Here are Ladies

J >> James Stephens >> Here are Ladies

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Below in the garden the late sun slanted upon her husband, as with
declamatory hands and intense brows he chanted emotional poetry, ready
himself on the slope of opportunity to roll into verses from his own
resources. He criticised, with agile misconception, the inner meaning,
the involved, hard-hidden heart of the poet; and the serpent sat before
him and nodded. She smiled enchantments at him, and allurements, and
subtle, subtle disagreements. On the grass at their feet the toy
terrier bounded from his slumbers and curved an imperative and furious
hind-leg in the direction of his ear.

Mrs. Morrissy called the dog, and it followed her into the house,
frisking joyously. From the kitchen she procured a small basket, and
into this she packed some old cloths and pieces of biscuit. Then she
picked up the terrier, cuffed it on both sides of the head, popped it
into the basket, tucked its humbly-agitated tail under its abject ribs,
closed the basket, and fastened it with a skewer. She next addressed a
label to her cousin's home, tied it to the basket, and despatched a
servant with it to the railway-station, instructing her that it should
be paid for on delivery.

At breakfast the following morning her cousin wondered audibly why her
little, weeny, tiny pet was not coming for its brecky.

Mrs. Morrissy, with a smile of infinite sweetness, suggested that Miss
O'Malley's father would surely feed the brute when it arrived. "It was
a filthy little beast," said she brightly; and she pushed the
toast-rack closer to her husband.

There followed a silence which drowsed and buzzed to eternity, and
during which Mr. Morrissy's curled moustaches straightened and grew
limp and drooped. An edge of ice stiffened around Miss O'Malley.
Incredulity, frozen and wan, thawed into swift comprehension and
dismay, lit a flame in her cheeks, throbbed burningly at the lobes of
her ears, spread magnetic and prickling over her whole stung body, and
ebbed and froze again to immobility. She opposed her cousin's kind
eyes with a stony brow.

"I think," said she rising, "that I had better see to my packing."

"Must you go?" said Mrs. Morrissy, with courteous unconcern, and she
helped herself to cream. Her husband glared insanely at a pat of
butter, and tried to look like some one who was somewhere else.

Miss O'Malley closed the door behind her with extreme gentleness.

So the matter lay. But the position was unchanged. For a little time
peace would reign in that household, but the same driving necessity
remained, and before long another, and perhaps more virulent, serpent
would have to be requisitioned for the assuagement of those urgent
woes. A man's moustaches will arise with the sun; not Joshua could
constrain them to the pillow after the lark had sung reveille. A woman
will sit pitilessly at the breakfast table however the male eye may
shift and quail. It is the business and the art of life to degrade
permanencies. Fluidity is existence, there is no other, and for ever
the chief attraction of Paradise must be that there is a serpent in it
to keep it lively and wholesome. Lacking the serpent we are no longer
in Paradise, we are at home, and our sole entertainment is to yawn when
we wish to.

THE DAISIES

In the scented bud of the morning--O,
When the windy grass went rippling far,
I saw my dear one walking slow
In the field where the daisies are.

We did not laugh and we did not speak
As we wandered happily to and fro;
I kissed my dear on either cheek
In the bud of the morning--O.

A lark sang up from the breezy land,
A lark sang down from a cloud afar,
And she and I went hand in hand
In the field where the daisies are.

THREE ANGRY PEOPLE

I

He sat cross-legged on the roadside beside a heap of stones, and with
slow regularity his hammer swung up and down, cracking a stone into
small pieces at each descent. But his heart was not in the work. He
hit whatever stone chanced to be nearest. There was no cunning
selection in his hammer, nor any of these oddities of stroke which a
curious and interested worker would have essayed for the mere trial of
his artistry.

He was not difficult to become acquainted with, and, after a little
conversation, I discovered that all the sorrows of the world were
sagging from his shoulders. Everything he had ever done was wrong, he
said. Everything that people had done to him was wrong, that he
affirmed; nor had he any hope that matters would mend, for life was
poisoned at the fountain-head and there was no justice anywhere.
Justice! he raised his eyebrows with the horrid stare of a man who
searches for apparitions; he lowered them again to the bored blink of
one who will not believe in apparitions even though he see them--there
was not even fairness! Perhaps (and his bearing was mildly tolerant),
perhaps some people believed there was fairness, but he had his share
of days to count by and remember. Forty-nine years of here and there,
and in and out, and up and down; walking all kinds of roads in all
kinds of weathers; meeting this sort of person and that sort, and many
an adventure that came and passed away without any good to it--"and
now," said he sternly, "I am breaking stones on a bye-way."

"A bye-road such as this," said I, "has very few travellers, and it may
prove a happy enough retreat."

"Or a hiding-place," said he gloomily.

We sat quietly for a few moments--

"Is there no way of being happy?" said I.

"How could you be happy if you have not got what you want?" and he
thumped solidly with his hammer.

"What do you want?" I asked.

"Many a thing," said he, "many a thing."

I squatted on the ground in front of him, and he continued--

"You that are always travelling, did you ever meet a contented person
in all your travels?"

"Yes," said I, "I met a man yesterday, three hills away from here, and
he told me he was happy."

"Maybe he wasn't a poor man?"

"I asked him that, and he said he had enough to be going on with."

"I wonder what he had."

"I wondered too, and he told me.--He said that he had a wife, a son, an
apple-tree, and a fiddle.

"He said, that his wife was dumb, his son was deaf, his apple-tree was
barren, and his fiddle was broken."

"It didn't take a lot to satisfy that man."

"And he said, that these things, being the way they were, gave him no
trouble attending on them, and so he was left with plenty of time for
himself."

"I think the man you are telling me about was a joker; maybe you are a
joker yourself for that matter."

"Tell me," said I, "the sort of things a person should want, for I am a
young man, and everything one learns is so much to the good."

He rested his hammer and stared sideways down the road, and he remained
so, pursing and relaxing his lips, for a little while. At last he said
in a low voice--

"A person wants respect from other people.--If he doesn't get that,
what does he signify more than a goat or a badger? We live by what
folk think of us, and if they speak badly of a man doesn't that finish
him for ever?"

"Do people speak well of you?" I asked.

"They speak badly of me," said he, "and the way I am now is this, that
I wouldn't have them say a good word of me at all."

"Would you tell me why the people speak badly of you?"

"You are travelling down the road," said he, "and I am staying where I
am. We never met before in all the years, and we may never meet again,
and so I'll tell you what is in my mind.--A person that has neighbours
will have either friends or enemies, and it's likely enough that he'll
have the last unless he has a meek spirit. And it's the same way with
a man that's married, or a man that has a brother. For the neighbours
will spy on you from dawn to dark, and talk about you in every place,
and a wife will try to rule you in the house and out of the house until
you are badgered to a skeleton, and a brother will ask you to give him
whatever thing you value most in the world."

He remained silent for a few minutes, with his hammer eased on his
knee, and then, in a more heated strain, he continued--

"These are three things a man doesn't like--he doesn't like to be spied
on, and he doesn't like to be ruled and regulated, and he doesn't like
to be asked for a thing he wants himself. And, whether he lets himself
be spied on or not, he'll be talked about, and in any case he'll be
made out to be a queer man; and if he lets his wife rule him he'll be
scorned and laughed at, and if he doesn't let her rule him he'll be
called a rough man; and if he once gives to his brother he will have to
keep on giving for ever, and if he doesn't give in at all he'll get the
bad name and the sour look as he goes about his business."

"You have bad neighbours, indeed," said I.

"I'd call them that."

"And a brother that would ask you for a thing you wanted yourself
wouldn't be a decent man."

"He would not."

"Tell me," said I, "what kind of a wife have you?"

"She's the same as any one else's wife to look at, but I fancy the
other women must be different to live with."

"Why do you say that?"

"Because you can hear men laughing and singing in every public-house
that you'd go into, and they wouldn't do that if their wives were hard
to live with, for nobody could stand a bad comrade. A good wife, a
good brother, a good neighbour--these are three good things, but you
don't find them lying in every ditch."

"If you went to a ditch for your wife----!" said I.

He pursed up his lips at me.

"I think," said I, "that you need not mind the neighbours so very much
for no one can spy on you but yourself. If your mind was in a glass
case instead of in a head it would be different; and no one can really
rule and regulate you but yourself, and that's well worth doing."

"Different people," said he shortly, "are made differently."

"Maybe," said I, "your wife would be a good wife to some other husband,
and your brother might be decent enough if he had a different brother."

He wrinkled up his eyes and looked at me very steadily--

"I'll be saying good-bye to you, young man," said he, and he raised his
hammer again and began to beat solemnly on the stones.

I stood by him for a few minutes, but as he neither spoke nor looked at
me again I turned to my own path intending to strike Dublin by the Paps
of Dana and the long slopes beyond them.

II

One day he chucked his job, put up his tools, told the boss he could do
this and that, called hurroo to the boys, and sauntered out of the place
with a great deal of dignity and one week's wages in cash.

There were many reasons why he should not have quitted his work, not the
lightest of them being that the food of a wife and family depended on his
sticking to it, but a person who has a temper cannot be expected to have
everything else.

Nothing makes a man feel better than telling his employer that he and his
job can go bark at one another. It is the dream of a great many people,
and were it not for the glamour of that idea most folk would commit
suicide through sheer disgust. Getting the "sack" is an experience which
wearies after the first time. Giving the sack is a felicity granted only
to a few people. To go home to one's wife with the information that you
have been discharged is an adventure which one does not wish to repeat,
but to go home and hand her thirty shillings with the statement that you
have discharged yourself is not one of the pleasantest ways of passing
time.

His wife's habits were as uncertain as her temper, but not as bad. She
had a hot tongue, a red head, a quick fist and a big family--ingredients
to compose a peppery dish. They had been only a short time married when
she gave her husband to understand that there was to be only one head of
that household, and that would not be he. He fought fiercely for a
position on the executive but he did not get it. His voice in the
household economy, which had commenced with the lordly "Let this be
done," concluded in the timidly blustering "All right, have it your own
way."

Furthermore, the theory that a woman is helpmate to a man was repugnant
to her. She believed and asserted that a man had to be managed, and she
had several maxims to which she often gave forcible and contemptuous
utterance--

"Let a man go his own road to-day and he will be shaking hands with the
devil to-morrow.

"Give a man his head and he'll lose it.

"Whiskers and sense were never found in the same patch.

"There's more brains in one woman's finger than there is in the
congregated craniums of a battalion of men folk.

"Where there is two men there's one fight. Where there's three there's a
drinking match, two fights and a fine to be paid."

But while advocating peace at any price and a tax on muscles that were
bigger than a fly's knuckle she was herself a warrior of the breed of
Finn and strong enough to scare a pugilist. When she was angry her
family got over the garden wall, her husband first. She did not think
very much of him, and she told him so, but he was sufficient of a man not
to believe her.

For a long time he had been a dissatisfied person, leading a grumpy
existence which was only made bearable by gusts of solitary blasphemy.
When a man curses openly he is healthy enough, but when he takes to
either swearing or drinking in secret then he has travelled almost beyond
redemption point.

So behold our man knocking at the door, still warmed by the fray with his
late employer, but with the first tremors of fear beginning to tatter up
and down his spine.

His wife opened the door herself. She was engaged in cleaning the place,
a duty in which she was by no means remiss, one of the prime points in
her philosophy being that a house was not clean until one's food could be
eaten off the floor. She was a big comely woman, but at the moment she
did not look dainty. A long wisp of red hair came looping down on her
shoulders. A smear of soot toned down the roses of her cheek, her arms
were smothered in soap suds, and the fact that she was wearing a pair of
her husband's boots added nothing to her attractions.

When she saw her husband standing in the doorway at this unaccustomed
hour she was a little taken aback, but, scenting trouble, she at once
opened the attack--

"What in the name of heaven brings you here at this hour of the day, and
the place upset the way it is? Don't walk on the soap, man, haven't you
got eyes in your head?"

"I'm not walking on the soap with my head," he retorted, "if I was I'd
see it, and if it wasn't on the floor it wouldn't be tripping folk up. A
nice thing it is that a man can't come into his own house without being
set slipping and sliding like an acrobat on an iceberg."

"And," cried his wife, "if I kept the soap locked up it's the nice, clean
house you'd have to come into. Not that you'd mind if the place was
dirty, I'll say that much for you, for what one is reared to one likes,
and what is natural is pleasant. But I got a different rearing let me
tell you, and while I'm in it I'll have the clean house no matter who
wants the dirty one."

"You will so," said he, looking at the soapy water for a place to walk on.

"Can't you be coming in then, and not stand there framed in the doorway,
gawking like a fool at a miracle."

"I'll sail across if you'll get a canal boat or a raft," said he, "or, if
the children are kept out of sight, I'll strip, ma'm, and swim for it."

His wife regarded him with steady gloom.

"If you took the smallest interest in your home," said she, "and were
less set on gallivanting about the country, going to the Lord knows
where, with the Lord knows who, you'd know that the children were away in
school at this hour. Nice indeed the places you visit and the company
you keep, if the truth were known--walk across it, man, and wipe your
feet on the kitchen mat."

So he walked into the kitchen, and sat down, and, as he sat, the last
remnants of his courage trembled down into his boots and evaporated.

His wife came in after him--she drooped a speculative eye on her lord--

"You didn't say what brought you home so early," said she.

When a hard thing has to be done the quickest way is generally the best
way. It is like the morning bath--don't ruminate, jump in, for the
longer you wait the more dubious you get, and the tub begins to look
arctic and repellent.

Some such philosophy as this dictated his attitude. He lugged out his
week's wages, slapped it on the table, and said--

"I've got the sack."

Then he stretched his legs out, pushed his fists deep into his trouser
pockets, and waited.

His wife sat down too, slowly and with great care, and she stared in
silence at her husband--

"Do you tell me you have lost your employment?" said she in a quiet voice.

"I do, then," said he. "I chucked it myself. I told old Whiskers that
he could go and boil his job and his head together and sell the soup for
cat-lap."

"You threw up your situation yourself."

"You've got the truth of it, ma'm," he rejoined.

"Maybe you'd be telling me what you did the like of that for?"

"Because," said he, "I'm a man and not a mouse. Because I don't want to
be at the beck and call of every dog and devil that has a bit more money
than I have--a man has got to be a man sometimes," he growled.

"Sure, you're telling the truth," said his wife, nodding her head at him.
"A man should be a man sometimes. It's the pity of the world that he
can't be a man always: and, indeed, it's the hard thing for a woman to
tell herself that the man she has got isn't a man at all, but a big fool
with no more wit than a boy."

Now this was the first time he had found his wife take trouble lying
down. As a rule she was readier for a fight than he was. She jumped
into a row with the alacrity of a dog: and the change worked on him. He
looked at her listless hands, and the sight of those powerful organs
hanging so powerlessly wrought on him. Women often forget that their
weakness is really their strength. The weakest things in the world are
by a queer paradox always the strongest. The toughest stone will wear
away under the dropping of water, a mushroom will lift a rock on its
delicate head, a child will make its father work for it. So the too
capable woman will always have a baby to nurse, and that baby will be her
husband. If she buttress her womanhood too much she saps his manhood.
Let her love all she can and never stint that blessing, but a woman
cannot often be obeyed and loved at the same time. A man cannot obey a
woman constantly and retain his self-respect: the muscles of his arms
reproach him if he does, and the man with his self-respect gone is a man
with a grudge, he will learn to hate the agent who brought him low. A
day may come when he will rise and beat her in self-defence, with his
fists if he is sufficiently brutalised, some subtler, but no less
efficient, weapon if his manhood refuses to be degraded--and this was our
case. His wife had grabbed the reins and driven the matrimonial coach:
driven it well, that is true, but the driver, by right of precedent, had
sat by hurt and angry, and at last, in an endeavour to prove his manhood
among men, he had damned his employer's self and work, although in
reality all his fury was directed against the mother of his children. He
threw up his work, and the semi-conscious thought that went home with him
was--"Now she will be sorry. If she must do everything let her earn the
bread."

The woman knew what poverty meant, and she had four young children. It
was the thought of these helpless ones crying with hunger (she could hear
them already, her ears were dinned with their hungry lamentation) that
took the fibre out of her arms, and left her without any fight. She
could only sit and look with wretched eyes on the man whom she had been
demoralising, and, for the first time since he knew her, the tears came,
and the poor woman laid her head on the kitchen table and wept.

He was astonished, he was dismayed, but he could not stand her tears: he
ran to her--the first time he ever did run to her--

"Sure, darling," said he, "is it crying you are? What would you be doing
that for? If I've lost one job I can get another. I'm not afraid of
work, and I know how to do it. I'll get something to do at once, if it's
only wheeling a handcart, or selling cockles in public-houses. Wisha,
dry your eyes--they're as pretty as they ever were," said he, trying to
look at them, while his wife, with a strange shyness, would not let him
see, for she felt that there was a strange man with her, some one she did
not know. That was a man's hand on her shoulder, and she had never felt
a man's hand before, as long as she was married.

"I'll go out at once," said he, "and when I come in to-night I'll have a
job if I have to bang it out of some one with a shovel."

He slapped on his hat, kicked the soap out of the way, tramped through
the water on the floor, and when at the door he turned again and came
back to kiss his wife, a form of caress which had long fallen into
desuetude, and so, out into the street, a man again.

When he had gone his wife returned to her scrubbing, and, as she worked
she smiled at something she was remembering, and, now and again, a bit of
a song came from lips that had scolded so much. Having finished her work
she spent nearly an hour at the looking-glass doing up her hair (grand
hair it was, too) with her ears listening for a footstep. Now and again
she would run to the pot to see were the potatoes doing all right--"The
children will be in shortly," said she, "and hungry to the bone, poor
dears."

But she was not thinking of the children. The warmth of a kiss was still
on her lips. Something in the back of her head was saying--"He will do
it again when he comes in."

And the second honeymoon was pleasanter than the first.

III

She was tall and angular. Her hair was red, and scarce, and untidy.
Her hands were large and packed all over with knuckles and her feet
would have turned inwards at the toes, only that she was aware of and
corrected their perversities.

She was sitting all alone, and did not look up as I approached--

"Tell me," said I, "why you have sat for more than an hour with your
eyes fixed on nothing, and your hands punching your lap?"

She looked at me for a fleeting instant, and then, looking away again,
she began to speak.--Her voice was pleasant enough, but it was so
strong that one fancied there were bones in it--

"I do not dislike women," said she, "but I think they seldom speak of
anything worth listening to, nor do they often do anything worth
looking at: they bore and depress me, and men do not."

"But," said I, "you have not explained why you thump your lap with your
fist?"

She proceeded--

"I do not hate women, nor do I love men. It was only that I did not
take much notice of the one, and that I liked being with the other,
for, as things are, there is very little life for a person except in
thinking. All our actions are so cumbered by laws and customs that we
cannot take a step beyond the ordinary without finding ourselves either
in gaol or in Coventry."

Having said this, she raised her bleak head and stared like an eagle
across the wastes.

After I had coughed twice I touched her arm, and said--

"Yes?"

"One must live," said she quickly. "I do not mean that we must eat and
sleep--these mechanical matters are settled for many of us, but life
consists in thinking, and nothing else, yet many people go from the
cradle to the grave without having lived differently from animals. I
do not want to be one of them. Their whole theory of life is
mechanical. They eat and drink. They invite each other to their
houses to eat and drink, and they use such speech as they are gifted
with in discussing their food and whatever other palpable occurrence
may have chanced to them in the day. It is a step, perhaps, towards
living, but it is still only one step removed from stagnation. They
have some interest in an occurrence, but how that occurrence happened,
and what will result from it does not exercise them in the least, and
these, which are knowledge and prophecy, are the only interesting
aspects of any event."

"But," said I, "you have not told me why you sit for a full hour
staring at vacancy, and thumping on your knee with your hand?"

She continued--.

"Sometimes one meets certain people who have sufficient of the divine
ferment in their heads to be called alive: they are almost always men.
We fly to them as to our own people. We abase ourselves before them in
happy humility. We crave to be allowed to live near them in order that
we may be assured that everything in the world is not nonsense and
machinery--and then, what do we find--?"

She paused, and turned a large fierce eye upon me.

"I do not know," said I, and I endeavoured vainly to look everywhere
but at her eye.

"We find always that they are married," said she, and, saying so, she
lapsed again to a tense and worried reflection.

"You have not told me," I insisted gently, "why you peer earnestly into
space, and thump at intervals upon your knee with the heel of your
fist?"

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