There would be the hurried crowding into every doorway and into all the squinting windows as he went past. Outwardly there would be smiles of welcome for him, but in the seven publichouses of Garradrimna the exultation would be so great as to make men who had been ancient enemies stand drinks to one another in the moment of gladness which had come upon them with the return of John Brennan.
"'Tis expelled he is like Ulick Shannon. That's as sure as you're there!"
"To be sure he's expelled. And wouldn't any one know he was going to be expelled the same as the other fellow, the way they were conducting themselves last summer, running after gerrls and drinking like hell?"
"And did ye ever hear such nonsense? The idea of him going on for to be a priest!" Then there would be a shaking of wise heads and a coming of wise looks into their faces.
He could see what would happen when he met the fathers of Garradrimna, when he met Padna Padna or Shamesy Golliher. There would be the short, dry laugh from Padna Padna, and a pathetic scrambling of the dimming intelligence to recognize him.
"And is that you, John? Back again! Well, boys-a-day! And isn't it grand that Ulick Shannon is at home these times too? Isn't it a pity about Ulick, for he's a decent fellow? Every bit as decent as his father, Henry Shannon, was, and he was a damned decent fellow. Ah, 'tis a great pity of him to be exshpelled. Aye, 'tis a great pity of any one that does be exshpelled."
The meeting with Shamesy Golliher formed as a clearer picture before his mind.
"Arrah me sound man, John, sure I thought you'd be saying the Mass before this time. There's nothing strange in the valley at all. Only 'tis harder than ever to get the rabbits, the weeshy devils! Only for Ulick Shannon I don't know what I'd do for a drink sometimes. But, damn it, he's the decentest fellow.... You're only a few minutes late, sure 'tis only this blessed minute that Miss Kerr's gone on to the school.... And you could have been chatting with her so grandly all the way!"
That John Brennan should be thinking after this fashion, creating all those little scenes before the eye of his mind and imagining their accompanying conversations, was indicative of the way the valley and the village had forced their reality upon him last summer. But this pictured combination of incidents was intensified by a certain morbid way of dwelling upon things his long spells of meditation by the lake had brought him. Yet he knew that even all his clear vision of the mean ways of life around him would not act as an incentive to combat them but, most extraordinary to imagine, as a sort of lure towards the persecution of their scenes and incidents.
"It must be coming near time to rise for Mass," he said aloud to himself, as he felt that he had been quite a long time giving himself up to speculations in which there was no joy.