Collected Stories (70 page)

“Mrs. Lynam,” he asked gravely, “is it the way you didn't like to ask the neighbors or the neighbors didn't like to be asked?”

“I don't know why you say that,” she said, shaking her head. “The children don't like going to strange houses, and you wouldn't blame them.”

“Do you mean that, ma'am, or do you mean they did not like going to houses where they would have to behave themselves? Mrs. Lynam, isn't it true that your children are too spoiled and vicious to be left in the home of any reasonable person?”

“No,” she replied shrilly, starting in her seat. “Certainly not. I never heard such a thing.”

But Tom Lynam himself looked at his counsel with such an expression of astonishment that it was clear to everyone that intuitively Mickie Joe had stumbled on the truth. He knew it himself too, and for the first time a smile of satisfaction played about his thin, mournful lips.

“Did many of your husband's friends visit you?”

“Some of them did, yes.”

“He had a lot of friends at the time he married you, hadn't he?”

“He had. A few.”

“And at the time of this break-up, how many of them were still coming to the house?”

The witness's eyes sought out one tall man sitting at the back of the court.

“I'm sure I couldn't say,” she replied doubtfully. “There was one of them at any rate.”

“The local St. Sebastian, I presume?”

“The local—I beg your pardon; I didn't catch.”

“Mrs. Lynam, every married man has at least one friend who sticks to him, even in spite of his wife's attempts to separate them,” Mickie Joe said savagely. “What happened his other friends?”

“I'm sure I don't know.”

“Mrs. Lynam, why did they stop coming to your house? Was it, for instance, that when they came for a meal, you sent your husband out to do the shopping?”

“Only a couple of times,” she said excitedly. “And that is a thing that might happen to anybody. No matter how careful a housekeeper you were, you couldn't remember everything.”

“And I dare say that while he was out, you left them there to entertain themselves?” he asked with a wicked smile.

“Only if I was putting the children to bed, sir,” she said sanctimoniously.

“And I suppose, too, that when this last remaining friend of your husband—this Last Rose of Summer left blooming alone—came to bring him out, say, to the greyhounds, it sometimes happened that they couldn't go?”

“Well, I explained about my back,” she said earnestly.

“You did, ma'am, fully,” said Mickie Joe cruelly. “We are now better acquainted with your back than with any other portion of your anatomy. And we may take it that your husband and his friend had to stay at home and mind the children instead of enjoying themselves.”

“I'm sure they enjoyed themselves more than I did,” she said. “They played cards a lot. They're both very fond of cards.”

But Tom Lynam was still staring incredulously at Mickie Joe. The tall man at the back of the court had grown red. He smiled and nodded amiably to the judge, to the counsel, and even to the pressmen. The Last Rose of Summer, a shy, neighborly sort of man, was clearly enjoying the publicity. Lynam leaned forward and whispered something to his solicitor, but Quill only frowned and brushed him off. Quill was beginning to see the power and pathos of the play Mickie Joe was producing and no more than any other man of the theatre had he time to spare for the author's views.

“Tell me, ma'am,” Mickie Joe asked, “how long is it since you had relations with your husband?”

“Since I what?” she asked in a baby voice, her head raised expectantly.

“Since you went to bed with him, if you like.”

“Oh, I forgot to mention that,” she said hastily. “He doesn't sleep with me, of course. He has a bedroom of his own.”

“Oh, he has a bedroom of his own, has he?” Mickie Joe asked with a new light in his eye. “We'll come back to that. But that wasn't the question I asked just now. The question I asked was how long it was since you had relations with him.”

“Well, with my back,” she began, raising her hand illustratively to her hip.

“Never mind your back now, ma'am. It's not your back we're talking about at the moment. How long is it?”

“Oh, I suppose about two years,” she replied pertly.

“Or more?”

“It could be.”

“No doubt it left no impression on your mind,” said Mickie Joe. “But when you asked your husband not to have further relations with Mrs. MacGee, you weren't inviting him to have them with you?”

“He never asked me.”

“And when he was at Mrs. MacGee's, nursing his child by her, he was in the only decent sort of home he had,” said Mickie Joe with a throb of pathos in his voice that, for once, didn't make anybody laugh. “Would it be true to say that you don't think much of married life, ma'am?”

“Oh, I wouldn't say that,” she replied vigorously. “The Church, of course, takes a very high view of it.”

“I was referring to you, ma'am, not to the Church. Now, weren't you always baaing and bleating to Sister Dominic about the drawbacks of married life?”

“I went to her for advice,” Mrs. Lynam replied anxiously. She was beginning to be doubtful of the impression she was creating, and small wonder.

“On your oath, ma'am,” shouted Mickie Joe, “didn't you say to Sister Dominic that you never had a happy day after you left the convent?”

“Did I?” Mrs. Lynam asked nervously with a finger to her chin.

“Didn't you?”

“I don't remember. But I might, when I was upset.”

“And to Father O'Regan, when you were trying to set him against your unfortunate, decent husband?”

“I never tried to set anyone against him,” she retorted indignantly. “All I asked Father O'Regan was to ask him to be more natural.”

“Natural?”

“Reasonable, I mean. Ah, 'tis all very well to be talking, Mr. Dougherty. That may be all right for young people, but 'tis no way for people like us to be behaving.”

The tables were turned now with a vengeance. Tom Lynam had ceased to look at anyone now but his wife, and at her he looked with an expression of overpowering gravity. He seemed to be saying: “I told you what would happen and you wouldn't believe me. Now look at the result.” He knew as everyone else did that she had failed to prove her case, and that even the policemen at the back of the court who had wives of cast iron were looking reproachfully at the gentle, insinuating little woman who was being revealed as a gray, grim, discontented monster with a mania for power.

When the court adjourned, Mickie Joe's cross-examination wasn't over, but he could easily have closed there, for even O'Meara's mother fixation could find nothing to fix on in the petitioner's case. She was probably the only person in court who didn't realize she had lost, but even she was badly shaken. She grabbed her handbag and waddled quickly down the court, looking neither to right nor to left. As she passed, her husband looked reproachfully at her, but she refused to catch his eye. Suddenly to everyone's astonishment he jumped up and followed her. The lawyers followed too without delay. They were afraid that in their moment of triumph he would snatch the victory from them by finishing the job in the hall. Instead, when they went out he was standing before her, talking in a low, pleading voice. She, with an actressy air, was listening, but half turned away from him as if caught in flight. Finally he approached Quill and Mickie Joe with a frown on his handsome face.

“Nellie and me are settling this between us,” he muttered.

“You're what?” Quill asked in consternation. “But damn it, man, you have it won.”

“I know that,” Lynam replied in an apologetic mutter, “and I'm very grateful, but I wouldn't like her to have to answer any more questions. She thinks I told you all the things you mentioned. You know yourself I didn't.”

Mickie Joe was fit to be tied. He stared at his client over his pince-nez.

“You mean you're going back to live with that woman?” he asked coldly.

“I am.”

“And you know that within forty-eight hours she'll be making your life a misery again?”

“If she does itself, we'll settle it between us,” Tom Lynam retorted in a low voice, though his anger could be heard rumbling beneath, like a volcano.

“You certainly will,” Mickie Joe said with icy fury. “You will not get me to assist you. A man tries to help you, but it is only talent thrown away. Go and commit suicide in your own way. I have nothing further to do with you.”

“There's a pair of us there,” Lynam exploded. “I don't know where you got your information, but you can go back to the people that told you and tell them to mind their own business. I won't let you or anyone talk to my wife that way.”

Quill almost had to separate them. Two madder men he had rarely seen. But from the window of the barristers' room he and Mickie Joe saw the Lynams depart together, she small and sprightly, he tall and morose, and realized that never would they see justice done to a man in a court of law. It was like Oedipus. You couldn't say whether it was the Destiny that pursued the man or the man the Destiny; but you could be quite sure that nothing in the world would ever keep the two of them apart.

The Old Faith

I
T WAS
a great day when, on the occasion of the Pattern at Kilmulpeter, Mass was said in the ruined cathedral and the old Bishop, Dr. Gallogly, preached. It was Father Devine, who was a bit of an antiquarian, who looked up the details of the life of St. Mulpeter for him. There were a lot of these, mostly contradictory and all queer. It seemed that, like most of the saints of that remote period, St. Mulpeter had put to sea on a flagstone and floated ashore in Cornwall. There, the seven harpers of the King had just been put to death through the curses of the Druids and the machinations of the King's bad wife. St. Mulpeter miraculously brought them all back to life, and, through the great mercy of God, they were permitted to sing a song about the Queen's behavior, which resulted in St. Mulpeter's turning her into a pillar-stone and converting the King to the one true faith.

The Bishop had once been Professor of Dogmatic Theology in a seminary; a subject that came quite naturally to him, for he was a man who would have dogmatized in any station of life. He was a tall, powerfully built, handsome old man with a face that was both long and broad, with high cheekbones that gave the lower half of his face an air of unnatural immobility but drew attention to the fine blue, anxious eyes that moved slowly and never far. He was a quiet man who generally spoke in a low voice, but with the emphasizing effect of a piledriver.

For a dogmatic theologian, he showed great restraint on reading Father Devine's digest of the saint's life. He raised his brows a few times and then read it again with an air of resignation. “I suppose that's what you'd call allegorical, father,” he said gravely.

He was a man who rarely showed signs of emotion. He seemed to be quite unaffected by the scene in the ruined cathedral, though it deeply impressed Father Devine, with the crowds of country people kneeling on the wet grass among the tottering crosses and headstones, the wild countryside framed in the mullioned windows, and the big, deeply molded clouds drifting overhead. The Bishop disposed neatly of the patron by saying that though we couldn't all go to sea on flagstones, a feat that required great faith in anyone who attempted it, we could all have the family Rosary at night.

After Mass, Father Devine was showing the Bishop and some of the other clergy round the ruins, pointing out features of archaeological interest, when a couple of men who had been hiding in the remains of a twelfth-century chapel bolted. One of them stood on a low wall, looking down on the little group of priests with a scared expression. At once the Bishop raised his umbrella and pointed it accusingly at him.

“Father Devine,” he said in a commanding tone, “see what that fellow has.”

“I have nothing, your eminence,” wailed the man on the wall.

“You have a bottle behind your back,” said the Bishop grimly. “What's in that?”

“Nothing, your eminence, only a drop of water from the Holy Well.”

“Give it here to me till I see,” ordered the Bishop, and when Father Devine passed him the bottle he removed the cork and sniffed.

“Hah!” he said with great satisfaction. “I'd like to see the Holy Well that came out of. Is it any use my preaching about poteen year in year out when ye never pay any attention to me?”

“'Tis a cold, windy quarter, your eminence,” said the man, “and I have the rheumatics bad.”

“I'd sooner have rheumatics than cirrhosis,” said the Bishop. “Bring it with you, father,” he added to Devine, and stalked on with his umbrella pressed against his spine.

The same night they all had dinner in the palace: Father Whelan, a dim-witted, good-natured old parish priest; his fiery Republican curate, Father Fogarty, who was responsible for the Mass in the ruined cathedral as he was for most other manifestations of life in that wild part, and Canon Lanigan. The Bishop and the Canon never got on, partly because the Canon was an obvious choice for the Bishop's job and he and his supporters were giving it out that the Bishop was getting old and needed a coadjutor, but mainly because he gave himself so many airs. He was tall and thin, with a punchinello chin and a long nose, and let on to be an authority on Church history and on food and wine. That last was enough to damn anyone in the Bishop's eyes, for he maintained almost
ex cathedra
that the best food and wine in the world were to be had on the restaurant car from Holyhead to Euston. The moment Lanigan got on to his favorite topic and mentioned Châteauneuf-du-Pape, the Bishop turned to Father Devine.