Collected Stories (79 page)

“Dublin would do me fine,” she said with satisfaction. “Mother and I would get on much better at that distance.”

He said nothing for a few moments, and Nan went on splashing gaily with her feet.

“Is that a bargain then?” he asked.

“Oh, yes,” she said, turning her big soft eyes on him. “That's a bargain. Don't you know I was always mad about you?”

Their engagement made a big change in Mick. He was, as I have said, a creature of habit, a man who lived by associations. He really knew the city in a way that few of us knew it, its interesting corners and queer characters, and the idea of having to exchange it for a place of no associations at all was more of a shock to him than it would have been to any of us; but though at certain times it left him with a lost feeling, at others it restored to him a boyish excitement and gaiety, as though the trip he was preparing for was some dangerous voyage from which he might not return, and when he lit up like that he became more attractive, reckless, and innocent. Nan had always been attracted by him; now she really admired and loved him.

All the same, she did not discontinue her outings with her other beaux. In particular, she remained friendly with Lyons, who was really fond of her and believed that she wasn't serious about marrying Mick. He was, as she said, a genuinely kind man, and was shocked at the thought that so beautiful a girl should even consider cooking and washing clothes on a clerk's income. He went to her father about it, and explained patiently to him that it would mean social extinction for Nan, and he would even have gone to Mick himself but that Nan forbade it. “But he can't do it, Nan,” he protested earnestly. “Mick is a decent man. He can't do that to you.” “He can't, like hell,” said Nan, chuckling and putting her head on Lyons's chest. “He'd send me out on the streets to keep himself in fags.”

These minor infidelities did not in the least worry Mick, who was almost devoid of jealousy. He was merely amused by her occasional lies and evasions, and even more by the fits of conscience that followed them.

“Mick,” she asked between anger and laughter, “why do I tell you all these lies? I'm not naturally untruthful, am I? I didn't go to Confession on Saturday night. I went out with Joe Lyons instead. He still believes I'm going to marry him, and I would, too, if only he had a brain in his head. Mick, why can't you be attractive like that?”

But if Mick didn't resent it, Mrs. Ryan resented it on his behalf, though she resented his complaisance even more. She was sufficiently feminine to know she might have done the same herself, and to feel that if she had, she would need correction. No man is ever as anti-feminist as a really feminine woman.

No, it was Nan's father who exasperated Mick, and he was sensible enough to realize that he was being exasperated without proper cause. When Joe Lyons lamented Nan's decision to Tom Ryan as though it were no better than suicide, the old man was thunder-struck. He had never mixed in society himself, which might be the reason that he had never got anywhere in life.

“You really think it would come to that, Joe?” he asked, scowling.

“But consider it yourself, Mr. Ryan,” pleaded Joe, raising that warning finger of his. “Who is going to receive them? They can always come to my house, but I'm not everybody. Do you think they'll be invited to the Healys'? I say, the moment they marry, Matt will drop them, and I won't blame him. It's a game, admitted, but you have to play it. Even I have to play it, and my only interest is in philosophy.”

By the end of the evening, Tom Ryan had managed to persuade himself that Mick was almost a ne'er-do-well and certainly an adventurer. The propect of the Dublin job did not satisfy him in the least. He wanted to know what Mick proposed to do then. Rest on his oars? There were examinations he could take which would insure his chances of promotion. Tom would arrange it all and coach him himself.

At first Mick was amused and patient; then he became sarcastic, a great weakness of his whenever he was forced on the defensive. Tom Ryan, who was as incapable as a child of understanding sarcasm, rubbed his bald head angrily and left the room in a flurry. If Mick had only hit him over the head, as his wife did whenever he got on her nerves, Tom would have understood that he was only relieving his feelings and liked him the better for it. But sarcasm was to him a sort of silence, a denial of attention that hurt him bitterly.

“I wish you wouldn't speak to Daddy like that,” Nan said one night when her father had been buzzing about Mick with syllabuses he had refused even to look at.

“I wish Daddy would stop arranging my life for me,” Mick said wearily.

“He only means it in kindness.”

“I didn't think he meant it any other way,” Mick said stiffly. “But I wish he'd get it into his head that I'm marrying you, not him.”

“I wouldn't be too sure of that either, Mick,” she said angrily.

“Really, Nan!” he said reproachfully. “Do you want me to be pushed round by your old man?”

“It's not only that,” she said, rising and crossing the room to the fireplace. He noticed that when she lost her temper, she suddenly seemed to lose command of her beauty. She scowled, bowed her head, and walked with a heavy guardsman's tread. “It's just as well we've had this out because I'd have had to tell you anyway. I've thought about it enough, God knows. I can't possibly marry you.”

Her tone was all that was necessary to bring Mick back to his own tolerant, reasonable self.

“Why not?” he asked gently.

“Because I'm scared, if you want to know.” And just then, looking down at him, she seemed scared.

“Of marriage?”

“Of marriage as well.” He noticed the reservation.

“Of me, so?”

“Oh, of marriage and you and myself,” she said explosively. “Myself most of all.”

“Afraid you may kick over the traces?” he asked with affectionate mockery.

“You think I wouldn't?” she hissed with clenched fists, her eyes narrowing and her face looking old and grim. “You don't understand me at all, Mick Courtney,” she added with a sort of boyish braggadocio that made her seem again like the little tomboy he had known. “You don't even know the sort of things I'm capable of. You're wrong for me. I always knew you were.”

Mick treated the scene lightly, as though it were merely another of their disagreements, but when he left the house he was both hurt and troubled. Clearly there was a side of her character that he did not understand, and he was a man who liked to understand things, if only so that he could forget about them and go on with his own thoughts. Even on the familiar hill-street, with the gas lamp poised against the night sky, he seemed to be walking a road without associations. He knew Nan was unhappy and felt it had nothing to do with the subject of their quarrel. It was unhappiness that had driven her into his arms in the first place, and now it was as though she were being driven out again by the same wind. He had assumed rather too complacently that she had turned to him in the first place because she had seen through Healy and Lyons, but now he felt that her unhappiness had nothing to do with them either. She was desperate about herself rather than them. It struck him that she might easily have been tempted too far by Lyons's good looks and kindness. She was the sort of passionate girl who could very easily be lured into an indiscretion, and who would then react from it in loathing and self-disgust. The very thought that this might be the cause moved him to a passion of protective tenderness, and before he went to bed he wrote and posted an affectionate letter, apologizing for his rudeness to her father and promising to consider her feelings more in the future.

In reply, he got a brief note, delivered at his house while he was at work. She did not refer at all to his letter, and told him that she was marrying Lyons. It was a dry note and, for him, full of suppressed malice. He left his own house and met Dinny on the way up to call for him. From Dinny's gloomy air Mick saw that he knew all about it. They went for one of their usual country walks, and only when they were sitting in a country pub over their beer did Mick speak of the breach.

Dinny was worried and his worry made him rude, and through the rudeness Mick seemed to hear the voices of the Ryans discussing him. They hadn't really thought much of him as a husband for Nan, but had been prepared to put up with him on her account. At the same time there was no question in their minds but that she didn't really care for Lyons and was marrying him only in some mood of desperation induced by Mick. Obviously, it was all Mick's fault.

“I can't really imagine what I did,” Mick said reasonably. “Your father started bossing me, and I was rude to him. I know that, and I told Nan I was sorry.”

“Oh, the old man bosses us all, and we're all rude,” said Dinny. “It's not that.”

“Then it's nothing to do with me,” Mick said doggedly.

“Maybe not,” replied Dinny without conviction. “But, whatever it is, the harm is done. You know how obstinate Nan is when she takes an idea into her head.”

“And you don't think I should see her and ask her?”

“I wouldn't,” said Dinny, looking at Mick directly for the first time. “I don't think Nan will marry you, old man, and I'm not at all sure but that it might be the best thing for you. You know I'm fond of her, but she's a curious girl. I think you'll only hurt yourself worse than you're hurt already.”

Mick realized that Dinny, for whatever reasons, was advising him to quit, and for once he was in a position to do so. With the usual irony of events, the job in Dublin he had been seeking only on her account had been offered to him, and he would have to leave at the end of the month.

This, which had seemed an enormous break with his past, now turned out to be the very best solace for his troubled mind. Though he missed old friends and familiar places more than most people, he had the sensitiveness of his type to any sort of novelty, and soon ended by wondering how he could ever have stuck Cork for so long. Within twelve months he had met a nice girl called Eilish and married her. And though Cork people might be parochial, Eilish believed that anything that didn't happen between Glasnevin and Terenure had not happened at all. When he talked to her of Cork, her eyes simply glazed over.

So entirely did Cork scenes and characters fade from his memory that it came as a shock to him to meet Dinny one fine day in Grafton Street. Dinny was on his way to his first job in England, and Mick at once invited him home. But before they left town they celebrated their reunion in Mick's favorite pub off Grafton Street. Then he could ask the question that had sprung to his mind when he caught sight of Dinny's face.

“How's Nan?”

“Oh, didn't you hear about her?” Dinny asked with his usual air of mild surprise. “Nan's gone into a convent, you know.”

“Nan?” repeated Mick. “Into a convent?”

“Yes,” said Dinny. “Of course, she used to talk of it when she was a kid, but we never paid much attention. It came as a surprise to us. I fancy it surprised the convent even more,” he added dryly.

“For God's sake!” exclaimed Mick. “And the fellow she was engaged to? Lyons.”

“Oh, she dropped him inside a couple of months,” said Dinny with distaste. “I never thought she was serious about him anyway. The fellow is a damned idiot.”

Mick went on with his drink, suddenly feeling embarrassed and strained. A few minutes later he asked, with the pretense of a smile:

“You don't think if I'd hung on she might have changed her mind?”

“I dare say she might,” Dinny replied sagaciously. “I'm not so sure it would have been the best thing for you, though,” he added kindly. “The truth is I don't think Nan is the marrying kind.”

“I dare say not,” said Mick, but he did not believe it for an instant. He was quite sure that Nan was the marrying kind, and that nothing except the deep unhappiness that had first united and then divided them had kept her from marrying. But what that unhappiness was about he still had no idea, and he saw that Dinny knew even less than he did.

Their meeting had brought it all back, and at intervals during the next few years it returned again to his mind, disturbing him. It was not that he was unhappy in his own married life—a man would have to have something gravely wrong with him to be unhappy with a girl like Eilish—but sometimes in the morning when he kissed her at the gate and went swinging down the ugly modern avenue towards the sea, he would think of the river or the hills of Cork and of the girl who had seemed to have none of his pleasure in simple things, whose decisions seemed all to have been dictated by some inner torment.

T
HEN
, long after, he found himself alone in Cork, tidying up things after the death of his father, his last relative there, and was suddenly plunged back into the world of his childhood and youth, wandering like a ghost from street to street, from pub to pub, from old friend to old friend, resurrecting other ghosts in a mood that was half anguish, half delight. He walked out Blackpool and up Goulding's Glen only to find that the big mill-pond had all dried up, and sat on the edge remembering winter days when he was a child and the pond was full of skaters, and summer nights when it was full of stars. His absorption in the familiar made him peculiarly susceptible to the poetry of change. He visited the Ryans and found Mrs. Ryan almost as good-looking and pattable as ever, though she moaned sentimentally about the departure of her boys, her disappointment with Nan, and her husband's growing crankiness.

When she saw him to the door she folded her arms and leaned against the jamb.

“Wisha, Mick, wouldn't you go and see her?” she asked reproachfully.

“Nan?” said Mick. “You don't think she'd mind?”

“Why would she mind, boy?” Mrs. Ryan said with a shrug. “Sure the girl must be dead for someone to talk to! Mick, boy, I was never one for criticizing religion, but, God forgive me, that's not a natural life at all. I wouldn't stand it for a week. All those old hags!”