Here are Ladies

J >> James Stephens >> Here are Ladies

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She entreated.

He heaved an angry forehead at her, puckered an eye, toned a long No
that wagged vibration behind it like an undocked tail.

She persisted, whereupon he loosed his thunder--

"You're not to step outside the house this night, ma'am," said he; and
to her angry "I will go," he barked, "If you do go, don't come back
here. I'll have a dutiful wife or I'll have none--stay in or stay out.
I'm tired humouring your whimsies, let you humour mine now----"

Then a flame gathered on her face, it grew hot in her voice, flashed to
a point in her eyes--

"I'm going out to-night," said she loudly; "are you coming with me?"

"I'm not," said he.

"Then," she snapped, "I'll go by myself."

"Wherever you go to-night you can stay," he roared. "Don't come back
to this house."

"I'm not mad enough to want to," she replied. "I wish I'd never seen
your old house. I wish I'd never seen yourself. You are just as dull
as your house is, and nearly as flat. It's a stupid, uninteresting,
slow house, so it is, and you are a stupid, dissatisfied grump of a
man, so you are. I'd sooner live in a cave with a hairy bear, so I
would----" and out she ran.

Two minutes later he had heard the door bang, and then silence.

That was five hours ago, and during all these long hours he had sat
staring sourly into the fire, seeing goodness knows what burnt-up
visions therein, waiting to hear a footfall, and an entreating voice at
the key-hole; apologies and tears perhaps, and promises of amendment.
Now it was after twelve o'clock, darkness everywhere and silence. Time
and again a policeman's tramp or the hasty, light footfall of adventure
went by. So he stood up at last sour and vindictive--

"She would have her fling. She wouldn't give in. She doesn't care a
tinker's curse what I say. . . . Let her go to Jericho," said he, and
he tramped up to bed.

In his bedroom he did not trouble to get a light. He undressed in a
bitterly savage mood and rolled into bed, only to jump out again in
sudden terror, for there was some one in it. It was his wife. He lay
down with a hazy, half-mad mind. Had he wronged her? Was she more
amenable than he had fancied? She had not gone out at all--or, had she
gone out, sneaked in again by the back door and crept noiselessly to
bed. . . .?

He fell asleep at last on the tattered fringe of a debate--Had he
wronged her? or had she diddled him again?

A GLASS OF BEER

It was now his custom to sit there. The world has its habits, why
should a man not have his? The earth rolls out of light and into
darkness as punctually as a business man goes to and from his office;
the seasons come with the regularity of automata, and go as if they
were pushed by an ejector; so, night after night, he strolled from the
Place de l'Observatoire to the Font St. Michel, and, on the return
journey, sat down at the same Cafe, at the same table, if he could
manage it, and ordered the same drink.

So regular had his attendance become that the waiter would suggest the
order before it was spoken. He did not drink beer because he liked it,
but only because it was not a difficult thing to ask for. Always he
had been easily discouraged, and he distrusted his French almost as
much as other people had reason to. The only time he had varied the
order was to request "un vin blanc gommee," but on that occasion he had
been served with a postage stamp for twenty-five centimes, and he still
wondered when he remembered it.

He liked to think of his first French conversation. He wanted
something to read in English, but was timid of asking for it. He
walked past all the newspaper kiosks on the Boulevard, anxiously
scanning the vendors inside--they were usually very stalwart, very
competent females, who looked as though they had outgrown their sins
but remembered them with pleasure. They had the dully-polished,
slightly-battered look of a modern antique. The words "M'sieu, Madame"
rang from them as from bells. They were very alert, sitting, as it
were, on tiptoe, and their eyes hit one as one approached. They were
like spiders squatting in their little houses waiting for their daily
flies.

He found one who looked jolly and harmless, sympathetic indeed, and to
her, with a flourished hat, he approached. Said he, "Donnez-moi,
Madame, s'il vous plait, le _Daily Mail_." At the second repetition
the good lady smiled at him, a smile compounded of benevolence and
comprehension, and instantly, with a "V'la M'sieu," she handed him _The
New York Herald_. They had saluted each other, and he marched down the
road in delight, with his first purchase under his arm and his first
foreign conversation accomplished.

At that time everything had delighted him--the wide, well-lighted
Boulevard, the concierges knitting in their immense doorways, each
looking like a replica of the other, each seeming sister to a
kiosk-keeper or a cat. The exactly-courteous speech of the people and
their not quite so rigorously courteous manners pleased him. He
listened to the voluble men who went by, speaking in a haste so
breathless that he marvelled how the prepositions and conjunctions
stuck to their duty in so swirling an ocean of chatter. There was a
big black dog with a mottled head who lay nightly on the pavement
opposite the Square de l'Observatoire. At intervals he raised his lean
skull from the ground and composed a low lament to an absent friend.
His grief was respected. The folk who passed stepped sidewards for
him, and he took no heed of their passage--a lonely, introspective dog
to whom a caress or a bone were equally childish things: Let me alone,
he seemed to say, I have my grief, and it is company enough. There was
the very superior cat who sat on every window-ledge, winking at life.
He (for in France all cats are masculine by order of philology), he did
not care a rap for man or dog, but he liked women and permitted them to
observe him. There was the man who insinuated himself between the
tables at the Cafe, holding out postcard-representations of the
Pantheon, the Louvre, Notre Dame, and other places. From beneath these
cards his dexterous little finger would suddenly flip others. One saw
a hurried leg, an arm that shone and vanished, a bosom that fled shyly
again, an audacious swan, a Leda who was thoroughly enjoying herself
and had never heard of virtue. His look suggested that he thought
better of one than to suppose that one was not interested in the nude.
"M'sieu," he seemed to say, with his fixed, brown-eyed regard, "this is
indeed a leg, an authentic leg, not disguised by even the littlest of
stockings; it is arranged precisely as M'sieu would desire it." His
sorrow as he went away was dignified with regret for an inartistic
gentleman. One was _en garcon_, and yet one would not look at one's
postcards! One had better then cease to be an artist and take to
peddling onions and asparagus as the vulgar do.

It was all a long time ago, and now, somehow, the savour had departed
from these things. Perhaps he had seen them too often. Perhaps a kind
of public surreptitiousness, a quite open furtiveness, had troubled
him. Maybe he was not well. He sat at his Cafe, three quarters down
the Boulevard, and before him a multitude of grotesque beings were
pacing as he sipped his bock.

Good manners decreed that he should not stare too steadfastly, and he
was one who obeyed these delicate dictations. Alas! he was one who
obeyed all dictates. For him authority wore a halo, and many sins
which his heyday ought to have committed had been left undone only
because they were not sanctioned by immediate social usage. He was
often saddened when he thought of the things he had not done. It was
the only sadness to which he had access, because the evil deeds which
he had committed were of so tepid and hygienic a character that they
could not be mourned for without hypocrisy, and now that he was
released from all privileged restraints and overlookings and could do
whatever he wished he had no wish to do anything.

His wife had been dead for over a year. He had hungered, he had prayed
for her death. He had hated that woman (and for how many years!) with
a kind of masked ferocity. How often he had been tempted to kill her
or to kill himself! How often he had dreamed that she had run away
from him or that he had run away from her! He had invented Russian
Princes, and Music Hall Stars, and American Billionaires with whom she
could adequately elope, and he had both loved and loathed the prospect.
What unending, slow quarrels they had together! How her voice had
droned pitilessly on his ears! She in one room, he in another, and
through the open door there rolled that unending recitation of woes and
reproaches, an interminable catalogue of nothings, while he sat dumb as
a fish, with a mind that smouldered or blazed. He had stood unseen
with a hammer, a poker, a razor in his hand, on tiptoe to do it. A
movement, a rush, one silent rush and it was done! He had revelled in
her murder. He had caressed it, rehearsed it, relished it, had jerked
her head back, and hacked, and listened to her entreaties bubbling
through blood!

And then she died! When he stood by her bed he had wished to taunt
her, but he could not do it. He read in her eyes--I am dying, and in a
little time I shall have vanished like dust on the wind, but you will
still be here, and you will never see me again--He wished to ratify
that, to assure her that it was actually so, to say that he would come
home on the morrow night, and she would not be there, and that he would
return home every night, and she would never be there. But he could
not say it. Somehow the words, although he desired them, would not
come. His arm went to her neck and settled there. His hand caressed
her hair, her cheek. He kissed her eyes, her lips, her languid hands;
and the words that came were only an infantile babble of regrets and
apologies, assurances that he did love her, that he had never loved any
one before, and never would love any one again. . . .

Every one who passed looked into the Cafe where he sat. Every one who
passed looked at him. There were men with sallow faces and wide black
hats. Some had hair that flapped about them in the wind, and from
their locks one gathered, with some distaste, the spices of Araby.
Some had cravats that fluttered and fell and rose again like banners in
a storm. There were men with severe, spade-shaped, most
responsible-looking beards, and quizzical little eyes which gave the
lie to their hairy sedateness--eyes which had spent long years in
looking sidewards as a woman passed. There were men of every stage of
foppishness--men who had spent so much time on their moustaches that
they had only a little left for their finger-nails, but their
moustaches exonerated them; others who were coated to happiness,
trousered to grotesqueness, and booted to misery. He thought--In this
city the men wear their own coats, but they all wear some one else's
trousers, and their boots are syndicated.

He saw no person who was self-intent. They were all deeply conscious,
not of themselves, but of each other. They were all looking at each
other. They were all looking at him; and he returned the severe, or
humourous, or appraising gaze of each with a look nicely proportioned
to the passer, giving back exactly what was given to him, and no more.
He did not stare, for nobody stared. He just looked and looked away,
and was as mannerly as was required.

A negro went by arm in arm with a girl who was so sallow that she was
only white by courtesy. He was a bulky man, and as he bent greedily
over his companion it was evident that to him she was whiter than the
snow of a single night.

Women went past in multitudes, and he knew the appearance of them all.
How many times he had watched them or their duplicates striding and
mincing and bounding by, each moving like an animated note of
interrogation! They were long, and medium, and short. There were
women of a thinness beyond comparison, sheathed in skirts as featly as
a rapier in a scabbard. There were women of a monumental, a mighty
fatness, who billowed and rolled in multitudinous, stormy garments.
There were slow eyes that drooped on one heavily as a hand, and quick
ones that stabbed and withdrew, and glanced again appealingly, and slid
away cursing. There were some who lounged with a false sedateness, and
some who fluttered in an equally false timidity. Some wore velvet
shoes without heels. Some had shoes, the heels whereof were of such
inordinate length that the wearers looked as though they were perched
on stilts and would topple to perdition if their skill failed for an
instant. They passed and they looked at him; and from each, after the
due regard, he looked away to the next in interminable procession.

There were faces also to be looked at: round chubby faces wherefrom the
eyes of oxen stared in slow, involved rumination. Long faces that were
keener than hatchets and as cruel. Faces that pretended to be scornful
and were only piteous. Faces contrived to ape a temperament other than
their own. Raddled faces with heavy eyes and rouged lips. Ragged lips
that had been chewed by every mad dog in the world. What lips there
were everywhere! Bright scarlet splashes in dead-white faces. Thin
red gashes that suggested rat-traps instead of kisses. Bulbous, flabby
lips that would wobble and shiver if attention failed them. Lips of a
horrid fascination that one looked at and hated and ran to. . . .
Looking at him slyly or boldly, they passed along, and turned after a
while and repassed him, and turned again in promenade.

He had a sickness of them all. There had been a time when these were
among the things he mourned for not having done, but that time was long
past. He guessed at their pleasures, and knew them to be without salt.
Life, said he, is as unpleasant as a plate of cold porridge. Somehow
the world was growing empty for him. He wondered was he outgrowing his
illusions, or his appetites, or both? The things in which other men
took such interest were drifting beyond him, and (for it seemed that
the law of compensation can fail) nothing was drifting towards him in
recompense. He foresaw himself as a box with nothing inside it, and he
thought--It is not through love or fear or distress that men commit
suicide: it is because they have become empty: both the gods and the
devils have deserted them and they can no longer support that solemn
stagnation. He marvelled to see with what activity men and women
played the most savourless of games! With what zest of pursuit they
tracked what petty interests. He saw them as ants scurrying with
scraps of straw, or apes that pick up and drop and pick again, and he
marvelled from what fount they renewed themselves, or with what charms
they exorcised the demons of satiety.

On this night life did not seem worth while. The taste had gone from
his mouth; his bock was water vilely coloured; his cigarette was a hot
stench. And yet a full moon was peeping in the trees along the path,
and not far away, where the countryside bowed in silver quietude, the
rivers ran through undistinguishable fields chanting their lonely
songs. The seas leaped and withdrew, and called again to the stars,
and gathered in ecstasy and roared skywards, and the trees did not rob
each other more than was absolutely necessary. The men and women were
all hidden away, sleeping in their cells, where the moon could not see
them, nor the clean wind, nor the stars. They were sundered for a
little while from their eternal arithmetic. The grasping hands were
lying as quietly as the paws of a sleeping dog. Those eyes held no
further speculation than the eyes of an ox who lies down. The tongues
that had lied all day, and been treacherous and obscene and respectful
by easy turn, said nothing more; and he thought it was very good that
they were all hidden, and that for a little time the world might swing
darkly with the moon in its own wide circle and its silence.

He paid for his bock, gave the waiter a tip, touched his hat to a lady
by sex and a gentleman by clothing, and strolled back to his room that
was little, his candle that was three-quarters consumed, and his
picture which might be admired when he was dead but which he would
never be praised for painting; and, after sticking his foot through the
canvas, he tugged himself to bed, agreeing to commence the following
morning just as he had the previous one, and the one before that, and
the one before that again.

ONE AND ONE

Do you hate me, you!
Sitting quietly there,
With the burnished hair
That frames the two
Deep eyes of your face
In a smooth embrace.

And you say naught,
And I never speak;
But you rest your cheek
On your hand, a thought
Showing plain as the brow
Goes wrinkling now.

Of what do you think,
Sitting opposite me,
As you stir the tea
That you do not drink,
And frown at nought
With those brows of thought.

THREE WOMEN WHO WEPT

He was one of those men who can call ladies by their Christian names.
One day he met twenty-four duchesses walking on a red carpet, and he
winked at them, and they were all delighted. It was so at first he
appeared to her. Has a mere girl any protection against a man of that
quality? and she was the very merest of girls--she knew it. It was not
that she was ignorant, for she had read widely about men, and she had
three brothers as to whom she knew divers intimate things.

The girl who has been reared among brothers has few defences against
other males. She has acquired two things--a belief in the divine right
of man, and a curiosity as to what those men are like who are not her
brothers. She may love her brothers, but she cannot believe that they
adequately represent the other sex. Does not every girl wish to marry
the antithesis of her brother? The feeling is that one should marry as
far outside of the family as is possible, and as far outside of one's
self as may be; but love has become subject to geography, and our
choice is often bounded by the tramline upon which we travel from our
houses to our businesses and back again.

While she loved and understood her brothers, she had not in the least
understood or believed in the stories she had read, and so, when the
Young Man out of a Book came to her, she was delighted but perplexed.

It was difficult to live up to him worthily. It was difficult to know
what he would do next, and it was exceedingly difficult to keep out of
his way; for, indeed, he seemed to pervade the part of the world where
she lived. He was as ubiquitous as the air or the sky. If she went
into a shop, he was pacing on the pavement when she came out. If she
went for a walk he was standing at the place farther than which she had
decided not to go. She had found him examining a waterfall on the
Dodder, leaning over the bear-pit in the Zoological Gardens, and
kneeling beside her in the Chapel, and her sleep had been distressed by
the reflection that maybe he was sitting on her window-sill like a sad
sparrow drenched in the rain, all its feathers on end with the cold,
and its eyes wide open staring at misery.

The first time they met he spoke to her. He plucked a handkerchief
from somewhere and thrust it into her hand, saying--

"You have dropped this, I think"--and she had been too alarmed to
disown it.

It was a mighty handkerchief. It was so big that it would scarcely fit
into her muff.--"It is a table-cloth," said she, as she solemnly
stuffed away its lengthy flaps. "It is his own," she thought a moment
later, and she would have laughed like a mad woman, only that she had
no time, for he was pacing delicately by her side, and talking in a low
voice that was partly a whisper and partly a whistle, and was entirely
and disturbingly delicious.

The next time they met very suddenly. Scarcely a dozen paces separated
them. She could see him advancing towards her, and knew by his knitted
brows that he was searching anxiously for something to say. When they
drew together he lifted his hat and murmured--

"How is your handkerchief to-day?"

The query so astonished her that (the verb is her own) she simply
bawled with laughter. From that moment he treated her with freedom,
for if once you laugh with a person you admit him to equality, you have
ranked him definitely as a vertebrate, your hand is his by right of
species, scarcely can you withhold even your lips from his advances.

Another, a strange, a fascinating thing, was that he was afraid of her.
It was inconceivable, it was mad, but it was true. He looked at her
with disguised terror. His bravado was the slenderest mask. Every
word he said was uttered tentatively, it was subject to her approval,
and if she opposed a statement he dropped it instantly and adopted her
alternative as one adopts a gift. This astonished her who had been
prepared to be terrified. He kept a little distance between them as he
walked, and when she looked at him he looked away. She had a vision of
herself as an ogre--whiskers sprouted all over her face, her ears
bulged and swaggled, her voice became a cavernous rumble, her
conversation sounded like fee-faw-fum--and yet, her brothers were not
afraid of her in the least; they pinched her and kicked her hat.

He spoke (but always without prejudice) of the loveliest things
imaginable--matters about which brothers had no conception, and for
which they would not have any reverence. He said one day that the sky
was blue, and, on looking she found that it was so. The sky was
amazingly blue. It had never struck her before, but there was a colour
in the firmament before which one might fall down and worship.
Sunlight was not the hot glare which it had been: it was rich,
generous, it was inexpressibly beautiful. The colour and scent of
flowers became more varied. The world emerged as from shrouds and
cerements. It was tender and radiant, comeliness lived everywhere, and
goodwill. Laughter! the very ground bubbled with it: the grasses waved
their hands, the trees danced and curtsied to one another with gentle
dignity, and the wind lurched down the path with its hat on the side of
its head and its hands in its pockets, whistling like her younger
brother.

And then he went away. She did not see him any more. He was not by
the waterfall on the Dodder, nor hanging over the bear-pit in the Zoo.
He was not in the Chapel, nor on the pavement when she came out of a
shop. He was not anywhere. She searched, but he was not anywhere.
And the sun became the hot pest it had always been: the heavens were
stuffed with dirty clouds the way a second-hand shop is stuffed with
dirty bundles: the trees were hulking corner-boys with muddy boots: the
wind blew dust into her eye, and her brothers pulled her hair and
kicked her hat; so that she went apart from all these. She sat before
the mirror regarding herself with woeful amazement--

"He was afraid of me!" she said.

And she wept into his monstrous handkerchief.

II

When he came into the world he came howling, and he howled without
ceasing for seven long years, except at the times when he happened to
be partaking of nourishment, or was fast asleep, and, even then, he
snored with a note of defiance and protest which proved that his humour
was not for peace.

The time came when he ceased to howl and became fascinated by the
problem of how to make other people howl. In this art he became an
adept. When he and another child chanced to be left together there
came, apparently from the uttermost ends of the earth, a pin, and the
other child and the pin were soon in violent and lamentable conjunction.

So he grew.

"Be hanged if I know what to do with him," said his father as he
rebuckled on his belt. "The devil's self hasn't got the shape or match
of such an imp in all the length and breadth of his seven hells. I'm
sick, sore and sorry whacking him, so I am, and before long I'll be
hung on the head of him. I'm saying that there's more deceit and
devilment in his bit of a carcass than there is in a public-house full
of tinkers, so there is."

He turned to his wife--

"It's no credit at all the son you've bore me, ma'am, but a sorrow and
a woe that'll be killing us in our old age and maybe damning our souls
at the heel of it. Where he got his blackguardly ways from I'm not
saying, but it wasn't from my side of the house anyway, so it wasn't,
and that's a moral. Get out of my sight you sniffling lout, and if
ever I catch you at your practices again I'll lam you till you won't be
able to wink without help, so I will."

"Musha," sobbed his wife, "don't be always talking out of you. Any one
would think that it was an old, criminal thief you were instructing,
instead of a bit of a child that'll be growing out of his wildness in
no time. Come across to me, child, come over to your mother, my lamb."

That night, when his father got into bed, he prodded his foot against
something under the sheets. Investigation discovered a brown paper bag
at the end of the bed. A further search revealed a wasp's nest, inside
of which there was an hundred angry wasps blazing for combat. His
father left the room with more expedition than decency. He did not
stop to put on as much as his hat. He fled to the stream which ran
through the meadow at the back of their house, and lay down in it, and
in two seconds there was more bad language than water in the stream.
Every time he lifted his head for air the wasps flew at him with their
tails curled. They kept him there for half an hour, and in that time
he laid in the seeds of more rheumatism than could be cured in two
lifetimes.

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