Collected Stories (6 page)

“But, God Almighty, when ye won't listen to me! How the blazes can I tell the story at all if ye keep on interrupting me? Now I'm after forgetting it all again. Where was I?”

“In the palace,” Monica replied, a little subdued.

“I remember now.” My uncle bowed his head and fingered his chin. “'Twas when he opened the door and saw the Grand Mufti outside on the landing. There was a big stairs at each side.”

“Like the Town Hall?” said Monica, who couldn't be repressed.

“Precisely! Only grander, of course, all gilt and fancy work. A little barbaric but very handsome, very handsome. Well, the Grand Vizier salaamed.” My uncle raised his hands to his temples and bowed his head to his knees in an attitude of abject reverence. “‘Salaam, effendi,' he says, and he tried to take the umbrella and fez from the Grand Mufti. But the Grand Mufti gave a wicked little grunt and walked in past him with his fez on his pate.… Now, the Grand Vizier, as I explained to you, was a Constantinople man, and all Constantinople men have the divil's own temper. You wouldn't know you were after insulting one of them before you got a knife in your ribs; and in Constantinople to walk into another man's room with your fez on was as much as to say you thought he was no better than a Christian. But the Grand Vizier, being young and inexperienced, thought he'd better wait and see. So he salaamed again. ‘Grand Mufti,' he says, ‘what can the least of the servants of Allah do for you?' ‘The least of the servants of Allah,' says the Grand Mufti, ‘will have to stop preaching his subversive doctrines.' ‘Most Excellent'”—my uncle joined his hands and bowed his head meekly—“‘utterance is obedience, as the Prophet says.' ‘No more foreign notions!' says the Grand Mufti. ‘No more infidel Christian ideas!' ‘My Lord Steeplejack,' says the Grand Vizier, ‘obedience is forgetfulness.' ‘Well, remember it,' says the Grand Mufti, ‘for one word more out of you about taxes, and so help me, Allah, off comes your head.'

“Now, I won't swear to the exact words,” my uncle continued excitedly, clawing the air with his hands. “I heard the story so long ago, and Turkish is a very confusing language. But those were the sentiments—‘off comes your head!'”

“Goodness!” cried Josie, so round-eyed with consternation that Monica and I both laughed outright at her. She stared from one to the other of us in confusion and blinked. My uncle smiled and paused to wipe his face in a large handkerchief.

“Well,” he continued, “this, I needn't say, wasn't the sort of language the young Grand Vizier was accustomed to in Paris. He couldn't take his eyes off the—” He tapped his forehead.

“Fez,” supplied Monica.

“'Twas very high; a most remarkable headgear, only worn by the steeplejacks. 'Twas a terrible temptation, but what kept him back was that shocking passage in the Koran about what happens anyone that lays irreverent hands on a mufti's fez. Seven different damnations! But just at that moment the Grand Mufti thumped his umbrella on the floor and said, ‘Rakaki skulati dinjji.'”

“What does that mean?” asked Josie with a frown.

“‘Nuff said,'” explained my uncle. “And then the Grand Vizier imagined what his pals in Paris would say if they saw him then, taking back-chat from a fat old mufti, and the Constantinople blood boiled in his veins. He opened the door behind him with his left hand and with his right he reached out and took hold of the fez—like this.”

“And threw it out the door,” cried Monica with her ringing laugh.

“Down the full length of the palace stairs and along the hall,” said my uncle eagerly, leaning half across the bed towards her. “And two out-of-works that were keeping up the palace door, discussing tips for the two-thirty, nearly jumped out of their skins when it landed between them. Imagine it, at their very feet, the sacred fez of a mufti! But listen now! Listen to this! This is good! The next thing they saw shooting through the air on top of them was the Grand Mufti's umbrella. And then—then what do you think they saw?”

“The Grand Mufti himself?” gasped Josie.

“They saw the Grand Vizier dragging the Grand Mufti, body and bones, by the collar of the coat and the slack of the breeches across the landing. He was too heavy to throw, but the Grand Vizier laid him neatly on the top step and gave him one good push with his boot that sent him rolling down like a barrel. And then the Grand Vizier went in and slammed the door behind him, and even from the hall they could hear him laughing like a madman, to think he was the first Mussulman in history to get hold of a mufti by the slack of the breeches.”

“And did they kill him then?” asked Josie eagerly.

“My goodness, can't you let me tell the story my own way?” my uncle said irritably. “They didn't kill him at all; 'twas out of fashion at the time, but the steeplejacks tipped the wink to the Caliph, and the Caliph had a few words with the Sultan, and the Sultan passed it on to all the provincial Emirs. That's the way things were done in Turkey then. They found it worked grand. Nothing crude, nothing bloodthirsty; nobody said a cross word; the thing was never mentioned again, and everyone was all salaams and smiles, but the Grand Vizier knew his goose was cooked.”

My uncle brought out the last phrase with sudden savagery. He drew a deep breath through his nose, then rose and drew the curtains. I saw the sudden matchflare of the lighthouse spurting in the black water.

“Wisha, bad cess to you, you ould show, are you going to be there all night?” shouted Nora from the foot of the stairs.

“This minute, Nora,” he replied with a laugh.

“And what happened him after?” asked Monica.

“Who?” he asked innocently. “Oh, the Grand Vizier? He took to drinking raki.”

“Whiskey?”

“No raki. The same sort of thing but more powerful. It made him talk too much. He ended up as an old bore.”

“Go on,” said Monica quietly.

“But my goodness,” he protested with his roguish laugh, “that's all there is. Nothing more. A simple story about a simple fellow. Ah, I didn't tell it right, though. I used to know it better—all the glamor of the East.… Well,” he added briskly, “I'd better let ye get some sleep.”

“That's not all of it,” Monica said in the same quiet way.

“But, my goodness, girl,” he shouted in exasperation, “when I tell you it is!”

He glared down at her, a tall, raking galoot of a man with his clenched fists held stiffly out.

“Ah, that's a queer old story,” Josie said uneasily. “You used to have better stories than that.”

“Tell us the rest of it,” Monica said challengingly.

“I don't even know what you're talking about,” he said in bewilderment. “What ails you? What more do you want?”

“The Grand Vizier had two daughters,” she cried, kneeling up in the bed, her long bare arm stretched out accusingly.

“I never said he had two daughters,” he snarled.

“But he had!”

“He hadn't.”

“And I tell you he had.”

“You're mixing it up, girl,” he said savagely. “You're thinking of a different story altogether.”

Then his head went up with a little jerk, he drew a deep breath through his nose and looked at the ceiling. His voice dropped to a whisper and faltered incredulously.

“One moment,” he said as though he were speaking to himself. “My memory isn't what it was. Maybe you're right. Maybe he had a daughter. 'Pon my soul, Mon, I believe you are. One daughter at any rate. Now what did I hear about her?”

He sank back on the end of the bed and clutched his lean skull in his hands. When he spoke again it was in the same low, faltering voice as though recollecting something he'd heard many years before. I began to shiver all over violently. It was very queer.

“He had a daughter,” he went on, “and she went to a school where the women muftis were teaching. But that must have been a long time after. She'd only have been a baby when all this occurred. Her father wouldn't tell her, of course. He wouldn't ask for pity. He'd be too proud. And she—'tis coming back to me!—she was attracted by a young fellow in the town, a shopkeeper's son. She was afraid to ask him to the house because she didn't want him to meet her disreputable old father—a respectable boy like that! The old Grand Vizier saw it all but he said nothing. He was too proud. Then the young fellow's father, the tool of the steeplejacks, the old bloodsucker, interfered; the boy took up with another girl, and the women muftis she was always in and out to told the Grand Vizier's daughter that 'twas only what she might expect on account of her father; a drunken, blasphemous old man, no better than a Christian. And the Grand Vizier's daughter …”—my uncle slowly raised his head, joined his hands and looked at the ceiling as though he were snatching the words out of the air—“the Grand Vizier's daughter mooned and cried for weeks on end … because she was … ashamed of her father.”

“I'm not ashamed,” Monica shouted angrily.

With eyes that seemed to see nothing, my uncle rose and moved towards the door like a man in a trance. For a moment I forgot that he was only an adorable, cranky, unreliable old gasbag of a man who had just been out boozing with Owney Mac in Riordan's disreputable pub on the quays. He looked like a king: a Richard or a Lear. He filled the room, the town, the very night with his presence. Suddenly he drew himself erect, head in air, and his voice rang like thunder through the house.

“God help us,” he said bitterly, “she was ashamed of her father.”

“They wouldn't say it to me,” Monica shouted hysterically, the tears starting from her eyes. “I'd tear their eyes out, the smug old bitches!”

My uncle didn't reply but we heard his heavy tread down the stairs to the kitchen. Suddenly Josie sprang clean out of bed and rushed after him. Her great brown eyes were starting from her head with terror. Her face was like the face of a little child left alone in a strange place.

“Daddy, Daddy,” she cried, “I'm not ashamed. Oh Daddy, I'll never do it again! Daddy, come back to me! Come back!”

Song Without Words

E
VEN IF
there were only two men left in the world and both of them saints they wouldn't be happy. One of them would be bound to try and improve the other. That is the nature of things.

I am not, of course, suggesting that either Brother Arnold or Brother Michael was a saint. In private life Brother Arnold was a postman, but as he had a great name as a cattle doctor they had put him in charge of the monastery cows. He had the sort of face you would expect to see advertising somebody's tobacco; a big, innocent, contented face with a pair of blue eyes that were always twinkling. According to the rule he was supposed to look sedate and go about in a composed and measured way, but he could not keep his eyes downcast for any length of time and wherever his eyes glanced they twinkled, and his hands slipped out of his long white sleeves and dropped some remark in sign language. Most of the monks were good at the deaf and dumb language; it was their way of getting round the rule of silence, and it was remarkable how much information they managed to pick up and pass on.

Now, one day it happened that Brother Arnold was looking for a bottle of castor oil and he remembered that he had lent it to Brother Michael, who was in charge of the stables. Brother Michael was a man he did not get on too well with; a dour, dull sort of man who kept to himself. He was a man of no great appearance, with a mournful wizened little face and a pair of weak red-rimmed eyes—for all the world the sort of man who, if you shaved off his beard, clapped a bowler hat on his head and a cigarette in his mouth, would need no other reference to get a job in a stable.

There was no sign of him about the stable yard, but this was only natural because he would not be wanted till the other monks returned from the fields, so Brother Arnold pushed in the stable door to look for the bottle himself. He did not see the bottle, but he saw something which made him wish he had not come. Brother Michael was hiding in one of the horse-boxes; standing against the partition with something hidden behind his back and wearing the look of a little boy who has been caught at the jam. Something told Brother Arnold that at that moment he was the most unwelcome man in the world. He grew red, waved his hand to indicate that he did not wish to be involved, and returned to his own quarters.

It came as a shock to him. It was plain enough that Brother Michael was up to some shady business, and Brother Arnold could not help wondering what it was. It was funny, he had noticed the same thing when he was in the world; it was always the quiet, sneaky fellows who were up to mischief. In chapel he looked at Brother Michael and got the impression that Brother Michael was looking at him, a furtive look to make sure he would not be noticed. Next day when they met in the yard he caught Brother Michael glancing at him and gave back a cold look and a nod.

The following day Brother Michael beckoned him to come over to the stables as though one of the horses was sick. Brother Arnold knew it wasn't that; he knew he was about to be given some sort of explanation and was curious to know what it would be. He was an inquisitive man; he knew it, and blamed himself a lot for it.

Brother Michael closed the door carefully after him and then leaned back against the jamb of the door with his legs crossed and his hands behind his back, a foxy pose. Then he nodded in the direction of the horse-box where Brother Arnold had almost caught him in the act, and raised his brows inquiringly. Brother Arnold nodded gravely. It was not an occasion he was likely to forget. Then Brother Michael put his hand up his sleeve and held out a folded newspaper. Brother Arnold shrugged his shoulders as though to say the matter had nothing to do with him, but the other man nodded and continued to press the newspaper on him.

He opened it without any great curiosity, thinking it might be some local paper Brother Michael smuggled in for the sake of the news from home and was now offering as the explanation of his own furtive behavior. He glanced at the name and then a great light broke on him. His whole face lit up as though an electric torch had been switched on behind, and finally he burst out laughing. He couldn't help himself. Brother Michael did not laugh but gave a dry little cackle which was as near as he ever got to laughing. The name of the paper was
The Irish Racing News
.