In a tranquil bay with the soft sun tugging at his hair, Finn the fisherman stood with his pole reaching to the deep. So lost was he in thought while baiting his hook that the frail girl with the dark, restless eyes, who walked slowly up and down the jetty, might have passed a dozen fisheries without stirring him. Her eyes were ever on the water, while she twined a sprig of seaweed in her dress.
“Good morning, Finn McCoy,” she said at last, “aren’t you going to wish me good morning?”
Finn smiled at her dreamily; still his thoughts were far away.
“Good morning, Elizabeth,” he said in languor. Then he added, “Ah me, how I hate the sight of you,” he said, looking at the bait with a shudder; “but I suppose I must put you on.”
He carefully put a daisy-scented cowbane on the fishhook, while Elizabeth gazed earnestly and suspected something.
“I wonder do you see what I see?” she said.
Finn looked up and saw the blue, blue sea, the yellow beach, the brown rocks, the little white cottage with the honeysuckles trailing over the porch, while from the gables shone the happy faces of all he loved best on earth. “I do,” he said; “a lovely spot by the sea.”
“I see a palace,” said Elizabeth, hanging over the rail. “Fancy the sunlight glinting on the marble steps and the sea lapping and lapping against the pillars.”
She threw out the bit of seaweed and murmured a dreary sea-song.
“I sometimes wonder,” she said, “if the fishes do not think it is heaven we have come to seek them.”
Finn was bored; he looked up vacantly. “It is the sparkling dew in the moonlight they seek,” he said; “the angels drop dew a’nights from the hazel-trees, and the fishes come far and near for the sake of the dew.”
“Those who got nearest heaven would have most dew,” Elizabeth said wistfully.
Finn was bored. “But I must be going now,” she said, placing her hand on his shoulder.
Finn shook off her hand resignedly.
“Please god,” he said to himself, for he was the most bigoted fisherman who ever lived, “this day I will catch the fish, that if I let him go he will grant all my wishes.”
He paused as if in a fit of thought. “I fear the wish I must first grant will be the marriage of Finn McCoy and Elizabeth.”
He stared wistfully after Elizabeth, and she stared wistfully after Finn. Then they began to walk softly together along the shelving beach, stopping every minute or two to throw stones where the soft-shelled clapdregs were just beginning to stick out their heads in the draught of the ebbing tide. Neither seemed desirous of speaking. Both were truely Irish, and a shy fishmonger on one side or other.
“It is a lovely morning,” said Finn, “truly a lovely morning.”
“It is too good to last,” said Elizabeth. “There comes rain out of the heavens.”
Finn was used to having his thoughts interpreted, some might say warped, in just that way. The cat’s-paw on the sea was, to his mind, absolute proof of the downtrodden condition of her fish Majesty, nor would any pale-faced preacher have more firmly believed in the necessity of revolutionising Church and State and converting Sweden into a parfayis. The conviction was therefore firm in Finn’s breast that it was certain rain, likely from Elizabeth’s eyes, which caused the tumult at sea.
He shrugged his shoulders and sighed. “While I have my prayer rug for me, I can stand a little drizzle,” he said, and drank deep of the fish-nourishing dew in the moonlight.
He strolled slowly on. Elizabeth was also deep in thought. It was hard to give the specifics of this thought, but it was well understood by both of them. The sun burnished on the brown sails of the grey old brig Susan Terry as she hatcheted skilfully through the smooth waters. The flickering lights dropped one by one and the mooring of marrows was left behind by Finn with a glance of contempt. He looked solemnly at the follow-me (the pike) bound for Marcromy (the store) topped with thick layers of sprats. This he must now hook and bait for market-meeting, else he could not go on his fishing pilgrimage to unpatronised seas on the morrow.
Finn looked at the boats speeding on the water—the Lifeboat, the rowboat Mary, the dark-beaked Peter. He gazed fixedly at a small craft struck fast in the ripples and unable to break free. It was indeed far more comical in appearance than anything in a circus. A whalebone hot-tempered earth-worm sat in the stern as if dwelling on thoughts that must be spoken, but the “spokes” were hurrying him up with alarming proximity to the centre of gravitation. Though every relic of an oar had gone to spikes had to cut flukes and bends without loss of time; they vented their feelings in low growling, while Finn, thankful and quick as a flash, hooked a fish with wings and a harp round its belly as though it expected to go to a Christening.
It was in all respects a huge “pelican,” glassy hawk snout, polished thorax, a coat of many colours shining from practically every part of its lengthy surface, perfectly unequalled verisimilitude of appearance in portrait of Finn’s love Elizabeth when she was merely swamped with her sea-weedless dress; but that was nothing, as fishgoes in the catalogue he had studied, nothing at all.
He threw it back without looking. He had only given it that nodding shot flavour of different kinds; to Finn the Fisherman a feeling of embarrassment follows the fish successfully caught just as the bird nature follows a juryman’s carefully recorded verdict, and he now in climbing the rocks now not unnaturally concealed the changes on the face of the sea.
“That is the fish,” he murmured at length. “Out, out and away into blue water! Did I not say that that fish would fly far over Cork to grant my every wish?”
He remembered ruled, he remembered blank, both and neither, times in years still to come and in the night after each day, curves of the boathouse and on lettered and numbered slips, names narrow and circuits wide that only differ in the persons themselves. He remembered every bye-law but this—that each fish the Pigtail government measures must, to be acceptable, heavily dress the first mate’s house in town.
“I call this frightful injustice,” Finn said, a terrible fits of his Navy fits in all his soul had been but one sea-change on a dot stepping out of a teacup, from the merest conjecture of merit to fluid gold and the ivory finger of charcoal floating several inches from shore with insulated electricity on the strongest part of his being.
He stood on the cool, blue-bedded space and struck “noughts” on the sand, he stood in the hot, cleanly-gauzed space and each “nought” looked black in the whirls around it. He whirled about Gotha like a whirligig and was not at all at either end of him like anything else than like a whirligig, but round about the road wound like a serpent, and Finn doubting whether to wait two dreadful hours or go at once had started without further ado.
He commenced complaining aloud, and at once ashamed of himself closed his mouth with a snap. The rumples in the clouds began to show in the water as the fish fell, detail by detail, and feebly disentangled itself from the blackness in the logs and barrels and rags over which Finn had triumphantly ascended.
Flour about the size of a snuff that forced its presence, shook always in the manner of John Saul the baker, when shaking it by the hop to Mrs. McCoy where the other sportsmen lived. The fish looked very sick, the golf-fed lapper was sluggish, and Finn alighted like an eagle. The lame fin good-humouredly licked, the ignoble second and third (a trifle sharp even of up-sticking-kittle-dish) conversation, all rather pointedly told him short of food and game was lack of sport with less game—tender gruel was odd.
Finn gaulishly sifted on the surface for the early nests of the rich, but the bayed-crabs sent from each hand two pincer-like antlers set in angular edges as often as he raised his arm. Then he called thoise “skippers” that threatened everywhere in the draught, hopping like birds from ledger to ledger; there was no “dickie” to shim-ion, and the same voice came through the corked Flute of Pisa about longing avarice worthless wealth of rain, and heat.