The Road to Nowhere

The Road to Nowhere 

by Maurice Walsh

First published in 1934

This edition published by Reading Essentials

Victoria, BC Canada with branch offices in the Czech Republic and Germany

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The Road To Nowhere 

 by 

 Maurice Walsh

PART ONE

ROGAN STUART, ADRIFT

CHAPTER I

I

SOUTH by east the early June sun was slowly climbing the long shoulder of Slievemaol.

The bell-tent, brown and shabby and patched, cowering under the great sweep of hill, stood on the only level plot of ground on the south side of the bay, and that unique plot was not more than fifteen yards square. In front it shelved down to a tilted slab of basalt wherefrom a swimmer might dive into five fathoms of brisk sea-water; behind, it sloped, slowly at first and then ever more hurriedly, into the craggy breast of Slievemaol, whose bald head looked steeply down from eighteen hundred feet. As far as the eye might see, all down the long winding south side of the bay, that insignificant brown cone of canvas was the only evidence of man and his handiworks. But on the north side, across a mile of water, where a wide green valley sloped gently back between the mountains, an ugly, red-brick, turreted mansion was mercifully screened by full-foliaged trees.

On the narrow level between tent and hillside a huge bacon-box rested on its side and was roughly fitted with shelves holding the nucleus of a camping outfit and several cartons of vegetarian dietary. Facing the shelves a slim, long-backed, bronzed young fellow sat cross-legged in the heather, and, with a table-spoon, ate a golden confection out of a glass jar. His plentiful black hair was still tousled and damp after his morning plunge, and his unbuttoned pyjama jacket showed a firm long neck and a muscular chest. He was using the spoon so deftly that it made no clink against the glass, and was wolfing the golden confection as hastily and criminally as a small boy in his mother’s preserve cupboard.

Back to back with this young cupboard-snatcher sat another man, just as long and as lean but many years older—long-chinned, long-nosed, with a humorous, sardonically-lined mouth, and grey-flecked dark hair receding on a white dome of brow. He was simply attired in flannel trousers and nothing more, and the long muscles rippled under his velvet, cream-tinted skin. He sat on his heels before a small but active fire of sticks, and, with a steel fork, carefully turned over three medium-sized sea-trout that sizzled odorously on a long-handled frying-pan. At the side of the fire a tin kettle, not quite as black as the pan, sent out small breaths of steam. He watched the trout intently for half a minute, then sat back on his heels, ran the fork handle through his hair, and lifted up a big baritone bellow with a modicum of tune:

I likes my grub, it pleases me

Better than love or amity:

Eggs-and-ham, bacon-liver,

An Easter lamb, trout of the river.

I dream of tart instead of Cupid;

A broken heart is very stupid—

Except the heart of sheep in gravy;

Give me that, and Heaven save ye!

‘That, Alistair MacIan, my American Highlandman, is the morning hymn of us Anglo-Saxons. All the same, who is going to demolish and devour this third white trout?’

Alistair MacIan swallowed hastily, ‘One’ll crowd my capacity this morning, Paddy Joe.’

‘Time we tried that vegetarian ham-and-egg on the shelf there. A nourishing food by all accounts?’

‘Hmn-hmn!’ agreed Alistair readily, and his mouth was so unmistakably full that Paddy Joe Long turned on him a slow but suspicious eye.

‘What’s choking you, tinker?’

‘Nothing,’ gulped the culprit.

‘You’re hiding something in front of you.’

‘An empty jar I found—just scraping the bottom of it.’ He held up the glass jar—and it was empty.

Paddy Joe emitted an anguished yell and started to his long length. He poised the iron fork dagger-wise over Alistair’s hunched shoulders and his chin jutted out like the ram of a battleship.

‘Yankee robber! King of thieves! Stealer of dead mice from blind kittens! Incontinent, bear-mouthed, sweet-toothed glutton! Oh high heaven! my last jar of nectaire honey that I was cherishing against hard times! On the prongs of this fork I will feed you with your own gizzard, you—you——’

‘ ’Ware trout!’ warned Alistair from under shielding arms. ‘Smell ’em!’

Paddy Joe turned hastily, grasped the long handle of the pan, and shook and tossed the trout with practised deftness. Then he sank back on his heels and laughed.

‘Well-oh-well! such is luck. Last night and the night before I toyed happily with the idea of getting outside that jar sort of unbeknownst—but what chance had I against an up-and-comer?’

‘Anticipation has its pleasures,’ philosophised Alistair, tossing the empty jar into the air and cleverly catching it, mouth down, on the iron spoon.

‘Ay! and may realisation torment you. One will crowd my capacity, says he. Not as much as a tail if I had any one——’

‘Here hastes one now,’ Alistair stopped him, ‘who grubbed early or went without.’

II

Along the pony-track, not more than a score of yards above the tent, came a tramper—not a tramp—a middle-sized youngish man in well-worn flannels, with a light knapsack slung on his shoulders and a silk oil-coat slipped under the straps. But he was not hasting. His head was doggedly down, his hands deep in his pockets; his slow long stride had something purposeful yet aimless about it—as if he were gloomily determined to get somewhere, yet had no interest in the end of the road.

Level with the tent the odour of the frying fish pierced his concentration, and his slow stride halted of itself. He turned and looked down at the camp and smiled contemplatively. He stood there very still for a matter of seconds, feet apart and head forward, and then brought right hand out of pocket and up to the level of an ancient felt hat.

‘God save the good work!’ he saluted quietly.

‘God save you kindly!’ Paddy Joe Long gave back the ritual. He liked the way that lad smiled. A pleasant, reserved smile with some strange touch of wistfulness in it, the mouth scarcely moving, but a crinkling about the deep eye-sockets and a narrowing of the full eye. And at the same moment Paddy Joe felt a queer psychic impulse flow into him. He smiled back, and swung to his frying-pan, gave the trout a final turn, moved one away from the others, and tapped it lightly with the iron fork.

Alistair was speaking in his easy American drawl with its quaint touch of Highland.

‘Plenty early on top of the road this morn—all the way from Corullish?’

‘Not this morn. I bedded in the bracken last night.’ And there was the real Highland note.

‘Wow! Cold?’

‘As charity—but no, sir!’ Again he smiled. ‘Charity is not cold, nor my breakfast far in front of me. The Red-Indian gentleman has already chosen me a trout.’

Alistair laughed. ‘I saw him. Come away down, travelling man.’

In that simple unconventional way was this man drawn fatefully into this company. He came down through the thin and worn heather, seated himself on a convenient boss of lichened stone, and slipped the strap of his knapsack loose. ‘I am extremely grateful to you, gentlemen,’ he said apologetically. ‘Hope you don’t mind me butting in?’

‘Sure, we’re all Christians,’ said Paddy Joe, ‘and every man is entitled to his bite and sup. Reach me that tin platter, Alistair.’

Alistair was measuring spoons of ground coffee from a rusty canister into a steaming kettle. ‘Just a moment, and I’ll slice you some bread and butter. You haven’t the barbarous taste for morning tea, Mr——?’

‘Stuart—Rogan Stuart.’ His voice hardened as in momentary challenge, and then: ‘No, I like coffee.’

At that name—Rogan Stuart—Paddy Joe looked up quickly and closely, and looked away again. His jaw muscles tightened, as if a stab of memory, not pleasant, had pierced him, but his voice was carelessly easy.

‘Alistair MacIan making coffee Américaine!’ he introduced with a hand gesture. ‘My name is Long—Patrick Joseph Stanislaus Long——’

‘Paddy Joe for short,’ the other finished for him. ‘I have heard of you, Mr Long—and read your last book.’

‘Why wouldn’t you?’ said Paddy Joe. ‘I won’t hold it against you. Two years ago I saw Rogan Stuart play stand-off half for Scotland at Lansdowne Road.’

The other looked at him steadily out of deep-set eyes. ‘I no longer play rugby, Mr Long.’ He paused, and then: ‘Two years is a long time.’

‘A hell of a long time, often,’ agreed Paddy Joe gloomily.

Alistair MacIan sensed some undercurrent of meaning between the two, something to be avoided, something unpleasant—yet something not shameful.

‘Grub-pile!’ he cried, beating two tin platters together. ‘Let us eat.’

Like practised outdoor men, they used their iron forks handily and made no crumbs. The soft morning air flowed softly about them; the sun, not yet done climbing Slievemaol, poured its young brilliance on them; below them the green waters of the bay rippled and dazzled between the green-draped breasts of the hills.

‘You are old hands at this game,’ said Rogan Stuart, his eyes admiring the rigid economy of the camp.

‘A pan and a tin kettle,’ said Paddy Joe, ‘and the width of Ireland to forage in—enough! Anything more, and one might as well stay safe home with one’s wife——’ He stopped suddenly, but Rogan Stuart ignored the pause and went on making small talk.

‘I was lucky this morning.’

‘Luckier than you knew, Mr Stuart,’ said Alistair blandly. ‘You very nearly ran into a vegetarian breakfast. We are trying out that stunt——’

Paddy Joe swallowed hastily and lifted up his long neck. ‘Ho, ho, ho! Vegetarian stunt, be Japers! Three days ago he ate two pounds of mountain mutton at Corullish Inn; and yesterday, Mary Whelan at the head of the bay roasted a chicken for him. Look at the elegant cartons in our pantry, and only one seal broken—a thing that with a spoonful of water and a lump of dripping turns into a beefsteak in the pan.’

Breakfast over, they filled leisurely pipes, and the two campers, waiving Rogan’s offer to help, did a practised clean-up. When finished the camp was housewifely tidy. The morning air flowed under the looped-up fall of the tent, and the closed lid of the big box, draped with a ground-sheet, hid away the few utensils.

While the campers were completing their toilet within the tent, Rogan Stuart sat leaning forward on his boss of lichened stone and smoked contemplatively. His half-closed eyes were on the sheening waters of the bay, and he was feeling comfortable, lazy, a little somnolent. Yes, he was lucky this morning. These were two real men. MacIan—probably Scots with American experience—or the other way about! And all Ireland knew Long—Paddy Joe Long, the rising novelist, married rather romantically to Norrey Carr, the famous actress. A wise bird Paddy Joe! He knew. The twitch of nostril, the flicker of eyelids had shown that he had not forgotten Rogan Stuart’s tragedy. Queer—most men had. Self-centred beasts men were—and none more so than himself. Yes! but no one—except one black hound—could know the completeness of the tragedy—the completeness that made this seeming entity that was Rogan Stuart nothing more than—than a dead man walking. Alive, yet dead, the trammels of life loose about him, and yet some dour spirit in him refusing to take the easy road. Never more would he be eager, or hungry—or even sorrowful. He would just drift and drift and drift for a little while by this serene, sea-washed Irish shore, and after that—go on drifting. Nothing—nothing—nothing—that was life. Oh merciless God!

Alistair and Paddy Joe came from the tent, and Rogan lifted his head, and his eyes, deep under brow, smiled wistfully. Oh, my fine, tall, easy-going men with life in your clear eyes and a joyful appreciation of life flowing from you!

‘On top of the road?’ he enquired, rising to his feet.

‘No hurry,’ said Paddy Joe carelessly.

There followed a little waiting pause, and then Alistair grinned happily. ‘We have a sort of nefarious date this morning with the harbour-master round the corner at the pier jump,’ he said tentatively.

‘Nefarious is right,’ said Paddy Joe. ‘This fellow suggests that a salmon may be caught in more ways than one.’

‘There’s a dandy way we used try—in Canada,’ said Alistair.

‘With a net,’ amplified Paddy Joe, ‘and the night not too dark.’

‘And Tom Whelan, the harbour-master, is a mine of information.’

‘So we are going up to interview him. Care for a lift?—the coracle below holds three.’

Rogan looked down at the cockle-shell moored at the foot of the sloping boulder. The framework was of fragile lath and the skin of tarred canvas; it would carry three in smooth water, but the fit would be a tight one.

‘Thank you. I think I’ll stroll round.’

‘Look in at the harbour-master’s office,’ invited Alistair, ‘and if no one is there, try the bar at the Harty Arms.’

‘Where one MacIan will be standing us a seldom drink,’ added Paddy Joe.

‘I’ll try the Harty Arms first,’ smiled Rogan.

He sat on his boss of stone and watched the two clamber down to water-level and gingerly board the bobbing little craft. Alistair took the narrow-bladed oars, Paddy Joe cast off the line from an empty petrol-tin that served as a mooring buoy, and the coracle slid and dipped with the lightness and security of an eggshell.

III

Paddy Joe sat in the stern, elbows on knees, and smoked steadily for a while; his shoulders swayed easily to the slow kick of the oars.

‘A nice lad yon,’ suggested Alistair presently.

‘He was in my thoughts,’ said Paddy Joe.

‘The look—something back of the eyes—deep in head—like ice-water down my back. What was it, Paddy Joe? You know?’

‘I do, God help me. That damned writer’s memory of mine!’

‘No weakling either—wine, woman——?’

‘Not ever! Two years ago he was as vigorous a man as ever donned the blue rugby jersey of Scotland, and that’s saying a mouthful. I saw him stop big Con Dolan flat as a flounder five yards from the line, and Con’s fifteen stone, like a fifteen-inch shell.’

‘Two years is a hell of a long time—you said that like a funeral.’

‘So I did. Think! Rogan Stuart! Does the name stir a memory?’

‘Rogan Stuart! No-o! I’m not a rugby fan.’

Paddy Joe looked down at the chess-board framework of the coracle and frowned. ‘My Norrey—your red-head,’ he half-mused, ‘and the young ones—God guard them——!’

‘What are you driving at?’

‘Suppose something happened—some accident——?’

Alistair lunged at the oars. ‘Drop that, Paddy Joe! Blast you, what a hellish thought! Do you want me to go tearing across Ireland and all Scotland——’

‘That is what happened to Rogan Stuart.’

‘When—how?’

‘Not so long ago. He lives in Dublin—or did. His wife and two-year-old daughter left the North Wall by the night-boat last winter and the boat sank in a collision in a Mersey fog.’

‘Both of them?’

‘Trapped in their berth. There was some rumour of scandal too—there always is. Some said the wife was running away from her husband, and others added that she was fleeing to the arms of another man——By the Powers! that’s queer.’

‘What is?’

‘We saw that man in the village yesterday.’

‘That tall good-looker you pointed out to me?’

‘Yes—Eudmon Butler, known as the Black Captain—a terror on two feet in love or war.’

‘Perhaps Stuart is on his trail?’

‘It could be—and what a hell of a fight at the end of it! But leave it, lad, leave it! Let the dead rest. Rogan Stuart must dree his own weird. That’s enough for you and me at this minute, and if more is required of us we’ll not be backward. Watch what you’re at! Pull your right, or you’ll bump the point.’

CHAPTER II

I

THE breeze of morning died, and the sun, poised on the shoulder of Slievemaol, grew ardent, too ardent for Rogan Stuart, somnolently abstracted on his lump of stone. Through his abstraction he felt the dry heat beat on the back of his neck, and looked lazily around for a patch of shelter. On the near side of the bridle-path a jag of basalt stood a man’s height out of the ground and cast a few feet of shadow on the heather. He lifted slowly to his feet and climbed leisurely towards it.

‘O shadow of a rock in a thirsty land!’ he murmured deeply, and sank down in the heather; he snuggled his shoulders between the two bumps on the stone and sighed comfortably. From the thighs down his legs were in the blaze of the sun, but the warmth, through the grey flannels, was not unpleasant. He clasped his hands across his flat stomach and receded into his somnolence.

Turning head to left, he could see along the bridle-path to where it curved round a buttress of the hill a hundred yards away; to the right he looked down the length of Dounbeg Bay as far as the narrows of Corullish, four miles distant. The tide was running out through the narrows, and some trick of refraction down there seemed to make the waters run uphill, a canal of shimmering pale gold curving over into the sky. All the rest of the bay was smoothed out into a level floor, and little crinkles of silver ran and spent themselves on the surface of it. Across near the other shore, which was sandy and shelving, the water was a translucent green, but under the basalt bluffs on the near side it was dark-blue, deepening to slate purple.

‘I’ll be asleep in a minute,’ thought Rogan Stuart.

Last night he had not slept well in his bracken bed, but that was not unusual; sleep had been an unsafe harbourage for him many and many a night. The sea air had had a bite, and years of city life had thinned his Scots blood. He had been roused by the chill dawn and had looked, with a strange desolation of spirit, at the panorama of mountains outlined starkly against a wan sky; and the floor of the bay was a cold steel mirror wherein the peaks stood head downwards. Then the tall bens were blacker than purple, darker than any blue, and a thick band of mist, softer than pearl, bridged Glounagrianaan and made a scarf for the shoulder of tall Leaccamore. Now the hills were less starkly outlined and more far-away, and looked bigger; green pastures, hazed by the sun, lapped the slopes between the rocky scarps; high up, basalt flashed yellow and pink and rust-brown; smoked shadows lay in fold and hollow; and the corries hid their ruggedness under a soft veil.

He liked the green over there across the water. It was lovely in the wide opening of the valley, and the trees were dark and restful. But what Fomorian had raised those red turrets? Some foreign man coming into these Irish glens and aping baronial architecture in red brick! Some idea, probably, of warming the ruggedness of the hills. Could it be that here too, as in the Highlands, strangers were stealing the lovely places from the old breed? And here was Rogan Stuart, of no stranger blood—out of Appin, like the great Alan Breck whom Stevenson had marvellously created without quite understanding—sleeping in the heather and the bracken—same as poor lost Davy Balfour—and ready to sleep at this instant—now—in one minute. . . . He was asleep in half that minute.

II

The clink of iron on gravel waked him. Rogan did not wake with a start, but carefully, guardedly, as one who has come out of quiet dreams to many a desperate dawn. O desolate wakings!

His half-shut eyes, under the brim of old felt, looked along the bridle-path to the left. Two ponies, one behind the other, were coming round the curve of the track at a fast smooth walk. It was a pace he had not before noticed in ponies—a walk that was almost an amble. And they were not quite ponies either—topping fifteen hands and wirily built, with manes and tails uncut but well groomed. The first was a smoke-blue, the second a colorado red with white stockings. Not native stock these. Their eyes were set too far forward and were too small—as if they were a throw-back to some ancient and feral breed.

He was so carelessly intent on observing the horses that, for a space, he did not particularly notice the riders. The smoke was ridden by a woman; white stockings by a tall, slimly built man. The man sat loosely in the saddle, his shoulders easily asway to the gait of his mount; he sported a big black Stetson hat, and his long legs were hidden below loose, yellow leather coverings. The woman wore the same sort of hat, but her legs were cased in the orthodox riding-breeches, and a red neckerchief was tied loosely above a white blouse. No, he did not care for women riding astride. He had seen plenty of them at the Dublin Horse Show, and many of them rode like a sack of flour—too heavy in the haunch and too much fat behind the knee. This young woman—she was young—rode, however, with full-length stirrups, and from saddle to crown she was straight as a lance, and carried herself like a lance, leaning a little forward, so that the firmness of her breasts was outlined against the thin silk. Joan of Arc would ride just like that, with all her iron fighting men behind and watching her straight back out of hard and adoring eyes.

Rogan had somewhere seen horses and riders and high-peaked saddles like these. Where? Of course! That time the cowboy rodeo visited Dublin. What was the name of that laughing plumpish girl who rode the pitching broncho? He remembered how she swung her big hat above her head while she stayed glued to the saddle and loosed a keen and melodious ky-yi-yi. This girl here was not that one. This girl was slim and unsmiling.

The ponies came on. American cow-ponies they would be—imported for the whim of some Western visitors—with a Spanish strain in them. Perhaps all this country-side was being turned into some sort of rodeo film, some soul-destroying unreal reality where the native, himself included, was a mere aborigine sitting stoically on his hunkers.

Rogan was far too lazy or not interested enough even to raise his head, and the drooping leaf of his hat hid all but the riders’ boots. The woman’s boot was of soft fawn leather, with long straight heels and fancy stitching up the front—size five about and a good instep. Now he could see only the pony’s legs, clean and fine and moving with a nice flip from the fetlock. And then the forefeet came together and stiffened, and the hind hoofs slithered an inch forward and stopped.

Rogan pushed back his old hat and looked up. The rear pony stopped short at the other’s tail, and the tall young