Here are Ladies

J >> James Stephens >> Here are Ladies

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When he returned home he found his wife lying on the floor with a
blanket wrapped about her head, groaning by instinct, for she was
senseless.

Her face had disappeared. There was nothing where it had been but
poisoned lumps. A few days later it was found that she was blind of
one eye, and there was danger of erysipelas setting in.

The boy could not be found for some time, but a neighbour, observing a
stone come from nowhere in particular and hit a cat, located the first
cause in a ditch. He brought the boy home, and grabbed his father just
in time to prevent murder being done.

It was soon found that the only thing which eased the restless moaning
woman was the touch of her son. All her unmanageable, delirious
thoughts centred on him--

"Sure he's only a boy; beating never did good to anything. Give him a
chance now for wouldn't a child be a bit wild anyhow. You will be a
good boy, won't you? Come to your mother, my lamb."

So the lad grew, from twelve to fifteen, from fifteen to twenty. Soon
he attained to manhood. To his mother he seemed to have leaped in a
day from the careless, prattling babe to the responsibly-whiskered
miracle at whom mothers sit and laugh in secret delight. This
towering, big-footed, hairy person! was he really the little boy who
used to hide in her skirts when his father scowled? She had only to
close her eyes and she could feel again a pair of little hands clawing
at her breast, sore from the violent industry of soft, wee lips.

So he grew. Breeches that were big became small. Bony wrists were
continually pushing out of coat cuffs. His feet would burst out of his
boots. He grew out of everything but one. A man may outgrow his
breeches, he cannot outgrow his nature: his body is never too big or
too small to hold that.

Every living thing in the neighbourhood knew him. When a cat saw him
coming it climbed a tree and tried to look as much like a lump of wood
as it could. When a dog heard his step it tucked its tail out of sight
and sought for a hole in the hedge. The birds knew he carried stones
in his pockets. No tree cast so black a shadow in the sunlight as he
did. There were stories of a bottle of paraffin oil and a cat that
screeched in flames. Folk told of a maltreated dog that pointed its
nose to heaven and bayed a curse against humanity until a terrified man
battered it to death with a shovel. No one knew who did it, but every
one said there were only two living hearts capable of these
iniquities--one belonged to the devil, the other to our young man, and
they acquitted Satan of the deeds.

The owner of the dog swore by the beasts in the field and the stars in
the sky that he would tear the throat of the man who had injured his
beast.

The father drove his one-eyed wife from the house, and went with her to
live elsewhere; but she left him and went back to her son, and her
husband forswore the twain.

When women saw him in the road they got past him with their breath
hissing through their teeth in fear. When men passed him they did it
warily, with their fists clenched and their eyes alert. He was shunned
by every one. The strength of his arms also was a thing to be afraid
of, and in the world there was but two welcomes for him, one from his
mother, the other from an old, grey rat that slept in his breast--

"Sure, you're all against him," his mother would say. "Why don't you
give the boy a chance? It's only the hot blood of youth that's working
in him--and he never did it either. Look how kind he is to me! never
the bad word or the hard look! Ye black hearts that blame my boy, look
among yourselves for the villain. No matter who is against you, come
to your mother, my lamb."

He was found one day at the foot of the cliff with his neck broken.
Some said that he had slipped and fallen, some said he had committed
suicide, other some pursed their lips tightly and said nothing. All
were relieved that he was gone, saving his mother only, she mourned for
her only son, and wept bitterly, refusing to be comforted until she
died.

III

She had begun to get thin. Her face was growing sharp and peaked. The
steady curve of her cheek had become a little indeterminate. Her chin
had begun to sag and her eyes to look a little weary. But she had not
observed these things, for we do not notice ourselves very much until
some other person thinks we are worthy of observation and tells us so;
and these changes are so gradual and tiny that we seldom observe them
until we awaken for a moment or two in our middle age and then we get
ready to fall asleep again.

When her uncle died, the solicitors who had administered his will handed
her a small sum of money and intimated that from that date she must hew
out her own path in life, and as she had most of the household furniture
of her late uncle at her disposal, she decided to let lodgings. Setting
about that end with all possible expedition she finished writing
"apartments to let" on a square of pasteboard, and, having placed it
prominently in a window, she folded her mittened hands and sat down with
some trepidation to await the advent of a lodger.

He came in the night time with the stars and the moon. He was running
like a youthful god, she thought, for her mind had not yet been weaned
from certain vanities, and she could not see that a gigantic policeman
was in his wake, tracking him with elephantine bounds, and now and again
snatching a gasp from hurry to blow furious warnings on a whistle.

It was the sound of the whistle which opened her eyes through her ears.
She went to the door and saw him coming framed in the moonlight, his arms
pressed tightly to his sides, his head well up and his feet kicking a
mile a minute on the pavement. Behind him the whistle shrilled with
angry alarm, and the thunder of monumental feet came near as the
policeman sprinted in majesty.

As the lodger ran she looked at him. He was a long-legged, young man
with a pleasant, clean-shaven face. His eyes met hers, and, although he
grinned anxiously, she saw that he was frightened. That frightened smile
gripped her and she panted noiselessly, "Oh, run, run!"

As he drew level he fixed his gaze on her, and, stopping suddenly, he
ducked under her arm and was inside the house in a twinkling.

The poor lady's inside curled up in fear and had started to uncurl in
screams when she felt a hand laid gently on her arm, and, "Don't make a
noise, or I'm caught," said a voice, whereupon, and with exceeding
difficulty, she closed her mouth while the scream went sizzling through
her teeth in little gasps. But now the enemy appeared round the corner,
tooting incessantly on his whistle, and whacking sparks from the
cobblestones as he ran. Behind her she could hear the laboured breathing
of a spent runner. The lodger was kneeling at her skirts: he caught her
hand and pressed his face against it entreatingly--

The policeman drew near--

"Did you see a fellow skedaddling along here, ma'am?" said he.

She hesitated for only a moment and then, pointing to a laneway opposite,
replied--

"He went up there."

"Thank you, ma'am," said the policeman with a genial smile, and he
sprinted up the laneway whistling cheerily.

She turned to the lodger--

"You had better go now," said she.

He looked at her ruefully and hesitated--

"If I go now," he replied, "I'll be caught and get a month. I'll have to
eat skilly, you know, and pick oakum, and get my hair cut."

She looked at his hair--it was brown and wavy, just at his ears it
crisped into tiny curls, and she thought it would be a great pity to cut
it. He bore her scrutiny well, with just a trifle of embarrassment and a
shyly humorous eye--

"You are the kindest woman I ever met," said he, "and I'll never forget
you as long as I live. I'll go away now because I wouldn't like to get
you into trouble for helping me."

"What did you do?" she faltered.

"I got into a fight with another man," he replied, "and while we were
hammering each other the policeman came up. He was going to arrest me,
and, before I knew what I was doing, I knocked him down."

She shook her head--

"You should not have done that. That was very wrong, for he was only
doing his duty."

"I know it," he admitted, "but, do you see, I didn't know what I was
doing, and then, when I hit him, I got frightened and ran."

"You poor boy," said she tenderly.

"And somehow, when I saw you, I knew you wouldn't give me up: wasn't it
queer?"

What a nice, gentlemanly young fellow he is, she thought.

"But, of course, I cannot be trespassing on your kindness any longer," he
continued, "so I'll leave at once, and if ever I get the chance to repay
your kindness to a stranger----"

"Perhaps," said she, "it might not be quite safe for you to go yet. Come
inside and I will give you a cup of tea. You must be worn out with the
excitement and the danger. Why, you are shaking all over: a cup of tea
will steady your nerves and give him time to stop looking for you."

"Perhaps," said he, "if I turned my coat inside out and turned my
trousers up, they wouldn't notice me."

"We will talk it over," she replied with a wise nod.

That was how the lodger came. He told her his name and his
employment--he was a bookmaker's clerk. He brought his luggage,
consisting mostly of neckties, to her house the following day from his
former lodgings--

"Had a terrible time getting away from them," said he. "They rather
liked me, you know, and couldn't make out why I wanted to leave."

"As if you weren't quite free to do as you wished," quoth his indignant
new landlady.

"And then, when they found I would go, they made me pay two weeks' rent
in lieu of notice--mean, wasn't it?"

"The low people," she replied. "I will not ask you to pay anything this
week."

He put his bandbox on the ground, and shook hands with her--

"You are a brick," said he, "the last and the biggest of them. There
isn't the like of you in this or any other world, and never was and never
will be, world without end, amen."

"Oh, don't say that," said she shyly.

"I will," he replied, "for it's the truth. I'll hire a sandwichman to
stop people in the street and tell it to them. I'll get a week's
engagement at the theatre and sing it from the stage. I'll make up a
poem about your goodness. I don't know what to do to thank you. Do you
see, if I had to pay you now I'd have to pawn something, and I really
believe I have pawned everything they'd lend on to get the money for that
two weeks' rent. I'm broke until Friday, that's my pay day, but that
night I'll come home with my wages piled up on a cart."

"I can lend you a few shillings until then," said she laughing.

"Oh, no," said he. "It's not fair. I couldn't do that," but he could.

Well the light of the world shone out of the lodger. He was like a sea
breeze in a soap factory. When he awakened in the morning he whistled.
When he came down to breakfast he sang. When he came home in the evening
he danced. He had an amazing store of vitality: from the highest hair on
the top of his head down to his heels he was alive. His average language
was packed with jokes and wonderful curses. He was as chatty as a girl,
as good-humoured as a dog, as unconscious as a kitten--and she knew
nothing at all of men, except, perhaps, that they wore trousers and were
not girls. The only man with whom she had ever come in contact was her
uncle, and he might have been described as a sniffy old man with a cold;
a blend of gruel and grunt, living in an atmosphere of ointment and pills
and patent medicine advertisements--and, behold, she was living in
unthinkable intimacy with the youngest of young men; not an old,
ache-ridden, cough-racked, corn-footed septuagenarian, but a young,
fresh-faced, babbling rascal who laughed like the explosion of a
blunderbuss, roared songs as long as he was within earshot and danced
when he had nothing else to do. He used to show her how to do
hand-balances on the arm-chair, and while his boots were cocked up in the
air she would grow stiff with terror for his safety and for that of the
adjacent crockery.

The first morning she was giving him his breakfast, intending afterwards
to have her own meal in the kitchen, but he used language of such
strangely attractive ferocity, and glared at her with such a
humorously-mad eye that she was compelled to breakfast with him.

At night, when he returned to his tea, he swore by this and by that he
would die of hunger unless she ate with him; and then he told her all the
doings of the day, the bets that had been made and lost, and what sort of
a man his boss was, and he extolled the goodness of his friends, and
lectured on the vast iniquity of his enemies.

So things went until she was as intimate with him as if he had been her
brother. One night he came home just a trifle tipsy. She noted at last
what was wrong with him, and her heart yearned over the sinner. There
were five or six glasses inside of him, and each was the father of an
antic. He was an opera company, a gymnasium, and a menagerie at once,
all tinged with a certain hilarious unsteadiness which was fascinating.
But at last he got to his bed, which was more than she did.

She sat through the remainder of the night listening to the growth of her
half-starved heart. Oh, but there was a warmth there now. . . .!
Springtime and the moon in flood. What new leaves are these which the
trees put forth? Bird, singing at the peep of morn, where gottest thou
thy song? Be still, be still, thou stranger, fluttering a wing at my
breast. . . .

At the end of a month the gods moved, and when the gods move they trample
mortals in the dust.

The lodger's employer left Dublin for London, taking his clerk with him.

"Good-bye," said he.

"Good-bye," she replied, "and a pleasant journey to you."

And she took the card with "Apartments to Let" written upon it and placed
it carefully in the window, and then, folding her mittened hands, she sat
down to await the coming of another lodger, and as she sat she wept
bitterly.

THE TRIANGLE

Nothing is true for ever. A man and a fact will become equally
decrepit and will tumble in the same ditch, for truth is as mortal as
man, and both are outlived by the tortoise and the crow.

To say that two is company and three is a crowd is to make a very
temporary statement. After a short time satiety or use and wont has
crept sunderingly between the two, and, if they are any company at all,
they are bad company, who pray discreetly but passionately for the
crowd which is censured by the proverb.

If there had not been a serpent in the Garden of Eden it is likely that
the bored inhabitants of Paradise would have been forced to import one
from the outside wilds merely to relax the tedium of a too-sustained
duet. There ought to be a law that when a man and a woman have been
married for a year they should be forcibly separated for another year.
In the meantime, as our law-givers have no sense, we will continue to
invoke the serpent.

Mrs. Mary Morrissy had been married for quite a time to a gentleman of
respectable mentality, a sufficiency of money, and a surplus of
leisure--Good things? We would say so if we dared, for we are growing
old and suspicious of all appearances, and we do not easily recognize
what is bad or good. Beyond the social circumference we are confronted
with a debatable ground where good and bad are so merged that we cannot
distinguish the one from the other. To her husband's mental
attainments (from no precipitate, dizzy peaks did he stare; it was only
a tiny plain with the tiniest of hills in the centre) Mrs. Morrissy
extended a courtesy entirely unmixed with awe. For his money she
extended a hand which could still thrill to an unaccustomed
prodigality, but for his leisure (and it was illimitable) she could
find no possible use.

The quality of permanency in a transient world is terrifying. A
permanent husband is a bore, and we do not know what to do with him.
He cannot be put on a shelf. He cannot be hung on a nail. He will not
go out of the house. There is no escape from him, and he is always the
same. A smile of a certain dimension, moustaches of this inevitable
measurement, hands that waggle and flop like those of automata--these
are his. He eats this way and he drinks that way, and he will continue
to do so until he stiffens into the ultimate quietude. He snores on
this note, he laughs on that, dissonant, unescapeable, unchanging.
This is the way he walks, and he does not know how to run. A
predictable beast indeed! He is known inside and out, catalogued,
ticketed, and he cannot be packed away.

Mrs. Morrissy did not yet commune with herself about it, but if her
grievance was anonymous it was not unknown. There is a back-door to
every mind as to every house, and although she refused it house-room,
the knowledge sat on her very hearthstone whistling for recognition.

Indeed, she could not look anywhere without seeing her husband. He was
included in every landscape. His moustaches and the sun rose together.
His pyjamas dawned with the moon. When the sea roared so did he, and
he whispered with the river and the wind. He was in the picture but
was out of drawing. He was in the song but was out of tune. He
agitated her dully, surreptitiously, unceasingly. She questioned of
space in a whisper, "Are we glued together?" said she. There was a bee
in a flower, a burly rascal who did not care a rap for any one: he sat
enjoying himself in a scented and gorgeous palace, and in him she
confided:

"If," said she to the bee, "if that man doesn't stop talking to me I'll
kick him. I'll stick a pin in him if he does not go out for a walk."

She grew desperately nervous. She was afraid that if she looked at him
any longer she would see him. To-morrow, she thought, I may notice
that he is a short, fat man in spectacles, and that will be the end of
everything. But the end of everything is also the beginning of
everything, and so she was one half in fear and the other half in hope.
A little more and she would hate him, and would begin the world again
with the same little hope and the same little despair for her meagre
capital.

She had already elaborated a theory that man was intended to work, and
that male sloth was offensive to Providence and should be forbidden by
the law. At times her tongue thrilled, silently as yet, to certain
dicta of the experienced Aunt who had superintended her youth, to the
intent that a lazy man is a nuisance to himself and to everybody else;
and, at last, she disguised this saying as an anecdote and repeated it
pleasantly to her husband.

He received it coldly, pondered it with disfavour, and dismissed it by
arguing that her Aunt had whiskers, that a whiskered female is a freak,
and that the intellectual exercises of a freak are---- He lifted his
eyebrows and his shoulders. He brushed her Aunt from the tips of his
fingers and blew her delicately beyond good manners and the mode.

But time began to hang heavily on both. The intellectual antics of a
leisured man become at last wearisome; his methods of thought, by mere
familiarity, grow distasteful; the time comes when all the arguments
are finished, there is nothing more to be said on any subject, and
boredom, without even the covering, apologetic hand, yawns and yawns
and cannot be appeased. Thereupon two cease to be company, and even a
serpent would be greeted as a cheery and timely visitor. Dismal
indeed, and not infrequent, is that time, and the vista therefrom is a
long, dull yawn stretching to the horizon and the grave. If at any
time we do revalue the values, let us write it down that the person who
makes us yawn is a criminal knave, and then we will abolish matrimony
and read Plato again.

The serpent arrived one morning hard on Mrs. Morrissy's pathetic
pressure. It had three large trunks, a toy terrier, and a volume of
verse. The trunks contained dresses, the dog insects, and the book
emotion--a sufficiently enlivening trilogy! Miss Sarah O'Malley wore
the dresses in exuberant rotation, Mr. Morrissy read the emotional
poetry with great admiration, Mrs. Morrissy made friends with the dog,
and life at once became complex and joyful.

Mr. Morrissy, exhilarated by the emotional poetry, drew, with an
instinct too human to be censured, more and more in the direction of
his wife's cousin, and that lady, having a liking for comedy, observed
the agile posturings of the gentleman on a verbal summit up and down
and around which he flung himself with equal dexterity and
satisfaction--crudely, he made puns--and the two were further thrown
together by the enforced absences of Mrs. Morrissy, into a privacy more
than sealed, by reason of the attentions of a dog who would climb to
her lap, and there, with an angry nose, put to no more than temporary
rout the nimble guests of his jacket. Shortly Mrs. Morrissy began to
look upon the toy terrier with a meditative eye.

It was from one of these, now periodical, retreats that Mrs. Morrissy
first observed the rapt attitude of her husband, and, instantly, life
for her became bounding, plentiful, and engrossing.

There is no satisfaction in owning that which nobody else covets. Our
silver is no more than second-hand, tarnished metal until some one else
speaks of it in terms of envy. Our husbands are barely tolerable until
a lady friend has endeavoured to abstract their cloying attentions.
Then only do we comprehend that our possessions are unique, beautiful,
well worth guarding.

Nobody has yet pointed out that there is an eighth sense; and yet the
sense of property is more valuable and more detestable than all the
others in combination. The person who owns something is civilised. It
is man's escape from wolf and monkeydom. It is individuality at last,
or the promise of it, while those other ownerless people must remain
either beasts of prey or beasts of burden, grinning with ineffective
teeth, or bowing stupid heads for their masters' loads, and all begging
humbly for last straws and getting them.

Under a sufficiently equable exterior Mrs. Morrissy's blood was pulsing
with greater activity than had ever moved it before. It raced! It
flew! At times the tide of it thudded to her head, boomed in her ears,
surged in fierce waves against her eyes. Her brain moved with a
complexity which would have surprised her had she been capable of
remarking upon it. Plot and counterplot! She wove webs horrid as a
spider's. She became, without knowing it, a mistress of psychology.
She dissected motions and motives. She builded theories precariously
upon an eyelash. She pondered and weighed the turning of a head, the
handing of a sugar-bowl. She read treason in a laugh, assignations in
a song, villainy in a new dress. Deeper and darker things! Profound
and vicious depths plunging stark to where the devil lodged in
darknesses too dusky for registration! She looked so steadily on these
gulfs and murks that at last she could see anything she wished to see;
and always, when times were critical, when this and that, abominations
indescribable, were separate by no more than a pin's point, she must
retire from her watch (alas for a too-sensitive nature!) to chase the
enemies of a dog upon which, more than ever, she fixed a meditative eye.

To get that woman out of the house became a pressing necessity. Her
cousin carried with her a baleful atmosphere. She moved cloudy with
doubt. There was a diabolic aura about her face, and her hair was red!
These things were patent. Was one blind or a fool? A straw will
reveal the wind, so will an eyelash, a smile, the carriage of a dress.
Ankles also! One saw too much of them. Let it be said then. Teeth
and neck were bared too often and too broadly. If modesty was indeed
more than a name, then here it was outraged. Shame too! was it only a
word? Does one do this and that without even a blush? Even vice
should have its good manners, its own decent retirements. If there is
nothing else let there be breeding! But at this thing the world might
look and understand and censure if it were not brass-browed and stupid.
Sneak! Traitress! Serpent! Oh, Serpent! do you slip into our very
Eden? looping your sly coils across our flowers, trailing over our beds
of narcissus and our budding rose, crawling into our secret arbours and
whispering-places and nests of happiness! Do you flaunt and sway your
crested head with a new hat on it every day? Oh, that my Aunt were
here, with the dragon's teeth, and the red breath, and whiskers to
match! Here Mrs. Morrissy jumped as if she had been bitten (as indeed
she had been) and retired precipitately, eyeing the small dog that
frisked about her with an eye almost petrified with meditation.

To get that woman out of the house quickly and without scandal. Not to
let her know for a moment, for the blink and twitter of an eyelid, of
her triumph. To eject her with ignominy, retaining one's own dignity
in the meantime. Never to let her dream of an uneasiness that might
have screamed, an anger that could have bitten and scratched and been
happy in the primitive exercise. Was such a task beyond her adequacy?

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