694
PARTISAN REVIEW
He spoke calmly, confidently, and with clispassionate sincerity
on many topics: on the sowing of the grain, the development of the
fisheries, the division of the ranches, and the resuscitation of the Gaelic
language. Gradually the neutral watchers realized that the quality
that had made him leader was concealed
in
his voice.
His
speech
could squarely be termed quietly florid with rhythmic periods. But
his
trick of understressing the rhetorical nature of
his
sentences set
his hearers the happy task of bringing the words up to full strength.
Each man in the square was thus an orator in his own right. But, after
a while, the continued urbanity of the speech made them a trifle
sleepy. But its most important attribute was this:
in
some inexplicable
fashion
it
had the effect of making the vexing question of the dead
boy quite ordinary. Little by little the watchers by the walls found
themselves being willingly filched of their parochial glorying in the
foxy lad: of their pride
in
his court-room gallantry and of their splen–
did insanity on the morning of his execution. The leader was laying
the ghost of the dead boy! He also kept implying ("implying" since,
in fact, he was dealing with fisheries and grain) that justice was as
impersonal as mathematics, that its conclusions could not be altered
for vivid personality or picturesque circumstance, that indeed (re–
motest of remote implications) if a foxy lad found himself compelled
to act in such and such a fashion, the elected leaders of the people
had no other option but to elucidate and underscore the conclusions
that justice had already reached. That insofar as justice was concerned,
leaders were vouchsafed only the imitativeness of the parrot, the
mimicry of the monkey and the stubborness of the bright bold boar.
The sky grew less ragged: aloft there was every evidence of
amnesty with an implied promise of no more pelting. Where pre–
viously there had been anger and inflammation there now appeared
a clean breach in which gleamed the true aluminum stars. Only the
breeze up from the swollen river still held an intransigent chill. The
people at the walls had long since surrendered their sullenness. They
stamped their shoes in disappointment and glanced peevishly at one
another in the darkness. The meeting had been a sell.
Then out from the town, walking slowly in mid-road, came an
old man and an old woman. The man was a caricature of the national
type of old man. He was dressed in a pepper-and-salt suit of square
out-of-fashion rig with black shiny buttons. The legs of his trousers
