The mac Nessa met the party in the great hall of Murrisk, and his ancestors looking down from the walls must surely have thought that they were back again in their own times of everlasting war and sudden death.
XV.
THE AMERICAN NURSE.
In the early ‘eighties there lived in the Cloonalla district a small farmer named Peter Walsh, who was what is generally called in the west a bad farmer, which is simply the Irish way of saying that he was lazy and good-for-nothing, and for several years Walsh had been in the clutches of the Cloonalla gombeen man, the local big shopkeeper.
The ways of the gombeen man are quite simple and usually most successful, the success largely depending on a run of bad potato crops, as generally after two successive failures the majority of the farmers in a poor mountainous district have no money at all. They are thus forced to go to the gombeen wallah, who advances them so much money, according to the size of their farm and their capacity for drink, as a mortgage on the farm at a high rate of interest. But instead of paying them money he gives credit for goods, and there is a verbal agreement that he will not foreclose as long as the farmer deals solely with him and makes no bones about the prices he is charged. Formerly this was the terrible millstone which used to hang for life round the necks of many western peasants.
However, Walsh’s millstone troubled him not one bit, and he “staggered” along for several years until there came a sequence of three bad and indifferent crops, which finished him completely. Seeing that Walsh was not going to make any effort, the gombeen man closed on the farm, and Peter, the wife, and their one child, Bridget, aged three years, left Ireland for America, illogically cursing the British Government for their own sins and those of the gombeen devil.
Now the gombeen man had no use for Peter’s farm himself, so he proceeded to make Peter’s brother, Michael, drunk one Saturday night in his shop, and made the farm over to him with the former conditions, not forgetting to double the mortgage.
In due course Michael died without kith or kin saving Bridget, now a hospital nurse in New York, who one day received a letter from a Ballybor solicitor informing her of her uncle’s death, and that she was the sole heiress to his two farms in Cloonalla, and asking for instructions.
From her youth upwards Nurse Bridget had heard nothing but abuse of the so-called English tyranny in Ireland—in fact, up to the time when she went to be trained hospital nurse, her only knowledge of England and Ireland was the thousand and one supposed wrongs which Ireland had suffered at the hands of England since the days of Cromwell, and her one ambition in life was to see the downfall of the British Empire, and with that the freedom of her fatherland. In America, the Irish children find plenty of mentors of hate of England, both among their own people and the Germans.
In time, when Bridget began to earn some money as a nurse, she joined every Irish anti-British society, secret and otherwise, she could, and at the time of her leaving the States to take over her uncle’s farms possessed more wonderful and weird badges and medallions than she could conveniently wear at once: incidentally the societies relieved her of most of her earnings “to provide powder and shot for ould Ireland.”
On the liner, Bridget met many of her race, mostly men and women who had worked hard for some years in the States and saved enough money to return to Ireland, where they hoped to buy a small farm or shop and never to wander any more. One and all were longing to be in Ireland once again, and not one ever mentioned a word of the “brutal English tyranny” until Bridget started the subject.