The Best of Frank O'Connor

by Frank O'Connor

  When they separated outside Madge’s lodgings in Rathmines late one summer evening, Archie felt that he was at last free to speak. He held her hand as he said good-bye.

  ‘I think we had quite good fun, don’t you?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh, yes, Archie,’ she cried, laughing in her delight. ‘It was wonderful. It was the happiest holiday I ever spent.’

  He was so encouraged by this that he deliberately retained hold of her hand.

  ‘That’s the way I feel,’ he said, beginning to blush. ‘I didn’t want to say it before because I thought it might embarrass you. I never met a woman like you before, and if you ever felt you wanted to marry me I’d be honoured.’

  For a moment, while her face darkened as though all the delight had drained from it, he thought that he had embarrassed her even now.

  ‘Are you sure, Archie?’ she asked nervously. ‘Because you don’t know me very long, remember. A few days like that is not enough to know a person.’

  ‘That’s a thing that soon rights itself,’ Archie said oracularly.

  ‘And, besides, we’d have to wait a long while,’ she added. ‘My people aren’t very well off; I have two brothers younger than me, and I have to help them.’

  ‘And I have a long way to go before I get anywhere in the Civil Service,’ he replied good-humouredly, ‘so it may be quite a while before I can do what I like, as well. But those are things that also right themselves, and they right themselves all the sooner if you do them with an object in mind. I know my own character pretty well,’ he added thoughtfully, ‘and I know it would be a help to me. And I’m not a man to change his mind.’

  She still seemed to hesitate; for a second or two he had a strong impression that she was about to refuse him, but then she thought better of it. Her face cleared in the old way, and she gave her nervous laugh.

  ‘Very well, Archie,’ she said. ‘If you really want me, you’ll find me willing.’

  ‘I want you, Madge,’ he replied gravely, and then he raised his hat and pushed his bicycle away while she stood outside her gate in the shadow of the trees and waved. I admired that gesture even as he described it. It was so like Archie, and I could see that such a plighting of his word would haunt him as no passionate love-making would ever do. It was magnificent, but it was not love. People should be jolted out of themselves at times like those, and when they are not so jolted it frequently means, as it did with Archie, that the experience is only deferred till a less propitious time.

  However, he was too innocent to know anything of that. To him the whole fantastic business of walking out with a girl was miracle enough in itself, like being dumped down in the middle of some ancient complex civilization whose language and customs he was unfamiliar with. He might have introduced her to history, but she introduced him to operas and concerts, and in no time he was developing prejudices about music as though it was something that had fired him from boyhood, for Archie was by nature a gospel-maker. Even when I knew him, he shook his head over my weakness for Wagner. Bach was the man, and somehow Bach at once ceased to be a pleasure and became a responsibility. It was part of the process of what he called ‘knowing his own mind’.

  On fine Sundays in autumn they took their lunch and walked over the mountains to Enniskerry, or cycled down the Boyne Valley to Drogheda. Madge was a girl of very sweet disposition, so that they rarely had a falling-out, and even at the best of times this must have been an event in Archie’s life, for he had an irascible, quarrelsome, gospel-making streak. It was true that there were certain evenings and weekends that she kept to herself to visit her old friends and an ailing aunt in Miltown, but these did not worry Archie, who believed that this was how a conscientious girl should be. As a man who knew his own mind, he liked to feel that the girl he was going to marry was the same.

  Oh, of course it was too perfect! Of course, an older hand would have waited to see what price he was expected to pay for all those perfections, but Archie was an idealist, which meant that he thought Nature was in the job solely for his benefit. Then one day Nature gave him a rap on the knuckles just to show him that the boot was on the other foot.

  In town he happened to run into one of the group of teachers he had met in Connemara during the holidays and invited her politely to join him in a cup of tea. Archie favoured one of those long mahogany teahouses in Grafton Street where daylight never enters; he was a creature of habit, and this was where he had eaten his first lunch in Dublin, and there he would continue to go till some minor cataclysm like marriage changed the current of his life.

  ‘I hear you’re seeing a lot of Madge,’ said the teacher gaily as if this were a guilty secret between herself and Archie.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Archie as if it weren’t. ‘And with God’s help I expect to be doing the same for the rest of my life.’

  ‘So I heard,’ she said joyously. ‘I’m delighted for Madge, of course. But I wonder whatever happened that other fellow she was engaged to?’

  ‘Why?’ asked Archie, who knew well that she was only pecking at him and refused to let her see how sick he felt. ‘Was she engaged to another fellow?’

  ‘Ah, surely she must have told you that!’ the teacher cried with mock consternation. ‘I hope I’m not saying anything wrong,’ she added piously. ‘Maybe she wasn’t engaged to him after all. He was a teacher, too, I believe – somewhere on the South Side. What was his name?’

  ‘I’ll ask her and let you know,’ replied Archie blandly. He was giving nothing away till he had had more time to think of it.

  All the same he was in a very ugly temper. Archie was one of those people who believe in being candid with everybody, even at the risk of unpleasantness, which might be another reason that he had so few friends when I knew him. He might, for instance, hear from somebody called Mahony that another man called Devins had said he was inclined to be offensive in argument, which was a reasonable enough point of view, but Archie would feel it his duty to go straight to Devins and ask him to repeat the remark, which, of course, would leave Devins wondering who it was that had been trying to make mischief for him, so he would ask a third man whether Mahony was the tell-tale, and a fourth would repeat the question to Mahony, till eventually, I declare to God, Archie’s inquisition would have the whole office by the ears.

  Archie, of course, had felt compelled to confess to Madge every sin of his past life, which, from the point of view of this narrative, was quite without importance, and he naturally assumed when Madge did not do the same that it could only be because she had nothing to confess. He realized now that this was a grave mistake since everyone has something to confess, particularly women.

  He could have done with her what he would have done with someone in the office and asked her what she meant, but this did not seem sufficient punishment to him. Though he didn’t recognize it, Archie’s pride was deeply hurt. He regarded Madge’s silence as equivalent to an insult, and in the matter of insults he felt it was his duty to give as good as he got. So, instead of having it out with her as another man might have done, he proceeded to make her life a misery. He continued to walk out with her as though nothing had happened, and then brought the conversation gently round to various domestic disasters which had or had not occurred in his own experience and all of which had been caused solely by someone’s deceit. This was intended to scare the wits out of Madge, as no doubt it did. Then he called up a friend of his in the Department of Education and asked him out for a drink.

  ‘The Hale girl?’ his friend said thoughtfully. ‘Isn’t she engaged to that assistant in St Joseph’s? Wheeler, a chap with a lame leg? I think I heard that. Why? You’re not keen on her yourself by any chance?’

  ‘Ah, you know me,’ Archie replied with a fat smile.

  ‘Why then, indeed, I do not,’ said his friend. ‘But if you mean business you’d want to hurry up. Now you mention it, they were only supposed to be waiting till he got a headship somewhere. He’s a nice fellow, I believe.’

  ‘So I’m tol
d,’ said Archie, and went away with a smile on his lips and murder in his heart. Those forthright men of the world are the very devil once they get a bee in their bonnets. Othello had nothing on a Civil Servant of twelve years’ standing and a blameless reputation. So he still continued to see Madge, though now his method of tormenting her was to press her about those odd evenings she was supposed to spend with her aunt or those old friends she spoke of. He realized that some of those evenings were probably really spent as innocently as she described them, since she showed neither embarrassment nor distress at his probing and gibing. It was the others that caused her to wince, and those were the ones he concentrated on.

  ‘I could meet you when you came out, you know,’ he said in a benign tone that almost glowed.

  ‘But I don’t know when I’ll be out, Archie,’ she replied, blushing and stammering.

  ‘Ah, well, even if you didn’t get out until half past ten – and that would be late for a lady her age – it would still give us time for a little walk. That’s if the night was fine, of course. It’s all very well, doing your duty by old friends, but you don’t want to deny yourself every little pleasure.’

  ‘I couldn’t promise anything, Archie, really I couldn’t,’ she said almost angrily, and Archie smiled to himself, the smug smile of the old inquisitor whose helpless victim has begun to give himself away.

  The road where Madge lived was one of those broad Victorian roads you find scattered all over the hills at the south side of Dublin, with trees along the pavement and deep gardens leading to pairs of merchants’ houses, semi-detached and solidly built, with tall basements and high flights of steps. Next night, Archie was waiting at the corner of a side-street in the shadow, feeling like a detective as he watched her house. He had been there only about ten minutes when she came out and tripped down the steps. When she emerged from the garden, she turned right up the hill, and Archie followed, guided more by the distinctive clack of her heels than by the glimpses he caught of her passing swiftly under a street lamp.

  She reached the bus stop at the top of the road, and a man came up and spoke to her. He was a youngish man in a bright tweed coat, hatless and thin, dragging a lame leg. He took her arm, and they went off together in the direction of the Dodder bank. As they did, Archie heard her happy, eager, foolish laugh, and it sounded exactly as though she were laughing at him.

  He was beside himself with misery. He had got what he had been seeking, which was full confirmation of the woman’s guilt, and now he had no idea what to do with it. To follow them and have it out on the river bank in the darkness was one possibility, but he realized that Wheeler – if this was Wheeler – probably knew as little of him as he had known of Wheeler, and that it would result only in general confusion. No, it was that abominable woman he would have to have it out with. He returned slowly to his post, turned into a public-house just round the corner, and sat swallowing whiskey in silence until another customer unwittingly touched on one of his pet political taboos. Then he sprang to his feet, and, though no one had invited his opinion, he thundered for several minutes against people with slave minds, and stalked out with a virtuous feeling that his wrath had been entirely disinterested.

  This time he had to wait for over half an hour in the damp and cold, and this did not improve his temper. Then he heard her footsteps, and guessed that the young man had left her at the same spot where they had met. It could, of course, have been the most innocent thing in the world, intended merely to deceive inquisitive people in her lodging house, but to Archie it seemed all guile and treachery. He crossed the road and stood under a tree beside the gate, so well concealed that she failed altogether to see him till he stepped out to meet her. Then she started back.

  ‘Who’s that?’ she asked in a startled whisper, and then, after a look, added with what sounded like joy and was probably merely relief: ‘Oh, Archie, it’s you!’ Then, as he stood there glowering at her, her tone changed again and he could detect the consternation as she asked:

  ‘What are you doing here, Archie?’

  ‘Waiting,’ Archie replied in a voice as hollow as his heart felt.

  ‘Waiting? But for what, Archie?’

  ‘An explanation.’

  ‘Oh, Archie!’ she exclaimed with childish petulance. ‘Don’t talk to me that way!’

  ‘And what way would you like me to talk to you?’ he retorted, letting fly with his anger. ‘I suppose you’re going to tell me now you were at your aunt’s?’

  ‘No, Archie,’ she replied meekly. ‘I wasn’t. I was out with a friend.’

  ‘A friend?’ repeated Archie.

  ‘Not a friend exactly either, Archie,’ she added in distress.

  ‘Not exactly,’ Archie repeated with grim satisfaction. ‘With your fiance, in fact?’

  ‘That’s true, Archie,’ she admitted. ‘I don’t deny that. You must let me explain.’

  ‘The time for explanations is past,’ Archie thundered magnificently, though the moment before he had been demanding one. ‘The time for explanations was three months ago. For three months and more, your whole life has been a living lie.’

  This was a phrase Archie had thought up, entirely without assistance, drinking whiskey in the pub. He may have failed to notice that it was not entirely original. It was intended to draw blood, and it did.

  ‘I wish you wouldn’t say things like that, Archie,’ Madge said in an unsteady voice. ‘I know I didn’t tell you the whole truth, but I wasn’t trying to deceive you.’

  ‘No, of course you weren’t trying,’ said Archie. ‘You don’t need to try. What you ought to try some time is to tell the truth.’

  ‘But I am telling the truth,’ she said indignantly. ‘I’m not a liar, Archie, and I won’t have you saying it. I couldn’t help getting engaged to Pat. He asked me, and I couldn’t refuse him.’

  ‘You couldn’t refuse him?’

  ‘No. I told you you should let me explain. It happened before, and I won’t have it happen again.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Oh, it’s a long story, Archie. I once refused a boy at home in our own place and – he died.’

  ‘He died?’ Archie said incredulously.

  ‘Well, he committed suicide. It was an awful thing to happen, but it wasn’t my fault. I was young and silly, and I didn’t know how dangerous it was. I thought it was just all a game, and I led him on and made fun of him. How could I know the way a boy would feel about things like that?’

  ‘Hah!’ Archie grunted uncertainly, feeling that as usual she had thought too quickly for him, and that all his beautiful anger accumulated over weeks would be wasted on some pointless argument. ‘And I suppose you felt you couldn’t refuse me either?’

  ‘Well, as a matter of fact, Archie,’ she said apologetically, ‘that was the way I felt.’

  ‘Good God!’ exploded Archie.

  ‘It’s true, Archie,’ she said in a rush. ‘It wasn’t until weeks after that I got to like you really, the way I do now. I was hoping all that time we were together that you didn’t like me that way at all, and it came as a terrible blow to me, Archie. Because, as you see, I was sort of engaged already, and it’s not a situation you’d like to be in yourself, being engaged to two girls at the one time.’

  ‘And I suppose you thought I’d commit suicide?’ Archie asked incredulously.

  ‘But I didn’t know, Archie. It wasn’t until afterwards that I really got to know you.’

  ‘You didn’t know!’ he said, choking with anger at the suggestion that he was a man of such weak and commonplace stuff. ‘You didn’t know! Good God, the vanity and madness of it! And all this time you couldn’t tell me about the fellow you say committed suicide on account of you.’

  ‘But how could I, Archie?’ she asked despairingly. ‘It’s not the sort a thing a girl likes to think of, much less to talk about.’

  ‘No,’ he said, breathing deeply, ‘and so you’ll go through life, tricking and deceiving every honourable man that comes
your way – all out of pure kindness of heart. That be damned for a yarn!’

  ‘It’s not a yarn, Archie,’ she cried hotly. ‘It’s true, and it never happened with anyone, only Pat and you, and one young fellow at home, but the last I heard of him he was walking out with another girl, and I dare say he’s over it by now. And Pat would have got over it the same if only you’d had patience.’

  The picture of yet a third man engaged to his own much for Archie, and he knew that he could never stand up to this little liar in argument.

  ‘Madge,’ he said broodingly, ‘I do not like to insult any woman to her face, least of all a woman I once respected, but I do not believe you. I can’t believe anything you say. You have behaved to me in a deceitful and dishonourable manner, and I can’t trust you any longer.’

  Then he turned on his heel and walked heavily away, remembering how on this very spot, a few months before, he had turned away with his heart full of hope, and he realized that everything people said about women was true down to the last bitter gibe, and that never again would he trust one of them.

  ‘That was the end of my attempts at getting married,’ he finished grimly. ‘Of course, she wrote and gave me the names of two witnesses I could refer to if I didn’t believe her, but I couldn’t even be bothered replying.’

  ‘Archie,’ I asked in consternation, ‘you don’t mean that you really dropped her?’

  ‘Dropped her?’ he repeated, beginning to scowl. ‘I never spoke to the woman again, only to raise my hat to her whenever I met her on the street. I don’t even know what happened to her after, whether she married or not. I have some pride.’

  ‘But, Archie,’ I said despairingly, ‘suppose she was simply telling the truth?’

  ‘And suppose she was?’ he asked in a murderous tone.

  Then I began to laugh. I couldn’t help it, though I saw it was making him mad. It was raining outside on the canal bank, and I wasn’t laughing at Archie so much as at myself. Because, for the first time, I found myself falling in love with a woman from the mere description of her, as they do in the old romances, and it was an extraordinary feeling, as though there existed somewhere some pure essence of womanhood that one could savour outside the body.