Collected Stories (100 page)

“Margaret was a second edition of himself, though in her the sense of responsibility conflicted with everything feminine in her till it became a joke. She was small. She was pretty, with one of those miniature faces that seem to have been reduced until every coarse line has been refined in them. She moved at twice the normal speed and was forever fussing and bossing and wheedling, till one of the nurses would lose her temper and say, ‘Ah, Margaret, will you for God's sake give us time to breathe!' That sort of impertinence would make Margaret scowl, shrug, and go off somewhere else, but her sulks never lasted, as her father's did. The feminine side of her wouldn't sustain them.

“I remember one night when all hell broke loose in the wards, as it usually does in any hospital once a month. Half a dozen patients decided to die all together, and I was called out of bed. Margaret and the other nurse on night duty, Joan Henderson, had brewed themselves a pot of tea in the kitchen, and they were scurrying round with a mug or a bit of seedcake in their hands. I was giving an injection to one of my patients, who should have been ready for discharge. In the next bed was a dying old mountainy man who had nothing in particular wrong with him except old age and a broken heart. I suddenly looked up from what I was doing and saw he had come out of coma and was staring at Margaret, who was standing at the other side of the bed from me, nibbling the bit of cake over which she had been interrupted. She started when she saw him staring at the cake, because she knew what her father would say if ever he heard that she was eating in the wards. Then she gave a broad grin and said in a country accent, ‘Johnny, would 'oo like a bit of seedcake?' and held it to his lips. He hesitated and then began to nibble, too, and then his tongue came out and licked round his mouth, and somehow I knew he was saved. ‘Tay, Johnny,' she said mockingly. ‘Thot's what 'oo wants now, isn't it?' And that morning as I went through the wards, my own patient was dead but old Johnny was sitting up, ready for another ten years of the world's hardship. That's nursing.

“Margaret lived in such a pitch of nervous energy that every few weeks she fell ill. ‘I keep telling that damn girl to take it easy,' her father would say with a scowl at me, but any time there was the least indication that Margaret was taking it easy, he started to air his sufferings with the anguish of an elephant. She was a girl with a real sense of service, and at one time had tried to join a nursing order in Africa, but dropped it because of his hatred for all nursing orders. In itself this was funny, because Margaret was a liberal Catholic who, like St. Teresa, was ‘for the Moors, and martyrdom' but never worried her head about human weaknesses and made no more of an illegitimate baby than if she had them herself every Wednesday, while he was an old-fashioned Catholic and full of obscure prejudices. At the same time, he felt that the religious orders were leaving Ireland without nurses—not that he thought so much of nurses!

“‘And I suppose nuns can't be nurses?' Margaret would ask with a contemptuous shrug.

“‘How can they?' he would say, in his shrillest voice. ‘The business of religion is with the soul, not the body. My business is with the body. When I'm done with it, the nuns can have it—or anyone else, for that matter.'

“‘And why not the soul and the body?' Margaret would ask in her pertest tone.

“‘Because you can't serve two masters, girl.'

“‘Pooh!' Margaret would say with another shrug. ‘You can't serve one Siamese twin, either.'

“As often as I went to dinner in that house, there was hardly a meal without an argument. Sometimes it was about no more than the amount of whiskey he drank. Margaret hated drink, and watched every drop he poured in his glass, so that often, just to spite her, he went on to knock himself out. I used to think that she might have known her father was a man who couldn't resist a challenge. She was as censorious as he was, but she had a pertness and awkwardness that a man rarely has, and suddenly, out of the blue, would come some piece of impertinence that plunged him into gloom and made her cringe away to her bedroom, ready for tears. He and I would go into the big front room, overlooking Dooras Bay, and without a glance at the view he would splash enormous tasheens of whiskey into our glasses, just to indicate how little he cared for her, and say in a shrill, complaining voice, ‘I ruined that girl, O'Malley. I know I did. If her mother was alive, she wouldn't talk to me that way.'

“Generally, they gave the impression of two people who hated one another with a passionate intensity, but I knew well that he was crazy about her. He always brought her back something from his trips to Dublin or Cork and once when I was with him, he casually wasted my whole afternoon looking for something nice for her. It never occurred to him that I might have anything else to do. But he could also be thoughtful; for once when for a full week he had been so intolerable that I could scarcely bring myself to answer him he grinned and said, ‘I know exactly what you think of me, O'Malley. You think I'm an old slave driver.'

“‘Not exactly,' I said, giving him tit for tat. ‘Just an old whoor!'

“At this, he gave a great gaffaw and handed me a silver cigarette case, which I knew he must have bought for me in town the previous day, and added sneeringly, ‘Now, don't you be going round saying your work is quite unappreciated.'

“‘Did I really say that?' I asked, still keeping my end up, even though there was something familiar about the sentiment.

“‘Or if you do, say it over the loudspeaker. Remember, O'Malley, I hear
everything
.' And the worst of it was, he did!

“Then, one night, when my year's engagement was nearly ended, I went to his house for dinner. That night there was no quarrelling, and he and I sat on in the front room, drinking and admiring the view. I should have known there was something wrong, because for once he didn't talk shop. He talked about almost everything else, and all the time he was knocking back whiskey in a way I knew I could never keep pace with. When it grew dark, he said with an air of surprise, ‘O'Malley, I'm a bit tight. I think we'd better go for a stroll and clear our heads.'

“We strolled up the avenue of rhododendrons to the gate and turned left up the hill. It was a wild, rocky bit of country, stopped dead by the roadway and then cascading merrily down the little fields to the bay. There was still a coppery light in the sky, and the reflection of a bonfire on one of the islands, like a pendulum, in the water. The road fell again, between demesne walls and ruined gateways where the last of the old gentry lived, and I was touched—partly, I suppose, by all the whiskey, but partly by the place itself.

“‘I'll regret this place when I leave it,' I said.

“‘Oh, no, you won't,' he snapped back at me. ‘This is no place for young people.'

“‘I fancy it might be a very pleasant memory if you were in the East End of London,' said I.

“‘It might,' said Fitzgerald, ‘if you were quite sure you wouldn't have to go back to it. That's what worries me about Margaret.'

“I had never noticed him worrying very much about Margaret—or anyone else, for that matter—so I took it as merely a matter of form.

“‘Margaret seems to do very well in it,' I said.

“‘It's no place for Margaret,' he said sharply. ‘People need friends of their own age and ideas old men like myself can't supply. It's largely my fault for letting her come back here at all. I made this place too much of my life, and that's all right for a man, but it's not good enough for a high-spirited girl like that.'

“‘But doesn't Margaret have friends here?' I asked, trying to comfort him.

“‘She has friends enough, but not of her own age,' he said. ‘She's too mature for the girls here that are her own age. Not that I ever cared much for her friends from Dublin,' he added shortly. ‘They struck me as a lot of show-boxes. I don't like those intellectual Catholics, talking to me about St. Thomas Aquinas. I never read St. Thomas Aquinas, and from all I can hear I haven't missed much. But young people have to make their own mistakes. All the men around here seem to want is some good-natured cow who'll agree to everything they say, and because she argues with them they think she's pert and knowing. Well, she
is
pert, and she
is
knowing—I realize that as well as anybody. But there's more than that to her. They'd have said the same about me, only I proved to them that I knew what I was doing.'

“Suddenly I began to realize what he was saying, and I was frightened out of my wits. I said to myself that it was impossible, that a man like Fitzgerald could never mean a thing like that, but at the same time I felt that he did mean it, and that it had been in his mind from the first night he met me. I muttered something about her having more chances in Dublin.

“‘That's the trouble,' he said. ‘She didn't know what she was letting herself in for when she came back here, and no more did I. Now she won't leave, because I'd be here on my own, and I know I wouldn't like it, but still I have my work to do, and for a man that's enough. I like pitting my wits against parish priests and county councillors and nuns. Besides, when you reach my age you realize that you could have worse, and they'll let me have my own way for the time I have left me. But I haven't so long to live, and when I die, they'll have some champion footballer running the place, and Margaret will be taking orders from the nuns. She thinks now that she won't mind, but she won't do it for long. I know the girl. She ought to marry, and then she'd have to go wherever her husband took her.'

“‘But you don't really think the hospital will go to pieces like that?' I asked, pretending to be deeply concerned but really only trying to head Fitzgerald off the subject he seemed to have on his mind. ‘I mean, don't you think Duane and MacCarthy will hold it together?'

“‘How can they?' he asked querulously. ‘It's not their life, the way it's been mine. I don't mean they won't do their best, but the place will go to pieces just the same. It's a queer feeling, Dermot, when you come to the end of your time and realize that nothing in the world outlasts the man that made it.'

“That sentence was almost snapped at me, out of the side of his mouth, and yet it sounded like a cry of pain—maybe because he'd used my Christian name for the first time. He was not a man to use Christian names. I didn't know what to say.

“‘Of course, I should have had a son to pass on my responsibilities to,' he added wonderingly. ‘I'm not any good with girls. I dare say that was why I liked you, the first time we met—because I might have had a son like you.'

“Then I couldn't bear it any longer, and it broke from me. ‘And it wasn't all on one side!'

“‘I guessed that. In certain ways we're not so unlike. And that's what I really wanted to say to you before you go. If ever you and Margaret got to care for one another, it would mean a lot to me. She won't have much, but she'll never be a burden on anybody, and if ever she marries, she'll make a good wife.'

“It was the most embarrassing moment of my life—and mind, it wasn't embarrassing just because I was being asked to marry a nice girl I'd never given a thought to. I'm a country boy, and I knew all about ‘made' matches by the time I was seventeen, and I never had anything but contempt for the snobs that pretend to despise them. Damn good matches the most of them are, and a thousand times better than the sort you see nowadays that seem to be made up out of novelettes or moving pictures! Still and all, it's different when it comes to your own turn. I suppose it's only at a moment like that you realize you're just as silly as any little servant girl. But it wasn't only that. It was because I was being proposed to by a great man, a fellow I'd looked up to in a way I never looked up to my own father, and I couldn't do the little thing he wanted me to do. I muttered some nonsense about never having been able to think about marriage—as if there ever was a young fellow that hadn't thought about it every night in his life!—and he saw how upset I was and squeezed my arm.

“‘What did I tell you?' he said. ‘I knew I was drunk, and if she ever gets to hear what I said to you, she'll cut me in little bits.'

“And that tone of his broke my heart. I don't even know if you'll understand what I mean, but all I felt was grief to think a great man who'd brought life to a place where life never was before would have to ask a favor of me, and me not to be able to grant it. Because all the time I wanted to be cool and suave and say of course I'd marry his daughter, just to show the way I felt about himself, and I was too much of a coward to do it. In one way, it seemed so impossible, and in another it seemed such a small thing.

“Of course, we never resumed the conversation, but that didn't make it any easier, because it wasn't only between myself and him; it was between me and Margaret. The moment I had time to think of it, I knew Fitzgerald was too much a gentleman to have said anything to me without first making sure that she'd have me.

“Well, you know the rest yourself. When he died, things happened exactly the way he'd prophesied; a local footballer got his job, and the nuns took over the nursing, and there isn't a Dublin doctor under fifty that could even tell you where Dooras is. Fitzgerald was right. Nothing in the world outlasts a man. Margaret, of course, has a great reputation, and I'm told on the best authority that there isn't a doctor in St. Dorothy's she hasn't put the fear of God into so I suppose it's just as well that she never got the opportunity to put it into me. Or don't you agree?”

I didn't, of course, as O'Malley well knew. Anyway, he could hardly have done much worse for himself. And I had met Margaret, and I had seen her autocratic airs, but they hadn't disturbed me much. She was just doing it on temperament, rather than technique—a very Irish way, and probably not so unlike her father's. I knew I didn't have to tell O'Malley that. He was a gentleman himself, and his only reason for telling me the story was that already, with the wisdom that comes of age, he had begun to wonder whether he had not missed something in missing Margaret Fitzgerald. I knew that he had.