Here are Ladies

J >> James Stephens >> Here are Ladies

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13

"I don't know what you are talking about, Pa," said the young lady.

"Don't you, now?" grinned the furious gentleman, and his bulging eyes
looked like little round balls of glass. "Who said you did, miss?
Gr-r-r-up," said he, and the poor girl jumped as though she had been
prodded with a pin.

Mr. Aloysius Murphy's activities began at ten o'clock in the morning by
opening the office letters with an ivory instrument and handing them to
his employer; then, as each letter was read, he entered its receipt and
date in a book kept for that purpose.

When Mr. MacMahon came in on the morning following the occurrences I
have detailed he neglected, for the first time in many years, to
respond to his clerk's respectfully-cordial salutation. To the
discreet "Good-morning, sir," he vouchsafed no reply. Mr. Murphy was a
trifle indignant and a good deal perturbed, for to an unquiet
conscience a word or the lack of it is a goad. Once or twice, looking
up from his book, he discovered his employer's hard eyes fixed upon him
with a regard too particular to be pleasant.

An employer seldom does more than glance at his clerk, just the
sideward glint of a look which remarks his presence without admitting
his necessity, and in return the clerk slants a hurried eye on his
employer, notes swiftly if his aspect be sulky or benign, and stays his
vision at that. But, now, Mr. Murphy, with sudden trepidation, with a
frightful sinking in the pit of his stomach, became aware that his
employer was looking at him stealthily; and, little by little, he took
to sneaking glances at his employer. After a few moments neither
seemed to be able to keep his eyes from straying--they created
opportunities in connection with the letters; the one looking intent,
wide-eyed, and with a cold, frigid, rigid, hard stare, and the other
scurrying and furtive, in-and-away, hit-and-miss-and-try-again, wink,
blink, and twitter.

Mr. MacMahon spoke--

"Murphy!"

"Yes, sir."

"Have you anything in Court to-day?"

"Yes, sir, an ex parte application, Donald and Cluggs."

"Let O'Neill attend to it. I shall want you to draft a deed for some
ladies who will call here at noon. You can come down at ten minutes
after twelve."

"Yes, sir," said Murphy.

He grabbed his share of the letters and got to the door bathed in
perspiration and forebodings. He closed the door softly behind him,
and stood for a few seconds staring at the handle. "Blow you!" said he
viciously to nothing in particular, and he went slowly upstairs.

"He can't know," said he on the first landing. On the second floor he
thought, "She couldn't have told for she didn't know herself." He
reached his desk. "I wish I had a half of whisky," said the young man
to himself.

Before, however, twelve o'clock arrived he had journeyed on the hopeful
pinions of youth from the dogmatic "could not be" to the equally
immovable "is not," and his mind resumed its interrupted equilibrium.

At twelve o'clock Mrs. and Miss MacMahon arrived, and were at once
shown into the private office. At ten minutes past, Mr. Murphy's
respectful tap was heard. "Don't, Eddie," said Mrs. MacMahon in a
queer, flurried voice. "Come in," said her husband. Nora was
examining some judicial cartoons pinned over the mantelpiece. Mr.
Murphy opened the door a few inches, slid through the aperture, and was
at once caught and held by his employer's eye, which, like a hand,
guided him to the table with his notebook. Under the almost physical
pressure of that authoritative glare he did not dare to look who was in
the room, but the rim of his eye saw the movement of a skirt like the
far-away, shadowy canter of a ghost's robe. He fixed his attention on
his note-book.

Mr. MacMahon began to dictate a Deed of Conveyance from a precedent
deed in his hand. After dictating for some few minutes--

"Murphy," said he, and at the word the young lady studying the cartoons
stiffened, "I've rather lost the thread of that clause; please read
what you have down."

Murphy began to read, and, at the first word, the girl made a tiny,
shrill, mouse's noise, and then stood stock-still, tightened up and
frightened, with her two wild eyes trying to peep around her ears.

Mr. Murphy heard the noise and faltered--he knew instinctively.
Something told him with the bellowing assurance of a cannon who was
there. He must look. He forced his slack face past the granite image
that was his employer, saw a serge-clad figure that he knew, one ear
and the curve of a cheek. Then a cascade broke inside his head. It
buzzed and chattered and crashed, with now and again the blank
brutality of thunder bashing through the noise. The serge-clad figure
swelled suddenly to a tremendous magnitude, and then it receded just as
swiftly, and the vast earth spun minutely on a pin's point ten million
miles away, and she was behind it, her eyes piercing with scorn. . . .
Through the furious winds that whirled about his brain he heard a
whisper, thin and cold, and insistent as a razor's edge, "Go on,
Murphy; go on, Murphy." He strove to fix his attention on his
shorthand notes--To fight it down, to stand the shock like a man, and
then crawl into a hole somewhere and die; but his mind would not grip,
nor his eyes focus. The only words which his empty brain could pump up
were these, irrelevant and idiotic, "'A frog he would a-wooing go,
heigho,' said Rowley"; and they must not be said. "It is a bit
difficult, perhaps," said the whispering voice that crept through the
tumult of winds and waters in his head. "Never mind, take down the
rest of it," and the far-away whisper began to say things all about
nothing, making queer little noises and pauses, running for a moment
into a ripple of sound, and eddying and dying away and coming back
again--buz-z-z! His notebook lying on the table was as small as a
postage stamp, while the pencil in his hand was as big as an elephant's
leg. How can a man write on a microscopic blur with the stump of a fir
tree? He poked and prodded, and Mr. MacMahon watched for a few moments
his clerk poking his note-book with the wrong end of a pencil. He
silently pulled his daughter forward and made her look. After a
little--

"That will do, Murphy," said he, and Mr. Murphy, before he got out,
made two severe attempts to walk through a wall.

For half an hour he sat at his desk in a trance, with his eyes fixed
upon an ink-bottle. At last, nodding his head slowly--

"I'll bet you a shilling," said he to the ink-bottle, "that I get the
sack to-night."

And the ink-bottle lost the wager.

THE BLIND MAN

He was one who would have passed by the Sphinx without seeing it. He
did not believe in the necessity for sphinxes, or in their reality, for
that matter--they did not exist for him. Indeed, he was one to whom
the Sphinx would not have been visible. He might have eyed it and
noted a certain bulk of grotesque stone, but nothing more significant.

He was sex-blind, and, so, peculiarly limited by the fact that he could
not appreciate women. If he had been pressed for a theory or
metaphysic of womanhood he would have been unable to formulate any.
Their presence he admitted, perforce: their utility was quite apparent
to him on the surface, but, subterraneously, he doubted both their
existence and their utility. He might have said perplexedly--Why
cannot they do whatever they have to do without being always in the
way? He might have said--Hang it, they are everywhere and what good
are they doing? They bothered him, they destroyed his ease when he was
near them, and they spoke a language which he did not understand and
did not want to understand. But as his limitations did not press on
him neither did they trouble him. He was not sexually deficient, and
he did not dislike women; he simply ignored them, and was only really
at home with men. All the crudities which we enumerate as masculine
delighted him--simple things, for, in the gender of abstract ideas,
vice is feminine, brutality is masculine, the female being older,
vastly older than the male, much more competent in every way, stronger,
even in her physique, than he, and, having little baggage of mental or
ethical preoccupations to delay her progress, she is still the guardian
of evolution, requiring little more from man than to be stroked and
petted for a while.

He could be brutal at times. He liked to get drunk at seasonable
periods. He would cheerfully break a head or a window, and would
bandage the one damage or pay for the other with equal skill and
pleasure. He liked to tramp rugged miles swinging his arms and
whistling as he went, and he could sit for hours by the side of a ditch
thinking thoughts without words--an easy and a pleasant way of
thinking, and one which may lead to something in the long run.

Even his mother was an abstraction to him. He was kind to her so far
as doing things went, but he looked over her, or round her, and marched
away and forgot her.

Sex-blindness carries with it many other darknesses. We do not know
what masculine thing is projected by the feminine consciousness, and
civilisation, even life itself, must stand at a halt until that has
been discovered or created, but art is the female projected by the
male: science is the male projected by the male--as yet a poor thing,
and to remain so until it has become art; that is, has become
fertilised and so more psychological than mechanical. The small part
of science which came to his notice (inventions, machinery, etc.) was
easily and delightedly comprehended by him. He could do intricate
things with a knife and a piece of string, or a hammer and a saw: but a
picture, a poem, a statue, a piece of music--these left him as
uninterested as they found him: more so, in truth, for they left him
bored and dejected.

His mother came to dislike him, and there were many causes and many
justifications for her dislike. She was an orderly, busy, competent
woman, the counterpart of endless millions of her sex, who liked to
understand what she saw or felt, and who had no happiness in reading
riddles. To her he was at times an enigma, and at times again a
simpleton. In both aspects he displeased and embarrassed her. One has
one's sense of property, and in him she could not put her finger on
anything that was hers. We demand continuity, logic in other words,
but between her son and herself there was a gulf fixed, spanned by no
bridge whatever; there was complete isolation; no boat plied between
them at all. All the kindly human things which she loved were
unintelligible to him, and his coarse pleasures or blunt evasions
distressed and bewildered her. When she spoke to him he gaped or
yawned; and yet she did not speak on weighty matters, just the
necessary small-change of existence--somebody's cold, somebody's dress,
somebody's marriage or death. When she addressed him on sterner
subjects, the ground, the weather, the crops, he looked at her as if
she were a baby, he listened with stubborn resentment, and strode away
a confessed boor. There was no contact anywhere between them, and he
was a slow exasperation to her.--What can we do with that which is ours
and not ours? either we own a thing or we do not, and, whichever way it
goes, there is some end to it; but certain enigmas are illegitimate and
are so hounded from decent cogitation.

She could do nothing but dismiss him, and she could not even do that,
for there he was at the required periods, always primed with the wrong
reply to any question, the wrong aspiration, the wrong conjecture; a
perpetual trampler on mental corns, a person for whom one could do
nothing but apologise.

They lived on a small farm and almost the entire work of the place was
done by him. His younger brother assisted, but that assistance could
have easily been done without. If the cattle were sick he cured them
almost by instinct. If the horse was lame or wanted a new shoe he knew
precisely what to do in both events. When the time came for ploughing
he gripped the handles and drove a furrow which was as straight and as
economical as any furrow in the world. He could dig all day long and
be happy; he gathered in the harvest as another would gather in a
bride; and, in the intervals between these occupations, he fled to the
nearest publichouse and wallowed among his kind.

He did not fly away to drink; he fled to be among men.--Then he
awakened. His tongue worked with the best of them, and adequately too.
He could speak weightily on many things--boxing, wrestling, hunting,
fishing, the seasons, the weather, and the chances of this and the
other man's crops. He had deep knowledge about brands of tobacco and
the peculiar virtues of many different liquors. He knew birds and
beetles and worms; how a weazel would behave in extraordinary
circumstances; how to train every breed of horse and dog. He recited
goats from the cradle to the grave, could tell the name of any tree
from its leaf; knew how a bull could be coerced, a cow cut up, and what
plasters were good for a broken head. Sometimes, and often enough, the
talk would chance on women, and then he laughed as heartily as any one
else, but he was always relieved when the conversation trailed to more
interesting things.

His mother died and left the farm to the younger instead of the elder
son; an unusual thing to do, but she did detest him. She knew her
younger son very well. He was foreign to her in nothing. His temper
ran parallel with her own, his tastes were hers, his ideas had been
largely derived from her, she could track them at any time and make or
demolish him. He would go to a dance or a picnic and be as exhilarated
as she was, and would discuss the matter afterwards. He could speak
with some cogency on the shape of this and that female person, the hat
of such an one, the disagreeableness of tea at this house and the
goodness of it at the other. He could even listen to one speaking
without going to sleep at the fourth word. In all he was a decent,
quiet lad who would become a father the exact replica of his own, and
whose daughters would resemble his mother as closely as two peas
resemble their green ancestors.--So she left him the farm.

Of course, there was no attempt to turn the elder brother out. Indeed,
for some years the two men worked quietly together and prospered and
were contented; then, as was inevitable, the younger brother got
married, and the elder had to look out for a new place to live in, and
to work in--things had become difficult.

It is very easy to say that in such and such circumstances a man should
do this and that well-pondered thing, but the courts of logic have as
yet the most circumscribed jurisdiction. Just as statistics can prove
anything and be quite wrong, so reason can sit in its padded chair
issuing pronouncements which are seldom within measurable distance of
any reality. Everything is true only in relation to its centre of
thought. Some people think with their heads--their subsequent actions
are as logical and unpleasant as are those of the other sort who think
only with their blood, and this latter has its irrefutable logic also.
He thought in this subterranean fashion, and if he had thought in the
other the issue would not have been any different.

Still, it was not an easy problem for him, or for any person lacking
initiative--a sexual characteristic. He might have emigrated, but his
roots were deeply struck in his own place, so the idea never occurred
to him; furthermore, our thoughts are often no deeper than our pockets,
and one wants money to move anywhere. For any other life than that of
farming he had no training and small desire. He had no money and he
was a farmer's son. Without money he could not get a farm; being a
farmer's son he could not sink to the degradation of a day labourer;
logically he could sink, actually he could not without endangering his
own centres and verities--so he also got married.

He married a farm of about ten acres, and the sun began to shine on him
once more; but only for a few days. Suddenly the sun went away from
the heavens; the moon disappeared from the silent night; the silent
night itself fled afar, leaving in its stead a noisy, dirty blackness
through which one slept or yawned as one could. There was the farm, of
course, one could go there and work; but the freshness went out of the
very ground; the crops lost their sweetness and candour; the horses and
cows disowned him; the goats ceased to be his friends--It was all up
with him. He did not whistle any longer. He did not swing his
shoulders as he walked, and, although he continued to smoke, he did not
look for a particular green bank whereon he could sit quietly flooded
with those slow thoughts that had no words.

For he discovered that he had not married a farm at all. He had
married a woman--a thin-jawed, elderly slattern, whose sole beauty was
her farm. How her jaws worked! The processions and congregations of
words that fell and dribbled and slid out of them! Those jaws were
never quiet, and in spite of all he did not say anything. There was
not anything to say, but much to do from which he shivered away in
terror. He looked at her sometimes through the muscles of his arms,
through his big, strong hands, through fogs and fumes and singular,
quiet tumults that raged within him. She lessoned him on the things he
knew so well, and she was always wrong. She lectured him on those
things which she did know, but the unending disquisition, the perpetual
repetition, the foolish, empty emphasis, the dragging weightiness of
her tongue made him repudiate her knowledge and hate it as much as he
did her.

Sometimes, looking at her, he would rub his eyes and yawn with fatigue
and wonder--there she was! A something enwrapped about with
petticoats. Veritably alive. Active as an insect! Palpable to the
touch! And what was she doing to him? Why did she do it? Why didn't
she go away? Why didn't she die? What sense was there in the making
of such a creature that clothed itself like a bolster, without any
freedom or entertainment or shapeliness?

Her eyes were fixed on him and they always seemed to be angry; and her
tongue was uttering rubbish about horses, rubbish about cows, rubbish
about hay and oats. Nor was this the sum of his weariness. It was not
alone that he was married; he was multitudinously, egregiously married.
He had married a whole family, and what a family--

Her mother lived with her, her eldest sister lived with her, her
youngest sister lived with her--and these were all swathed about with
petticoats and shawls. They had no movement. Their feet were like
those of no creature he had ever observed. One could hear the
flip-flap of their slippers all over the place, and at all hours. They
were down-at-heel, draggle-tailed, and futile. There was no
workmanship about them. They were as unfinished, as unsightly as a
puddle on a road. They insulted his eyesight, his hearing, and his
energy. They had lank hair that slapped about them like wet seaweed,
and they were all talking, talking, talking.

The mother was of an incredible age. She was senile with age. Her
cracked cackle never ceased for an instant. She talked to the dog and
the cat; she talked to the walls of the room; she spoke out through the
window to the weather; she shut her eyes in a corner and harangued the
circumambient darkness. The eldest sister was as silent as a deep
ditch and as ugly. She slid here and there with her head on one side
like an inquisitive hen watching one curiously, and was always doing
nothing with an air of futile employment. The youngest was a
semi-lunatic who prattled and prattled without ceasing, and was always
catching one's sleeve, and laughing at one's face.--And everywhere
those flopping, wriggling petticoats were appearing and disappearing.
One saw slack hair whisking by the corner of one's eye. Mysteriously,
urgently, they were coming and going and coming again, and never, never
being silent.

More and more he went running to the public-house. But it was no
longer to be among men, it was to get drunk. One might imagine him
sitting there thinking those slow thoughts without words. One might
predict that the day would come when he would realise very suddenly,
very clearly all that he had been thinking about, and, when this
urgent, terrible thought had been translated into its own terms of
action, he would be quietly hanged by the neck until he was as dead as
he had been before he was alive.

SWEET-APPLE

At the end of the bough, at the top of the tree
(As fragrant, as high, and as lovely as thou)
One sweet apple reddens which all men may see,
At the end of the bough.

Swinging full to the view, tho' the gatherers now
Pass, and evade, and o'erlook busily:
Overlook! nay, but pluck it! they cannot tell how.

For it swings out of reach as a cloud, and as free
As a star, or thy beauty, which seems too, I vow,
Remote as the sweet rosy apple--ah me!
At the end of the bough.

THREE HAPPY PLACES

I

One awakened suddenly in those days. Sleep was not followed by the
haze which trails behind more mature slumbers. One's eyes opened wide
and bright, and brains and legs became instantly active. If by a
chance the boy lying next to you was still asleep, it was the thing to
hit him with a pillow. Even among boys, however, there are certain
morose creatures who are ill-tempered in the morning, and these, on
being struck with a pillow, become malignantly active, and desire to
fight with fists instead of pillows.

Bull was such a boy. He was densely packed with pugnacity. He lived
for ever on the extreme slope of a fight, down which he slid at a word,
a nod, a wink, into strenuous and bloodthirsty warfare. He was never
seen without a black eye, a bruised lip, or something wrong with his
ear. He had the most miscellaneous collection of hurts that one could
imagine, and he was always prepared to exhibit his latest injury in
exchange for a piece of toffee. If this method of barter was not
relished, he would hit the proprietor of the toffee and confiscate the
goods to his own use.

His knowledge of who had sweets was uncanny. He had an extra sense in
that direction, which was a trouble to all smaller boys. No matter how
cunningly one concealed a sticky treasure, just when one was secretly
enjoying it he came leaping out of space with the most offensive
friendliness crinkling all over his face, and his desire to participate
in the confection was advanced without any preliminary courtesies--

"What have you got? Show! Give us a bit. Can't you give a fellow a
bit?"

When the bit was tendered he snatched it, swallowed it, and growled--

"Do you call that a bit? Give us a real bit."

There are plenty of boys who will defend their toffee with their lives.
Such boys he liked to meet, for their refusal to surrender a part gave
him an opportunity to fight and a reason for confiscating the whole of
the ravished sweetmeat. One often had to devour one's sweets at a full
gallop. It was no uncommon thing to see a small boy scudding furiously
around a field with Bull pounding behind, intent as a bloodhound, and
as horribly vocal. A close examination would discover that the small
boy's jaws were moving with even greater rapidity than his legs. If he
managed to get his stuff devoured before he was caught it was all
right, but he got hammered anyhow when he was caught. However, Bull's
approach was usually managed with great skill and strategy, and before
the small boy was aware Bull was squatting beside him using
blandishments both moral and minatory.

He was a very gifted boy. He had no bent for learning lessons but he
had a great gift for collecting and turning to his own use the property
of other people. Sometimes three or four boys swore a Solemn League
and Covenant against him. His perplexity then was extreme. He saw
toffee being devoured and none of it coming his way. Possibly his
method of thinking was in pictures, and he could visualise with painful
clarity the alien gullets down which toffee was traveling, and,
simultaneously, he could see the woeful emptiness of his own red lane.
He must have felt that all was not right with a Providence which could
allow such happenings. A world wherein there was toffee for others and
none for him was certainly a world out of joint. His idea of Utopia
would be a place where there were lots of things for him to eat and a
circle of hungry boys who watched his deliberate jaws with envy and
humility. Furthermore, the idea that smaller boys could have, not the
courage, but the heart to congregate against him, must have come to him
with a shock. He was appalled by a sense of the sinfulness of human
nature, and dismayed by the odds against which virtue has to fight.

The others, strong in numbers, followed him on such occasions chewing
their tuck with grave deliberation, descanting minutely and loudly on
the taste of each bit, the splendid length of time it took to dissolve,
and the blessedly large quantity which yet remained to be eaten. He
threatened them, but his threats were received with yawns. He wheedled
(a thing he could do consummately well) but they were not to be
blandished. He mapped out on his own person the particular and painful
places where later on he would hit them unless he was bound over to the
peace by toffee. And they sucked their sweetstuff and made diagrams on
each other of the places where they could hit Bull if they had a mind
to, and told each other and him that he was not worth hitting and,
would probably die if he were hit. But they were careful not dissolve
partnership until the sweets were eaten and beyond even the wildest
hopes of salvage. Then, in the later-on that had been predicted, Bull
captured them in detail, and, as he had promised, he "lammed the
stuffing" out of them.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13