Men of No Property (43 page)

The next morning Alex and he rose at dawn and sailed up the South coast putting in at the cove which Peg’s cottage overlooked. It was low tide and they waded ashore, remarking that they would need to swim out. They trudged through the sand and climbed to the top of the bluff. Even as they reached level ground the sounds of revelry reached them—laughter and singing as though it were nighttime and not the middle of the day. A fire was burning in the open and before it a hulk of a woman sat basting a turkey as she turned it on the spit. An old man was beside her and as he drew near Vinnie recognized Peg’s father.

Vinnie hailed him and introduced his friend. “What are they celebrating?” He jerked his head toward the cottage.

“I’d rather you asked someone but me,” the old man said. “She’s marryin’ that fella Redmond.”

“What!” Alex exclaimed.

“What, what,” the old man mimicked. “I couldn’t ask her ‘what’ as a child, much less now.”

Vinnie looked at Taylor who had gone a trifle pale. He was ready to return to the boat without stopping, but Vinnie shook his head. Then Alex drew from beneath his blouse the manuscript he had concealed there.

“May I burn some papers in your fire, please?”

The old woman looked up and threaded the gray hair from her eyes with an arthritic finger. An obvious native, she was tanned by the wind and the spray. She grinned toothlessly. “Love letters allus sweeten a bird,” she said, poking a place in the embers. She gave a wheeze of a laugh at her own joke.

Vinnie watched the pages curl up, more elegant in script than in substance. He waited for his friend to signal that they might carry on. “I shan’t stay long,” said Alex.

“Whenever you say,” Vinnie said, and put his arm about his friend’s shoulders for a moment.

The whole of the Windust’s crowd seemed to have taken up residence with Peg. Bohemia-by-the-sea. A woman sat at the door, her bloomered legs stretched before her, a cigar in one hand and a pencil in the other with which she was sketching furiously. She flicked the ash from the cigar in the same gesture as the greeting she spared the boys. Around a lad with a squeeze box were the carolers, men with more hair on their faces than on their chests, bare to the navel, singing the songs made famous at the barricades in France, by the Garibaldi Legions, by the English coal miners. The smell of coffee was as strong as the smell of wine, and both were suffused with the smell of sweat. There was one great room to the cottage, which could better have been called a lodge. Vinnie moved into it, Alex following him, timid now as a child. Two chess players were hunched over a board, immobile as the pieces, and a delicate boy of nineteen or so was at an easel a few feet from them. Vinnie looked at his project. Not in a hundred years would he have expected from so fragile an artist the hard, bold lines in which he was capturing the players. “You should sculpt them as well,” said Vinnie. “I expect to,” the boy answered. A lovely girl, with her blond hair streaming, was explaining to her companion: “There’s so much sky, I want to weep. The world’s too large!” “It’s the size of a pea,” the man pontificated, “and we are less than dust.” Peg had gathered them all, piping them out of Manhattan even as the piper had the children from Hamelin, the false and the true, the seers and the bemused, the dissolute and the determined. God have mercy on them all!

“Where’s Peg?” Vinnie called out.

“Am I called?” Peg rose from a cluster of people at the end of the room. “Vinneee! My first, my own true love!” She came tripping as though it were sponge beneath her feet, her hands out to him. Her bodice was fresh and the scent of rosewater hung about her, but Vinnie felt the little sway of unbalance in her body as she caught his hands. Her over-bright eyes gave credence to his suspicions: Peg had been drinking, and a considerable amount. She turned to Taylor. “Alex, thank you for bringing him.”

Poor Alex! He bowed like a diplomat in a hostile court.

“Is it too early for a drink?” said Peg airily. “Dear Vinnie, don’t frown. It was with you I bought the first jug of whiskey I ever approved. Have you met all these wonderful people? No? In time, in time. They’re frightfully busy, God knows about what—but what odds? So many friends. David has written a play for me.”

In time Vinnie met the man, a playwright of high repute, and his wife, to whom he promised twice within Vinnie’s hearing that she should have another play, one better suited to her talents. And Vinnie met John Redmond and asked him bluntly if he was to be congratulated.

“You are as well informed as myself,” Redmond responded. “Anyone is.” Someone else explained that it was off one minute and on the next.

Thank God for that at least, Vinnie thought, for he looked as priggish as Alex had described him. But there was no joy in the news for Alex. If he had been disillusioned at the word, he was disenchanted now. A quick cure, Vinnie thought, for a slight malaise. Ah, but Peg: there was the deeper ill. Her hand was cold and moist although the day was warm, and she clung to Vinnie at every chance.

“Peg,” he asked, “is Jabez Reed with this crowd, by any chance?”

“Do you know him? He’s the sweetest man.”

“Like a sugared pickle,” Vinnie said. “Is he here?”

“Somewhere. Someone will know.” And there was that vagueness again.

Taylor was persuaded to stay long enough to have lunch. Vinnie then went down to the beach with him. He had promised Peg to stay on.

“She’s drunk, isn’t she?” Taylor said.

“I shouldn’t say that.”

“What shall I tell mother, about her invitation, I mean?” They had carried it with them.

“The truth. Mrs. Stuart has guests of her own this week.”

Vinnie returned to find Peg changed into a walking costume, her skirt above her ankles and split to the knee. She fastened a green kerchief under her chin.

“May I come?” Vinnie asked.

“You and no other.”

They started along a path through the scrubby pines, following until it divided and then redivided and then vanished altogether. They scrambled down through the dunes and with scarcely a word took off their shoes and trudged in the warm sand barefoot. At last they rested in a wind-hollowed valley.

“Dunes. It’s a lonesome-sounding word, isn’t it?” Peg said.

“You can make most any word sound lonesome if you want it to,” Vinnie said.

“I never thought you would grow up so sensible. But that’s Mr. Finn’s influence, I suppose.” She thought a moment about what he had said. “No, I don’t think I agree with you—about words. There are some which cannot be made sound sad. Baby, for example. Isn’t that a happy word?”

“If you want a baby,” Vinnie said flatly.

“Good heavens! What should I want with a baby?”

Vinnie shrugged.

“Are you very disappointed in me, Vinnie?”

“No.”

“Or don’t you care enough for that?”

“I’m surprised, that’s all. You’re different.”

Peg laughed. “Have you any notion at all how different you are?”

“Are you going to marry Redmond?”

“I think not. I can’t marry every child who asks me. Your friend was rather smitten, wasn’t he?” Vinnie nodded. “He comes from a very proper family, I suppose?”

“Four sisters, too,” Vinnie said.

“And there is nothing more proper than one’s sister. Can you imagine Norah walking in on me now?”

Vinnie whistled.

“Yet I should rather this by far than to be alone. There is nothing in the world more desolate than a solitary player. People mean quite as much to him as bread. The only time he really wants to be alone is with his other self—until they become intimate, married, one. Then that self struts upon the stage, again in search of himself amongst people of his own kind. It’s a sort of fulfillment. Can you understand?”

“Better than table rapping anyway,” he said.

“It is mystical, I expect. Do you still go to church, Vinnie?”

“Now you sound like Norah.”

“Ha!”

“I go to church fairly regular, but that’s all. I should like to find my own religion.”

“God help us, no wonder Norah’s after you!”

“Stephen is Irish without being a Catholic,” Vinnie said, jumping to the point in his mind which disturbed him.

Peg was a moment finding the relevancy. “’Tis a strange thing,” she said then, “the Irish will forgive you for falling away from the church. They’ll wink at your transgressions—if you transgress with a grace, and are a man. But if you turn to another religion they’ll neither forgive nor forget it in your lifetime.”

“And yet they’ve had to fight to practice their own religion,” Vinnie said.

“Sure and that’s why.” Peg leaned back in the sand. “I remember Stephen saying at the time Bishop Hughes went against him—that by making the Irish martyrs to Rome, England had best destroyed us…something like that.” She touched Vinnie’s hand. “Most of them back at the house feel that way about it, too.”

“I know,” Vinnie said. “It wasn’t hymns they were singing this morning. And it’s true, Peg. People are fighting for their freedom all over the world and the Church is on the other side. Think of it, Irish volunteers to keep the people’s army out of Rome!”

“How that must destroy Stephen,” she crooned.

“Do you know what I believe to be at the source and bottom of it all?” said Vinnie. “Original sin.”

“No Irishman will say that’s a lie,” Peg said.

“Well I shall say it’s a lie, and if that makes me an apostate, I’m one from this moment on. I don’t believe men created in the image of God are born evil, are born in sin. The trees are good—they bear fruit and shade and shelter. Are we less than the trees, than animals on the farm? How comes there a Shelley into the world? A St. Francis? How comes there democracy after tyranny? Light after the dark ages? How comes equality after slavery, if men are not perfect-able? We may be born in ignorance, but not in sin. What is sin, Peg? Truly what do you believe is sinful?”

She glimpsed his earnest face and averted her eyes. “I’ve always believed that the only grievous sin was to purposefully hurt another person.”

“Nobly said!” Vinnie cried. “Not the law, but man himself is the measure.”

“And you to be a lawyer?” Peg chided.

“A lawyer does not make the laws. He interprets them. Have you ever read Emerson?” Peg shook her head that she had not. “The law is only a memorandum, he says—a currency which we stamp with our own portrait. I shall loan you a book, if you like.”

“Dear, serious boy, you flatter my intelligence thinking I’ll understand it reading it. I shall try, but I warn you, don’t expect a convert. I’ll go a long way, but I swing back to the old faith like a pendulum. I’m not a Bloomer and I’m not a Fourrierist or whatever you call them though many a try has been made for my conversion.”

“So long as you’re not afraid to read the book,” Vinnie said.

“That I’m not. Perhaps because I’m too stupid to be afraid of it.”

“You?”

Peg smiled. “Endow me with many things, Vinnie, but not too much intellect or I shall again disappoint you.”

“You have never disappointed me. Stop saying it.”

“Then your heart sees less than your eyes, for I disappoint myself. Tell me about the Taylor girls. Are they pretty?”

“Rather.”

“And intelligent?”

“Not especially. One of them maybe, but she never says anything.”

Peg laughed. “Will you loan her also a book?”

“And one of them reminds me of you sort of… before…”

“Sort of—before,” Peg repeated his hesitant words. “When we were very young?” Vinnie nodded. “And her you’ll marry?”

“I shan’t marry until I’m thirty!” he cried.

Peg took his hand in hers. “I’m so glad you came, Vinnie. Somehow, your coming makes things seem to have a purpose, and they don’t always for me. I don’t know if it’s because my success came so late, but truly it did not exalt me at all…the praise, the recognition. I was doing what I had to do in
Camille.
And Val was still Val. You never liked him, did you?”

“Not much,” Vinnie admitted.

“It doesn’t matter. How often does one love in a lifetime? Ha! If this were Norah saying all this I should say she was born old. But she’s a child, Vinnie. When I came home I discovered she was still a child.”

“With children,” said Vinnie.

“Ah yes,” said Peg. “That’s the reason.” Which Vinnie thought then a wandering logic. “How do you come to know Jabez Reed?”

Vinnie told her even to the meeting at Stephen’s and Reed’s exchange with Delia Farrell.

Peg was delighted with the story. “You must stay with us, Vinnie, the night at least. Jabe will come home at dark. He’s painting beautifully. He quite takes for granted my hospitality. I begrudge it to no one, but he is the most welcome to it, besides yourself. A living, he says, is not much of an exchange for a life. A deep ’un, Jabe. Will you stay?”

Vinnie consented.

“You may have to lay your head on the sand.”

“So long as I don’t stick it in it.”

But the night was not an especially happy one. Reed did not return, apparently having found the hospitality of some fisherman more to his liking. There was too much wine and too many people talking without listeners. Vinnie played a game of Father William, a drinking bout with experts, and he could not even forfeit sobriety. He joined for a while in the singing of ribald songs, recalling to Peg’s pleasure some of the best from Dublin’s slums. But in the midst of one of them he discovered that lo! he had forgotten the words. He was prodded and primed and could but shake his head and wonder what he was doing, singing them at all. He got to his feet. “There must be something better of Ireland for me to remember than that,” he said, puzzling the matter aloud. “If there isn’t, to hell with it. I’m going to bed.” And turning, he marched out clacking his heels. He was drunker, he thought, than he knew.

Peg followed him outdoors with a blanket.

“The stars will cover me,” he kept saying. “The stars will cover me.”

Inside, the singing had turned again to the revolutionary tunes he had heard in the morning. He lay on his back, his hands beneath his head, and listened. “But when they’ve won the revolution, what then?” he mused aloud. “What will they do then, poor things, poor things? They will sit in the barn and keep themselves warm, and hide their heads under their wings, poor things…”