Collected Stories (29 page)

“Who's there?” Bill cried shrilly.

“'Tis only me, Bill,” the doctor replied soothingly. “Can I come in?”

“I'm too sick,” shouted Bill. “I'm not seeing anyone.”

“One moment, doctor,” Father Finnegan said calmly, putting his shoulder to the door. The barricade gave way and they went in. One glance was enough to show Bobby that Bill had had time to get panic-stricken. He hadn't a gun, but this was the only thing that was lacking to remind Bobby of Two-Gun Joe's last stand. He was sitting well up, supported on his elbows, his head craned forward, his bright blue eyes flashing unseeingly from the priest to Bobby and from Bobby to the improvised altar. Bobby was sadly afraid that Bill was going to disappoint him. You might as well have tried to convert something in the zoo.

“I'm Father Finnegan, Mr. Enright,” the Jesuit said, going up to him with his hand stretched out.

“I didn't send for you,” snapped Bill.

“I appreciate that, Mr. Enright,” said the priest. “But any friend of Dr. Healy is a friend of mine. Won't you shake hands?”

“I don't mind,” whinnied Bill, letting him partake slightly of a limp paw but without looking at him. “But I warn you I'm not a religious sort of bloke. I never went in for that at all. Anyone that thinks I'm not a hard nut to crack is in for a surprise.”

“If I went in for cracking nuts, I'd say the same,” said Father Finnegan gamely. “You look well able to protect yourself.”

Bill gave a harsh snort indicative of how much could be said on the score if the occasion were more propitious; his eyes continued to wander unseeingly like a mirror in a child's hand, but Bobby felt the priest had struck the right note. He closed the door softly behind him and went down to the drawing room. The six windows opened on three landscapes. The lowing of distant cows pleased his ear. Then he swore and threw open the door to the hall. Nellie was sitting comfortably on the stairs with her ear cocked. He beckoned her down.

“What is it, doctor?” she asked in surprise.

“Get us a light. And don't forget the priest will want his supper.”

“You don't think I was listening?” she said indignantly.

“No,” Bobby said dryly. “You looked as if you were joining in the devotions.”

“Joining in the devotions?” she cried. “I'm up since six, waiting hand and foot on him, with the result that I dropped down in a dead weakness on the stairs. Would you believe that now?”

“I would not,” said Bobby.

“You would not?” she repeated incredulously. “Jesus!” she added after a moment. “I'll bring you the lamp,” she said in a defeated tone.

Nearly an hour passed before there was any sound upstairs. Then Father Finnegan came down, rubbing his hands briskly and complaining of the cold. Bobby found the lamp lit in the bedroom and the patient lying with one arm under his head.

“How are you feeling now, Bill?” the doctor asked.

“Fine, Bobby,” said Bill. “I'm feeling fine. You were right about the priest, Bobby. I was a fool to bother my head about the Canon. He's not educated at all, Bobby, not compared with that man.”

“I thought you'd like him,” said Bobby.

“I like a fellow to know his job, Bobby,” said Bill in the tone of one expert appraising another. “There's nothing like the bit of education. I wish I met him sooner.” The wild blue eyes came to rest hauntingly on the doctor's face. “I feel the better of it already, Bobby. What sign would that be?”

“I dare say 'tis the excitement,” said Bobby, giving nothing away. “I'll have another look at you.”

“What's that she's frying, Bobby? Sausages and bacon?”

“It smells like it.”

“There's nothing I'm so fond of,” Bill said wistfully. “Would it make me worse, Bobby? My stomach feels as if it was sand-papered.”

“I don't suppose so. But tea is all you can have with it.”

“Hah!” crowed Bill. “'Tis all I'm ever going to have if I live to be as old as Methuselah. But I'm not complaining, Bobby. I'm a man of my word. Oh, God, yes.”

“Go on!” said Bobby. “Did you take the pledge?”

“Christ, Bobby,” said the patient, giving a wild heave in the bed, “I took the whole bloody ship, masts, and anchor.… God forgive me for swearing!” he added piously. “He made me promise to marry the Screech,” he said with a look which challenged the doctor to laugh if he dared.

“Ah, well, you might do worse, Bill,” said the doctor.

“How sure he is I'll have him!” bawled Nellie cheerfully, showing her moony face at the door.

“You see the way it is, Bobby,” said Bill without rancor. “That's what I have to put up with.”

“Excuse me a minute, Nellie,” said the doctor. “I'm having a look at Bill.… You had a trying day of it,” he added, sitting on the bed and taking Bill's wrist. Then he took his temperature, and flashed the torch into his eyes and down his throat while Bill looked at him with a hypnotized glare.

“Begor, Bill, I wouldn't say but you're right,” the doctor said approvingly. “I'd almost say you were a shade better.”

“But that's what I'm saying, man!” cried Bill, beginning to do physical exercises for him. “Look at that, Bobby! I couldn't do that before. I call it a blooming miracle.”

“When you've seen as much as I have, you won't have so much belief in miracles,” said the doctor. “Take a couple of these tablets anyway, and I'll have another look at you in the morning.”

It was almost too easy. The most up-to-date treatments were wasted on Bobby's patients. What they all secretly desired was to be rubbed with three pebbles from a Holy Well. Sometimes it left him depressed.

“Well, on the whole, Dr. Healy,” Father Finnegan said as they drove off, “that was a very satisfactory evening.”

“It was,” Bobby said guardedly. He had no intention of telling his friend how satisfactory it was from his point of view.

“People do make extraordinary rallies after the Sacraments,” went on Father Finnegan, and Bobby saw it wasn't even necessary to tell him. Educated men can understand one another without embarrassing admissions. His own conscience was quite easy. A little religion wouldn't do Bill the least bit of harm. The Jesuit's conscience, he felt, wasn't troubling him either. Even without a miracle Bill's conversion would have opened up the Canon's parish to the order. With a miracle, they'd have every old woman, male and female, for miles around, calling them in.

“They do,” Bobby said wonderingly. “I often noticed it.”

“And I'm afraid, Dr. Healy, that the Canon won't like it,” added the Jesuit.

“He won't,” said the doctor as though the idea had only just occurred to himself. “I'm afraid he won't like it at all.”

He was an honest man who gave credit where credit was due, and he knew it wasn't only the money—a couple of hundred a year at the least— that would upset the Canon. It was the thought that under his own very nose a miracle had been worked on one of his own parishioners by one of the hated Jesuits. Clerics are almost as cruel as small boys. The Canon wouldn't be allowed to forget the Jesuit miracle the longest day he lived.

But for the future he'd let Bobby alone.

Don Juan's Temptation

A
GAINST
the Gussie Leonards of the world, we poor whores have no defenses. Sons of bitches to a man, we can't like them, we can't even believe them, and still we must listen to them because deep down in every man jack of us there is the feeling that our own experience of life is insufficient. Humanly we understand our wives and girls and daughters; we put up with their tantrums and consider what we imagine are their wishes, but then the moment comes and we realize that that fat sleeky rascal understands them at a level where we can never even meet them, as if they put off their ordinary humanity as they put off their clothes, and went wandering through the world invisible except to the men like Gussie whose eyes are trained only to see them that way. The only consolation we have is that they too have their temptations—or so at least they say. The sons of bitches! Even that much you can't believe from them.

Anyhow, Gussie met this girl at a party in the Green and picked her out at once. She was young, tall, dark, good-looking, but it wasn't so much her looks that appealed to Gussie as the naturalness with which she moved among all those wooden dolls in night-dresses. She was a country town girl who had never learned to dress up and pose, and however she moved or whatever she said it always seemed to be natural and right.

They left together and she took Gussie's arm with a boyish camaraderie that delighted him. It was a lovely night with the moon nearly at the full. Gussie's flat was in a Georgian house on the street which ran through the Green; she had a room in Pembroke Road, and as they passed the house Gussie halted and asked her in. She gave a slight start, but Gussie, having a few drinks in, didn't notice that until later.

“For what?” she asked gaily.

“Oh, for the night if you like,” Gussie replied in the same tone and felt like biting off his tongue when he heard it. It sounded so awkward, like a schoolboy the first time he goes with a girl.

“No, thanks,” she said shortly. “I have a room of my own.”

“Oh, please, Helen, please!” he moaned, taking her hand and squeezing it in the way of an old friend of the family. “You're not taking offense at my harmless little joke. Now you'll have to come up and have a drink, just to show there's no ill feeling.”

“Some other night,” she said, “when it's not so late.”

He let it go at that because he knew that anything further he said would only frighten her more. He knew perfectly well what had happened. The Sheehans, mischief-makers and busybodies, had warned her against him, and he had walked straight into the trap. She still held onto his arm, but that was only not to make a fuss. Inside she was as hurt as anything. Hurt and surprised. In spite of the Sheehans' warnings she had taken him at his face value, not believing him to be that sort at all. Or rather, as Gussie, whose eyes were differently focused from ours, phrased it to himself, knowing damn well he was that sort but hoping that he would reveal it gradually so that she wouldn't be compelled to take notice.

She stopped at the canal bridge and leaned over to look at the view. It was beautiful there in the moonlight with the still water, the trees, the banked houses with odd windows caught in the snowy light, but Gussie knew it was not the moonlight she was thinking of. She was getting over her fright and now it was her pride that was hurt.

“Tell us,” she said, letting on to be very lighthearted and interested in the subject, as it were, only from the psychological standpoint, “do you ask all the girls you meet the same thing?”

“But my goodness, didn't I tell you it was only a joke?” Gussie asked reproachfully.

She rested her head on her arms and looked back at him over her shoulder, the cloche hat shading her face to the chin. It was a natural, beautiful pose but Gussie knew she wasn't aware of it.

“Now you're not being honest,” she said.

“Are you?” Gussie asked with a faint smile.

“Am I what?” she replied with a start.

“Can't you admit that you were warned against me?” he said.

“As a matter of fact I was,” she replied candidly, “but I didn't pay much attention. I take people as I find them.”

“Now you're talking sensibly,” said Gussie and thought in a fatherly way: “The girl is nice. She's a bit shocked but she'll have to learn sooner or later and it would be better for her to learn from someone who knows.” The awkwardness of Irish husbands was a theme song of Gussie's. The things their wives told you were almost incredible.

“You probably wouldn't believe me if I told you how few women interest me enough for that,” he said.

“But the ones you do ask,” she went on, sticking to her point, though pretending to be quite detached as though she really were only looking for information, “do they come?”

“Some,” he said, smiling at her innocence. “Sometimes you meet a difficult girl who makes a hullabaloo and won't even come and get a drink with you afterwards.”

“Married women or girls?” she asked in the tone of an official filling up a form, but the quaver in her voice gave her away.

“Both,” said Gussie. If he had been perfectly honest he would have had to admit that at that time there was only one of the former and not exactly a queue of the latter but he had decided, purely in Helen's own interest, that since she needed to have her mind broadened there was no use doing it by halves. It was better to get it over and be done with it, like having a tooth out. “Why?”

“Oh, nothing,” she said casually, “but I'm not surprised you have such a poor opinion of women if you can pick them up as easily as that.”

This view of the matter came as a real surprise to Gussie, who would never have described his conduct in that way.

“But my dear young lady,” he said offering her a cigarette, “whoever said I have a poor opinion of women? What would I be doing with women if I had? On the contrary, I have a very high opinion of women, and the more I see of them the more I like them.”

“Have you?” she said, stooping low over the match-flame so that he shouldn't see her face. He guessed that it was very flushed. “It must be a poor opinion of me so.”

“What an extraordinary idea!” said Gussie, still genuinely trying to fathom it. “How can you make out that wanting to see more of you means I have a poor opinion of you. Even if I do want to make love to you. As a matter of fact, if it's any news to you, I do.”

“You want it rather easy, don't you?” she asked with a trace of resentment.

“Why?” he asked blandly. “Do you think it should be made difficult?”