Collected Stories (12 page)

Then he looked at the clock. Dictation came next. Without a moment's thought he went to the blackboard, wiped out the sums on it, and wrote in a neat, workmanlike hand: “The Diary of a Cheapjack.” Even then he had no notion of what he was actually going to do, but as the boys settled themselves he took a deep breath and began to read.

“October twenty-first,” he dictated in a dull voice. “I think I have bowled the widow over.”

There was a shocked silence and some boy giggled.

“It's all right,” Sam explained blandly, pointing to the blackboard. “I told you this fellow was only a cheapjack, one of those lads you see at the fair, selling imitation jewelry. You'll see it all in a minute.”

And on he went again in a monotonous voice, one hand holding the diary, the other in his trouser pocket. He knew he was behaving oddly, even scandalously, but it gave him an enormous feeling of release, as though all the weeks of misery and humiliation were being paid for at last. It was everything he had ever thought of Carmody, only worse. Worse, for how could Sam have suspected that Carmody would admit the way he had first made love to Nancy, just to keep his hand in (his own very words!), or describe the way love came to him at last one evening up Bauravullen when the sun was setting behind the pine trees and he found he no longer despised Nancy.

The fellows began to titter. Sam raised his brows and looked at them with a wondering smile as if he did not quite know what they were laughing at. In a curious way he was beginning to enjoy it himself. He began to parody it in the style of a bad actor, waving one arm, throwing back his head and cooing out the syrupy pseudo-Byronic sentences. “And all for a widow!” he read, raising his voice and staring at Carmody. “A woman who went through it all before.”

Carmody heard him and suddenly recognized the diary. He came up the classroom in a few strides and tore the book out of Sam's hand. Sam let it go with him and only gaped.

“Hi, young man,” he asked amiably, “where are you going with that?”

“What are you doing with it?” Carmody asked in a terrible voice, equally a caricature of a bad actor's. He was still incredulous; he could not believe that Sam had actually been reading it aloud to his class.

“Oh, that's our piece for dictation,” Sam said and glanced at the blackboard. “I'm calling it ‘The Diary of a Cheapjack.' I think that about hits it off.”

“You stole my diary!” hissed Carmody.

“Your diary?” Sam replied with assumed concern. “You're not serious?”

“You knew perfectly well it was mine,” shouted Carmody beside himself with rage. “You saw my name and you know my writing.”

“Oh, begod I didn't,” Sam protested stolidly. “If anyone told me that thing was written by an educated man I'd call him a liar.”

Then Carmody did the only thing he could do, the thing that Sam in his heart probably hoped for—he gave Sam a punch in the jaw. Sam staggered, righted himself and made for Carmody. They closed. The boys left their desks, shouting. One or two ran out of the school. In a few moments the rest had formed a cheering ring about the two struggling teachers. Sam was small and gripped his man low. Carmody punched him viciously and effectively about the head but Sam hung on, pulling Carmody right and left till he found it hard to keep his feet. At last Sam gave one great heave and sent Carmody flying. His head cracked off the iron leg of a desk. He lay still for some moments and then rose, clutching his head.

At the same moment Miss Daly and Nancy came in.

“Sam!” Nancy cried. “What's the matter?”

“Get out of my way,” Carmody shouted, skipping round her. “Get out of my way till I kill him.”

“Come on, you cheapjack!” drawled Sam. His head was down, his hands were hanging, and he was looking dully at Carmody over his spectacles. “Come on and I'll give you more of it.”

“Mr. Higgins, Mr. Higgins!” screamed Miss Daly. “Is it mad ye are, the pair of ye?”

They came to their senses at that. Miss Daly took charge. She rang the bell and cleared the school. Sam turned away and began fumbling blindly with the lid of a chalk-box. Carmody began to dust himself. Then, with long backward glances, he and the two women went into the playground, where Sam heard them talking in loud, excited voices. He smiled vaguely, took off his glasses and wiped them carefully before he picked up his books, his hat, and his coat, and locked the school door behind him. He knew he was doing it for the last time and wasn't sorry. The three other teachers drew away and he went past them without a glance. He left the keys at the presbytery and told the housekeeper he'd write. Next morning he went away by an early train and never came back.

We were all sorry for him. Poor Sam! As decent a man as ever drew breath but too honest, too honest!

The Luceys

I
T'S EXTRAORDINARY
, the bitterness there can be in a town like ours between two people of the same family. More particularly between two people of the same family. I suppose living more or less in public as we do we are either killed or cured by it, and the same communal sense that will make a man be battered into a reconciliation he doesn't feel gives added importance to whatever quarrel he thinks must not be composed. God knows, most of the time you'd be more sorry for a man like that than anything else.

The Luceys were like that. There were two brothers, Tom and Ben, and there must have been a time when the likeness between them was greater than the difference, but that was long before most of us knew them. Tom was the elder; he came in for the drapery shop. Ben had to have a job made for him on the County Council. This was the first difference and it grew and grew. Both were men of intelligence and education but Tom took it more seriously. As Ben said with a grin, he could damn well afford to with the business behind him.

It was an old-fashioned shop which prided itself on only stocking the best, and though the prices were high and Tom in his irascible opinionated way refused to abate them—he said haggling was degrading!—a lot of farmers' wives would still go nowhere else. Ben listened to his brother's high notions with his eyes twinkling, rather as he read the books which came his way, with profound respect and the feeling that this would all be grand for some other place, but was entirely inapplicable to the affairs of the County Council. God alone would ever be able to disentangle these, and meanwhile the only course open to a prudent man was to keep his mind to himself. If Tom didn't like the way the County Council was run, neither did Ben, but that was the way things were, and it rather amused him to rub it in to his virtuous brother.

Tom and Ben were both married. Tom's boy, Peter, was the great friend of his cousin, Charlie—called “Charliss” by his Uncle Tom. They were nice boys; Peter a fat, heavy, handsome lad who blushed whenever a stranger spoke to him, and Charlie with a broad face that never blushed at anything. The two families were always friendly; the mothers liked to get together over a glass of port wine and discuss the fundamental things that made the Lucey brothers not two inexplicable characters but two aspects of one inexplicable family character; the brothers enjoyed their regular chats about the way the world was going, for intelligent men are rare and each appreciated the other's shrewdness.

Only young Charlie was occasionally mystified by his Uncle Tom; he hated calling for Peter unless he was sure his uncle was out, for otherwise he might be sent into the front room to talk to him. The front room alone was enough to upset any high-spirited lad, with its thick carpet, mahogany sideboard, ornamental clock, and gilt mirror with cupids. The red curtains alone would depress you, and as well as these there was a glass-fronted mahogany bookcase the length of one wall, with books in sets, too big for anyone only a priest to read:
The History of Ireland, The History of the Popes, The Roman Empire, The Life of Johnson
, and
The Cabinet of Literature
. It gave Charlie the same sort of shivers as the priest's front room. His uncle suited it, a small, frail man, dressed in clerical black with a long pinched yellow face, tight lips, a narrow skull going bald up the brow, and a pair of tin specs.

All conversations with his uncle tended to stick in Charlie's mind for the simple but alarming reason that he never understood what the hell they were about, but one conversation in particular haunted him for years as showing the dangerous state of lunacy to which a man could be reduced by reading old books. Charlie was no fool, far from it; but low cunning and the most genuine benevolence were mixed in him in almost equal parts, producing a blend that was not without charm but gave no room for subtlety or irony.

“Good afternoon, Charliss,” said his uncle after Charlie had tied what he called “the ould pup” to the leg of the hallstand. “How are you?”

“All right,” Charlie said guardedly. (He hated being called Charliss, it made him sound such a sissy.)

“Take a seat, Charliss,” said his uncle benevolently. “Peter will be down in a minute.”

“I won't,” said Charlie. “I'd be afraid of the ould pup.”

“The expression, Charliss,” said his uncle in that rasping little voice of his, “sounds like a contradiction in terms, but, not being familiar with dogs, I presume 'tis correct.”

“Ah, 'tis,” said Charlie, just to put the old man's mind at rest.

“And how is your father, Charliss?”

“His ould belly is bad again,” said Charlie. “He'd be all right only the ould belly plays hell with him.”

“I'm sorry to hear it,” his uncle said gravely. “And tell me, Charliss,” he added, cocking his head on one side like a bird, “what is he saying about me now?”

This was one of the dirtiest of his Uncle Tom's tricks, assuming that Charlie's father was saying things about him, which to give Ben his due, he usually was. But on the other hand, he was admitted to be one of the smartest men in town, so he was entitled to do so, while everyone without exception appeared to agree that his uncle had a slate loose. Charlie looked at him cautiously, low cunning struggling with benevolence in him, for his uncle though queer was open-handed, and you wouldn't want to offend him. Benevolence won.

“He's saying if you don't mind yourself you'll end up in the poor-house,” he said with some notion that if only his uncle knew the things people said about him he might mend his ways.

“Your father is right as always, Charliss,” said his uncle, rising and standing on the hearth with his hands behind his back and his little legs well apart. “Your father is perfectly right. There are two main classes of people, Charliss—those who gravitate towards the poor-house and those who gravitate towards the jail.… Do you know what ‘gravitate' means, Charliss?”

“I do not,” said Charlie without undue depression. It struck him as being an unlikely sort of word.

“‘Gravitate,' Charliss, means ‘tend' or ‘incline.' Don't tell me you don't know what they mean!”

“I don't,” said Charlie.

“Well, do you know what this is?” his uncle asked smilingly as he held up a coin.

“I do,” said Charlie, humoring him as he saw that the conversation was at last getting somewhere. “A tanner.”

“I am not familiar with the expression, Charliss,” his uncle said tartly and Charlie knew, whatever he'd said out of the way, his uncle was so irritated that he was liable to put the tanner back. “We'll call it sixpence. Your eyes, I notice, gravitate towards the sixpence” (Charlie was so shocked that his eyes instantly gravitated towards his uncle), “and in the same way, people gravitate, or turn naturally, towards the jail or poorhouse. Only a small number of either group reach their destination, though—which might be just as well for myself and your father,” he added in a low impressive voice, swaying forward and tightening his lips. “Do you understand a word I'm saying, Charliss?” he added with a charming smile.

“I do not,” said Charlie.

“Good man! Good man!” his uncle said approvingly. “I admire an honest and manly spirit in anybody. Don't forget your sixpence, Charliss.”

And as he went off with Peter, Charlie scowled and muttered savagely under his breath: “Mod! Mod! Mod! The bleddy mon is mod!”

W
HEN
the boys grew up Peter trained for a solicitor while Charlie, one of a large family, followed his father into the County Council. He grew up a very handsome fellow with a square, solemn, dark-skinned face, a thick red lower lip, and a mass of curly black hair. He was reputed to be a great man with greyhounds and girls and about as dependable with one as with the other. His enemies called him “a crooked bloody bastard” and his father, a shrewd man, noted with alarm that Charlie thought him simpleminded.

The two boys continued the best of friends, though Peter, with an office in Asragh, moved in circles where Charlie felt himself lost; professional men whose status was calculated on their furniture and food and wine. Charlie thought that sort of entertainment a great pity. A man could have all the fun he wanted out of life without wasting his time on expensive and unsatisfactory meals and carrying on polite conversation while you dodged between bloody little tables that were always falling over, but Charlie, who was a modest lad, admired the way Peter never knocked anything over and never said: “Chrisht!” Wine, coffee cups, and talk about old books came as easy to him as talk about a dog or a horse.

Charlie was thunderstruck when the news came to him that Peter was in trouble. He heard it first from Mackesy the detective, whom he hailed outside the courthouse. (Charlie was like his father in that; he couldn't let a man go by without a greeting.)

“Hullo, Matt,” he shouted gaily from the courthouse step. “Is it myself or my father you're after?”

“I'll let ye off for today,” said Mackesy, making a garden seat of the crossbar of his bicycle. Then he lowered his voice so that it didn't travel further than Charlie. “I wouldn't mind having a word with a relative of yours, though.”