Tarry Flynn Read Online Free PDF Page A

said in a dramatically silly tone.
    Tarry had a number of meaningless phrases which he used to astonish girls with. This particular phrase he had read somewhere. By saying something queer like this he expected to get the attention of the mystery-loving heart of woman. Women thought him a little touched when he made such remarks. This was not the arcanum to which they, were accustomed. He knew it was not the usual aphrodisiacal double-meaning, illiterate joking which a man such as Charlie Trainor was an adept at, but he felt that it ought to be much more effective. It wasn’t.
    And so the girls at the gate separated and Tarry was left – with his dreams.
    He couldn’t go to the town that day, because his two sisters, Aggie and Bridie, were going in the hope of getting a man, and he had to keep an eye on things. It was dangerous to leave a small farm without a steward for a day. Something was liable to go wrong, and then there would be a row with his mother. So all day he had plenty of time to read and smoke. Getting enough money to buy cigarettes was a problem; if it wasn’t for all the eggs he stole and which Aggie sold for him he’d be without a cigarette many a time.
    The day passed.
    Cyclists passed down the lane on their way to the town. The bawl of unsold cattle could be heard as they were being driven home. Tarry was not unhappy.
    Tarry was running a centre in the potato drills. As he was using only one horse to pull the old plough the work was rather bumpy–and in the local phrase ‘in and out like a dog pissing on snow’.
    Was he interested very deeply in his work? In some ways, yes. Although he was trying to compose a verse as he worked he was also thinking with much comfort of the excellent progress his potatoes were making. They were three inches over the tops of the drills, the best spuds in the country. Growing potatoes was a thing he took a great pride in. By merely admiring the buds as they grew he felt that they responded and progressed. Indeed he was sure they responded. Clay climbed in the back of his boots.The plough struck a rock and the handles flew high over his shoulders. Up and down the alleys he went for about an hour in a great hurry. Then he sat on the beam of the plough to dream.
    As he dreamt Molly Brady came down the path on the far side of the dividing stream, towards the well. In one hand she carried a tin can and in the other a long pot-stick. She left the can beside the well and began to search with the pot-stick in the rushes that grew in the swamp; she was looking for hens’ nests.
    Molly was about twenty years old, a soft, fat slob of a girl who appealed to Tarry in a sensual way.
    And for weeks in his daydreams he had been planning an approach to her. He knew the times she’d be coming to the well. Accidental-like he had a large plank lying across the stream for a week or more now – he had it there for the purpose of making a platform when he would be removing the big boulder that had rolled into the stream, blocking the flow of water. Molly’s mother did not get up out of bed these mornings until near eleven. That would be a good time. Among his other arrangements he had two large corn sacks which presumably were for covering the horse when he would be cooling down after a sweat. And now the time had arrived.
    Molly was obviously waiting for Tarry to open the conversation. It was plain that her interest in the hens’ secret nests was merely collateral.
    â€˜Hello,’ he called.
    This ‘hello’ conveyed a different meaning from other hellos. In country places a single word is inflected to mean a hundred things, so that only a recording of the sounds gives an idea of the speech of these people.
    This hello had in it a touch of bravado, the speech of a wicked monster making a bid for a woman’s virtue, the consciousness of the wickedness producing a tremulous quality in the tones. Speaking, he felt that the whole