Collected Stories (90 page)

“You're a great little girl,” she whispered huskily. “'Twon't be forgotten for you.”

“But, Auntie,” Eileen replied, “that's the way Jim would have liked it. It makes me feel close to him, and it won't be too long till we're together again. Once Mammy goes, there'll be nothing to keep me.”

There was something about her words and her dry-eyed air and her still youthful face, that the other woman found disconcerting.

“Ah, nonsense, child!” she said lightly. “We all feel that way. You'll be happy yet, and you'll deserve it. One of these days you'll have a houseful of your own.”

“Oh, no, Auntie,” Eileen replied with a sweet smile that was curiously knowledgeable and even condescending, as though Jim's aunt were too much of a child to understand. “You know yourself I could never find another husband like Jim. People can't be as happy as that a second time, you know. That would be too much to ask.”

And relatives and even neighbors began to realize that Eileen was only telling the truth; that in spite of everything she had been intensely happy, happy in some way they could not understand, and that what had seemed to them a mockery of marriage had indeed been one so complete and satisfying that beside it, even by their standards, a woman might think everything else in the world a mere shadow.

The Cheat

T
HE ONLY THING
that distinguished Dick Gordon from the other young men of my time in Cork was his attitude to religion. As an engineer he seemed to feel that he could not afford to believe in anything but the second law of thermodynamics: according to him, this contained everything a man required to know.

For years he courted a girl called Joan Twomey, and everyone expected he would marry her and settle down as most men of his kind do. Usually, they are of a serious disposition and settle down more easily than the rest of humanity. You often see them in their later years, carrying round the collecting bag at twelve-o'clock Mass, and wonder what has happened to all their wild dreams of free thought and social justice. Marriage is the great leveller.

But Joan's mother died, and she had to do the housekeeping for a father and two younger sisters, so she became serious too, and there was no more reckless behavior in the little seaside house they rented in summer. She was afraid of marrying a man who did not believe in anything and would probably bring up his children the same way. She was wrong in this, because Dick was much too tolerant a man to deprive his worst enemy of the pleasure of believing in eternal damnation, much less his wife, but Joan's seriousness had developed to the dimensions of spiritual pride and she gave him up as she might have given up some pleasure for Lent.

Dick was mystified and hurt: it was the first shock to his feeling of the basic reasonableness of life; but he did not allow it to change him. After all, his brother Tom was an ex-cleric and he had been worked on by experts. Some time later he met a girl called Barbara Hough who was a teacher in a Protestant school and started to walk out with her. On the surface Barbara was much more his style. She was good-looking and urbane, vaguely atheistic and left-wing in her views, and she thought that all Irish people, Catholic and Protestant, were quite insane on the subject of religion. All the same, for a young fellow of good Catholic family to take up with a Protestant at all was a challenge, and Barbara, who was a high-spirited girl, enjoyed it and made the most of it. His friends were amused and his family alarmed. Of course, Dick could get a dispensation if Barbara signed the paper guaranteeing that their children would be brought up as Catholics, but would Barbara, who was a rector's daughter, agree to it? Characteristically, when his brother Tom asked him this, Dick only smiled and said, “Funny, isn't it? I never asked her.” He would probably have been quite safe in doing so, for though Barbara herself did not recognize it, she had all the loneliness of one brought up in a minority religion, always feeling that she was missing something, and much of Dick's appeal for her was that he was a Prince Charming who had broken the magic circle in which she felt she would be trapped until the day she died. But Dick did not ask her. Instead he proposed a quiet register-office marriage in London, and she was so moved by his consideration for her that she did not even anticipate what the consequences might be.

You see, it was part of Dick's simplicity of mind that he could not realize that there were certain perfectly simple things you couldn't do without involving yourself in more trouble than they were worth, or if he did see it, he underrated its importance. A few of his old friends stood by him, but even they had to admit that there was an impossible streak in him. When Barbara was having a baby the family deputed his brother Tom to warn him of what he was doing. Tom was tall, good-looking, dreamy, and morbidly sensitive. He did not want to approach Dick at all, but seeing that he was the nearest thing to a priest in the family, he felt that it might be his duty.

“You know what people are going to think, Dick,” he said with a stammer.

“The same as they think now, I suppose,” Dick replied with his gentle smile.

“This is different, Dick.”

“How, Tom?”

“This concerns a third party, you see,” said Tom, too embarrassed even to mention such things as babies to his brother.

“And a fourth and fifth, I hope,” Dick said cheerfully. “It's a natural result of marriage, you know. And children do take after their parents, for the first few years anyway.”

“Not in this country, they don't,” Tom said ruefully. “I suppose there are historical reasons for it,” he added, being a great student of history.

“There are historical reasons for everything in this country, Tom,” said Dick with a jolly laugh. “But because some old fool believes in the fairies for good historical reasons is no excuse for bringing up my kids the same way.”

“Ah, well, it's not as foolish as all that, Dick,” said Tom, looking more miserable than ever. “It's poetic, or fanciful, or whatever you like, but it's what we were brought up to believe, and our fathers and grandfathers before us.”

“And the monks told us that Ireland was such a holy country that we'd have the end of the world eight years before anywhere else.… I'm not sure what the advantage was supposed to be.… I don't suppose you still believe that?”

“Why would I?” asked Tom. “It's not an article of faith.”

“It was an article of faith to you and me, and I wouldn't have liked to be the fellow that disbelieved it,” said Dick with a sniff. “Anyway, it's no worse than the rest of the nonsense we listen to. That sort of thing is looked on as childishness everywhere else today, and it'll be looked on as childishness here, too, in your lifetime and mine. In fifteen years' time people will only laugh at it.”

That was Dick all out, entirely reasonable and tolerant, and yet as big a misfit as if he had two heads. How could any responsible superior recommend a man as pig-headed as that for promotion? The sensible thing for Dick would have been to emigrate and start all over again in England or America where apparitions were not so highly regarded, but there was a dogged, cynical streak in him that derived a sort of morose pleasure from seeing some devotee of apparitions promoted over his head and making a mess of some perfectly simple job.

He had a number of friends who sympathized with his views and who met at his little house in the College Road on Sundays to discuss the latest piece of jobbery in the University. They grew mad about it, but Dick's attitude of amused tolerance rarely varied. At most he sighed: it was as though he saw things that they could not see. One old schoolteacher called Murphy used to grow furious with him over this. He was a gloomy-looking, handsome man who was at the same time very pious and very anticlerical. Passion made him break out in angles, as when he called his old friends “Mister.”

“Mister Gordon,” he shouted one night, “you're out of your mind. A hundred years from now the descendants of those hobblers will still be seeing apparitions behind every bush.”

“They won't, Ned,” Dick said with a smile. He was particularly fond of Murphy and enjoyed seeing him in a rage.

“What'll stop them, Mister Gordon?”

“Facts, Ned!”

“Facts!”

“Facts impose their own logic, Ned. They're imposing it now, at this very minute, here and everywhere, even though we may not see it. It's only an elaboration of skills. Skills here are still too rudimentary. But women are beginning to do men's work, and they'll have to think men's thoughts. You can't control that, you know. The world you're talking about is finished. In ten or fifteen years' time it'll be a joke. Simple facts will destroy it.”

T
HAT
was all very well. Dick might have a good eye for what was going on in the outside world, but he had no eye at all for what was going on in his own very house. One evening, after they had been married for ten years, Dick was at home and Barbara out with their son, Tom, when there was a knock at the door. Outside was a young priest; a tall, thin, good-looking young man with a devil-may-care eye.

“Can I come in?” he asked, as though he had no doubt whatever of his welcome.

“Oh, come in, come in!” said Dick with a thin smile. He hated those embarrassing occasions when people with more self-confidence than manners enquired how his soul was doing. He was a friendly man and did not like to appear rude or ungrateful.

“Mrs. G. out?” the priest asked cheerfully.

“Yes, gone into town for some messages,” Dick said resignedly. “She won't be long.”

“Ah, it gives us the chance of a little chat,” said the priest, pulling at the legs of his trousers.

“Look, father, I don't want a little chat, as you call it,” Dick said appealingly. “This town is full of people who want little chats with me, and they can't understand that I don't appreciate them. I gave up religion when I was eighteen, and I have no intention in the world of going back to it.”

“Did I ask you to go back to it?” the priest asked with an air of consternation. “I wasn't expecting to see you at all, man! I came here to talk to your wife. You are Mrs. Gordon's husband, aren't you?”

“Yes,” Dick replied, somewhat surprised by the priest's tone.

“Well, she's been receiving instruction. Didn't you know that?”

Dick was a hard man to catch off balance, and when he replied he did not even sound surprised.

“Instruction? No. I didn't.”

“Crumbs, I'm after saying the wrong thing again!” the priest said angrily. “I shouldn't be left out without a male nurse. Look, I'm terribly sorry. I'll come back another time.”

“Oh, as you're here, you may as well stay,” Dick said amiably. It was partly pride, partly pity. He could see that the priest was genuinely distressed.

“Another time! Another time!”

“Who will I say called?” Dick asked as he saw him to the door.

“The name is Hogan. Mr. Gordon, I wouldn't have wished it for a hundred pounds.”

“It was hardly your fault,” Dick said with a friendly smile.

But as he closed the door the smile faded and he found himself cold and shaking. He poured himself a drink but it only made him feel sick. Nothing that could have happened to him would have been quite so bad as this. He had been betrayed shamelessly and treacherously and he could already see himself as the laughing stock of the city. A man's loneliness is his strength and only a wife can really destroy him because only she can understand his loneliness.

He heard her key in the lock and wished he had left before her return. He liked to be master of himself and now he feared he had no control over what he did or said.

“Dick!” she called in her clear ringing voice and opened the living-room door. “Is something wrong?” she asked as he did not turn round. “One moment, Tom!” she said to the child in the hall. “Run upstairs and take your things off. I'll call you when tea is ready. Don't argue now, sweetheart. Mummy is busy.” She closed the door behind her and approached him. “I suppose Father Hogan called,” she added in her weary well-bred voice. “Was that it? You should know I intended to tell you. I wanted to make up my own mind first.” Still he did not reply and she burst out into a wail. “Oh, Dick, I've tried to tell you so often and I didn't have the courage.”

She knew the moment he looked at her that she had fooled herself; persuaded herself that he was dull and tolerant and gentle and that nothing she did to him would affect their relationship. It is the weak spot in the cheat, man and woman.

“You hadn't the courage,” he repeated dully. “But you had the courage to make a fool of me before your clerical friends.”

“I didn't, Dick,” she said hotly. “But you know yourself it's something I can't discuss with you. It's a subject you can't be reasonable about.”

The word “reasonable” stung him.

“Is that what you call being reasonable?” he asked bitterly. “I should have been reasonable and made you conform before I married you. I should have been reasonable and brought Tom up as my family wanted him brought up. Every day of my life I had to accept humiliation on your account when I could have been reasonable about it all. And then you don't even have the courage to discuss with me what you're going to do or what the consequences will be for Tom. You prefer to bring him up believing that his father is damned! There's reasonableness for you!”

“But I'd discuss it with you now, Dick, if only you'd listen to me patiently.” She began to wring her hands. “It's not my fault if I can't live without believing in something:”

“In Heaven,” he said cynically.

“In Heaven, if you like. Anyway, in something for you and me and Tom. I was brought up to believe in it, and I threw it away because I didn't value it, and now I need it—maybe because I haven't anything else. If only you wouldn't tell me it's all just nonsense!”