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They stepped into the room and the door shut, and the room was very dark indeed. And before them loomed a great glass eye, the porthole, a window four feet high and six feet wide, from which they could look out into space.
The boy gasped.
Behind him the father and the mother gasped with him, and then in the dark room some people began to sing.
“Merry Christmas, son,” said the father.
And the voices in the room sang the old, the familiar carols, and the boy moved forward slowly until his face was pressed against the cool glass of the port. And he stood there for a long long time, just looking and looking out into space and the deep night at the burning and the burning of ten billion billion white and lovely candles …
The Great Collision of Monday Last
The man staggered through the flung-wide doors of Heber Finn’s pub as if struck by lightning. Reeling, blood on his face, coat, and torn pants, his moan froze every customer at the bar. For a time you heard only the soft foam popping in the lacy mugs, as the customers turned, some faces pale, some pink, some veined and wattle-red. Every eyelid down the line gave a blink.
The stranger swayed in his ruined clothes, eyes wide, lips trembling. The drinkers clenched their fist. Yes! they cried, silently—go on, man! what happened?
The stranger leaned far out on the air.
“Collision,” he whispered. “Collision on the road.”
Then, chopped at the knees, he fell.
“Collision!” A dozen men rushed at the body.
“Kelly!” Heber Finn vaulted the bar. “Get to the road! Mind the victim; easy does it! Joe, run for the Doc!”
“Wait!” said a quiet voice.
From the private stall at the dark end of the pub, the cubby where a philosopher might brood, a dark man blinked out at the crowd.
“Doc!” cried Heber Finn. “It’s you!”
Doctor and men hustled out into the night.
“Collision …” The man on the floor twitched his lips.
“Softly, boys.” Heber Finn and two others gentled the victim atop the bar. He looked handsome as death on the fine inlaid wood with the prismed mirror making him two dread calamities for the price of one.
Outside on the steps, the crowd halted, shocked as if an ocean had sunk Ireland in the dusk and now bulked all about them. Fog in fifty-foot rollers and breakers put out the moon and stars. Blinking, cursing, the men leapt out to vanish in the deeps.
Behind, in the bright doorframe, a young man stood. He was neither red enough nor pale enough of face, nor dark enough or light enough in spirit to be Irish, and so must be American. He was. That established, it follows he dreaded interfering with what seemed village ritual. Since arriving in Ireland, he could not shake the feeling that at all times he was living stage center of the Abbey Theatre. Now, not knowing his lines, he could only stare after the rushing men.
“But,” he protested weakly, “I didn’t hear any cars on the road.”
“You did not!” said an old man almost pridefully. Arthritis limited him to the top step where he teetered, shouting at the white tides where his friends had submerged. “Try the crossroad, boys! That’s where it most often does!”
“The crossroad!” Far and near, footsteps rang.
“Nor,” said the American, “did I hear a collision.”
The old man snorted with contempt. “Ah, we don’t be great ones for commotion, nor great crashing sounds. But collision you’ll see if you step on out there. Walk, now, don’t run! It’s the devil’s own night. Running blind you might hit into Kelly, beyond, who’s a great one for running just to squash his lungs. Or you might head on with Feeney, too drunk to find any road, never mind what’s on it! You got a torch, a flash? Blind you’ll be, but use it. Walk now, you hear?”
The American groped through the fog to his car, found his flashlight, and, immersed in the night beyond Heber Finn’s, made direction by the heavy clubbing of shoes and a rally of voices ahead. A hundred yards off
in eternity the men approached, grunting whispers: “Easy now!” “Ah, the shameful blight!” “Hold on, don’t jiggle him!”
The American was flung aside by a steaming lump of men who swept suddenly from the fog, bearing atop themselves a crumpled object. He glimpsed a bloodstained and livid face high up there, then someone cracked his flashlight down.
By instinct, sensing the far whiskey-colored light of Heber Finn’s, the catafalque surged on toward that fixed and familiar harbor.
