Collected Short Stories - Patrick O’Brian

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      He wound his reel and packed his rod. The first owl cried and he went over the bridge: he went away, through the woods by the lost road, in the dying light.

      SLIEVE DONAGH on the east and Ardearg on the west hold a valley between them as lovely as any valley in the world. The nearest road is a great way off, however, and the valley is beautiful without praise.

      A man standing halfway up the side of Ardearg would see the whole of the valley at once, from the high curtain of precipitous rock that closes the upper end to the curious, bar-like round of hill at its mouth. This bar is pierced by a single cleft that lets the river through, but the cleft is wooded, not to be seen, and the bar hides the valley from the lower world. On each side of the valley’s head stand the tall mountains, rising nobly, each in a smooth, steep slope to shale, naked rock and savagery; their ridges, equal in height and unbroken, form the valley’s sides. From his vantage point, the observer would see the soaring sweep of the top of the valley, the steep flanks whose slope ends suddenly in the flat green of the bottom: there would be half a mile of swimming air between him and the other side, and this would give him a feeling of immense height. He would see with the utmost clarity the meandering course of the Uisge, whose source is here at the foot of Slieve Donagh.

      The Uisge, the bright stream, was high and running fast between its banks; two and three days before it had been over them, flooding the bright green bed of the valley and scouring the rock pools clear. The fishing in this highest stretch of the river was not at all good by most standards. There was no possibility of sea-trout above the falls in the cleft and the brown trout were tiny, elusive fish, never above four or five ounces in weight and mostly half that size.

      It was this that made it possible for Woollen to be fishing there. The lower water had some value and was let to an angling association. On account of his extreme poverty, Woollen belonged neither to this association nor to any other: indeed, there were times when it seemed to him that he hardly belonged to the human race at all, the more the pity, for he was a sociable creature by nature. He was an incongruous figure, with his mild, sheep-like face and bowed, apologetic shoulders, here in this fierce valley – a valley that must have looked the same before ever the Firbolgs came into it – primitive and harsh, a place for cruel and bloody slaughter.

      Woollen was as unsuited to the neighbourhood as he might well be. He was an Englishman, and it was widely known that he was, or had been, a Freemason. This was an unusually devout parish, and Fr. Tobin a bitter Anglophobe.

      Woollen had a wife, a deathless shrew. There was something wrong with her that caused her to lie the day long on a sordid stuffed couch, from which she screamed abuse in an untiring, metallic voice, rendered piercingly sharp by long wear. Her face was a disagreeable purple and flour lay thick upon it; her body, of ponderous bulk, was covered with a deep layer of pale grey fat. She did not wash: she had many disgusting personal habits. Woollen had married her in haste a great many years since; she had been employed in an inferior boarding-house at the time. As for Woollen, he had been gently bred, of no particular family, but a gentleman. An elderly, ailing parson had brought him up, had disliked him nearly all the time, and had seen him into the Army with querulous relief. With neither connections nor abilities, he had found his way into one of the nastiest of infantry regiments, and he had passed several unenviable years in association with a number of third-rate subalterns who, sensing his timidity, had from the first used him ill. He had been their butt, and they had shown an ape-like ingenuity in making him wretched. Some of them had traded on the kindness of his stupid heart.

      When he had thrown up his commission to join an acquaintance in a commercial undertaking, they had said that he would be rooked, and they were right. The businessman from Manchester, who had promoted a company with a registered office and documents bright with seals, and who had allowed Woollen to come in on the ground floor with the title of Director in Charge of Army Contracts, had taken his small patrimony and his gratuity within six months. All that was left to him was the income of seventy-two pounds a year that an aunt, his last known relation, had left him in trust.

      He was, as he very soon discovered, wholly unemployable – these were the bad days, the very bad days – so he had taken the advice of a sort of friend, the senior captain of his regiment, and had come to Ireland with the intention of living in rural ease, keeping hens and so on, in a cottage on the estate of the captain’s cousin, Harler.

      It had taken nearly all Woollen’s loose cash to transport himself, his vile wife and their few possessions to this far, hidden corner of County Mayo. He had been deceived again: the cabin was barely habitable, the possibilities of making money from tomatoes, mushrooms or eggs were non-existent, and the reputation that he brought with him of being a friend of the Harlers damned him. This was a district that had suffered terribly in the troubles, and at least one Harler had been proved an informer. Two sons of the family had been in the Black and Tans. The paltry estate was now managed at a distance by a Harler who was some kind of a broker or attorney, a heavy, unshaven, loud-mouthed fellow who met all complaints, all requests for repairs, with blank indifference.

      Woollen, of his own act, had effectually closed the door of silence upon himself. He had thought it best to maintain his status by a certain stiffness – after he had asserted his gentility, he could unbend to the two or three half-gentlemen of the neighbourhood. He never had the opportunity. His poverty was quickly discovered and they felt themselves outraged. Even the poorest of his neighbours considered himself affronted. Woollen had picked up a glaze of military stupidity in the Army and a kind of superficial arrogance – a protective colouring of which he was wholly unconscious – and this unconciliating manner, added to his horrible wife, his native stupidity and to his other overwhelming disadvantages, rendered him perhaps the loneliest man in the county.

      Years of slow misery had passed since he first came. All his ill-informed ideas and schemes for making a little extra money had come to nothing: worse, many of them had cost invaluable pounds. Those which had not been downright foolish had wrecked on the indifference or open hostility of his neighbours. They would not teach him anything, and, being town-bred, he knew almost nothing of any value. His pig had died; his attempt at goat-keeping had been disastrous, for the animals had strayed incessantly, and after they had accomplished a great havoc he found them mutilated in the Irish fashion. His hens had gone, victims of a family of stoats: long after the event the memory could bring a choking disappointment. Seventeen pullets, so carefully bred up, fed at such cost, cosseted by him from chicks to the point of lay, housed with such pains, all slaughtered for fun within a few minutes. His beehives had been tipped over so often by unknown hands in the night that he was hardly sorry when the survivors died of Isle of Wight disease. So the list would run on; every enthusiasm, each fresh plan frustrated by lack of knowledge, want of a few pounds, evil fortune; perpetual failure, unending poverty.

      It would not have been a gay life alone: in the company of his wife it was hell. That unlovely woman lay, wrapped in a mauve thing, on her creaking stuffed couch, with a malevolent blur in place of a mind. Directly she was legally married she had resolved never to do a hand’s turn again her whole life long. She had deceived herself as to her husband’s resources, but with incredible persistence she maintained her resolution. She was a teetotaller. She lived almost entirely upon tea and bread and margarine. She was unbelievably ignorant, and her tiny mind had narrowed with the passing years to the point of insanity.

      Through countless nights of dumb, aching misery Woollen had revolved plans for removal, for going away to some happier place where children would not shriek after him with stones, to some English backwater, somewhere where he could do something; but every fresh day had shown him their impossibility. Poverty had brought him there, and poverty chained him there. Long ago he had made an arrangement for his tiny income to be sent to him in weekly sums; it was the only way, he had found, of keeping out of debt – it should be stated, with great emphasis, that he had a single-hearted regard for what he conceived to be his duty, and a simple honesty that would put nine men out of ten to shame at the judgment seat. From this weekly sum it had never yet been possible for him to save twopence.

      Mrs

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