Collected Stories (99 page)

It gave me a nasty turn. Pa Hourigan was happy. He had done his duty, but mine still remained to be done. I sat for an hour, thinking about it, and the more I thought, the more hopeless it seemed. Then I put on my hat and went out.

Terry lived at that time in a nice little house on College Road; a little red-brick villa with a bow window. He answered the door himself, a slow, brooding, black-haired man with a long pale face. He didn't let on to be either surprised or pleased.

“Come in,” he said with a crooked smile. “You're a great stranger, aren't you?”

“You're a bit of a stranger yourself, Terry,” I said jokingly. Then Tess came out, drying her hands in her apron. Her little cheeks were as rosy as ever but the gloss was gone. I had the feeling that now there was nothing much she didn't know about her brother. Even the nervous smile suggested that she knew what I had come for—of course, old Hourigan must have brought him home.

“Ah, Ted, 'tis a cure for sore eyes to see you,” she said. “You'll have a cup? You will, to be sure.”

“You'll have a drink,” Terry said.

“Do you know, I think I will, Terry,” I said, seeing a nice natural opening for the sort of talk I had in mind.

“Ah, you may as well have both,” said Tess, and a few minutes later she brought in the tea and cake. It was like old times until she left us, and then it wasn't. Terry poured out the whiskey for me and the tea for himself, though his hand was shaking so badly that he could scarcely lift his cup. It was not all pretense; he didn't want to give me an opening, that was all. There was a fine print over his head—I think it was a Constable of Salisbury Cathedral. He talked about the monastery school, the usual clever, bitter contemptuous stuff about monks, inspectors and pupils. The whole thing was too carefully staged, the lifting of the cup and the wiping of the mustache, but it hypnotized me. There was something there you couldn't do violence to. I finished my drink and got up to go.

“What hurry is on you?” he asked irritably.

I mumbled something about its getting late.

“Nonsense!” he said. “You're not a boy any longer.”

Was he just showing off his strength of will or hoping to put off the evil hour when he would go slinking down the quays again?

“Ah, they'll be expecting me,” I said, and then, as I used to do when we were younger, I turned to the bookcase. “I see you have a lot of Maupassant at last,” I said.

“I bought them last time I was in Paris,” he said, standing beside me and looking at the books as though he were seeing them for the first time.

“A deathbed repentance?” I asked lightly, but he ignored me.

“I met another great admirer of his there,” he said sourly. “A lady you should meet some time.”

“I'd love to if I ever get there,” I said.

“Her address is the Rue de Grenelle,” he said, and then with a wild burst of mockery, “the left-hand pavement.”

At last his guard was down, and it was Maupassant's name that had done it. And still I couldn't say anything. An angry flush mounted his pale dark face and made it sinister in its violence.

“I suppose you didn't know I indulged in that hideous vice?” he snarled.

“I heard something,” I said. “I'm sorry, Terry.”

The angry flush died out of his face and the old brooding look came back.

“A funny thing about those books,” he said. “This woman I was speaking about, I thought she was bringing me to a hotel. I suppose I was a bit muddled with drink, but after dark, one of these places is much like another. ‘This isn't a hotel,' I said when we got upstairs. ‘No,' she said, ‘it's my room.'”

As he told it, I could see that he was living it all over again, something he could tell nobody but myself.

“There was a screen in the corner. I suppose it's the result of reading too much romantic fiction, but I thought there might be somebody hidden behind it. There was. You'd never guess what?”

“No.”

“A baby,” he said, his eyes boring through me. “A child of maybe eighteen months. I wouldn't know. While I was looking, she changed him. He didn't wake.”

“What was it?” I asked, searching for the message that he obviously thought the incident contained. “A dodge?”

“No,” he said almost grudgingly. “A country girl in trouble, trying to support her child, that's all. We went to bed and she fell asleep. I couldn't. It's many years now since I've been able to sleep like that. So I put on the light and began to read one of these books that I carried round in my pocket. The light woke her and she wanted to see what I had. ‘Oh, Maupassant,' she said. ‘He's a great writer.' ‘Is he?' I said. I thought she might be repeating something she'd picked up from one of her customers. She wasn't. She began to talk about
Boule de Suif
. It reminded me of the arguments we used to have in our young days.” Suddenly he gave me a curious boyish smile. “You remember, when we used to walk up the river together.”

“Oh, I remember,” I said with a sigh.

“We were terrible young idiots, the pair of us,” he said sadly. “Then she began to talk about
The Tellier Household
. I said it had poetry. ‘Oh, if it's poetry you want, you don't go to Maupassant. You go to Vigny, you go to Musset, and Maupassant is life, and life isn't poetry. It's only when you see what life can do to you that you realize what a great writer Maupassant is.' … Wasn't that an extraordinary thing to happen?” he asked fiercely, and again the angry color mounted his cheeks.

“Extraordinary,” I said, wondering if Terry himself knew how extraordinary it was. But it was exactly as if he were reading the thoughts as they crossed my mind.

“A prostitute from some French village; a drunken old waster from an Irish provincial town, lying awake in the dawn in Paris, discussing Maupassant. And the baby, of course. Maupassant would have made a lot of the baby.”

“I declare to God, I think if I'd been in your shoes, I'd have brought them back with me,” I said. I knew when I said it that I was talking nonsense, but it was a sort of release for all the bitterness inside me.

“What?” he asked, mocking me. “A prostitute and her baby? My dear Mr. Magner, you're becoming positively romantic in your old age.”

“A man like you should have a wife and children,” I said.

“Ah, but that's a different story,” he said malevolently. “Maupassant would never have ended a story like that.”

And he looked at me almost triumphantly with those mad, dark eyes. I knew how Maupassant would have ended that story all right. Maupassant, as the girl said, was life, and life was pretty nearly through with Terry Coughlan.

A Great Man

O
NCE
when I was visiting a famous London hospital, I met the matron, Miss Fitzgerald, a small, good-looking woman of fifty. She was Irish, and we discussed acquaintances in common until I mentioned Dermot O'Malley, and then I realized that somehow or other I had said the wrong thing. The matron frowned and went away. A few minutes later she returned, smiling, and asked me to lunch in a way that, for some reason, reminded me of a girl asking a young fellow for the first time to her home. “You know, Dr. O'Malley was a great friend of my father,” she said abruptly and then frowned again.

“Begor, I was,” said O'Malley when I reported this to him later. “And I'll tell you a story about it, what's more.” O'Malley is tall and gentle, and has a wife who is a pain in the neck, though he treats her with a consideration that I can only describe as angelic. “It was when I was a young doctor in Dublin, and my old professor, Dwyer, advised me to apply for a job in the hospital in Dooras. Now, you never heard of Dooras, but we all knew about it then, because that was in the days of Margaret's father, old Jim Fitzgerald, and he was known, all right.

“I met him a couple of nights later in a hotel in Kildare Street. He had come up to Dublin to attend a meeting of doctors. He was a man with piercing eyes and a long, hard face—more the face of a soldier than a doctor. The funny thing was his voice, which was rather high and piping and didn't seem to go at all with his manner.

“‘Dooras is no place for a young man who likes entertainment,' he said.

“‘Ah, I'm a country boy myself,' said I, ‘so that wouldn't worry me. And of course, I know the hospital has a great reputation.'

“‘So I understand,' he said grimly. ‘You see, O'Malley, I don't believe in all this centralization that's going on. I know it's all for the sake of equipment, and equipment is a good thing, too, but it's taking medicine away from where it belongs. One of these days, when their centralization breaks down, they'll find they haven't hospitals, doctors, or anything else.'

“By the time I'd left him, I'd as good as accepted the job, and it wasn't the job that interested me so much as the man. It could be that, my own father having been a bit of a waster, I'm attracted to men of strong character, and Fitzgerald was a fanatic. I liked that about him.

“Now, Dwyer had warned me that I'd find Dooras queer, and Dwyer knew the Dublin hospitals weren't up to much, but Dooras was dotty. It was an old hospital for infectious diseases that must have dated from about the time of the Famine, and Fitzgerald had got a small local committee to take it over. The first couple of days in it gave me the horrors, and it was weeks before I even began to see what Fitzgerald meant by it all. Then I did begin to see that in spite of all the drawbacks, it worked in a way bigger hospitals didn't work, and it was happy in a way that bigger hospitals are never happy. Everybody knew everybody else, and everybody was madly curious about everybody else, and if anybody ever gave a party, it wasn't something devised by the staff to entertain the patients; it was more likely to be the patients entertaining the staff.

“Partly this was because Margaret Fitzgerald, the woman you met in London, was the head nurse. I don't know what she's like now, and from all I can hear, she's a bit of a Tartar, but in those days she was a pretty little thing with an air of being more efficient than anybody ever was. Whenever you spoke to Margaret, she practically sprang to attention and clicked her heels, and if you were misguided enough to ask her for anything she hadn't handy, she gave you a demonstration of greyhound racing. And, of course, as you can see from the job she has now, she was a damn great nurse.

“But mainly the place worked because of Fitzgerald and his colleagues, the local doctors. Apart from him, none of them struck me as very brilliant, though he himself had a real respect for an old doctor called Pat Duane, a small, round, red-faced man with an old-fashioned choker collar and a wonderful soupy bedside manner. Pat looked as though some kind soul had let him to mature in a sherry cask till all the crude alcohol was drawn out of him. But they were all conscientious; they all listened to advice, even from me—and God knows I hadn't much to offer—and they all deferred in the most extraordinary way to Fitzgerald. Dwyer had described him to me as a remarkable man, and I was beginning to understand the full force of that, because I knew Irish small towns the way only a country boy knows them, and if those men weren't at one another's throats, fighting for every five-bob fee that could be picked up, it was due to his influence. I asked a doctor called MacCarthy about it one night and he invited me in for a drink. MacCarthy was a tall old poseur with a terrible passion for local history.

“‘Has it occurred to you that Fitzgerald may have given us back our self-respect, young man?' he asked in his pompous way.

“‘Our what?' I asked in genuine surprise. In those days it hadn't occurred to me that a man could at the same time be a show-box and be lacking in self-respect.

“‘Oh, come, O'Malley, come!' he said, sounding like the last Duke of Dooras. ‘As a medical man you are more observant than you pretend. I presume you have met Dr. Duane?'

“‘I have. Yes,' said I.

“‘And it didn't occur to you that Dr. Duane was ever a victim of alcohol?' he went on portentously. ‘You understand, of course, that I am not criticizing him. It isn't easy for the professional man in Ireland to maintain his standards of behavior. Fitzgerald has a considerable respect for Dr. Duane's judgment—quite justified, I may add, quite justified. But at any rate, in a very short time Pat eased off on the drink, and even began to read the medical journals again. Now Fitzgerald has him in the hollow of his hand. We all like to feel we are of some use to humanity—even the poor general practitioner.… But you saw it all for yourself, of course. You are merely trying to pump a poor country doctor.'

“Fitzgerald was not pretentious. He liked me to drop in on him when I had an hour to spare, and I went to his house every week for dinner. He lived in an old, uncomfortable family house a couple of miles out on the bay. Normally, he was cold, concentrated, and irritable, but when he had a few drinks in he got melancholy, and this for some reason caused him to be indiscreet and say dirty things about his committee and even about the other doctors. ‘The most interesting thing about MacCarthy,' he said to me once, ‘is that he's the seventh son of a seventh son, and so he can diagnose a case without seeing the patient at all. It leaves him a lot of spare time for local history.' I suspected he made the same sort of dirty remarks about me, and that secretly the man had no faith in anyone but himself. I told him so, and I think he enjoyed it. Like all shy men he liked to be insulted in a broad masculine way, and one night when I called him a flaming egotist, he grunted like an old dog when you tickle him and said, ‘Drink makes you very offensive, O'Malley. Have some more!'

“It wasn't so much that he was an egotist (though he was) as that he had a pernickety sense of responsibility, and whenever he hadn't a case to worry over, he could always find some equivalent of a fatal disease in the hospital—a porter who was too cheeky or a nurse who made too free with the men patients—and he took it all personally and on a very high level of suffering. He would sulk and snap at Margaret for days over some trifle that didn't matter to anyone, and finally reduce her to tears. At the same time, I suppose it was part of the atmosphere of seriousness he had created about the makeshift hospital, and it kept us all on our toes. Medicine was his life, and his gossip was shop. Duane or MacCarthy or some other local doctor would drop in of an evening to discuss a case—which by some process I never was able to fathom had become Fitzgerald's case—and over the drinks he would grow gloomier and gloomier about our ignorance till at last, without a word to any of us, he got up and telephoned some Dublin specialist he knew. It was part of the man's shyness that he only did it when he was partly drunk and could pretend that instead of asking a favor he was conferring one. Several times I watched that scene with amusement. It was all carefully calculated, because if he hadn't had enough to drink he lacked the brass and became apologetic, whereas if he had had one drink too much he could not describe what it was about the case that really worried him. Not that he rated a specialist's knowledge any higher than ours, but it seemed the best he could do, and if that didn't satisfy him, he ordered the specialist down, even when it meant footing the bill himself. It was only then I began to realize the respect that Dublin specialists had for him, because Dwyer, who was a terrified little man and hated to leave home for fear of what might happen him in out-of-the-way places like Cork and Belfast, would only give out a gentle moan about coming to Dooras. No wonder Duane and MacCarthy swore by him, even if for so much of the time they, like myself, thought him a nuisance.