Collected Stories (60 page)

“No,” I replied modestly. “I biked it.”

“Biked it?”

“Yes.”

“That's a hell of a distance,” he said.

“It is long,” I agreed.

“What did you come all that way for?” he asked in surprise.

“Ah, I was running away from home,” I said despondently.

“You were what?” he asked in astonishment. “You're not serious.”

“But I am,” I said, very close to tears. “I did my best, but then I couldn't stick it any longer and I cleared out.” I turned my head away because this time I was really crying.

“Oh, begor, I know what 'tis like,” he said in a friendlier tone. “I did it myself.”

“Did you?” I asked eagerly, forgetting my grief. This, I felt, was the very man I wanted to meet.

“Ah, indeed I did. I did it three times what's more. By that time they were getting fed up with me. Anyway, they say practice makes perfect. Tell me, is it your old fellow?”

“No,” I said with a sigh. “My mother.”

“Ah, do you tell me so? That's worse again. 'Tis bad enough to have the old man at you, but 'tis the devil entirely when the mother is against you. What are you going to do now?”

“I don't know,” I said. “I wanted to get to Dublin, but the savings bank is shut, and all my money is in it.”

“That's tough luck. Sure, you can't get anywhere without money. I'm afraid you'll have to go back and put up with it for another while.”

“But I can't,” I said. “'Tis twenty miles.”

“'Tis all of that, begor. You couldn't go on the bus?”

“I can't. I haven't the money. That's what I asked them in the Post Office, to let me ring up Daddy, but they wouldn't.”

“Where's your daddy?” he asked, and when I told him: “Ah, we'll try and get him for you anyway. Come on in.”

There was a phone in the corner, and he rang up and asked for Daddy. Then he gave me a big smile and handed me the receiver. I heard Daddy's voice and I nearly wept with delight.

“Hullo, son,” he said in astonishment. “Where on earth are you?”

“In the city, Daddy,” I said modestly—even then I couldn't bring myself to make a lot of it, the way another fellow would.

“The city?” he repeated incredulously. “What took you there?”

“I ran away from home, Dad,” I said, trying to make it sound as casual as possible.

“Oh!” he exclaimed and there was a moment's pause. I was afraid he was going to get angry, but his tone remained the same. “Had a row?”

“Yes, Dad.”

“And how did you get there?”

“On the bike.”

“All the way? But you must be dead.”

“Just a bit tired,” I said modestly.

“Tell me, did you even get a meal?”

“No, Dad. The savings bank was shut.”

“Ah, blazes!” he said softly. “Of course, it's the half-day. And what are you going to do now?”

“I don't know, Dad. I thought you might tell me.”

“Well, what about coming home?” he said, beginning to laugh.

“I don't mind, Dad. Whatever you say.”

“Hold on now till I see what the buses are like.… Hullo! You can get one in forty minutes' time—seven ten. Tell the conductor I'll be meeting you and I'll pay your fare. Will that be all right?”

“That's grand, Dad,” I said, feeling that the world was almost right again.

When I finished, the barman was waiting for me with his coat on. He had got another man to look after the bar for him.

“Now, you'd better come and have a cup of tea with me before your bus goes,” he said. “The old bike will be safe outside.”

He took me to a café, and I ate cake after cake and drank tea and he told me about how he'd run away himself. You could see he was a real hard case, worse even than I was. The first time, he'd pinched a bicycle and cycled all the way to Dublin, sleeping in barns and deserted cottages. The police had brought him home and his father had belted hell out of him. They caught him again the second time, but the third time he'd joined the army and not returned home for years.

He put me and my bicycle on the bus and paid my fare. He made me promise to tell Dad that he'd done it and that Dad owed me the money. He said in this world you had to stand up for your rights. He was a rough chap, but you could see he had a good heart. It struck me that maybe only rough chaps had hearts as good as that.

Dad was waiting for me at the bus stop, and he looked at me and laughed.

“Well, the gouger!” he said. “Who ever would think that the son of a good-living, upright man like me would turn into a common tramp.”

All the same I could see he was pleased, and as he pushed my bike down the street he made me tell him all about my experiences. He laughed over the barman and promised to give me the fare. Then, seeing him so friendly, I asked the question that had been on my mind the whole way back on the bus.

“Mummy back yet, Dad?”

“No, son,” he said. “Not yet. She probably won't be in till late.”

What I was really asking him, of course, was “Does she know?” and now I was torn by the desire to ask him not to tell her, but it choked me. It would have seemed too much like trying to gang up against her. But he seemed to know what I was thinking, for he added with a sort of careful casualness that he had sent Martha to the pictures. I guessed that that was to get her out of the way so that she couldn't bring the story to Mother, and when we had supper together and washed up afterwards, I knew I was right.

Mother came in before we went to bed, and Father talked to her just as though nothing had happened. He was a little bit more forthcoming than usual, but that was the only indication he gave, and I was fascinated, watching him create an understanding between us. It was an understanding in more ways than one, because it dawned on me gradually that, like myself and the barman, Dad too had once run away from home, and for some reason—perhaps because the bank was shut or because he was hungry, tired, and lonely—he had come back. People mostly came back, but their protest remained to distinguish them from all the others who had never run away. It was the real sign of their manhood.

I never ran away after that. I never felt I needed to.

The Sorcerer's Apprentice

T
HEIR FRIENDS
said that whenever Jimmy Foley named the day, Una MacDermott slipped a disk. They had been keeping company for five years, and at least half a dozen times they had been on the point of marriage, only to be put off by another row. Jimmy blamed this on Una, who was an only child, and whose father, according to him, simply ruined her. Una blamed it on Jimmy's mother, and declared loudly that Irish mothers were a menace to their sons. Their friends thought it a pity, because they got so much pleasure discussing which of them was in the wrong that you felt they would never be short of subjects to talk about.

Una was a warmhearted, excitable, talkative girl with a great flow of gossip. Jimmy was more reserved; a handsome man who dressed according to his looks, serious and rather pompous, though with great skittishness when he chose to relax. He was the center of a small planetary system of flappers, and these, Una said, were part of the trouble. Not that she was jealous, but they did spoil him, and after a trying day at the office he arrived at her house with a dying air; too dispirited to talk, and thought she had nothing better to do than to prop his head and feed him chocolates.

That was bad enough, but even when she fed him chocolates, he still didn't seem prepared to let her have views of her own. She didn't want much in the way of views, for she was an intensely pious girl, always in and out of churches; but she did like to gossip, and even this Jimmy denied her out of respect for what he called “facts.” The “facts,” of course, were the facts as admitted by Jimmy's newspaper, which was exceedingly orthodox. Anything more was scandal. She had only to tell some story against a minister for him to knit his brows and ask: “Where did you hear that, if I may ask?” On occasion, he even rang up the city editor in Dublin to confirm the story. The city editor, of course, never confirmed it.

After three rows in one week, Una decided again that they were entirely unsuited to one another and took a train to Dublin to stay with her friends the Sheehys, who had a flat on the South Side. Joan Sheehy was Una's oldest friend. When Una stayed with them, she got into Una's bed, and they lay awake half the night, discussing every problem of love and marriage in the most concrete terms. Joan had been a nurse, so she knew all the terms. Sometimes her husband got bored or cold, sleeping alone, and staggered in to them half asleep with a pillow in his hand, but talk about love always bored him, and in a few minutes he was usually snoring while they went on with their discussion in excited whispers.

But for a full year Una had been getting less and less sympathy from Joan, who had begun to suspect that the delay in the marriage was being caused by Una rather than by Jimmy, and that she had no intention of marrying at all. Una swore she had, but Joan didn't believe her.

“Ah, for goodness' sake, girl,” she said, “it's about time you stopped making excuses and settled down. You're thirty, and if you go on like this much longer, you won't have any alternative.”

“But I haven't an alternative now, Joanie,” Una said earnestly. “Honestly, how can I marry a man that I fight with every week?”

“Well, it's good training for fighting with him every day,” said Joan. “And I'm tired of the way you grouse about your men. It doesn't matter who they are—you're bound to find something wrong with them. There was Ned Buckley,” she went on, ticking them off on her fingers. “He was the best of the bunch, but he had no religion. Doyle, the fellow with the shop on the Grand Parade, had too much. He was at Mass every morning, so he got on your nerves. Michael Healy had a lovely voice, but he drank. Now for the last five years we're hearing about Jimmy. I suppose there's something wrong with every man if you go at him with a microscope. You're turning into a proper old maid, Una, that's what's happening you.”

This was precisely what alarmed Una herself whenever she thought of it, and, to disprove the charge, she set out to flirt violently with the Sheehys' friend Denis O'Brien. Charm came natural to Una, but when she wanted to be charming, she could knock a man out in the first round. And Denis didn't look as though he had many defenses. He was forty-five, an age when every man becomes fair game for flattery. He was separated from his wife. As well as that, he was poor and plain. He had a plump, bright, beaming face, with a small dark mustache, a high, bald forehead, and a quiet voice with insinuating manners. He was lonely; he did not get much in the way of solid meals, so he came a good deal to the Sheehys, who were very fond of him. He was clearly delighted with Una, encouraged her to rattle on in her usual excitable, forthright way—the way that irritated Jimmy so much—and then poked good-natured fun at her. When he had gone, Joan warned Una that Denis wasn't quite so defenseless as he appeared.

This was quite sufficient to rouse Una's interest in him. When, two evenings later, he called in the Sheehys' absence, she invited him in and deliberately encouraged him to make love to her. He needed little in the way of encouragement. When they fell to discussing love, he took the line which always irritated her when people introduced it: that of treating love as a sort of natural expression of the personality. You couldn't be yourself while you repressed this tendency. She listened to him with grave disapproval. When she told him of her difficulties with Jimmy, he irritated her further by taking Jimmy's side and giving her precisely the same line as Joan had already given her—she even suspected that he might be a mouthpiece for Joan.

“Well, you see, Una,” he said in that insinuating, sermonizing way of his, “you have to take a chance. There's no such thing in marriage as absolute security. You can be friends with a man for twenty years and think you know all about him, but when you marry him, you find out things about him you never even guessed. It's a gamble, however you do it. Sooner or later you'll have to take a chance, and you should take it before you get too set in your ways.”

“Haven't you ever regretted taking a chance, Denis?” she asked mockingly.

“Well, no, dear,” he said after a moment's hesitation. “I can't say I have. It's no use trying to be wise before the event, you know, not in matters like that.”

“It's no use throwing your judgment out the window either,” she retorted.

“No,” he agreed quietly, “I wouldn't ask you to do that. But you've used your judgment, so far as it takes you, and now it won't take you any farther. It's only when you find you've let opportunity slip that you really start to throw your judgment out of the window. Think of all the women you know who made fools of themselves in their thirties.”

“And the men who made fools of themselves in their forties,” she said maliciously, but he only slapped his knee in delight and said: “Doesn't Jimmy ever knock you about, Una?”

She repeated this conversation to Joan, omitting the love-making, but Joan didn't seem to be flattered at Denis's giving the same advice as herself. She didn't like the way Una carried her personal problems to anyone who would listen; she felt it was almost a way of ridding herself of them and of the urge to get married.

“You mean you were talking to
Denis
about Jimmy?” she asked incredulously.

“Oh, just generally,” Una replied with a blush.

“God help your husband if you go round talking of him like that after you're married,” Joan added dryly.

Next evening Una went to the pictures with Denis and they returned to his flat for coffee. She felt slightly self-conscious with him. He never wore a hat; his graying hair was long behind his big bald brow, and his trousers, which he never seemed to press, flapped about his heels. The flat depressed her too: two large rooms on the ground floor, a dirty toilet without a bolt in the hallway, and a communal bathroom three floors up. It had the tidy and joyless look of bachelor quarters anywhere. But it was pleasant to sit in the dusk by the large window and watch the lights come on like stars in the great pink mass of a city square, and tell him about all the young men who had courted her from the age of sixteen on. Denis was a good listener, and everything she told him moved him to some comment. When she talked of Jimmy, he repeated his advice with even more conviction. This time it struck her as positively funny, because he had his arm about her waist. Jimmy wouldn't exactly approve of this oily old clerk as an advocate.