Collected Stories (20 page)

That was a pity, for it left Rita unaware that Ned, whom she respected, was far from being the only one who liked her. For instance, there was Justin Sullivan, the lawyer, who had once been by way of being engaged to Nellie. He hadn't become engaged to her, because she was as slippery as an eel, and her fancy finally lit on a solicitor called Fahy whom Justin despised with his whole heart and soul as a lightheaded, butterfly sort of man. But Justin continued to visit the house as a friend of the girls. There happened to be no other house that suited him half as well, and besides he knew that sooner or later Nellie would make a mess of her life with Fahy, and his services would be required.

Justin, in other words, was a sticker. He was a good deal older than Rita, a tall, burly man with a broad face, a brow that was rising from baldness as well as brains, and a slow, watchful ironic air. Like many lawyers, he tended to conduct conversation as though the person he was speaking to were a hostile witness who had either to be coaxed into an admission of perjury or bullied into one of mental deficiency. When Justin began, Fahy simply clutched his head and retired to sit on the stairs. “Can't anyone shut that fellow up?” he would moan with a martyred air. Nobody could. The girls shot their little darts at him, but he only brushed them aside. Ned Lowry was the only one who could even stand up to him, and when the pair of them argued about religion, the room became a desert. Justin, of course, was a pillar of orthodoxy. “Imagine for a moment,” he would declaim in a throaty rounded voice that turned easily to pomposity, “that I am Pope.” “Easiest thing in the world, Justin,” Kitty assured him. He drank whiskey like water, and the more he drank, the more massive and logical and orthodoxly Catholic he became.

At the same time, under his truculent air he was exceedingly gentle, patient, and understanding, and disliked the ragging of Rita by her sisters.

“Tell me, Nellie,” he asked one night in his lazy, amiable way, “do you talk like that to Rita because you like it, or because you think it's good for her?”

“How soft you have it!” Nellie cried. “We have to live with her. You haven't.”

“That may be my misfortune, Nellie,” said Justin with a broad smile.

“Is that a proposal, Justin?” asked Kitty shrewdly.

“Scarcely, Kitty,” said Justin. “You're not what I might call a good jury.”

“Better be careful or you'll have her dropping in on your mother, Justin,” Kitty said maliciously.

“Thanks, Kitty,” Rita said with a flash of cold fury.

“I hope my mother would have sufficient sense to realize it was an honor, Kitty,” Justin said severely.

When he rose to go, Rita accompanied him to the hall.

“Thanks for the moral support, Justin,” she said in a low voice, and then threw her overcoat over her shoulders to go as far as the gate with him. When he opened the door they both stood and gazed about them. It was a moonlit night; the garden, patterned in black and silver, sloped to the quiet roadway, where the gas lamps burned with a dim green light, and in the farther walls gateways shaded by black trees led to flights of steps or to steep-sloping avenues which led to moonlit houses on the river's edge.

“God, isn't it lovely?” Rita said in a hushed voice.

“Oh, by the way, Rita,” he said, slipping his arm through hers, “that was a proposal.”

“Janey Mack, they're falling,” she said, giving his arm a squeeze.

“What are falling?”

“Proposals.”

“Why? Had you others?”

“I had one anyway.”

“And did you accept it?”

“No,” Rita said doubtfully. “Not quite. At least, I don't think I did.”

“You might consider this one,” Justin said with unusual humility. “You know, of course, that I was very fond of Nellie. At one time I was very fond of her indeed. You don't mind that, I hope. It's all over and done with now, and there are no regrets on either side.”

“No, Justin, of course I don't mind. If I felt like marrying you I wouldn't give it a second thought. But I was very much in love with Tony too, and that's not all over and done with yet.”

“I know that, Rita,” he said gently. “I know exactly what you feel. We've all been through it.” If he had left it at that everything might have been all right, but Justin was a lawyer, which meant that he liked to keep things absolutely shipshape. “But that won't last forever. In a month or two you'll be over it, and then you'll wonder what you saw in that fellow.”

“I don't think so, Justin,” she said with a crooked little smile, not altogether displeased to be able to enlighten him on the utter hopelessness of her position. “I think it will take a great deal longer than that.”

“Well, say six months, even,” Justin went on, prepared to yield a point to the defense. “All I ask is that in one month or six, whenever you've got over your regrets for this—this amiable young man” (momentarily his voice took on its familiar ironic ring), “you'll give me a thought. I'm old enough not to make any more mistakes. I know I'm fond of you, and I feel pretty sure I could make a success of my end of it.”

“What you really mean,” said Rita, keeping her temper with the greatest difficulty, “is that I wasn't in love with Tony at all. Isn't that it?”

“Not quite,” Justin said judiciously. Even if he'd had a serenade as well as the moonlight and the girl, it couldn't have kept him from correcting what he considered to be a false deduction. “I've no doubt you were very much attracted by this—this clerical Adonis; this Mr. Whatever-his-name-is, or that at any rate you thought you were, which in practice comes to the same thing, but I also know that that sort of thing, though it's painful enough while it lasts, doesn't last very long.”

“You mean yours didn't, Justin,” Rita said tartly.

“I mean mine or anybody else's,” Justin said pompously. “Because love—the only sort of thing you can really call love—is something that comes with experience. You're probably too young yet to know what the real thing is.”

As Rita had only recently told Ned that he didn't yet know what the real thing was, she found this rather hard to stomach.

“How old would you say you'd have to be?” she asked viciously. “Thirty-five?”

“You'll know soon enough—when it hits you,” said Justin.

“Honest to God, Justin,” she said, withdrawing her arm and looking at him with suppressed fury, “I think you're the thickest man I ever met.”

“Good night, my dear,” said Justin with perfect good humor, and he raised his cap and took the few steps to the gate at a run.

Rita stood gazing after him with folded arms. At the age of eighteen to be told that there is anything you don't know about love is like a knife in your heart.

K
ITTY
and Nellie grew so tired of her moodiness that they persuaded her mother that the best way of distracting her mind was to find her another job. A new environment was also supposed to be good for her complaint, so Mrs. Lomasney wrote to her sister who was a nun in England, and the sister found her work in a convent there. Rita let on to pay no attention, though she let Ned see something of her resentment.

“But why England?” he asked wonderingly.

“Why not?” replied Rita challengingly.

“Wouldn't any place nearer do you?”

“I suppose I wouldn't be far enough away from them.”

“But why not make up your own mind?”

“I'll probably do that too,” she said with a short laugh. “I'd like to see what's in theirs first though.”

On Friday she was to leave for England, and on Wednesday the girls gave a farewell party. This, too, Rita affected to take no great interest in. Wednesday was the half-holiday, and it rained steadily all day. The girls' friends all turned up. Most were men: Bill O'Donnell of the bank, who was engaged to Kitty; Fahy, the solicitor, who was Justin's successful rival for Nellie; Justin himself, who simply could not be kept out of the house by anything short of an injunction; Ned Lowry, and a few others. Hasty soon retired with his wife to the dining room to read the evening paper. He said all his daughters' young men looked exactly alike and he never knew which of them he was talking to.

Bill O'Donnell was acting as barman. He was a big man, bigger even than Justin, with a battered boxer's face and a Negro smile, which seemed to well up from depths of good humor with life rather than from any immediate contact with others. He carried on loud conversations with everyone he poured out drink for, and his voice overrode every intervening tête-à-tête, and challenged even the piano, on which Nellie was vamping music-hall songs.

“Who's this one for, Rita?” he asked. “A bottle of Bass for Paddy. Ah, the stout man! Remember the New Year's Day in Bandon, Paddy? Remember how you had to carry me up to the bank in evening dress and jack me up between the two wings of the desk? Kitty, did I ever tell you about that night in Bandon?”

“Once a week for the past five years, Bill,” said Kitty philosophically.

“Nellie,” said Rita, “I think it's time for Bill to sing his song. ‘Let Me like a Soldier Fall,' Bill!”

“My one little song!” Bill said with a roar of laughter. “My one and only song, but I sing it grand. Don't I, Nellie? Don't I sing it fine?”

“Fine!” agreed Nellie, looking up at his big, beaming moonface shining at her over the piano. “As the man said to my mother, ‘Finest bloody soprano I ever heard.'”

“He did not, Nellie,” Bill said sadly. “You're making that up.… Silence please!” he shouted joyously, clapping his hands. “Ladies and gentlemen, I must apologize. I ought to sing something like Tosti's ‘Good-bye,' but the fact is, ladies and gentlemen, that I don't know Tosti's ‘Good-bye.'”

“Recite it, Bill,” said Justin amiably.

“I don't know the words of it either, Justin,” said Bill. “In fact, I'm not sure if there's any such song, but if there is, I ought to sing it.”

“Why, Bill?” Rita asked innocently. She was wearing a long black dress that threw up the unusual brightness of her dark, bony face. She looked happier than she had looked for months. All the evening it was as though she were laughing to herself.

“Because 'twould be only right, Rita,” said Bill with great melancholy, putting his arm about her and drawing her closer to him. “You know I'm very fond of you, don't you, Rita?”

“And I'm mad about you, Bill,” said Rita candidly.

“I know that, Rita,” he said mournfully, pulling at his collar as though to give himself air. “I only wish you weren't going, Rita. This place isn't the same without you. Kitty won't mind my saying that,” he added with a nervous glance at Kitty, who was flirting with Justin on the sofa.

“Are you going to sing your blooming old song or not?” Nellie asked impatiently, running her fingers over the keys.

“I'm going to sing now in one minute, Nellie,” Bill said ecstatically, stroking Rita fondly under the chin. “I only want Rita to know the way we'll miss her.”

“Damn it, Bill,” Rita said, snuggling up to him with her dark head on his chest, “if you go on like that I won't go at all. Tell me, would you really prefer me not to go?”

“I would prefer you not to go, Rita,” he replied, stroking her cheeks and eyes. “You're too good for the fellows over there.”

“Oh, go on doing that,” she said hastily, as he dropped his hand. “It's gorgeous, and you're making Kitty mad jealous.”

“Kitty isn't jealous,” Bill said fondly. “Kitty is a lovely girl and you're a lovely girl. I hate to see you go, Rita.”

“That settles it, Bill,” she said, pulling herself free of him with a determined air. “I simply couldn't cause you all that suffering. As you put it that way, I won't go.”

“Won't you, just?” said Kitty with a grin.

“Now, don't worry your head about it anymore, Bill,” said Rita briskly. “It's all off.”

Justin, who had been quietly consuming large whiskeys, looked round lazily.

“Perhaps I ought to have mentioned,” he boomed, “that the young lady has just done me the honor of proposing to me and I've accepted her.”

Ned Lowry, who had been enjoying the scene between Bill and Rita, looked at him for a moment in surprise.

“Bravo! Bravo!” cried Bill, clapping his hands with childish delight. “A marriage has been arranged and all the rest of it—what? I must give you a kiss, Rita. Justin, you don't mind if I give Rita a kiss?”

“Not at all, not at all,” replied Justin with a lordly wave of his hand. “Anything that's mine is yours, old man.”

“You're not serious, Justin, are you?” Kitty asked incredulously.

“Oh, I'm serious all right,” said Justin. “I'm not quite certain whether your sister is. Are you, Rita?”

“What?” Rita asked as though she hadn't heard.

“Serious,” repeated Justin.

“Why?” asked Rita. “Trying to give me the push already?”

“We're much obliged for the information,” Nellie said ironically as she rose from the piano. “Now, maybe you'd oblige us further and tell us does Father know.”

“Hardly,” said Rita coolly. “It was only settled this evening.”

“Well, maybe 'twill do with some more settling by the time Father is done with you,” Nellie said furiously. “The impudence of you! How dare you! Go in at once and tell him.”

“Keep your hair on, girl,” Rita advised with cool malice and then went jauntily out of the room. Kitty and Nellie began to squabble viciously with Justin. They were convinced that the whole scene had been arranged by Rita to make them look ridiculous, and in this they weren't very far out. Justin sat back and began to enjoy the sport. Then Ned Lowry struck a match and lit another cigarette, and something about the slow, careful way in which he did it drew everyone's attention. Just because he was not the sort to make a fuss, people realized from his strained look that his mind was very far away. The squabble stopped as quickly as it had begun and a feeling of awkwardness ensued. Ned was too old a friend of the family for the girls not to feel that way about him.