The Wind Bloweth | Page 7

the racing boats, wee fellow?"
And that was all he ever got from Uncle Robin. But he knew some of
his father's songs that were sung in the country-side ...
Is truagh, a ghradh, gan me agas thu im Bla chliath! No air an traigh
bhain an ait nach robh duine riamh, Seachd oidhche, seachd la, gan
tamh, gan chodal, gan bhiadh, Ach thusa bhi 'm ghraidh's lamh geal
thardam gu fial!
"O God! my loved one, that you and I were in Dublin town! Or on a
white strand, where no foot ever touched before. Day in, night in,
without food or sleep, what mattered it? But you to be loving me and
your white arm around me so generously!"
He couldn't understand the song, though the lilt of the words captured
him. What should people accept being without food or sleep? And what
good was a white arm generously around one? However, that was love,
and it was a mystery.... But that song could not have been to his mother.
He could not imagine her being generous with even a white arm. And
none would want to be with her on a strand without food or sleep; that
he instinctively felt. She was a high, proud cliff, stern and proud and
beautiful, and that song was a song of May-time and the green rushes....
And other songs of his father's were sung: "Maidne
Fhoghmhair--Autumn Mornings," and "In Uir-chill an Chreagain--In
the Green Graveyard of Creggan...."
A queer thing that all that should be left of his father was a chill silence
and a song a man might raise at the rising of the moon....
Silent he was in his grave, dumb as a stone, and all his uncles were
silent, too, barring the little smile at the corners of their mouths, that
was but the murmuring of the soul.... There were paintings of them all
and they young in the house, their high heads, their hawks' eyes, Alan

and Robin and Mungo.... And Mungo, too, was dead with Wellington
in the Peninsula. He and three of his men were all left of the Antrim
company. "Christ! have I lost this fight, too?" He laughed and a French
ball took him in the gullet. "Be damned to that!" He coughed. "He
might have got me in a cleaner place!" And that was the end of
Mungo....
And Alan had gone with Sir John Franklin to the polar seas, and come
back with the twisted grin. "'T was a grand thing you did, Alan, to live
through and come back from the wasted lands." "'T was a grand thing
they did, to find the channel o' trade. But me, I went to find the north
pole, with the white bear by the side of it, like you see in the
story-books. And I never got within the length of Ireland o' 't! Trade,
aye; but what's trade to me? It's a unco place, the world!"
His father he could imagine: "Poor Colquitto Campbell! He wanted to
bark like an eagle, and he made a wee sweet sound, like a canary-bird!
Ah, well, give the bottle the sunwise turn, man o' the house, and come
closer to me, a bheilin tana nan bpog, O slender mouth of the kisses!"
His father, wee Shane thought, must have worn the twisted grin, too.
He knew what the twisted grin meant. It meant defeat. He had seen it
on his Uncle Alan's face when he lost the championship of Ireland on
the golf links of Portrush. And that morning he had been so confident!
"'T is the grand golf I'll play the day, and the life tingling in my
finger-tips!" And great golf he did play, with his ripping passionate
shots, but a thirty-foot putt on the home green beat him. All through the
match his face had been dour, but now came the outstretched hand and
the smile at the corner of the mouth:
"Congratulations, sir! 'T is yourself has the grand eye for the hard putt
on the tricky green!"
The wee grin meant that Alan had been beaten.
And Uncle Robin, too, the wisest and oldest of them all, who had been
to Arabia and had been all through Europe and was Goethe's friend, he
had the twisted grin of the beaten man. Only occasionally you could get

past the grin of Uncle Robin, as he had gotten past it the day Uncle
Robin had spoken of his brother, Shane's father. And sometimes when
a great hush was on the mountains and the Moyle was silent, Uncle
Robin would murmer a verse of his great poet friend's:
Über allen Gipfeln Ist Ruh, In allen Wipfeln Spürest du Kaum einen
Hauch; Die Vögelein schweigen im Walde. Warte nur, balde Ruhest du
auch.
The sharp