Collected Stories (67 page)

“There isn't much I can do for her,” he said apologetically. “But it isn't good for the little fellow to have to be left with strangers every day.”

“'Tis hard,” she agreed. “I dare say it won't make it too easy for you to settle down yourself,” she added.

“I dare say not,” agreed Jack.

“Isn't it a long time to ask Susie to wait, Jack?” she asked reproachfully.

“It's longer than I like to wait myself, Mrs. D.,” he said, knocking out his pipe. “I have some hopes I might get a rise, but I can't be certain. Of course, if Susie got a better chance, I wouldn't stand in her way.”

“I think we'd better leave it at that, Jack,” she replied with the least trace of pompousness. Whatever else Mrs. Dwyer might be, she was not pompous, but she had the mortifying feeling that she was being bested by an amateur without a trump in his hand. Madge Hunt, who wasn't even intelligent, could get round Jack and she couldn't.

“I'd have nothing more to do with that fellow, Susie,” she told her daughter unemotionally. “He hasn't enough manliness to make anyone a good husband. The Cantillons all take after their mother.”

But Susie wasn't like that at all. She was gentle and a nagger; alarmed at the idea that Jack did not appreciate her, she was more concerned with making him change his mind than maintaining her dignity.

So she began in the most flagrant way to throw herself at Pat Farren's head. She didn't really like Pat; she could not like any man with a reputation of his sort, and he knew more than Susie approved of about her little weaknesses. It's all very well, a man dancing attendance on you, but not when he shows that he knows what's going on in your mind. Susie couldn't have a grievance without Pat's seeing it first. At the same time she wanted Jack to see that others besides himself could appreciate her.

Another man would have withdrawn from a situation of such profound delicacy, but Pat lacked all niceness of feeling. He thought it the funniest thing ever. He was delighted with Susie's conviction that nobody knew what she was doing, and was passionately inquisitive to know how far she'd go with it. It was just the sort of situation that appealed to him because it showed up a woman's character like a searchlight. If Susie had known, she would have died of mortification, but he even discussed it with Jack. When the three of them were together he acted it for all he was worth.

“Are you coming home with me, Susie?” he would say, throwing his arms about her. “I can't live another day without you.”

“I can't, sure,” Susie would cry, half-pleased, half-terrified by his manner.

“Is it that fellow you're afraid of?” he would say, pointing at Jack.

“He'd kill me!”

“That fellow? He doesn't care a snap of his fingers about you. I'm the one that really loves you.”

“Go on out of that, ye pair of whoors!” Jack would cry with tears of laughter in his eyes.

In Crosshaven, where the Dwyers had a cottage for the summer and where Pat spent most of his time, the flirtation continued, and Susie even began to enjoy it. But it seemed to have no effect on Jack. She began to wonder whether her mother mightn't be right, and if Jack was a man at all.

Coming on to Christmas, Pat fell ill and had to be operated on. Susie had never seen Jack so upset. He spent every afternoon at the hospital. She discovered from Pat's mother that he had offered to guarantee a loan to get his friend to Switzerland. But it was too late for that. Pat died the week after Christmas. Jack took to visiting the Farrens as he had visited Madge Hunt, and busied himself with tidying up Pat's small business interests. But it was far worse than the business of Mick's death. He kept a picture of Pat on his mantelpiece, and sometimes when Susie called she found him glancing at it and realized that she was interrupting some sort of colloquy between him and the picture. As time went on and she saw that it had become a sort of fixation with him, she became more concerned. It was morbid; she felt it was her duty to put a stop to it, but she could not get him to listen to ordinary reasonable criticism of Pat. Either he looked pained and changed the subject or he told her gently that she didn't understand. The latter charge really riled Susie. After all, which of them had been made love to by Pat?

“You're very foolish,” she said in a distant tone. “You let people influence you too much. Now, I'd never let anyone influence me like that, not even a man. Pat was amusing enough, but you never realized how shallow he was.”

“Now, Susie, don't let's argue,” he said with a slight pained smile. “Pat had a very fine brain.”

“Ah, he was very insincere, Jack,” Susie said with a frown and a shake of the head.

“Pat was sincere enough in his own way. It wasn't your way or my way. We all have different ways of being sincere.”

“Ah, for goodness' sake,” she exclaimed with a superior air. “Pat was all right as long as he was with you, but he let you down the moment your back was turned. My goodness, didn't I know him?”

“You didn't, Susie. Pat made fun of us, as he made fun of everybody, but he'd never do anything to harm a friend. He didn't even know what it was.”

Then Susie realized that she must make the sacrifice of her life. Nothing else would ever shake Jack out of his absorption in his dead friend.

“That's all you know,” she said in a low voice, her lip trembling at the thought of her own nobility.

“I know as much as anyone.”

“I suppose so, you know that Pat and myself were—living together?” she asked with a long underhung look while she tried to keep her voice level.

“You were what?” Jack exclaimed testily.

Susie broke down.

“Oh, it's all very well for you to criticize,” she sobbed, “but it's your own fault for keeping me dragging on like this from year to year. How soft you have it! Any other girl would do the same.”

“Not making you a saucy answer, Sue,” Jack said irritably, “I don't give a damn what you do, but I'm not going to have you going round telling lies about a man who can't defend himself.”

“Lies?” she cried indignantly.

“What the hell else is it?”

“It is not lies,” she cried, really furious with him this time. “The impudence of you! I suppose you think no one could do a thing like that to you. Well, Pat Farren did, and I can hardly blame him. You're not natural. My mother said it. You don't even know the temptations people have.”

“And as I said before, I don't give a damn,” Jack said, almost wagging his finger at her as though she were nothing but a schoolgirl kicking up a scene at a funeral. “But it could cause great pain to Pat's people to have stories like that going round about him. So don't do it again, like a good girl.”

Susie realized with stupefaction that whether he believed her or not, he would still continue to think it more important not to cause pain to Farren's parents than to consider her warnings. What made it worse was that she could not tell them at home what the quarrel was about. They would never realize the magnitude of the sacrifice she had made to bring Jack round to a sense of reality. Either they would believe her and regard her as a monster, or they wouldn't and regard her as a fool. She went home in a state approaching hysterics and said that Jack was a most appalling man, a most unnatural man. Her mother said quietly: “Well, girl, you can't say you weren't warned,” which was about the most useless thing she could have said, for the more Susie was warned against Jack, the more interesting he became to her. It was inquisitiveness more than anything else. When a girl ceases to be inquisitive about a man, she is finished with him.

It was five years before he was in a position to marry her, and by that time Susie's spirit was broken. He had become a habit with her. It was no use pretending that Mrs. Dwyer was pleased; she had sized the man up, once for all, but as Susie seemed so set on him, she supposed she must only do her best to put up with him. By this time Jack was chief clerk in the carrier's where he worked, and they were fairly comfortable. They bought a nice house on a terrace only a stone's throw from the Dwyers', and produced two children, a girl and a boy. It seemed as if everything was running smooth for them at last. Almost too smooth for Susie's comfort. She had never really got over the way Jack had slighted her great sacrifice. According to her mood, she had two entirely different versions of her relations with Pat. The first and general one was that it had been entirely innocent—which it had; the second was that it had been nothing of the sort—which was equally true, according to the way you viewed it. When she was in good humor—which was most of the time—there had been nothing between Pat and herself except what she called “old nonsense”; when she was out of sorts, she had had a dark past, forced on her entirely by Jack, and had made a magnificent gesture in confessing it to him, only to have it dismissed as childishness. And when she felt like this, and had repeated it in Confession as a sin of her past life which she particularly regretted, and remembered her own nobility, grief and fury rose in her till she made Jack a thorough, good, old-fashioned scene in which she wept and screamed and called him an old molly. Jack, with his feet on the mantelpiece and a book or paper in his hands, would look up at her with concern from time to time over his spectacles and make some reasonable masculine protest, which only started her off again. Finally it would get too much for him. He would dash down his paper, say “F—you!” in a choking voice, and go out to get drunk. The first time he did this, Susie was thrilled, but she soon discovered that Jack's emotional vocabulary was limited to one word, which he used only under extreme provocation, and once he had done this, he had nothing more to say for himself.

T
HEN
, at the height of their married happiness, the worst happened. Mrs. Cantillon, having managed to exhaust her small means and entangle herself in a labyrinth of tiny debts, none of which could be explained at less than novel length, was threatened with eviction. Jack was profoundly worried. He went to Madge Hunt for advice. Madge was the only woman whose judgment he really trusted.

“Well, it seems to me you'll just have to be a bit of a bastard for once in your life, Jack,” she said.

“Would I have to take lessons for that?” he asked gently.

“The first lesson is that you ought to put your mother in a home,” she said coldly.

He shook his head.

“That's what I mean,” she said with a shrug. “If you weren't the sort who couldn't be sensible, I wouldn't be sitting here on my bottom advising you to be sensible. You know she'll make a wreck of your house.”

“I fancy she'll try,” he agreed with a sombre nod.

“Don't kid yourself, Jack, she will. The only thing you can do is ask her to come here. There's a room here, and she's welcome to it on your account. But my bet is she'll go to the workhouse first.”

Then Madge saw him go off despondent, and thought in her cynical way that he was probably the one man in the world she could have been happy with.

But she had seen through Mrs. Cantillon, for those, more or less, were the words Mrs. Cantillon used. First she looked at Jack with a timid smile as if wondering if he was in earnest. Then she explained in her simple, homely way that Madge had killed poor Mick before his time; that though at the time she had lied herself black in the face for the child's sake, everyone knew poor Mick had committed suicide, and that, though as a Christian she had long forgiven and forgotten all that, the daily contact with her son's murderess would be more than a sensitive woman like herself could bear. Mrs. Cantillon, for all her silliness, was a woman of infinite perception. She saw that in the matter of mischief-making, Madge Hunt was a woman you'd get nowhere with; a hard, cynical woman who would see through an old lady's tricks before she even began them, while Susie, as well as being a much better cook, would be clay in her hands.

Mrs. Dwyer, a woman of small silliness and excellent perception, saw the situation in the same light. She warned Susie that Mrs. Cantillon would drive her out of her home by hook or by crook. She went further. Seeing Susie's complete lack of gumption, she spoke to Jack herself about it. This time there was no pleasantness. The gloves were off so far as she was concerned.

“I don't think you realize the danger of in-laws in your house, Jack,” she said severely.

“I think I do, Mrs. D.,” said Jack with a sigh.

“I don't think so, Jack,” she said, her voice growing hard, “or you wouldn't offer your mother a home with Susie and the children. I've seen more of that sort of thing than you have, and I never yet saw it come to any good. People may mean no harm, but they make mischief just the same.”

“Mrs. Dwyer,” Jack said almost appealingly, “even my mother's worst enemy wouldn't accuse her of meaning no harm,” and for a moment Mrs. Dwyer's eyes twinkled. She knew Mrs. Cantillon too.

“That's all the more reason she shouldn't share a house with Susie, Jack,” she said remorselessly. “When you married Susie, you took on certain responsibilities to her. Young people have to have their disagreements, and they have to have them in some sort of privacy. I never interfered, good or bad, between Susie and you because I know what it leads to. Marriage is a secret between two people. 'Tis at an end when outsiders join in.”

“If you think I'd be likely to side with anyone in the world against Susie!” Jack exclaimed, almost with a groan.

“You mightn't be able to help it, Jack. 'Tis all very well talking, but your mother is your mother.”

“If that day came, I could always cut my throat,” said Jack with something like passion. “But old people have to live, Mrs. Dwyer.”

“They have, Jack,” she said almost with resignation, “but they haven't the same claims as young people, and there's no good denying it. For everybody's sake, your mother would be better in a home. I have to think of Susie.”