Strange how this city of Dublin and nation of Ireland drew him! He sensed the something else behind: the troubled discontent of dreams that ever and again flared into action, and moved an Empire to doubts of its own permanence; because this nation retained its entity despite all attempts to make it conform. His own mood was in tune—that lazy detached mood that had a restless undercurrent of wondering what was to happen next.
A tall man, this Major Archibald MacDonald, retired British officer, but still in the prime of life; tall, and lean under easy-fitting homespuns; tough, indestructible, with a brown face and cool ironic eyes. When he pushed back his tweed hat, his brow, in contrast to the tan of his jaw, was startlingly white below black hair.
And now, at last, he was at a loose end. He was done with soldiering. He had nothing to do—nothing worth while—and he knew that contentment did not abide in idleness. Tomorrow, Sean Glynn and himself would move off southwards, and he would fish industriously for a month. And then? Back to Scotland for some more fishing, till the shooting season came around. He had an income big enough for all purposes, and not one foot of ground he could call his own. He would go on fishing and shooting, like so many of his class, until the years set him in a mold, and he became a sporting crank, no earthly use to any one, and greeted everywhere with a friendly contempt. . . .
Why not run across to New Mexico and see his sister Margaid? Yes, dammit! And there he would do some more fishing and shooting with his brother-in-law, Owen Jordan, and Art O’Connor who had married Kate O’Brien. . . . Or he might get married, himself! And who the devil would marry him? All his friends here in Ireland had taken wives unto themselves—or the other way round. Hugh Forbes Sean Glynn, Mickeen Oge Flynn, Paddy Bawn Enright, all good men, and all nicely tied up, with painfully pleasant little romances safely behind them. . . . Time some good honest tragedy was introduced into this cosmos.
He came out under a tall memorial arch raised to the Dublin Fusiliers who had died in the Boer War, and paused to look at the long list of so-Irish names. Died fighting for big business against the small republics, but it was a good fight at any rate! He crossed over to the top of Grafton Street, and saw the portico of the Gaiety Theatre down on his left. That reminded him. Sean Glynn, up from the country, would like a show, and a couple of seats might be managed.
It was a popular English play, and circles and parterre had been booked out. But he could have two seats in the manager’s box, if he did not object to the owner of the show looking in once or twice. He took the two seats. And if Sean Glynn wanted to go to the Abbey instead, no doubt he had booked by wire.
Grafton Street was not yet crowded by the afternoon shoppers. A narrowish, twisting, wood-paved street, queerly intimate, and leisurely even for Dublin; with tall houses of irregular architecture and plate-glass windows for the allure of women, who loved to hide or dissemble themselves behind silks and skins, corsetry and cosmetics—especially cosmetics. The cult of the Cosmetic! Sort of universal religion for women, older than Egypt, older than Crete, older than the last ice age. It did not beautify, it only typified—the art of the demimondaine. With the ideal of the demimondaine? Woman imitating the prostitute—but why? Religion, of course. Some pretty girls along this street—even below the cosmetic insipidity—but, at that, how insipid any of them would be placed beside one of the great courtesans: Aspasia, Magdalen, Elizabeth—even Mary Queen?
A cool entry down there on the left and people trickling in and out. A cross over an arched doorway, and a narrow concreted yard inside. There would be a church in there—a Catholic chapel. All the old Catholic churches in Dublin were in laneways and back streets; a relic of penal days, Mickeen Oge Flynn had told him, when no Roman church could be built on a main thoroughfare. Well, this was a half-foreign city, and in foreign cities one usually visited the churches. It would be cool in there too.
He followed a fashionable lady who dipped an ungloved hand in a holy-water font and touched her brow with a dainty, practised, feline gesture. The interior of the church opened out wide and high, cool, serene, remote from the busy street not forty paces away; not as dark as Notre-Dame, not as lovely as Chartres, not as somber as St. Paul’s, but with its own atmosphere all the same: something Byzantine, something foreign, a shade garish, but yet with a softly-brooding, glimmering, withdrawn quiet. A brazen framework of votive candles flamed yellowly outside the sanctuary, and there was a lovely, fragile piece of sculpture under the high altar: Christ laid in the sepulcher—fine work, delicate work, lily-like, not tragic, not strong, just sorrowful only.
He moved softly on coir matting down a side-aisle and took a seat far back. It was pleasantly cool in here—even if he had no prayer to say. . . . But one did murmur a prayer instinctively. . . . “Our Father ’chart in Heaven . . . forgive us our trespasses . . .” Was there no trespass that God would not insist on man forgiving? The traitor—the betrayer—the man who sold an ideal for vanity of power, as men had done, were now doing—even here in Ireland. . . .
Women kept slipping in and out, kneeling, praying, asking for the moon, things beyond the moon: nurtured women, kept women, draggled women—women. Men too: workmen, unemployed men, men no man would employ, men who employed many men—for the love of God or the love of Mammon. Yes, this was a strayed bit of Latin Europe. . . . Surely the Church held its grip, and would keep on doing so—holding its grip—needing to hold it firmly—preaching Christ’s ideal as prudently interpreted by a wise old man—and his wise college of Cardinals—who lived in a palace of eleven hundred windows. . . . A damned Calvinist, Archibald!
A small cold air blew about the crisp hair at the side of his neck. He shivered. There was a draught from a door or window over there somewhere. He turned to look. There was no door or window for any draught to blow from—and there was no draught now. Just a little breath of iced air shivering through him, and it was gone. And then he saw the woman.
II
She knelt at the other side of the passage in the last seat of the nave, her hands clasped on the armrest before her, but her head not bent as in prayer. She knelt straight up, her shoulders back, chin lifted, staring before her at the far tabernacle on the high altar, sunk in some contemplation that might be beyond thought—beyond breathing. So might some saint commune unafraid with her God. Her profile in the diffused light was cut as clean as a cameo, and, like a cameo, it had no color. She wore a wide blue hat, and under it, her hair showed paler than pale yellow. And she was not old.
She came out of her absorption. Without any effort, without a lift of shoulders, a sigh of returning life, she turned, picked up a pair of gloves from the seat, and stepped out on the coir matting of the passage. And then she looked directly at Archibald MacDonald, as he was looking directly at her.
She saw a lean brown face and eyes cool as still water: a man secure in his own poise and not afraid to look at any woman—or at any crisis.
She was not afraid either; she was merely detached. A natural woman with none of the smooth modern insipidity of woman about her. Her brow had a serious contemplative set that was almost but not quite a half-frown. Smiling rarely, laughing rarely, that serious, contemplative, faintly-perplexed brow would still be there adding salt to her amusement. And though she was very fair, very blond, she gave a strange impression of darkness.
So they contemplated each other for a second or two that had no hurry; and then, with that effortlessness he had noted, her head and eyes turned away from him, and she walked without haste down the passage and through the door in the aisle. Slenderly built, and not too tall, she was wearing a bluish light cloak. That woman knew all about life. . . .
After a time Archibald MacDonald came out of the chapel into Grafton Street, and resumed his stroll. Presently he paused at a big plate-glass window, his glance caught by the flaming flimsy things that women wear. Cunningly and economically displayed, they caught even his male eye. He smiled at them, wondering—and gave up wondering. A woman stood at his side.
She
was the woman of the chapel. They looked at each other, hers the same unhurrying consideration, and then, unhurriedly still, she turned and moved away through the growing crowd.
He stayed where he was, looking in at the window, not seeing anything, meditatively rubbing his chin. There might be nothing in it. She did not look that sort of woman—or did she not? He smiled oddly. Back there in the chapel she had reminded him of a saint in her absorption and—He smiled again. Saint—and sacrifice . . . and he was a dashed fool anyway!
He turned back then, and moved up the pavement and by the west side of Stephen’s Green to the entrance of Harcourt Street. There was the Municipal Art Gallery up there, and he had time to give it half an hour. There was a thing or two by Keating and Johns worth another look, and one extraordinary landscape of Constable’s, where an immensity of sky made puny an immensity of plain.
He clicked through the turnstile into what was once the hall of a middle-class Georgian house, and went through the almost empty rooms aimlessly; pictures all round him—good and middling, not too well arranged in that not-too-well-lighted house.
He was idly looking at the splashed colors of a modern Italian artist when a woman came in at the door. He glanced up quickly. There was an odd draining away in his breast, and after that his heart beat a little quicker—just a shade more quickly. He was a cool man.
As she passed him they looked at one another, and neither her face nor her eyes showed any surprise. But, darn it! she should have shown some surprise. His face must have shown some, and he was not a man of surface emotion.
He looked unseeing at the paletted colors before him, and again rubbed his long chin. This was too much of a coincidence. This looked damn like an invitation, and he was a man never much amenable to that sort of invitation. Saintliness, my hat! A pity too. A beautiful woman and pitiful! Don’t be a prig, Archie. Great saints, yes! Great courtesans—why not? Beyond a doubt. They needed to be great, and they were great: changing the face of Europe, Egypt, the world, making history alive. But ah! no longer was there room for such great ones. Not even the greatest could cause more than a flutter in the dirty little political dovecotes. . . . This diffusion of Demos, the lordship of the bureaucrat, led to every silly woman painting her lips—courtesans in embryo, and never developing. . . . And the great ones, instead of ruling kings, might follow half-pay soldiers round the streets of foreign towns. . . . He grinned at himself. . . . Hardly fair accusing a strange and beautiful woman even in his own mind. But, by the soul of Somerled! he would just see if there was anything in this business, and take a fall in the bygoing if he had to.
He walked slowly through the doorway and saw her in the statuary room, a well-lighted annex with a glass roof. He circled round, taking his own time, glancing at this and that, the torso of a Fenian, Tolstoi’s beard, Rodin’s head of Bernard Shaw, and, so, to where she was half-frowningly considering the bust of Lady Gregory by Epstein. He paused just behind her shoulder.
“The typical peasant woman?” He was addressing no one in particular.
“Yes, she thought she understood peasantry.” Her tone was as impersonal as his own.
“Did she not?”
“Ye-e-s! she did. But there is no Irish peasantry—that was the trouble—even in Kiltartan.”
“Peasantry?”
“The coarse rustic, of course.”
She was right. The Irish country man was not a peasant. Someone had defined him as a strayed nomad tent-dweller, forced to till the soil and till it damn badly. A farmer by necessity, a saloon-keeper by choice, a politician by ideal.
“You know Lady Gregory’s work?” That was more direct.
“Played it at the old Abbey.”
“One of the Abbey players?”
“In an amateurish sort of way. I wasn’t a very good actress.”
She had not turned to look at him, and now, in her unhurried, unhesitating way, she moved aside from Lady Gregory and halted before the backless sardonic head of Bernard Shaw. It was not a dismissal. It was merely the interruption of a casual conversation.
This was a woman who knew the world and could remain herself. She had not started or bridled or shown calculated surprise. She just remained herself. But she could talk. He liked her voice. An Irish voice unmistakably. A man’s voice similarly pitched might be almost harsh, but, though this voice could never be mistaken for a man’s, it had the timbre and production very nearly masculine. Let this adventure develop. Again he moved up near her shoulder, rubbing that obstinate chin of his.
“We have been meeting rather often this afternoon?” he said.
She bent closer to Shaw’s sardonic eyebrows. “Why mention it? I haven’t.” The voice was a casual murmur.
“Sorry—but I would be much sorrier—” he paused, and she finished the sentence for him without turning.
“If you thought I had been following you round?”
“Exactly.”
“It does look suspicious, doesn’t it?” And then, “You are not very complimentary, though.”
“Yes, I am. Would you care to come and have a cup of coffee?”
The fall was due him there. She turned round full and looked at him—that direct, half-frowning, faintly-perplexed, cogitating look.
“Just a cup of coffee,” he said, his eyes steady on hers.
She smiled then, and, as he had known, her smile was faint, yet deep, slightly frowning, and with a small crinkling of the eyes. A man would remember that smile.
“Thank you,” she said. “That will be nice.”
It was as easy as that.
They went out into Harcourt Street together, and an attendant looked after them with admiration—the tall, easy, brown man and the slender, lovely woman with the pale hair. She was not too tall, but a tall man would not have to bend to look under the widish leaf of the blue hat.
“There used to be a place—I think—at this end of Grafton Street,” she told him.
“You’ve been out of Dublin?”
“Some years.”
“And you were taking a look at some of the old places you knew?”
“It could be.” That was a southern Irish idiom.
“So was I. Incidentally, we seem to have followed the same route.”
“That’s nice of you.”
“You are Irish, of course?”
“And you Highland?”
“Much the same, aren’t they?”
“Are they?”
“The same thought processes—and the same idea—of the things to see in Dublin of a summer afternoon.”
She smiled up at him again. “And the same liking for coffee—or would you prefer beer? And, let me see, did you say the same prayer that I said in the Carmelite church—or did you pray at all?”
“Yes, I did. ‘Our Father ’chart in heaven, never let me forgive a traitor.’ ”
“I have never forgiven a traitor.”
Her voice had not grown emphatic, but it had grown deeper, and, while holding no emotion, held emotion curbed. He looked aside at her. She was looking straight ahead, and all expression was wiped off her face. He knew then that he had touched a nerve.
“No one should,” he murmured.
They were at the busy top of Grafton Street and paused, waiting for the traffic signal. And then:
“Hello, Nance!” came a strong English voice behind them. “I’ve been waiting here twenty confounded minutes.”
The woman was not startled—or she never showed it.
“Sorry, Harry!” she said, without looking round. Instead she looked at Archibald MacDonald and smiled her faint deep smile. “Sorry we could not have that coffee and a long talk, Captain MacDonald,” she said. And then, over her shoulder, “See you later, Harry.”
She stepped off the pavement, moving quickly but not flurriedly, and swung on to a tram just moving out for Terenure.
The man Harry—a well-built, well-dressed, handsome fellow—said “Damn!” explosively, and strode off the pavement too. And a ta
xi did its best to kill him, though an unusually humane driver clapped on all the brakes he had. In return the humane man was called an ugly name, and in reply, being Irish, told the “mealy-mouthed Jew man” his final and immediate destination. Archibald MacDonald left them at it.
For a moment he had thought of making a run for the tram-car, and then some inspiration of Highland insight warned him that that was not the way. He felt disappointed, robbed, a little forlorn, but something that underlay consciousness had a confidence that curiously stood apart from himself. He shrugged a shoulder, turned his back, and proceeded down Grafton Street.
“May the Devil sweep Harry!” the Highlandman cursed with Irish warmth.
III
He leant an elbow on the counter of the lounge-bar and ordered his pot of Munchen Spatenbrau. He had the lounge to himself, for the evening exodus from the near-by Government Offices had not yet begun.
He started to go over the last hour in his mind. It had been interesting, exciting in a way, and, in spite of the disappointment, that same confidence still held—just as if something were leading up to something else more important. A striking, cool woman, and she knew him! “Captain MacDonald,” she had called him. He was a Major now, and had been for five years. Someone that had known him more than five years ago? But if he had ever met her how could he have forgotten? One could not easily forget her. He straightened up then and his mouth opened. It stayed open for five seconds, and shut then with a snap.
“My God!” he said, and hit the counter with clenched fist.
The swing-door swished behind him and a man came to his side at the bar, so close that MacDonald moved a little away without looking up.
“You know that lady?”
It was the cultivated voice of an English gentleman, and there was a bold autocratic eye behind the formal smile. The man that she had called “Harry” at the corner of Grafton Street. And Archibald MacDonald was rather glad to see him. The astounding thought that had made him hit the counter was racing in his mind, and here was a man who might help to elucidate it. But he would have to move cautiously.
The Quiet Man and Other Stories Page 22