Collected Stories (72 page)

“I must be gone wrong, father,” he said anxiously. “I don't know what happened to me tonight. I can usually do this easy enough. We'll go over the wall and up the wood.”

“I can't,” shouted Father Fogarty in a paroxysm of chuckles.

“Nonsense, man!” the Bishop said sternly, holding on to a bush and looking down at him from the top of the wall. “Why can't you?”

“The fairies have me,” roared Father Fogarty.

“Pull yourself together, father,” the Bishop said sternly. “You don't want to be making an exhibition of yourself.”

Next moment Father Fogarty was lying flat at the foot of the wall, roaring with laughter. Father Devine shouted to the Bishop, but he slid obstinately down at the other side of the wall. “The ould divil!” Paddy exclaimed admiringly. “That's more than we'll be able to do at his age, father.”

A few minutes later they found him flat under a tree in the starlight, quite powerless, but full of wisdom, resignation, and peace. They lifted him on a bench, where he reclined like the effigy on a tomb, his hands crossed meekly on his breast, and carried him back to bed.

“Since that evening,” Father Devine used to say in the waspish way the Bishop so much disliked, “I feel there's nothing I don't know about fairies. I also have some idea about the sort of man who wrote the life of St. Mulpeter of Moyle.”

Unapproved Route

B
ETWEEN
men and women, as between neighboring states, there are approved roads which visitors must take. Others they take at their peril, no matter how high-minded their intentions may be.

When I lived in England I became friendly with another Irishman named Frankie Daly. Frankie was the sort of man men like. He was scrupulous, but not so as to irritate people who might have scruples of a different kind. Exacting with himself, he was tolerant of others. The good qualities he had—conscientiousness, loyalty, and generosity—were not those he demanded of his friends, and, as a result, they made great efforts to show them where he was concerned. Even Mick Flynn, who lived by borrowing, made a hullabaloo about paying back a pound he owed to Frankie.

Frankie and I were also friendly with two schoolmistresses who had a little cottage in School Lane, and they frequently joined us in the pub for a drink. Rosalind and Kate could have been sisters, they had so little in common. Kate was a born spinster, lean, plain, and mournful, and with the kindest heart in the world. She was very left-wing and tended to blame capitalism for most of her troubles. Rosalind was a good-looking girl with a fat and rather sullen face, who was always up and down with some man, usually—according to Kate, at any rate—of the shadiest kind. Women with a man on their hands usually vote Tory—they dislike being interrupted—and Rosalind was a Conservative. Cooking being a form of activity associated with love-making, she was also an excellent cook, while Kate, who adored food, not only couldn't cook herself but was driven into hysterics of fastidiousness by the mere sight of cooking fat. She felt about grease as she felt about men, and I sometimes had a suspicion that she identified the two. I often wondered how she could face the liquidation of capitalists and all the blood and mess it would involve.

One day another fellow countryman of Frankie and myself turned up on a temporary job. He was a shambling, good-natured, high-spirited man, given to funny stories and inexplicable fits of morose anger. Lodgings were scarce and hotels expensive, so the girls offered him a room in the cottage. He settled down so well with them that inside a week or so he and Rosalind were lovers. She simply could not be kept away from men.

Kate then devoted herself entirely to the task of hating Jim Hourigan, and being as rude to him as she dared with Rosalind there. Having a lover of Rosalind's in the cottage was like having endless greasy frying-pans to dodge; she couldn't move without seeing a masculine singlet or a pair of socks. Kate derived enormous pleasure from her own griefs, and she told us with gloomy humor that it had been bad enough before, lying awake and wondering what Rosalind was up to. She couldn't kick up a row with Rosalind, who had an unpredictable and violent temper where men were concerned. Kate rationalized this to herself by saying that Rosalind, being a girl of exceptional intelligence, knew they were all wasters but was too proud to admit it. She told us that Rosalind never had had any taste, that all the men she knew had exploited her, that Jim Hourigan was only another of them, and that the only consolation was that she was there herself, ready to pick up the pieces when the inevitable disillusionment came. Frankie and I only laughed at Kate's groans. We didn't know what sort Jim Hourigan was, and we didn't really care much.

When his job ended, he returned to Ireland after making many promises of bringing the girls for a long summer holiday there, and of returning himself at the first opportunity. Kate was very cheerful because she was quite convinced that he didn't mean a word of it—she had the lowest view of his character and motives—and was delighted to have Rosalind and the cottage to herself again. Rosalind, too, was cheerful because, never before having had anything to do with an Irishman, she took all his promises for gospel, had everything ready for her holiday in the summer, and was certain that Hourigan would then ask her to marry him. She wrote him long, animated letters, cleverly recalling our little town and the characters he had met there, and quoting Kate's doleful predictions about the weather, the European situation, and the cost of living.

There was an alarming lack of response to her letters; finally they did produce a wet spark of a picture postcard saying how much Hourigan looked forward to coming back, which might have encouraged a more persevering correspondent but merely infuriated Rosalind. She wasn't accustomed to having her brilliant letters treated with such lack of ceremony and told him so, but this didn't produce even a spark. Kate began to put on weight, though how she did was a miracle, because Rosalind was so upset that she refused to cook, and Kate had not only to eat sausages—which she loathed—but even to clean the disgusting frying-pan herself.

But that wasn't the end of Kate's troubles. Imprudent as usual, Rosalind was having a baby. Now, in the natural way of things, a nice baby without any messy father to get in the way would have been Kate's idea of bliss, but bliss of that sort is not contemplated in English provincial towns. To begin with, Rosalind would lose her job; women teachers cannot have babies without marriage lines; the thing is unknown. Besides, the landlady would be bound to ask them to leave; this was also part of the drill, and even if the landlady had been a considerate woman, which she wasn't, she would still have found it difficult to overlook such conduct. They would have to try and hush things up and put the baby out to nurse.

This was where Rosalind became completely unmanageable. She said she wanted to keep her baby, and she didn't mind who knew. Just the same, she stopped coming to the public-house with the rest of us, and Kate, gloomier than ever, came alone. She was depressed by her failure to make Rosalind see reason. It would only be for a couple of years, and then they could make some arrangement, like pretending to adopt the baby.

“That wouldn't be so very good, Kate,” Frankie said when she mentioned it to him.

“Well, what else can she do, Frankie? Go out as a charwoman?”

“Those are questions that answer themselves, Kate,” he said stubbornly. “A baby put out to nurse is a question that never answers itself.”

Next evening, without saying anything to Kate or me, he called at the cottage and found Rosalind sitting alone over the fire.

“Coming down to the pub, Rosa?” he asked cheerfully.

“No, Frankie, thanks,” she said, without looking up.

“Why not? You know it's not the same without you.”

She covered her face with her hands. Frankie sat awkwardly with his legs stretched out, sucking his pipe.

“Kate tells me you don't want to part with the child.”

“It seems I'm not likely to be asked.”

“All the same, I think you're right and Kate is wrong,” he said gravely.

“That's easily said, Frankie,” she replied. “It isn't so easy for Kate, with her job to mind.”

“If that's how you feel about it, wouldn't it be better for you to marry?”

“The man who got me would get a treasure,” she said savagely. “Whistled after in the street!”

“That's a matter for him,” said Frankie. “Plenty of men would be very glad to marry you. You mustn't let a thing like this make you undervalue yourself.”

“Ah, talk sense, Frankie!” she said wearily. “Who'd marry me in the middle of all this scandal?”

“I would, to begin with—if you hadn't anyone you liked better.”

“You?” she asked incredulously.

“And consider myself very much honored,” Frankie added steadily.

“Are you serious, Frankie?” she asked, almost angrily.

“Of course I'm serious.”

“And face all the humiliation of it?”

“There isn't any humiliation,” he said flatly. “That's where you're mistaken. There's no humiliation where there hasn't been any offense. The offense is in deceiving others, not in being deceived ourselves.”

“Oh, I can't, Frankie, I can't,” she said desperately. “I've made a fool of myself over this waster, and I can't let another man shoulder my burdens.”

“There's no particular burden either,” he said. “You mustn't think I'm asking you only because you're in a fix. I'd have asked you anyway when this thing was all over and you could make up your own mind. I'm only asking now in case it might make the immediate future a bit easier.”

“Why didn't you ask me before?”

“Maybe because I felt I hadn't much to offer you,” Frankie said with a shy smile.

“My God,” she said, rising. “I'd have married you like a shot.”

She sat on his knee and hugged him despairingly. He was a clumsy lover. He talked in an apologetic, worried tone about his job, his home, and his family; how much he earned and where they could live. She didn't listen. She thought of what it would mean to her to start life again, free of this nightmare. Then she took him by the shoulders and looked into his eyes with the air of a sleepwalker.

“I'll do it,” she said. “God help me, Frankie, I hate it, but I'll do it for the kid's sake. All I can say is that I'll make it up to you. You needn't be afraid of that. I'll make it up to you all right.”

Kate, whose low view of life had led her to take a low view of its Creator, almost got converted because of it. She had always liked Frankie, but her experience of people she liked had been that they only got her into fresh trouble, and that it was better, if you could manage it, to have nothing to do with anybody. She wasn't the only one who admired Frankie's behavior. It dawned on others of us that he had done exactly what we would have done ourselves except for what people might think. Actually, as we discovered, “people,” meaning the neighbors with one or two exceptions, liked Rosalind and were pleased to see her escape the machine of social ignominy reserved for women with more feeling than calculation in them.

Frankie and Rosalind were married quietly and went to live in a little cottage some miles outside the town, a rather lonely cottage with low beams, high chimneys, and breakneck staircases, but it had a big garden, which Rosalind enjoyed. She kept on her job; she knew the other teachers knew, but now it only amused her. It was wonderful to have Frankie there as a prop. Up to this, all the men she had lived with had taken advantage of her, and she had accepted it in a cynical, good-humored way as part of the price you had to pay for being too fond of them. She believed, as Kate did, that men were like that, but she was lacking in any desire to reform them.

Under Frankie's care she grew round as a tub, stupid, and quite remarkably beautiful, while Kate managed to look as like the anxious father of her unborn child as a girl could look. But the change in Frankie was even more remarkable. He had always kept a youthful freshness, but now he suddenly began to look like a boy of seventeen. It might have been something to do with Rosalind's cooking—Kate, who had begun to feel the lack of it, visited them every day—but he rang her up regularly at the school to see that she was all right, raced for his bus to get home early in the evenings, and took her for her evening walk to the pub. He was full of banter and tricks, and Rosalind looked on with the affectionate calm of a woman watching the man she loves make a fool of himself. And it really was pleasant those summer evenings outside the public-house, watching that late flowering of emotion, the bachelor crust of caution breaking up, the little shoots of sentiment beginning to peer out.

Their happiness was lyrical. It was only at odd time that Rosalind remembered her griefs, and usually it was in the early morning when she was waked by the heaving of the child within her, listened to the birds outside their window, and felt deserted even with Frankie beside her. Not to wake him, she sniffled quietly into her handkerchief, her back turned on him and her body shaken with suppressed sobs. When he woke, she still tried to keep away from him.

“What ails you now didn't ail you before?” he would ask humorously.

“What you've got in me.”

“What's that?”

“I told you—a daisy!”

“No, that was what I told you,” he said, and slapped her bottom affectionately.

Then she bawled without restraint and beat her stomach.

“Why can't it be yours?” she cried despairingly.

“One thing at a time,” said Frankie.

He believed her; that was his mistake. He really thought when he heard her lonely weeping that it was merely the ambiguity of her position that caused it, and not the humiliation of being rejected and hounded into marriage with someone else by a tramp like Hourigan. Frankie was a decent man; he didn't realize that in circumstances like those no woman can ever be happy, even with the best man in the world—even with the man she loves. Love, in fact, has nothing to do with it. To ignore that is to ignore a woman's vanity, the mainspring of her character.