Minnie's Bishop and Other Stories/Sonny
II.—SONNY
IT WAS late in November and it had been raining without cessation for more than three weeks—not vigorously, as I have seen it rain in New York and Philadelphia, but with a dull persistence, as it rains nowhere else except in the West of Ireland. Rain there seems—at certain, indeed at most seasons of the year—to be the normal thing, as if the genius that presides over the weather had turned on rain and then gone to sleep. The country was saturated, and I, though well inured to the climate of Connaught, felt that the pervading damp was getting on my nerves. I was dry in bed at night—I did not seem to be dry anywhere else. I confess that my temper was bad.
John Cassidy met me on the road a mile from my house at four o'clock one afternoon. He was standing at the bottom of a muddy lane that leads up to the wretchedly poor cabin in which he lives. I realised at once that he was waiting for me. I sighed.
John Cassidy is an excellent fellow—what we call a decent poor man—and I would do a good deal for him; but I did not want to do anything for him just then. I wanted to get home and change my sodden clothes. I had been tramping through the rain all day. I wanted hot tea. I wanted tobacco. I wanted a deep chair in front of a fire.
John Cassidy also wanted something—something from me. Therefore I sighed.
"I'd be glad," he said, "if your reverence would step up and take a look at herself—and maybe say a word to her that would do her good."
Herself was, of course, Mrs. Cassidy. It is in this way that we speak of our wives in the West of Ireland. It is, I think, a beautiful and respectful way of speaking of them. The use of the pronoun in this absolute fashion suggests that for each of us there is no other woman in the world, but only the one; and that is as it should be.
"There's a kind of weakness on her," said John Cassidy; "and it's worse she's getting instead of better."
I grasped at a ray of hope. I am, after all, a clergyman—not a doctor. A weakness is a physical rather than a spiritual malady. I could scarcely be expected to cure her.
"Why don't you get the doctor if she's ill?" I asked.
I was standing in a pool of water, but that made very little difference to me. My boots had been soaked through for hours.
"I had the doctor," said Caasidy. "I had him four times and I paid him twice, and it's very little good he did her."
Doctors are not of much use if you take them off the beaten track. In the face of a recognised disease—measles, pneumonia, or appendicitis, something they can look up in a book—they make some kind of fight. When they come up against anything as vague and formless as a weakness they can very rarely do anything.
"He gave her a bottle, I suppose," I said bitterly.
In Ireland we describe every medicine as a bottle and we are beginning to lose faith in bottles.
"For all the good it did her," said Cassidy, "it might as well have been water that was in it; though I will say for that bottle it smelt powerful bad when you took the cork out of it."
"I don't see," I said, "that I'm likely to be of much use."
"It could be," said Cassidy, "that if your reverence was to speak a word to her it might comfort her."
This was, of course, possible. I followed John Cassidy up the lane.
On the way to the cabin he explained more fully the nature of the weakness.
"It's been coming on her," he said, "ever since the young lad went from us. Two years ago he took the notion into his head that he'd go to America—and he went."
I knew that. We had all discussed the departure of the Cassidys' son; but he had been gone two years and I had seen Mrs. Cassidy many times since. She seemed none the worse. Cassidy read my thoughts with that uncanny intuition which you often find among west of Ireland peasants.
"At the first go off," he said, "you wouldn't have thought she minded—no more than another would anyway; but the weakness was within, in the inside of her, and it's lately that it has begun to come out."
I listened to a list of symptoms. It seemed that Mrs. Cassidy had lost heart and no longer took any pleasure in life. She baked bread; she washed clothes; she fed the pig—but she did these things without zest.
"It's seldom ever I can get her to go as far as the town on a market day," said Cassidy; "and she doesn't care if she never saw a neighbour woman or heard a word of what's going on.
"You couldn't get her to put a shawl over her head and go as far as the road—not if you was to offer her a fistful of gold for doing it."
This was plainly an evil case; but it seemed scarcely likely that my words would charm away so lethal an apathy.
"You'd think now," said Cassidy, "that she was no more than able just to put the one foot in front of the other."
He whispered these words in my ear, for we had reached the door of the cottage and it stood open. I went in and Cassidy followed me.
Mrs. Cassidy was sitting on a stool in the chimney corner, crouching over a fire that had burned low. There was a great round pot at her feet, with glowing cinders underneath it and grey, ash-covered coals piled on its lid. In such pots the west of Ireland people bake their bread, and Mrs. Cassidy, no doubt, had a loaf in hers; but she was not watching her pot.
I got accustomed to the gloom of the house and I could see that her eyes were fixed on something beyond the pot, beyond the chimney corner and beyond the house itself. They had a long, sorrowful look in them. For a while she seemed unconscious that we were in the room with her. Her husband roused her.
"Do you not see," he said, "that his reverence is here? Will you not give him a chair the way he'll be able to take an air of the fire? He's wet through so he is."
Mrs. Cassidy's courtesy overcame the weakness that was on her. She stood up and bowed to me with that air of quiet, unassertive dignity which the west of Ireland peasant possesses in common with the best-bred members of the English aristocracy. Neither squalor, on the one hand, nor the surroundings of the smart set, on the other, can rob a woman of this great-lady manner if it is born in her.
Having bowed, Mrs. Cassidy drew forward a chair and wiped the seat of it with her apron.
"It's pleased I am to see your reverence," she said, "either now or at any other time."
I sat down. John Cassidy gave me a meaning glance, and then said he was going out to see whether the young heifer had broken down the wall which separated her field from the potato patch. It is, I know, the habit of young heifers to break walls. The young of all species do it. I have heard of young girls—but their doings are no concern of mine. They may break all the walls of all the conventions without interference from me.
Nor do I think that John Cassidy cared much whether his heifer had broken her wall or not. The potatoes had long since been dug. The ground in which they grew would suffer no harm by the incursions of a young heifer. He was making an excuse to escape, so that I should be left alone to speak to Mrs. Cassidy the word which might do her good and help to remove the weakness that was on her.
For some time Mrs. Cassidy and I sat in silence, one on each side of the fire. I looked at her and noted a slovenliness in her attire that was new to me. She used to be a neat, trim woman, even when she was going about the business of cleaning her house and feeding her pig.
I noticed that the hens wandered unchecked about the floor of the room. They pecked and scratched among the ashes on the hearth. They sprang up on the dresser, where plates and jugs stood in rows. They were free with all that was in the house. This was not Mrs. Cassidy's way with hens. In the old days an intruding fowl, unless it were a chicken in delicate health, was ruthlessly driven from the door. Now Mrs. Cassidy was apathetic.
It is only very good friends who can sit opposite each other without speaking. Silence is usually embarrassing to civilised people. I confess that our long silence began to embarrass me, and it came as a relief when Mrs. Cassidy began to speak. Her words fell from her slowly and scarcely seemed to be addressed to me. It was rather as if she spoke a monologue, telling to the brooding spirit of her home the tale of her sorrow.
"It was three years ago that the fancy first took him. Before that he was always contented enough."
I knew she was speaking about her boy—her son, who had gone to America.
"His name," she added, "was Michael Antony; but it was Sonny we called him."
I waited, for I had nothing to say. There are scores of these sonnies, whose names are really something else. The mother love that cleaves to the pet name is the same for all of them; so is the heartbreak for the mother.
"I don't rightly know," she went on, "how the notion of America came to him first. You'd think he was contented enough. It wasn't that his father was hard on him. The lad had no more to do than what he seemed willing for. He had a decent suit of clothes to wear of a Sunday or a fair day, and nobody denied him his share of any pleasuring there might be in it—the like of a football kicking, or maybe a dance at an odd time; but the notion took him and nothing would do him only to go to America. I was against it and so was his father."
Mrs. Cassidy relapsed into silence again. She seemed to have forgotten my presence altogether. Then suddenly she looked at me and added a word of explanation—a pathetically unnecessary word.
"His name was Michael Antony, but it was Sonny we did be calling him. Well," she went on, "nothing would do him but to write to his Aunt Matilda, who's out in Pittsburgh and married to a man that went from this parish. I never seen her myself, but she was his father's sister. Sonny was always a good scholar and he was well fit to write a letter to his aunt or to any other one. We kept him to his schooling regular, only when there might be a press of work at the hay or the like of that, so as he'd be wanted at home. It was always his father's wish and my own that he'd get good learning while he could—and he got it. There wasn't a better speller than Sonny; and the way he'd write, a blind man could have read it!"
The half door of the cottage was opened and two girls came in. I looked round and recognised the Cassidys' little daughters, children of twelve and fourteen years of age, with school satchels over their arms.
"Norah Kate," said Mrs. Cassidy, "your dinner's waiting for you and Susan's along with it. Will you sit down now and eat it? And, before you do, let Susy hoosh the hens out of the house. It's too bold those same hens is getting."
The children did as they were bidden, without speaking. Doubtless they shouted and laughed elsewhere, in the school playground or on the roadside. Here at home they were silent. It may have been my presence that awed them; but I think that even the merriest child would have found it hard to laugh in the house where Mrs. Cassidy ceaselessly mourned for Sonny, whose real name was Michael Antony.
When Mrs. Cassidy spoke again the hens had been driven forth and the two girls were sitting at the table, with a bowl of boiled potatoes between them.
"It was a month, or maybe a little more, before the answer came back from his aunt; but when it did come I was glad to see it. What she said was that it would be no use for Michael Antony—his name was Michael Antony, though it was Sonny we always called him—that it would be no use for him to go to America. The times was bad out there, she said, and little likelihood of their getting better. Let the boy stay where he is, she said, where he has a living to get without working the flesh off his bones. Let him not go there, she said, or else he'd be sorry for it after. Well, you'd think that would have contented him and put the notion of America out of his head—and so it did seemingly."
The hens, grown bold by long impunity, had made their way into the house again; but Mrs. Cassidy was roused now.
"Norah Kate," she said, "will you and Susy put them hens out and yourselves along with the hens! Don't you see I'm talking to his reverence?"
Mrs. Cassidy, like most good women, had small respect for her daughters. Sonny, I imagine—had Sonny remained at home might have sat out the visit of a bishop. His mother would have considered his presence an honour to the highest ecclesiastic; but daughters, even though their fathers spoil them, never stand so high as sons in the opinion of a good mother. Norah Kate and Susy knew their place. They went out, driving the hens before them. Mrs. Cassidy took the loaf out of the pot oven and set it on the table to cool. Then she sat down again on her stool and went on with her story:
"Seemingly he was contented enough and had given up the notion of America when he seen that his aunt was against him going. It was well pleased we were. His father gave him a calf for his own and I took care that he didn't want for a shilling in his pocket, so as he wouldn't be ashamed before his comrades—and them maybe spending more or less in the town after a football kicking or the like.
"Well, for as much as six months there wasn't a word out of him about America, and we thought he was settled down for good. Then one day, all of a sudden, he walked in on us, the same as it might be you walking in this minute: 'I'm off to America, to-morrow,' says he. 'I've sold the young bullock'—it was a young bullock the calf was by that time—'and I have my passage booked; and there's no use your talking, for my mind's made up.'
"I knew well enough it was no use talking, for Sonny was always terrible stubborn once his mind was made up. He wouldn't change, not if the King of England was to go down on his knees to him. He went the next morning, sure enough."
"He'll be back some day," I said feebly.
"He'll not be back," said Mrs. Cassidy; "or if he is I won't be here to see him. I buried one and I've lost the other. Is it any wonder my heart is broke to pieces?"
A poet—Tennyson, I think—speaks of the words of the comforter as "Vacant chaff, well meant for grain." I felt the truth of this description when I tried to talk to Mrs. Cassidy. She felt the same thing, I suppose, for she cut me short.
"Never a word did we hear of him or from him from that day to this," she said. "I made Norah Kate write a letter to his aunt out in Pittsburgh, to know if she'd seen the lad. It was a good letter and well written, though Norah Kate isn't the equal of Sonny for writing. But what use was it? He hadn't been near his aunt—nor she hadn't heard from him. All she said was that America's a big country and Michael Antony might be somewhere in it without her knowing. It was Michael Antony she said in her letter, not knowing that it was Sonny we always called him, though, of course, Michael Antony was his name."
I plodded home that evening along the muddy road and my heart in me was as sorrowful as the grey clouds which hung low over my head. Mrs. Cassidy's tragedy is the tragedy of Ireland. Their names are many, though we call them all Sonny. They go from us to a land that is very far off and we are left to grow old alone.
It was on Christmas Eve that I saw Mrs. Cassidy again. I did not mean to go to see her; but I was passing along the road and Norah Kate was watching for me at the end of the lane, as her father had watched for me a month before.
"My mother says," she said, "will your reverence step up to the house for a minute the way she'll be able to speak to you? For there's something that she wants to say."
It had rained steadily day and night since the last time I visited the Cassidys' house. The lane that led to it was like a running river. I picked my way from one large stone to another. I crawled along through deep mud beside the wall. Norah Kate, barefooted and therefore indifferent, splashed gaily beside me. Boots and trousers are a curse! If we had any sense we should wear kilts, as our remote ancestors did, and protect the soles of our feet with sandals.
The yard outside the house was incredibly filthy. The manure heap and the pigsty had—if the expression can be used of them—overflowed their banks. The thatch of the house was sodden and stained green in great patches. I expected to see worse desolation inside.
I was mistaken. Mrs. Cassidy met me at the door. She was bright-eyed and alert. She wore a clean apron. A bright turf fire burned on the hearth. There were sprigs of holly on the shelves of the dresser.
"You've had news of Sonny!" I said.
"Well, now, you're a wonderful man, so you are!" said Mrs. Cassidy. "How did you know that, when it's no more than an hour ago that the letter came?"
"It wasn't hard to guess," I said. "A merry Christmas to you, Mrs. Cassidy!"
"I was sitting by the side of the fire," she said, "after himself and the two little girleens had their breakfast ate, the same as I'd sat many's the day—God forgive me! I see now that I oughtn't ever to have given in the way I did. Well, I was sitting by the fire and himself was out about the place, and the two girleens was playing themselves, when all of a sudden Susy ran in on me"
"It was me and not Susy!" said Norah Kate.
"What matter the which of you it was?" said Mrs. Cassidy. "My own belief is it was the two of ye together—and says she: 'The postman's coming up the lane.' 'He is not!' I said. 'He couldn't be, for the lane leads nowhere but to this house and who'd be writing a letter to one of us?'
"That was what I said; but I knew well that the postman was coming—and I knew that it was a letter from Sonny he had for me. I knew it by the way my heart was beating so as I could hear the noise of it with my ears—till all of a sudden it stopped entirely and I had to take hold of the table with my two hands, so as I wouldn't fall. That's what made me know there was a letter from Sonny; but I wasn't fit to go to the door to get it—not if I'd been given the crown of the Queen of Spain I couldn't have moved. Norah Kate got the letter."
"Me, and Susy along with me," said Norah Kate.
She is a fair-minded child. She objected to being deprived of her glory as the first bearer of the news; but she was jealous for her sister's honour too. Norah Kate and Susy together had taken the letter from the postman.
"I seen by the stamp on it," said Mrs. Cassidy, "that it was an American letter; and as soon as I seen that, the sight of my eyes went from me and I seen no more. It was Norah Kate read the letter."
"I did," said Norah Kate.
"Norah Kate's a good scholar," said Mrs. Cassidy; "and well she may be, for we've kept her regular to school; but sure it's small credit to her to be able to read Sonny's letter, for he's a beautiful writer. Would you like now, your reverence, that she'd read it for you?"
Mrs. Cassidy fumbled in the bosom of her dress and drew out a letter, already crumpled with much handling already, I think, stained with tears of joy. I spared Norah Kate the task of reading it again. Sonny's handwriting is really very legible.
"'Dearest Father and Mother,' he wrote: 'This comes hoping to find you as well as it leaves me presently. Within is an order for twenty dollars. It's what I'd like to have sent before, only I hadn't it till now—nor I wouldn't write so long as I'd nothing to send; but I've fine earning now and I've made good, which is what they say out here. I'd like you to get something for the Christmas, and a cake or the like of that for Norah Kate and Susy. And you needn't be afraid of spending it—for there's plenty more where this comes from.'"
"My father and Susy is gone into the town," said Norah Kate; "and there's a grand doll, with a pink dress on her, in Mary Finnegan's shop, and it's to be got for Susy and me."
"What signifies the doll, or the money either?" said Mrs. Cassidy. "It's the letter I'm thinking of. Go on with it now, your reverence. I'd never be tired listening to it."
"'The place I'm in,' Sonny wrote, 'would strike you as mighty queer, not being like what you're accustomed to at home. How's father? And how's the polly cow? And, hoping that you're keeping your own health,
"'Your loving Sonny.'"
"It was Sonny we called him," said Mrs. Cassidy; "but his name was Michael Antony."
"'P.S.,' I read. 'I didn't go near Aunt Matilda, for fear she might think I was wanting something from her, which is what I wouldn't take if she offered it to me—after the letter she wrote saying it would be better for me not to come out. But I'll take a run down to see her some day when I'm through with the job I'm at. I want nothing from her now—thanks be to God! But it might be some time before I get going, for Pittsburgh's a long way from this—farther than you'd think.'"
"Sonny was always terrible stubborn and independent," said Mrs. Cassidy. "Since ever he was in his cradle he'd do what he thought fit and do it the way he chose himself. He'd not be under a compliment to e'er a one."
I next heard of Michael Antony Cassidy—whom his mother called Sonny—under circumstances that made the rain-swept, desolate Connaught land seem like a half-forgotten dream. I was in the smoking room of one of the great liners, crossing the Atlantic for the first time in my life, and full of curiosity about the land I was to visit. In one corner of the room was a group of men playing some card game I did not understand. At other tables sat more men, talking in a lazy, desultory way. There is no use talking rapidly on shipboard. Why shoot remarks at your neighbour when you have all day long with nothing to do except hand them to him quietly?
All by themselves in the farthest corner of the room sat the only two men who seemed to be in earnest about what they were doing. They were playing chess. Their absorption in the game must have created a kind of atmosphere round them that their fellow voyagers found distasteful. They were isolated and several seats were vacant near them. I sat down beside them, not because I care much for chess—it is a game that bores me—or because I wanted to be earnest; but because I like to have room to stretch my legs and to spread my elbows.
I suppose, however, that their atmosphere influenced me when I breathed it. I watched the game without knowing or caring much about it; but I observed the players with some interest. They were both young men. They both had eagerly intelligent faces. The fact that they were not drinking either beer or coffee convinced me that they were Americans. Chess-players of any other nation drink either beer or coffee while they play. Americans seldom drink anything except iced water or cocktails—and neither one nor other is a possible drink while playing chess.
I guessed they were university men—possibly professors; certainly athletes. Then I guessed again, making up my mind that they were business men, with ample leisure for golf. They were certainly accustomed to use their brains. They certainly lived a good deal in the open air.
The game came to an end before I guessed any more. One of the players knocked the ashes out of his pipe and declared that he was going to bed. The other disclaimed sleepiness and lit a cigar. We began to talk and—of all subjects in the world—hit on American politics.
Now politics is not, in my opinion, a fit subject for conversation anywhere. If you talk your own politics—the politics of your native land—you are sure to lose your temper or else the other man will lose his. If you talk the politics of another nation you yawn and finally go to sleep, because all foreign politics, being quite uncomprehensible, are dull. American politics are to me the dullest of all, because I never get anywhere near understanding them. Nevertheless it was American politics my keen-eyed chess-player talked.
I listened and gained nothing from his denunciation of one party or the other. I forget now which it was that he denounced. At last I asked my question. I call it mine because I have asked it eighteen times of eighteen Americans and got eighteen different answers to it: "Why is there no Labour party in America—no Labour party that runs candidates in frank opposition to Republicans and Democrats alike, as the English Labour party opposes both Conservatives and Liberals?"
This is, I think, an intelligent question. There are labourers in America—immense numbers of them. It seems odd that they should be satisfied with either of the old-established parties. My new friend pondered the answer for a minute. Then he gave me his answer—a clear-cut, logically complete answer, which did not satisfy me in the least.
"America," he said, "is a land of free opportunities for all. Any man, no matter how he starts, may become rich."
"Lots of men do," I said. "Look at and ." I named two worthy millionaires who happened to be on board our steamer.
"Well," said my friend, "if a man thinks he's going to be rich—and every labourer in America thinks that—he's not going to help the other labourers to combine against capital, is he?"
I suppose my face showed that I did not regard this as a satisfactory explanation of the failure of American cilivisation to produce a Labour party. My friend went on to justify his general statement by quoting a particular case.
"I'm an engineer," he said, "and I'm in charge of a big job away out in what you'd call the wilds. That section isn't settled much—just a few farmers scattered about; and my crowd fixed up in a little wooden town the company built for them. There are a couple of thousand of them—and a pretty tough lot they are—Slavs mostly, with a sprinkling of Italians. Scum!"
He spoke the last word with venom that surprised me in a citizen of the land of human equality—the land that fought to secure the negro his rights as a man and a brother.
"Some time ago," he went on, "we had trouble with them—not a strike; it doesn't come to that—just trouble over some agreement the company made the men sign. I'm not saying it was quite a legal agreement, for it wasn't; but it was good enough and nobody lost by it. Well, the trouble wouldn't have amounted to much if it hadn't been for a big, husky Russian—a sulky devil of a man who started talking about knifing the company's officers, chiefly me.
"I knew what was going on, but I didn't see my way to stop it. I just slept with a gun handy and kept my eyes open during the day. I watched that Russian pretty close. You can't blame a Russian, of course, for wanting to knife people. Murder seems to be the only way of getting the necessary reforms in their country, and this fellow wasn't long out of it. All the same, I didn't want to be an innocent victim."
I think my engineer friend showed a nice spirit in making excuses for the Russian.
"Well, one day the whole conspiracy just got bursted. There was a little Irishman—the only one we had in the whole crowd, for the Irish are a bit above that kind of work now. The Russian was making a speech one evening and the rest of the men were cheering him. He was a big brute, well over six feet high. I was a football player when I was in college, but I don't mind owning that I should have thought twice before engaging in a scrap with that Russian.
"My little Irishman didn't think more than once. He walked right up to the Russian, and when he was standing in front of him he didn't reach up beyond where the top button of the Russian's waistcoat would have been if he'd had a waistcoat. 'Listen to me now, son!' said the Irishman: 'Just you can that talk about knives and killing. It's not wanted here.' The Russian kind of collapsed, and that was the end of our labour trouble."
"It's an interesting story," I said; "but I don't quite see what it has to do with the curious fact that there's no effective Labour party in America."
"It's got this to do with it: Cassidy expects to be a capitalist some day—and he doesn't want any Russian coming round and knifing him when the time comes. See that?"
I did not even try to see it. The matter had ceased, for the moment, to interest me. My attention was fixed on the Irishman's name.
"Did you say Cassidy?" I asked.
"Yes. And if you look out you'll see that name on the list of first-class passengers on one of these boats pretty soon. He'll be down as having engaged a suite of rooms on B Deck."
"Was he by any chance called Michael Antony?" I asked.
"The men called him Mick," said my friend; but of course, that's common with all Irishmen. Now I come to think of it, I believe it was Michael Antony he wrote when he signed as an overseer. I made him overseer after he laid out the Russian."
"That," I said, "was probably last November."
"It was—sure. But how did you guess?"
"I happened to hear another part of the same story from his mother," I said. "It was Sonny she called him, but his real name was Michael Antony."
"Sonny or Micky," said my friend, "the name will be worth having on the bottom of a cheque some day soon. That little Irishman will make good! He's got grit!"