The Wind Bloweth

by Donn Byrne

It came to him with a sense of revelation that all his life he had been looking forward: always the new thing. And now he would be looking back. Always before guessing. Looking back now, knowing, or not quite knowing, but having before him material from which to draw wisdom, truth. All his life it seemed he had been gathering something. Now was the time to sort it, make it.... And then, what was he to do with whatever he had made? Toward what end? The paper he had in his hands dropped to his knees. His eyes fixed on the windows where the lights of the city began to shine, saw a haze, saw nothing. His ears, listening to the clop-clop-clop of the hansoms, heard only rhythm, then a faint harmony, then nothing.... Himself, within him, seemed to see old scenes, to be in old scenes. The little boy going down to the sea in ships, seeking an island he had seen in a mirage ... a mood of wonder.... There were feet, there was the world. Every tree was an emerald miracle, every house a mystery, all people were riddles.... Come, little boy, come and look! The instinct of the salmon for the sea. The river where he was spawned hurries to the sea, and his instinct is to go with it, not against it.... It deepens and broadens, and ahead is always a clearer pool, a more shadowy rock, a softer water-fern. It is pleasant to swim under the sallow-branches, and rapids whip.... And there is the lull of an estuary, and the chush-chush of little waves, and he is in the sea.... And now he must lay his own course.... The lure of the river has brought him so far.

And Shane thought: I was born a salmon in a river. The stupid pretty trout remained in the river, and the secretive eels.... And the perch and the roach and the ponderous bream, and the pike that is long of snout, they remained by the grassy waters.... But those that are born salmon must go down to the sea....

A little shadow came into his face, and his breath was caught sharp. He was remembering Moyra, the wife he had, and he no older than a boy.... Like some strange fascination, ugly dream that came to him.... And queerly enough, the picture of Moyra's mother, the old wife of Louth, was clearer in his mind than his wife.... Moyra was like some troubled cloud, a thing that blotted out sunshine for a while, through no fault of its own, but the mother was sinister. An old woman keening, and the breath of whisky on her, and her eyes sobering in a bitter greed.... Why should Moyra have died? Fate: the act of God: whatever you care to call it. Why should he have been dragged into it, Shane wondered. If he hadn't, what would have happened? He didn't know. But he knew this, that in the marriage to Moyra he had been gripped by the shoulder, and looked in the eyes, and a voice had said: "Wait. All is not wonder and mystery. Life is not a child's toy. You must learn."

Poor Moyra, he could hardly remember anything but her pleading, half-inimical eyes, her mouth that twisted easily to anger, her shame that her hands and feet were uncouth. And now she had loved him. And now hated him. He remembered one May evening when suddenly she had caught his hand and kissed it, and pressed it to her heart. And later that night she had cursed bitterly at him, saying black was the day she had set eyes on him, and black the day she married him, and her face was twisted into agonized ugliness. And when he went to sea a few days later he had found a symbol of her religion, an Agnus Dei, sewed into his coat to protect him against the terrors of the deep waters.

And she had died, poor tortured Moyra, suddenly. Why? Had What had fashioned her thought: That's not rightly done? No. That's poor. Wait. I'll do it over....

Ah, well, God give her peace, wherever she wandered! How many years had it taken to get over, not her death, but their being married? A long time. Seven bitter years. He might have turned into a bitter, fierce old man, hating all things. The whole thing had been like a cruelty to a happy wondering child. And he had closed his heart, resentful, afraid.... And then had come Claire-Anne.

Once he had been a child with wondering gray eyes, and life had made him blind as a mole, secretive as a badger, timid of the world as the owl is timid of daylight. The shock of Claire-Anne, and he was cognizant of great enveloping currents of life. Wonder he had known, and bitterness he had known, but the immense forces that wind the stars as a clock is wound he had not known.... And with Claire-Anne they had burst about him like thunder. They had played around him as the corposant flickers around the mast-head of a ship.... Poor Claire-Anne! The miracle of her. She was like some flowering bush in an arctic waste.... Her wonderful scared eyes, her tortured self.... It was a very strange thing that her end did not bother him.... A gesture of youth, that sudden snap of the wrist with the poor dead prince's dagger.... He had been very honest about it, and it did not bother him, any more than it would have been on his conscience to have shot a crippled horse.... Once it had seemed to him unnecessarily histrionic, but now he knew it was merciful.... Her spirit had gone too far ever to return to normal life....

But the little woman of the East, that did bother him. In boyhood he had known the wonder of life. In youth he had known there existed sordid tragedy. In young manhood passion had crashed like lightning.... And then he had thought he knew all. He had considered himself the master of life and said: "I will do such and such a thing and be happy. Enjoy this, because I know how to enjoy it. To the wise man, all is a pleasant hedonism." It struck, him at the time how terribly foolish and piteous great men were.... Jesus dead on a crucifix; Socrates and the hemlock bowl; the earnest Paul beheaded at Rome.... A little wisdom, a little callousness would have avoided all this.... How satisfied he was, how damned petty! His little bourgeois life, his harem of one pretty girl, his nice ship ... smug as a shop-keeper ... and then life, fate, whatever you call it, had tripped him up, abashed, beaten, through the medium of a mountebank wrestler whom he had conquered in a street brawl....

And after seven years of blackness, and despair. The long reach to Buenos Aires, and the querulous sea-birds mocking him: On the land is desolation and pettiness and disappointment.... And what is there on the sea? The great whale is dying; the monster who ranged the deep must go because men must have oil to cast up their accounts by the light of it, and women must have whalebone for stays.... The sleek seal with brown gentle eyes must die that harlots shall wear furs.... And there never was a Neptune or a Mannanan mac Lir.... There were only stories from a foolish old book.... The sun shines for a moment on the green waters, and your heart rises.... But remember the blackness of the typhoon, and how the cold left-hand wind rages round the Horn.... And the coral islands have great reefs like knives, and the golden tropics lure to black lethal snakes.... Fool! Fool! We have ranged the clouds, and there is no good-willing God.... There is only coldness and malignant things.... So cried the querulous sea voices, and they tempted him: "All you have known is desolation and vanity. Better to have died a boy while the meadows they were green.... All before you is emptiness," they mocked. And they came nearer: "Behold, the night is black, the ocean is of great depth, immeasurable, the ship plows onward under a quartering breeze. A little step, a little step leeward, a vault over the taffrail as over a little ditch, and there will be peace and rest. Look at the water flow past. No problems there.... God! how close he had been to it, in the seven black years, the long voyage from Liverpool, and the sordid town at the end.... How close! And then Alan Donn, God rest him! had died, and he had gone back to Ireland, and met Granya, and been foolish as a boy in his teens. A shipload of rifles to free Ireland! What a damned fool he had felt when they had simply shooed him away!"