Teresa still had a cask in hand. Bohenna could hardly make a second journey before dawn. Moreover, it was leaking, so she stove the head in with a stone and invited everybody to help themselves. Some ran to the houses for cups and jugs, but others could not wait, took off their sodden shoes and baled out the contents greedily. It was overproof Oporto wine and went to their unaccustomed heads in no time. Teresa, imbibing in her wholesale fashion, was among the first to feel the effects. She began to sing. She sang “Prithee Jack, prithee Tom, pass the can around” and a selection of sottish ditties which had found favor in Portsmouth taverns, suiting her actions to the words. From singing she passed to dancing, uttering sharp “Ai-ees” and “Ah-has” and waving and thumping her detached shoe as though it were a tambourine. She infected the others. They sang the first thing that came into their heads and postured and staggered in an endeavor to imitate her, hoarse-throated men dripping with sea water, shrill young women, gnarled beldames dribbling at the mouth, loose-jointed striplings, cracked-voiced ancients contracted with rheumatism, squeaky boys and girls. Drink inspired them to strange cries, extravagant steps and gesticulations. They capered round the barrel, dipping as they passed, drank and capered again, each according to his or her own fashion. Teresa, the presiding genius, lolled over the cask, panting, shrieking with laughter, whooping her victims on to fresh excesses. They hopped and staggered round and round, chanting and shouting, swaying in the wind which swelled their smocks with grotesque protuberances, tore the women’s hair loose and set their blue cloaks flapping. Some tumbled and rose again, others lay where they fell. They danced in a mist of flying spindrift and sand with the black cliffs for background, the blazing wreckage for light, the fifes and drums of the gale for orchestra. It might have been a scene from an infernal ballet, a dance of witches and devils, fire-lit, clamorous, abandoned.
The eight drowned seamen, providers of this good cheer, lay in a row apart, their dog nosing miserably from one to the other, wondering why they were so indifferent when all this merriment was toward, and barking at any one who approached them.
When the Preventive men arrived with dawn they thought at first it was not a single ship that had foundered but a fleet, so thick was the beach with barrel staves and bodies, but even as they stared some corpses revived, sat up, rose unsteadily and made snake tracks for the cottages; they were merely the victims of Teresa’s bounty. Teresa herself was fast asleep behind a rock when the Preventive came, but she woke up as the sun rose in her eyes and spent a pleasant hour watching their fruitless hunt for liquor and offering helpful suggestions.
Hunger gnawing her, she whistled her two sons as if they had been dogs and made for home, tacking from side to side of the path like a ship beating to windward and cursing her Maker every time she stumbled. The frightened boys kept fifty yards in rear.
In return for Teresa’s insults the Preventives paid Bosula a visit later in the day. Teresa, refreshed by some hours’ sleep, followed the searchers round the steading, jeering at them while they prodded sticks into hay-stacks and patches of newly dug ground or rapped floors and walls for hollow places. She knew they would never find those kegs; they were half a mile away, sunk in a muddy pool further obscured by willows. Bohenna had walked the horses upstream and down so that there should be no telltale tracks. The Preventives were drawing a blank cover. It entertained Teresa to see them getting angrier and angrier. She was prodigal with jibes and personalities. The Riding Officer retired at dusk, informing the widow that it would give him great pleasure to tear her tongue out and fry it for breakfast. Teresa was highly amused. Her good humor recovered and that evening she broached a cask, hired a fiddler and gave a dance in the kitchen.
CHAPTER VIII
The Penhale brothers grew and grew, put off childish things and began to seek the company of men worshipfully and with emulation, as puppies imitate grown dogs. Ortho’s first hero was a fisherman whose real name was George Baragwanath, but who was invariably referred to as “Jacky’s George,” although his father, the possessive Jacky, was long dead and forgotten and had been nothing worth mentioning when alive.
Jacky’s George was a remarkable man. At the age of seventeen, while gathering driftwood below Pedn Boar, he had seen an intact ship’s pinnace floating in. The weather was moderate, but there was sufficient swell on to stave the boat did it strike the outer rocks—and it was a good boat. The only way to save it was to swim off, but Jacky’s George, like most fishermen, could not swim. He badly wanted that boat; it would make him independent of Jacky, whose methods were too slow to catch a cold, leave alone fish. Moreover, there was a girl involved. He stripped off his clothes, gathered the bundle of driftwood in his arms, flopped into the back wash of a roller and kicked out, frog-fashion, knowing full well that his chances of reaching the boat were slight and that if he did not reach it he would surely drown.
He reached the boat, however, scrambled up over the stern and found three men asleep on the bottom. His heart fell like lead. He had risked his life for nothing; he’d still have to go fishing with the timorous Jacky and the girl must wait.
“Here,” said he wearily to the nearest sleeper. “Here, rouse up; you’m close ashore . . . be scat in a minute.”