them rich men although there were queer stories told 
 of enormous sums that Phelim O'Brien had got for 
 work he had sent to America. Many drinks were stood 
 to Phelim on the strength of these stories. A night 
 that such a story had gained stronger currency than 
 usual would be a big night in the life of Phelim O'Brien, 
 and he would leave the place immensely drunk. Next 
 day all the great story would begin to dwindle and crum- 
 ble and to appear suddenly as fabulous as any story of a 
 legacy that had ever come from America. The fading 
 of Phelim's fortune was as pathetic as the fading of 
 a dream, and, amid the gloom of it, surrounded by 
 his friends of "The Daffodils," he appeared almost 
 a figure of tragedy, his head bent low upon his chest, 
 and nothing save a great depression in the appearance 
 of him. . . The whole scene would swim queerly before 
 the vision of Martin, and again he would see the drunk- 
 ards drowning their sorow in the widow Kelly's pub 
 in Glannidan over the death of a beast. . . Often 
 he came here as if to enter into mourning thus for 
 some part of himself that had died. . . And there 
 was little doubt but that the beast had leaped to life 
 in him here and more and more often he watched 
 the window when the women with the plumes would 
 be coming by. . . He seemed to have moved out of
 
 THE DREAMER 107 
 
 that world wherein lived such saints as Sean O'Hanlon. 
 It was through this idealist he had glimpsed the 
 beauty wherein great literature could be made 
 too, and a man might make a thing of beauty out of 
 his life. At the instigation of O'Hanlon he had read 
 the poems of Padraic Pearse, Thomas McDonagh, and 
 Alice Milligan whom he saw so often writing in the 
 Library. And in his talks with Ellen O'Connor, too, 
 on their way across the lamplit streets of Dublin after 
 nights in the Tower, he had glimpses of the same 
 shining hills. Both had moved up from the poor life 
 of the clay to association with literature through the 
 Tower. It was an influence in both their lives, although 
 the working of the influence was in strangely contrasted 
 ways. It was leading her far above life into a romantic 
 way of thought, him down into life as if in search 
 of a mode of expression, too, among the people of 
 "The Daffodils," who were often blinded to all beauty. 
 They seemed to set great store by drink as an essential in 
 giving a man breadth of outlook, vision, as they put 
 it, and this obsession was particularly unfortunate in the 
 case of Martin where there was more than a trace of 
 hereditary craving. . . It was quite possible that his 
 father, Arthur Duignan, during his famous visits to 
 Dublin had spent long hours in some such pub, talking 
 of books, with men who wore Dundreary whiskers and 
 drinking bottled stout until the day had faded and the 
 plumes had begun to pass by some such window. . . 
 Yet still for love of Ellen there came grand thoughts 
 both here in "The Daffodils" and in the Library 
 which built up a fine piece of dreaming. . . Very often, 
 too, in the vacant spaces of their night at the Tower 
 he would tell her of the novel he was writing. But
 
 io8 IN CLAY AND IN BRONZE 
 
 so far, in reality there was no novel at all. He was 
 merely writing a story with his life, a story which might 
 never come to be read. Once she suggested how all 
 this time he was spending at the Tower was such waste. 
 Their economy had been perfectly phrased by Mr. 
 Leonard Thompson they were artists. Often when 
 he sat in "The Daffodils" taking a cheese sandwich 
 and a bottle of stout, which formed his usual luncheon, 
 he would become fully convinced of the dismal reality 
 of his life. He would stand up and look at himself in 
 the glass advertisements in a self-pitying way. The 
 dapper appearance he had begun to cultivate when he 
 first came to the Tower had somehow disappeared. 
 His coat looked seedy, his trousers, to use an expression 
 of "The Daffodils," had already begun to resemble "the 
 bearded breeches of the bard," his felt hat was fading 
 out of shape and his tie was frayed. . . When he sat 
 down again he felt that he was humped heavily in his 
 seat. He was ever more and more like some evening 
 loafer in the widow Kelly's. It seemed very difficult 
 to fancy him as a Bohemian in a Parisian cafe. 
 
 However, it was when he spoke that the difference 
 in him became manifest. He talked with an easy grace 
 acquired from association with the gods of the Tower 
 Theatre and the companionship of Phelim O'Brien. He 
 now possessed that full charm of manner which comes 
 to the poet at some period of his life, the something 
 of magical personality that wins the beloved and hence 
 helps to create the image of beauty in his poems. Thus 
 was he in different aspects outwardly to the crowd in 
 "The Daffodils," to Ellen O'Connor, and even to all 
 the others at the Tower. Yet, inwardly, he knew 
 himself to be no poet at all, but merely one who wore
 
 THE DREAMER 109 
 
 the wings of a lost spirit fluttering around the flame 
 that must eventually burn him. Already was he 
 scorched by the breath of hell. . . 
 
 One night he came out to the door of "The Daffodils" 
 and stood for a while on the pavement. A girl of 
 striking carriage came by. She passed and re-passed 
 him where he stood. He saw at once that she belonged 
 to the class which is swung perilously between the 
 stage and the streets. . . In a moment they were 
 speaking of life and love and literature and passion 
 as they went on through the crowds. He did not seem 
 to feel the passing of time until they were walking some 
 of the pleasant lanes around Dundrum. Some new 
 rich spirit of adventure in his life seemed to hurry them 
 along. Like two figures out of a realistic dream or a 
 tragedy by Maeterlinck they crossed a grassy, starlit 
 field. 
 
 END OF BOOK H
 
 BOOK III 
 THE PAGAN
 
 THE PAGAN 113 
 
 BOOK III 
 
 THE PAGAN 
 
 I 
 
 HE spent the greater part of next day in the National 
 Library. He had been given a pretty large part 
 in a new play and the Library was the place where he 
 usually went to memorise his lines. . . But the weari- 
 ness of the world was already upon him and he turned 
 from his work to write to Kitty Haymer, the girl of 
 the night that had just passed into this clouded day. 
 . . . And to-day he was a different man. Sean O'Hanlon 
 thought surely that the glory of poetry had descended 
 upon him as he sat writing in the Library. He seemed 
 suddenly akin to all the poets who came there to write, 
 to McDonagh and Pearse and Padraic Colum. Yet was 
 he putting something of evil into this letter, something 
 that pleased him, not as the equal in genius, but as the 
 imitator in mannerism of Aubrey Beardsley, Oscar Wilde, 
 George Moore, and lesser writers of The Yellow Book. 
 The curtains of his mind had changed from the golden 
 haze of poetry to this yellow dream. He thought of the 
 vase of withering daffodils in the pub of literature. In 
 his eyes these grew to have an evil colour like Baude- 
 laire's Fleurs-de-Mal. . . 
 
 He met Kitty very frequently. She kept a little 
 memorandum in which their meetings were recorded.
 
 ii4 IN CLAY AND IN BRONZE 
 
 Her sketchy accounts of herself sounded like bits lifted 
 bodily from a girl's novel that had been written by a 
 "daring" authoress. Once she told Martin that she was 
 wealthy. A Russian nobleman who had burned 
 himself to death for love of her had left her a great deal 
 'of money. . . They were passing into the Laurel 
 Restaurant as she finished the story. Martin was 
 worried by the thought that he had not sufficient money 
 to stand a meal in keeping with her splendour, but 
 suddenly she clutched him by the arm and put a handful 
 of silver into his coat pocket. He was stunned a little, 
 although relieved, for the possibility of a painful 
 situation had been suddenly averted. And had not 
 George Moore created a similar situation around the 
 hero in Evelyn Innes? 
 
 Yet after this quite unexpected fashion there arose 
 about him a sense of comfort and well-being. Kitty 
 began to invite him out to grand hotels in Kingstown 
 and Bray. These were curious, cloudy adventures, 
 hung mistily about the impudent glory of her sculptured 
 pose. . . 
 
 Sometimes she talked of England in her pleasant 
 English accent; of quiet villages with their neat houses 
 and trim lawns. There suddenly arose the picture 
 of her moving against these surroundings and then it 
 came out in her talk with him that she was a clergy- 
 man's daughter and that she was a divorced woman. 
 At least she said that she had been divorced. These 
 little stabs of information flashed out so casually that 
 they scarcely shocked him into appreciation of the 
 depth to which he had fallen, seeing that it was only a 
 few months since he had left the clay. Yet the mixed 
 circumstances of his present entanglement sometimes
 
 THE PAGAN 115 
 
 suggested to his mind that he had arisen a minister's 
 daughter, imagine! Again he saw Miss Alexandra Smyth, 
 the daughter of the Rector of Glannidan, a tidy little 
 person who dressed in white and kept a toy dog to 
 run after her down the road. Often as he walked into 
 Glannidan, his big boots scraping along the road, he had 
 met her and pulled his cap sideways by way of salutation 
 in the ancient feudal fashion. 
 
 "He was a rough, horrible old scoundrel, who used 
 to hurt me frightfully. It was my money that he 
 married, the few hundreds that I have as income. 
 He took me away from that quiet parsonage in Surrey 
 where I was happy to the only life he could give me, 
 the stage, and all the disgusting devils I met there. 
 How I loathe to think of them with their filthy, womanish 
 ways, but you ; Martin, dearest, my great big peasant 
 lover. . ." 
 
 In such talk did she reveal herself, and so his feelings 
 of gradual disgust were mingled with feelings of ad- 
 venturous exaltation. Yet he very often shuddered 
 to think of what they would say of him in Glannidan 
 now. . . 
 
 His life was becoming rapidly more and more remote 
 from that which a Christian gentleman should lead. 
 But he was an Irish peasant, and this was how the 
 brutality of the clay had chosen to express itself in him. 
 "The Tower" had never put any such character on 
 the stage as he was in reality; The Playboy of the 
 Western World was a very feeble scoundrel indeed 
 by comparison. . . If ever they should come to read 
 about him in Glannidan or Glannanea how could they 
 be angry? He was one of themselves, and his vivid 
 literary expression in terms of life the publication of
 
 u6 IN CLAY AND IN BRONZE 
 
 them before the world. . . Perhaps Brian Doyle would 
 attempt an attack upon the book for the Ballycidlen 
 Gazette. It would abound in all the well-worn phrases 
 which made up his style. . . "An outrage upon all 
 creeds and classes," "parishioners, respectable people are 
 implicated." "A cold blooded attack upon the Irish 
 peasant and upon holy Ireland." 
 
 How they would enjoy that attack upon him in this 
 old rag which was published every Thursday in Bally- 
 cullen. As it was passed eagerly from hand to hand 
 any single copy of the paper would grow limp and dirty 
 as a dish-cloth. . . Indeed the word was singularly ap- 
 posite as a description of the Ballycullen Gazette. It was 
 certainly a dish-cloth in the hands of Brian Doyle. He 
 used it to rub the dirt off from people who struck his 
 fancy on to people who did not. 
 
 Yet there were moments when Martin felt the immense 
 punishment of his degradation. It sometimes seemed 
 a very terrible thing that he should have been ordained 
 to suffer like this, and merely because it had appeared 
 particularly fitting to Fate that it was through him 
 this dirty little place should be expressed before the 
 world. He felt that the structure of an enormous tragedy 
 was being reared about himself and Kitty Haymer. . . 
 There were moments when she appeared essentially 
 noble and great almost as the woman in a Greek play, 
 and he too like (Edipus, because of the woman he had 
 married. . . 
 
 It often seemed particularly unfair that he who had 
 never even mixed himself with the life of Glannidan 
 and Glannanea should have been chosen to make this 
 example of himself before the world. And Kitty 
 Haymer, this pretty Englishwoman, what had she to
 
 THE PAGAN 117 
 
 do with all the dirt that had ever oozed from any place 
 in Ireland? She hated Ireland with all the bigoted hatred 
 of her nationality, yet she must be sacrificed and her 
 beauty made to fade perhaps for sake of Ireland, because 
 in a remote district of Ireland, until Martin Duignan 
 had sprung from them, men had hidden their vileness in 
 quiet ways. . . 
 
 There were lucid moments when Martin thought of 
 other gentry who might some day come to figure in 
 this story. These were the clever critics who might 
 review him, very timid Philistines whose aim in life was 
 that they might never offend any kind of opinion either 
 public or private. Their notices would be all after the 
 same pattern, so that by reading one of them one 
 would have read them all. . . To begin with, this was 
 untrue to average Irish life, and that the author had 
 putrefied his mind by reading Zola and that he had 
 merely succeeded in perpetuating another sneer at Ire- 
 land like the stuff they produced at the Tower 
 Theatre ... he was the man with the muck-rake in 
 his hand ... he had outraged the feelings of every 
 lover of Ireland ... no such character as his hero, 
 although it was almost a blasphemy of language to use 
 the word in describing such a depraved character, had 
 ever come out of Ireland or, in fact, out of anywhere 
 but the brain or the book of Mr. Martin Duignan . . . 
 if his mind was as bad as his book he was bound to 
 end a thoroughly wicked life by his own hand. . . 
 
 This he felt full well was likely to be his only reward 
 from the Ireland of his time, for it was the poor reward 
 that many others had won. 
 
 "If you want to write, Duignan," Phelim O'Brien 
 had said to him, "you must come live with us, as the
 
 n8 IN CLAY AND IN BRONZE 
 
 saying is, you must descend to our level and become 
 a swine for only then can you get your snout, so to speak, 
 under the muck of life and root it up for the world 
 to see." 
 
 Ellen O'Connor with the cleaner ambition she had 
 raised up in him was very far from him in these days. 
 ... It was down this strange path he was walking 
 the sad way of the writer now and even Sean O'Hanlon 
 had lost his little influence over him. The season at 
 the Tower was coming to an end, and instead of going 
 on tour with the Company he was remaining here in 
 Dublin with Kitty Haymer. They met every morning, 
 and, day by day, she seemed to gain greater influence 
 over him. She was continually by his side, pulling him 
 down from every decent resolve to a negation almost of 
 his will and personality. . . They left the summer sun- 
 light and went into dark picture houses. Then it was 
 the sunlight again with the clouds hung low before their 
 eyes. . . Every day they went for luncheon to the 
 "Laurel Restaurant." Sometimes Martin paid the 
 waitress, who always regarded them curiously, but more 
 often was it Kitty who paid. 
 
 On the days her allowance arrived from England she 
 had fits of spending, expensive cigarettes and wine, 
 and drives far into the country. She was not very fond 
 of drink, but it amused her to observe the effect of it 
 upon Martin. . . He always liked to go into St. 
 Stephen's Green and to remain until the sunlit scene 
 had preyed sufficiently upon his mood. Then he would 
 write scraps of muddy verse and she would praise his 
 person and his genius. He thought of himself as rapidly 
 qualifying to be a second George Moore. . . He was a 
 -modern lover, not in Paris but in Dublin.
 
 THE PAGAN 119 
 
 Once upon such an occasion she went with him into 
 the dark woods, which the Dublin poets love. It was 
 a lovely evening, and the sun going down behind the 
 mountains made patterns of gold upon the leaves and 
 upon the ground. . . Suddenly Kitty stood all whitely 
 gleaming against the background of the tall, dark 
 trees. 
 
 "Let us be a nymph and a dryad of the woods," 
 she said in her sudden, impulsive way, "and then you 
 can write a poem on it like Keats." 
 
 She made a wreath of laurels for his brow as, in the 
 succeeding sadness, he repeated Dowson's poem "Non 
 sum qualis eram bonae sub regno Cynarae." . . She 
 called him her poet, her prince, her master, the lord 
 of her life. . . Then they began to speak for the first 
 time of leaving Dublin together. It would be such a 
 "lark," she said; and her eyes were gleaming as she 
 gazed deeply into his eyes. . .
 
 120 IN CLAY AND IN BRONZE 
 
 II 
 
 A FEW curious little causes had gone to determine 
 this decision. Their inward weariness had begun 
 to reshape their world. . . They had become well-known 
 figures moving together about the streets of Dublin, so 
 well-known indeed that a feeling of shame had begun 
 to struggle into the breast of Martin. Cattle men up 
 from Glannidan for the market would often poke their 
 heads out of a thick crowd and stare at them as they 
 went past. . . One night, too, in Kingstown, who, 
 of all people, had Martin seen but Father Clarke sitting 
 in a secluded place and looking out upon the sea. . . 
 Kitty wondered what could have been the matter a little 
 later so fully did his mind seem occupied by some 
 far thought. . . This little shadow of separation by 
 something behind their present way of life caused each 
 to fully realise one another in this moment. . . 
 She was struck curiously by the thought that it was 
 their different nationality that had suddenly arisen as 
 the barrier between their souls. Few love words fell 
 from either of them on this night, but instead they began 
 to discuss points in the age-long hatred of Ireland and 
 England. . . Then she cried and flew into hysterics. 
 In the morning Martin felt acutely miserable. They 
 returned to Dublin in the tram and parted without a 
 word of tenderness at the corner of Nassau Street. 
 
 When he went to the new lodgings he had taken at 
 the behest of Kitty he found a letter from his mother 
 awaiting him. He recognized the poor writing on the 
 envelope at once. Inside were a few lines which made
 
 THE PAGAN 121 
 
 the strangest attempts to remove themselves from the 
 page, a sorry scrawl. The letter told of Jamesey Cassels 
 who had married his sister, Brigid. 
 
 "He never stopped drinking in the widow Kelly's 
 since he came to learn about the child. And that was 
 not bad enough, but he's after leaving her and going 
 back to Mucklin. The grand meadow field is after 
 rotting on the shank and the oats is falling off the head. 
 It's what I write to ask if maybe you could get a holiday 
 or something and come home to give us a hand. We 
 heard from Father Clarke that you were after 
 getting put out of College. He's a grand man, and 
 you should never forget him, the way he sent Peter 
 O'Brien to settle you in Dublin and all. Now, Martin, 
 it's what I want to ask you, what d'ye be doing in 
 Dublin these times? I do be having the quarest dreams 
 about you." 
 
 What was he doing now? The present way of his 
 life was such a dark part of his consciousness that his 
 search for a reply resulted merely in a great, dumb 
 sadness. . . He spent* the day in striving to write 
 something, and in the afternoon his new landlady, 
 Margaret Murtagh, came into his room. She was a 
 woman of the Midlands who had come away from the 
 country many many years before to make a fortune for 
 herself by keeping a boarding house in Dublin. She had 
 made no fortune, but only a bare living, which removed 
 her but a little way from poverty. Martin thought of her 
 as possessing at one time some desire to raise herself 
 above the mean life of the narrow places. Now she 
 looked worn and broken, although it might be said that 
 she was still a fine figure of a woman. It was a 
 hard life, this* continual scraping to make ends meet.
 
 122 IN CLAY AND IN BRONZE 
 
 Boarders frequently left her without paying their bills, 
 and there was a man stopping with her just presently, 
 a solicitor, whom she had been hoping would marry 
 her for the past four or five years, and who had not paid 
 her a penny during all that time. 
 
 This was the only joy of her life, this hour of the day 
 when she put on a white blouse and her best black 
 skirt. Sjjie was not yet an old maid although perilously 
 near that age when a woman stands in urgent need of 
 adornment. Martin was immediately oppressed by a 
 smell of scent, so heavily administered that it subdued 
 the odour of the greasy plates and the dirt of the kitchen 
 which somehow clung about her still. He felt, too, that 
 she had come into the room to ask him for his board 
 for the past few weeks. Perhaps she had mistaken him 
 too for he did not now appear a very reliable boarder, 
 coming in at all hours of the morning and sleeping 
 through half the day. Here was she before him 
 now in this dual realisation of the peasant, strongly 
 repulsive compared with the woman he had just 
 left and with whom he was so intimately en- 
 tangled. . . He caught the ample body of Margaret 
 Murtagh in his arms, in no embrace of affection but 
 rather in some curious prostitution of himself. But, 
 just presently he had no money with which to pay his 
 board. . . She breathed against his cheek in quiet sur- 
 render, and he could not help thinking of the man she 
 expected to marry her. . . 
 
 When he went down into the dining-room, before 
 going out to the Tower, she would have a nice 
 tea waiting for him. But there was a smear of disgust 
 across his thought. . . The dusk was beginning to 
 creep into the room. Across the wide roof of old
 
 THE PAGAN 123 
 
 Dublin the shadows were stealing, and far away towards 
 the Coombe he could hear a barrel-organ playing. 
 
 "What d'ye be doing now?" 
 
 These words from his mother's letter were burning into 
 his brain. This was what he was doing while there 
 was sorrow in his mother's house and the harvest still 
 in the fields. . . There was a sickness of heart upon 
 him as he took his tea. Margaret moved about him 
 in attendance. . . 
 
 He was blind to the beauty of the evening scenes 
 as he went on through the streets. Passing "The Daffo- 
 dils" he thought of taking a drink, but his disgust merely 
 swelled higher with the thought. The decadents would 
 all be in here, the wasters talking of books they had 
 never written nor never would write. . . At the stage 
 door of the Tower he was oppressed by the thought 
 that Ellen O'Connor would be waiting in the wings to 
 speak to him with a quiet look of trust in her eyes. . . 
 A few minutes later, as he stood before the mirror in 
 his dressing-room he was saddened by the thought that he 
 was supremely unworthy of her. He was chilled into a 
 bronze stillness of despair as he stood there gazing into 
 the mirror. . . The other actor in the room was quoting 
 passages from The Hound of Heaven to himself. . . 
 
 He started abruptly, and going into the office told 
 Mr. Leonard Thompson that he had made up his mind 
 to leave the Tower Theatre. Mr. Thompson snorted in 
 quiet amazement, and his surprise seemed very calm 
 indeed by the side of this great intention of Martin's 
 to change the ignoble way of his life at the bidding of 
 his mother and to bend in filial fulfilment to the clay. 
 ... In the intervals of his part on the stage he told 
 Ellen of his sudden resolve to leave Dublin. She agreed
 
 124 IN CLAY AND IN BRONZE 
 
 with him that it was a poor sort of place for anyone 
 to think of spending their lives. If he went to America 
 his writings would soon make him rich and famous 
 there. . . She hoped he would not forget that she would 
 then be fading in that shop in George's Street where 
 she worked during the day. Indeed she wished that 
 she could break away from Dublin too. . . So there 
 while a play about Robert Emmet and Sara Curran was 
 being played upon the stage they listened half-light- 
 heartedly to the pitiful story of the love of that dead man 
 for that dead woman and fluttered timidly about the 
 realisation of their own love. . . For all the pagan sen- 
 suality into which his life had drifted he was truly noble 
 in his every feeling whenever he spoke with Ellen. It 
 seemed to be because of her that he had thought of 
 leaving Dublin to save himself. Already his mind had 
 turned back to the scenes of his youth as a way of 
 escape, but now, through the suggestion of her presence, 
 it had leaped far in pursuit of his ambition. . . But 
 the immortal longing of the clay still made an immense 
 struggle within his breast. . . 
 
 It would mean escape from the dark spell of Kitty 
 Haymer too, yet, by what seemed the queerest accident, 
 he met her that night in Grafton Street as he walked 
 home pensively from the Tower. She had just come 
 out of a picture house in which an American film had 
 captivated her. 
 
 "I'm going there next. I'm sick of this filthy Dublin 
 she said. 
 
 "Funny, I have just been thinking of going to 
 America, too," said Martin. 
 
 "Oh, then, let's go together, It'll be the greatest fun. 
 I've just got my allowance!"
 
 THE PAGAN 125 
 
 Her eyes were upon him again even as they had been 
 in the deep, dark woods, and he seemed always powerless 
 before that rich look. . . Yet it brought him none of 
 the soul's gladness which had so often flowed out to 
 him from the eyes of Ellen when they had gone walking 
 together like dream figures through the enchanted 
 streets.
 
 126 IN CLAY AND IN BRONZE 
 
 III 
 
 "TW TOW their minds were altogether so concentrated 
 L^ U P D fli S ht that they put on the faces of fugitives. 
 Their lives had been suddenly swallowed in a great eager- 
 ness to be away from Dublin and from Ireland. When- 
 ever they were together now they were fond of taking 
 occasional glances at the tickets to America, which he 
 carried. Continually she saw him, not the declining 
 figure he presently was in Dublin, but dressed up as a 
 cinema actor in America with a new velour hat, a cigar, 
 and an amount of gallant assurance. 
 
 "You'll be my Maurice Costello!" she was fond of 
 saying. 
 
 It was strange that Kitty should have come to con- 
 ceive a genuine affection for him. She now saw him 
 as her real husband, in whom she might take pride as 
 the citizen of another country. She fancied somehow, 
 beyond the torture of her doubts, that a certain validity 
 could be given to her connection by a sincere love. . . 
 She had thrown away the little book in which she had 
 been accustomed to write down her appointments with 
 her other lovers. . . Yet was there upon Martin, very 
 frequently, remembrance of these things. But she had 
 shown great kindnesses towards him. It was through 
 her that he was now moving towards his ambition 
 achieved for love of Ellen O'Connor. It hardly ever 
 struck him to think of the traitor he was both in his 
 mind and in his life. . . He often wondered why his 
 heart should be for ever torn. . . 
 
 Now that he had thought, even momentarily, of
 
 THE PAGAN 127 
 
 returning to the clay, it seemed even more strange that 
 he had been plucked away from what should have been 
 his real life to this queer destiny. . . Lucy Flynn with 
 her talk of cattle and the crops was very far from him 
 now. . . The girl he had known at Mrs. McQuestion's 
 he had seen late one night, a wan face wrapped up in 
 a shawl. . . Ellen he still met, but Kitty Haymer was 
 always very near to him; yet out there in America who 
 could say what curious happenings might yet evolve! 
 He might be rid of her. They might gradually tire 
 of one another and agree to separate. Not exactly 
 that he desired this for she still possessed a certain curi- 
 ous fascination of personality that would make her 
 eminently desirable to any man. . . And besides she 
 was continually the means of connecting him with a 
 grander way of life, which was an agreeable flattery 
 of his vanity. 
 
 She had bought a pretty outfit for this expedition 
 to America and had compelled him to accept the present 
 of a splendid suit as well. In fact between the purchase 
 of the tickets and all her allowance was overdrawn for 
 several terms to come. But they looked an unusually 
 brilliant pair as they stepped aboard at Queenstown, he 
 speaking in imitation of her fine English accent. The 
 crowd with whom they mingled looked at them admir- 
 ingly and thought them a very well-matched pair indeed. 
 Yet when he read the coupling of their names together 
 on the list of passengers it was with feelings of curious 
 abasement rather than of pride. . . But there was 
 no chance of anyone seeing them now here travelling 
 second class on a swift Atlantic liner, and when they 
 sat down to luncheon, to the good food so cleanly served, 
 the excellence of his luck began to appear in a very
 
 128 IN CLAY AND IN BRONZE 
 
 comforting way to Martin. . . Certainly he had pro- 
 gressed amazingly since the days when he had followed 
 the plough. . . But there was one thing that rankled 
 in his mind, his quiet farewell to Ellen O'Connor, the 
 secretive, evasive answers he had given to her consider- 
 ate questions. . . 
 
 "You'll remember me, Martin, dear, for always and 
 always, for ever and ever." 
 
 "For always and always, for ever and ever." 
 
 "And you will make a great name for yourself with 
 that fine brain of yours, a name that will ring all over 
 the world." 
 
 "Yes, darling." 
 
 Remembering this now he hated himself. How on 
 earth had he managed to look into her trusting eyes? 
 It had been a near thing once or twice to have averted 
 a meeting in the company of Kitty. . . He pictured 
 Ellen dreaming in the vacant moments of the shop in 
 George's Street, dreaming of him who was now crossing 
 over to America with Kitty Haymer. . . But he would 
 do great things yet for her sake, yes, he would do great 
 things yet for her sake. . . But there was Kitty still so 
 fascinating by his side. 
 
 He had written a short note to his mother saying 
 simply that he could not go home to Glannidan, that 
 he had got a great job in America and was going there. 
 He had a half-conscious recollection that this was the 
 usual, vague way of setting the wisp of talk alight in 
 Glannidan. "A great job in America!" They would 
 talk over a rumour of the kind for months all around 
 Glannanea. It would flatter his mother's pride to know 
 that her son was on the way to triumph. But they 
 would be in a poor way, his sister and herself, with
 
 THE PAGAN 129 
 
 no man in the house. Doubtless they would expect 
 some help from him, for had not both of them to 
 some extent, determined his present way of life? 
 Very clearly he remembered another phrase from her 
 letter: "And all the money that was spent on you." 
 
 He did not find the pleasure he had anticipated in the 
 voyage. Its monotony increased the weariness which had 
 already begun to creep into his soul. They were thrown 
 so continually into the company of one another that they 
 had already begun to fade in each other's eyes. . . 
 For the first time in his life he knew the real bitterness 
 of a woman's tongue, and once there sprang a cry from 
 her which amazed even Martin, who had produced it. 
 ... It was like the cry he had once heard in the ditch 
 near Glannidan, the broken though still rebellious cry 
 of a tinker's woman with her man kicking her. . . He 
 felt that fierce love had often been quenched down to 
 such an ugly ending. . . 
 
 The bright gaiety of their passion had become dimmed. 
 There seemed to be a certain obligation upon him now 
 with regard to her and it was a fetter which hurt. 
 Continually was he turning from her, when she 
 wished him to linger by her side and talk of the wide 
 glory of the sea, to his writing-pad and his pipe and 
 chair on the deck, where he wanted to go on with his 
 writing for love of Ellen. But he could write nothing 
 while she was so near him. . . Once when she asked 
 him for her sake to think more seriously of a real way 
 of life in America he had spoken crossly, and she had 
 replied with obscene words which cut two-edged into 
 his soul. Because of her, perhaps, and because of the 
 deadly influence of the blithering crowd he had met 
 in "The Daffodils" the great ambition that had been
 
 130 IN CLAY AND IN BRONZE 
 
 raised up in him through contact with the noble fact 
 of the Tower Theatre, the clean idealism of Sean 
 O'Hanlon and the love of Ellen O'Connor had not been 
 fulfilled. . . He never included himself in any accusa- 
 tion of this kind, for even at the most tortured times 
 there was always upon him a feeling of wonder as to the 
 strangeness of the personality he had taken away from 
 the clay. Yet now for all the curious magic of the 
 difference he had made in himself, he was aimless, use- 
 less to all seeming for the battle of life, a man without 
 a single qualification for entry into the tumultuous life 
 of America. He was merely possessed of the dream 
 of authorship, the dream of a dream. . . Neither Kitty 
 nor he were very hopeful or very happy as they sailed 
 into New York Harbour. The thought of this land of 
 liberty made no new and brave appeal to them who, 
 seeking through what they were pleased to call liberty, 
 had found only an enduring bondage.
 
 THE PAGAN 131 
 
 IV 
 
 THEY went to a theatrical boarding-house in 45th 
 Street; Kitty had had experience of such places 
 in her tours of England. Not so Martin, who now saw 
 this side of the stage for the first time. The situation 
 seemed to decide momentarily the bent of his inclin- 
 ations, intentions and possibilities. He thought he had 
 said farewell to the stage upon leaving Dublin and 
 the Tower, but now the very circumstances of his 
 flight had determined his return to it, not the stage, 
 however, of art and literature, but that of mud and 
 doggerel. Kitty fell easily among these people. Al- 
 though the immediate distrust of the Americans to 
 her as an Englishwoman remained the strongest feature 
 of their association there was something of the real 
 and deeper kinship of the stage between them as well. 
 Because of that touch of literary perception he had 
 acquired in the National Library, in "The Daffodils" 
 and in the Tower, he beheld these large Americans 
 with almost the clarity of Dickens in Martin Chuzzle- 
 wit and The American Notes. He listened, some- 
 times unmoved, more often merely irritated, to their 
 great bombast as they sat eating their queer food in 
 the dining-room where a crowd of them always lingered, 
 gobbling and gabbling. . . Now neither Kitty nor he 
 kept one another in torment with battling over the age- 
 long quarrel between his country and the British Empire. 
 They were united in their detestation of America, and 
 so some of the old regard for one another had re- 
 awakened in them. The first days drifted fruitlessly.
 
 i 3 2 IN CLAY AND IN BRONZE 
 
 The monster that was America loomed ever more hugely 
 around them, and their talk at all times was but an echo 
 to their fear. 
 
 The pictorial idea, the jolly romantic film play of 
 America, had completely disappeared, and their attempt 
 to retreat daily from reality was increasingly more 
 miserable for further and further were they entering 
 into the shame of one another. Their slight resources 
 had dwindled to an alarming extent and he had not 
 found work. The sense of his failure smote him doubly. 
 He had not made a single step along the path of his 
 ambition for love of Ellen, nor had he so far made any 
 return for all the kind assistance of Kitty. . . It seemed 
 sufficient treachery to one and the other to go the round 
 of the theatrical agents every morning and to bear the 
 perpetual insults of big men with enormous cigars and 
 diamond-studded fronts. 
 
 "The Tower Theatre, is it? Some theatre that. We 
 don't want you." 
 
 Now it was wholly unlike their days in Dublin when 
 both she and he had had money and a certain amount 
 of leisure to spend it. Now was there something utterly 
 different in their relations. Their lives were becoming 
 more and more of a burden, each now with a separate 
 and complete torture. . . Kitty acutely felt the com- 
 pulsion of her life with Martin, who now seemed less 
 admirable than the man she had left. She tortured him 
 with talking of the mistake she had made in attempting 
 to escape from the mess which had been her marriage 
 with Edmund Haymer. 
 
 He now spent a great portion of his time in the streets 
 fearful of meeting the face of Kitty sitting there in their 
 poor room, so much alone with her tongue turning to
 
 THE PAGAN 133 
 
 greater and greater bitterness because she had been 
 robbed by him of the gay life she loved so well. . . And 
 whenever he returned early it was continuously the same 
 hopeless tale. . . Sometimes he came in exhausted 
 with hunger. He took only his breakfast in the house, 
 and she would save him little scraps of bread or meat 
 from her dinner which he ate ravenously. . . Then a 
 sleepless night to break only into another unhappy 
 day. 
 
 His days were queer things as the torture of each 
 one became heaped upon the torture of those that went 
 before it. He was an aimless wanderer here in the 
 great roaring city of New York. His face did not betray 
 his nationality, although his heavy coat of Irish 
 frieze, the one good article of clothing in his possession, 
 hinted that he came from Ireland. The heels of his 
 shoes were rapidly disappearing, and there is nothing 
 quite so depressing to the wearer as vanished heels. 
 They are an epitome of failure. From thinking of work 
 as he moved about the streets he had come to think 
 more and more frequently of food. He stopped often 
 before the window of a "Childs Restaurant." In the 
 days when he had had leisure to express an opinion 
 on anything in terms of literature he would have thought 
 of the "Childs Restaurant' as the most expressive 
 institution in America. The men baking the wheat 
 cakes upon the hot plate behind the window of polished 
 glass, the shining walls, the white-robed attendants, 
 the glistening nickel fittings, the shining quickness with 
 which the food was served; all appealed to his sense of 
 the theatrical and fascinated him. . . Those who have 
 never been hungry are quite unable to realise the effect 
 that food has upon life. . . If he could go into a "Childs
 
 134 IN CLAY AND IN BRONZE 
 
 Restaurant" at any time he knew he would emerge as 
 with the halo of a metamorphosis. . . 
 
 It was New Year's Eve and he turned from contem- 
 plation of the window of the Restaurant and faced 
 towards where the din was already beginning on Broad- 
 way. It was like the rumble of distant thunder, but 
 it was cheerful thunder. He did not suddenly think 
 of the celebration in its symbolic or religious aspect, 
 but just like the "Childs Restaurant" as part of the 
 howling blatancy of America. How it swelled and rose! 
 He had already heard that New York's ringing out of the 
 Old Year was an appalling thing. He passed into the 
 thick of it, a lonely wanderer, with a dark cloud around 
 him. The very lights of Broadway seemed to evolve 
 a golden shrieking against the sky. . . Here was an 
 advertisement for the pretence of America which hid 
 its baseness and cruelty and hunger. . . He moved 
 forward with difficulty. Here and there he got wedged 
 in amongst the crowd. He avoided as best he could 
 the blasts of the coloured paper bugles, but he was 
 already white from the confetti which fell from the 
 windows above him as a snow-shower. He was almost 
 deafened by the noise of the things which were specially 
 manufactured for making this kind of noise. These 
 were shockingly effective. How meaninglessly excited 
 were the faces of the men; how lost to dignity the faces 
 of the women? ... In this moment surely was the 
 gallant riding of the uncurbed passion as of a mad 
 sweaty rider against a lonely wind-swept hill. It 
 became oppressive, saddening. . . He could not 
 shoulder his way through it any further. He would 
 have to turn into a side street and go a longer way
 
 THE PAGAN 135 
 
 home. That was all it meant to him, more weariness, 
 more torture. 
 
 He thought it was 45th Street into which he had 
 turned; but he was so glad to escape that it did not 
 matter. He merely felt released, thankful. There was 
 a man standing up the street a little way in the shadows 
 watching the whole mad pageant go by. . . Martin 
 stopped suddenly. He thought he knew the man. 
 He spoke to him and the man made reply in an Irish 
 accent, which had some of the hardness of the northern 
 province. . . Why, it was Arthur Nicholson whom he 
 had met just once in "The Daffodils," and who had 
 been introduced to him by Phelim O'Brien as the first 
 Orangeman to renounce capitalised faction and turn 
 poet. . . They exchanged a few remarks regarding 
 the futile idiocy of the celebration they had just been 
 witnessing. There was something magnificent and 
 mighty in the serene repose of the poet before all that 
 howling littleness. When he laughed it was like the 
 laughter of a god. . . In a few moments he had ex- 
 plained his presence here. He had come to America 
 as a member of a theatrical company to produce plays 
 which were also literature. He spoke of his mission 
 with pride, considering himself the artistic emissary 
 of one nation to another. He was most cordial in his 
 invitation to enter the company of his fellow-actors. 
 Martin went into a shining cafe and sat amongst 
 them. . . 
 
 Suddenly here in this saloon in America through power 
 of this literary companionship was he back again in 
 "The Daffodils," and through imagination of "The 
 Daffodils" back further in the widow Kelly's pub in 
 Glannidan. . . He was listening to talk which told
 
 136 IN CLAY AND IN BRONZE 
 
 only of his hopelessness slowly erecting about him the 
 circle of his doom. . . However the drinks they were 
 standing him were bringing back some of the old enthu- 
 siasm which was rapidly making a horrible caricature 
 of him as he sat there in his present condition. It was 
 a grand thing, he imagined, to hear himself talking about 
 books and literature while over yonder in 46th Street 
 was the woman who had helped him to America. And 
 in that dingy shop in George's Street in Dublin Ellen 
 O'Connor was dreaming of the fame that was to come 
 to him. . . And in Glannanea his mother, very pro- 
 bably, was still anxious to convince the neighbours of 
 the great job her son Martin was after getting in 
 America. . . Yet there were moments when he almost 
 felt great in his spiritual emancipation. He was abso- 
 lutely unlike any Irish immigrant who had ever come 
 from Erin. He was curiously unstirred by any thought 
 of Ireland. That part of his soul was one with those 
 parts of him that had died. The essential element of 
 his country, that constituent from which the national 
 life sprang upward to flower to what perfection it might 
 attain the clay and its breed, he had seen with the 
 realistic and not with the romantic eye. No thought of 
 poetry or Ellen coloured his mood when he remembered 
 the life of Glannidan and Glannanea. 
 
 He was spiritual exile, too, for no stir of comradeship 
 or patriotism came to him when he often stood to watch 
 an Irish-American procession go by, the men all dressed 
 in black and bedecked in green with a great green flag 
 at their head. . . Even the frantic cheers and the hat 
 waving of those on the side-walk only made him faintly 
 smile. . . He was like no Irishman that had ever been, 
 and he knew it so he was always very remote from the
 
 THE PAGAN 137 
 
 grand pageant sweeping by. . . As he caught glimpses 
 of the dark, purposeful faces of the men he imagined 
 them to be thinking of Ireland, and that in their eyes 
 as they marched were heroic visions of Wolfe Tone and 
 Robert Emmet, Dan O'Connell and Charles Stewart 
 Parnell, all curiously though brilliantly commingled. 
 ... It seemed a shame that he was not one of them. 
 . . . And yet a very ancient Irishman who had once 
 plucked his sleeve as he stood thus gazing remote and 
 lonely had said: 
 
 "Now I want to ask you, young fellow, did you ever 
 see anything so gorgeous as them guys and they going 
 by, for every mother's son of them is a fine, smart fellow 
 with a great job, a ward heeler, a cop, a saloon keeper, 
 a bar-tender, a bum, a bully or a bowsie. Of course 
 it's no right, I suppose, to question the way they get 
 their dollars when they're all so ready to fire the stuff 
 at envoys to America whenever they tramp over here 
 with the hat held out looking for subscriptions to 'The 
 Cause,' and wouldn't you know well by the green and 
 gold eyes of them that there isn't one of them guys at 
 the present moment but's ready to frizzle for pure love 
 of Ireland." . . 
 
 Martin knew some comfort in the thought that there 
 were many honoured names around him whose secret 
 stories would not bear telling at the same firesides by 
 which they were almost beatified for sending home the 
 money.
 
 138 IN CLAY AND IN BRONZE 
 
 succeeded a curious stopping, as if for a mo- 
 ment, of Martin upon the downward path. A 
 minor member of the company dropped out, and Nichol- 
 son got him the job, which consisted for the most part 
 of walker on in the crowd. He was very glad to get it, 
 although in comparison it was nothing better than the 
 job he had already left at the Tower. But it was better 
 than walking the streets, and would mean a surcease 
 from torture for the month or so that it lasted. It 
 would mean an opportunity of talking again in the old 
 way that was sweet to him, the curious, melancholy way 
 that had become a part of his life, that condition wherein 
 he became magnified and fondly imagined his name upon 
 the covers of books. . . 
 
 Kitty was slipping further and further out of his mind. 
 He had written to Ellen and back to him had already 
 come a letter in reply, full of the most anxious regard. 
 Kitty watched him narrowly one morning as he read 
 it. . . It was not until then that her hatred for him 
 really leaped into flame. Her money was quite gone now 
 and this was a condition she had never before known. 
 She blamed him for it entirely, although he paid the 
 landlady for her food now, but he had to keep a little 
 for the entertainment of himself and his friends during 
 these frozen nights in New York. 
 
 Often as he sat in the very midst of it he would 
 strive to view himself in this hour "after the show." 
 Arthur Nicholson did not accompany him, but 
 wandered New York in search of material for an
 
 THE PAGAN 139 
 
 epic which he was writing. Consequently Martin's 
 companions were Connor, Harman and McKeon, who, 
 although amateurs only a year or so before, were now 
 real actors muffled up in great coats and with long 
 hair. . . First came a flow of stage talk. Then as this 
 customary discussion of the faults of their fellow-players 
 began to dwindle their night became suddenly filled by 
 some unusual incident or personality passing vaguely for 
 a moment into their lives. 
 
 A man was coming towards them down the tesselated 
 floor of the saloon. Connor nudged the others, re- 
 marking in his best American: "Here's a guy made 
 up as an actor"! He might not be an actor exactly, 
 figured Harman, but he resembled an actor in the manner 
 in which he behaved. The three actors were watching 
 him most carefully. Martin watched their faces as 
 they watched the other man. They were psycho- 
 metrists in their different ways and this kind of thing 
 gave them immense pleasure. The newly-entered one 
 had called for a drink, and was now talking theatrically 
 with the bar-man. They guessed so much from the loud 
 gestures of him and by the way in which he was letting 
 the words out of his mouth. The bar-man was listening, 
 with that kind of attention in which boredom is evident, 
 to a story which had often fallen upon his ears. Sud- 
 denly, at a whisper from the other, the man turned 
 sharply round. 
 
 "Say, but he's coming our way!" ejaculated McKeon. 
 
 Connor said nothing as he pulled at his old calabash. 
 . . . And down upon them he came like something 
 inevitable. It was only a little way up the counter where 
 he had been standing, but a great space of time seemed
 
 140 IN CLAY AND IN BRONZE 
 
 to separate the moment when the resolve had sprung 
 into his mind to the moment in which he stood by them. 
 There seemed to hang about him such a sense of in- 
 decision that one could scarcely think of him as doing 
 anything definite at all. Even as he came towards them 
 his eyes were wandering and wondering in vacuity. . . 
 He was a pale, exhausted man with light hair and an 
 undisturbed, impersonal look. The last glass of beer he 
 had ordered at the bar he now carried in his hand to 
 the table around which the actors sat. The salutation 
 was abrupt and decisive: 
 
 "Will you gentlemen allow me to buy a drink for 
 you?" 
 
 "Certainly, friend," said Connor, whose glass was 
 empty, and who, being the father of the company, felt 
 himself called upon to make this statement. 
 
 Soon the drinks were on the table before them, and it 
 was not long until he had added cigars. They knew 
 well that they would have to pay the penalty of being 
 thus entertained, and show by their behaviour and their 
 speech that it was delightful to be an actor. The new- 
 comer said that his name was Nolan and that he was 
 from Dublin, in Ireland. 
 
 "Nine years ago when I was an actor in the Broadway 
 Teeayther." (For a theatrical enthusiast it was strange 
 to hear him pronounce his favourite word with such in- 
 correctness.) His tongue, however, seemed to linger 
 around the dear sound of the word and his eyes now 
 gleamed with a look that was definite. Harman mirth- 
 fully kicked McKeon under the table. It was a pretty 
 crude story. 
 
 "It may seem funny, gentlemen, but even in the old 
 country I was always full of the idea of going on the
 
 THE PAGAN 141 
 
 stage, but the father wouldn't hear of it, so I had to 
 come to this country to get my chance. But I used to 
 be a great gymnastic performer. I was once offered an 
 engagement in Pat Kinsella's Music-hall in Dublin." 
 
 He seemed quite unable to distinguish between 
 degrees or divisions of the stage. To sing a song in the 
 manner of George Lashwood was, he said, one of the 
 most striking turns of his great ambition. His talk 
 flowed on upon a tide of beer. . . The bar-tenders 
 smiled in the polished distance, for it was well known 
 that he had been merely employed as a "super" upon 
 one occasion at the Broadway Theatre. . . Each con- 
 tribution of drink meant another long instalment of his 
 story. He was acquainted with obscure facts in the 
 careers of great actors, yet was he better acquainted 
 with the careers of subsided and lost actors. He 
 rapidly recounted queer, disgusting stories of once 
 famous mummers who had gone on the rocks, of fallen 
 stars who borrowed half-dollars from bar-tenders they 
 had known in their hey-days, and of others still further 
 fallen who would follow one all round New York for 
 a glass of beer. 
 
 He left them to guess how his own real existence 
 passed, but his philosophy of life as expressed in his 
 reminiscences went to show that his whole conception 
 of having a good time was to do with as little sleep as 
 possible. Carefully cultivated insomnia and talking of 
 the stage seemed to be the two things for which he con- 
 tinued to live this life. 
 
 "Was he still connected with the stage?" 
 
 No, he was not. His brother, a man who had no 
 education attached to him, good or bad, had put him off 
 it by repeated threats.
 
 i 4 2 IN CLAY AND IN BRONZE 
 
 "Now if only I could have afforded the time to wait 
 for engagements like other actors, what might I not 
 have become? I might be wearing a grand fur coat 
 now and listening to people saying as I passed through 
 the streets: 'There's Ignatius Nolan, the famous Irish 
 actor!' That, gentlemen, was the future I put before 
 me nine years ago when I was an actor in the Broadway 
 Teeayther." 
 
 As the evening passed, the others knocked good fun 
 out of this poor enthusiast, as well as good entertain- 
 ment. But although he was thankful for the beer and 
 the cigars Martin did not enter into the joke with the 
 same relish. He saw the pity of this fool through the 
 fool that was in himself. Here was one with purple 
 longings of the same pattern as those which hung around 
 his own mind, one who could never have made the actor 
 that he fancied himself, just as he, Martin Duignan, 
 might never make the writer he dreamt of being, both 
 still clinging desperately to the associations of the 
 dream. . . Yet, even as he listened to the others chuck- 
 ling at the good evening joke that their stray entertainer 
 had made of himself, he knew that it was he only who 
 had felt and seen the queer reality of Nolan and in 
 that seeing eye of his human sympathy there might still 
 be hope for him as a writer.
 
 THE PAGAN 143 
 
 VI 
 
 TT7ITH the departure of Arthur Nicholson's Com- 
 \\ pany from New York and the consequent con- 
 clusion of his engagement, Martin felt that America had 
 hopelessly defeated him. He was being removed further 
 and further from the stage and literature, in fact from 
 life itself, by continuing in a course which questioned 
 one of the facts which control life. . . He never passed 
 a theatre now, outside one of which the great electric 
 signs would be blazing, but he felt himself an essential 
 portion of the firmament of which these things were 
 the burning glory. During his little engagement, for 
 all the association of downfall with which it had been 
 attendant, he had struggled up some distance in the 
 theatre. He had had a visiting card printed, which 
 sometimes got him admission to the theatre on Broad- 
 way. . . One night he had gone to see a play in 43rd 
 Street, and to Kitty it was an event which momentarily 
 ended their torment, and she seemed to struggle back 
 again into some of the gaiety which had so long fallen 
 from her. He, too, wore his best clothes, but as they 
 stood in the vestibule of the theatre they looked like to 
 two poor survivals from a brilliant past, two figures, 
 as it were, out of a comic paper, as they stood there 
 among the brilliant crowd. . . Once in the auditorium 
 they chatted gaily enough, and just as soon as the curtain 
 rose they began to criticise the acting, for the quality 
 of being satirically critical had somehow come to 
 Martin in the Tower and Kitty had acquired it long 
 since in distant England. . . Momentarily they forgot
 
 144 IN CLAY AND IN BRONZE 
 
 the kind of life which they were now compelled to live. 
 Yet, once back in their dismal room, each felt that their 
 little taste of joy had only the effect of making them 
 still more angry with one another. Then suddenly 
 it seemed that it was the theatre that had mined both 
 of them. In one wide sweep of remorse he saw with 
 dear eyes the life from which he had sprung. There 
 were young men who had come away from the country 
 just like him and they had made a success of their lives, 
 at least according to the vulgar estimate of success as 
 it obtained in Glannidan. He had seen them coming 
 home from this America with their padded shoulders 
 and wide pants and high-heeled shoes and little round 
 hats, and heard them speak of their greatness over 
 yonder. These, he could well feel even now, had been 
 moments of triumph for such men, the old men and 
 women marvelling the while that bits of their own clay 
 could have arisen to such supreme perfection. If he 
 could return as them, even now, it would be a solace 
 to his mother. There came a curious re-awakening of 
 sympathy with her. 
 
 He knew the names of some who had left Glannidan 
 and Glannanea, and won to such success that they had 
 become saloon-keepers. Next day he went to the great 
 Metropolitan Library, and taking down a Directory 
 searched for the names of some of those he had known 
 and heard of as saloon-keepers. He scribbled the ad- 
 dresses on a slip of paper, and that very day went 
 out in quest of his fortune. He searched in his pockets 
 and discovered that he had 40 cents. He knew that 
 a glass of beer must be purchased in every saloon he 
 entered, but with these there would be the compen- 
 sation of a free snack or a free luncheon and a number
 
 THE PAGAN 145 
 
 of such might produce the same effect on a man as a 
 decent dinner. Again he had begun to think altogether 
 in terms of food. 
 
 He had gone in and out of a great many saloons 
 since his coming to America, grand palaces of dazzling 
 glass and polished wood where white-robed attendants 
 stood attentively behind the bar; queer houses in moan 
 streets where women waited round little tables. . . He 
 had an idea that the kind of saloons he sought would 
 be characterised midway between these two extremes, 
 so it was along streets where he might find such places 
 that he went. 
 
 "Joe Reilly." The first name upon the list was 
 burning itself into his mind. He remembered Joe as 
 a man whom his dead father could not endure. "That 
 man is a vulgar clown!" He distinctly remembered 
 the phrase in which his father had described Joe Reilly 
 to his mother upon a memorable occasion when the 
 American had called while on an ostentatious visit 
 to Glannidan. 
 
 "Arrah, man, what vulgar is he, and him having 
 a great job or something? That's the lad that got on 
 well. Sure, I remember him and me going to school 
 together, he used never to have a breeches that you'd 
 know the masterpiece on. And look at him now with 
 a saloon, they say, of his own!" 
 
 "He's a dirty, vulgar hound, and I'd think nothing of 
 telling him so, and kicking him out of the house. The 
 like of them fellows set a bad example when they come 
 over here luring young fellows and girls to destruction 
 by their big talk and their bragging." 
 
 "Ah, but sure, sometimes they bring them to more 
 good fortune than the ones that stay behind."
 
 146 IN CLAY AND IN BRONZE 
 
 He could realise, too, as he remembered it, that his 
 mother must have meant this as a cut even as she meant 
 all such sayings, for her face wore a vexatious little 
 look as she said it and her voice was slightly touched 
 with disdain. . . It was the very best way she had 
 of sending his father from the house and across the fields 
 into Glannidan. . . 
 
 It seemed very strange that he should be thinking 
 of this and striving, half consciously, to fit the incident 
 into the vague scheme of romance his mind was always 
 striving to weave. Yet for all his faults, and they were 
 many, the dead man his mother had married always 
 seemed far more admirable than this great podgy 
 creature he was now searching these streets in the hope 
 of meeting, the man who had sat so stolidly before the 
 fire in the kitchen smoking a big cigar and spitting into 
 the ashes and talking windy talk about America. . . 
 
 He walked into the East Side Cafe which had Joe 
 Reilly's name above the door. It was years since he 
 had seen him, then in the flush of his prosperous twenties, 
 but immediately he recognised the man with the heavy 
 jowl who stood evidently discussing some matter of po- 
 litical graft with a knot of men just inside the door. 
 The air was thick with blasphemy and smoke. 
 
 "Well, you God-damned son of a bitch!" he said 
 just as soon as Martin had announced himself. Then 
 he took him into the bar and stood him a glass of beer. 
 Thus had Martin been saved disappointment first shot, 
 and his 40 cents were so far untouched. Joe Reilly 
 was talking rapidly. Hitherto Martin had been in 
 contact with the intelligence of America. Now, how- 
 ever, he was dealing with the crude material. His 
 intellectual superiority was pitifully apparent to him-
 
 THE PAGAN 147 
 
 self, yet somehow it was the remembered Yank of his 
 boyhood days in Glannanea that was in his mind. . . . 
 There was a puzzled light in the eyes of Joe Reilly, too, 
 as if his mind was being sped by a similar effort of 
 memory. Martin was beginning to experience the old 
 cowardly sensation, in fact the most marked feeling 
 that a man took away with him from Glannidan and 
 Glannanea, a certain shame of his appearance in the 
 presence of another who knew something of his family 
 history. It seemed scarcely possible that Joe Reilly 
 could be pained by the same feelings of abasement. . . 
 Yet he was certainly in a state of excitement, 
 mouthing out a great volume of irrelevance. But he 
 was an Irishman, and it might be that he wished, by 
 talking thus, to take his mind away from that fireside 
 in Ireland where he had once talked in much the same 
 way to help him forget that it was Arthur Duignan 
 and not himself who had married the only girl he had 
 ever loved. Despite his uncouth exterior there was still 
 a rare softness in his heart for that woman, and 
 here was her son now seeing him in his natural dirt 
 in this place and surrounded by the scum of the East 
 Side of New York. . . There were coming curious, 
 awkward breaks in the conversation, moments when both 
 were plunged in abysmal regrets. . . But these 
 passed with little, sad flutters from their minds for each 
 was making a courageous effort to act his part before 
 the other. . . Joe Reilly was speaking as rapidly as 
 his heart permitted him: 
 
 "Say, sure! sure! Get you a jawb, I guess, why 
 sure! Why didn't you call around sooner? Always at 
 your service, old son." 
 
 "I have had some big engagements in the theatrical
 
 148 IN CLAY AND IN BRONZE 
 
 line, and I'm going in for writing, too novels and plays. 
 I have a few terrific ideas for plays. I expect to make 
 a few hundred thousand dollars out of them." 
 
 "Plays, eh? Why that's a God-damned big ambition 
 of yours. Arthur Duignan's son from Glannanea writing 
 plays for John Drew or Arnold Daly! Plays for the 
 love of Mike!" 
 
 Martin, with the false pride of Ireland, was attempting 
 to be big here, just as Joe Reilly had tried to make 
 himself big back in Ireland, but each was now becoming 
 rapidly naked in the eyes of the other. . . Suddenly 
 Joe made an heroic attempt to recover the attitude out 
 of which he had been knocked by the talk of this 
 youngster from Glannidan. 
 
 "Say, I just recollect, I have influence in the theatrical 
 line vaudeville. I can get you a jawb." 
 
 Suddenly Martin saw him stride down the bar towards 
 a man who, from his appearance might be a scene-lifter 
 at a ten cent picture house with Vaudeville turns. 
 
 "Tell the kid to call around on Monday," he heard 
 the man shouting. 
 
 Joe came back, gave him the address of the picture- 
 house and told him to call around there on Monday. 
 Then he stood him a few more drinks, gave him a handful 
 of cigars, and just as he was about to leave slipped a 
 five-dollar bill into his hand. 
 
 "Now, son, if you're writing home to your mother, 
 or to anyone in Glannidan, you'll say that you met Joe 
 Reilly in New York and that he's some big pot out there, 
 got you a jawb, and all that sort of thing." 
 
 That night he spent the five dollars on Kitty, and she 
 tried to be kinder to him than she had been for many 
 a day. Yet her chatter only sounded distantly to his
 
 THE PAGAN 149 
 
 ears. . . One moment he blamed himself for accepting 
 a mean job from the like of Joe Reilly, because it seemed 
 such a definite attack upon his great ambition, and the 
 next he blamed himself for not having looked for such 
 a position sooner. . . But the struggle between hunger 
 and imagination had already been decided within 
 him.
 
 ISO IN CLAY AND IN BRONZE 
 
 VII 
 
 HE felt, somehow, that he must remove from his 
 present environment, because it was odorous of 
 the theatre and continuously within it did he breathe 
 the poison of his dream. He had fallen into acquaint- 
 ance with a few of the boarders in this house in 45th 
 Street, and he had often stopped to chat with them for 
 a moment in the hallway, or go at their invitation for 
 a drink to the saloon across the street. Their talk and 
 the general atmosphere was but a poor imitation of 
 the fine literary scenes which had been created in the 
 company of Arthur Nicholson's players. He did not 
 care to spend so much time with Kitty in their room 
 now. She was always sewing, or else doing some work 
 of that kind, continually musing over a writing-pad as if 
 striving to make up her mind to write to someone. 
 . . . Yet still that curious affectionate sympathy which 
 comes to two who suffer together had fallen upon them 
 and they seemed to know a certain happiness. She 
 had grown so quiet, too. In Dublin it had been im- 
 possible to please her whims, but now she seemed very 
 grateful for the smallest kindness. She grew more 
 and more remote from the grimy scene which had 
 enveloped her, and it often appeared as she sang a 
 snatch of an old song that she was back again in that 
 quiet parsonage in England, and that all the shame had 
 fallen away from her. . . Often as he listened, Martin's 
 mind would turn back to Glannidan in an attempt 
 to catch the beauty of his young years. In an occasional 
 moment of mad fancy he thought, of going back there
 
 THE PAGAN 151 
 
 with her when he had won through his present diffi- 
 culties, which he was going to face like a man, in the 
 job that Joe Reilly had got for him, on the following 
 Monday. 
 
 "Martin Duignan, be the holy farmer! Did you 
 hear what Martin Duignan done over in the States; 
 married a Protestant, begad, a minister's daughter, 
 no less?" 
 
 The enormous offence it might seem to the good 
 people of Glannidan and Glannanea was at once suffi- 
 cient to prevent him seeing himself married, or letting 
 on to be married, and bringing her into the house 
 where his mother and sister lived with his sister's 
 child. . . Yet in the face of all this dark impossibility 
 he grew strangely kinder and more kind to Kitty. 
 . . . On Monday he was beginning. . . But it seemed 
 too late now, for frequently she turned away from him 
 and went on with her attempt to write upon the pad. 
 . . . Once he saw it where she had thrown it down 
 upon rushing with unaccountable suddenness from 
 his presence. It contained a columnar list of dates 
 beginning some weeks back and continuing down 
 to the date upon which he knew her allowance would 
 next come due. The days that had already passed 
 were neatly ticked off. Then, inside, and still untorn 
 from the pad, was a letter phrased in the form of a 
 confession and containing a full record of the way of 
 her life since she had left her husband. . . It seemed 
 hard to think that any man could have her back now; 
 she must eventually drift and drift until the streets had 
 claimed her. Yet through her great sorrow might come 
 a great forgiveness. . . He saw, for the first time, 
 in this note, too, how she had loved him, and yet did
 
 152 IN CLAY AND IN BRONZE 
 
 he feel a powerful disgust for her immediately. . . 
 Next day with their poor belongings they took a street 
 car, and getting off near Central Park took up lodging 
 in a miniature room in a Harlem flat. . . It would be 
 nearer his work, Martin thought, and away from the 
 cursed atmosphere which had only dragged him down 
 and down. . . 
 
 On the Monday when he went to his work it was with 
 no great enthusiasm. All the way across to the east 
 side street, where the Vaudeville house was, he could 
 not help thinking that he had once gone into saloons 
 with his big frieze coat, which was the very nearest 
 approach to a fur coat, and drank and smoked cigars 
 with the best of them "after the show." Now he was 
 about to become worse, or at least lower in his own 
 estimation and in the social scale, than those stage la- 
 bourers he had seen in the theatre where he had played 
 small parts with Arthur Nicholson's Company. . . 
 An old, queer dread came to him. . . Would anyone 
 who had known him in Glannidan or in Dublin see him 
 now? . . . 
 
 At last he stood at the stage door of the "Champion" 
 Vaudeville. When he went in the man who was sweep- 
 ing the stage thought, through a cloud of dust, that he 
 was a "star," who had strayed into the wrong theatre. 
 The brush dropped out of his hand when he explained 
 that he was the man who had been recommended for 
 the job by Joe Reilly. . . The man, however, immedi- 
 ately recovered his assurance and his nationality and 
 ordered Martin to pick up the brush and to go on with 
 his sweeping of the stage! . . . 
 
 It was here and now that he thought of Ellen O'Connor, 
 thought of her, too, with a great rush of regard that
 
 THE PAGAN 153 
 
 would not be suddenly darkened by the murkiness of 
 this place. He had written to her only once since his 
 coming to America, just after he had got the short en- 
 gagement with Arthur Nicholson's company. She had 
 sent him what he considered a beautiful reply, and 
 out of it he had imagined a short study. He fancied 
 that she had come out to America and entered into the 
 rough, crude life there. He pictured her lover, himself, 
 for the moment unable to rise himself, meeting her in 
 this setting. Their confusion for the moment, and then 
 the sudden and penultimate unveiling of their souls. . . 
 He sent it to one of the New York evening papers, and 
 for a week or so bought the paper every evening in the 
 hope of seeing his name in print at the bottom of a piece 
 of writing about Ellen. But it had not appeared, and he 
 had almost forgotten it until now. 
 
 This was another definite circle of his hell. It was 
 one of those small American Vaudeville houses whose 
 performance continues for ever. . . It began at eleven 
 in the morning and continued till eleven at night. 
 The material for vulgar laughter had to be manufac- 
 tured at a fearful rate to supply value for the money 
 of the crowds which poured into the place continuously. 
 There were ten "turns," each of which came on 
 fourteen times a day. These turns were alternated 
 by pictures. 
 
 It was Martin's work to set the stage for the turns, 
 some of which carried a great number of properties 
 as well as some heavy scenery. It was like the work 
 of sailors. The man who helped him had been a sailor 
 and called the place a "ship." The sweat dripped 
 from them in the close atmosphere. Continually the 
 sound of the stage-manager shouting harsh commands
 
 1 54 IN CLAY AND IN BRONZE 
 
 was about them, while around them stood or waited 
 the painted men and women in flashy clothes 
 awaiting their turns. . . Sometimes a comedienne 
 would gaze at him from out the dressing-rooms beneath 
 the stage with wide pencilled eyes. But he had no 
 leisure in which to fully realise the degradation into 
 which he had fallen. Then something happened which 
 recalled him to realisation of his personality. In the 
 second half of the week there was a certain "show" 
 which required the assistance of two "supers" and the 
 other man and he were employed at the rate of four 
 dollars for the half week to become part of the turn. . . 
 Their make-up consisted of something like a compromise 
 between the nakedness of a South Sea Islander and the 
 clownishness of a Stage Irishman. The sailor did not 
 seem to feel it and the extra four dollars came in useful, 
 but to Martin it was the infinite torture. To be com- 
 pelled to do it fourteen times a day. . . At the end of 
 the first day he was like a man gasping for air. He 
 hurried on his great coat. He would drink this night, 
 drink surely as he had never drunk before. He rushed 
 into the first saloon and bought pint after pint of beer. 
 . . . Then even through this queer method of recovery 
 he began to feel some of the manhood returning. But 
 there was torture raging like a burning forest through 
 his mind. . . He picked up a paper and there was the 
 short study, The End of the Dream, which his thought 
 of Ellen had led him to write. . . His eyes became 
 suddenly luminous as he read. This little thing was 
 like manna falling on his mind. . . He read and re- 
 read it as he stood there with his glass of beer before 
 him. . . Here was something that plucked him 
 from his hell and it was through Ellen it was happening.
 
 THE PAGAN 155 
 
 ... He could go home to Kitty in a great ecstasy 
 to-night, but he could not tell her of Ellen. . . These 
 were the two flames of his life which must remain for 
 ever hidden from one another by the cloudy barrier, which 
 was himself. . . 
 
 Yet, presently his mood took a turn which produced 
 a different result. He got quite drunk, more soddenly 
 drunk than he had ever before been. He was scarcely 
 able to reach home. He slept on the floor, and early 
 in the morning Kitty awoke him and looked down pity- 
 ingly into his face. He did not go to work that day. 
 About noon he called at the ticket office of the "Cham- 
 pion" Vaudeville and collected what money was due to 
 him. After spending a short while in a saloon he went 
 on to the Metropolitan Library and remained there writ- 
 ing until far on in the evening.
 
 156 IN CLAY AND IN BRONZE 
 
 VHI 
 
 W came the complete collapse of Martin. With 
 the few dollars he had earned at the "Champion" 
 Vaudeville he did not pay the debts already contracting 
 rapidly with his new landlady, but bought instead a 
 fountain pen and a number of writing pads, which he 
 made admirable attempts to blacken in the Metropolitan 
 Library. He bought all the evening papers and searched 
 them through, but never another sketch of his made an 
 appearance. The torment of the damned litterateur be- 
 came his portion. . . 
 
 Then a startling thing happened. He saw the pre- 
 liminary notice of a forthcoming play, and the news 
 almost blinded him as he read it, for it was one of his 
 own ideas put into the form of a play by a clever man 
 who turned out melodramas. This must be one of the 
 ideas he had spoken of to Joe Reilly. But he could 
 scarcely remember, so thick was the haze about his 
 mind, whether or not he had submitted it in scenario 
 form to some of the theatrical managers. Perhaps it 
 was that he had merely thought or dreamt of it simul- 
 taneously with this man who had written it. Good 
 Lord! Why had not he written it first? This fellow 
 who turned out melodramas by the yard would make 
 a pot of money out of it. . . In that event, if he had 
 only been so lucky, he saw himself acting the man by 
 Kitty. He saw his dream being realised for love of 
 Ellen; he saw himself in splendour before the people 
 of Glannidan. A terrible sense of loss by turns over- 
 came him and urged him. It worked on his brain.
 
 THE PAGAN 157 
 
 He wrote to the author and the manager, and even 
 attempted to get his case taken up by the papers, but 
 without success. He met Ignatius Nolan again, and, 
 having told him the story, the two would spend the 
 greater part of the day in saloons cursing the luck that 
 had prevented one of them from being an actor and the 
 other from winning fame as a playwright. It was the 
 theatre that had broken both of them, yet they could 
 never stop talking about it. Nolan brought him over 
 half the city, introducing him to bar-tenders and to 
 subsided and lost actors. He became known in the 
 circle of Nolan's queer friends as Mr. Martin Duignan, 
 the lost playwright. Those, even most distantly connec- 
 ted with the theatre, evidently did not believe him, and 
 he did not believe the lofty stories they told of their some- 
 time glory. . . This was the continual scene which 
 Ignatius Nolan created for their individual torture round 
 him and them, but because of his immense enthu- 
 siasm for the stage and because he really knew 
 nothing of its inner meaning he believed both in Martin 
 and in the others. 
 
 "Now you just watch me! I'll show New York City 
 and the whole United States of America who's the real 
 author of The Sybil and the Sphinx when it comes to 
 be produced. You just wait! I'll get it over on that 
 cheap guy who sneaked your play." 
 
 Martin used to smile wearily at this repeated affir- 
 mation of Nolan's trust in him and wonder vaguely 
 what this poor semi-illiterate hanger-on of the stage 
 could do before the might of the lurid press, the arro- 
 gance of theatrical managers and the pride of successful 
 authorship. But Martin became mildly excited in the 
 knowledge that he would certainly do something. . .
 
 158 IN CLAY AND IN BRONZE 
 
 So on the night before the production of the play in 
 New York he was not surprised to see Nolan come into 
 their favourite saloon with a roll of slips in his hand 
 and the pockets of his overcoat bulged with a paste- 
 pot on one side and a brush, with a long collapsible 
 handle in the other. These were the accessories of the 
 thing he was going to do. 
 
 They went out and pasted the slips, which caused 
 the announcement to read, "The Sybil and the Sphinx 
 by Martin Duignan," over as many posters as they 
 could see, without unduly attracting the attention of 
 policemen or passers by. . . Then they went into saloon 
 after saloon as long as Ignatius Nolan's money lasted, 
 and emerged to parade past the altered posters feeling 
 like two lords, the real author of the successful new play 
 and his friend moving distantly as fame would permit 
 them among the throng. 
 
 He was still babbling drunken nonsense about his 
 greatness when he went into the little room where he 
 lived with Kitty. Although it was very late she was 
 standing before the looking-glass gazing deep as it were 
 into the hell of punishment which was mirrored in her 
 eyes. There were lines of weariness about her mouth 
 and her complexion was beginning to lose the last trace 
 of its bloom. 
 
 "Oh, dear, dear," she sighed for the thousandth time. 
 "I'm growing old, I'm fading away." 
 
 "Old," he laughed, his mind suddenly falling down to 
 realisation of his body's condition; "old, what has that 
 got to do with it; which is worse, age or hunger?" 
 
 She did not heed him, but went on lamenting. 
 
 "Oh, if Edmund saw me now, why he'd scarcely know 
 his bride."
 
 THE PAGAN 159 
 
 "Edmund and his bride," he sneered, coarsely. "I 
 wish to the Lord God I had left you, my precious darling, 
 with your loving Edmund." 
 
 There was something exceedingly brutal, something 
 of supreme disregard in his words. The whole, tremen- 
 dous adventure of their elopement had suddenly 
 narrowed down to a question of her desire for beauty 
 and adornment as opposed to his hunger, a mere matter 
 of selfishness, a triumph for the elemental desire in 
 both of them. . . 
 
 She had not been supremely disgusted with him until 
 this moment, for in his efforts to provide for her, queer 
 and poor though they were, he showed that he was not 
 altogether without appreciation of all she had done for 
 him, her brave struggle with the trustees of her little 
 property to get what paid for their tickets to America, 
 the fact that she had given him the few dollars she was 
 possessed of on landing and, later, pawned her dead 
 mother's very beautiful ring to save him from 
 hunger . . . full of remembrance of all these things 
 and with her beauty robbed from her, she spoke 
 angrily to him now. She had remembered the days be- 
 fore they had planned this trip to America, and with 
 this recollection the pictorial idea of America had re- 
 turned, and she spoke with wild bitterness. 
 
 "Kitty," he pleaded, suddenly chilled by her anger 
 into realisation, "I'm hungry, leave me be." 
 
 "No, you're not hungry, you're only drunk, you big, 
 filthy beast, and isn't it a fine thing when a great, big 
 strong fellow like you can't make enough money to buy 
 anything for his wife." 
 
 "You're not my wife." 
 
 There was no sound of pity in his flat, dull voice,
 
 160 IN CLAY AND IN BRONZE 
 
 nothing save an immense power to wound her. She 
 turned on him with her fierce dark eyes, and there in 
 that little room she tortured and tortured him until 
 his soul writhed in extremest agony. She had given 
 him everything, all that a woman can give a man, 
 and what return had he made her, nothing save age 
 and loneliness and the immense beastliness of this little 
 room. 
 
 And now the little love that had managed to linger 
 on ended here, and the succeeding days were unwarmed 
 by any ray of affection. As he slunk home of an evening, 
 after an empty day, he knew very well that the sad, 
 tired face would be looking out for him with a 
 look of sullen anger in her dark eyes. . . It came at 
 last one evening after he had stumbled home, even thus, 
 half silly with hunger and disappointment. She said 
 she was leaving him; she was returning to Edmund 
 Haymer, if he would have her back again. 
 
 "That is, if he will have me back now that I have been 
 ruined by you," she said, imparting an unnecessary bit- 
 terness to the simple statement of intention. 
 
 "You are quite sure he does not know about me, I 
 mean," asked Martin, still not without some concern for 
 her happiness. 
 
 "No, my plans were brilliant, because I loved you, 
 I suppose, for all it has brought me to this. He wrote 
 to me the other day, and it seems that the story of my 
 theatrical engagement and my stay with friends has 
 never since been doubted by him. You have never 
 once entered into his calculations. At any rate he 
 seemed just glad to get rid of me. You know by a 
 lucky chance I said four months, although I surely 
 thought then that I could stay with you for ever.
 
 THE PAGAN 161 
 
 Doubtless he has already begun to pick himself up in 
 anticipation of my return, the beast." 
 
 Henceforth they were to one another as strangers from 
 far countries. . . As the weary weeks, until the day 
 she had named for her going, passed slowly he began 
 to care less and less for her company and he would often 
 come home very late after having spent the night in 
 vainly trying to bury his mood in some of the low saloons 
 of Fourth Avenue. . . She would often wake up sud- 
 denly as he came in, and say: 
 
 "Is that Edmund?" But he would answer gruffly, 
 drunkenly: "No, it is I, Martin!" as if angry to the last 
 that some spark of kind concern for his existence did not 
 remain with her. She saw that he was daily falling 
 deeper and deeper into the slough. She seemed very 
 glad of his misery, and often laughed loudly on Sun- 
 days when she saw him trying to suck some joy out of a 
 Sabbath newspaper. . . 
 
 But the day of her departure from America and the 
 ending of it drew swiftly nearer. He was continuously 
 reminded of it by the time-table she kept by her bedside 
 with the number of days decreasing daily between 
 America and "her dearest Edmund." The irony of the 
 term of endearment! How many thousand times had she 
 told Martin how she loathed the man? It was her stories 
 of the brute's cruelty that had helped to finally en- 
 tangle him with this wife of another. . . He fell to 
 wondering what kind of parting they would make of it 
 between them.
 
 162 IN CLAY AND IN BRONZE 
 
 IX 
 
 THE little sum which was to take her back to 
 England had at last come, and with it the eve 
 of their parting. She was full of eagerness to get away 
 from the little room which beheld the obscenity of their 
 quarrels and recriminations. . . He carefully packed her 
 few faded belongings in their old theatrical basket and 
 got an express man to take it down to the docks for 
 fifty cents. She paid the landlady, and they went out 
 together to buy the ticket back to England. It was not 
 the intention of either of them to return ever again to the 
 little room. He suggested that it would be more con- 
 venient to stop at a small hotel in 45th Street. 
 
 There was good heat in the room that was given them 
 and it filled them with a sense of comfort and decency; 
 as he looked around, after vainly striving to realise his 
 present position, the quiet pattern of the wall-paper 
 led his mind into the way of flat, oppressive thought. . . 
 There rushed across his mind the whole story of his years, 
 so bent and warped by his connection with this 
 woman. But it was their last night together and he 
 had resolved to be truly magnanimous. He could 
 not keep himself from regarding her half tenderly. She 
 made the best possible attempt to adorn herself, and 
 there was about her the rare brightness of other lovely 
 nights and other lovely days. 
 
 As she looked into his face she seemed of a sudden 
 to grow weary of the hatred she had worked up against 
 him. It had been his misfortune to meet with her, and 
 but for the pity of their meeting he might still be
 
 THE PAGAN 163 
 
 the romantic figure she had known. She kissed him, 
 saying she was sorry, awfully sorry. Would he be so 
 very kind as to forgive her? They grew suddenly so 
 compassionate of one another. She came and sat upon 
 the arm of his chair and ran her thin, delicate fingers 
 through his hair. She bent low again to kiss him and 
 he saw very clearly the little lines which had begun to 
 deepen around her eyes. It was he who had done that 
 furrowing for he had considered her of unblemished 
 beauty on the first night they had met in Dublin. 
 
 She was going from him now because he had made 
 that beauty fade; she was returning to the other brute 
 from whom he thought he had so gallantly helped her 
 to escape. . . Their sorrow became rapidly apparent to 
 one another. She turned away to gaze, half vacantly, 
 upon the meagre comfort of the little room and to think 
 upon the coldness of the sea. . . 
 
 "I think I'll stay," she said. 
 
 Her words smote his ears with a sense of shock. He 
 had been somehow glad since the day she had made 
 up her mind to leave America, glad for her sake, glad 
 for his own. She might regain a little happiness back 
 in England, and he might be better when he was away 
 from her. But this return to her old desire of him after 
 he had tried to quench the last spark of affection for 
 her was something he could not understand. He did not 
 reply. 
 
 "You wish me to go back to Edmund, and I want 
 so badly to remain here with you. Is there no more hope 
 of that now?" 
 
 "None," he said, and his tones were final in their ring; 
 "where would be the sense in living it all over again. 
 It has been pretty beastly, you know."
 
 i6 4 IN CLAY AND IN BRONZE 
 
 "It has been awful, dearest Martin, but now the 
 thought has come to me that I am not quite strong 
 enough for the journey. I have ever had a strange, 
 lonely horror of the sea." 
 
 "But, what about the second-cabin passage you have 
 just purchased? It would be a lot of money to waste. 
 Have you thought of that?" 
 
 "I have," she said, disappointed cruelly by his ques- 
 tion. "But what is such a little consideration at all if 
 only we could love in the fine, fierce way of old." 
 
 "It is just the means that make such considerations 
 that might have helped us to retain that love." 
 
 There was such a queer turn of bitterness in his every 
 word. She was crying, and clutching his cheek with her 
 hand. 
 
 "I'm afraid," she sobbed. "Oh! I'm awfully afraid of the 
 sea andof what is beyond the sea. Oh, Martin, I am really." 
 
 "You're not ill?" 
 
 "No, but I'm dreadfully afraid that I am going to 
 be ill. I have the strangest fancies about myself. A 
 month ago I should have seen a doctor." 
 
 "You can see the ship's doctor to-morrow." 
 
 Why was he still so hopelessly cruel? But in spite 
 of it all she talked on to him, trying hard to fan the old 
 love into some kind of little flickering flame, while he 
 endeavoured to quench it with his every word. Suddenly 
 she almost screamed with the painful suggestion of a 
 sudden thought. 
 
 "What if I were going to Oh, you know, Martin, 
 
 what should I do then?" 
 
 He laughed loud and long. 
 
 "Ridiculous!" he at last managed to jerk out. . . . 
 
 But there was a light upon her face now and she
 
 THE PAGAN 165 
 
 seemed of a sudden to be of great power and signifi- 
 cance in his life. He began to grow afraid of the bond 
 that still seemed to tie them even in their last moments 
 together. What if it had grown to such strength as 
 she had just suggested? The blasting punishment of it 
 would be certain to envelop his whole life. . . 
 
 All through the night as she remained very near him 
 for the last time, she implored him to allow her 
 to remain. But he merely laughed and tried to put the 
 idea away from her. She cried out in her dread 
 that something beyond the world was telling her to re- 
 main, but he would sigh away with horrible insistence 
 that it was better for them to part. . . She whispered, 
 pleadingly, how this feeling of impending illness had 
 been growing upon her for some time and how strange 
 things had happened to her physically. . . She could 
 not imagine what they meant, unless . . . unless. . . 
 Then she attempted to create for his torture again all 
 the torturing thoughts that had come to him on all the 
 nights he had stayed away from her, swilling in the 
 saloons of Fourth Avenue. He told her, not without a 
 certain tearfulness in his tones, that the bare idea of her 
 sufferings had never entered his mind. 
 
 "And it always seemed a kind of funny that you were 
 never able to pay a doctor to tell me what was wrong. I 
 used to be thinking over that all the time you were away . . ." 
 
 At length, worn out by their torment of one another, 
 they dropped into a fitful slumber. They would start 
 up quite suddenly every hour or so to have a look at 
 one another and to behold the fearful reflections of the 
 sin which still bound them. He rose at six and made 
 what preparations were necessary for departure. She 
 awakened painfully, and looked at him with disappoint-
 
 166 IN CLAY AND IN BRONZE 
 
 ment in her eyes. . . How dreadfully anxious he 
 appeared for her departure? She did not feel any desire 
 to go at all, but he was soon by her side telling her the 
 time. She glanced lovingly towards him in a final, 
 stricken appeal, but he did not seem to notice or to 
 understand. Then she rose, an infinite weariness 
 hanging on her every movement, and put on her faded 
 fineries. He thought she looked quite ill in the morning 
 light. They were soon ready. He took up the two 
 tattered suit-cases which held her poor belongings, 
 even to the photograph of Edmund Haymer, and hurried 
 downstairs. A man they met in the hall viewed them 
 askance, but they reached the street in safety and turned 
 into Eighth Avenue. 
 
 "About breakfast?" he said. 
 
 His possessions in money amounted to about a dollar. 
 It was his intention to buy a decent breakfast for her 
 before they went down to the steamer. So far he had 
 not begun to wonder where the money was going to 
 come from when she had returned to England. He had 
 none with which to seek new lodgings; he had no pros- 
 pect of employment and he had no allowance. They 
 walked into a quick-lunch restaurant and he ordered a 
 substantial breakfast. Whatever might be the cause, 
 whether it was the rare spectacle of Martin buying good 
 food for himself and her, or else the feeling of nausea 
 surviving from his abominable callousness of the night 
 before, she did not rightly know what made her eat 
 scarcely any of the fine and unusual meal. She observed 
 with infinite disgust how comfortably and how greedily 
 he devoured his plateful. 
 
 "Do you mind?" he said, putting over his knife and 
 fork and taking what remained of her portion.
 
 THE PAGAN 167 
 
 "Dirty beggar!" she said. 
 
 "It may seem a disgusting thing to do, but I have 
 really no notion where the next meal is coming from." 
 
 He said this with a complete absence of emotion, his 
 eyes fixed upon the bit of meat before him. 
 
 Soon they were in a street car on their way to the 
 steamer. . . He assisted her across the gangway and 
 down below. She looked weak, and said that she felt 
 very cold. He arranged her few things just before the 
 stewardess came in to answer a lot of questions. . . 
 It might be some time before they could start as the 
 fog in the river was dense and dangerous. . . Yes it 
 would be possible to see the ship's doctor presently. 
 . . . When she heard this she clung to Martin and 
 asked him to wait and hear what was the medical opinion 
 of her condition. . . Reluctantly he gave his word that 
 he would, but just then the order was given for all visitors 
 to go ashore. . . 
 
 He remained for a long time looking fixedly at the 
 spot on the deck where he had left her. Before his 
 vacant eyes lay a muddy ooze of musing. . . After 
 what seemed an interminable time the ship began to 
 move away. Then, through the thick veil of sorrowful 
 stupidity which overhung the bitterness of his mind he 
 saw her appear, her hands outstretched to him, almost 
 theatrically, in a last wild appeal. . . She had seen the 
 doctor. Then it was true. . . When the startled, be- 
 seeching look in her eyes met the look in his, which was 
 lifeless, pitiless, she fainted and was carried below by 
 two women and a steward. . . He turned up his coat 
 collar and was soon lost among the drab crowd in Four- 
 teenth Street. . . 
 
 As soon as his mind returned to realisation he felt
 
 168 IN CLAY AND IN BRONZE 
 
 that he had reached the end of a definite episode in 
 his life. It would seem to have taken all this muddy 
 and mean adventure to fully express and then to end 
 some dark streak of the personality he had taken from 
 the clay. It might be that the giant hand of Fate had 
 merely projected this woman into his life so that he 
 might shed the brute in himself away. . . But he had 
 almost exceeded the realistic possibilities of himself; he 
 had made himself a character, as it were, out of some 
 beastly Russian novel. He had made himself supremely 
 unworthy of all the beauty which Dublin and the Tower, 
 with the affection almost of another mother, had sought 
 to crowd into his life. He felt as if the love of 
 the Earth mother and the Art mother for him 
 had torn his life between them. But he knew of 
 a certainty beyond all doubts and fears that the 
 pagan in him had already begun to dwindle down to 
 ashes, for now all the darkened places of his memory 
 had become suddenly illuminated. He was thinking of 
 the night that his fateful resolve had come to him be- 
 fore the mirror in the Tower and of how the great lines 
 of Francis Thompson had been sounding with such sweet 
 music in his ears at the very same moment: 
 
 I fled Him down the nights and down the days; 
 I fled Him down the arches of the years; 
 
 I fled Him down the labyrinthine ways, 
 Of my own mind and in the midst of tears 
 
 I hid from Him. . . 
 
 And was he hiding still, and was he still pursued? He 
 felt that his face must wear the look of a fugitive again 
 as he hurried on to be lost in the throngs. And he knew 
 not through what vicissitudes of the soul he might still 
 have to pass. . .
 
 THE PAGAN 169 
 
 HE fell lower now. Ignatius Nolan used to bring 
 him scraps from his dinner in his pocket and give 
 them to him late at night as they would be drinking in 
 some of the saloons of Fourth Avenue. . . There was 
 upon him a kind of wretched recklessness. Often when 
 Ignatius had failed to bring anything in his pocket, and 
 as he crossed to the free-lunch counter of the 
 saloon there he would take a glance into the long mirrors 
 inset in the walls to observe the change that had so 
 rapidly come upon his very soul. It seemed that he 
 still looked handsome in the eyes of others, for people 
 passing up or down the floor of the saloon would often 
 stop and gaze as if arrested by his striking appearance; 
 even Kitty, on the night before they parted had praised 
 his good looks, but this was not the Martin Duignan 
 that he saw as he crossed over to the free-lunch counter 
 to take scraps of broken food from it. He saw himself 
 marked as it were by the sinful mess he had made of 
 his life. He thought of Wilde, and The Pkture of 
 Dorian Grey, and laughed to himself as the fancy 
 struck him again and again. . . Then back again to 
 the company of damnable fools which his curious 
 association with Ignatius Nolan had helped to gather 
 around him. 
 
 "Nine years ago, when I was an actor at the Broad- 
 way Teeayther." 
 
 "Martin, here, is the real author of the play that's 
 making the big success at the New Republic 
 Teeayther."
 
 1 70 IN CLAY AND IN BRONZE 
 
 "Yeah!" 
 
 "Yeah!" 
 
 Then a flow of putrid stage talk, so long as the beer 
 kept flowing. Later the roaring streets, the cold and 
 the "Millington Hotel." In some cities of America 
 they build their doss-houses upon a huge scale, and fit 
 them up with all modern equipments, but still they 
 are merely doss-houses for the accommodation of the 
 creatures that once were men. As he went in and out 
 of this place it appeared to Martin that he possessed 
 very little life within himself, that he was merely a 
 creature of impulse, moving blindly. . . Often he would 
 go into the writing room and taking over to his hand 
 some of the sheets of free notepaper he would begin 
 to set down some of the thoughts of his autobiography. 
 Always, however, they were coloured, and finally dark- 
 ened by thoughts of Kitty and of the long night which 
 had fallen upon his life. . . But he forgave her even 
 though he could feel the chains she had forged for him 
 still about his mind. It seemed so recently that he had 
 known her in the springtime of his ambitions. 
 She had drawn him nearer to his vision of pagan beauty. 
 . . . That was when his mother had written asking 
 what he was doing then. . . He remembered all that 
 so clearly in the light of the second letter which had 
 come from his mother. . . The thirty-first cousin of 
 someone from Glannidan had run away with the 
 daughter of Lowry Pigeon, the tailor, and both were 
 doing well in New York. "Doing great" was the 
 phrase which Martin half-humorously remembered 
 Lowry had used to describe Jane and her man. . . 
 Well, she had seen whom she took to be Martin upon 
 the stage of a grand theatre, and she had written home
 
 THE PAGAN 171 
 
 about it to Lowry. . . Lowry had evidently received 
 the news with pleasure. It gave him scope to cut the 
 ground from under some of Mary Duignan's bragging. 
 . . . Play-acting, that was not much of a life, and his 
 mother always prating about him at the egg carts on 
 a Friday as she sold her eggs. There she would be, 
 a big hat upon her and a rusty shawl, telling them 
 breathlessly, of the great job that Martin had just got 
 in America while at the very same moment her heart 
 was sick and sore with worrying for the future of the 
 little homestead in Glannanea. . . But she would seem 
 to flatter her mind into forgetfulness as she talked agi- 
 tatedly to Glennon the eggman, and the other women 
 crowded around the carts. . . Then the talk of Lowry 
 Pigeon gabbling to the crowd who filled his shop in the 
 evenings had broken in upon her dream. . . 
 
 And so because of that the mother had cried out to 
 the son across the world: "Play-acting again, is that what 
 you're at, Martin? Now, sure, that will ruin you. I'm 
 near sure that's what ruined you in Dublin, so it was. 
 I'm never done dreaming about you, and even though 
 you refused me the last time, I'm going to ask you to 
 come home again, son. We're hard set here for a bit 
 of help. Sure you may depend on me to say that 
 it's for the good of your health and everything that you're 
 after coming home. For all he's such a grand man, God 
 bless him! I knew Father Clarke was making a mis- 
 take and he sending you off to be a scholar, you that had 
 the breed of the farmer in you although your father was 
 terrible fond of books." 
 
 Translated thus from the queer, illiterate scrawl that 
 they were he read many times the sentences which 
 constituted this letter from his mother as he sat there
 
 172 IN CLAY AND IN BRONZE 
 
 in the writing-room of the Millington Hotel in New York 
 City. . . The clerk at the desk was turning his cigar 
 with his tongue and calling to him. . . 
 
 His presence was required at the desk for a moment; 
 another letter had just come re-addressed to him from 
 Ignatius Nolan's address which he had sent to his mother 
 and given to Kitty. It was from Kitty, and the eyes 
 leaped wildly in his head as he read: 
 
 ". . .1 have been to see another doctor, too, in 
 Liverpool, and there's no doubt about it, Martin. . . 
 Edmund will never have me back now. . . But it's 
 lovely, all the same, to think that it is for you, and you'll 
 come to me, won't you, darling? I am staying at the 
 Y.W.C.A. in Liverpool, but yesterday they gave me no- 
 tice to leave. I don't know why, excepting, I suppose, 
 that the signs are beginning to be heavy upon me. . . 
 Oh! darling, please come. If you have no money you'll 
 work your passage, now, won't you? Anything, only 
 come to be with me then. They'll know of my 
 whereabouts here when you arrive. Oh! come, dearest 
 Martin, come!" 
 
 He rose as one stunned into a condition of almost 
 lifelessness and went out into the streets of New York. 
 Gone now was his hope of life and beauty for ever. . . 
 How were these two letters now calling him away from 
 America. . . Was it to be back to the clean freshness 
 of the fields or back to Kitty? Here were the voices 
 of the two women calling to him across the void of his 
 sorrow and for such different reasons but with the same 
 elemental fact trembling at the root of both their 
 loves. . . 
 
 He slipped past a few theatres which in their darkened 
 state of the daytime had some of the dead daylight
 
 THE PAGAN 173 
 
 look of prostitutes. Yet it was in one of these very 
 places that 'the play he thought had been stolen from 
 him was making thousands of dollars nightly while he 
 had poor clothes on him and the small ways of life 
 were still calling, calling. His head was bowed low 
 upon his chest when someone good-naturedly slapped 
 him on the back. It was Arthur Nicholson. Although 
 a poet he looked prosperous in his big fur coat. He 
 walked upright like a man in curious contrast to the 
 shrinking, defeated figure of Martin. The story of 
 Martin and the lost play had been dragged down 
 to the level of a mere pot-house tradition in the 
 saloons of Fourth Avenue but Arthur Nicholson 
 was prepared to look at the matter somewhat 
 differently; because he saw where the glimmer of 
 genius lay in Martin. . . Immediately their talk was 
 of the stage and of this misfortune. There were 
 kindly gleams in the poet's eyes as he listened, and in 
 the music of his voice there was a golden sympathy. . . 
 Martin felt as if this other was seeing the real truth of 
 his soul through the almost divine sympathy of the 
 artist. 
 
 Arthur Nicholson saw with a clearness which was 
 not for the eyes of common men the abyss of destruc- 
 tion now gaping wide before this other who had 
 fluttered moth-like around the flame. This saloon 
 crawling was rapidly developing what was merely his 
 misfortune into something which might come to be 
 characterized later as the fine art of sponging when, with 
 a theatrical swagger, and the full jargon of the stage, 
 he would come round the stage doors of nights to negoti- 
 ate loans of five dollars or so. This would be a terrible 
 fate, thought Arthur, for one who had seen sufficient
 
 174 IN CLAY AND IN BRONZE 
 
 of the world's beauty to write The Sybil and the Sphinx, 
 or at least to evolve the idea from which it had 
 been written. Strange, although the plays he had 
 brought with him to America were literature, he had 
 made a considerable amount of money out of them. 
 Now he was going back to a quiet cottage in one of the 
 hills of Dublin to write the poems, and was this young 
 man who had seen a greater beauty than even he to 
 be doomed to this sad condemnation. . . His poems 
 in praise of the beauty of the world must henceforth 
 be the merest lies if he did not hold out a helping hand 
 for this poor, fallen one was his brother in the kinship 
 of art. 
 
 They turned into a shipping office. Scarcely seeming 
 to realise the meaning of it, Martin saw Arthur Nicholson 
 take some bills from a roll and hand them across the 
 counter to a little weazened clerk who was chewing 
 gum. As distantly remembered names he heard the 
 words Ireland, Belfast and Dublin. . . Dublin! It 
 suddenly appeared that many brave things had happened 
 there. Dublin, that lovely place of light and beauty, 
 where Ellen would meet him in the lamplit streets and 
 they would talk again of plays and poetry and the 
 hills of Dublin. Yes, Dublin was surely the place 
 where he might re-habilitate himself. . . He had 
 visions of walking with her towards the hills again on 
 bright, idyllic evenings and on Sundays which would be 
 all adoration. . . It seemed very strange that it was 
 Ellen who was calling him back now and not either of 
 the two who had so recently written to him, neither 
 she who was bound to him by birth nor she who was 
 bound to him by sin. The very thought seemed to 
 give him a startling and swift interest in life. It brought
 
 THE PAGAN 175 
 
 him a surge of hope, too, which sang in his heart 
 while Arthur Nicholson was doing this thing because 
 the poet had seen that he had still some possibilities. . . 
 For her, or because of her, he might yet do great 
 things. . . 
 
 Later Nicholson brought him to a grand hotel and 
 entertained him to a costly supper. Yet it was 
 the free tribute of one man to another, and he never 
 even made him faintly feel under a compliment. In a 
 bright moment it reminded Martin of another incident 
 in literary history when Yeats met the author of The 
 Playboy in Paris and turned his steps towards the Aran 
 Islands, for this man too was equal to the loftiness 
 of the thing he was doing. He was rescuing the makings 
 of a writer from this place where there was neither light 
 nor literature, nor happiness, nor hope, and send- 
 ing him to Ireland where there was the essence 
 and the making of all these things. . . They were very 
 lords of language as they sat smoking good cigars amid 
 the grandeur. Nicholson recited some of his best poems, 
 and in return Martin told him the plots of plays and 
 stories with which it was his intention yet to enrich 
 the world. And even as they talked they conceived 
 further beauty for the glory of inspiration was again 
 their portion. . . The poet was not returning to Ireland 
 just yet, but when he did he hoped Martin would call 
 to see him at his cottage in the hills. . . "And you'll 
 give up pub-crawling, like a good fellow," he said at 
 parting. 
 
 Next morning as he stood upon the deck of the ship 
 that was to carry him to Ireland he thought more clearly 
 among many other things of his own play, The Sybil 
 and the Sphinx, and wondered why he should have
 
 176 IN CLAY AND IN BRONZE 
 
 thought of writing a play around the idea that life on 
 this earth is but one act of the many act drama of the 
 dream of personality towards the achievement of 
 reality. . . It seemed at once queer and at the same 
 time perfectly reasonable to think that everything that 
 had already happened to him, even the beastly actuality 
 of this sojourn in America was but part of a dream. . . 
 Yet was there a sorrow upon him even in the moment of 
 his tremendous thought a powerful regret for some part 
 of himself that had died. . . His regret seemed the only 
 reality about him until Ignatius Nolan, that vague 
 man, came running up the gangway to shake his hand 
 at parting. In some quite unaccountable way he 
 had got wind of his going. . . Just then the gangway 
 was removed, and seeing him standing so sadly still upon 
 the wharf a few seconds later, Martin thought that Nolan 
 looked curiously like himself on that morning that Kitty 
 had gone down to the sea. 
 
 END OF BOOK III
 
 BOOK IV 
 
 THE MAN
 
 THE MAN 179 
 
 BOOK IV 
 
 THE MAN 
 
 MARTIN was not sorry to leave behind that jumb- 
 ling together of great facts which was represented 
 by America. But the roar of it was still in his ears and 
 the dazzling show of it was still in his eyes. . . Some- 
 times he went to the place where a bronzed man passed 
 out exorbitantly priced drinks through a hole. Already 
 was he beginning to lose a portion of the money that 
 remained from the roll of bills which Arthur Nicholson 
 had passed to him after he had purchased a ticket which 
 would take him to Londonderry and Belfast and Dublin. 
 It had been very kind of the poet although the ticket 
 only carried him steerage. 
 
 Sometimes the sea looked so blue and cold, yet with 
 a curious invitation upon its face after he had made a 
 vain attempt to win forgetfulness. . . Drowning 
 seemed as easy as any other way out of it, but even as 
 he resolved upon the accomplishment of his own ending 
 some unexpected light of his ambition would present it- 
 self. He would touch some spring of character in one of 
 his fellow-passengers or see some curl of beauty in the 
 lift of the waves that made a painter's vision to his 
 poet's eye. 
 
 On the boat he was meeting rough, uncouth men
 
 i8o IN CLAY AND IN BRONZE 
 
 who were enjoying the adventure of the passage, who 
 relished the coarse food they were given, and who saw 
 nothing that was an offence in the way they had to 
 sleep and wash and perform the other different functions 
 of the body. But to Martin there was something 
 exceedingly gross about every circumstance of it, par- 
 ticularly when he contrasted it with all he remem- 
 bered of his crossing with Kitty. He had had leisure 
 then and an opportunity of thinking and writing and 
 reading, of even acting the part of W. B. Yeats, with 
 his big, knotted tie, his long stride and his hands en- 
 twined behind him. Now he was so much the subject 
 for a character sketch, a character sketch still of a grossly 
 realistic kind, such as he had often met with in a Russian 
 novel. His clothing was now in a state of sad decay, 
 but mercifully, his coat, his great artistic coat, still 
 hid him. Sometimes he would take a peep at his few 
 other soiled belongings, especially at the collar that Kitty 
 had once made an attempt to make up. It was stiff 
 and thick and brown with starch. Yet had Kitty 
 once been a conductor of ecstasy in this world. Her 
 body had brought delight through his eyes and his 
 body, the poor shell of clay that now housed his torment, 
 had become vibrant with the beauty of passion. He 
 shuddered at the thought that he was still moving nearer 
 to her. . . 
 
 But on the morning that he caught sight of Ireland, 
 the old, beloved country, the surge of youth and beauty 
 rose in him again, calling upon his ambition to make 
 him greater than he had been. It seemed in this moment 
 that he owed his country something. It was there 
 that he had been born, and there seemed something 
 suddenly akin to him in the very nature of the fields.
 
 THE MAN 181 
 
 There were men in Ireland too whose loves, whether in 
 literature or labour, were all clean and unsullied, but his 
 had been carried into life upon the lusts of clay. . . 
 
 The landing at Derry was quite uneventful, his wait 
 for a few hours without incident. It was only when 
 he sat in the train going through the dark night that 
 his mind began to turn again in such a way as to show 
 that he was still portion of a certain reality. He opened 
 the bag which held his soiled collars and his other things 
 and took out the bits of the book he had been so long 
 striving to write. . . It all seemed so sketchy, so in- 
 complete. . . He remembered all the books he had read, 
 the novels, and thought upon their ordered completeness, 
 exhibiting the peace and leisure in which their authors 
 must have set about their work. Not so he. He 
 did not seem to know where to begin, and as the 
 train sped southward he took a pencil from his 
 pocket and began to write. Already was he the litterateur 
 again in Ireland, but there was something almost patheti- 
 cally incoherent in the lines he began to scribble under 
 the heading "Foreword." 
 
 "I, Martin Duignan, sit me down in a kind of despair 
 to write what I must say about the world and 
 to give to those who have leisure to read 
 some idea of the strange adventures of the spirit 
 through which the mortal and immortal parts of 
 me have passed. For the deeds of the body colour 
 the life of the soul. It has taken me all the years 
 of my life to learn this truth, but I know it now. 
 Oh! would that the knowledge had come as it 
 comes to saner and happier mortals, and then my 
 life might now be a less fearful thing to see as I 
 now see it. But it pleased the Lords of Life and
 
 182 IN CLAY AND IN BRONZE 
 
 Death to make an example of me. No man knows 
 my story, and no man might ever know, but then 
 I might have fallen short of the example for which I 
 was intended. If only I could shock people into a 
 full appreciation of my degradation, then I might 
 have some comfort in thinking that my extraordinary 
 life had not been lived in vain." 
 
 It was a poor, weak beginning. It seemed to offend 
 against all the canons of art as he had learned them at 
 the Tower, from Sean O'Hanlon in their conver- 
 sation, and from seeing Pearse and McDonagh in the 
 National Library, from Phelim O'Brien and the unpub- 
 lished critics of "The Daffodils." He knew the 
 word that must be used to describe it if ever it came to 
 be read by those vehement men, an ugly obscene word 
 which might sometimes be seen scrawled on the walls 
 of urinals. . . He searched further and found another 
 attempt to set down his life in the form of an auto- 
 biography written out as a novel in which he was the 
 leading character. He read: 
 
 "Those curious sufferings from his eighteenth 
 year onwards seemed to have twisted his mind a 
 little in the direction of morbid callousness which 
 I can now excuse and see as something altogether 
 different in the light of the confession of these 
 pages. 'I am a weakling, I know very well that 
 I lack something strength of will, I suppose,' he 
 would often say after some particularly unlucky 
 reverse. As he stood cowering before a world 
 he could not understand his opinion of him- 
 self seemed true enough, but now that I have read 
 through his own account of his life and seen in how
 
 THE MAN 183 
 
 many phases the manuscript was blotted by tears 
 I have viewed more clearly the heart of the man. 
 It was a heart so filled with great good nature as 
 to be too good for the humanity he met and the 
 bright mind which accompanied it out of place in 
 the sombre colour scheme which enfolded his life. 
 His life had come to be ruined and ruined most 
 thoroughly by influences altogether outside the true 
 personality which was himself. And continually he 
 would say with mournful insistence: 'There is 
 no use in attempting a task so impossible, one 
 cannot rebuild a broken life, but, as one waits in 
 patience for the end, a certain amount of morbid 
 pleasure may be derived from watching the crum- 
 bling of the ruins. There is something of comforting 
 curiosity in such observation. But to begin again. 
 No. The drunkard hates the one who insists on 
 saving him from his beloved pleasure, the dreamer 
 shrinks in loathing from the hand which would 
 snatch him out of his imaginary paradise, and surely 
 no one, least of all myself, would be so unkind as 
 to take from me the means of my great enjoyment 
 here in this little room." 
 
 Yet in spite of all the blinding egotism of this, it 
 would seem in odd moments, even to himself, that there 
 might be hope in him still but for one deplorable fact. 
 Continually it appeared that he wished to excuse the 
 mess he had made of things on the ground that in him, 
 beyond the common man, the flame of genius had been 
 lit by an unseen hand. It was very queer indeed that 
 one whose early years had been trained to the beauty 
 of self-sacrifice should thus have his mind turned into 
 the ways of a consuming egotism. . . And in this
 
 1 84 IN CLAY AND IN BRONZE 
 
 moment had been given to him to see the opening of 
 his eyes in all the beauty of Ireland and the glory it 
 was to sacrifice oneself. 
 
 In "The Daffodils" it was supposed that a would-be 
 writer must spend several years of hopeless drifting 
 before he could consider himself sufficiently endowed 
 with wisdom or vision or genius, to see "the thing" 
 as it should be seen. These they always spoke of 
 with affectionate experience as "the wander years." . . 
 Now was he returning from his wander years, and surely 
 there was promise behind that fine brow of his across 
 which the wind from the open window of the carriage 
 now blew his dusky hair. He was very young, not more 
 than twenty-two. A beautiful girl was still in love 
 with him, and in Glannidan there were the sunlit 
 fields of his youth to which his mother still called him. 
 It was impossible for him to realise just yet how his 
 mind might turn or what scheme for the future it might 
 embrace. But there were the things that men and women 
 had told him of his genius and there was the life he had 
 lived. . . 
 
 At one moment it seemed that everything must be 
 for Ellen, at another his mother, his sister and the child 
 would be before his mind in a phrase which was the 
 phrase of the countryside: 
 
 "In a bad way, aye, indeed: they must be in a bad 
 way." 
 
 He had known of sons who had done brave things 
 to keep the old homestead still standing, and for all that 
 the later episodes of his life might prove his cowardice, 
 he had worked as well and as bravely as any man. It 
 was the turning of him from his natural work that 
 had ruined him, this and probably some legacy in the
 
 THE MAN iBs 
 
 blood from his father. His life was again trembling in 
 the balance. . . 
 
 That morning he slept in Belfast for a few hours, 
 and in the afternoon went on to Dublin. There settled 
 a perfect and steady greyness upon his mind as he 
 drew near the city, for he knew that Dublin, for good 
 or ill, was the place from which his final decision must 
 spring. . . When he got out at Amiens Street he left 
 his belongings in the parcel office and went on into the 
 city. He anxiously scanned the clocks as he hurried 
 along to meet Ellen. He ran into George's Street, 
 and was there just at the moment when the girls were 
 coming out of the shop. . . One by one they tripped 
 down the stairs and hurried out into the evening. . . 
 And still she did not come. . . There was upon him 
 such a fearful anxiety. . . It suddenly seemed as if 
 he had come all the way from America to effect this 
 meeting. . . Then one of the girls who knew him came 
 up and said: 
 
 "Oh, Mr. Duignan, did you hear about Ellen? 
 She left the Tower and the shop here and everything 
 and went off to America the other day. Went off to join 
 you out there, she said. And now, isn't it curious to 
 think that you're back again. Did you not meet her 
 there at all and she so dying fond of you? ..." 
 
 There was a good deal more gabble of the same kind, 
 but the blinding fact that continually emerged was 
 identical Ellen was gone from Dublin, and gone from 
 him suddenly was his brave attempt to rehabilitate him- 
 self. . . He was dazed. . . He remembered another 
 leave-taking after which he had gone to buy forgetfulness 
 in a saloon on i4th Street. . . Now he almost raced in 
 the direction of "The Daffodils."
 
 i86 IN CLAY AND IN BRONZE 
 
 At once, upon entering, so powerfully was the literary 
 sense in him stirred that he was compelled to let his 
 present sorrow slip quietly into the grey scheme of 
 his life. . . For, there were the poets, critics, artists, 
 scholars, journalists, professors, and all the miscellaneous 
 hangers-on of literature who might be inclusively 
 termed "The Dublin Decadence," still in the various 
 stages of repose in which he had left them on his last 
 day in Dublin. . . They were sitting in exactly the 
 same positions at the tables, taking their usual quantity 
 of drink and contributing their customary remarks 
 to the symposium. . . As soon as he had gulped down 
 his first bottle of stout it seemed to Martin in a moment 
 of sudden illumination that even as men had been caught 
 in the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum so had these 
 young Irish litterati been caught in the lava of 
 their immense egotism, suddenly paralysed as it 
 were by the great gestures of Yeats and Synge and 
 "IE." And so, embedded in the failure of their execu- 
 tion, they had turned to spiteful, poisonous criticism. 
 . . . The stout flowed as usual; the evening faded into 
 night, yet so blindly powerful was the inner concentra- 
 tion of these young men that they scarcely seemed to 
 have noticed the absence of him since his last visit. He 
 had been more than six months in America, yet Phelim 
 O'Brien asked suddenly: 
 
 "What night were you here last? Tuesday, was it?" 
 
 "I haven't been here for quite a long while," said 
 Martin suddenly vexed that his presence or absence 
 should not have been considered more important than 
 this. 
 
 "I suppose you have been working at the book. How 
 is it getting along?"
 
 THE MAN 187 
 
 "Slowly," said Martin. 
 
 "Look here," said the leader of the decadents twisting 
 his dark moustache with his womanish hands. "You're 
 too damned distinguished looking for a man that has 
 written so little!" 
 
 The night dwindled somehow after this fashion until 
 all were sufficiently drunk to bring it to the usual end- 
 ing. . . The nodding plumes began to pass by the 
 window. Martin fell into chat with Gillachrist McBrady, 
 who had been introduced to him as "the new realist in 
 Irish." . . At closing time they staggered away together 
 toward a doss-house on the south side of the city, Gilla- 
 christ McBrady mouthing broken English, the par- 
 ticular form of affectation which distinguished him, and 
 Martin with all thought of Ellen becoming gradually 
 blotted from his mind.
 
 x88 IN CLAY AND IN BRONZE 
 
 II 
 
 AS befitted a member of the shining circle of "The 
 Daffodils," Gillachrist McBrady was writing a 
 book, a novel. 
 
 "This is going to be one of the greatest things since 
 Synge," Phelim O'Brien had said, although in making 
 this momentous pronouncement he had only the word of 
 Gillachrist for it. 
 
 Gillachrist was merely one of these unhappy mortals 
 who in Dublin, of all places, are soonest ruined by the 
 possession of a little ability. Irish was his particular 
 obsession, but with him it was not merely the knowledge 
 of a few harmless and unnecessary words. He really 
 meant it, and had as well the right idea about the revival 
 of Irish, and it was this: that if a man were suddenly 
 to write a great literary masterpiece in Irish, say a 
 masterpiece of fiction, then he would have done more 
 enduring work for the future of Irish than talking the 
 biggest chunks of Irish in the hearing of people who 
 did not know any Irish. This, of course, was an elderly 
 idea of George Moore's, but Gillachrist said that it was 
 original to himself. 
 
 After the dark lapse of a drunken sleep in the ver- 
 minous doss-house they went down and washed amid 
 the lashing and splashings and razor-stroppings of the 
 common wash-house. The new Irish novelist was 
 sick and moody, and when he spoke at all it was in 
 gloomy and profane Gaelic. They went into the common 
 dining-room, and soon Martin was seeing that place 
 with the eyes of the mind of Gillachrist McBrady. . .
 
 THE MAN 189 
 
 It was a queer place surely, this common dining-room 
 of the doss-house, noisy, cold and gloomy, like a place 
 out of a story by Maxim Gorky. The men in the place 
 peered hungrily through the grey of the morning. 
 Their heads were bent low, and they seemed unmindful 
 of everything but the food before them on the greasy 
 deal tables the crude, ugly mess that men devour to 
 keep the life in them. . . Before them on the tables 
 most of the eaters had a little box, a disused soap or 
 starch box, and in this was ranged methodically a set of 
 canisters. These numerous canisters held the raw begin- 
 nings of the food a pinch of tea, a spoonful of sugar, a 
 scrap of sickly-looking butter, a bit of desolate and for- 
 gotten meat. The eaters made a great bustle as they 
 passed and repassed between the tables and the common 
 cooking range. . . Always as they returned to the tables 
 with the cooked stuff the joy of their hearts 
 sprang into their faces. Many a smile half-formed 
 itself upon many a wan and famished face. But these 
 looks of jubilation soon gave way to looks of resolution 
 as they devoured the food. No man lifted his eyes 
 more than six inches from his plate until the last few 
 scraps remained. . . Then, filled with food and com- 
 placency, he gazed calmly around. If his neighbour 
 at the next table having a larger feed had not yet got 
 right through it he would not regard him with any kind 
 of envy; if a neighbour at the next table had nothing, 
 the man full of new confidence would look upon him 
 with disdain. It was queer that such a feeling should 
 arise in his breast, but, inevitably, it would come when 
 he began to compliment himself that, somehow or other, 
 he had managed to get a full meal to-day, by work, 
 by begging, by stealing. . . The others, although the
 
 igo IN CLAY AND IN BRONZE 
 
 same broad fields were opened to them had not pros- 
 pered in their endeavours. The difference in achieve- 
 ment was the gulf between them. One by one they 
 arose with deliberation and proceeded to put away 
 their eating utensils. An old pensioner who had been 
 a cavalry man was always the first to arise. He carried 
 himself erectly and without any suggestion of decay. 
 His pension assured him of food, and so the bending 
 ache of hunger had never attacked him. . . He was 
 now being closely observed by an old withered man of 
 seventy who shook with the fatigues of many hungers. 
 . . There were days when this other sat looking at 
 the pensioner with a dim smile on his face. On such 
 days he was hungry, but the pensioner sat straight and 
 unmoved. On days after the old man had taken a 
 drink or two he sometimes observed the shadow of a 
 sneer hovering around the pensioner's mouth. . . Now 
 the present being such a moment he did a strange 
 thing. He rose feebly from the greasy table, and taking 
 therefrom his eating utensils proceeded to set them out 
 in fine array upon the table. Then hurrying to the 
 common cooking range, he made a great pretence that 
 he was cooking something. He kept up a continual 
 passage between the table and the range until the pen- 
 sioner had finished his meal and went away from the 
 greasy table. . . Then, as his grey smile returned, he 
 gathered up his things, and, replacing them in the locker, 
 went away unfilled, but triumphant. . . 
 
 The girls who sold the food seemed to have a varied 
 experience of every customer. They sometimes saw 
 a man throw a pound note upon the counter with a 
 magnificent swagger, and they saw the same man a 
 few days later begging a piece of stale bread for a half-
 
 THE MAN 191 
 
 penny. They could always tell the amount of a man's 
 possessions by the way in which he approached the 
 counter. . . 
 
 When any of the girls were dismissed for being too 
 cheeky there was great rejoicing among the patrons 
 of the dining-room of the doss-house. It was grand to 
 think that the dispensers of food, some of those who 
 had handled it and been so near to it might yet be 
 brought down to learn the true value of the food, to 
 desire it fiercely and strive to get it in penn'orths and 
 ha'porths. 
 
 The dark man who mopped up the mess and put the 
 cups and saucers back into a clean pile behind the 
 counter also passed frequent comments upon the food 
 and the feeders. But one man beyond all those who 
 came here had set himself apart as a critic of the place. 
 Another, and always the same person, accompanied 
 him, but the latter was merely a patient listener to 
 the criticism. The critic always took up the same seat 
 near the counter where he could have a full view of 
 everyone's purchase. Written clearly in his mind was a 
 list of the articles which constituted everybody's ordinary 
 meal, and when these happened to be exceeded or 
 abridged he was filled with annoyance. Then, with his 
 patient auditor, he had tried to puzzle out what had 
 happened to the unfortunate man. Was it lack of 
 funds? Was it loss of appetite resulting from a drunken 
 night? Had he been suddenly left a fortune? Was 
 it the beginning of miserliness? Had he robbed some- 
 body? Had he got a job? As the critic observed 
 the man's method of eating, he elaborated and con- 
 firmed his suspicions. There was yet another who 
 might sometimes be seen hovering near the dining-
 
 I 9 2 IN CLAY AND IN BRONZE 
 
 room door. He seldom entered the room. It was his 
 continual fancy to visualise it. 
 
 "The most pathetic times in this house," he used to 
 say, "are, first of all, when a man has to look on at 
 the others eating and he after coming up from washing 
 himself. Now isn't it a hard kind of a case when you 
 have to go out to do your endeavours for the day with 
 the thought of all the others' fine breakfasts in your 
 mind? But, d'ye know what I'm going to tell you, it's 
 a harder case to come in after a wet, hard day 
 with your heart falling away from you and you not to 
 have the price of anything to put a bit of life or fire 
 into you at all, and then to think of stumbling up to 
 bed with no thought in your mind but the weary, 
 killing length of the steps." 
 
 And so each of them in turn struggled into life before 
 the mind of Martin, their visions narrowed by their 
 dreams of food. . . When hunger was not actually 
 upon them the fear of foodlessness seemed to rise up 
 an awful monster before their eyes. As they bent over 
 the greasy tables their fugitive faces glowering in the 
 grey light one could easily feel that hunger was the 
 eternal hound upon their tracks. . . 
 
 Although Gillachrist McBrady could not very clearly 
 express his meaning in English, not at least in regard 
 to the finer points of characterisation, the artist that 
 was in Martin rose complementary to the deficiency 
 originating from the obsession of the other with another 
 tongue. They sat there amongst the crowd, two men 
 of art whose minds moved gradually from the pathos 
 to the humour of the situation. . . Both had sprung 
 from the peasant in obedience to the same impulse
 
 THE MAN 193 
 
 which had called them away from the plough in the 
 Ireland of their time. Either condition, that of 
 peasantry or literature, might appear healthy enough of 
 itself, but it was pitiful to think that it had led them 
 to this, to become part of the dregs of the population. 
 Why had both drifted into this condition which betokened 
 social failure? This fable about coming here to look 
 for copy was only a pretence they had made copy of 
 themselves, they were really unable to afford a night's 
 lodging in any better place. 
 
 They parted after a drink in the public-house across 
 the street from the doss-house. The taste of their pints 
 was disgusting as they stood there while the old women 
 with the rusty shawls and dirty cans crowded in around 
 them, and there came a thick trail of speech in the lower 
 Dublin accent across and about the shop like the trail 
 of a slimy thing. 
 
 "Fine copy!" said Gillachrist McBrady, as he let down 
 the last gulp of his pint. 
 
 "Aye!" said Martin, making a parody of his action. 
 
 Then they put down the measures quietly and went 
 out. Martin moped slowly about some of the old ways 
 and Dublin began to return gradually to his realisation. 
 It was a rich and beautiful sensation, this quiet un- 
 veiling, as it were, of a lovely picture which for the 
 moment had been obscured from the vision. He went 
 into St. Stephen's Green and sat upon the very seat from 
 which he and Kitty had thrown crumbs to the birds upon 
 the lake. . . 
 
 "The doctor told me that the baby will come in May." 
 
 This sentence from her letter now burned itself in 
 his mind. It was May now, and spring had reached 
 the beauty of its fulness upon the flowers and trees. . .
 
 194 IN CLAY AND IN BUONZE 
 
 It was curious to think of this coming of new life for 
 which he only was responsible. . . It was woeful to sit 
 here thinking, thinking. He who had once possessed kin- 
 ship to beauty was now wallowing in the slough, even as 
 Gillachrist McBrady, whose ambition had taken the 
 poisonous turn of talking about a novel which he was 
 going to write in Irish. He had been equipping himself 
 for the writing of some such story, but, but. . . 
 
 As he wandered aimlessly out of the Green he came 
 upon a way which led towards Ranelagh and along which 
 he had often gone in the lamplit evenings with Ellen. 
 And to think that all their talking had brought them 
 only to this, a quiet parting and a meeting that had been 
 missed because of the queer fate that had enmeshed 
 him. . . He retraced his steps and turned into an- 
 other street. . . Now he was meeting people who all 
 seemed at some time or other to have been con- 
 nected with the Tower Theatre. Even now there was a 
 certain agreeable surprise in knowing that he had risen 
 up from the plough into that glorious purlieu of the 
 pen in Ireland. It suddenly appeared as the place from 
 which all the adventure of his life had sprung. . . 
 And yet, as he moved along Cuffe Street and past the 
 house of Mrs. McQuestion, his life appeared to have 
 been coloured by other influences more firmly embedded 
 in his being. . . It was from this very house, and be- 
 cause of him, that the half-clad girl had gone to join 
 the women of the shawls. . . He was a pretty scoundrel 
 surely, a traitor even to Arthur Nicholson, for although 
 not yet twenty-four hours returned to Dublin he had 
 already slipped back a considerable distance into the way 
 that had ruined him, and Nicholson had asked him to 
 give up pub-crawling.
 
 THE MAN 195 
 
 He began to hurry in the direction of the National 
 Library. It was here he would meet Sean O'Hanlon with 
 whom he had gone a certain distance down a starry 
 way. . . They shook hands warmly, while O'Hanlon 
 spoke again of Ireland. 
 
 ''There's no place like it," said the idealist in his flat, 
 Dublin accent; "we're going to do something for Kath- 
 leen-ni-Houlihan and I want you to join us. Meet me 
 at five. This is pay-day, and we'll have a little snack at 
 'The Laurel.' " 
 
 Martin began to move aimlessly about the Library 
 looking at the new books in the case and at the authors 
 newly arrived in the index. There was an immediate 
 personal cause for this exploration although it was 
 but dimly perceptible to his own mind. He was 
 possessed of the remote idea that some day his name, 
 too, should appear there. Now and then he turned 
 around to observe those who came in through the turn- 
 stiles, strangers to him for the most part, new students 
 at University College, young men and women eager for 
 jobs and knowledge. . . Then there were the famous, 
 old frequenters whose tastes were on histories and sta- 
 tistics and encyclopedias, a dismal crowd. The poets were 
 absent; he did not see McDonagh or Pearse. He saw 
 little knots of men conversing eagerly on the steps of 
 the Library as he came out with O'Hanlon. He 
 imagined them to be talking fiercely against England. 
 The face of the idealist was lit by a quiet smile. . . 
 Then he suddenly turned into a house in Kildare Street 
 and emerged ten minutes later wearing a uniform such as 
 Martin had seen upon others although he had been only 
 a short while returned to Dublin. There seemed to be 
 something theatrical about this military ostentation
 
 ig6 IN CLAY AND IN BRONZE 
 
 which might be spoiled by the slightest touch of realism, 
 as Martin had seen the effect of an Irish National For- 
 ester's Robert Emmet uniform spoiled, on the day of 
 some great National demonstration, by a heavy man thus 
 richly attired stumbling drunk out of a pub in Parnell 
 Street, the froth of fresh porter in brown beads upon 
 his dark moustache. 
 
 "I couldn't wear the blessed thing in the Library, 
 for you see it is anathema there. A Government 
 institution, you know, and this is not a Government 
 uniform." A little later, over a bottle of stout and a 
 snack in the bar of "The Laurel," O'Hanlon told 
 Martin of this thing that had happened in their midst, 
 the warlike preparation which had begun to emerge out 
 of the whirl of the world war, this proposed attempt 
 through the possible desolation of youth and bravery to 
 pluck the mantle of sorrow from the shoulders of Kath- 
 leen-ni-Houlihan. Martin could not feel himself 
 suddenly entering into the great enthusiasm which made 
 Sean almost a poet as he talked on. It was just the 
 kind of talk which Martin had so far been unable to 
 understand. It sprang from the writings of Davis and 
 Mitchel and Fintan Lalor, and told of the building of 
 the nation from within. Vaguely all that philosophy 
 of poetical patriotism included him in the poetic signi- 
 ficance it gave the nation, but it expected him first to 
 be a nation-builder, a fighter, while his mind was alto- 
 gether so subtle and so minutely threaded by cross- 
 currents of sympathy that he could not suddenly see him- 
 self in this state which would seem to be the very heart's 
 desire of Sean O'Hanlon. It was O'Hanlon who had 
 led him childlike into the ways of literature. His mind 
 had been crude enough before the coming of that guid-
 
 THE MAN 197 
 
 ance, but now its innermost workings were so richly 
 contrived that, apart from all incidents of politics or 
 government or nationality, he could view it at any point 
 and see its humanity and its meaning. Sean O'Hanlon 
 must have passed through this struggle, too, and 
 triumphed even to the extent of his present enthusiasm, 
 for all soldiering, whether for Britannia or Kathleen-ni- 
 Houlihan, was essentially crude and in perpetual conflict 
 with the gentle inclinations of the poetic tempera- 
 ment. . . They had been a long time talking between 
 their lapses of thoughtful silence, but at last they arose 
 and went out into the lamplit streets. 
 
 It was now about the hour when Dublin is most 
 beautiful, when the very sounds in the street seem 
 to acquire some of the colour of the evening and 
 all things drop quietly in processional order into a 
 grand monotone. Beyond the continuous boom of 
 the hurrying trams could be heard surprising sounds 
 breaking in upon the evening, the children singing and 
 dancing round a barrel-organ in a distant street, the 
 steady, adenoidal chorus of the newsboys. Passing 
 "The Daffodils" they stood for a moment to gaze at 
 the vase of well-known flowers drooped desolately in the 
 window. 
 
 They saw the gesticulating litteratl reflected upon the 
 frosted glass. . . Each thought simultaneously of 
 Wilde's poem of The Harlot's House, and the quo- 
 tation broke from the lips of O'Hanlon while Martin 
 nodded in exultation because of the coincidence of 
 remembrance. 
 
 . . . Like wire-pulled automatons 
 Slim silhouetted skeletons
 
 198 IN CLAY AND IN BRONZE 
 
 Sometimes a horrible marionette 
 Came out and smoked a cigarette 
 Upon the steps like a live thing. . . 
 
 Then, in the kinship and love of poetry, they walked 
 on with their heads held high. Each felt that it is not so 
 easy to move a man from his inner impulse. O'Hanlon, 
 because he had lifted his eyes beyond himself to the 
 glory of the newer Ireland, seemed the nobler figure. 
 Yet, Martin, because he had not merged his egotism, 
 because he still stood in nearer relation to all that was 
 himself, remained nearer poetry. But there was upon 
 both at parting the full sadness of their minds' endow- 
 ment. . . 
 
 Martin stood a long time at the corner of Nassau 
 Street wondering blindly where he might spend the 
 night. The doss-house again was pretty well all he 
 could afford. . . Suddenly he saw a face looking at him 
 long and strangely apart from the hurrying throng. It 
 was Margaret Murtagh, his lover landlady. He thought 
 she looked older than when he had last seen her, and 
 her dust-coat, too, seemed shabby beyond recovery. She 
 smiled, and then came over to him. Momentarily he 
 wondered what her purpose could be. What else except 
 to dun him for what he owed her? This was the im- 
 mediate revenge of life for his attempt to find a little 
 poetic exaltation while in the company of O'Hanlon. He 
 knew a sudden and powerful depression, but he had al- 
 ready found himself in this situation. 
 
 "I'm sorry," he said, "awfully sorry, but on the evening 
 I went to America I hadn't a second to spare and I 
 could not possibly manage to see you. I'm sorry." 
 
 He half-expected a sharp, distrustful, reproachful
 
 THE MAN 199 
 
 answer, but she only looked up at him with her big, 
 tired eyes, and said: 
 
 "Oh, not at all, Mr. Duignan, don't mention it. I 
 always knew that you'd come back to me some day, and 
 just imagine meeting you like this! Come on up to the 
 house and have a bottle of stout or something!" 
 
 As they went up Grafton Street and Harcourt Street 
 she was prattling continuously although he spoke little. 
 He was catching glimpses of her story, her shattered ro- 
 mance with its dingy, quiet ending. . . 
 
 As they sat facing one another later in the kitchen 
 after she had given him a good meal they seemed to be 
 surrounded by an atmosphere pregnant of happen- 
 ing. . . All the boarders were in their beds, and there 
 was no sound about them save that of an occasional late 
 pedestrian going up or down the South Circular 
 Road. . . She was a fine woman still, her face still soft 
 and strong in its frame of billowy hair. There was a look 
 in her eyes as if she had become suddenly famished for 
 love. Her talk was continually interspersed with such 
 phrases "And musha, sure I was only a weeshey girl at 
 the time and I going to school." Through their talk the 
 scenes of their youth were returning, and there was fall- 
 ing upon him crushingly a leaden sadness. . . 
 
 They remained talking far into the night here in the 
 kitchen. At last they spoke only in snatches. . . But, 
 gradually, her purpose grew before his mind from which 
 all realisation had been almost blotted by her desire. 
 She wanted him to stay with her, to live with her, or 
 to marry her the solicitor had failed her and she after 
 keeping him so many years. He had gone away after 
 owing her four or five years' board. . . 
 
 Martin could have a comfortable, easy life of it here,
 
 200 IN CLAY AND IN BRONZE 
 
 and could go on with his writing in peace. It was a 
 great chance for him happening, so luckily, too, at this 
 very time. . . But the mere thought seemed, somehow, 
 the end of his great ambition and the interment of his 
 very soul a common boarding-house bully, the very no- 
 tion was appalling. At last the thoughts of both retreated 
 into a very forest of gloom. . . 
 
 He rose hurriedly for the morning was already high 
 and warm, and left the house with an air of decision.
 
 THE MAN 201 
 
 III 
 
 HE walked with the speed of a fugitive down the 
 South Circular Road and up through the city. 
 The sense of the increasing degradation which had 
 befallen him was heavy about his eyes and his mind. 
 Henceforth, what better was he than those men, police- 
 men and Irishmen, who lived on women in New York 
 City! It had been that way with him and Kitty, but 
 her beauty had somehow kept him from falling down to 
 this filthy level. His life had dwindled deplorably, but 
 as he went up the hill by Findlater's Church and past 
 Parnell Square into old Dublin, with its Georgian houses, 
 he felt the full, surging beauty of this lovely city. . . 
 He thought of lines from poems as he hurried along, and 
 as he went past the Roman Catholic Church at Phibs- 
 borough the keen summer wind seemed to strip his mind 
 of all sin and shame. 
 
 Already Margaret Murtagh was no more to him than 
 Kitty Haymer. . . He seemed free again as the wind 
 blowing over the fields. He marched on with a fine 
 swing, a glow in his body and a glow in his mind. He 
 felt freer now than on any other day during his life 
 and he seemed to be at the beginning of a new life. 
 The summer morning was wide and windy upon the 
 green fields. . . After he had walked a mile or so he 
 lit a cigarette and stood for a moment to look across 
 a wall at the cattle and sheep standing there so peace- 
 fully in the high, luxurious grass. . . He fell into a 
 trance of remembered beauty and lines from Yeats be- 
 gan to throng through his mind:
 
 202 IN CLAY AND IN BRONZE 
 
 I cannot see what flowers are at my feet, 
 
 Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs, 
 But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet 
 
 Wherewith the seasonable month endows 
 The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild; 
 
 White hawthorn and the pastoral eglantine 
 Fast- fading violets covered up in leaves; 
 And Mid-May's eldest child 
 
 The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine, 
 
 The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves. 
 
 It was strange that this brief, half-dreamy repetition 
 or recollection of these lines should be running through 
 his mind now as he journeyed this road way in County 
 Dublin. There was so little that might be considered 
 poetical in the appearance of the men he was meeting. 
 They looked at him in sullen distrust. Who in 
 the world was this stranger walking along the 
 road? Immediately Martin felt himself cowering be- 
 fore the power of their inquisitive stare, that power 
 he had felt of old in Glannidan. They were exactly 
 like those he had known in that place, and as they 
 met him amid the brightness of the summer road he 
 could hear them muttering to themselves: "Who's 
 that now?" "Who's that, I wonder?" "Damn 
 it, he's city dressed, so he is, and it's hellish curious to 
 see him tramping!" "Maybe he had a motor car or 
 a motor bike and it's what it broke down on him!" 
 "But, begad, it must be tramping he is for his boots 
 is dusty and he looks tired." "An educated young 
 fellow, too, by the looks of him, but he must have made 
 damn little use of it or it's not tramping he'd be now." 
 "I suppose he hasn't as much money in his pocket
 
 THE MAN 203 
 
 at the present time as would jingle on a tombstone." 
 By realisation of their soliloquies or their talk the glory 
 of his mood was becoming surmounted and the fine plan 
 he had so unaccountably formed in Margaret Murtagh's 
 house was becoming suddenly abridged. He was 
 beginning to feel the power which might break him after 
 his return to the clay. They would be like this about 
 him always, such people inquiring into his every action, 
 endeavouring to peer into his very soul, making every 
 possible attempt to trace the recent course of his life 
 and to indicate for his torture this downward curve 
 by which it had returned to the clay. That strange 
 retreat would be for ever before his mind all starkly 
 in accusation, the few bright splashes of ecstasy here and 
 there being almost obliterated by the massive and 
 quiet gloom of this ending whose beginning had been 
 Kitty Haymer. 
 
 Now, the occasional farmers going towards their 
 fields were being interspersed by men of the tramp class. 
 They, too, looked at him in distrust for, although some 
 subtle feeling of kindred told them that the same hideous 
 torture of life had driven him to the road, he still wore 
 good clothes, the trappings of respectability, and they 
 had their suspicions of him. He had not become wholly 
 emancipated, although he had tasted some of the fresh- 
 ness and freedom of the road. 
 
 It was pleasant to come into a tidy village on the 
 mearing as it were, between Meath and Dublin, and to 
 think upon its history as he came. It was curious to 
 remember that in other centuries men had moved 
 about here pretty much as they were moving now. 
 Why was it that they were so much after a pattern, 
 these Irish villages, so stereotyped? There was
 
 204 IN CLAY AND IN BRONZE 
 
 scarcely a variation. The Protestant church at one 
 end and the Catholic chapel at the other, a few ivy- 
 covered cottages in the centre and a few more cottages 
 straggling away down the roads which led from it; the 
 forge with its door shaped like a horse-shoe, leading into 
 the dark, heavy smelly atmosphere within; the black- 
 smith coming over from the anvil with a red-hot shoe 
 and burning the hoof of a horse, while the street seemed 
 to have been suddenly filled with the stink of burning 
 horn. A little further on was the aged, humped cobbler, 
 looking strangely caricatured behind a bubble window, 
 a handful of tacks in his mouth and all his philosophy 
 of life and death simmering up in his mind and ready 
 to overflow through tacks and all upon the entrance of 
 any customer. Then came the dressmaker with sore, 
 watery eyes, immensely patient at her machine, the next 
 house being a hardware shop with the agricultural im- 
 plements outside the door, further on a public-house 
 and then another and still another public-house, for 
 drink is a necessary aid in man's battle with the fields. 
 The barracks with passive peelers leaning against the 
 door. All these were here. 
 
 Martin went into what seemed the most quiet of the 
 pubs. Although he had been unable to afford the 
 train fare from Dublin to Ballycullen he had still a few 
 shillings in his possession, and he was dusty and tired 
 and still thirty miles from his native place. He threw 
 out threepence for a pint and another penny for a bun. 
 He sat down on the end of a porter barrel, but, for a 
 few minutes, was too tired either to eat or drink. His 
 mind was in a state of semi-vacancy over which easily 
 flowed the talk of those around him. It seemed that 
 there were a number of men going out to cut a meadow
 
 THE MAN 205 
 
 of first crop grass and that there was a great discussion 
 in progress as to the exact amount of drink they would 
 require to sustain them in their labours. . . They were 
 fine, bronzed fellows with wiry stubbles, and it seemed 
 unbelievable that Martin had once been like them. . . 
 Yet he had not been altogether like them, for in Glan- 
 nanea he had never taken porter to drown the sorrow of 
 his labour. . . Yet, through power of the vicissitudes 
 through which he had passed, was he now about to 
 drink a pint, so he suddenly grew into sympathy with 
 them and listened. . . The Tower had taught him some 
 of the tricks of literature or, as some of the critics he 
 had foreshadowed would put it, the placing of his ear 
 to a crevice in the floor. He found himself listening 
 for the intonation of the Syngian speech, but it was 
 notably absent. This mixture of blasphemy and dirt 
 was cfcrtainly no literary medium. After much wrang- 
 ling and grinning and spitting and lighting of their 
 pipes they took their drinks hurriedly and left the 
 bar. 
 
 He turned to his pint and his bun, and the bored, 
 oily publican, sticking a stub of indelible pencil into his 
 mouth every second or so as he proceeded with some 
 calculation, was observing him furtively from beneath 
 the brim of his wide, white hat. It almost seemed as 
 if he were making a mathematical explanation for his own 
 satisfaction of the extent of the sudden and swift degra- 
 dation which had befallen Martin. 
 
 He drank the pint without much enjoyment for he 
 grew suddenly fearful of further scrutiny and was 
 soon slipping quietly down the unfrequented side of 
 the village street. On the open road once more his 
 thoughts arose to torture him. It seemed that it was
 
 206 IN CLAY AND IN BRONZE 
 
 now to be a fight between his own personality and the 
 combined personalities of those from whom he had 
 sprung. . . Their horrible inquisitiveness would be con- 
 tinually compelling him to remember the life through 
 which he had passed. It would hold continual promise 
 of torment. It was quite impossible to think that what- 
 ever powers his mind possessed might ever dominate 
 their minds towards respect for him, either reading or 
 writing they would think of as a most laughable waste 
 of time. It was difficult to fully realise his return to the 
 clay even as it was more amazingly difficult to realise 
 how far he had moved away from it. . . 
 
 He could hear the noise of a motor moving towards 
 him along the road. Then it passed contemptuously in 
 a cloud of dust. The car contained only Austin Pagan. 
 . . . The sudden flashing-back of time and event and 
 place did not immediately strike him as a coincidence 
 of fiction for the Clerk of the Union went every other 
 day to Dublin in quest of joy. . . But the small and 
 splendid motor was somewhat of a surprise. It formed 
 proof of the extent to which Austin had thriven in the 
 absence of Martin. A motor-car, imagine, although even 
 the motor bicycle had made them curse to a shocking 
 extent. Martin's ears grew warm as he thought of the 
 words they must be using about Austin now. If he 
 ever heard them again in the spaces of their work in 
 the fields. . . This, above all, seemed to affect him 
 with a deeper sense of misgiving of the life into which 
 he was returning, his sensibility might never be able 
 to triumph over the surge of anger this would bring to 
 his blood to think of Austin Pagan and his sister 
 B rigid. 
 
 Towards evening he went into a farmer's place for
 
 THE MAN 207 
 
 a drink of water. The people of the house were taking 
 their tea and invited him to join them, which he did, 
 gladly. . . He fell into admiration of the healthy 
 appetite of the men who came in from the fields. The 
 women of the house looked at him in concern. It must 
 be his pale, handsome face, he thought. . . After a 
 rest and a chat by the fire, when the night had fallen, 
 he went on upon his further journey to Glannidan and 
 Glannanea.
 
 208 IN CLAY AND IN BRONZE 
 
 IV 
 
 ALTHOUGH the physical exhaustion of Martin was 
 great his mind was driven down to a greater 
 weariness as he entered the boreen which led up to his 
 mother's house. In one moment it seemed the most 
 natural thing in the world that he should be returning; 
 at another it appeared a mean and despicable thing and 
 an offence against his manhood as well, this slinking 
 home, beaten and ashamed; but had his mother not 
 invited him to return after the departure of Jamesey 
 Cassels from the household; had she not pressed him to 
 return just quite recently? But, doubtless, his mother 
 had striven to magnify him in their eyes and they ex- 
 pected great things of him, these ignorant, anxious people 
 of the boreens. It was not usual to return, from America, 
 above all places, without the signs of success upon one. 
 Those who had never won success never thought of re- 
 turning, but he was an exception. 
 
 This continual thought that he was an exception 
 sufficiently denoted the full strength to which his egotism 
 had arisen and was earnest sufficient of the remarkable 
 conflict which was about to be inaugurated. There 
 were the fields about him, their mearings dimly defined 
 in the half-light, and from out them seemed to come 
 a continual crush of little memories, a flow of small 
 tortures mingled curiously with remembrance of glad 
 moments he had spent with Lucy Flynn. . . The stars 
 were bright in the young summer sky, and it seemed 
 a very glad thing indeed to be coming down the home- 
 ward curve of the clay now. A kind of wild happiness
 
 THE MAN 209 
 
 seemed to claim him as he came up to his mother's 
 door. What was he doing after all, only coming home 
 in obedience to her call. He had delayed about it, 
 of course, but now at last it had come, this return in 
 filial obedience. Yet was there some kind of flutter in 
 his heart, a slight stir of fearful anticipation. He had 
 little money in his pocket, and only poor clothes, and 
 he had walked from Dublin. His heels had vanished 
 even further than their state of disappearance in New 
 York. He was aware that he was not returning as his 
 mother had seen him in her dreams and endeavoured 
 to picture him in her talk by the egg carts at the market 
 of Glannidan. . . He who had gone away from the clay 
 because that lowly condition was insufficient for him 
 was now returning, not altogether fit for the condition 
 from which he had so ambitiously removed himself. He 
 went up to the door and knocked, just as a stranger 
 might have done, instead of walking in with the old 
 familiarity. A double reason for this seemed to suddenly 
 shape itself in his mind. It was part of the good bearing 
 of decency he had learned abroad, and yet in this moment 
 it suggested a subtle aspect of the separation from his 
 mother. He noticed as she stood in the open doorway 
 that she looked out at him even more wistfully than had 
 been her custom, and gathered the little black shawl 
 depending from her shoulders across her breast with a 
 more desolate gesture. 
 
 "Who's that?" 
 
 "It's me, mother." 
 
 "Who are you? Why, I declare it's Martin! And 
 are you back from America? What's up?" 
 
 He had expected a warmer welcome, and now some of 
 the inevitable constraint he had dreaded all the way from
 
 2io IN CLAY AND IN BRONZE 
 
 Dublin was upon him. He shuffled into the kitchen, and 
 immediately his attitude was one of defeat. Life had 
 chastened him to a most amazing extent, and as soon 
 as he entered he fell beneath the influence of the well- 
 known scene. . . But now he felt the presence of the 
 new life whose power had already begun to over- 
 shadow his own. There was his sister Brigid sitting by 
 the fire and dandling a child upon her knee. Here was 
 the little life whose coming had shrouded him in gloom 
 and had driven him with the impulse of a withering 
 fire through his sin. . . Yet, how innocent did it look 
 here now dancing upon its mother's knee and clutching 
 with its little fat hands the soft part of her face. And 
 his sister Brigid was so completely unmindful of him 
 as he came into the kitchen. All her thought and life 
 seemed to be for this child of her shame, the creature 
 who had so curiously twisted the fortunes of this house. 
 She had eyes for no other thing. He was hurt by her 
 indifference. She was his sister, and he felt she should 
 have some subtle understanding of the pain through 
 which he had passed. . . His mother was behaving dif- 
 ferently. She was making a cup of tea for him and 
 striving to maintain a good show of humour, although, 
 in the very anxiety of her effort her real condition was 
 becoming more pitifully apparent to Martin. Continu- 
 ally she was accompanying her preparations by questions 
 as to his way of life since he had left home. The marks 
 of success were not upon him, consequently the effort of 
 her words was in no way inspiring. Rather did they 
 fall, in their quiet commonsense phrasing, upon the 
 weak spots of his mind to torture him still further. They 
 smote him with a sense of his failure. 
 "Musha, d'ye read as much books as ever, Martin?"
 
 THE MAN 211 
 
 "Man alive, Martin, it's you that had the great times 
 when you were off play-acting in Dublin. . . Bad cess 
 to it, but they often made me laugh when they'd tell 
 me about the figarios that you'd have yourself got up 
 in. Well, well, whoever would think that you would 
 have took such a whim for circus people, for the sorra 
 one of my family ever had anything to do with cir- 
 cuses." 
 
 "Musha, and did you not get married the time you 
 used to be going about Dublin so much with the ac- 
 tressy-looking lassie? Why, anybody that used to be in 
 Dublin that time used never be tired telling me of the 
 fine figure both of yous used to cut and yous going about 
 the street!" 
 
 "And d'ye know what it is, Martin? You're not 
 swanky at all and all the grand life you're after going 
 through and all to that. Just as plain as you were 
 the day you left this floor, with no grand clothes on you 
 or anything at all. I suppose, don't you know, that 
 you're after getting a little sense?" 
 
 Thus did she run on as with aching, humbled body 
 he sat there on the chair, the hot soles of his boots burn- 
 ing his feet. . . When she had ceased, only to go 
 on sighing to herself, the burden of the torment was taken 
 up by the wailing of the child mingled with Brigid's 
 attempts to comfort it: 
 
 "Hushaby, Austineen; Hushaby, Austineen!" 
 
 He knew that the people of a betrayed girl always 
 took a peculiar delight in calling the child, if it were 
 a boy, by the name of the girl's betrayer. Hence the 
 Austineen which seemed to connote a continuous be- 
 littlement of Austin Fagan. . . Little wonder indeed 
 that Jamesey Cassels, fool and all as he was, had
 
 212 IN CLAY AND IN BRONZE 
 
 gone back to Mucklin and then into the army and later 
 out to France, as his mother presently told him. 
 
 His bed of chaff seemed very soft as he laid him 
 down. But his weariness did not win him sleep. . . 
 Continually there came thronging regrets as to what he 
 had done with his life, and there passed before him in 
 continual procession the figures which had determined 
 the character of his life, his father, Arthur Duignan; 
 his mother, his sister, Brigid; Austin Fagan, Father 
 Clarke, Peter O'Brien, Mr. Cullen, Mrs. McQuestion, 
 Leonard Thompson, and the Tower people; Sean 
 O'Hanlon, Ignatius Nolan, Arthur Nicholson, but fore- 
 most always and more clearly, Lucy Flynn, the girl in 
 Mrs. McQuestion's, Margaret Murtagh, Ellen O'Connor, 
 and Kitty Haymer. . . At the other end of the house 
 he could hear the crying of Brigid's child, the mother 
 comforting it, and then his mother talking to her again 
 as if they were discussing between them the best method 
 of rearing children. Maybe they were comparing his 
 babyhood with that of Austineen. . . 
 
 A great deal of the life of the house had hitherto 
 centred around his existence, or at least it had appeared 
 so to him, but now this other life had begun to oust 
 him. The women had concentrated their attention upon 
 it and so his vanity had been subjected to an attack 
 which was not at all to his liking. He had fallen into 
 the habit of being considered somebody, even if only by 
 himself, and although this seemed a mean little thing to 
 bother about it was something definite which for the 
 moment replaced all speculations concerning the life 
 through which he had passed. . . At last he fell into 
 a heavy slumber. . . 
 
 In the morning he could hear his mother putting
 
 THE MAN 213 
 
 down the fire which would prepare the breakfast. 
 Then about these poor sounds he began to feel the great 
 silence of the fields. For more than a year his ears had 
 been filled with the immense sounds of cities and now 
 this tremendous lull. . . This was surely the place 
 where a man's sadness might thrive, where a man might 
 be crushed by himself down to the nethermost circle of 
 his hell. . . Now he could hear voices in the yard just 
 beneath his window. It was his mother talking to a 
 neighbour who had called for the loan of something. 
 
 "I was thinking it was him we seen passing. He 
 had his head down, and you wouldn't know him from 
 Adam." 
 
 "Aye, he's home, begad." 
 
 "Bedambut!" 
 
 "Arrah, musha, Mike, 'tis a poor heart that never re- 
 joices, and sure he's home from America for a bit of 
 sport. And mightn't he as well. Sure, youth is the 
 proper season for sport and the like." 
 
 "Damn its soul, didn't he grow into the fine big slob 
 of a lad? But a bit heavy on his feet, wouldn't you 
 think, and remindful of the Gauger Conroy?" 
 
 Here was a marvellous bit of satirical criticism, and 
 Martin felt it as he lay there his mind burning him. 
 The Gauger Conroy was an old drunkard of Glannidan. 
 He was a man, huge, blasphemous, almost obscene in 
 his bigness. He had had a great job in his time, as 
 great jobs were understood in Glannidan. Away in 
 a big distillery, drinking all day and getting well paid 
 for it. Now wasn't that a great job for any man? 
 Then he had come home, a foul-mouthed drunkard, 
 and married a young wife. He was always drunk, 
 and his habit became so widely known and the
 
 214 IN CLAY AND IN BRONZE 
 
 fact that sobriety was a condition impossible to him, 
 that "as drunk as the gauger" was now a term illustra- 
 tive of complete intoxication. 
 
 Here, surely, thought Martin, was an almost un- 
 cannily clever attempt to place him. It sent the fire 
 surging through his veins. . . Yet he did not feel any 
 immediate desire to condemn the people among whom 
 he had fallen. It seemed now that his sole desire was 
 to lose himself in the immense quietness which flowed 
 over the place. To-day he would wander about all 
 the old scenes as he had previously wandered about Dub- 
 lin and New York, viewing them contemplatively, 
 in their literary aspects. But his mind was burning 
 to feel the realisation of one spot the widow Kelly's. 
 He began to think of all the pubs he had seen across 
 the world, and he was desirous of here consolidating 
 his experience. He remembered it now, but very 
 faintly, as some place he had known in a bygone time. 
 He thought of it as a place where men had gone with 
 their sorrows. . . 
 
 Therefore as soon as his breakfast was over he pre- 
 pared to leave the house. Brigid had not yet made her 
 appearance out of bed, but just as he was leaving the 
 house his mother came to the door and gave him a look 
 which was a mixture of pity and anxiety. 
 
 "I'm sorry," she said, "that I have nothing in the 
 house to offer you a treat, and sure a grand, fine-looking 
 fellow like you was used to being treated in style and 
 you going about with the plays. Here!" 
 
 She handed him half-a-crown, but the situation 
 had been so crudely created that it hurt him, yet he 
 took the money, for, immediately, he felt that it would 
 be sufficient to blot out of his consciousness the hurt
 
 THE MAN 215 
 
 which that action had created. Down the road he went 
 now with that look which he had always associated 
 with those who went the roads in the evenings or often 
 indeed at mid-day, running for the bare life as it were 
 from some sudden torture that had sprung up in the 
 fields. Yet the curious conceit he had acquired was 
 sustaining him. He was going in search of copy now, an 
 author, I thank you, in the making, although still some 
 distance from arrival. It would be interesting to watch 
 them, he thought, as they sat drinking there. They might 
 grow into a common sympathy with the drowning of their 
 sorrow. Yet, as in every definite intention of his life, 
 was he destined to be frustrated in this, for here was 
 Lucy Flynn coming towards him down the road. She 
 was swinging a can rather gaily in her hand and singing 
 as she came. She had a curious smile playing around 
 her lips as she stopped before him. 
 
 "Martin!" she said, simply. 
 
 His voice seemed very uncertain as he replied. Yet 
 here surely was Lucy Flynn, of whom he had often 
 thought in distant places and under strange circum- 
 stances. Now she stood before him. As she laid down 
 the can upon the road and folded her arms he took 
 notice of their strength. She had not those charms of 
 the body which had brought into his life the curse of 
 Kitty. . . There was red down upon the arms of Lucy, 
 and Kitty's skin had been so white and smooth. She 
 did not know, of course, how well his mother had 
 guessed at least one byeway of his degradation. But then, 
 immediately, it appeared that Lucy had intuitively seen 
 him further buried in his shame. There were ugly 
 little wrinkles about her eyes, and it was easy to see 
 that she was no longer young. No doubt he had con-
 
 216 IN CLAY AND IN BRONZE 
 
 tributed to the ravages of the years in her case; he had 
 marched hand in hand with Father Time. . . For a 
 moment it was queer to think that he had not written 
 her one single letter. . . 
 
 "I was just going up to your mother with a sup of 
 buttermilk. Isn't it a pity of the world the way the 
 second cow is after dying on her, the poor thing? We 
 only heard that you were home about twenty minutes 
 ago." 
 
 Here was a curious opportunity for mixture of sen- 
 sations. The second cow had died on them, and in the 
 natural course of events had he remained here and fallen 
 into the ways of those around him he should have gone 
 into the widow Kelly's to exhibit his gloom. Now surely 
 was he only about to enjoy the arrears of his gloom. . . 
 And here was Lucy to tell him by her presence of all 
 she might still be to him, of all she might be to him at 
 the present moment even though things had happened 
 differently and the second cow had died. Yet here was 
 he making for the widow Kelly's now, while because of 
 him and all he had done the summer was beginning to 
 fade from her cheek. 
 
 He went on the road towards Glannidan and she con- 
 tinued her way towards his mother's house. No 
 doubt she was going there now to condole and to question 
 in a friendly way and to show great interest in his 
 home coming. 
 
 The village of Glannidan when he entered it seemed 
 not less impossible than it had ever been. It now 
 appeared a great while since he had been here. When 
 he went into the widow Kelly's the proprietress was 
 moving hugely behind the counter, a great bulk of 
 pride and flesh. Out of this little hole of a public-
 
 THE MAN 217 
 
 house she had made sufficient to farm and fortune all 
 her sons and daughters thereby proving to the fullest 
 the truth of the old saying that where there was a yard 
 of counter well managed it was better than a farm of 
 land. She had not known Martin very well, but she 
 had seen his father, "Arthur Duignan, the common idiot," 
 spend his life and the most of his farm here by this 
 counter. Indeed it was she who had seen and heard 
 him, a big, slobbering man, always quoting out of books. 
 She detested books, because before all things she was 
 a realist and life was the volume that she read. She 
 had prospered exceedingly, and no one, not even the 
 priest himself, had ever been able to say a word to her. 
 She had made the farms and the money for her sons 
 and daughters out of the money for gloom and the farms 
 that had been drunk here.
 
 218 IN CLAY AND IN BRONZE 
 
 MARTIN paid for his drink with the half-crown 
 his mother had given him. The widow Kelly was 
 not the usual oily, obsequious type of publican. On the 
 contrary she made a parade of her boorishness, scarcely 
 ever speaking to a customer, but always moving thus 
 ponderously and sullenly behind the counter. 
 
 If he had foolishly imagined any sudden comfort 
 from the presence of this woman he was immediately 
 mistaken. She looked at him with a contempt born of 
 a feeling of superiority and spotlessness which had 
 arisen out of the stories she had heard of him. A play- 
 actor that was what he was, a grand-looking thing indeed 
 for any mother's son to be, a fellow that painted himself 
 up and made himself a clown for people to laugh at. 
 This while his mother and sister, God help them, through 
 his fault and no one's else, were a laughing-stock in 
 the country. And his mother, too, in the face of all 
 that to go let on many a time to Glennon, the egg-man, 
 that her son, Martin, had a great job away in America. 
 Indeed she felt a queer disgust against her customer. 
 He had begun by ordering a stylish and literary drink 
 gin and brandy. However, it was not until he had 
 ordered a second one that she was moved to speak 
 her mind: 
 
 "Gin and brandy, begad, and sure I remember well how 
 your poor father, God be good to him, used to be satis- 
 fied with a pint of porter. Musha, it's not everyone can 
 afford to take a stylish drink like that." 
 
 Momentarily he felt a little vexed with himself for
 
 THE MAN 219 
 
 being in this place at all. Yet he felt some of his 
 acquired personality stir up to assist him as he stood 
 here talking to this vulgar woman, something which came 
 out of his faculty for literary perception, and which 
 in the end might come to his salvation enabling 
 him to see things as they really were. Yet it was the 
 very littleness of this place which gave it such amazing 
 power, and the stillness upon the street which crushed 
 his life into a narrow point of vast personal importance. 
 Now and again this great stillness was broken by the 
 voice of someone speaking outside, and soon men were 
 rushing in from their labour, their nailed boots ham- 
 mering hard upon the cement floor. They looked dirty 
 in their mid-week beards and there was a noisome 
 smell of sweat from them. In their midst Martin 
 appeared genteel by comparison. His clothes might 
 look shabby among the grand surroundings of cities, 
 but here he was as one strangely elevated, and this 
 was the immediate fact that made them hate him even 
 as he stood there. Soon his presence began to be felt, 
 that is, to be detested to an even greater degree. Here 
 were they only rushing in from their work to get a pint 
 for God's sake, while he could sit here and take it at his 
 leisure. This was an immense consideration seeing 
 that these men measured the excitement of their lives by 
 bouts of drinking and by little snatches of idleness like 
 the present. And there was he not even asking them to 
 have a drink either, and this was something that 
 had always been done by men who had returned from 
 America. The fact that he had not got it for himself 
 did not immediately appear to them, but merely the 
 outward fact that he had it and was too bloody mean to 
 share it with them. . .
 
 220 IN CLAY AND IN BRONZE 
 
 Yet the half-crown his mother had given him was 
 bringing Martin rapidly towards a state of exaltation. 
 He was beginning to feel the gladness of the bottle; 
 soon he was seeing himself as the litterateur, the author 
 arrived. Here moving intimately around him, were the 
 people whose little lives and little tragedies would make 
 him famous. . . The people of his book were very near 
 him surely, but he was waiting for some in- 
 cident that would concentrate them. He waited 
 eagerly until it came. . . He saw Mrs. Kelly climb up 
 into the window, where the cobwebbed bottles hid the 
 lower portion of the view, and look out upon the street, 
 and he saw the crowd in the shop rush to the street 
 door to look out. There was a smirk of a grin upon 
 the faces of all of them as they returned from their 
 gazing, and as she came down, flopping awkwardly from 
 the window, to supply them. 
 
 "Fill us another pint, ma'am, if you please!" 
 
 "They're in town again." 
 
 "Begad, they are." 
 
 Then those who through every effort of knavery had 
 effected their escape would feel the extent of their es- 
 cape. The "grippers" were in Glannidan! The "grippers" 
 were in Glannidan! The very first intimation of this 
 legal visitation was sufficient to bring them joy. But to 
 know with whom they had come to stay was sufficient 
 to extend their satisfaction. 
 
 "Be the holy!" or "Be Jaises!" or "Begad!" 
 they would ejaculate continuously in the naked gladness 
 of their malevolence. These descendants of gallant 
 and glorious Irishmen who, in old times, had been the 
 sworn enemies of law and order had already regarded 
 themselves in sympathy as one man upon the
 
 THE MAN 221 
 
 side of the grippers and the peelers against the man 
 who had fallen although he had fallen only because he 
 had failed to equal or to excel them in "the 
 trickery of business" as they politely called it. 
 Most of them owed money, and so they were glad 
 to see the menace he represented smashed before 
 their eyes. They would begin to drink in jubiliation as 
 they realised that the gripping process was being pro- 
 ceeded with a little way down the street. Begad and 
 Bechrist, it was great! It was bloody well right to run 
 him out of Glannidan! The curse of hell on him, the 
 common robber. 
 
 The unfortunate man was in the very middle of his 
 hell in the very middle of Glannidan. The eyes of all 
 his neighbours were enjoying the scene which had been 
 created. The "grippers" were throwing out his few poor 
 sticks of furniture on the road, the few familiar 
 utensils which for so many years had cooked the food 
 that kept himself and his wife and children alive, even 
 the nice big photograph of himself and the wife that 
 they had got taken while on their honeymoon in Dublin; 
 the grand second-hand piano which he had bought in 
 the hey-day of his business and which had served to 
 give a sense of comfort and decency to their lives 
 all these intimate, almost living things, were given the 
 road amid the cries of the children which mingled 
 continuously with the laughter of the others a little 
 way up the street. A drunken policeman stood on guard 
 at the door of the shop. He owed the man who was 
 being "gripped" a considerable sum and had made up 
 his mind to steal something before he went off duty at 
 the door. . . 
 
 Here all starkly presented was the first clear glimpse
 
 222 IN CLAY AND IN BRONZE 
 
 that Martin had got of Glannidan in its literary aspect. 
 Now Mrs. Kelly left the bar and went into the outer 
 shop where Austin Fagan and Brian Doyle had come 
 together for a drink. Mrs. Kelly always hung upon their 
 words as the finest products of great wisdom. They were 
 a couple of young men who had triumphed according 
 to the idea of triumph which obtained in Glannidan, two 
 "successes" they were. By a curious chance they began 
 to talk about America. Neither of them had ever been 
 there and the little they had read did not warrant 
 them posing as authorities on America. Why had 
 the widow Kelly not spoken of America to him? He 
 knew, and it was through Austin Fagan indirectly, that 
 he had seen and now knew so much about America. . . 
 The half-crown was drunk so he staggered out from the 
 bar and went home.
 
 THE MAN 223 
 
 VI 
 
 HE began to take control of affairs again on the little 
 farm in Glannanea, but only in a half-hearted 
 sort of way, and only in so far as it was of immediate 
 benefit to him. There was a fair about to be held in 
 Glannidan so he proposed the sale of a few calves from 
 off the field that adjoined that of Lucy Flynn's father. 
 This was the last field in the little holding, and seemed 
 to urge, by its very luxuriance, the union for their mu- 
 tual benefit of both families. As he looked over the 
 little farm he saw with a feeling of rising sadness how 
 the stock and the tillage had dwindled. Jamesey Cassels 
 had let the land go to hell. Of course the poor fellow 
 could scarcely be blamed for he had brought good money 
 into the place, but where had it gone? Father Clarke 
 knew all about that, and possibly also his first lieutenant, 
 Peter O'Brien, the Marquis of Clonlough. He had 
 not encountered Father Clarke since he came home, but 
 he had seen him pass down the dusty streets of Glan- 
 nidan as he stood in the widow Kelly's. The whole 
 business of Martin and his mother and Brigid and 
 Austin Fagan and Jamesey Cassels was well hidden in his 
 mind. Many such arrangements were well hidden in his 
 mind. Martin sometimes imagined him to be seeking 
 some distraction from them as he went around Glannidan 
 reading his holy book. . . 
 
 And there were things buried in the mind of Martin 
 that he could not forget. There was Kitty Haymer, 
 for instance. . . So he wanted to be going to the widow 
 Kelly's continually, and it was not a place where one
 
 224 IN CLAY AND IN BRONZE 
 
 could go without plenty of money. So far he had not 
 been able to think of returning to work in the old way. 
 The clothes he wore were of a finer texture than those 
 Lowry Pigeon, the tailor, had been used to make for 
 him. This queer hesitancy which held him suspended 
 above endeavour was further symbolised in his memories 
 of Kitty, who was set, as in a burning frame, within 
 his memory. She was at home in England now, and 
 her time had already come and he had not gone to her 
 in her need. 
 
 He had come out into the mearing field to have a 
 look at the calves he was going to sell at the fair of 
 Glannidan, and now he saw Lucy Flynn coming towards 
 him from the direction of her father's field where she 
 had been second-moulding potatoes. Considering her 
 occupation she was dressed neatly enough and her 
 white apron was in artistic contrast to the green 
 fields. Yet did she look coarse and strong, and as she 
 showed her big white teeth in a smile there 
 was something that pained him in the thought of Kitty 
 which she brought to his mind. As his eyes fell to the 
 earth with the depression of his thought he caught sight 
 of her great brogues, and he remembered all the dainti- 
 ness of Kitty. . . 
 
 Immediately was she talking of the crops and the 
 land, deploring the disaster that his brother-in law, 
 Jamesey Cassels, the dirty idiot, had brought upon the 
 nice, tidy fields. Her talk was almost comforting in 
 the commonsense it exhibited. In a few moments it 
 drew him back from the dark period of his life and he 
 was at home again in the quiet evenings before the little 
 tragedy in his own home had driven him into the
 
 THE MAN 225 
 
 strange byeways of life through which he had passed. 
 Around them stretched all the fields both knew and 
 all the homesteads of the boreens. It was upon such 
 scenes that his eyes had dwelt in peace before his mind 
 had finally turned into the great ways of thought and 
 upon them fell now an immense peace as they viewed the 
 olden, quiet place and listened to the happy, quiet sounds. 
 
 As he turned to look at her where they sat side by 
 side he saw that she was gazing wistfully away over 
 the fields as if in quest of some little portion of the 
 happiness that had been denied her. He saw that she 
 had grown a little older, at least she was not as young 
 as the Kitty he constantly remembered. The clay and 
 strong air and sunshine of the fields had left their mark 
 upon her surely. Suddenly she spoke: 
 
 "I'm sorry for you, Martin; sorry that you have not 
 made better use of your time. Sorry that you do be 
 giving them the chance to talk about you the way 
 they do." 
 
 Her words fell upon his mind with an even throbbing 
 insistence and there sprang into his consciousness a 
 sudden feeling of immense shame. He felt very well that 
 she was speaking out of the great regard for him which 
 had survived his early unfaithfulness. 
 
 "They're talking of you, Martin; they're talking of 
 you, night, noon and morning. They're saying awful 
 things about you. Nothing is too bad for them to say 
 and it hurts me. My God, it hurts me! And it's putting 
 between us, too. You know my father wasn't a lover 
 of yours at any time, and you might say he's not a 
 lover of yours now in any case!" 
 
 In these moments suddenly was being reborn his 
 early love for Lucy, and now were sweeping over
 
 226 IN CLAY AND IN BRONZE 
 
 him also the withering blasts of his punishment. Yet 
 was the clay continually drawing them nearer. They 
 were kissing now, great silent, blind kisses, the tears 
 filling up their eyes. She was in his arms now, and all 
 the appearance of strength and coarseness had gone 
 from her. She was to him now even as Kitty had been. 
 Long ago she had struggled out of his arms as he tried 
 to kiss her, but now there was no struggle, not even the 
 smallest attempt at refusal. Even until the present 
 moment had she been puzzled to know what it was 
 that had driven him away from her. Maybe it was 
 that he had not seen. . . So there was upon her now 
 a very tremendous ecstasy of revealment. Through the 
 disturbing talk of the neighbours he might slip further 
 and further away from her. . . But he would know 
 now, and he would surely triumph over the life around 
 him for her sake. 
 
 As they remained talking there a fuller depression 
 settled down upon them. The point of all her words 
 seemed curiously concentrated upon the thing that was 
 himself and his talks with Kitty had been mostly of 
 art and love and beauty. Now he was being forced to 
 talk of things so near the clay. . . He was more distant 
 from his curve of glory than he had ever been before. 
 She had set her eye upon him for a husband and there 
 seemed to be no denying her desire. Momentarily he 
 remembered Barney Shaw's play of Man and Superman, 
 which he had seen in Dublin. She must have 
 caused Masses to be said for his safe return and made 
 Novenas for the success of her intentions. And what 
 a Godsend it must have been to her when he came 
 rambling home. She was just beginning to show her 
 age, and soon people would be saying that she had not
 
 THE MAN 227 
 
 been able to keep her man. He might not be much of 
 a man, for already her curious pride in him was fading 
 further. But the blame would be put on her. Why 
 hadn't she kept him? Now she must keep him to her- 
 self. She must hold and encourage him, even unto the 
 ignominy of this surrender. . . Yet even now was she 
 curiously ashamed. . . To think of all the years she 
 had so modestly waited; waited, too, with such an 
 amount of noble, although neglected affection, only to 
 be betrayed at last by her love into this moment of 
 madness. . . And he, too, was ashamed. . . Frequently 
 even in his uttermost degradation, he had thought of her 
 in a pure, tender way, and, strange as it might seem, 
 even towards more complete perfection of regard since 
 his return to the quiet life of the boreens. Now he had 
 desecrated even the possible holiness of this thought. 
 . . . Suddenly they found themselves moving hur- 
 riedly away from one another. He ran down thorny 
 byways on his way to Glannidan for a few drinks before 
 closing time.
 
 228 IN CLAY AND IN BRONZE 
 
 VII 
 
 EVEN in spite of the frequent joy of such meetings 
 he knew little peace. The widow Kelly's seemed 
 to call him with a louder and more clear call. Always, 
 in the evenings, between the conspiracy of his own mind 
 with the silence of the fields he could hear the lapping 
 of low, mournful sounds about his soul. He wore a 
 forlorn look always like that of a spoiled priest although 
 he was merely a spoiled pagan. 
 
 Often he came into the widow Kelly's at that quiet 
 hour of the evening before the usual drunkards had 
 assembled for their nightly carouse. He would stand 
 there by the counter behind his drink listening to the 
 small noises which at long intervals disturbed the street. 
 In such deserted places one's ears attain to perfect 
 acquaintanceship with the smallest sound so, although 
 the cobwebbed bottles in the window hid his view, he 
 recognised all the people who passed in the varying 
 noises of their footsteps. . . These seemed to carry to 
 his imagination full realisation of what the passers by 
 had on their tongues and in the abysmal depths of their 
 mean minds. Hard words of him, no doubt, always 
 and always. 
 
 "He's drunk this evening again!" "Arrah, musha, sure 
 he was blind, stinking drunk all day!" "Begad he's a 
 rare one for the drop!" "He won't be long drinking out 
 the little place entirely on the mother and sister." "Oh, 
 the son of Arthur Duignan, don't you know, and what 
 else could he be?" 
 
 And so as he stood there by the widow Kelly's little
 
 THE MAN 229 
 
 counter he always knew full well the things that were 
 being said of him. That they were in the main true 
 seemed to be the strangest thing about them, for he 
 was still a young handsome man showing all the marks 
 of that individuality which had lifted him, even for a 
 short while, beyond the clay. But this was the in- 
 evitable punishment for endeavouring to place himself 
 apart from the peasant and was, on the part of the 
 others, the method of attack always found most effective 
 in dealing with such cases. And the feeling of an- 
 tagonism thus brought to life had grown and grown 
 until now it was a big thing threatening the whole fabric 
 of his existence. Foolishly he had tried to flout it, 
 doing by way of defiance the very things for which he 
 had fiercely incurred their dislike. Yet even because 
 of this had he given them ever increasing opportunities 
 of besmirching him. And now was he beginning to feel 
 that the wagging tongues had in a way defeated 
 him. He had grown fond of drink. This dirty 
 pub in Glannidan had become the scene of his recre- 
 ation, the place of respite from the onslaughts of the 
 hatred opposed to him, yet in this place was he continu- 
 ally betraying himself. 
 
 It was the most important place of degradation in 
 Glannidan, but behind its bold and imposing front 
 was another house which but thinly hid the gloom of 
 death. This house was inhabited by the sad ghosts 
 of the men who had here drunk themselves to death. 
 There were many nights when it seemed that the two 
 houses became merged in one another. Among the 
 frequenters of the bar one could almost fancy the 
 dead still moving. And when the drunken laughter 
 rang out dear and disgusting one could almost detect
 
 230 IN CLAY AND IN BRONZE 
 
 other laughter behind it which seemed always of a 
 sudden to give it another echo and another sound. 
 This was the laughter of the lost and dead men. 
 
 Away from those who came here for absolutely no 
 other purpose but drink was another crowd of evening 
 visitors who stood apart in the better portion of the pub. 
 It was made up, for the most part, of Austin Fagan, 
 Brian Doyle, his inseparable counterpart, a district coun- 
 cillor or two, the architect to the District Council, 
 the schoolmaster. Martin was always forced to hear 
 them begin their usual evening chat the talk of Glan- 
 nidan, that mean and hurtful gossip which to them 
 appeared eternally interesting. Listening to the bitter 
 things they said of one another one might be inclined 
 to think that they were segregated as enemies from the 
 community and banded together in the firm friendship 
 of one another. However, this illusion was quickly 
 dispelled when any of them dropped away from the 
 group and went out of the shop. It was then that the 
 moment became propitious for a new object of attack. 
 The character of the person just gone from their com- 
 pany was laid pitilessly bare, and no matter in what 
 high air of calumny the others happened to be soaring 
 they at once alighted to this new feast like flies upon 
 a festering sore. It was a good illustration of their liking 
 for one another, and showed upon what manner of 
 foundation their friendship was laid. They were 
 merely the head pismires of Glannidan who were 
 always full of the desire to sting one another even 
 while continuously and collectively desirous of stinging 
 someone else. 
 
 As Martin listened to them his mind was always filled 
 with anger and disgust. But why did he come here
 
 THE MAN 231 
 
 to this place at all; why was he allowing himself to be 
 dragged further and further into the slough of Gianni- 
 dan? But he might as well have asked himself why 
 did Gillachrist McBrady, who was writing a great novel 
 in Irish, stop in a doss-house on the south side of Dublin? 
 All the clear issue that ever came of his torturing 
 questioning was the fact that he always emerged at 
 ten sodden, oblivious, drunk, blind to the ugliness of 
 Glannidan as to the beauty of the world, letting talk 
 out of his mouth which was in keeping with the codes 
 of the village. 
 
 Lucy had become angry with him for his continual 
 surrender to the villainy of the village, particularly seeing 
 that she had surrendered herself to him. But there were 
 times, during the long day in the fields, when she began 
 to fear the very splendour of her intentions and to grow 
 despondent. But it would be grand to snatch him, still 
 clean to her seeming, even although the net had begun 
 to settle around him. 
 
 One Sunday she met him on the walk that led around 
 by Murray Hall, which was the promenade of Glannidan. 
 It was on Sunday that all about this place a perfect orgy 
 of scandal reigned high over all thought of God. . . 
 But as they sat at the foot of a tree looking towards 
 where the afternoon sunlight made golden the windows 
 of Murray Hall they were drawn at length to talk of the 
 ways of Glannidan. Lucy hung her head after the way 
 of one who has herself been hurt when she repeated 
 the hard words that had been said of him one night in 
 the widow Kelly's. But never had any even imagined 
 words against himself brought him such a feeling of 
 punishment as those which now fell from her lips. 
 They debased him before his own eyes and he grew
 
 232 IN CLAY AND IN BRONZE 
 
 sorry for his soul. He felt that some of the great pride 
 of his manhood must have fallen away from him when 
 he gave people the continual opportunity to speak of 
 him thus. Their talk and the feeling that overhung it 
 seemed to invade his very heart. . . Long after she had 
 slipped away, for fear of her father being told 
 of their walk together round the Hall, he remained 
 there in gloomy reverie. He had wandered away down 
 the avenue which led from Murray Hall, and again he 
 was in the country of the boreens and very near to the 
 churchyard of Kilkenna. He leaned across the 
 wall and remained there gazing out for hours over 
 the ridges of quiet graves in what he liked to call "the 
 meadow of the dead." This little graveyard had always 
 been a subtle aid to memory. Long ago it had helped 
 him to recollect a line from literature, and now it caused 
 to spring into his mind queer thoughts of many things, 
 the tragedy of continual, aching separation, because it 
 seemed he must have always two separations in his life 
 and from two women at one time. Now he was far away 
 from either Kitty Haymer or Ellen O'Connor, 
 and often in the vacant spaces of America there had 
 appeared such a great distance between him and his 
 mother and Lucy Flynn. He was coming to remember, 
 too, the burials, not of dead kinsmen, but of the burials 
 that had taken place within himself, of vanished pieties 
 and dead ambitions. . . 
 
 And now as he stood here in meditation he thought 
 that at last he had seen the meaning of life very vague 
 and vapoury within this sanctuary of peaceful bones. 
 He had been a long time straining his eyes and his mind 
 as it were to pierce this vision, but the lords of life and 
 death had resolutely shut him out from the wisdom of
 
 THE MAN 233 
 
 such a glimpse. . . As he had looked towards death 
 for enlightenment upon the meaning of life, so did he 
 now, as he went down the road, look towards life for 
 some clear knowledge of death. . . A drift of little 
 girls were coming down the road in their clean Sunday 
 pinafores. Their simple frocks were white and pretty 
 and their faces shone with innocence in the sun. 
 They laughed up into his face as they went by. He 
 had a sudden thought of them flowering into woman- 
 hood. He fancied some man, might it not be himself, 
 coming to love one of these children grown. . . "Musha, 
 sure, a man can marry at any time but a poor girl, God 
 help us" Lucy had said more than once since his 
 return. 
 
 But beyond such a momentary flash of deeper specu- 
 lation the thought of Lucy would be for ever filling his 
 mind. The awakening of her passion and his glimpse 
 of her tremendous regard for him had somehow snatched 
 his heart from desolation. These were the feelings 
 which would mark his approach to her, a generous 
 breath of sympathy with the small compass of her mind, 
 a fine tenderness melting and blinding him. But when 
 they were together it was the springing of the same old 
 darkness into his mind. He was seeing Kitty as a 
 shadowy figure rising up between them as of old he had 
 seen Lucy when Kitty had been with him. Yet had the 
 great love of Lucy begun to unite them closely and they 
 were together every evening of their lives. . . 
 
 Even still the aspect of homecoming had not been 
 put away from him. Every evening when he left Lucy 
 he went into Glannidan as seemed quite natural, because 
 every Yankee that ever lived had always done it. 
 A certain amount of his original gift of observation
 
 234 IN CLAY AND IN BRONZE 
 
 had been blotted out by his dreaming, and he was un- 
 able to see that in selling some of his sheep and calves 
 on returning to the management of his father's farm 
 he merely showed that he had returned to drink it, 
 even as his father had done his best to drink it in the 
 years gone by. 
 
 Therefore a most remarkable thing was happening. 
 Glannidan was rapidly coming into some triumph over 
 him and compelling him to conform to its own ideas 
 of greatness. For generations it had been an unalter- 
 able convention that a man home from America should 
 march proudly into the pub and stand a drink to every 
 spitting idler who might be there. From failing to realise 
 this on the first day he had come to the widow 
 Kelly's he had now come to have a certain cowering in 
 his heart compelling him to feel that he must do it, 
 even while he half felt that they were laughing at him 
 all the time. 
 
 The widow Kelly could only barely hide her huge dis- 
 gust of him. 
 
 "The mouth," she used to say, "but sure he's his 
 father's son." 
 
 Then there was the walk home to the boreens every 
 evening with a crowd sometimes shouting and singing, 
 every man of them in sane interludes, especially those 
 who had claims to be considered "Yanks" themselves, 
 having spent some time in America, finding out the places 
 he had been, the streets, in fact sometimes the very 
 houses. In describing a scene or an incident when he 
 would quite casually mention the name of a street they 
 would break in on his talk. 
 
 "Ah, sure that's a street where there's a lot of 'bad' 
 houses," they would say in the most casual manner
 
 THE MAN 235 
 
 possible, and then as soon as he parted company with 
 them would stop to wonder to one another about the 
 queer places that Martin Duignan knew in America. 
 
 The hours of the day he was forced to spend in the 
 house were a particular torture. There was a curious 
 feeling of restraint or reserve between him and his 
 mother which lashed both of them into the very froths 
 of torment. Often they would not speak for days and 
 a wide flame of bitterness would be burning between 
 them. Her face would grow gradually whiter beneath 
 the strain of it and not a word would they speak to one 
 another. She knew and felt her responsibility for his 
 present condition. Her ambitious notions for Brigid had 
 resulted merely in the fact that he had been replaced by 
 this other life which crawled and shouted on the floor 
 before his eyes. 
 
 More often than seemed absolutely necessary in the in- 
 terests of cleanliness the little naked body would be 
 stripped for his enjoyment as it were. The subtle, quiet 
 enmity which had again sprung into being between Brigid 
 and himself had now relapsed into silence. But it was 
 this continual parading of the child that got on his 
 nerves and drove him from the house in the evenings. 
 And where he always went was to Lucy Flynn. This 
 was another cause of his mother's grief, for right well 
 did she know where he was always going. It annoyed 
 her more than anything else to see him slipping back 
 from the grand ways of life thus far. And then at those 
 times when he spoke to his mother, always something 
 would be let fall in the conversation, always something 
 would suddenly attack his mind twisting it into a greater 
 fury than heretofore. She had love for him surely, 
 and as her son he flashed back some of that love; but
 
 236 IN CLAY AND IN BRONZE 
 
 it was beyond her to understand the moulding of his 
 mind. To her he appeared as a good-for-nothing and 
 no more. All that he had passed through was not to 
 her way of thinking an adventure of the soul but merely 
 so much blackguardism. A book she had never read in 
 her life, so it was quite impossible for her to see the enor- 
 mous importance with which Martin looked upon books. 
 
 "Why you'd think I was a tramp the way I'm looked 
 down upon in this house!" he said angrily, one morning. 
 
 "And what else are you, I'd like to know? You have 
 no job and no clothes, and only whatever money in your 
 pocket belongs by right to me and your sister and the 
 little child. Musha, sure, 'tis only making a show of us 
 before the people of Glannidan you are. Sure if 
 you're so mad and all that on books and writ- 
 ing, sure can't you go in properly for writing for the 
 Ballycullen Gazette like Brian Doyle. Indeed you might 
 say that he's a success as a writer." 
 
 This seemed the very unkindest cut, this putting of 
 him on the same level with one for whose abilities and 
 character he had the most complete contempt. Brian 
 Doyle might be considered a success, as success was un- 
 derstood in Glannidan, but his idea of success was a 
 lamp of the intellect that shone out over the world. 
 It was a portion of the bright dream that had come into 
 his mind for love of Ellen. For Ellen! The very 
 thought appeared as a blasphemy and a betrayal. 
 Poor Ellen O'Connor! What had he done for her 
 since they had drifted apart nothing, less than nothing. 
 He had degraded her memory in ten thousand ways. 
 He had betrayed her. Maybe she was searching for 
 him in America, battling with poverty and mean ways 
 in the endless hope of love and all for sake of him who
 
 THE MAN 237 
 
 was so supremely unworthy, a coward who after every 
 effort to ruin his life had crept hpme here to bring more 
 sorrow to the heart of his mother. 
 
 Through such little conflicts with the harshness of 
 life, the crude world around him, there came very 
 gradually into his mind the first realities of his great 
 ambition. But they came in their full immensity one 
 evening as he sat, his elbows on his knees and a pint 
 in his hand, in the widow Kelly's. Around him were 
 the louts of the parish, and he was entering into their 
 gibes and their talk. Here were men with neither minds 
 nor thought beyond the comfort of the pints in their 
 hands their Unholy Grail whose quest was the grey ad- 
 venture of their lives. 
 
 In "The Daffodils" it had been different; even in 
 America the gold that Arthur Nicholson had seen in him 
 had been the means of plucking him from the furnace. 
 But here he had allowed himself to be reduced to the 
 level of those around him. Not many signs of success 
 about him surely. And always, as he sat here, he could 
 hear the sound of men of success outside in the other 
 apartment of the shop. Whenever a loud guffaw 
 rang in as far as where he sat he would feel that 
 it was at him they were laughing. The whole 
 attitude of Glannidan towards him was a gigantic 
 sneer. And always he saw Austin Fagan as the head 
 and front of that sneer. Why was it that he had not 
 wreaked just vengeance upon that cur? It must be that 
 he had accepted his fate as part of the punishment he 
 so richly deserved for his treatment of Kitty. He had 
 taken it in a mood of Christian acceptance, he who had 
 done his best to make himself a pagan and yet it had 
 only brought him to this. . .
 
 238 IN CLAY AND IN BRONZE 
 
 To pluck success out of the depths to which he 
 had descended would be the best revenge upon the 
 forces which had conspired so resolutely to de- 
 stroy his life. Suddenly this seemed to be the moment 
 for which all his life had waited. All his years had 
 moved blindly as it were to this ecstasy, but now it leaped 
 and surged brightly about him. It was an immense idea 
 surely, and it had been forced upon his commonsense 
 by the life he must express in terms of literature. To 
 make use of the people he best knew for this purpose, 
 all those who had crushed him towards his punishment 
 showing always so darkly contrasted with those who in 
 odd moments had lit his life. . . He suddenly remem- 
 bered, with a more insistent clearness, how every- 
 one of them bought the Ballycullen Gazette to gloat 
 over any piece of unfortunate connection with the law 
 reported, even most illiterately, by Brian Doyle. It now 
 appeared predestined that it was Martin Duignan 
 and not Brian Doyle who was to give them a great read 
 some day. . . 
 
 It was strange that the dream which had been evoked 
 by Ellen in places of light and beauty should move 
 towards realisation through the dirty darkness of the 
 lowest aspect of Glannidan. The character of his 
 resolve, too, was not entirely unrelated to the malignity 
 and spitefulness of those who sprang from the clay. 
 His dream had only been a dream after all. In itself 
 it may have been noble, but it had raised up no nobility 
 in him. Now it appeared to him that all achievement 
 is essentially of the clay and that he was seeing 
 his way, after such a long spell of blindness, to begin 
 his life's work at the point from which all his personality 
 should have begun to shape itself from the very first.
 
 THE MAN 239 
 
 VIII 
 
 SO all through the long evenings of the winter he 
 laboured, and far into the night, when it lay very 
 thick upon Glannidan and the boreens around Glan- 
 anea, and upon the bog stretching far away to Bally- 
 cullen. Here in the room where his dead father 
 had brought all the books from the quays in Dublin, 
 and heedless of the crying of Brigid's child, he would 
 remain working and laughing queerly to himself as 
 he worked. Sometimes there would spring up before him 
 odd little sketches which he could not possibly embody 
 in his malignant story. These he made into short 
 stories which he sent to the papers and magazines. 
 After a little delay some of these came to be published, 
 and with the first cheques he had bought 'good clothes 
 which put him on a decent footing in Glannidan. He 
 did not attempt to imitate the foppishness of Austin 
 Fagan and Brian Doyle, yet was this effort of his 
 suddenly putting him on a level with them. This the 
 people of Glannidan would not have minded in the 
 least, but a curious side of him remained which they 
 could not understand. He was a queer character 
 anyway. Here now stories by him were being printed 
 in papers a thousand times more important than the 
 Garradrimna Guardian or even the Ballycullen Gazette, 
 yet it was in the public bar of the widow Kelly's that 
 he still chose to take his pleasure. When Austin Fagan 
 or Brian Doyle drank it was in secret in some of the 
 remote and hidden places of the widow Kelly's, but there 
 he would be, the first man in Glannidan whose
 
 240 IN CLAY AND IN BRONZE 
 
 name hacTever appeared over a story in a paper, standing 
 against the counter as of old he had stood in "The 
 Daffodils," not now, however, with kindred spirits but 
 with damnable fools who talked continually of cattle 
 and the crops. Then, too, on days when the enmity 
 between his mother and sister and the torture of the 
 child would be too great he would come in here meeting 
 possibly some man who had come to drown his sorrow, 
 some "curse of God annoyance" that had sprung out 
 of his bit of land. They would remain here until the 
 night had fallen thick over Glannidan and until the con- 
 dition of his mind prevented him from even 
 finding copy for his book. . . His mood would relapse 
 into a conflict between gloom and brightness, between 
 his last thoughts of Kitty and the dream of sometime 
 meeting Ellen again. . . But already had he begun to 
 forget both in reality for the delicacy had fallen from 
 many sides of his mind. . . Very often he would find 
 himself entering into the sullen blasphemy of the men 
 with whom he was after spending the long hours. 
 Then he would fall into one of those conditions of 
 vacancy when all the world would seem to slope away 
 from his feet. . . Sometimes the effect of the drink 
 would help him to doze off, and the life that sloped 
 away from the widow Kelly's would swim far beyond 
 him. He would have a faint notion that people were 
 coming up to the door to have a look at him, the author, 
 begad, the man who was writing stories in the papers 
 about Glannidan! But what about his own story? 
 That was a grand one surely. What a lovely character 
 he was! They loved to read him at this moment 
 with a terrible enmity stirring their minds. He wanted 
 to raise himself beyond them, but, thanks be to God,
 
 THE MAN 241 
 
 his father's love for drink was in him, too, and they 
 depended on that to finish him. Thus had he made 
 his purpose in coming to the widow Kelly's twofold, one 
 side threatening gradually to subjugate the other down 
 into a low byeway of destruction. 
 
 He had an awakening one evening as he sat alone 
 in the bar, in a condition of semi-stupor with all his 
 dreams of life and longing going from him. He saw the 
 sergeant of Glannidan, Sergeant O'Donoghue, steal 
 into the bar and slip a bottle of port wine from a shelf 
 for his drunken wife, and put it away beneath his tunic. 
 Then taking another bottle from the shelf he stole 
 over and put it into Martin's pocket who feigned 
 greater stupor so that he might observe the 
 action, but directly the sergeant had left the bar he 
 was as sober as ever he had been. . . He quickly re- 
 placed the bottle on the shelf as his mind leapt into 
 a perfect flame. Here was a plot to degrade him 
 utterly from which he had been just barely saved by 
 the grace of God. He had only made slight mention 
 of O'Donoghue's propensities in a little sketch, and he 
 saw very clearly now why this determined attempt had 
 been made to bring him down. What would the others 
 do if only they knew what use he had made of them? 
 Why they would murder him. Now the widow Kelly 
 came back into the bar, followed by the sergeant who 
 called for a pint quite casually. 
 
 "Gimme a pint, ma'am," he said, "and good evening, 
 Martin! Good evening, Martin! How are ye, Martin?" 
 
 "Good evening, O'Donohue," replied Martin. 
 
 The salutation on both sides displayed an amazing 
 familiarity. O'Donoghue had been accustomed to
 
 242 IN CLAY AND IN BRONZE 
 
 have himself addressed as "Sergeant," "Sir," "Your 
 Honour," etc., etc., and this sudden "O'Donoghue" 
 of Martin was startling. Also it betrayed sobriety. 
 Martin's eyes, too, were upon the bulge beneath 
 his tunic, which was the bottle of port wine he was 
 stealing from the widow Kelly. His own eyes glanced 
 hurriedly at the shelf above his head. The other bottle 
 had been replaced there. Mrs. Kelly waddled out of 
 the bar. 
 
 "Damn it!" he said, sidling up to Martin. "I only 
 did it for the cod your bottle, I mean. I want this 
 for the wife. She's after having a kid and I can't 
 afford delicacies. Of course you won't say a bloody word. 
 What'll you have?" 
 
 "Get away, you swine, before I lay hands on you!" 
 . . . Great Christ! Where had he fallen at all? Among 
 drunkards, liars, thieves, adulterers, hypocrites. It 
 seemed as if all their villainy had been concentrated 
 into this attempt to besmirch him. . . 
 
 He went on feverishly with the writing of his book. 
 All the little turn of nobility it might have betrayed had 
 suddenly become warped in him. It would be a hideous 
 book now, telling of the ghoulishness of that Ireland 
 whose reality was being forced upon him. Through its very 
 bitterness might it become great and upon its greatness 
 should he arise. . . He had thoughts now that did not seem 
 altogether dreams of becoming the great Irish novelist. 
 The Dostoevsky of Ireland, the man for whom his country 
 had waited since William Carleton, and of whom Carleton 
 had written prophetically in his autobiography. Synge, 
 Moore, Joyce, Colum, Stephens, Ervine, Robinson he 
 thought of the best men of his day who had made his
 
 THE MAN 243 
 
 countrymen characters of fiction and drama. He had read 
 all of them, but somehow he felt that his was a more 
 stark presentation. He fully realised the mistake that all 
 of them had made. They had all attempted to express 
 the Irish peasant through the medium of his talk, in 
 what he said rather than in what he did. In fact, not 
 one of them seemed able to realise what he was capable 
 of doing, for although calling themselves artists they, not 
 so very distantly, resembled porters of an Irish Nation- 
 alist newspaper setting down the flamboyant periods of 
 some successful patriot. They seemed to fondly fancy 
 that they had broken away from all conventions, when 
 as a matter of fact they were hedged in by the most 
 tyrannical convention in Ireland. They moved always 
 in their pages within the shadow of the Moloch to whom 
 their books were as children of sacrifice. The language 
 obsession of the Gaelic League was merely a perfect 
 concentrated expression of the same fallacy, for here was 
 an organised attempt to give language an importance 
 greater than the life for which, at the fullest stage of its 
 development, it could never be more than an ornament. 
 The national self-respect had dwindled for the very same 
 reason. It was always the speechifying about it and 
 not the progress that was made which seemed to matter. 
 In this newer Irish literature, too, it was the power of 
 prate which successfully hid the power of the clay. It 
 was a perverse subjugation, and the full reason why it 
 had failed to react upon Irish life towards any good 
 purpose. And so the Russian-Irish realist who would 
 scourge his countrymen into a clear view of themselves 
 had not yet emerged. 
 
 There were moments when he almost failed before 
 the might of his task and collapsed into despair. He
 
 244 IN CLAY AND IN BRONZE 
 
 never went towards Glannidan now, and those hours of 
 the evening when he rested from writing he spent with 
 Lucy Flynn, but not a word or a thought had she in 
 common with him, and even Kitty had not been blind 
 to the beauties of literature. His book, he knew, would 
 bring him much fame and some money, but it was not 
 likely to bring him any happiness, not now, anyhow, 
 when he had begun to make a second Kitty of Lucy 
 Flynn. 
 
 And where was Ellen? Ellen would understand the 
 present splendour of his mind; Ellen who had fanned 
 his mind during the queer days of "The Daffodils" and 
 the Tower. And so he was amazed to think that, even 
 with this tremendous return of power and beauty to his 
 mind, Ellen had slipped still further out of his affec- 
 tionate recollection. With the coming of spring his book 
 was approaching completion. But the land, too, was 
 calling, and the ancient impulses of the clay had returned 
 to him so strongly that he could not resist. It was on 
 their cattle that the curse in their case had turned, and 
 so they had the horses still. 
 
 In the days before he had taken again to the land they 
 seemed to be inviting him continually with their big, soft 
 eyes. So now he was out and ploughing daily. He was 
 throwing his whole strength into an attempt to bring 
 back to the little holding that look of glad prosperity 
 he had put upon it after the death of his father. Yet 
 curiously enough this caused a new annoyance to his 
 mother. She had considered his literary effort an attempt 
 to emulate such successful young men as Austin Fagan 
 and Brian Doyle, and it pleased the turn of vanity in 
 her which had been sadly disappointed by Brigid. 
 
 "I suppose the writing didn't turn out much of a
 
 THE MAN 245 
 
 success, Martin?" she said to him one evening as he 
 came in with a dejected attitude from the ploughing. He 
 did not answer. He was doing this for love of them, 
 even as he had done many a thing for his mother and 
 Brigid and little Austineen, and yet they were unable 
 to see it. . . The extraordinary vanity of his mother 
 had survived her afflictions. He saw daily how Brigid 
 had overreached her ambition and was sitting there very 
 quietly amid the ruins of her beauty. The helplessness 
 of little Austineen seemed to symbolise the helplessness 
 of all three. 
 
 Often as he worked now in the tillage field old Henry 
 Flynn would come over to the mearing wall and look 
 out at him in curiosity not unmixed with a certain crude 
 admiration. Damn it! wasn't Martin Duignan working 
 well, begad, after all the time he had wasted in the 
 bloody cities. He was mending to a degree most extraor- 
 dinary to imagine. He did not put forward any objec- 
 tions to Lucy keeping company with him now since he 
 was after giving up going into Glannidan in the day- 
 time. And Lucy was proud now with a noble pride. She 
 had plucked her man from his idleness, and surely that 
 was a great thing to have done. 
 
 They were to be married in the following harvest. 
 It seemed that even in this he had bowed obediently 
 to all the things that life had wished to do with him 
 from the beginning. In queer, lucid moments of his 
 curious morality he felt it was something he must do 
 in atonement for his connection with Kitty. . . Yet 
 it was the thought of Ellen that would seem to hold his 
 mind always from the perfect resignation of one resolve. 
 It would be fcard to think of himself settled so quietly 
 here, married to Lucy Flynn, and doing the work of the
 
 246 IN CLAY AND IN BRONZE 
 
 two farms, doing all that heavy, animal work whicfi 
 seemed part of his gloomy duty while the tremendous 
 account which had sprung from the immortal part of 
 him would be ringing his name around the world. Arthur 
 Nicholson would not regret the hand he had had in it. 
 There would be a stirring of admiration at the 
 Tower and of envy in "The Daffodils" when 
 they would read it in either of those places. . . Again 
 he could hear them talking of him around the tea table 
 in the great room, and Mr. Leonard Thompson's quiet, 
 queer laugh, as he sat smoking in the biggest armchair, 
 his long legs sprawled between the others and the gas 
 stove. . . "A putrid book," he could hear Phelim 
 O'Brien say in "The Daffodils," while the others showed 
 their enjoyment of this opinion around the greasy 
 tables, a certain young man from the south hitting 
 his knee continually as he endorsed the opinion of his 
 master "Like nothing so much as a bloody big field, 
 all weeds and thistles and dirt, where a fellow would 
 want to go out with a bloody big scythe and slash 
 around him before the damn thing would be even bear- 
 able to walk through." 
 
 Ellen might read it and even Kitty. . . Yet 
 his dream seemed suddenly to have been changed by this 
 reality. The book had been accepted by a London 
 firm and would be published in the autumn.
 
 THE MAN 247 
 
 IX 
 
 ' 
 
 FAR into the spring was Martin's peace returning 
 to him with sweet additions daily. He had 
 brought the land back to its original beauty, and he 
 had brought himself back to the early beauty of his mind 
 in the great days of Ellen. And it was the clay that had 
 wrought this wonder. It was a queer, great thing for him 
 who in his early days had not got a great deal of school- 
 ing to have caught so much of the world into his mind 
 as to be able to write a book about it, a book, too, which, 
 in a way, might prove to be his vindication and help 
 to put him finally in the imagination of those from whom 
 he had sprung as a "damn smart fellow entirely." And 
 in Dublin, too, some of the clever critics might be at 
 their wits' end to know what to write of him. 
 
 It was to be in another way the justification of his 
 dead father, too, and the deadly accusation of the one 
 who had brought ruin to his sister. Yet was it a curious 
 kind of revenge. . . He often fancied how people must 
 think he should go up to Austin Fagan and strike him 
 publicly between the two eyes. Perhaps this was what 
 even Brigid herself thought, and her feeling of it the 
 cause of the dark reserve between them even when the 
 eyes of both were held by the laughing spell of the little 
 child. . . Yet, for all the almost insane subtlety which 
 marked it, they would be able to appreciate it in Glan- 
 nidan for they were all woefully fond of reading the 
 Ballycullen Gazette, and, strange as it might seem, it 
 was the crude scurrility of its method that had shown 
 him a definite way of turning his dream into reality.
 
 248 IN CLAY AND IN BRONZE 
 
 Suddenly he made a discovery which amazed him. 
 In the long, quiet evenings towards the end of the 
 spring it was his custom to come out to the road gate 
 and lean upon it in a way which led him into curious 
 twists of thought which were different in their turnings 
 from the tortuous, urgent life through which he had 
 passed. He felt the enormously introspective turn of 
 his nature. It was upon himself that all the urging 
 of his mind had turned. He appeared wholly unable 
 to escape from himself even in the whirling disintegration 
 of the present when the thoughts of mankind seemed 
 only to be for blood and war. He was not even thinking 
 of Ireland, yet was he aware that at this very moment 
 men were dedicating illustrious lives to the service of 
 Ireland. 
 
 It was a strange thing, too, this love of Ireland. 
 How it gathered up the whole being of a man into its 
 white consuming flame. It had caught up S6an 
 O'Hanlon, and he was part of the warlike urge of the 
 moment for love of Ireland. If he had gone this way 
 with Sean he must ere now have been filled by 
 the beauty of the flame, and be preparing to die 
 for Ireland. There was not much, he often thought, 
 that Ireland had shown him worth dying for, with the 
 possible exception of Ellen. It was queer how he would 
 think of her so insistently in the light of men dying for 
 the Kathleen-ni-Houlihan of Yeats's play. But he had 
 merely filled his life with mud for the purpose of writing 
 a muddy book in which he would show men who had 
 sprung from the same clay as himself, crawling about 
 dark places which were filled with a heavy stench of 
 the soul. 
 
 Yet the personal reason would survive past all the
 
 THE MAN 249 
 
 battle of the ideal for its natural place in his conscious- 
 ness. He was at enmity and must ever be at enmity 
 with those people of the day, because of the certain 
 turn of genius that had been implanted in him. But 
 there were men of genius among the Irish Volunteers, and 
 yet they thought their lives very little to give for Ireland. 
 
 But, continually as he leaned over the road gate, 
 men with this little twist in their minds and with that 
 would go trooping towards Glannidan with heads 
 downcast. There was little thought of Ireland in their 
 thick skulls. As he remained longer and longer thinking 
 here in the evenings he saw less and less of Lucy Flynn, 
 although what was between them had resolved itself into 
 a condition of acceptance so far as the neighbours 
 were concerned. In the certainty she represented she 
 remained the "Ann Whitfield" of his life. Yet were 
 there odd, bright moments in his thought of Ellen when 
 he wondered had the clay caught him finally to 
 its breast. . . 
 
 Two remarkable things happened at Easter, 1916 
 he wrote a letter, which in some undreamt of way he 
 hoped would reach Ellen, and the Easter Rising broke 
 out in Dublin. There came upon him an almost un- 
 accountable madness when he realised that men were 
 dying in Dublin, dying for love of him and all their 
 countrymen. He knew the very men they must be and 
 Sean O'Hanlon would be fighting not far from them. 
 . . . There came upon him a real and bitter regret that 
 he was not there. He went everywhere in these days 
 among the people for whom those men had gone out to 
 lay down their lives, everywhere he went in the hope of 
 hearing one good word of them. But not one. What he 
 heard merely fed his rage.
 
 250 IN CLAY AND IN BRONZE 
 
 As was most meet, it was in the forge, the Parliament 
 of Glannidan, that he heard the most bitter things. 
 Said an ancient who used to tell frequent lies of having 
 been out in " '67." 
 
 "And would you tell me now, or d'ye know how these 
 damn Sinn Feiners got into Ireland?" 
 
 He seemed to think, "ould pathriot" though he was, 
 that they were a savage tribe from the heart of Africa 
 that had somehow remained over from the Exhibition, 
 the time it was in Dublin, in 1907. 
 
 The publicans of Glannidan, the men who throve upon 
 this degradation to the depths of ignorance, were the 
 loudest in their denunciation of the rebels. 
 
 "D'ye know what I'd do with them?" said Gilbert 
 Cooney, as he stood at his own door striving hard to 
 suck comfort from a week-old Freeman's Journal, 
 "I'd bring them out into a field, theirselves and their 
 looting Larkin crowd, and I'd shoot the whole bloody 
 lot. A proper lot of frauds in the pay of the Govern- 
 ment, striving for to destroy poor John Dillon and John 
 Redmond and 'the Cause.' Sham Gaelic Leaguers 
 and Government officials, God damn them anyway! 
 Look at the disadvantage this rebellion puts me to now, 
 me not to have the paper, and so not knowing what 
 move the Government be striving to get on us. Well, 
 bad luck to them, anyway, theirselves and their re- 
 bellion!" 
 
 Then there was the schoolmaster, a man who in his 
 knowledge of the history of rebellions would seem to 
 be a potential rebel. Now he wore a curious, puzzled 
 smile which danced even in his eyes behind his glasses. 
 But immediately he seemed anxious to give out an 
 opinion:
 
 THE MAN 251 
 
 "Foolish! Foolish! All the Irish rebellions from 
 that of Silken Thomas were foolish, but this is the most 
 foolish of all. The poor, unfortunate young fellows 
 to go get up a mere handful and to go attack the British 
 Empire. Well, well, was there ever heard such patent 
 foolishness?" 
 
 A little later, Father Clarke coming by reading his 
 office and stopping to talk with a crowd of corner-boys 
 about the rebellion: 
 
 "Ah, God help them for their foolishness, the poor, 
 misguided creatures to go help the hated Hun after all 
 the poor nuns he's after murdering in Belgium." 
 
 "And there's women in it too, Father," said the widow 
 Kelly coming to her own door, big and important before 
 her parish priest, her hands clasped across her stomach 
 under her apron. "How d'ye pronounce that name, 
 
 Father? The Countess ? 
 
 "Musha, don't be bothering your head about that 
 name, Mrs. Kelly. I always lift up my eyes in horror 
 whenever I see anything like a socialist name in a paper." 
 Further on the three young blacksmiths in the forge: 
 "But will they make anything out of it?" 
 "You may be damn sure they'll make out of it." 
 "D'ye think they're bloody idiots, and they Larkin's 
 crowd?" 
 
 "O, Jim was the boyo could gull the public." 
 Not, however, until the close of the week, and when 
 magnified stories of the lootings began to run around 
 Glannidan, did the village appear perfectly naked to 
 Martin. He was passing by a wall where a few old men 
 were sitting up in the sun. They too had heard the 
 stories of the lootings, and their minds were just pres- 
 ently being warmed by them.
 
 252 IN CLAY AND IN BRONZE 
 
 "Christ!" dribbled one ancient, Ms lips lapping soft 
 over his toothless gums, "if a fellow was able only to 
 foot it to Dublin, a suit of clothes, a hat, a pair of boots 
 and bags of drink. Money maybe, too, to be picked 
 up in the streets. . . " 
 
 "It's a woeful thing to be crippled like this when one 
 might be doing well." 
 
 Then late in the anxious evenings the wise winks from 
 one to another. Martin Duignan was the only man in 
 Glannidan who had expressed sympathy with the rebels, 
 with the thieves and scoundrels. Wasn't it well known 
 that he was one of them when he was in Dublin, and 
 that he'd try the same game on again if he was let, and 
 here in Glannidan, too? 
 
 As if in support of this suspicion, Sergeant O'Donoghue 
 always hitched up his belt at Martin's approach or when 
 he stood near him. A certain amount of suspicion had 
 been put upon Martin by his openly expressed sym- 
 pathies, and so there was little chance of him being be- 
 lieved, even if he felt inclined to tell the true story of 
 the wine now. . . Besides he felt that great days of 
 very congenial work and promotion maybe were ap- 
 proaching for the police. . . 
 
 The week passed in a continuous whirl of rumour to 
 the memorable Sunday of the surrender. The intimation 
 of the end of the rebellion had been posted up in the 
 windows of the Post Office and the widow Kelly came 
 out of her pub with her hands clasped across her stomach 
 under her apron, and laughed loud and long. . . 
 
 Somehow Martin was enabled to visualise all that had 
 passed in Dublin. It was a blinding torture to him to 
 think that he had not been there. He knew well that 
 Sean O'Hanlon was dead, for that bond of common
 
 THE MAN 253 
 
 thought and hope which holds together the loves and 
 the minds of great friends felt somehow strained in pain. 
 Now appeared to him in the fulness of its destructive 
 aspect his connection with this woman who had passed. 
 It was the thing that had made impossible this beautiful 
 and pure dying. . . Yet he should have been with them 
 and so have made the perfect atonement for all he had 
 done. . . If only he had died for love of Ellen. . . 
 Had they been in Dublin together during these great days 
 she must have added his spirit to the beauty both had 
 always seen in Dublin. But now no comfort came out 
 of the promise of atonement he had made for himself. 
 Lucy did not understand. 
 
 "And, musha, what were they fighting for? Weren't 
 they very foolish to be fighting for anyone by them- 
 selves?" 
 
 And when he had grown cross at her stupidity: 
 
 "Isn't it a wonder now, that if you felt so fond of 
 them entirely that you weren't with them and they fight- 
 ing. Why, if I felt so heart gone upon anything I'd be 
 in it, you might swear." 
 
 And then the scene upon the street of Glannidan 
 on the Sunday after the first executions had taken 
 place, a crowd of young fellows tossing pennies and con- 
 versing in a jargon which was half Irish idiom, half 
 soldiers' adjectives, more young men playing cards in the 
 shade, and still more young men talking to Sergeant 
 O'Donoghue at the barrack and asking his opinion of 
 the rising: 
 
 "Is it to go attack the forces of the Crown in the 
 very middle of the war and Ourselves and the Army 
 protecting you with the great British Navy. I'd say 
 that the man that'd go attack the police at the present
 
 254 IN CLAY AND IN BRONZE 
 
 time is no Irishman." This sentiment was duly received 
 with humorous approval by these fine young men, for 
 whom Padraic Pearse and his comrades had gone out to 
 die, as they sidled closer, as if for affectionate protec- 
 tion, to the six peelers of Glannidan. Then there was a 
 hurried consultation between the young men and the 
 police. Evidently an illegal descent was about to be 
 made upon one of the pubs of Glannidan. A contingent 
 of young men began to move rapidly away. 
 
 "Don't forget to bring us back a few bottles," said 
 Sergeant O'Donoghue. 
 
 "Be hell we won't, you might swear, for you're the 
 heart's blood of a decent fellow!" said the leader of the 
 
 This was the conversation and the scene that Martin 
 was forced to hear and witness on this Sunday after 
 the executions in Dublin, and his hatred of this great 
 guiltiness burned so far into his soul that he knew he 
 would be free for evermore from any regrets for the 
 things he had written in his book. And although the 
 rebellion had been fought and lost without him it had 
 summoned his mind to a new decision regarding his 
 life.
 
 THE MAN 255 
 
 HE did not go into Glannidan again, but remained 
 buried in the more deadly life of Glannanea, not 
 even to Mass on Sundays, and this rapidly came to be 
 established as another stain upon his character. The 
 rumour rose that he was after turning over Atheist. 
 From the newspapers of the time he saw that the out- 
 look of men of all kinds upon the rebellion and its causes 
 and effects was being rapidly changed. He did 
 not want to know whether the outlook of Glannidan 
 had changed, for he did not care to spoil his impression 
 of it during Easter Week. That was too splendidly 
 black. He could already feel the disgust with which 
 he would be filled if ever they turned over to Sinn Fein 
 in this place. 
 
 Otherwise he knew the contentment of the fields, 
 the hard labour of the long, warm days, and the dream- 
 less untroubled sleep. All those alien desires and 
 appetites he had brought with him from the cities had 
 faded gradually from his mind. Yet was there upon 
 him some immense pre-occupation that no one guessed; 
 none save himself knew how fiercely his mind burned. 
 Great opportunities seemed to have arisen, and the part 
 of him that Ellen O'Connor and Sean O'Hanlon 
 and Arthur Nicholson had seen had been re-born to 
 meet them again. Sean O'Hanlon was dead. He 
 had been killed, not fighting, the papers reported 
 but by looters as he was making his way home 
 from seeing his beloved. It seemed strange to Martin 
 as he read the account that even Sean should have any
 
 256 IN CLAY AND IN BRONZE 
 
 love other than Kathleen-ni-Houlihan. News of Ellen 
 came to him with less of the embellishments of romance, 
 the letter he had written returned with a note saying 
 that the writer's friend, poor Ellen, despairing of finding 
 him in America and thinking surely that he must have 
 returned and been killed in the destruction of the great 
 war, had entered a convent. "Isn't it queer now how 
 things turn out?" the writer had written near the end 
 of the letter. . . And this thought of Ellen had recently 
 grown so real and definite in the pride of what he had 
 done. . . 
 
 In the ache of his loss he read Evelyn Innes, 
 to bring him comfort in his imagination of Ellen 
 in a convent, but George Moore was a weak reed to lean 
 upon in such a case. His book seemed an attempt to 
 describe what he himself might have been like, had sex 
 and inclination permitted his entrance to a nunnery. But 
 the psychology was too obscure, and Martin threw it 
 aside in disgust. To read an analysis of the spiritual 
 struggle which might bring a girl out of a convent would 
 be more to his mind. 
 
 He saw to the fullest how now, in this ending of Ellen, 
 all that proud life to which he might have allied himself 
 was on the heights beyond him. But his uprise to that 
 glory might still be all the brighter, the full sweep of a 
 star. His life would commingle in effort with clean men 
 in the great times that the dead had made and so in the 
 very bitterness of his satire he saw shining a love for 
 those that were gone. He scarcely dared to fancy how 
 his book might be received, but at any rate he knew that 
 it was sufficiently great to excite men either to praise or 
 anger. The days when he was to break upon the world 
 were coming rapidly nearer.
 
 THE MAN 257 
 
 A thing of remarkable importance to the affairs of 
 the family now happened. Jamesey Cassels, finding 
 no comfort even in his native Mucklin, had run into 
 the army, and now the news came that he had been 
 killed in action in France. Mary Duignan and Brigid 
 were very glad that he was gone, and sure the child was 
 not his child either. . . 
 
 Almost immediately the mother's ambition for the 
 daughter began to re-appear. Brigid was still a fine 
 slip of a lassie, even although she had had a kind of 
 a misfortune. Many a man might like to marry her 
 still, a sort of a stranger maybe who would take her 
 for a decent widow woman with an only son. Thus it 
 was, and very quickly, too, that the ancient enmity be- 
 tween Martin and herself began to spring up again. She 
 sent away to Dublin for patterns and selected a fine 
 dress for Brigid, which she got made with Mrs. Doolan 
 over in Ballyowen, where also Lucy Flynn was getting 
 her wedding dress made for her marriage with Martin. 
 Neither side spoke much of their intentions, but he felt 
 that his marriage must precipitate a quarrel which might 
 come to be very serious in its results. But there remained 
 one way of escape. 
 
 Then the day of publication came, and a few days 
 later a cheque from the publishers. He had been 
 stacking the oats in the haggard all the morning, and 
 there was no thought in his mind of this letter 
 or of London, for he had made up his mind in antici- 
 pation. That evening he would be finished with the 
 clay. . . He went into the house and began to clean 
 himself for the journey. Little Austineen kept playing 
 continually about his legs as he went on with his shaving. 
 This other life appeared somehow across the path of
 
 258 IN CLAY AND IN BRONZE 
 
 his purpose. He had a momentary concern for the 
 future of this little child. There was something subtly 
 revengeful in the thought that he might devote some 
 of the money he would get for his book to this purpose. 
 He called Brigid into the room and told her, and she in 
 turn went out and told her mother, and there was jubili- 
 ation between them in the kitchen. It must be that he 
 was not going to marry Lucy Flynn after all. . . 
 Brigid threw on her shawl and went running across the 
 fields to Mrs. Doolan. It was there she would tell the 
 story, so that it might get a good start. 
 
 As he went on with his preparations he began to be 
 pained by the thought of his parting with Lucy. It 
 seemed such a treacherous thing to do and she getting 
 her wedding dress made with Mrs. Doolan of Ballyowen. 
 . . . But now he was ready, and as yet he had not told 
 them a word. . . His intention had formed itself so 
 quietly, so deliberately, that each succeeding action 
 seemed to pass insensibly into it. 
 
 "I'm going now, mother." 
 
 "Indeed then I'm glad to hear it. Sure you were at 
 home here long enough. Sure you'll be more contented 
 away in some place where you'll be always at the books 
 and the writings, and with Jamesey Cassels dead you'll 
 see Brigid making a fine match yet, and that's as sure 
 as you're there." 
 
 "Where is she?" 
 
 "She went running over to the dressmaker, to Mrs. 
 Doolan. She'd be right glad to hear that you're going. 
 But the little lad'll say good-bye for her. Say good-bye 
 to your uncle, Austineen!" 
 
 As Martin looked into the eyes of the little child a 
 prayer flashed through his mind that his little nephew
 
 THE MAN 259 
 
 should never have to pass through the hell that he had 
 known, and he would do his best for him in the days 
 to be. . . But he knew better now than to turn any 
 mind away from the clay in imitation of the way that 
 his had been turned. 
 
 As he went from the house after this quiet farewell, 
 he sighed with satisfaction as he looked at the haggard 
 so rich and trim in the October twilight. It seemed to 
 represent the reality he stood for beyond his dream. 
 What he had done here was an earnest sufficient, before 
 the eyes of all the people, of the greater fields to which 
 he might attain and which he might adorn through the 
 power that was in him. 
 
 "It was a queer world, surely." 
 
 This phrase from the Tower plays came hurrying 
 into his mind. As he went down the boreen, his bag 
 in his hand, on his way to catch the evening train from 
 Ballycullen, the mist upon the bog seemed folded in 
 great impenetrable volumes like books on mysticism. 
 ... He met Lucy about the same place that he had 
 met her on that other morning so long ago. She was ex- 
 cited, panting, for she had just come from the dress- 
 maker's where Brigid had let fall the news that Martin 
 was preparing himself to leave the house, that he was 
 leaving altogether, and that he was going to do for little 
 Austineen. . . 
 
 The news coming from his own lips stunned her 
 somewhat. Leaving without her, was it, and going 
 away from the farm where his work had just been so 
 grand and promising, and now when she thought that 
 their marriage and the union of the two farms 
 were only a matter of days. Old Henry Flynn was 
 anxious now that he saw Martin to be not such an
 
 2 6o IN CLAY AND IN BRONZE 
 
 idiot as they had supposed, and he could live at their 
 house if he did not care to bring her in over his mother 
 and sister. . . But beyond all, after all the years she 
 had waited, it was hard to think of her dream being thus 
 so quietly desolated. . . He did not seem to have a 
 thought of the great cruelty of his words. . . 
 
 "Oh, God!" she said, "after all my long, weary wait- 
 ing." Then he went on to talk of differences of taste 
 and all the chasm of separation that the accident of his 
 genius cut. Hitherto he had merely used the term per- 
 sonality to distinguish himself. It was not altogether a 
 question of their farms or their lives, but of something 
 that, although bursting out from him, wa at the same 
 time moving and leaping far beyond him. He could not 
 help it, he said. But she could not see it in this light. 
 She was merely blind impulse now. She clung to him. 
 
 "Oh, have I not pleased you, Martin; have I not given 
 you all the sweetness I could? Why do you want to 
 spit on me like this. Oh, musha, why? After all the 
 years I have waited for you they will say that poor Lucy 
 Flynn was not able to keep her man after all. And they'll 
 laugh at me and tell the story for ever of me having my 
 wedding dress made and all. Oh, Martin, why don't 
 you take me over to the cliff of the quarry and smash me 
 down against the sharp rocks?" 
 
 He could feel her a mass of burning passion rapidly 
 becoming limp in his arms. . . He felt for her and for 
 himself in the sudden recollection how it was only 
 natural that a struggle in agony should have occurred 
 somewhere seeing that he had attempted to do an 
 unnatural thing by severing finally the bond which 
 tied him to the clay. . . He saw this very clearly in 
 its aspect of inevitability, in its literary aspect, and,
 
 THE MAN 261 
 
 further, he thought of a certain heresy which had always 
 been current in "The Daffodils" that there was no passion 
 in peasant Ireland, and hence the Tower plays were bad 
 literature. . . It was surprising that his mind should 
 attain to such complete detachment in this moment. . . 
 He comforted her as best he could, although there was 
 upon him a queer pitilessness which seemed to tell that 
 his very action was but make believe and that all life 
 was but the dream of a dream. . . He had clear re- 
 membrance, too, of this which was the theme of the play 
 he thought had been stolen from him in America. . . 
 
 He began to speak of meetings in Dublin, and she 
 grew quiet when, as he supposed, she began to picture 
 meeting him when he was a great man with a grand 
 house and a lovely high-up wife. . . It was curious to 
 imagine her, a pious Irish peasant girl, who had never 
 before had wild notions, thinking these things. But as 
 he bent to kiss her for the last time he thought he heard 
 her mind whispering to itself: 
 
 "Too old, too old! He thinks I'd never have a child 
 for him, because I'm too withered with hard work, but 
 sure it was for him I worked and waited. And now, 
 after all my loving, he's leaving me here to be lonely." 
 
 As he looked far into her eyes he saw queer, unhappy 
 lights dancing and glinting, but there grew upon him 
 finally only an immense feeling of shame, and he knew 
 that this was the end and the end. . . 
 
 It was not what he was leaving, but what he was 
 going towards which held his mind as he went out of 
 Ballycullen and on through the dark night to Dublin. 
 ... It seemed very bright and joyous in the streets 
 and he knew, as he went down from Broadstone, that
 
 262 IN CLAY AND IN BRONZE 
 
 the curve of his life should never again return to the 
 clay. Henceforth his life must be phrased in bronze. 
 ... It was very bright in Grafton Street. . . There 
 were lights which showed the windows of the bookshops. 
 He looked there and saw his own book and his own name 
 burning before his eyes. . . For the first time in this 
 place there was something which kept him from gazing 
 upon the soft-eyed women in unquiet thought. He had 
 snatched himself from many a byeway of destruction, 
 and there was a surge of power in his heart which was 
 good to feel here in this lamp-lit street. . . There was 
 a look of lovely wonder on the face of Dublin as of old 
 it had worn in the days of Ellen. . . 
 
 Phelim O'Brien came towards him floating mistily like 
 a figure out of a picture by "IE" 
 
 "Hello!" he said, "the new man, one of my discoveries, 
 of course. Your book is the greatest Irish novel." 
 
 When the congratulations had subsided they drifted 
 on towards "The Daffodils." All the unknown authors 
 of Dublin were assembled there around their stout. 
 They stood up to shake hands, and for the first 
 time in their intercourse he saw that their attitude was 
 marked by sincerity. Even Gillachrist McBrady stood 
 up to congratulate him, although the book was written 
 in English and published in London. 
 
 "The new man! The new man!" they said very sol- 
 emnly as if each had a right to some of the fame that 
 was about to descend upon him. 
 
 Martin felt that surely he must have done a great 
 thing with his life as Phelim O'Brien went up to the 
 bar and called for the drinks. 
 
 THE END.
 
 tflfl. 
 
 LIBRARY FACILITY 
 
 A 000031 112 6