The Complete Stories of Morley Callaghan: Volume One

by Morley Callaghan

  Speaking quietly, as if nothing had happened to surprise her, Mrs. Hilliard began, “Did you think there was something the matter, Tom?” But then her voice broke, and she cried out: “Why did you come running down here like that?”

  “I heard the way you laughed,” he said.

  “What was the matter with the way I laughed?”

  “I haven’t heard you laugh like that for such a long time.”

  “I was only asking him if he’d be passing by the station tonight. I was going to ask him if he’d bring my mother here, if she was on the night train.”

  “You’re making up a story,” he shouted.

  It was the first time he had openly accused her of deceit; and when she tried to smile at him, her eyes were full of terror. It was as though she knew she was helpless at last, and she said slowly: “I don’t know why you keep staring at me. You’re frightening me. I can’t bear the way you watch me. It’s been going on for such a long time. I’ve got to speak to someone — can’t you see? It’s dreadfully lonely here.”

  She was staring out over the choppy wind-swept water: she turned and looked up with a child’s wonder at the great oak trees that shut the house off from the road. “I can’t stand it any longer,” she said, her voice soft and broken. “I’ve been a good wife. I had such an admiration for you when we started. There was nothing I wouldn’t have trusted you with. And now — I don’t know what’s happened to us.” This was the first time she had ever tried to tell him of her hidden desolation; but all he could see was that her smile as she pleaded with him was pathetically false.

  “You’re lying. You’re scared of what might happen,” he shouted.

  “I’ve known how you’ve been watching me, and I’ve kept asking myself what the both of us have been waiting for,” she said. As the wind, driving through the leaves of the trees, rattled a window on the side of the house, and the last of the light faded from the lake, she cried out: “What are we waiting for, day after day?”

  “I’m not waiting any more,” he shouted. “I’m going. You don’t need to worry about me watching you any more. I’ll not come back this time.” He felt crazy as he started to run over to the car.

  Running after him, she cried out: “I’ve kept hoping something would happen to make it different, something that would save us. I’ve prayed for it at night, just wanting you to be like you were three years ago.”

  But he had started the car, and it came at her so suddenly that she had to jump out of the way. When the car lurched up the lane, he heard her cry out, but the words were blown away on the wind. He looked back, and saw her standing stiff by the gate, with both hands up to her head.

  He drove up to the highway, swinging the car around so wildly at the turn by the grocery store that the proprietor shouted at him. He began to like the way the car dipped at high speed down the deep valleys, and rose and fell with him always rigid and unthinking. When he reached the top of the highest hill in the county, the first of the rain whipped across his face, slashing and cutting at him. His arms were trembling so he stopped the car; and there he sat for a long time, looking out over the hills in the night rain, at the low country whose roll and rise could be followed by the line of lights curving around the lake through the desolation of the wooded valleys and the rain-swept fields and pasture land gleamed for a moment in the dark. Then he seemed to hear her voice crying out above the wind: “I’ve been waiting for so long!” And he muttered: “How lost and frightened she’ll be alone there on a night like this.” He knew then that he could go no farther. With his heart full of yearning for the tenderness he knew she had offered to him, he kept repeating: “I can’t leave her. I can’t ever leave her. I’ll go back and ask her to forgive me.”

  He sighed and was ashamed; and he drove back slowly along the way he had come, making up in his head fine little speeches that would make his wife laugh and forgive him.

  But when he had turned off the highway and was going down the lane that led to the house, he suddenly thought it could do no harm if he stopped the car before it was heard, and went up to the house quietly to make sure no one else was there.

  Such a notion made him feel terribly ashamed. As the car rocked in the ruts and puddles of the dirt road, and the headlights gleamed on the wet leaves from overhanging branches, he was filled with a profound sadness, as if he knew instinctively that no matter how he struggled, he would not be able to stop himself from sneaking up to the house like a spy. Stopping the car, he sat staring at the shuttered windows, through which the light hardly filtered, mumbling: “I’ve got a heart like a snake’s nest. I’ve come back to ask her to forgive me.” Yet as he watched the strips of light on the shutters, he found himself thinking it could do no harm to make sure she was alone, that this would be the last time he would ever spy on her.

  As he got out of the car, he stood a while in the road, getting soaking wet, assuring himself he had no will to be evil. And then as he started to drag his feet through the puddles, he knew he was helpless against his hunger to justify his lack of faith in her.

  Swinging open the gate and crossing the grass underneath the oak tree, he stepped softly on the veranda and turned the doorknob slowly. When he found that the door was locked, his heart began to beat unevenly, and he went to pound the door with his fist. Then he grew very cunning. Jumping down to the grass, he went cautiously around to the side of the house, pressed his head against the shutters and listened. The rain streamed down his face and ran into his open mouth.

  He heard the sound of his wife’s voice, and though he could not make out the words, he knew she was talking earnestly to someone. Her voice seemed to be breaking; she seemed to be sobbing, pleading that she be comforted. His heart began to beat so loud he was sure they would be able to hear it. He grabbed at the shutter and tried to pry it open with his hands, but his fingers grew numb, and the back of his hand began to bleed. Stepping back from the house, he looked around wildly for some heavy stick or piece of iron. He remembered where there was an old horseshoe imbedded in the mud by the gate, and running there, he got down on his knees and scraped with his fingers, and he grinned in delight when he tugged the old horseshoe out of the mud.

  But when he had inserted the iron prongs of the shoe between the shutters, and started to use his weight, he realized that his wife was no longer talking. She was coming over to the window. He heard her gasp and utter a little cry. He heard her running from the room.

  Full of despair, as though he were being cheated of the discovery he had been patiently seeking for years, he stepped back from the house, trembling with eagerness. The light in the room where he had loosened the shutter was suddenly turned out. He turned and ran back up the lane to the car, and got his flashlight.

  This time he went round to the other side of the house, listening for the smallest sounds which might tell him where they were hiding, but it was hard to hear anything above the noise of the wind in the trees and the roll of the waves on the shore. At the kitchen window at the back of the house he pulled at the shutter. He heard them running out of the room.

  The longing to look upon the face of the one who was with his wife became so great that he could hardly think of his wife at all. “They probably went upstairs to the bedroom. That’s where they’ll be.” He went over to the garage and brought out the ladder they had used to paint the house, and put it up against the bedroom window and started to climb on the slippery rungs with the flashlight clutched in his hand, eager for the joy that would be his if he could see without being seen.

  The voices he heard as he lay against the ladder were broken with fright; he began to feel all the terror that grew in them as they ran from room to room and whispered and listened and hid in the darkness and longed to cry out.

  But they must have heard some noise he made at the window, for before he was ready to use the flashlight, they ran from the room; they hurried downstairs in a way that showed they no longer cared what noise they made, they fled as though they intended to
keep on going out of the front door and up the lane.

  If he had taken the time to climb down the ladder, they might have succeeded, but instead of doing that, he wrapped his arms and legs around the wet rails and slid to the ground; he got over to the oak tree, and was hidden, his flashlight pointed at the door, before they came out.

  As they came running from the house, he kept hidden and flashed the light on them, catching his wife in the strong beam of light, and making her stop dead and scream. She was carrying the rifle he used for hunting in the fall.

  With crazy joy he stepped out and swung the light on the other one; it was his wife’s mother, stopped in horror. They were both held in the glare of the light, blinking and cringing in terror, while he tried to remember that the mother was to come to the house. And then his wife shrieked and pointed the gun into the darkness at the end of the beam of light, and fired: and he called out helplessly: “Mario—”

  The light dropped from his hand as he sank to the ground and began to cough.

  Then his wife snatched up the light and let it shine on his face. “Oh, Tom, Tom! Look what I’ve done,” she moaned.

  The mother was still on her knees, stiff with fright.

  His hand held against his breast was wet with warm blood; and as his head sank back on the grass he called out to the mother: “Get someone — for Marion. I’m dying. I want to tell them how it happened.”

  The mother, shrieking, hobbled over to the lane, and her cries for help were carried away on the wind.

  With his weeping wife huddled over him, he lay dying in the rain. But when he groped with his hand and touched her head, he was suddenly overwhelmed by an agony of remorse for his lack of faith in her: in these few moments he longed to be able to show her all the comforting and tenderness she had missed in the last three years. “Forgive me,” he whispered. “It was my fault — if only you could forgive me.” He wanted to soothe the fright out of her before the others came running up from the lane.

  A Sick Call

  Sometimes Father Macdowell mumbled out loud and took a deep wheezy breath as he walked up and down and read his office. He was a bulky priest, white-headed except for a shiny baby-pink bald spot on the top of his head, and he was a bit deaf in one ear. His florid face had many red interlacing veins. For hours he had been hearing confessions and he was tired, for he always had to hear more confessions than any other priest at the cathedral; young girls who were in trouble, and wild but at times repentant young men, always wanted to tell their confessions to Father Macdowell, because nothing seemed to shock or excite him, or make him really angry, and he was even tender with those who thought they were most guilty.

  While he was mumbling and reading and trying to keep his glasses on his nose, the house girl knocked on the door and said, “There’s a young lady here to see you, Father. I think it’s about a sick call.”

  “Did she ask for me especially?” he said in a deep but slightly cracked voice.

  “Indeed she did, Father. She wanted Father Macdowell and nobody else.”

  So he went out to the waiting room, where a girl about thirty years of age, with fine brown eyes, fine cheekbones, and rather square shoulders, was sitting daubing her eyes with a handkerchief. She was wearing a dark coat with a gray wolf collar. “Good evening, Father,” she said. “My sister is sick. I wanted you to come and see her. We think she’s dying.”

  “Be easy, child; what’s the matter with her? Speak louder. I can hardly hear you.”

  “My sister’s had pneumonia. The doctor’s coming back to see her in an hour. I wanted you to anoint her, Father.”

  “I see, I see. But she’s not lost yet. I’ll not give her extreme unction now. That may not be necessary. I’ll go with you and hear her confession.”

  “Father, I ought to let you know, maybe. Her husband won’t want to let you see her. He’s not a Catholic, and my sister hasn’t been to church in a long time.”

  “Oh, don’t mind that. He’ll let me see her,” Father Macdowell said, and he left the room to put on his hat and coat.

  When he returned, the girl explained that her name was Jane Stanhope, and her sister lived only a few blocks away. “We’ll walk and you tell me about your sister,” he said. He put his black hat square on his head, and pieces of white hair stuck out at the sides. They went to the avenue together.

  The night was mild and clear. Miss Stanhope began to walk slowly, because Father Macdowell’s rolling gait didn’t get him along the street very quickly. He walked as if his feet hurt him, though he wore a pair of large, soft, specially constructed shapeless shoes. “Now, my child, you go ahead and tell me about your sister,” he said, breathing with difficulty, yet giving the impression that nothing could have happened to the sister which would make him feel indignant.

  There wasn’t much to say, Miss Stanhope replied. Her sister had married John Williams two years ago, and he was a good, hard-working fellow, only he was very bigoted and hated all church people. “My family wouldn’t have anything to do with Elsa after she married him, though I kept going to see her,” she said. She was talking in a loud voice to Father Macdowell so that he could hear her.

  “Is she happy with her husband?”

  “She’s been very happy, Father. I must say that.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “He was sitting beside her bed. I ran out because I thought he was going to cry. He said if I brought a priest near the place he’d break the priest’s head.”

  “My goodness. Never mind, though. Does your sister want to see me?”

  “She asked me to go and get a priest, but she doesn’t want John to know she did it.”

  Turning into a side street, they stopped at the first apartment house, and the old priest followed Miss Stanhope up the stairs. His breath came with great difficulty. “Oh dear, I’m not getting any younger, not one day younger. It’s a caution how a man’s legs go back on him,” he said. As Miss Stanhope rapped on the door, she looked pleadingly at the old priest, trying to ask him not to be offended at anything that might happen, but he was smiling and looking huge in the narrow hallway. He wiped his head with his handkerchief.

  The door was opened by a young man in a white shirt with no collar, with a head of thick, black, wavy hair. At first he looked dazed, then his eyes got bright with excitement when he saw the priest, as though he were glad to see someone he could destroy with pent-up energy. “What do you mean, Jane?” he said. “I told you not to bring a priest around here. My wife doesn’t want to see a priest.”

  “What’s that you’re saying, young man?”

  “No one wants you here.”

  “Speak up. Don’t be afraid. I’m a bit hard of hearing,” Father Macdowell smiled rosily. John Williams was confused by the unexpected deafness in the priest, but he stood blocking the door with sullen resolution as if waiting for the priest to try to launch a curse at him.

  “Speak to him, Father,” Miss Stanhope said, but the priest didn’t seem to hear her; he was still smiling as he pushed past the young man, saying, “I’ll go in and sit down, if you don’t mind, son. I’m here on God’s errand, but I don’t mind saying I’m all out of breath from climbing those stairs.”

  John was dreadfully uneasy to see he had been brushed aside, and he followed the priest into the apartment and said loudly, “I don’t want you here.”

  Father Macdowell said, “Eh, eh?” Then he smiled sadly, “Don’t be angry with me, son,” he said. “I’m too old to try and be fierce and threatening.” Looking around, he said, “Where’s your wife?” and he started to walk along the hall, looking for the bedroom.

  John followed him and took hold of his arm. “There’s no sense in your wasting your time talking to my wife, do you hear?” he said angrily.

  Miss Stanhope called out suddenly, “Don’t be rude, John.”

  “It’s he that’s being rude. You mind your business,” John said.

  “For the love of God let me sit down a moment with her, anyway. I’m
tired,” the priest said.

  “What do you want to say to her? Say it to me, why don’t you?”

  Then they both heard someone moan softly in the adjoining room, as if the sick woman had heard them. Father Macdowell, forgetting that the young man had a hold of his arm, said, “I’ll go in and see her for a moment, if you don’t mind,” and he began to open the door.

  “You’re not going to be alone with her, that’s all,” John said, following him into the bedroom.

  Lying on the bed was a white-faced, fair girl, whose skin was so delicate that her cheekbones stood out sharply. She was feverish, but her eyes rolled toward the door, and she watched them coming in. Father Macdowell took off his coat, and as he mumbled to himself he looked around the room, at the mauve silk bed-light and the wallpaper with the tiny birds in flight. It looked like a little girl’s room. “Good evening, Father,” Mrs. Williams whispered. She looked scared. She didn’t glance at her husband. The notion of dying had made her afraid. She loved her husband and wanted to die loving him, but she was afraid, and she looked up at the priest.

  “You’re going to get well, child,” Father Macdowell said, smiling and patting her hand gently.

  John, who was standing stiffly at the door, suddenly moved around the big priest, and then bent down over the bed and took his wife’s hand and began to caress her forehead.

  “Now, if you don’t mind, my son, I’ll hear your wife’s confession,” the priest said.

  “No, you won’t,” John said abruptly. “Her people didn’t want her, and they left us together, and they’re not going to separate us now. She’s satisfied with me.” He kept looking down at her face as if he could not bear to turn away.

  Father Macdowell nodded his head up and down and sighed. “Poor boy,” he said. “God bless you.” Then he looked at Mrs. Williams, who had closed her eyes, and he saw a faint tear on her cheek. “Be sensible my boy,” he said. “You’ll have to let me hear your wife’s confession. Leave us alone for a while.”