The trout lay on the bottom and would not move: the fisherman had been so near success and failure that he grew over-cautious now. He knew that his cast must be in a bad way, and he dared not pull until a sudden feeling of desperation nerved him to it. The fish had recovered, and it had learnt cunning. It meant to go through the bridge again, and he only stopped it with a strain that came within an ace of snapping the cast at the worst fray. Then he saw the line coming back and he scrabbled his way fast up the bank to keep the strain, reeling in as he went. I know I shall trip, he said, and that will be an end to it: but his good fortune was with him, and he kept his feet among the bushes and lumps. He kept the fish on the top now and bore masterfully on it, because there was no other way. Its strength ebbed in short rushes and a few angry leaps; the continual pressure was breaking its heart, and at the end it lost its head, used up the last of its strength in an unavailing burst and rolled sideways in the water.
He reeled in it very cautiously over the shingle where he stood ankle-deep. He was between the fish and the water as it grounded; there was a wild flurry and he had it out jerking and gasping on the grass in the last golden sunlight of the day.
He took the draggled fly from the corner of its jaw – it had nearly worn free in the fight – and he stood above the fish, gazing at it with satisfied admiration. It was a perfect fish: he looked down on its small, well-formed head, the gleaming pools of its eyes, and the golden yellow under the delicate white of its throat, and it lay there quiet with labouring gills. He must weigh a good four pounds, he said, drawing his finger down the fine, pink-flecked line that divided its belly from its gorgeous spotted sides. The fish bounded at his touch, and lay still again. He saw its strong shoulders, the saffron of its fins and the splendid play of colours over its whole glowing body, and he could not find it in his heart to kill the fish. It was the day and an undefined symbolism that worked upon him too.
Bending to the water, he held the trout upright with its head upstream: it was certainly four pounds. Its gills opened and closed and the cool water laved through them: for minutes he held it so, until fresh life and a little strength flowed into it and it lashed free. The trout almost turned belly-up a little way out, but more strength came to it. It turned into the stronger current and sank down to the waving green. He could see it there plainly, working gently under the soft shelter.
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.
The Happy Despatch
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 st
upidity 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. Woollen hated fishing. It had been the subject of countless disgusting rows, bellowing, smashing quarrels that had left him shattered in spirit and her exhilarated. Once she had broken his rod, and he, moved out of himself, had beaten her almost to insensibility with the butt-end. This had earned him one undisputed day’s fishing a week, for a deep voice had warned him, against his convictions, never to apologize for this outburst, nor, indeed, to refer to it.
The day was Thursday, and this Thursday had dawned fair. He had risen before the alarm clock rang, as excited as a boy, and he had walked the four miles up the river with an eager impatience. The locals were sure that he fished the preserved water, and they would willingly have sworn to it; the water-bailiff often hid up for him. But Woollen had never in his days of life put a fly upon forbidden water. As he walked he averted his eyes from the pools with their widening circles of invitation, and pressed on to the ravine at the bottom of the high valley.
At the top of it, hot and panting, he was in his own place. The lower river, with its chequer-work of farms and small-holdings, was out of sight; his own prison and incubus too. Above there were the impassive mountains, which had always seemed friendly to Woollen, and there was hardly a sign of man. The high valley was notorious for the bog-evil and the poverty of its grazing; no walls divided it – in this it was singular – and the only sign that men had ever been in the valley was a mound with a circle of stones on the top of it. The mound was regular, thirty or forty paces round and five feet high. By some it was called the Torr an Aonar, because it was supposed that an anchorite had lived there, though indeed the stones had been piled by hands that knew nothing of the Cross. Formerly the mound had been at a considerable distance from the water, but the stream changed its course in very rainy winters and now it ran fast round half the mound, following the curve of it.
Immediately below the mound was a large pool, the best in the upper stream; several times Woollen had seen a trout in it that must have weighed over a quarter of a pound, and twice it had risen to his fly. At present he was still a long way from the mound, fishing the quiet middle stretches. The fish were coming up well – rising a little short, some of them, but already he had caught five. One had been too small even for this stream, but two were gratifyingly heavy. He had missed a dozen or more, but that was nothing to a man so habituated to misfortune.
He stalked along now, casting well forward with each step. He was throwing a longer line than was necessary, mostly for the pleasure of seeing it go out straight before him; he was casting easily and well, with a slight, constant breeze at his shoulder to lay the cast out flat. His mild, foolish face had an unwonted happiness on it. He talked gently as he went, in a voice a little above a whisper.
‘Behind the rock, in the calm place … no, nobody there … try each side.’ His fly was going down just where he wanted it, on the spot he was looking at each time. To the right of the rock the fly danced down the edge of the main current; there was a silver flash under it and Woollen struck, whipping the fish into the air, well out on to the bank. He had found this to be the only way of taking these mercurial little trout, but it still came hard to him to strike with such force and speed. The fish sprang and sprang in the grass until he reached it; it was of due size and he killed it, not without a qualm for its beauty. Thousands of trout he must have caught by now, and still, each time, he had to justify himself for the final killing.
He smoothed his fly, a red quill in the last stages of decrepitude, and looked over the length of his cast. It had a great many knots in it, most of them clumsy, for he was not a man of his hands, and it was uncommonly short. Both cast and fly would have to last a great while yet, as Woollen knew with a deep certainty. Few things would have given him greater pleasure than a five-pound note to be spent without remorse of conscience in a good tackle shop.
He went on, along the right bank, fishing steadily. The sun came out hot on the back of his neck. For a long stretch no fish came up, and he saw that it must be about noon. Lunch was cold new potatoes and a white pudding – good for a hungry man. He ate it with his back against the deep bank, where the Uisge came down through a series of rocky pools. The warmth beat down upon him; new-sprung ferns shaded his head with a green, sweet, shade, and he dozed for a while.
When he woke up the sun had gone in again and the day was overcast, though still warm. His first cast brought out a better fish than he had caught all the morning, and the omen held true. The three rock pools, generally good for a rise apiece, yielded seven fish, not one of them under two ounces. It was odd, Woollen observed aloud as he arranged the fish according to size on the grass, gazing at them with a childish complacence, it was odd how one’s standards changed: he had fished some of the English chalk streams where a half-pound fish was as a minnow; now he was delighted with two-ounce fish. Anything much smaller than that was rather disappointing, but these did in truth look like real trout; small ones, indeed very small ones, but the real fish for all that.
He went up the river slowly now, for the fish were coming up in a most gallant and determined rise. The Uisge had little trout, but there were many of them on a good day. By the time he reached the pool under the mound his cloth bag was heavy in his pocket, and he had lost certain count of his fish, a thing that had not happened to him since he came into Ireland. He was o
n the opposite side to the mound, and as he stood at the foot of the pool he saw that the flood had bitten deeper into the round of the Torr an Aonar; there was a deep scar of bare earth, and the low scrub that had lined the far bank at the top was now in the water, most of it lying sideways with branches tearing the water, still anchored by the roots.
He wanted to cast diagonally up the pool, straight for the mound, for the deepest water was just under it, and there he had raised his good trout before. Formerly he had cast up from where he stood now, dropping his fly into the little smooth place on the far side of the incoming current – a natural weir brought it in with some force – so that it poised momentarily before dragging across and down. Now, with this change, the piece of slack water was very much enlarged, and might hold nothing; also, the halfsubmerged tangle of dwarf willow and bramble, with all the rushes and grass that it had gathered, made the cast a dangerous one. He was undecided still when he saw a rise in the eddy; he could not see whether it was his fish or not, but he made a couple of air casts, feeling his way across the pool, and then dropped his fly neatly into the middle of the slack water. But he had too long a line out, and when he struck with the rising of the fish he could not whip it cleanly from the water. It darted instantly into the tangle, and before he could reel in, the line was fast knit.
Woollen crossed the pool at the bottom and came round to the tangle. It was awkward to get at it, because of the slope of the mound, which ran straight into the water here, but with a good deal of trouble he pulled the whole weedy mess up on to the side. The trout was only a very little fish, not the big one at all. Woollen took it carefully in his wet hand and worked the hook out. He went up to the bank overhanging the slack water so that he could put the fish into a quiet place out of the run of the current. Much more of the bank had caved in than he had supposed, looking from the other side. He knelt and held the little fish in the hollow of his hand under the water; it stayed there for a moment before shooting away into the waving green bed, out of sight.