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Nick! I thought, and turned, and there he sat, only one thing the same. On his lips a cigarette burned, blinding first one eye, then the other.
But the rest of Nick, behind the cigarette, was changed as if the Adversary himself had squeezed and molded and fired him with a dark hand. There he was, whirling the wheel round-about, over-around; here we frenzied under trestles, out of tunnels, here knocked crossroad signs spinning like weathercocks in whirlwinds.
Nick’s face; the wisdom was drained from it, the eyes neither gentle nor philosophical, the mouth neither tolerant, nor at peace. It was a face washed raw, a scalded, peeled potato, a face more like a blinding searchlight raking its steady and meaningless glare ahead while his quick hands snaked and bit and bit the wheel again to lean us round curves and jump us off cliff after cliff of night.
It’s not Nick, I thought, it’s his brother. Or a dire thing’s come in his life, some destroying affliction or blow, a family sorrow or sickness, yes, that’s the answer.
And then Nick spoke, and his voice, it was changed too. Gone was the mellow peat bog, the moist sod, the warm fire in out of the cold rain, gone the gentle grass. Now the voice fairly cracked at me, a clarion, a trumpet, all iron and tin.
“Well, how ya been since!” Nick shouted. “How is it with ya!” he cried.
And the car, it too had suffered violence. It protested the change, yes, for it was an old and much-beaten thing that had done its time and now only wished to stroll along, like a crusty beggar toward sea and sky, careful of its breath and bones. But Nick would have none of that, and cadged the wreck on as if thundering toward Hell, there to warm his cold hands at some special blaze. Nick leaned, the car leaned; great livid gases blew out in fireworks from the exhaust. Nick’s frame, my frame, the car’s frame, all together, were wracked and shuddered and ticked wildly.
My sanity was saved from being torn clean off the bone by a simple act. My eyes, seeking
the cause of our plaguing flight, ran over the man blazing here like a sheet of ignited vapor from the Abyss, and laid hands to the answering clue.
“Nick,” I gasped, “it’s the first night of Lent!”
“So?” Nick said, surprised.
“So,” I said, “remembering your Lenten promise, why’s that cigarette in your mouth?”
Nick did not know what I meant for a moment. Then he cast his eyes down, saw the jiggling smoke, and shrugged.
“Ah,” he said, “I give up the other.”
And suddenly it all came clear.
The other one hundred forty odd nights, at the door of the old Georgian house I had accepted from my employer a fiery douse of scotch or bourbon or some-such drink “against the chill.” Then, breathing summer wheat or barley or oats or whatever from my scorched and charcoaled mouth, I had walked out to a cab where sat a man who, during all the long evenings’ wait for me to phone for his services, had lived in Heber Finn’s pub.
Fool! I thought, how could you have forgotten this!
And there in Heber Finn’s, during the long hours of lacy talk that was like planting and bringing to crop a garden among busy men, each contributing his seed or flower, and wielding the implements, their tongues, and the raised, foam-hived glasses, their own hands softly curled about the dear drinks, there Nick had taken into himself a mellowness.
And that mellowness had distilled itself down in a slow rain that damped his smoldering nerves and put the wilderness fires in every limb of him out. Those same showers laved his face to leave the tidal marks of wisdom, the lines of Plato and Aeschylus there. The harvest mellowness colored his cheeks, warmed his eyes soft, lowered his voice to a husking mist, and spread in his chest to slow his heart to a gentle jog trot. It rained out his arms to loosen his hard-mouthed hands on the shuddering wheel and sit him with grace and ease in his horse-hair saddle as he gentled us through the fogs that kept us and Dublin apart.
And with the malt on my own tongue, fluming up my sinus with burning vapors, I had never detected the scent of any spirits on my old friend here.
“Ah,” said Nick again. “Yes; I give up the other.”
The last bit of jigsaw fell in place.
Tonight, the first night of Lent.
Tonight, for the first time in all the nights I had driven with him, Nick was sober.
All those other one hundred and forty-odd nights, Nick hadn’t been driving careful and easy just for my safety, no, but because of the gentle weight of mellowness sloping now on this side, now on that side of him as we took the long, scything curves.
Oh, who really knows the Irish, say I, and which half of them is which? Nick?—who is Nick?—and what in the world is he? Which Nick’s the real Nick, the one that everyone knows?
I will not think on it!
There is only one Nick for me. The one that Ireland shaped herself with her weathers and waters, her seedings and harvestings, her brans and mashes, her brews, bottlings, and ladlings-out, her summer-grain-colored pubs astir and advance with the wind in the wheat and barley by night, you may hear the good whisper way out in forest, on bog, as you roll by. That’s Nick to the teeth, eye, and heart, to his easygoing hands. If you ask what makes the Irish what they are, I’d point on down the road and tell where you turn to Heber Finn’s.
The first night of Lent, and before you count nine, we’re in Dublin! I’m out of the cab and it’s puttering there at the curb and I lean in to put my money in the hands of my driver. Earnestly, pleadingly, warmly, with all the friendly urging in the world, I look into that fine man’s raw, strange, torchlike face.
“Nick,” I said.
