Collected Stories (39 page)

Peter Humphreys's eyes almost grew straight with the shock of such reckless slander on a blameless judge. He didn't know what had come over the Roarer. But that wasn't the worst. When the settlement was announced and the Flynns were leaving he went up to them again.

“You can believe me when I say you did the right thing, Mr. Flynn,” he said. “I never like cases involving good-looking girls. Gentlemen of his Lordship's age are terribly susceptible. But tell me, why wouldn't your son marry her now as he's about it?”

“Marry her?” echoed Ned, who hadn't yet got over the shock of having to pay two hundred and fifty pounds and costs for a little matter he could have compounded for with Father Corcoran for fifty. “A thing like that!”

“With two hundred and fifty pounds, man?” snarled Cooper. “'Tisn't every day you'll pick up a daughter-in-law with that.… What do you say to the girl yourself?” he asked Tom.

“Oh, begod, the girl is all right,” said Tom.

Tom looked different. It was partly relief that he wouldn't have to perjure himself, partly astonishment at seeing his father so swiftly overthrown. His face said: “The world is wide.”

“Ah, Mr. Flynn, Mr. Flynn,” whispered Cooper scornfully, “sure you're not such a fool as to let all that good money out of the family?”

Leaving Ned gasping, he went on to where Dick Carty, aglow with pride and malice, was receiving congratulations. There were no congratulations for Delia who was standing near him. She felt a big paw on her arm and looked up to see the Roarer.

“Are you still fond of that boy?” he whispered.

“I have reason to be, haven't I?” she retorted bitterly.

“You have,” he replied with no great sympathy. “The best. I got you that money so that you could marry him if you wanted to. Do you want to?”

Her eyes filled with tears as she thought of the poor broken china of an idol that was being offered her now.

“Once a fool, always a fool,” she said sullenly.

“You're no fool at all, girl,” he said, giving her arm an encouraging squeeze. “You might make a man of him yet. I don't know what the law in this country is coming to. Get him away to hell out of this till I find Michael Ivers and get him to talk to your father.”

The two lawyers made the match themselves at Johnny Desmond's pub, and Johnny said it was like nothing in the world so much as a mission, with the Roarer roaring and threatening hellfire on all concerned, and Michael Ivers piping away about the joys of Heaven. Johnny said it was the most instructive evening he ever had. Ivers was always recognized as a weak man so the marriage did him no great harm, but of course it was a terrible comedown for a true Roarer, and Cooper's reputation has never been the same since then.

The Masculine Principle

M
YLES
R
EILLY
was a building contractor in a small way of business that would never be any larger owing to the difficulty he found in doing sums. For a man of expansive nature sums are hell; they narrow and degrade the mind. And Myles was expansive, a heavy, shambling man, always verging on tears or laughter, with a face like a sunset, and something almost physically boneless about his make-up. A harassed man too, for all his fat, because he was full of contradictory impulses. He was a first-rate worker, but there was no job, however fascinating, which he wouldn't leave for the sake of a chat, and no conversation, however delightful, which did not conceal a secret sense of guilt. “God, I promised Gaffney I'd be out of that place by Saturday, Joe. I know I ought to be going; I declare to my God I ought, but I love an intelligent talk. That's the thing I miss most, Joe—someone intelligent to talk to.”

But even if he was no good at sums he was great at daughters. He had three of these, all stunners, but he never recognized his real talent and continued to lament the son he wanted. This was very shortsighted of him because there wasn't a schoolboy in town who didn't raise his cap to Myles in hopes of impressing his spotty visage on him, so that one day he might say to his daughters “Who's that charming fellow from St. Joseph's Terrace—best-mannered boy in the town. Why don't we ever have him round here?” There was no recorded instance of his saying anything of the sort, which might have been as well, because if the boys' mothers didn't actually imply that the girls were fast, they made no bones about saying they were flighty. Mothers, unfortunately, are like that.

They were three grand girls. Brigid, the eldest, was tall and bossy like a reverend mother; Joan, the youngest, was small and ingratiating, but Evelyn was a bit of a problem. She seemed to have given up early any hope of competing with her sisters and resigned herself to being the next best thing to a missing son. She slouched, she swore, she drank, she talked with the local accent which her sisters had discarded; and her matey air inspired fierce passions in cripples, out-of-works, and middle-aged widowers, who wrote her formal proposals beginning: “Dearest Miss Reilly, since the death of my dear wife R. I. P. five years ago I gave up all hopes of meeting another lady that would mean the same to me till I had the good fortune to meet your charming self. I have seven children; the eldest is eighteen and will soon be leaving home and the other six are no trouble.”

Then Jim Piper came on the scene. Nobody actually remembered inviting him, nobody pressed him to come again, but he came and hung on. It was said that he wasn't very happy at home. He was a motor mechanic by trade. His mother kept a huxter shop, and in her spare time was something of a collector, mostly of shillings and sixpenny bits. This was supposed to be why Jim was so glad to get out of the house. But, as Father Ring was the first to discover, Jim had a tough streak too.

Father Ring was also a collector. Whatever pretty girls he had banished from his conscious mind came back to him in dreams, disguised as pound notes, except the plainer, coarser types who took the form of ten-shilling notes. Mrs. Piper was shocked by this, and when Father Ring came for his dues, she fought him with all the guile and passion of a fellow collector. When Jim was out of his time Father Ring decided that it would be much more satisfactory to deal with him; a nice, easygoing boy with nothing of the envy and spite of his mother.

Jim agreed at once to pay the dues himself. He took out his wallet and produced a ten-shilling note. Now, ten shillings was a lot of money to a working man, and at least four times what his mother had ever paid, but the sight of it sent a fastidious shudder through Father Ring. As I say, he associated it with the coarser type of female.

“Jim,” he said roguishly, “I think you could make that a pound.”

“I'm afraid I couldn't, father,” Jim replied respectfully, trying to look Father Ring in the eye, a thing that was never easy.

“Of course, Jim,” Father Ring said in a tone of grief, “'tis all one to me what you pay; I won't touch a penny of it; but at the same time, I'd only be getting into trouble taking it from you. 'Twouldn't be wishing to me.”

“I dare say not, father,” said Jim. Though he grew red he behaved with perfect respect. “I won't press you.”

So Father Ring went off in the lofty mood of a man who has defended a principle at a great sacrifice to himself, but that very night he began to brood and he continued to brood till that sickly looking voluptuary of a ten-shilling note took on all the radiance and charm of a virgin of seventeen. Back he went to Jim for it.

“Don't say a word to anybody,” he whispered confidentially. “I'll put that through.”

“At Christmas you will, father,” Jim said with a faint smile, apparently quite unaware of the favor Father Ring thought he was doing him. “The Easter dues were offered and refused.”

Father Ring flushed and almost struck him. He was a passionate man; the lovers' quarrel over, the reconciliation complete, the consummation at hand, he saw her go off to spend the night with another man—his beautiful, beautiful ten-shilling note!

“I beg your pardon,” he snapped. “I thought I was talking to a Christian.”

It was more than a man should be asked to bear. He had been too hasty, too hasty! A delicate, high-spirited creature like her! Father Ring went off to brood again, and the more he brooded, the dafter his schemes became. He thought of having a special collection for the presbytery roof but he felt the Bishop would probably only send down the diocesan architect. Bishops, like everything else, were not what they used to be; there was no gravity in them, and excommunication was practically unknown. A fortnight later he was back to Jim.

“Jim, boy,” he whispered, “I'll be wanting you for a concert at the end of the month.”

Now, Jim wasn't really much of a singer; only a man in the throes of passion would have considered him a singer at all, but such was his contrariness that he became convinced that Father Ring was only out to get his money, by hook or crook.

“All right, father,” he said smoothly. “What's the fee?”

“Fee?” gasped Father Ring. “What fee?”

“The fee for singing, father.”

And not one note would Jim sing without being paid for it! It was the nearest thing to actual free-thinking Father Ring had ever encountered, the reflection among the laity of the bishops' cowardice, and he felt that at last he understood the sort of man Voltaire must have been. A fee!

Myles Reilly loved telling that story, not because he was against the Church but because he was expansive by temperament and felt himself jailed by the mean-spiritedness of life about him. “God, I love a man!” he muttered and turned to his pint. “A man, not a pincushion,” he added, drinking and looking fiercely away. He liked Jim because he was what he would have wished a son of his own to be. When Evelyn and Jim became engaged he was deeply moved. “You picked the best of the bunch,” he muttered to Jim with tears in his eyes. “God, I'm not criticizing any of them because I love them all, but Evvie is out on her own. She may have a bit of a temper, but what good is anyone without it?”

He said the same things about Jim to the girls, but they, being romantic, didn't pay much heed to him, even Evelyn herself. He had no patience with the sort of fellows they knocked round with; counter-jumpers and bank clerks with flannel bags and sports coats; tennis players, tea-party gents carrying round plates of sandwiches—“Will you have some of this or some of that, please?” God Almighty, how could anyone put up with it? When Jim started bringing Evelyn ten shillings a week out of his wages to put in her Post Office account towards the wedding, Myles drew the lesson for them. There was the good, steady tradesman—the man, the
man
—not like the sports coats and flannel bags who'd have been more likely to touch them for the ten bob. When Evelyn had two hundred saved he'd build a house for them himself. It would be like no house they ever saw; modern, if you wished, and with every labor-saving device, but it would be a house, a
house
, not a bloody concrete box. The girls listened to him with amusement; they always enjoyed their father's temperamental grumblings and moanings without ever taking them seriously.

“You don't know what you're letting yourself in for,” Evelyn said dryly to Jim. “You may be engaged to me but you're going to marry my da. Greatest mistake anyone could make, getting too thick with their in-laws.”

In fact, Jim was more popular with father than with daughters. They, of course, were not haunted by the image of a son they could not have. Evelyn liked Jim well enough, and given a chance, she might even have loved him, but the sense of inferiority towards her sisters left her peculiarly vulnerable to their criticisms. They didn't understand what she could see in Jim, a poor fish of a fellow who only came to their house because he wasn't happy at home. The ten shillings a week put the finishing touches to him. How any girl of feeling could go with a man who saved ten shillings a week towards his wedding was beyond them. Evelyn defended him as best she could, but secretly she felt they were right, and that as usual she had got the second best out of life, a decent poor slob of a mechanic whom her sisters would turn up their noses at.

Then, at Christmas, she went out to do the shopping with the week's housekeeping in her purse, ran into a crowd of fellows home from Dublin for the holidays, and started to drink with them. She kept saying she had all the money in the house and must really go off and do the shopping, but all the Reillys had a remarkable capacity for reminding themselves of what they should be doing without doing it, and what began as a protest ended up as a turn. The fellows said she was a great card. When she came home half tight with only half the shopping done Brigid smacked her face.

Evelyn knew she ought to kill Brigid, but she didn't do that either. Instead she went to her room and wept. Jim came up later to go to midnight Mass with her. He was a bit lit up too but drink only gave Jim words without warmth. It roused his sense of abstract justice, and instead of soothing Evelyn as he should have done he set out to prove to her how unreasonable she was.

“My goodness,” he said with a feeble oratorical gesture, “what do you expect? Here's poor Brigid trying to get things ready for Christmas and you drinking yourself stupid down in Johnny Desmond's with Casserley and Doyle and Maurice the Slug. Sure, of course, she was mad.”

“That's right,” Evelyn said, beginning to flame. “It's all my fault as usual.”

“There's nothing usual about it,” Jim went on with futile reasonableness, “only you don't know what a good sister you have. The girl was a mother to you. A mother! I only wish I had a mother like her.”

“You have time still,” said Evelyn, beside herself.

“I wouldn't be good enough for her,” said Jim with sickly servility.

“If you're not good enough for her you're not good enough for me.”

“I never said I was. Are you going to make it up and come to Mass?”