Adam & Eve & Pinch Me

MARCHING TO ZION

In the great days that are gone I was walking the Journey upon its easy smiling roads and came one morning of windy spring to the side of a wood. I had but just rested to eat my crusts and suck a drink from the pool when a fat woman appeared and sat down before me. I gave her the grace of the morning.

“And how many miles is it now?” I asked of her.

“What!” said she, “you’re not going the journey?”

“Sure, ma’am,” said I, “I’m going, and you’re going, and we’re all going ... aren’t we?”

“Not,” said she, looking at me very archly, “not while there are well-looking young fellers sitting in the woods.”

“Well, deliver me!” said I, “d’ye take me for the Angel Gabriel or the duke of the world!”

“It’s not anything I’m taking you to be, young man ... give me a chew of that bread.”

She came and sat beside me and took it from my hands.

“Little woman ...” I began it to her; but at that she flung the crust back in my face, laughing and choking and screaming.

“Me ... that’s fat as a ewe in January!”

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“Fat, woman!” says I, “you’re no fat at all.”

But, I declare it, she’d a bosom like a bolster. I lay on my back beside her. She was a rag of a woman. I looked up through the tree branches at the end of the shaw; they were bare, spring was late that year. The sky was that blue ... there wasn’t a cloud within a million miles ... but up through the boughs it looked hard and steely like a storm sky. I took my hat from her, for she had put it on her own head, and I stood on my feet.

“Fat, ma’am!” says I ... and she looked up at me, grinning like a stuffed fox.... “Oh no, ma’am, you’re slim as the queen of Egypt!”

At that she called out to another man who was passing us by, and I went to walk on with him. He had a furuncle on one side of his chin; his garments were very old, both in fashion and in use; he was lean as a mountain cow.

I greeted him but he gave me glances that were surly, like a man would be grinding scissors or setting a saw—for you never met one of that kind that didn’t have the woe of the world upon him.

“How many miles is it now, sir?” I asked, very respectful then. He did not heed me. He put his hand to his ear signifying deafness. I shouted and I shouted, so you could have heard me in the four kingdoms, but I might just have been blowing in a sack for all the reason I got from him.

I went on alone and in the course of the days I fell in with many persons, stupid persons, great persons, jaunty ones. An ass passes me by, its cart burdened

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 with a few dead sprays of larch and a log for the firing. An old man toils at the side urging the ass onwards. They give me no direction and I wonder whether I am at all like the ass, or the man, or the cart, or the log for the firing. I cannot say. There was the lad McGlosky, who had the fine hound that would even catch birds; the philosopher who had two minds; the widow with one leg; Slatterby Chough, the pugfoot man, and Grafton. I passed a little time with them all, and made poems about them that they did not like, but I was ever for walking on from them. None of them could give me a direction for the thing that was urging me except that it was “away on, away on.”

Walk I did, and it was full summer when I met Monk, the fat fellow as big as two men with but the clothes of a small one squeezing the joints of him together. Would you look at the hair of him—it was light as a stook of rye; or the face of him and the neck of him—the hue of a new brick. He had the mind of a grasshopper, the strength of a dray horse, the tenderness of a bush of reeds, and was light on his limbs as a deer.

“Look ye’re,” he said to me; he had a stiff sort of talk, and fat thumbs like a mason that he jiggled in the corners of his pockets; “look ye’re, my friend, my name is Monk.”

“I am Michael Fionnguisa,” said I.

“Well I never struck fist with a lad like you; your conversation is agreeable to me, you have a stride on you would beat the world for greatness.”

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“I could beat you,” said I, “even if you wore the boots of Hercules that had wings on ’em.”

“It is what I like,” said he, and he made a great mess of my boasting before we were through. “Look ye’re, my friend, we needn’t brag our little eye-blink of the world; but take my general character and you’ll find I’m better than my ... inferiors. I accomplish my ridiculous destiny without any ridiculous effort. I’m the man to go a-travelling with.”

He had that stiff way of his talk, like a man lecturing on a stool, but my mercy, he’d a tongue of silk that could twist a meal out of the pantry of Jews and strange hard people; fat landladies, the wives of the street, the widows in their villas, they would feed him until he groaned, loving him for his blitheness and his tales. He could not know the meaning of want though he had never a coin in the world. Yet he did not love towns; he would walk wide-eyed through them counting the seams in the pavements. He liked most to be staring at the gallant fishes in the streams, and gasping when he saw a great one.

I met him in the hills and we were gone together. And it was not a great while before he was doing and doing, for we came and saw a man committing a crime, a grave crime to be done in a bad world leave alone a good one like this, in a very lonely lovely place. So Monk rose up and slew him, and the woman ran blushing into the woods.

I looked at Mr. Monk, and the dead man on the road, and then at Mr. Monk again.

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“Well,” I said, “we’d ... we’d better bury this feller.”

But Monk went and sat upon a bank and wiped his neck. The other lay upon his face as if he were sniffing at the road; I could see his ear was full of blood, it slipped over the lobe drip by drip as neat as a clock would tick.

And Monk, he said: “Look ye’re, my friend, there are dirtier things than dirt, and I would not like to mix this with the earth of our country.”

So we slung him into an old well with a stone upon his loins.

And a time after that we saw another man committing crime, a mean crime that you might do and welcome in America or some such region, but was not fitting to be done in our country.

So Monk rose up and slew him. Awful it was to see what Monk did to him. He was a great killer and fighter; Hector himself was but a bit of a page boy to Mr. Monk.

“Shall we give him an interment?” I asked him. He stood wiping his neck—he was always wiping his neck—and Monk he said:

“Look ye’re, my friend, he was a beast; a man needn’t live in a sty in order to become a pig, and we won’t give him an interment.” So we heaved him into a slag pit among rats and ravels of iron.

And would you believe it, again we saw a man committing crime, crime indeed and a very bad crime.

There was no withstanding Monk; he rose up and

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 slew the man as dead as the poor beast he had tortured.

“God-a-mercy!” I said to him, “it’s a lot of life you’re taking, Mr. Monk.”

And Monk he said: “Life, Michael dear, is the thing we perish by.” He had the most terrible angers and yet was kind, kind; nothing could exceed the greatness of his mind or the vigour of his limbs.

Those were the three combats of Monk, but he was changed from that out. Whenever we came to any habitations now he would not call at back doors, nor go stravaiging in yards for odd pieces to eat, but he would go gallantly into an inn and offer his payment for the things we would like. I could not understand it at all, but he was a great man and a kind.

“Where did you get that treasure?” said I to him after days of it. “Has some noble person given you a gift?”

He did not answer me so I asked him over again. “Eh!”

And Monk he said, “Oh well then, there was a lot of coin in the fob of that feller we chucked in the well.”

I looked very straight at Mr. Monk, very straight at that, but I could not speak the things my mind wanted me to say, and he said very artfully: “Don’t distress yourself, Michael dear, over a little contest between sense and sentiment.”

“But that was the dirty man,” said I.

“And why not?” said he. “If his deed was dirty, his money was clean: don’t be deethery, man.”

“’Tis not fitting nor honourable,” said I, “for men

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 the like of us to grow fat on his filth. It’s grass I’d be eating sooner.”

“That’s all bombazine, Michael, bombazine! I got two dollars more from the feller we chucked in the pit!”

“Mr. Monk, that was the pig!” said I.

“And why not?” said he. “If his life was bad then his end must be good; don’t be deethery.”

“You can’t touch pitch,” I said....

“Who’s touching pitch?” he cried. “Amn’t I entitled to the spoils of the valiant, the rewards of the conqueror....”

“Bombazine!” says I to him.

“O begod!” he says, “I never struck fist on a lad the like of you, with your bombazine O! I grant you it doesn’t come affable like, but what costs you nothing can’t be dear; as for compunctions, you’ll see, I fatten on ’em!”

He laughed outright at me.

“Don’t be deethery, Michael, there was a good purse in the last man’s trousers!”

I could no more complain to him; how could I under the Lord! Dear me, it never was seen, a man with the skin of that man; he’d the mind of a grasshopper, but there was greatness in him, and Mary herself loved him for a friend.

What do I say about Mary! Ah, there was never in anything that had the aspects of a world a girl with her loveliness, I tell you, handsome as a lily, the jewel of the world; and the thing that happened between us was strange above all reckoning. We gave her the

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 good will of the evening in a place that would be as grand as Eden itself, though the bushes had grown dim on the hills and the sod was darkening beside the white water of the streams.

“And are you going the Journey?” we asked of her.