Collected Stories (63 page)

“Would you like to show me your bag so?” she asked icily.

“Why would I show you my bag?” Kitty asked indignantly.

“You got that money from Father,” Joan said.

“I did not get it from Father,” shouted Kitty, now thoroughly scared as she saw the source of her independence threatened. “I got it from Aunt Molly, as you're so blooming inquisitive.”

Joan didn't even bother to reply. She felt too bitterly about it. Now she understood a certain air of independence that “the children” had worn for months. Their father had been keeping them in funds. In spite of the credit she had earned among the neighbors, in spite of her struggles to keep the house going, he conspired with them as though she were some sort of ogre who denied them the necessities of life. She could see it all exactly as if it were some man who was being unfaithful to her. It never occurred to her to excuse him because he had been equally generous to her during her mother's life, because he had always responded fondly when she came to him, bubbling with her secret crises, because, in fact, he was the sort of man who was at his best only when you went to him in a scrape. Any form of regular commitment was torture to him because it had no emotional overtones, but he loved the little occasions that enabled him to show the real warmth of his heart.

When she challenged him with it, he was horrified. It would never have occurred to him that anyone could possibly put such a cruel construction on his innocent generosity. He had never seen it in that way at all. He didn't have to go to the neighbors to know what sort of job she was making of the home. It was just that he loved them all!

He argued, he pleaded; he even lost his temper and threatened to hand over the housekeeping to Kitty, but Joan was remorseless. He had been unfaithful to her and she was disillusioned; and, like every other deceived wife, she knew that her disillusionment was a weapon which would keep him in order for the rest of his days with her. Never again would he betray her. He wouldn't have the nerve. Kitty might weep on him for a new dress, but he would only mumble apologies about “the troubles of poor Joan,” and even when she went beyond the beyonds and tackled him about the amount he spent on drink—a thing her mother would never have dared to do—he was humble and apologetic. He had never behaved so abjectly to his wife, but then, she had spurts of sentiment which he well knew how to take advantage of. All he had to do to get around Mrs. Twomey was to mention some fellow he had met who had spent a holiday in Killarney, where he and she had spent their honeymoon, and within a half an hour Mrs. Twomey was washing up while she sang in a sweet cracked voice “By Killarney's Lakes and Fells.” He had no such hold over Joan. Now she had three quivering victims, a thing that might have gone to the head of a less emotional girl than she was.

I
T HORRIFIED
her to see how badly they had all been brought up. Until then, when she heard criticism of their wildness, she had only mocked at the neighbors and said that they were jealous. Now that she found herself in the neighbors' camp, she saw how right they had been. No attempt had ever been made to correct herself and her sisters until she had taken things into her own hands. She could not blame her mother for this and found it hard to attach anything so substantial as blame to an unstable character like her father. It must, she thought, be plain, crude original sin. There were even moments when she wondered whether God in His infinite wisdom had not been compelled to remove her mother to bring her to a proper sense of responsibility—a common stage in the development of spiritual pride.

But Dick Gordon was the one who really saw the profound change that was taking place in her. Till her mother died, she had seen no harm in him; neither her parents nor herself had taken his atheism seriously, and her father had even said that every intelligent young fellow went through the same thing; it had given her a feeling of broad-mindedness to listen to his dashing, cynical talk. But now she had only to imagine him saying the same sort of things to Kitty to realize that there are two ways of looking at a man.

It troubled her a lot; she prayed a good deal, and tried to break off with him gently by diminishing the number of occasions when she went out with him, but there was a curious thickness about Dick that made him come back again and again. Finally she had to speak to him seriously about it, but it was with real regret and pity.

“I think, Dick, boy, we've got to give up going with one another,” she said with a gentle smile.

“Go on!” Dick said lightly, raising his head and looking at her curiously. “Why do you think that?”

“Well, you see, I have certain responsibilities, and I don't see how we can ever get married.”

“I have a few responsibilities myself, and we never expected to be able to get married in a hurry.”

“But this is a long job, Dick—years and years.”

Dick shrugged his shoulders uncomprehendingly.

“Well, if we have to wait, we have to wait. If you find someone that suits you, you have to put up with the inconveniences.”

“But that's the trouble, Dick,” she said, realizing that she was not going to escape without open discussion. “I don't think we do suit one another.”

He still refused to be shaken. Dick was an engineer, and he tended to treat life very like a delicate machine. If something went wrong, you opened it up and fixed it, and then it worked again.

“How long have you thought that, Joan?”

“For quite a while.”

“Since your mother's death?”

“I dare say.”

“Well, I know it upset you; that's only to be expected, but it's also only to be expected that you'll get over it.”

“I don't think so, Dick. Not so far as that goes. You see, I was young and giddy, and I didn't realize how much certain things meant to me. Religion, for instance. I couldn't marry a man who didn't believe the same things as I do.”

Dick shrugged his shoulders. “It hasn't affected you very much up to this.”

“No, Dick, but it could.”

“Could!” he repeated with light mockery. He was bewildered. He couldn't help feeling that religion had nothing to do with it; that a cog wasn't engaging somewhere or a plug wasn't sparking. He continued to argue. At last he rose with a shrug.

“Oh, well,” he said, “if that's how you feel about it.”

He was really very fond of Joan and enjoyed knocking about the house, so he was quite incredulous at her dropping him. It was a thing to hurt the feelings of any man, but Dick was worse than hurt, he was bewildered. From his limited, logical, liberal point of view, the thing didn't make sense. Sometimes he even wondered whether there wasn't something in religion after all, and whether he wasn't a freak of nature whom any sensible girl must naturally drop. At other times it seemed to him that Joan was becoming slightly touched, and that it was his duty to speak to her father about it. Either way you took it, it seemed monstrous. He knew the wild side of Joan better than anyone else, and loved it in his own limited way, and he could not understand how it could disappear like that, overnight, leaving nothing behind but a soured, censorious old maid. He talked lightly to Kitty about it.

“It's all pride, Dick,” she said violently. “It's all rotten pride and vanity.”

He was a creature of habit, and he continued to come to the house; to rag May, who adored him, and chat with Mick Twomey, who liked his manliness. When Joan refused to make it up, he shrugged his shoulders and flirted with Kitty instead. To put the crowning touch on it, Kitty fell head and ears in love with him; she could scarcely believe that the ideal of her early girlhood was now at her feet, and Kitty in love could be observed not only by Joan but by half the road. When she was kept five minutes late for an appointment, she burst into tears and threatened suicide.

Then Joan grew really angry. This was a development she hadn't intended at all, and Kitty was far too young and too spoiled to understand her objections. She chose to think that the breach between Joan and Dick had been caused by Dick's resentment at the change in her, and that her objections to Dick going with herself were merely jealousy. Joan, intensely aware of the purity of her own motives, found it hard to realize what was going on in Kitty's head.

“I suppose it's because you can't have him yourself you don't want anyone else to have him?” blazed Kitty.

“I don't give a button who has him,” Joan said flatly. “I just don't want you to have anything to do with him, that's all.”

“Ah, we know all about this.”

“What on earth do you mean, child?” asked Joan.

“Where do you get your women from?” retorted Kitty. “I'm not such a child as all that. You pretend you don't want him; other people might think 'twas the way he didn't want you.”

Joan looked at Kitty in stupefaction. It was only now she was beginning to realize the change in her own character. Six months before, that skinny little brat wouldn't have dared to tell Joan that any man in the world preferred herself to Joan without Joan's showing her pretty soon the mistake she was making. Even then she could feel a certain temptation to take Dick back, just to teach the little fool a good lesson about the nature of men and the facts of life. But it was only for a moment.

“You're welcome to think it, if it gives you any satisfaction,” she said coldly.

In spite of it, Kitty continued to defy her, and Dick, with that unshakable self-confidence of his, continued to come to the house and behave exactly as though nothing whatever had happened, beyond the change from herself to Kitty. He even did with Kitty the sort of things he had done with herself, and took her off on the pillion of his motor bicycle to Crosshaven for the weekend without saying a word to her about it. This was really too much for Joan, who had no faith whatever in Kitty's capacity for keeping out of mischief, and she complained to her father.

Now, Mick was a bad man to complain to, because he was full of pity for humanity in general and young fellows of Dick's age in particular. He too thought she was jealous—it was extraordinary, the number of people who got that impression.

“Ah, listen, Joan,” he said with an anguished air, “wouldn't you make it up with him, whatever he did to you?”

“Honestly, Daddy,” she protested, “he did nothing to me.”

“Whatever ye did to one another so.”

“But I tell you we did nothing to one another. It's just that I don't think Dick and I are suited to one another. He doesn't go to Mass. I don't think he has a proper sense of responsibility. And Kitty is much too young and too giddy to be mixing round with that Crosshaven crowd. She's bound to drink too much, and Dick will only encourage her. I tell you, unless we put a stop to it, she'll be ruined within a year.”

“Ah, God, Joanie,” muttered her father with a distraught air, “I was very like Dick at that age. He's only knocking round with Kitty to spite you. It only shows how fond of you he is. Damn it, I nearly married your Aunt Molly after one row I had with your poor mother, God rest her.”

In fact, though he did speak to Kitty, he only made matters worse, for he mumbled that he didn't know what was after coming over Joan, but she was mad jealous of anyone who looked crosswise at Dick Gordon—nothing, it seemed, could convince him of the nobility of Joan's motives—and that it would be very unkind of Kitty to go between them. Kitty, who had a violent temper, flew off the handle, told him no one could live in the house since her mother's death; that it was all his fault because he let Joan do what she liked; and swore that if he wasn't careful, she'd leave and get a job in Dublin. She scared him so badly that he withdrew to his bedroom and sulked in protest against both of them.

But Joan wasn't to be beaten so easily. One day she called at the office where Dick Gordon worked. He brought her into the waiting-room, looking quite pleasant and collected, and stood at the fireplace with his hands behind his back.

“Dick,” she said sweetly, “I want to ask a favor of you.”

“Sure,” said Dick with his usual amiability. “Fire ahead.”

“It's about Kitty.”

He pursed his lips and tossed his head deprecatingly. He knew now that he was in for a scene.

“What about her?”

“Please, Dick, for my sake, will you stop taking her out?”

“Why should I stop taking her out?”

“Because it's upsetting her, and you know you don't really care about her.”

Hands still behind his back, he drew himself up on his heels.

“It seems to be upsetting more than her,” he said pleasantly.

“It is, if you want to know,” she replied quietly. “You're only doing it to spite me.”

“You have a very high opinion of yourself, haven't you?” he asked with a laugh.

“You don't have to talk to me like that,” she said reproachfully.

“I don't have to talk to you at all, if it comes to that,” he retorted indifferently.

She knew that the indifference was only assumed, and that he would have welcomed the chance of a good breakdown like anyone else.

“You know you think a great deal of me, and I think the same of you,” she said appealingly. “Why won't you do this for me?”

Joan could be angelic when it suited her, and it suited her then. She didn't leave till he had given his promise, though he gave it grudgingly, feeling that in some way he was being exploited. Even then he insisted on telling Kitty himself. Kitty wept for hours and then packed her bag and announced that she was leaving for Dublin at once. Her father was very upset, but Joan, still indignant at Kitty's defiance, assured him that this was the best way of bringing “the child” to her senses. Left to herself for a while in lodgings, she would soon learn the value of a good home.

T
HERE
was more peace after she left, and to everyone's surprise Joan became friendly with another fellow, a civil servant named Chris Dwyer. Chris was the very opposite of Dick Gordon; a pale, pious, harassed young fellow with an angular, irritable sense of humor and a passion for music. Where Dick swaggered into any group, entirely at his ease, Chris arrived with a bundle of gramophone records under his arm and a politeness and pleasure which he couldn't keep up and which gradually gave place to an air of doubt and distress. Even when he was playing one of his beloved records on the gramophone, he clasped his hands and watched the gramophone feverishly, as though he expected that at any moment it would come out with a wrong note. He lived in Sunday's Well—a classy quarter—was of a good family which had come down in the world, and devoted himself to the care of his mother, a woman of such invincible refinement that she couldn't even understand what had happened to her income. Chris couldn't enlighten her much, for he understood it all so well that to explain anything at all, he had to begin with the history of banking.