The Best of Frank O'Connor

by Frank O'Connor

  The sergeant came up to me with his hand over his mouth and his big head a little on one side, a way he had of indicating to the world that he was speaking aside.

  ‘I see by the paper how they’re after making it up again,’ he whispered anxiously. ‘Isn’t she a changeable little divil?’

  It took me a moment or two to realize that he was referring to Coleman and the publican’s daughter; I always forget that he looks on me as a fellow-artist of Coleman’s.

  ‘Poets prefer them like that,’ I said.

  ‘Is that so?’ he exclaimed in surprise. ‘Well, everyone to his own taste.’ Then he scanned the bay thoughtfully and started suddenly. ‘Who the hell is that?’ he asked.

  Into the pillar of smoky light from the bonfire a boat had come, and it took us a little while to identify it. It was Patch’s, and there was Patch himself pulling leisurely to shore. He had given up the impossible task of going round Flurry. Some of the crowd began to shout derisively at him but he ignored them. Then Mike Mountain took off his bowler hat and addressed us in heart-broken tones.

  ‘Stone him!’ he besought us. ‘For Christ’s sake, ladies and gentlemen, stone him! He’s no son of mine, only a walking mockery of man.’

  He began to dance on the edge of the slip and shout insults at Patch who had slowed up and showed no inclination to meet him.

  ‘What the hell do you mean by it?’ shouted Mike. ‘You said you’d race the man and you didn’t. You shamed me before everyone. What sort of misfortunate old furniture are you?’

  ‘But he fouled me,’ Patch yelled indignantly. ‘He fouled me twice.’

  ‘He couldn’t foul what was foul before,’ said his father. ‘I’m eighty-one, but I’m a better man than you. By God, I am.’

  A few moments later Flurry’s boat hove into view.

  ‘Mike Mountain,’ he shouted over his shoulder in a sobbing voice, ‘have you any grandsons you’d send out against me now? Where are the great Caheragh sailors now, I’d like to know?’

  ‘Here’s one of them,’ roared Mike, tearing at the lapels of his coat. ‘Here’s a sailor if you want one. I’m only a feeble old man, but I’m a better man in a boat than either of ye. Will you race me, Flurry? Will you race me now, I say?’

  ‘I’ll race you to hell and back,’ panted Flurry contemptuously.

  Mike excitedly peeled off his coat and tossed it to me. Then he took off his vest and hurled it at the sergeant. Finally he opened his braces, and, grabbing his bowler hat, he made a flying leap into his own boat and tried to seize the oars from Patch.

  ‘’Tisn’t fair,’ shouted Patch, wrestling with him. ‘He fouled me twice.’

  ‘Gimme them oars and less of your talk,’ snarled his father.

  ‘I don’t care,’ screamed Patch. ‘I’ll leave no man lower my spirit.’

  ‘Get out of that boat or I’ll have to deal with you officially,’ said the sergeant sternly. ‘Flurry,’ he added, ‘wouldn’t you take a rest?’

  ‘Is it to beat a Caheragh?’ snarled Flurry viciously as he brought Sullivan’s boat round again.

  Again the sergeant gave the word and the two boats set off. This time there were no mistakes. The two old men were rowing magnificently, but it was almost impossible to see what happened then. A party of small boys jumped into another boat and set out after them.

  ‘A pity we can’t see it,’ I said to the sergeant.

  ‘It might be as well,’ he grunted gloomily. ‘The less witnesses the better. The end of it will be a coroner’s inquest, and I’ll lose my bleddy job.’

  Beneath us on the slip, Patch, leaning against the slimy wall, seemed to have fallen asleep. The sergeant looked down at him greedily.

  ‘And ’tis only dawning on me that the whole bleddy lot of them ought to be in the lock-up,’ he muttered.

  ‘Sergeant,’ I said, ‘you ought to be in the diplomatic service.’

  He brought his right hand up to shield his mouth, and with his left elbow he gave me an agonizing dig in the ribs that nearly knocked me.

  ‘Whisht, you divil you! Whisht, whisht, whisht!’ he said.

  The pendulum of firelight, growing a deeper red, swayed with the gentle motion of an old clock, and from the bay we could hear the excited voices of the boatful of boys, cheering on the two old men.

  ‘ ’Tis Mike,’ said someone, staring out into the darkness.

  ‘’Tisn’t,’ said a child’s voice. ‘ ’Tis Flurry. I sees his blue smock.’

  It was Flurry. We were all a little disappointed. I will say for our people that whatever quarrel they may have with the Portuguese, in sport they have a really international outlook. When old Mike pulled in a few moments later he got a rousing cheer. The first to congratulate him was Flurry.

  ‘Mike,’ he shouted as he tied up Sullivan’s boat, ‘you’re a better man than your son.’

  ‘You fouled me,’ shouted Patch.

  In response to the cheer Mike rose in the rocking boat. He stood in the bow and then, recollecting his manners, took off his hat. As he removed his hand from his trousers, they fell about his scraggy knees, but he failed to perceive that.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he said pantingly, ‘ ’Twasn’t a bad race. An old man didn’t wet the blade of an oar these twelve months, ’twasn’t a bad race at all.’

  ‘Begod, Mike,’ said Flurry, holding out his hand from the slip, ‘you were a good man in your day.’

  ‘I was, Flurry,’ said Mike, taking his hand and staring up affectionately at him. ‘I was a powerful man in my day, my old friend, and you were a powerful man yourself.’

  It was obvious that there was going to be no fight. The crowd began to disperse in an outburst of chatter and laughter. Mike turned to us again, but only the sergeant and myself were listening to him. His voice had lost its carrying power.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he cried, ‘for an old man that saw such hard days, ’tis no small thing. If ye knew what me and my like endured ye’d say the same. Ye never knew them, and with the help of the Almighty God ye never will. Cruel times they were, but they’re all forgotten. No one remembers them, no one tells ye, the troubles of the poor man in the days gone by. Many’s the wet day I rowed from dawn to dark, ladies and gentlemen; many’s the bitter winter night I spent, ditching and draining, dragging down the sharp stones for my little cabin by starlight and moonlight. If ye knew it all, ye’d say I was a great man. But ’tis all forgotten, all, all, forgotten!’

  Old Mike’s voice had risen into a wail of the utmost poignancy. The excitement and applause had worked him up, and all the past was rising in him as in a dying man. But there was no one to hear him. The crowd drifted away up the road. Patch tossed the old man’s clothes into the boat, and, sober enough now, stepped in and pushed off in silence, but his father still stood in the bow, his bowler hat in his hand, his white shirt flapping about his naked legs.

  We watched him till he was out of sight, but even then I could hear his voice bursting out in sharp cries of self-pity like a voice from the dead. All the loneliness of the world was in it. A flashlight glow outlined a crest of rock at the left-hand side of the bay, and the moonlight, stealing through a barrier of cloud, let a window of brightness into the burnished water. The peace was safe for another week. I handed the sergeant a cigarette and he fell into step beside me.

  ‘He’s in the wrong job altogether,’ he whispered, and again I had to pull myself together to realize the way his mind had gone on, working quietly along its own lines. ‘ ’Tis in Dublin he ought to be. There’s nothing for a fellow like that in our old job. Sure, you can see for yourself.’

  A THING OF NOTHING

  I

  NED LYNCH was a decent poor slob of a man with a fat purple face, a big black moustache like the villain in a melodrama, and a paunch. He had a brassy voice that took an effort of his whole being to reduce it by a puff, sleepy bloodshot eyes, and a big head. Katty, who was a well-mannered, convent-educated girl, thought him very old-fashioned. He sai
d the country was going to the dogs and the land being starved to put young fellows into professions, ‘educating them out of their knowledge,’ he said. ‘What do they want professions for?’ he asked. ‘Haven’t they the hills and the fields – God’s great, wonderful book of Nature?’ He courted her in the same stiff sentimental way, full of poetic nonsense about ‘your holy delicate white hands’ and ‘the weaker sex’.

  The weaker sex indeed! You should see him if he had a headache. She havered for years about marrying him at all. Her family thought he was a very good catch, but Katty would have preferred a professional man. At last she suggested that they should separate for a year to see whether they couldn’t do better for themselves. He put on a sour puss at that, but Katty went off to business in Dublin just the same. Except for one drunken medical who borrowed money from her, she didn’t meet any professional men, and after lending the medico more money than she could afford, she was glad enough to come back and marry Ned. She didn’t look twenty-five, but she was thirty-nine. The day of the marriage he handed her three anonymous letters about herself and the medico.

  Katty thought a lot about the anonymous letters. She thought she knew the quarter they had come from. Ned had a brother called Jerry who was a different class of man entirely. He was tall and dark and lean as a rake, with a high colour and a pair of bright-blue eyes. Twenty years before, himself and Ned had had some disagreement about politics and he had opened Ned with a poker. They hadn’t spoken since, but as Jerry had two sons and only one farm, Katty saw just why it mightn’t suit him that Ned and herself would marry.

  She was a good wife and a good manager; a great woman to send to an auction. She was pretty and well behaved; she dressed younger than her years in short coloured frocks and wide hats that she had to hold the brim of on a windy morning. She managed to double the business inside two years. But before the first year was well out she began to see rocks ahead. First there was Ned’s health. He looked a giant of a man, but his sister had died of blood pressure, and he had a childish craze for meat and pastries. You could see him outside the baker’s, looking in with mournful, bloodshot eyes. He would saunter in and stroll out with a little bag of cakes behind his back, hide them under the counter, and eat them when she wasn’t looking. Sometimes she came into the shop and found him with his whole face red and one cheek stuffed. She never said anything then; she was much too much a lady, but afterwards she might reproach him gently with it.

  And then to crown her troubles one day Father Ring called and Ned and himself went connyshuring in the parlour. A few days later – oh, dear, she thought bitterly, the subtlety of them! – two country boys walked in. One was Con Lynch, Jerry’s second son. He was tall and gawkish, with a big, pale, bony face; he walked with a pronounced stoop as if his sole amusement was watching his feet, his hands behind his back, his soft hat down the back of his neck, and the ragged ends of his trousers trailing round the big boots.

  He looked at Katty and then looked away; then looked at her again and said: ‘Good morra.’ Katty put her hands on the counter and said with a smile: ‘How d’ye do?’ ‘Oh, all right,’ said Con, as if he thought she was presuming. Ned didn’t say anything. He was behind the counter of the bar in his shirt-sleeves.

  ‘Two bottles of stout, i’ ye plaze,’ said Con with a take-it-or-leave-it air, planking down the two-shilling piece he had squeezed in the palm of one hand. Ned looked at the money and then at Con. Finally he turned to the shelves and poured out three stiff glasses of Irish.

  ‘Porter is a cold drink between relations,’ he said in his kind, lazy way.

  ‘Begor, ’tis true for you,’ said Con, resting his two elbows on the counter while his whole face lit up with a roguish smile. ‘ ’Tis a thin, cold, unneighbourly Protestant sort of drink.’

  After that Con and his brother Tom dropped in regularly. Tom was secretary of some political organization and, though very uncouth, able to hold his own by sheer dint of brass, but Con was uncouth without any qualification. He sat with one knee in the air and his hands locked about it as if he had sprained his ankle, or crouched forward with his hands joined between his legs in a manner that Katty would have been too lady-like to describe, and he jumped from one position to another as if a flea had bitten him. When she gave him salad for tea he handed it back to her. ‘Take that away and gi’ me a bit o’ mate, i’ ye plaze,’ he said with no shyness at all. And the funny thing was that Ned, who in his old-fashioned way knew so much better, only smiled. When he was going, Ned always slipped a packet of cigarettes into his pocket, but Con always pulled them out again. ‘What are thim? Faga? Chrisht! Ah, the blessings of God on you!’ And then he smiled his rogue’s smile, rubbed his hands vigorously, lowered his head as if he were going to butt the first man he met, and plunged out into the street.

  It was easy to see how the plot was developing. She was a year married and no child!

  II

  One day a few weeks later Katty heard a scuffle. She looked out the shop window and saw Jerry with the two boys holding him by the arms while he let on to be trying to break free of them.

  ‘Come on, come on, and don’t be making a show of us!’ said Tom angrily.

  ‘I don’t give a Christ in hell,’ cried his father in a shrill tremolo, his wild blue eyes sweeping the sunlit street in every direction except the shop. ‘I’ll go where I’m asked.’

  ‘You’ll go where you’re told,’ said Con with great glee – clearly he thought his father was a great card. ‘Come on, you ould whore you, come on!’

  Ned heard the scuffle and leaned over the counter to see what it was. He gave no sign of being moved by it. There was a sort of monumental dignity about Ned, about the slownessof his thoughts, the depth of his sentiment, and the sheer volume of his voice, which enabled him to time a scene with the certainty of an old stage hand. He lifted the flap of the counter and moved slowly out into the centre of the shop and then stopped and held out his hand. That, by the way, did it. Jerry gave a whinny like a young colt and sprang to take the proffered hand. They stood like that for a full minute, moryah they were too overcome to speak! Katty watched them with a bitter little smile.

  ‘You know the fair lady of my choice,’ said Ned at last.

  ‘I’m very glad to meet you, ma’am,’ said Jerry, turning his knife-blue eyes on her, his dropped chin and his high, small perfect teeth making it sound like the greeting of a well-bred weasel to a rabbit. They all retired to the back parlour, where Katty brought the drinks. The atmosphere was maudlin. After arranging for Katty and himself to spend the next Sunday at the farm, Ned escorted them down the street. When he came back there were tears in his eyes – a foolish man!

  ‘Well,’ he said, standing in the middle of the shop with his hands behind his back and his bowler hat well down over his eyes, ‘ ’twas nice being all under the one roof again.’

  ‘It must have been grand,’ said Katty, affecting to be very busy. ‘I suppose ’twas Father Ring did it,’ she added over her shoulder with subtle mockery.

  ‘Ah,’ said Ned, looking stolidly out at the sunlit street with swimming eyes, ‘we’re getting older and wiser. What fools people are to embitter their lives about nothing! There won’t be much politics where we’re going.’

  ‘I wonder if ’tis that,’ said Katty, as if she were talking to herself while inwardly she fumed at the stupidity of the man.

  ‘Ah, what else could it be?’ asked Ned, wrapped up in whatever sentimental fantasies he was weaving.

  ‘I suppose ’twould never be policy?’ she asked archly, looking up from under her brows with a knowing smile.

  ‘How could it be policy, woman?’ asked Ned, his voice harsh with indignation. ‘What has he to gain by policy?’

  ‘Ah, how would I know?’ she said, reaching towards a high shelf. ‘He might be thinking of the shop for Con.’

  ‘He’d be thinking a very long way ahead,’ said Ned after a pause, but she saw it had gone home.

  ‘Maybe he’s hoping
’twouldn’t be so long,’ she said smoothly.

  ‘How’s that?’ said Ned.

  ‘Julia, God rest her, went very suddenly,’ said Katty.

  ‘He’d be a very foolish man to count on me doing the same,’ boomed Ned, but his face grew purple from shame and anger – shame that he had no children of his own, anger that she had pricked the sentimental bubble he had blown about Jerry and the boys.

  It was a warning to Katty. Twice in the next year she satisfied herself that she was having a baby, and each time put the whole house into confusion. She lay upstairs on the sofa with a handbell at her side, made baby clothes, ordered the cradle, even got an option on a pram. To secure herself against accidents she slept in the spare room. And then it passed off and with a look like murder she returned to the big bedroom. Ned stared at her over the bedclothes with an incredulous, long-suffering air and then heaved a heavy sigh and turned in.

  She knew he blamed her. After being taken in like that it would be weeks before he started again. Weaker sex, indeed! One would think it was he that was trying to start the baby. But Katty blamed herself as well. It was the final year in Dublin and the goings-on with the drunken medico that had finished her. For days on end she sat over the range in the kitchen with a little shawl over her shoulders, shivering and tight-lipped, taking little tots of brandy when Ned’s back was turned and complaining of him to the servant girl. To make it worse, the daughter of another shopkeeper came home on holidays from England; a nurse with fast, flighty ways that appealed to Ned. He was always in and out there, full of old-fashioned gallantries. He kissed her hand and even called her ‘a rose’. It reached Katty’s ears and she clamped her lips. She was far too well bred to make vulgar scenes. Instead, with her feet on the fender, hands joined in her lap, she asked in the most casual friendly way: