Collected Stories (37 page)

Her face suddenly cleared and she gave my arm a little squeeze.

“You know, Dan, I almost wish I was,” she said in a tone that restored all our intimacy.

Anyone who didn't know her would have taken it for an invitation, but even then, emotional as I felt, I knew it was nothing of the sort. I had a great admiration for her; I knew she'd make an excellent wife for Joe, and I couldn't help feeling that there was something wrong about letting religion come between them.

The following evening I went for a walk with Joe up the Western Road and we had it out.

“I had a talk with Winnie last night,” I said. “I hope you won't think me interfering if I mention it to you.”

“I know anything you said would be kindly meant, Dan,” he replied reasonably.

That was one nice thing about Joe. However much of a bully he might be, you didn't have to skirmish for position with him. It had something to do with the capital letters that the Dalys used as if by nature. They had no time for trifles.

“I think she's very fond of you, Joe,” I said.

“I think the same, Dan,” he agreed warmly, “and 'tisn't all on one side. I needn't tell you that.”

“You couldn't come to some agreement with her about religion?” I asked.

“I'd like to know what agreement we could come to,” he said. “I can talk to you about it because you know what it means. You know what would happen the business if I defied everybody and married her in a register office.”

“But you want her to do it instead, Joe,” I said.

“'Tisn't alike, Dan,” he said in his monumental way. “And you know 'tisn't alike. This is a Catholic country. Her people haven't the power they had. It might mean ruin to me, but it would mean nothing to her.”

“That only makes it worse,” I said. “You want her to give up a religion that may mean something to her for one that doesn't mean anything to you, only what harm it can do you.”

“I never said it meant nothing to me,” he said without taking offense. “But you've shifted your ground, Dan. That's a different proposition entirely. We were talking about my responsibility to provide for a family.”

“Very well then,” I said, seeing what I thought a way out of it. “Tell her that! Tell her what you've told me; that you'll marry her your way and take the responsibility for what happens, or marry her her way and let her take the responsibility.”

“Aren't you forgetting that it would still be my responsibility, Dan?” he asked, laying a friendly hand on my shoulder.

“And because it is, she won't take it,” I said warmly.

“Ah, well, Dan,” he said, “she mightn't be as intelligent as you about it, and then I'd have to face the consequences.”

“That's not the sort of girl she is at all,” I said.

“Dan,” he said whimsically, “I'm beginning to think you're the one that should marry her.”

“I'm beginning to think the same,” I said huffily.

We didn't discuss the subject again, but I'd still take my oath that if he had done what I suggested she'd have pitched her family to blazes and married him. All a girl like that wanted was proof that he cared enough for her to take a risk, to do the big thing, and that was what Joe wouldn't do. Capital letters aren't enough where love is concerned. I don't blame him now, but at that age when you feel that a friend should be everything I felt disillusioned in him.

Winifred wasted no tears over him, and in a few months she was walking out in a practical way with a schoolteacher of her own persuasion. She still called at the Dalys', but things weren't the same between them. Mrs. Daly was disappointed in her. It seemed strange to her that an intelligent girl like Winifred couldn't see the error of Protestantism, and from the moment she knew there was to be no spectacular public conversion, she gave it up as a bad job. She told me she had never approved of mixed marriages, and for once she got me really angry.

“All marriages are mixed marriages, Mrs. Daly,” I said stiffly. “They're all right when the mixture is all right.”

And then I began to notice that between Maire and myself the mixture had ceased to be all right. It was partly the feeling that the house was not the same without Winifred there. These things happen to people and to families; some light in them goes out, and afterwards they are never the same again. Maire said the change was in me; that I was becoming conceited and argumentative; and she dropped me.

I was sore about that for months. It wasn't Maire I missed so much as the family. My own home life had been quiet, too quiet, and I had loved the capital letters, the gaiety and bad tempers. I had now drifted into another spell of loneliness, but loneliness with a new and disturbing feeling of alienation, and Cork is a bad place for one who feels like that. It was as though I could talk to nobody. One Sunday, instead of going to Mass, I walked down the quays and along the river. It was charming there, and I sat on a bench under the trees and watched the reflection of the big painted houses and the cliffs above them at the opposite side of the river, and wondered why I hadn't thought of doing this before. I made a vow that for the future I'd bring a book. A long, leisurely book.

I had been doing that for months when one day I noticed a man who turned up each Sunday about the same time as myself. I knew him. He was a teacher from the South Side, with a big red face and a wild mop of hair. We chatted, and the following Sunday when we met again he said in an offhand way:

“You seem to be very fond of ships, Mr. Hogan?”

“Mr. Reilly,” I said, “those that go down to the sea in ships are to me the greatest wonder of the Lord.”

“Oh, is that so?” he said without surprise. “I just wondered when I saw you here so much.”

That morning I was feeling a bit depressed, and I didn't care much who knew my reason for being there.

“It happens to be the most convenient spot to the church where my family think I am at the moment,” I said with a touch of bitterness.

“I fancied that from the book you have under your arm,” he said. “I wouldn't let too many people see that book if I was you. They might misunderstand you.” Then as he noticed another man we had both seen before come towards us, he added with amusement: “I wonder would he, by any chance, be one of us too?”

As a matter of fact, he was. It was remarkable, after we all got to know one another, the number of educated men who found their way down the Marina Walk on Sunday mornings. Reilly called us “the Atheists' Club” but that was only swank, because there was only one atheist. Reilly and myself were agnostics, and the rest were anticlericals or young fellows with scruples. All this revealed itself gradually in our Sunday-morning arguments. It was also revealed to me that I was not the only young man in town who was lonely and unhappy.

After Winifred married I visited her a few times, and her husband and I got on well together. He was a plump, jolly, good-humored man, fond of his game of golf and his glass of whiskey, and he and she seemed to hit it off excellently. They had two sons. Joe Daly never gave her any cause to regret him, because, though his business prospered, he proved a handful for the girl who married him. Drink was his trouble and he bore it with great dignity. At one time half the police in Cork seemed to be exclusively occupied in preventing him from being charged with drunkenness, and, except for one small fine for being on unlicensed premises after hours—a young policeman was to blame and he was transferred immediately—he never was charged.

But, of course, we all drifted apart. Ten years later when I heard that Winifred's husband was dead, I went to the funeral for the sake of old times, but I knew nobody there and slipped away again before it reached the cemetery.

A couple of months later I strolled back from the Atheists' Club one Sunday morning as Mass was ending to pick up two orthodox acquaintances who I knew would attend it. It was a sunny day. The church, as usual, was crammed, and I stood on the pavement watching the crowds pour down the steps. Suddenly I glimpsed Winifred passing under the portico at right angles in the direction of the back entrance. She had the two children with her. It was the sight of these that convinced me I wasn't imagining it all. I made a dash through the crowd to reach her, and when she saw me her face lit up. She caught my hands—it was one of those instinctive gestures that at once brought back old times to me.

“Dan!” she cried in astonishment. “What on earth brings you here?”

“Young woman,” I said, “I'm the one that should ask that question.”

“Oh, that's a long story,” she said with a laugh. “If you're coming back my way I might tell you.… Run along, Willie!” she called to the elder boy, and he and his brother went ahead of us up the steps.

“So you took the high jump!” I said.

“Ah, there's nothing to keep me back now,” she said with a shrug. “Daddy and Mummy are dead, and you know how much Ernest cares.”

“Well, you still seem quite cheerful,” I said. “Almost as cheerful as a roaring agnostic like me.”

“Ah, but look at you!” she said mockingly, taking my hand again quite without self-consciousness. “A bachelor, with nothing in the world to worry you! Why on earth wouldn't you be cheerful?”

I nearly told her why but thought better of it. It was complicated enough as it was. But for the first time I understood how her life had gone awry. A woman always tries to give her children whatever it is she feels she has missed in life. Sometimes you don't even know what it is till you see what she is trying to give them. Perhaps she doesn't know herself. With some it's money, with others it's education; with others still, it is love. And the kids never value it, of course. They have never really known the loss of it.

And there, as we sat over our drinks in the front room of her little house, two old cronies, I thought how strange it was that the same thing should have blown us in opposite directions. A man and woman in search of something are always blown apart, but it's the same wind that blows them.

Legal Aid

D
ELIA
C
ARTY
came of a very respectable family. It was going as maid to the O'Gradys of Pouladuff that ruined her. That whole family was slightly touched. The old man, a national teacher, was hardly ever at home, and the daughters weren't much better. When they weren't away visiting, they had people visiting them, and it was nothing to Delia to come in late at night and find one of them plastered round some young fellow on the sofa.

That sort of thing isn't good for any young girl. Like mistress like maid; inside six months she was smoking, and within a year she was carrying on with one Tom Flynn, a farmer's son. Her father, a respectable, hard-working man, knew nothing about it, for he would have realized that she was no match for one of the Flynns, and even if Tom's father, Ned, had known, he would never have thought it possible that any laborer's daughter could imagine herself a match for Tom.

Not, God knows, that Tom was any great catch. He was a big uncouth galoot who was certain that love-making, like drink, was one of the simple pleasures his father tried to deprive him of, out of spite. He used to call at the house while the O'Gradys were away, and there would be Delia in one of Eileen O'Grady's frocks and with Eileen O'Grady's lipstick and powder on, dong the lady over the tea things in the parlor. Throwing a glance over his shoulder in case anyone might spot him, Tom would heave himself onto the sofa with his boots over the end.

“Begod, I love sofas,” he would say with simple pleasure.

“Put a cushion behind you,” Delia would say.

“Oh, begod,” Tom would say, making himself comfortable, “if ever I have a house of my own 'tis unknown what sofas and cushions I'll have. Them teachers must get great money. What the hell do they go away at all for?”

Delia loved making the tea and handing it out like a real lady, but you couldn't catch Tom out like that.

“Ah, what do I want tay for?” he would say with a doubtful glance at the cup. “Haven't you any whiskey? Ould O'Grady must have gallons of it.… Leave it there on the table. Why the hell don't they have proper mugs with handles a man could get a grip on? Is that taypot silver? Pity I'm not a teacher!”

It was only natural for Delia to show him the bedrooms and the dressing-tables with the three mirrors, the way you could see yourself from all sides, but Tom, his hands under his head, threw himself with incredulous delight on the low double bed and cried: “Springs! Begod, 'tis like a car!”

What the springs gave rise to was entirely the O'Gradys' fault since no one but themselves would have left a house in a lonesome part to a girl of nineteen to mind. The only surprising thing was that it lasted two years without Delia showing any signs of it. It probably took Tom that time to find the right way.

But when he did he got into a terrible state. It was hardly in him to believe that a harmless poor devil like himself whom no one ever bothered his head about could achieve such unprecedented results on one girl, but when he understood it he knew only too well what the result of it would be. His father would first beat hell out of him and then throw him out and leave the farm to his nephews. There being no hope of conciliating his father, Tom turned his attention to God, who, though supposed to share Ned Flynn's views about fellows and girls, had some nature in Him. Tom stopped seeing Delia, to persuade God that he was reforming and to show that anyway it wasn't his fault. Left alone he could be a decent, good-living young fellow, but the Carty girl was a forward, deceitful hussy who had led him on instead of putting him off the way any well-bred girl would do. Between lipstick, sofas, and tay in the parlor, Tom put it up to God that it was a great wonder she hadn't got him into worse trouble.

Delia had to tell her mother, and Mrs. Carty went to Father Corcoran to see could he induce Tom to marry her. Father Corcoran was a tall, testy old man who, even at the age of sixty-five, couldn't make out for the life of him what young fellows saw in girls, but if he didn't know much about lovers he knew a lot about farmers.