She had gone through caring not at all, and then caring too much, and was now busy caring just the right way.

The corners of her mouth were pinned up, gently.

A close call, I thought. Very close.

I left them like two friends met in the street, the harp and herself.

I ran for the hotel to thank her the only way I knew how: to do my own work and do it well.

But on the way I stopped at The Four Provinces.

The music was still being treaded lightly and the clover was still being treaded softly, and no lover at all was being bruised as I let the pub door hush and looked all around for the man whose hand I most wanted to shake.

22.

And on and on it went as day after day I struck and flensed the Whale, and read Marcus Aurelius and admired his suicide, and had myself taxied out each night to discuss my eight pages of daily script with the man who arose from women to ride with hounds. Then, each midnight, when I was ready to turn back to the tidal rains and the Royal Hibernian Hotel, John would wake the operator in the Kilc.o.c.k village exchange and have her put me through to the warmest, if totally unheated, spot in town.

"Heeber Finn's pub?" I'd shout, once connected. "Is Mike there? Could you send him along, please?"

My mind's eye saw them, the local boys, lined up, peering over the barricade at that freckled mirror-frozen winter pond and themselves all drowned and deep in that lovely ice. I heard Heeber Finn sing out from the phone and Mike's quick shout: "Just look! I'm headin' for the door!"

Early on, I learned that "headin' for the door" was no nerve-shattering process that might affront dignity or destroy the fine filigree of any argument being woven with great and breathless beauty at Finn's. It was, rather, a gradual disengagement, a leaning of the bulk so one's gravity was diplomatically shifted toward that far empty side of the public room where the door, shunned by all, stood neglected.

Timing it, I figured the long part of Mike's midnight journey- the length of Finn's-took half an hour. The short part-from Finn's to the house where I waited--but five minutes.

So it was on a night late in February when I called and waited.

And at last, down through the night forest thrashed the 1928 Nash, peat-turf-colored on top, like Mike. Car and driver gasped, sighed, wheezed softly, easily, gently, as they nudged into the courtyard and I stepped down under a moonless and for a change rainless brightly starred sky.

I peered through the car window at unstirred dark; the dashboard lights had been dead these many years.

"Mike . . . ?"

"None other," he whispered secretly. "And ain't it a fine warm evenin'?"

The temperature was forty. But Mike'd been no nearer Rome than the Tipperary sh.o.r.eline; so weather was relative.

"A fine warm evening." I climbed up front and gave the squealing door its absolutely compulsory, rust-splintering slam. "Mike, how've you been since?"

"Ah." He let the car bulk and grind itself down the forest path. "I got me health. Ain't that all-and-everything with Lent comin' on tomorra?"

"Lent," I mused. "What will you give up for Lent, Mike?"

"I been turnin' it over." Mike sucked his cigarette suddenly; the pink, lined mask of his face blinked off the smoke. "And why not these terrible things ya see in me mouth? Dear as gold fillin's, and a dread congestor of the lungs they be. Put it all down, add 'em up, and ya got a sick loss by the year's turnin', ya know. So ya'll not find these filthy creatures in me face again the whole time of Lent, and, who knows, after!"

"Bravo!" said I, a nonsmoker.

"Bravo, says I to meself," wheezed Mike, one eye flinched with smoke.

"Good luck."

"I'll need it," whispered Mike, "with the sin's own habit to be broke."

And we moved with firm control and thoughtful shift of weight, down and around a turfy hollow and through a mist and into Dublin at thirty-one easy miles an hour.

Bear with me while I stress it: Mike was the most careful driver in all G.o.d's world, including any sane, small, quiet, b.u.t.ter-and-milk producing country you name.

Above all, Mike stood innocent and sainted when compared to those motorists who key that small switch marked paranoia each time they fuse themselves to their bucket seats in Los Angeles, Mexico City, or Paris. Also, to those blind men who, forsaking tin cups and canes but still wearing their Hollywood dark gla.s.ses, laugh insanely through the Via Veneto, shaking brake-drum linings like carnival serpentine out their race-car windows. Consider the Roman ruins; surely they are the wreckage strewn by motorbiking otters who, all night beneath your hotel shriek down dark Roman alleys, Christians h.e.l.l-bent for the Colosseum lion pits.

Mike, now. See his easy hands loving the wheel in a slow clocklike turning as soft and silent as winter constellations snow down the sky. Listen to his mist-breathing voice all night-quiet as he charms the road, his foot a tenderly benevolent pat on the whispering accelerator, never a mile under thirty, never two miles over. Mike, Mike, and his steady boat gentling a mild sweet lake where all Time slumbers. Look, compare. And bind such a man to you with summer gra.s.ses, gift him with silver, shake his hand warmly at each journey's end.

"Good night, Mike," I said at the hotel. "See you tomorrow." "G.o.d willing," he murmured. And he drove softly away.

Let twenty-three hours of sleep, breakfast, lunch, supper, late nightcap pa.s.s. Let hours of writing bad script into fair script fade to peat mist and rain, and here this young writer comes again, another midnight, out of that Georgian mansion, its door throwing a warm hearth of color before me as I tread down the steps to feel Braille-wise in fog for the car I knew hulked there. I heard its enlarged and asthmatic heart gasping in the blind air, and Mike coughing his "gold by the ounce is not more precious" cough. "Ah, there you are, sir!" said Mike.

And I climbed in the sociable front seat and gave the door its slam. "Mike," I said, smiling.

And then the impossible! The car jerked as if shot from the blazing mouth of a furnace, roared, bounced, skidded, then cast itself in full, stoning ricochet down the path among shattered bushes and writhing shadows. I s.n.a.t.c.hed my knees as my head hit the roof in staccato.

Mike! I almost shouted. Mike!

Visions of Los Angeles, Mexico City, Paris, jumped through my mind. I gazed in frank dismay at the speedometer. Eighty, ninety, one hundred miles; we shot out a great blast of gravel to hit the main road, rocked over a bridge, and slid down in the midnight streets of Kilc.o.c.k. No sooner in than out of town at one hundred ten miles, I felt all Ireland's gra.s.s put down its ears when we, with a yell, soared over a rise.

Mike! I thought, and turned.

There he sat, only one thing the same. On his lips a cigarette burned, smoking first one eye, then the other.

But the rest of Mike, above the cigarette, was changed as if the Adversary himself had squeezed, molded, and fired him with dark hands. There he was, whirling the wheel round about, over around; here we frenzied under trestles, out of tunnels, here knocked crossroad signs spinning like weatherc.o.c.ks in whirlwinds.

Mike's face: the wisdom was drained from it, the eyes neither gentle nor philosophical, the mouth neither tolerant nor at peace. It was a face washed raw, a scalded, peeled potato, a face more like a blinding searchlight raking its steady and meaningless glare ahead while his quick hands snaked and bit and bit the wheel again to lean us round curves and jump us off cliff after cliff f night.

It's not Mike, I thought, it's his brother. No, a dire thing's. .h.i.t his life, some affliction or blow, a family sorrow or sickness, yes, that's it.

And then Mike spoke, and his voice, it was changed too. Gone was the mellow peat bog, the moist sod, the warm fire in out of the cold rain, gone the gentle gra.s.s. Now the voice cracked at me, a clarion, a trumpet, all iron and tin.

"Well, how ya been since! How is it with ya!" he cried.

And the car, it too had suffered violence. It protested the change, yes, for it was an old and much-beaten thing that had done its time and now only wished to stroll along, like a crusty beggar, toward sea and sky, careful of its breath and bones. But Mike would have none of that, and cadged the wreck on as if thundering toward h.e.l.l, there to warm his cold hands at some special blaze. Mike leaned, the car leaned; great livid gases blew out in fireworks from the exhaust. Mike's frame, my frame, the car's frame, racked all together, shuddered and ticked wildly.

My sanity was saved from being torn clean off the bone by a simple act. My eyes, seeking the cause of their plaguing flight, ran over the man blazing there like a sheet of ignited vapor from the Abyss, and laid hold to the answering clue.

"Mike," I gasped, "it's the first night of Lent!"

"So?"

"So," I said, "remembering your Lenten promise, why's that cigarette in your mouthT'

Mike cast his eyes down, saw the jiggling smoke, and shrugged.

"Ah," he said, "I gave up the ither."

"The ither?" I cried.

"The other!" He corrected the word.

And suddenly it was all clear.

For what seemed like a thousand nights, at the door of the old Georgian house, I had accepted from Odd John a fiery douse of Irish "against the chill." Then, breathing hot summer charcoal from my scorched mouth, I had walked out to a cab where sat a man who, during all the long evenings' waiting for me to phone for his services, had lived in Heeber Finn's pub.

Fool! I thought. How could you have forgotten!

And there in Heeber Finn's, during the long hours of lazy talk that was like planting and bringing to crop a garden among busy men, each contributing his seed or flower, and wielding the implements, their tongues, and the raised, foam-hived gla.s.ses, their own hands softly curled about the dear drinks, there Mike had taken into himself a mellowness.

And that mellowness had distilled itself down in a slow rain that damped his smoldering nerves and put the wilderness fires in every limb of him out. Those same showers laved his face to leave the tidal marks of wisdom, the lines of Plato and Aeschylus, there. The harvest mellowness colored his cheeks, warmed his eyes soft, lowered his voice to a husking mist, and spread in his chest to slow his heart to a gentle trot. It rained out his arms to loosen his hard-mouthed hands on the shuddering wheel and sit him with grace and ease in his horsehair saddle as he gentled through the fogs that kept us and Dublin apart. And with the malt on my own tongue, fluming up my sinus with burning vapors, I had never detected the scent of any spirits on my old friend here.

"Ah," said Mike again, "yes; I give up the other."

The last bit of jigsaw fell in place.

Tonight, the first night of Lent.

Tonight, for the first time in all the nights I had driven with him, Mike was sober.

All those other one hundred and forty-odd nights, Mike hadn't been driving careful and easy just for my safety, no, but because of the gentle weight of mellowness sloping now on this side, now on that side of him as we took the long, scything curves.

Oh, who really knows the Irish, and which half of them is which? Mike? Who is Mike-and what in the world is he? Which Mike's the real Mike, the one that everyone knows?

I will not think on it! I thought.

There is only one Mike for me. The one that Ireland shaped herself with her weathers and waters, her seedings and harvestings, her brans and mashes, her brews, bottlings, and ladlings-out, her summer-grain-colored pubs astir and advance with the wind in the wheat and barley by night: you may hear the good whisper way out in forest, on bog, as you roll by. That's Mike to the teeth, eye, and heart, to his easygoing hands. If you ask what makes the Irish what they are, I'd point on down the road and tell where you turn to Heeber Finn's.

The first night of Lent, and before you could count nine, we were in Dublin!

The next night I was at Kilc.o.c.k and coming out of the great himself's house, and there was my taxi waiting and puttering its motor. I leaned in to put a special bottle in the hands of dear Mike.

Earnestly, pleadingly, warmly, with all the friendly urging in the world, I looked into that fine man's raw, strange, torchlike face.

"Mike," I said.

"Sir!" he shouted.

"Do me a favor," I said.

"Anything!" he shouted.

"Take this," I said. "It's the best bottle of Irish moss I could find. And just before we leave now, Mike, drink it down, drink all or some. Will you do that, Mike? Will you promise me, cross your heart and hope to die, to do that?"

He thought on it, and the very thought damped the ruinous blaze in his face.

"Ya make it terrible hard on me," he said.

I forced his fingers shut on the bottle.

"Give up something else for Lent, Mike," I said.

"There's nothing else to give up, in all of Ireland. Wait a minute! I'll give up women!"

"Have you ever had any?"

"No," said Mike, "but I'll give them up anyway!"

He drank.

And as he drank, a great calm, a great peace, a great serenity came over his mouth, his eyes, his face; his bones quietly slumped in his clothes.

I looked into that face.

"Ah, Mike, Mike," I said, "you're "I was long away," he said.

We drove to Dublin, slowly.

23.

It was when I was going into the Royal Hibernian Hotel that a beggar woman shoved her filthy baby in my face and cried: "Ah, G.o.d, pity! It's pity we're in need of! Have you some!!"

I had some somewhere on my person, and slapped my pockets and fetched it out, and was on the point of handing it over when I gave a small cry, or exclamation. The coins spilled from my hand.

In that instant, the babe was eyeing me, and I the babe.

Then it was s.n.a.t.c.hed away. The woman bent to paw after the coins, glancing up at me in some sort of panic.

"What on earth?" I guided myself up into the lobby, where, stunned, I all but forgot my name. "What's wrong? What happened out there?"

It was the baby, the beggar's child. It was the same, same nose and mouth, but the eyes, the same eyes seen years ago, when I traveled Ireland and saw the poor. Far back in 1939, yes, but- my G.o.d!-the same!

I walked slowly back to the hotel door and opened it to look out.