Chapter 7

“An’ after the gaugers and their crony, Ould Nick, ran off wid the uncle of him, Nance and he and the childer lived together in their father’s and mother’s house; and if they didn’t live and die happy, I wish that you and I may.”

NEAL MALONE

BY WILLIAM CARLETON

There never was a greater-souled or doughtier tailor than little Neal Malone. Though but four feet four in height, he paced the earth with the courage and confidence of a giant; nay, one would have imagined that he walked as if he feared the world itself was about to give way under him. Let no one dare to say in future that a tailor is but the ninth part of a man. That reproach has been gloriously taken away from the character of the cross-legged corporation by Neal Malone. He has wiped it off like a stain from the collar of a secondhand coat; he has pressed this wrinkle out of the lying front of antiquity; he has drawn together this rent in the respectability of his profession. No. By him who was breeches-maker to the gods,--that is, except, like Highlanders, they eschewed inexpressibles,--by him who cut Jupiter’s frieze jocks for winter, and eke by the bottom of his thimble, we swear that Neal Malone was _more_ than the ninth part of a man.

Setting aside the Patagonians, we maintain that two thirds of mortal humanity were comprised in Neal; and perhaps we might venture to assert that two thirds of Neal’s humanity were equal to six thirds of another man’s. It is right well known that Alexander the Great was a little man, and we doubt whether, had Alexander the Great been bred to the tailoring business, he would have exhibited so much of the hero as Neal Malone. Neal was descended from a fighting family, who had signalised themselves in as many battles as ever any single hero of antiquity fought. His father, his grandfather, and his great-grandfather were all fighting men, and his ancestors in general, up, probably, to Con of the Hundred Battles himself. No wonder, therefore, that Neal’s blood should cry out against the cowardice of his calling; no wonder that he should be an epitome of all that was valorous and heroic in a peaceable man, for we neglected to inform the reader that Neal, though “bearing no base mind,” never fought any man in his own person. That, however, deducted nothing from his courage. If he did not fight it was simply because he found cowardice universal. No man would engage him; his spirit blazed in vain; his thirst for battle was doomed to remain unquenched, except by whisky, and this only increased it. In short, he could find no foe. He has often been known to challenge the first cudgel-players and pugilists of the parish, to provoke men of fourteenstone weight, and to bid mortal defiance to faction heroes of all grades-but in vain. There was that in him which told them that an encounter with Neal would strip them of their laurels. Neal saw all this with a lofty indignation; he deplored the degeneracy of the times, and thought it hard that the descendant of such a fighting family should be doomed to pass through life peaceably, whilst so many excellent rows and riots took place around him. It was a calamity to see every man’s head broken but his own; a dismal thing to observe his neighbours go about with their bones in bandages, yet his untouched, and his friends beat black and blue, whilst his own cuticle remained unscoloured.

“Blur an’ agers!” exclaimed Neal one day, when half tipsy in the fair, “am I never to get a bit o’ figtin’? Is there no cowardly spalpeen to stand afore Neal Malone? Be this an’ be that, I’m blue-mowlded for want of a batin’! I’m disgracin’ my relations by the life I’m ladin’! Will none o’ ye fight me aither for love, money, or whisky, frind or inimy, an’ bad luck to ye? I don’t care a traneen which, only out o’ pure frindship, let us have a morsel o’ the rale kick-up, ’t any rate. Frind or inimy, I say agin, if you regard me; sore _that_ makes no differ, only let us have the fight.”

This excellent heroism was all wasted; Neal could not find a single adversary. Except he divided himself like Hotspur, and went to buffets one hand against the other, there was no chance of a fight; no person to be found sufficiently magnanimous to encounter the tailor. On the contrary, every one of his friends--or, in other words, every man in the parish--was ready to support him. He was clapped on the back until his bones were nearly dislocated in his body, and his hand shaken until his arm lost its cunning at the needle for half a week afterward. This, to be sure, was a bitter business, a state of being past endurance. Every man was his friend--no man was his enemy. A desperate position for any person to find himself in, but doubly calamitous to a martial tailor.

Many a dolourous complaint did Neal make upon the misfortune of having none to wish him ill; and what rendered this hardship doubly oppressive was the unlucky fact that no exertions of his, however offensive, could procure him a single foe. In vain did he insult, abuse, and malign all his acquaintances. In vain did he father upon them all the rascality and villainy he could think of; he lied against them with a force and originality that would have made many a modern novelist blush for want of invention--but all to no purpose. The world for once became astonishingly Christian; it paid back all his efforts to excite its resentment with the purest of charity; when Neal struck it on the one cheek, it meekly turned unto him the other. It could scarcely be expected that Neal would bear this. To have the whole world in friendship with a man is beyond doubt an affliction. Not to have the face of a single enemy to look upon would decidedly be considered a deprivation of many agreeable sensations by most people as well as by Neal Malone. Let who might sustain a loss or experience a calamity, it was a matter of indifference to Neal. They were only his friends, and he troubled neither his head nor his heart about them.

Heaven help us! There is no man without his trials; and Neal, the reader perceives, was not exempt from his. What did it avail him that he carried a cudgel ready for all hostile contingencies, or knit his brows and shook his kippeen at the fiercest of his fighting friends? The moment he appeared they softened into downright cordiality. His presence was the signal of peace; for, notwithstanding his unconquerable propensity to warfare, he went abroad as the genius of unanimity, though carrying in his bosom the redoubtable disposition of a warrior; just as the sun, though the source of light himself, is said to be dark enough at bottom.

It could not be expected that Neal, with whatever fortitude he might bear his other afflictions, could bear such tranquillity like a hero. To say that he bore it as one would be basely to surrender his character; for what hero ever bore a state of tranquillity with courage? It affected his cutting out! It produced what Burton calls “a windie melancholie,” which was nothing else than an accumulation of courage that had no means of escaping, if courage can, without indignity, be ever said to escape. He sat uneasy on his lap-board. Instead of cutting out soberly, he flourished his scissors as if he were heading a faction; he wasted much chalk by scoring his cloth in wrong places, and even caught his hot goose without a holder. These symptoms alarmed his friends, who persuaded him to go to a doctor. Neal went to satisfy them; but he knew that no prescription could drive the courage out of him, that he was too far gone in heroism to be made a coward of by apothecary stuff. Nothing in the pharmacopoeia could physic him into a pacific state. His disease was simply the want of an enemy, and an unaccountable superabundance of friendship on the part of his acquaintances. How could a doctor remedy this by a prescription? Impossible. The doctor, indeed, recommended blood-letting; but to lose blood in a peaceable manner was not only cowardly, but a bad cure for courage. Neal declined it: he would lose no blood for any man until he could not help it; which was giving the character of a hero at a single touch. _His_ blood was not to be thrown away in this manner; the only lancet ever applied to his relations was the cudgel, and Neal scorned to abandon the principles of his family.

His friends, finding that he reserved his blood for more heroic purposes than dastardly phlebotomy, knew not what to do with him. His perpetual exclamation was, as we have already stated, “I’m blue-mowlded for want of a batin’!” They did everything in their power to cheer him with the hope of a drubbing; told him he lived in an excellent country for a man afflicted with his malady; and promised, if it were at all possible, to create him a private enemy or two, who, they hoped in heaven, might trounce him to some purpose.

This sustained him for a while; but as day after day passed and no appearance of action presented itself, he could not choose but increase in courage. His soul, like a sword-blade too long in the scabbard, was beginning to get fuliginous by inactivity. He looked upon the point of his own needle and the bright edge of his scissors with a bitter pang when he thought of the spirit rusting within him; he meditated fresh insults, studied new plans, and hunted out cunning devices for provoking his acquaintances to battle, until by degrees he began to confound his own brain and to commit more grievous oversights in his business than ever. Sometimes he sent home to one person a coat with the legs of a pair of trousers attached to it for sleeves, and despatched to another the arms of the aforesaid coat tacked together as a pair of trousers. Sometimes the coat was made to button behind instead of before; and he frequently placed the pockets in the lower part of the skirts, as if he had been in league with cutpurses.

This was a melancholy situation, and his friends pitied him accordingly.

“Don’t be cast down, Neal,” said they; “your friends feel for you, poor fellow.”

“Divil carry my frinds,” replied Neal; “sure, there’s not one o’ yez frindly enough to be my inimy. Tare an’ ouns! what’ll I do? I’m blue-mowlded for want of a batin’!”

Seeing that their consolation was thrown away upon him, they resolved to leave him to his fate; which they had no sooner done then Neal had thoughts of taking to the Skiomachia as a last remedy. In this mood he looked with considerable antipathy at his own shadow for several nights; and it is not to be questioned but that some hard battles would have taken place between them had it not been for the cunning of the shadow, which declined to fight him in any other position than with its back to the wall. This occasioned him to pause, for the wall was a fearful antagonist, inasmuch as it knew not when it was beaten; but there was still an alternative left. He went to the garden one clear day about noon, and hoped to have a bout with the shade free from interruption. Both approached, apparently eager for the combat and resolved to conquer or die, when a villainous cloud, happening to intercept the light, gave the shadow an opportunity of disappearing, and Neal found himself once more without an opponent.

“It’s aisy known,” said Neal, “you haven’t the _blood_ in you, or you’d come to the scratch like a man.”

He now saw that fate was against him, and that any further hostility toward the shadow was only a tempting of Providence. He lost his health, spirits, and everything but his courage. His countenance became pale and peaceful-looking; the bluster departed from him; his body shrank up like a withered parsnip. Thrice was he compelled to take in his clothes, and thrice did he ascertain that much of his time would be necessarily spent in pursuing his retreating person through the solitude of his almost deserted garments.

God knows it is difficult to form a correct opinion upon a situation so parodoxical as Neal’s was. To be reduced to skin and bone by the downright friendship of the world was, as the sagacious reader will admit, next to a miracle. We appeal to the conscience of any man who finds himself without an enemy whether he be not a greater skeleton than the tailor; we will give him fifty guineas provided he can show a calf to his leg. We know he could not; for the tailor had none, and that was because he had not an enemy. No man in friendship with the world ever has calves to his legs. To sum up all in a parodox of our own invention, for which we claim the full credit of originality, we now assert that more men have risen in the world by the injury of their enemies than have risen by the kindness of their friends. You may take this, reader, in any sense; apply it to hanging if you like; it is still immutably and immovably true.

One day Neal sat cross-legged, as tailors usually sit, in the act of pressing a pair of breeches; his hands were placed, backs up, upon the handle of his goose, and his chin rested upon the backs of his hands. To judge from his sorrowful complexion, one would suppose that he sat rather to be sketched as a picture of misery or of heroism in distress than for the industrious purpose of pressing the seams of a garment. There was a great deal of New Burlington Street pathos in his countenance; his face, like the times, was rather out of joint; “the sun was just setting, and his golden beams fell, with a saddened splendor, athwart the tailor’s--” The reader may fill up the picture.

In this position sat Neal when Mr. O’Connor, the schoolmaster, whose inexpressibles he was turning for the third time, entered the workshop. Mr. O’Connor himself was as finished a picture of misery as the tailor. There was a patient, subdued kind of expression in his face which indicated a very fair portion of calamity; his eye seemed charged with affliction of the first water; on each side of his nose might be traced two dry channels, which, no doubt, were full enough while the tropical rains of his countenance lasted. Altogether, to conclude from appearances, it was a dead match in affliction between him and the tailor; both seemed sad, fleshless, and unthriving.

“Misther O’Connor,” said the tailor, when the schoolmaster entered, “won’t you be pleased to sit down?”

Mr. O’Connor sat; and, after wiping his forehead, laid his hat upon the lap-board, put his half-handkerchief in his pocket, and looked upon the tailor. The tailor, in return, looked upon Mr. O’Connor; but neither of them spoke for some minutes. Neal, in fact, appeared to be wrapped up in his own misery, and Mr. O’Connor in his; or, as we often have much gratuitous sympathy for the distresses of our friends, we question but the tailor was wrapped up in Mr. O’Connor’s misery, and Mr. O’Connor in the tailor’s.

Mr. O’Connor at length said: “Neal, are my inexpressibles finished?”

“I am now pressin’ your inexpressibles,” replied Neal; “but, be my sowl, Mr. O’Connor, it’s not your inexpressibles I’m thinkin’ of. I’m not the ninth part o’ what I was. I’d hardly make paddin’ for a collar now.”

“Are you able to carry a staff still, Neal?”

“I’ve a light hazel one that’s handy,” said the tailor, “but where’s the use o’ carryin’ it whin I can get no one to fight wid? Sure, I’m disgracin’ my relations by the life I’m ladin’. I’ll go to my grave widout ever batin’ a man or bein’ bate myself; that’s the vexation. Divil the row ever I was able to kick up in my life; so that I’m fairly blue-mowlded for want of a batin’. But if you have patience--”

“Patience!” said Mr. O’Connor, with a shake of the head that was perfectly disastrous even to look at,--“patience, did you say, Neal?”

“Ay,” said Neal, “an’ be my sowl, if you deny that I said patience I’ll break your head!”

“Ah, Neal,” returned the other, “I don’t deny it; for, though I’m teaching philosophy, knowledge, and mathematics every day in my life, yet I’m learning patience myself both night and day. No, Neal; I have forgotten to deny anything. I have not been guilty of a contradiction, out of my own school, for the last fourteen years. I once expressed the shadow of a doubt about twelve years ago, but ever since I have abandoned even doubting. That doubt was the last expiring effort at maintaining my domestic authority--but I suffered for it.”

“Well,” said Neal, “if you have patience, I’ll tell you what afflicts me from beginnin’ to endin’.”

“I _will_ have patience,” said Mr. O’Connor; and he accordingly heard a dismal and indignant tale from the tailor.

“You have told me that fifty times over,” said Mr. O’Connor, after hearing the story. “Your spirit is too martial for a pacific life. If you follow my advice, I will teach you how to ripple the calm current of your existence to some purpose. _Marry a wife_. For twenty-five years I have given instruction in three branches, namely, philosophy, knowledge, and mathematics. I am also well versed in matrimony, and I declare that, upon my misery and by the contents of all my afflictions, it is my solemn and melancholy opinion that, if you marry a wife, you will, before three months pass over your concatenated state, not have a single complaint to make touching a superabundance of peace or tranquillity or a love of fighting.”

“Do you mane to say that any woman would make me afeard?” said the tailor, deliberately rising up and getting his cudgel. “I’ll thank you merely to go over the words agin, till I thrasy you widin an inch of your life. That’s all”

“Neal,” said the schoolmaster, meekly, “I won’t fight; I have been too often subdued ever to presume on the hope of a single victory. My spirit is long since evaporated; I am like one of your own shreds, a mere selvage. Do you not know how much my habiliments have shrunk in even within the last five years? Hear me, Neal, and venerate my words as if they proceeded from the lips of a prophet. If you wish to taste the luxury of being subdued--if you are, as you say, blue-moulded for want of a beating, and sick at heart of a peaceful existence--why, marry a wife. Neal, send my breeches home with all haste, for they are wanted, you understand. Farewell.”

Mr. O’Connor, having thus expressed himself, departed; and Neal stood, with the cudgel in his hand, looking at the door out of which he passed, with an expression of fierceness, contempt, and reflection strongly blended on the ruins of his once heroic visage.

Many a man has happiness within his reach if he but knew it. The tailor had been hitherto miserable because he pursued a wrong object. The schoolmaster, however, suggested a train of thought upon which Neal now fastened with all the ardour of a chivalrous temperament. Nay, be wondered that the family spirit should have so completely seized upon the fighting side of his heart as to preclude all thoughts of matrimony; for he could not but remember that his relations were as ready for marriage as for fighting. To doubt this would have been to throw a blot upon his own escutcheon. He therefore very prudently asked himself to whom, if he did not marry, should he transmit his courage. He was a single man, and, dying as such, he would be the sole depository of his own valor, which, like Junius’s secret, must perish with him. If he could have left it as a legacy to such of his friends as were most remarkable for cowardice, why, the case would be altered: but this was impossible, and he had now no other means of preserving it to posterity than by creating a posterity to inherit it. He saw, too, that the world was likely to become convulsed. Wars, as everybody knew, were certain to break out; and would it not be an excellent opportunity for being father to a colonel, or perhaps a general, that might astonish the world?

The change visible in Neal after the schoolmaster’s last visit absolutely thunderstruck all who knew him. The clothes which he had rashly taken in to fit his shrivelled limbs were once more let out. The tailor expanded with a new spirit; his joints ceased to be supple, as in the days of his valor; his eye became less fiery but more brilliant. From being martial, he got desperately gallant; but, somehow, he could not afford to act the hero and lover both at the same time. This, perhaps, would be too much to expect from a tailor. His policy was better. He resolved to bring all his available energy to bear upon the charms of whatever fair nymph he should select for the honour of matrimony; to waste his spirit in fighting would, therefore, be a deduction from the single purpose in view.

The transition from war to love is by no means so remarkable as we might at first imagine. We quote Jack Falstaff in proof of this; or, if the reader be disposed to reject our authority, then we quote Ancient Pistol himself--both of whom we consider as the most finished specimens of heroism that ever carried a safe skin. Acres would have been a hero had he worn gloves to prevent the courage from oozing out at his palms, or not felt such an unlucky antipathy to the “snug lying in the Abbey”; and as for Captain Bobadil, he never had an opportunity of putting his plan for vanquishing an army into practice. We fear, indeed, that neither his character nor Ben Jonson’s knowledge of human nature is properly understood; for it certainly could not be expected that a man whose spirit glowed to encounter a whole host could, without tarnishing his dignity, if closely pressed, condescend to fight an individual. But as these remarks on courage may be felt by the reader as an invidious introduction of a subject disagreeable to him, we beg to hush it for the present and return to the tailor.

No sooner had Neal begun to feel an inclination to matrimony than his friends knew that his principles had veered by the change now visible in his person and deportment. They saw he had ratted from courage and joined love. Heretofore his life had been all winter, darkened by storm and hurricane. The fiercer virtues had played the devil with him; every word was thunder, every look lightning; but now all that had passed away. Before he was the _fortiter in re_; at present he was the _suaviter in modo_. His existence was perfect spring, beautifully vernal. All the amiable and softer qualities began to bud about his heart; a genial warmth was diffused over him; his soul got green within him; every day was serene, and if a cloud happened to become visible, there was a roguish rainbow astride of it, on which sat a beautiful Iris that laughed down at him and seemed to say, “Why the dickens, Neal, don’t you marry a wife?”

Neal could not resist the afflatus which decended on him; an ethereal light dwelled, he thought, upon the face of nature; the colour of the cloth which he cut out from day to day was, to his enraptured eye, like the colour of Cupid’s wings--all purple; his visions were worth their weight in gold; his dreams a credit to the bed he slept on; and his feelings, like blind puppies, young and alive to the milk of love and kindness which they drew from his heart. Most of this delight escaped the observation of the world, for Neal, like your true lover, became shy and mysterious. It is difficult to say what he resembled; no dark lantern ever had more light shut up within itself than Neal had in his soul, although his friends were not aware of it. They knew, indeed, that he had turned his back upon valor; but beyond this their knowledge did not extend.

Neal was shrewd enough to know that what he felt must be love; nothing else could distend him with happiness until his soul felt light and bladderlike but love. As an oyster opens when expecting the tide, so did his soul expand at the contemplation of matrimony. Labour ceased to be a trouble to him; he sang and sewed from morning till night; his hot goose no longer burned him, for his heart was as hot as his goose; the vibrations of his head, at each successive stitch, were no longer sad and melancholy. There was a buoyant shake of exultation in them which showed that his soul was placid and happy within him.