Collected Stories (89 page)

“We're not thinking in that direction at all, Mrs. Grahame, thank you all the same,” he said, giving her a sweet smile. “It's got to be a double murder or nothing at all.”

H
E KNEW
that in spite of her jealousy, Mrs. Grahame resented this fate for them, but Mrs. Clery jovially pretended that they should be grateful for their good fortune.

“Ye don't know how well off ye are,” she said. “Ye're young and healthy; a lot ye have to complain of. The way they rush into marriage you'd think they were robbing a bank. Soon enough they get tired of it, and then, oh my! Nothing is bad enough for them to say about one another.”

“So you don't approve of marriage, Mammy?” Eileen would ask demurely.

“Who said I don't approve of marriage?” her mother asked suspiciously, certain that the “divils” were trapping her again. “What matter whether you approve of it or not? That doesn't make it any better. Let ye be young while ye can, Jim,” she counseled, laying a rocky hand on Jim's knee. “Ye'll be married long enough.”

But, of course, Eileen and himself did not share her views. On their evening walks they usually passed through one of the new developments, glanced into half-built houses with the enthusiasm of the children who played cowboys and Indians in them; chatted with young husbands digging in little patches of garden that were mainly builders' rubble, and let themselves be invited in for cups of tea by young couples in all the pride and joy of recent possession. They saw nothing of the ugliness of it. They saw only the newness of everything as though it were life itself renewed; the way the evening sunlight brought up the freshness of the paint, the whiteness of the curtains, the tender green of the new grass. Later in the evening Eileen would say, shaking her head: “I didn't think the curtains were right in the big corner windows, Jim, did you?” and Jim would know she had furnished the house in her own mind.

T
HAT YEAR
Jim suggested that he and Eileen should take their holidays together. This didn't suit Mrs. Clery at all. She was sure it would give Eileen a bad name. Mrs. Clery was all for their being young while they could, but only as long as they were being young under her eye. Jim knew it wasn't Eileen's good name that her mother worried about at all, but the possibility that their holiday might start something she could not control. He had his way; they went to a seaside place north of Dublin, and walked and swam and sun-bathed to their hearts' content for a fortnight, going into the city when it rained.

On their way home, looking out at the Galtee Mountains from the window of their carriage, he said: “Next time we go on holidays like that, we should be married. It's not the same thing.”

“No, Jim, it isn't,” she agreed. “But what can we do?”

“What's to stop us getting married?” he asked with a smile.

“Now?” she asked in alarm. “But what would we do with our mothers?”

“What we do with them now,” he said with a shrug.

“You mean get married and go on the way we're going?”

“Why not? Of course, it's not what we want, but it's better than nothing.”

“But suppose—well, Jim, you know yourself there might be children.”

“I should hope so,” he replied. “We can cross that bridge when we come to it. But anyhow, there's no particular reason we should have kids yet.”

“But Jim,” she asked timidly, “wouldn't people talk?”

“Do you think they don't talk now?”

Jim was like that, and what Jim thought his mother would think, regardless of public opinion. She, of course, had seen nothing wrong with their going on holidays together, and Eileen, who had felt rather doubtful of it herself, now knew that she was right. She felt he was probably right now too, but she wasn't sure.

The more she thought of it, the more she felt he was, though her reasons were of a different kind. Jim didn't want to wait; he didn't want to grow old and sour in expectation of the day when they could get married; he wanted something, however little it might be, of the pleasure of marriage while they were still young enough to enjoy it. Eileen thought of it in a more mystical way, as a sort of betrothal which would bind them to one another, whatever life might have in store for them. She knew it was too much to hope that she and Jim would both be set free at the same time; one would be bound to be free long before the other, and then the real temptation would begin.

But she knew that even this she would not get without a fight with her mother. Mrs. Clery was conventional to the heart, and besides she knew what happened in marriage. Eileen was very sweet and gentle now, but Eileen as wife or mother would be an altogether different proposition and one an old lady might be unable to handle at all.

“What a thing you'd do!” Mrs. Clery gasped with one hand on her hip. “What sort of marriage would that be? Him living there and you living here! You'd have the whole town laughing at you.”

“I don't really see what they'd have to laugh at, Mammy,” Eileen said earnestly. “Any more than they have now.”

“Go off with him!” her mother said brokenly. “Go on off with him! I'd sooner go to the workhouse than be disgraced by ye.”

“But, Mammy,” persisted Eileen, laughing in spite of herself, “we won't do anything to disgrace you, and you won't have to go to the workhouse or anywhere else.”

M
RS
. G
RAHAME
was upset too, but it was her pride that was hurt. What the neighbors would say did not worry her at all, but it seemed to her that it was her dependence on Jim that forced him into this caricature of a marriage. If by getting out of his way she could have made it easier for him, she would cheerfully have gone into the workhouse. But when Jim explained that even if he agreed to her doing so, it would change nothing regarding Eileen and her mother, she saw that he was right. When next Eileen called, Mrs. Grahame embraced her and muttered: “Ye poor children! Ye poor, distracted children!”

“You don't think we're doing wrong, Mrs. Grahame?” Eileen asked, beginning to be tearful herself.

“Sure, how could you be doing wrong, child?” Mrs. Grahame exclaimed angrily. “Why would ye care what anybody thinks? People who never sacrificed a thing in their lives!”

Then Mrs. Clery threw a fit of the sulks, would not speak to Jim when he called, and finally refused to attend what she called “the mock wedding.” Mrs. Clery had little experience of that sort of thing but she did know when she had been tricked, and she had been tricked by Jim. He had come to the house as a friend and stolen her only daughter from under her eyes. As for all this talk of putting her first, she didn't believe a word of it. A man who would do what he had done would think nothing of putting arsenic in her cup of tea.

B
EFORE
she left for the church that morning, Eileen went into her mother and asked gently: “Mammy, won't you even wish me luck?” But all her mother said was “Go away, you bold thing!”

“I'll be back tomorrow night in time to get your supper, Mammy,” Eileen said meekly.

“You needn't come back at all,” said her mother.

Eileen was very upset, but Mrs. Grahame only scoffed at it when they said good-bye outside the church.

“Ah, she'll get over it, child,” she said. “Old people are all lick alike. I'm the same myself, if the truth was known. I'll see her on the way home and give her a bit of my mind.”

“And, Mrs. Grahame, if you wouldn't mind making her an egg flip, she'd be easier to talk to,” Eileen said earnestly. “She's very fond of egg flips, and she likes a lot of whiskey in them.”

“I'll give her an egg flip,” said Mrs. Grahame, suddenly lighthearted because her own savage jealousy melted in the thought of comforting another old woman in her tantrums. She had a job on her hands, even with the egg flip.

“Don't talk to me, ma'am!” cried Mrs. Clery. “Young people today are all the same; all selfish, all for pleasure.”

“How can you say it, Mrs. Clery?” Mrs. Grahame asked indignantly. “There isn't a better daughter in Ireland. I'd be the last to criticize Jim, but I only wish I had one like her.”

“And when the children start coming?” asked Mrs. Clery, looking at her as if she were out of her mind.

“You reared one yourself.”

“'Tisn't alike, ma'am,” said Mrs. Clery and refused to be comforted. She was intelligent enough to realize that the presence of another baby in the house might rob her of some of the attention to which she felt entitled, and might even result in her being totally deprived of her privileges. Young people today were so selfish!

A
FTER
their one-day honeymoon, Jim and Eileen obediently returned to their duties as though they had never been married at all. Yet Eileen, when you met her on the road, was exceedingly lighthearted and lightheaded, sporting her ring like any young bride. She needed all the joy her new position gave her because her mother had been shrewd enough in her summing up of what the neighbors' attitude would be. The marriage had become a matter of scandalous jokes, and remained so as long as it lasted. Even from intimate friends, Eileen got little jabs that reminded her of her anomalous wifehood. It wasn't that the neighbors were uncharitable, but their feelings about marriage, like their feelings about death, had a certain fierceness that was obvious even in their dislike of second marriages. This marriage that seemed to end at the church door was a mockery of all they believed in, so they took their revenge as people will whose dearest beliefs have been slighted.

Jim affected not to notice the scandal: he had his mother's curious imperviousness to public opinion, and he dropped in on Eileen as though nothing in particular could be said against him. Eileen dropped in rather more frequently on him and his mother, and Jim and she went off for a fortnight in the summer to Kerry or Connemara. It took Mrs. Clery a full year to get used to it, and all that time she watched Eileen closely, expecting her each week to show signs of pregnancy. Perhaps it was fortunate that there were none. Heaven alone knows what she might have done.

Then Mrs. Grahame fell ill, and Jim nursed her by day while Eileen took over from him at night. She was dying, and in the intervals of consciousness, she molded Eileen's hands with her own and said: “I always wanted a daughter, and I had my wish. I had my wish. Ye'll be happy now that ye have the house to yerselves. You'll look after Jim for me?”

“I'll look after him for you,” Eileen said, and on the night when his mother died, she let him sleep on.

“I thought I'd better not wake you, Jim,” she said when she roused him next morning. “You were so tired and Mammy went so peacefully.… That's the way she'd have wished it, Jim,” she added gravely when she saw his look of surprise.

“I dare say you're right, Eileen,” he agreed.

B
UT
their troubles were far from being at an end. When they proposed to shift into Jim's house, Mrs. Clery raised more of a hullabaloo than she had raised over the marriage.

“Is it up among strangers?” she cried aghast.

“Strangers half a mile away, Mammy?” Eileen exclaimed, still unable to conceal a laugh at her mother's extraordinary reception of every new proposal.

“Half a mile?” her mother echoed dully. “'Tis a mile.”

“And you think your old friends would desert you?” asked Eileen.

“I wouldn't ask them,” her mother replied with dignity. “I couldn't sleep in a place where I wouldn't hear the sound of the trams. Jim's mother died in her own house. Oh, my, isn't it a queer thing he wouldn't let me die in mine!”

And once more Jim and Eileen had to resign themselves to frustration. They could offer no adequate substitute for the soothing squeak of the trams climbing Summerhill from the city, and as Eileen saw, it would be folly for them to give up Jim's excellent house, which they would need later on, and come to share her own tiny cottage with a cranky mother-in-law.

Instead, they played at being married. On a couple of evenings each week, Eileen would give her mother supper early, and then come to Jim's house and have supper ready for him when he got in from the shop. When she heard his key in the lock, she ran to the front door to meet him in her white housecoat, and he would let on to be suitably astonished at seeing her. As they went in, she would point silently to the big fire she had lit in the living room, and they would have supper together and read or talk till he saw her home coming on to midnight. Yet, even with the extra work, it gave them both a deep pleasure to make the big bed that Eileen never slept in except as a visitor, to wash up together, or best of all, to entertain some friends, just as though Eileen did not, like Cinderella, have to fly back at midnight to her old part as daughter and nurse. Someday, they felt, the house would really be theirs, and she would open the door in the morning to milkman and breadman.

But this was not how things happened. Instead, Jim fell seriously ill, and rather than consent to the conflict which he knew this would set up in Eileen's mind between her duty to him and her duty to her mother, he chose to go to hospital. Two years after his mother's death, he died there.

S
OMETHING
seemed to happen to Eileen at this point that made even her mother afraid. There was no argument between them as to what she should do. She shut up her own cottage, and her mother joined her in Jim's house, where she received his relatives. The body had been taken to the church, and when Jim's family came, Eileen had lunch ready for them, and chatted as she served, as though the trouble had been theirs rather than hers. It was a cold lunch, and she was full of apologies. At the graveside while they wept, she showed no sign of tears. When the grave had been covered over Jim and his mother, she stood there silently, her head bowed, and Jim's aunt, an enormous woman, came up and took her two hands.