Collected Stories (91 page)

“Why should I tell you anything?” he asked. “You have better advisers now.”

In fact, he never did discuss it with her. He even allowed Tom to go to Mass with her and attend the local monks' school without protest. The older Tom was Barbara's biggest surprise. She knew that in arguments with Dick he had taken her side, but when they discussed it together he seemed to judge her far more severely than Dick. It was curious, because the diffidence, the slight stammer, the charming smile did not change.

“Of course, Barbara, as a Catholic I am naturally pleased, for your sake and the kid's, but as Dick's brother I can't help feeling that it's unfortunate.”

“But don't you think it may help Dick to see things a bit differently in the course of time?”

“No, Barbara, I don't,” he said with a gentle, almost pitying smile.

“But, Tom, I don't see that it should make any more difference than it does between you and Dick.”

“Marriage is different, Barbara,” he said, and she didn't even see anything peculiar about being told of marriage by a man who had almost been given up by his own family as unmarriageable. “People don't know it, but they marry for protection as much as anything else, and sometimes they have to be protected at the cost of other people's principles.”

“And you think Dick needs protection?” she asked wonderingly.

“I think Dick needs a great deal of protection, Barbara,” he said with an accusing look.

There was a good deal of talk in the city, much of it ill-natured, though on the whole it did Dick less harm than good. He had ceased to be an active force for evil and become a mere figure of fun, as vulnerable to ridicule as any University intriguer. It had even become safe to promote him.

But it was old Ned Murphy who said the thing that stuck. He and two of Dick's other friends were drinking in a public-house one night, and the others—Cashman and Enright, who was a bit of a smart aleck—were making good-humored fun of Dick. Murphy alone did not laugh at all. He scowled and rubbed his forehead with his fist till it grew inflamed.

“It's like your wife having an affair with another man,” he said sourly, and because he was unmarried, Cashman and Enright laughed louder. Still there was something uncomfortably apt about the analogy; both were married men and there had been a small scandal about Enright's wife, who had had an affair with a commercial traveller. They knew there was always another man, a shadowy figure, not real as they were, and they dreaded his presence in the background.

“Still, you'd think he'd have given her some cause,” said Cashman.

“He gave her plenty of cause,” said Murphy.

“But they always got on well together.”

“They got on all right,” Murphy admitted. “But she must have had a terrible life with him. She's a religious girl.”

“Lots of religious girls marry men like that, though,” said Enright, as though he were following the conversation, which he wasn't.

“Not men like Dick Gordon,” Murphy said broodingly. “He's an optimist, and optimism is the plague of a religious mind. Dick has no notion how intolerable life can be. A man like that doesn't even believe in evil.”

D
ICK'S
optimism was tested severely enough a few years later. He was ill, and word was going round that he would never be well again.

This put half Cork in a flutter, because everyone who had ever had a conversation with him seemed to feel a personal responsibility for seeing that he was converted, and those who might see him were warmly advised of what they should do and say. His boss put a car at the disposal of his friends so that they could rush a priest to his bedside at any hour of the day or night. “Vultures are a breed of bird that has always fascinated me, though I thought they were supposed to be extinct,” said Ned Murphy.

Barbara was exasperated by all the hysteria, more particularly because it put her in such a false position, and her replies became shorter. “I'm afraid it is a matter I never discuss with my husband,” she said. “There are certain things that are too personal even for a wife.” Even that did not put people off the subject. They said that converts were never really like their own people.

One rainy evening Dick was alone in the house, trying to read, when a strange priest called. He was tall and fat and very grave.

“Mr. Gordon?” he said.

“Yes,” said Dick.

“Can I come in for a moment?”

“Oh, certainly. Sit down.”

“You don't know who I am, Mr. Gordon,” the priest said jovially as he took a chair. “I know quite a lot about you, though. I'm the parish priest, Father Ryan.”

Dick nodded.

“Mr. Gordon, I want to talk to you about your soul,” he said with a change of tone.

Dick smiled and lit a cigarette. He had been through it all so often.

“Surely, among your congregation you could find plenty of others,” he suggested mildly.

“Not many in such danger, shall we say,” the priest replied with a smile. Something about the smile shook Dick. It seemed to radiate a sort of cold malice which was new to him.

“Considering that we've only just met, you seem to know a lot about the state of my soul,” Dick said with the same weary sarcasm.

“Mr. Gordon,” the priest said, raising his hand, “I wasn't speaking only of your spiritual danger. Mr. Gordon, you're a very sick man.”

Dick rose and opened the door for him.

“Father Ryan, you're concerning yourself with things that have nothing to do with you,” he said icily. “Now, do you mind getting out of my house?”

“Your arrogance won't last long, Mr. Gordon,” the priest said. “You're dying of cancer.”

“You heard me,” Dick said menacingly.

“You have less than three months to live.”

“All the more reason I shouldn't be persecuted by busybodies like you,” Dick said with sudden anger. “Now get out before I throw you out.”

He scarcely raised his voice, but anger was so rare with him that it had a sinister quality that overawed the priest.

“You'll regret this,” he said.

“Probably,” Dick said between his teeth. “I'll regret that I didn't treat you as you deserve.”

Afterward he went back to his book, but he was even more incapable of reading or of understanding what he read. Something about the priest's tone had upset him. He was himself almost devoid of malice and had shrugged off the opposition to himself as mere foolishness, but this was something more and worse than foolishness. This was foolishness going bad, foolishness turning into naked evil. And Dick, as Ned Murphy had said, did not really believe in evil.

When Barbara came in he was still sitting in darkness before the fire, brooding.

“Hello, dear,” she said with false brightness. “All alone?”

“Except for a clerical gentleman who just called,” he said with an air of amusement.

“Oh, dear!” she said in distress. “Who was it?”

“His name is Ryan. A rather unusual character.”

“What did he want?”

“Oh, just to tell me I had cancer and had less than three months to live,” Dick said bitterly.

“Oh, God, no, Dick! He didn't say that?” she cried, and began to weep.

He looked at her in surprise and concern and then got up.

“Oh, don't worry about that, Babs!” he said with a shrug. “It's only their stock in trade, you know. You should have heard the pleasure with which he said it! Where would they be without their skeleton to brandish?”

It was only the sort of thing he had said to her in the early days of their marriage and had not said since her conversion. She did not know whether he really meant it or said it just to comfort her. After their years of married life he was still gentle and considerate. His brother Tom was little help to her.

“I'll only have to try and be at the house more,” he said gloomily. “This thing could happen again.”

“But can't we complain to the Bishop about it?” she said angrily.

“I'm afraid that wouldn't do much good, Barbara. The Bishop would be more likely to take Father Ryan's side. By the way, have you confidence in that doctor of yours?”

“Dr. Cullen? Oh, I suppose he did what he could.”

“I don't mean that,” Tom said patiently. “Are you sure he didn't go to Father Ryan himself?”

“Oh, God, Tom!” she said. “What sort of people are they?”

“Much like people anywhere else, I suppose,” he said despondently.

After this, she dreaded leaving Dick alone. She knew now the hysteria that surrounded them and knew that those who indulged in it were ruthless in a way that Dick would never understand.

One day she was upstairs chatting with him when the doorbell rang. She answered it and saw Father Hogan outside. He was now parish priest in a village ten miles outside the town, and they saw less of him. He was one of the few friends she had whom Dick seemed to like.

“Come in here, please, father,” she said, and led him into the little front room. She closed the door and spoke in a low voice. “Father, I can't have Dick persecuted now.”

“Persecuted?” he asked in surprise. “Who's persecuting him?”

“You know what he believes,” she said. “I daresay he's wrong, and if you catch him in a moment of weakness he may say he's wrong, but it will be his weakness, not him.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” he asked angrily. “Are you out of your mind? I rang him up when I heard he was sick, and he asked me to call for a drink. I'm not going to do anything to him—except maybe give him conditional absolution when it's all over, and that won't be on his account. There are people in this town who'd try to refuse him Christian burial. You don't know it, but you wouldn't like it. No more would his family.”

“You had nothing to do with the man who told him he was dying?”

“Why?” he asked quietly. “Did someone do that?”

“The parish priest did it.”

“And am I to be held responsible for every fool and lout who happens to wear a soutane?” he asked bitterly. “He asked me in for a drink, Barbara, and I'm going to have it with him, whatever you may think.…” Then with one of his quick changes of mood he asked, “Did it upset him?”

“Fortunately, he didn't believe it.”

“Didn't believe it, or pretended not to believe it?” he asked shrewdly and then threw the question away. “Ah, how would you know? I won't disturb him, Barbara,” he added gently. “I wish I was as sure of my own salvation as I am of his.”

“So do I—now,” she said, and he knew as though he were inside her that she was regretting the weakness of years before and wishing that she could go into the dark with her husband as they had both imagined it when they were young and in love. It was the only way that would have meant anything to Dick now. But he was a good priest and he could not afford to brood on what it all meant. He still had a duty to the living as well as to the friend who was about to die.

The Weeping Children

J
OE
S
AUNDERS
and his wife, Brigid, had been married a year when they had their first baby—a little girl they called Nance, after Brigid's mother. Brigid was Irish, and Joe had always had a feeling that there must be some Irish blood in himself. She was a Catholic, and, though Joe was an unbeliever, he liked it in her, and encouraged her to put up holy pictures and statues all over the house. He even went to Mass with her occasionally, but she said he put her off her prayers with his air of devotion, which made him laugh. She often made him laugh, and he liked it, because he had a natural gravity that turned easily to melancholy and even tears. She had good breeding as well, and he liked that too, though she sometimes upset him by the way she unconsciously patronized his mother and sisters. They were common, and he knew they were common, but he didn't like it to be rubbed in. Brigid had kept her girlish gaiety and her delight in flirting shamelessly with any man who fancied her. It amused Joe, because for all her charm, he knew the wild, chaste, innocent streak in her, and realized that the smart operators would get absolutely nowhere with her.

After Nance's birth Joe felt that life had done him proud. There were times when he saw everything with a sort of double vision, as though he were not only doing whatever he was doing—like pushing the pram round the estate, or creeping into the back room at night to see that the baby was covered—but watching himself do it, as though he were someone in a film or a book, and the conjunction of the two visions gave the thing itself an intense stereoscopic quality. He was sure that this must be what people meant when they talked of happiness.

But he realized that it was different for Brigid. Though at times she could forget herself and play with the baby like a girl with a doll, she was often gloomy, tearful, and irritable. This was not like her. Joe's great friend, Jerry Cross, called it something like postpartum psychosis, and though Joe had no great faith in the long names Jerry liked to give things, he accepted his advice and took Brigid for a week to Brighton. It did her good but only for a short while. Joe—a sensitive man—sometimes thought he knew exactly how she felt—a wild girl with a vivacious temperament, who loved outings and parties, trapped by a morsel of humanity who took everything and gave nothing.

Joe was attentive to the point of officiousness, seeing that she went to the cinema and visited friends. But even to old friends she had changed, and had taken a positive dislike to Jerry Cross. Though Jerry was great at giving women little presents, he didn't seem to like them much, and now Brigid chose to interpret this as dislike of herself. With a sort of schoolgirl pertness that drove Joe to despair she mocked Cross about his overheated bachelor flat, his expensive gramophone and collection of records, and his liqueur cabinet that always seemed to contain some new exotic drink that Jerry would press on his visitors, rubbing his hands and saying in his anxious way, “It's not bad, is it? I mean, it really is not bad. You think that, too, Joe.” Twice, to protect Cross, Joe had to reprove her, and though he did it gently, it cut him to the heart to have to do it at all.