The Best of Frank O'Connor

by Frank O'Connor

  ‘And what changed your mind?’

  ‘Nothing changed my mind. I didn’t care about anyone, only Tony, but I didn’t want to go to that damn place, and I had no alternative. I had to marry one of you, so I made up my mind that I’d marry the first of you that called.’

  ‘You must have been mad,’ Nellie said indignantly.

  ‘I felt it. I sat at the window the whole afternoon, looking at the rain. Remember that day, Ned?’

  He nodded.

  ‘The rain had a lot to do with it. I think I half hoped you’d come first. Justin came instead – an old aunt of his was sick and he came for supper. I saw him at the gate and he waved to me with his old brolly. I ran downstairs to open the door for him. “Justin,” I said, grabbing him by the coat, “if you still want to marry me, I’m ready.” He gave me a dirty look – you know Justin! “Young woman,” he said, “there’s a time and place for everything.” And away with him up to the lavatory. Talk about romantic engagements! Damn the old kiss did I get off him, even!’

  ‘I declare to God!’ said Nellie in stupefaction.

  ‘I know,’ Rita cried, laughing again over her own irresponsibility. ‘Cripes, when I knew what I was after doing I nearly dropped dead.’

  ‘Oh, so you came to your senses?’ Nellie asked ironically.

  ‘What do you think? That’s the trouble with Justin; he’s always right. That fellow knew I wouldn’t be married a week before I didn’t give a snap of my fingers for Tony. And me thinking my life was over and that was that or the river! God, the idiots we make of ourselves over men!’

  ‘And I suppose ’twas then you found out you’d married the wrong man?’ Nellie asked.

  ‘Who said I married the wrong man?’ Rita asked hotly.

  ‘I thought that was what you were telling us,’ Nellie said innocently.

  ‘You get things all wrong, Nellie,’ Rita replied shortly. ‘You jump to conclusions too much. If I did marry the wrong man I wouldn’t be likely to tell you – or Ned Lowry either.’

  She looked mockingly at Ned, but her look belied her. It was plain enough now why she wanted Nellie as an audience. It kept her from admitting more than she had to admit, from saying things which, once said, might make her own life impossible. Ned rose and flicked his cigarette ash into the fire. Then he stood with his back to it, his hands behind his back, his feet spread out on the hearth.

  ‘You mean if I’d come earlier you’d have married me?’ he asked quietly.

  ‘If you’d come earlier, I’d probably be asking Justin to stand godfather to your brat,’ said Rita. ‘And how do you know but Justin would be walking out the señorita, Ned?’

  ‘Then maybe you wouldn’t be quite so interested whether he was or not,’ said Nellie, but she didn’t say it maliciously. It was now only too plain what Rita meant, and Nellie was sorry for her.

  Ned turned and lashed his cigarette savagely into the fire. Rita looked up at him mockingly.

  ‘Go on!’ she taunted him. ‘Say it, blast you!’

  ‘I couldn’t,’ he said bitterly.

  A month later he married the señorita.

  IN THE TRAIN

  I

  ‘THERE!’ SAID the sergeant’s wife. ‘You would hurry me.’

  ‘I always like to be in time for a train,’ replied the sergeant with the equability of one who has many times before explained the guiding principle of his existence.

  ‘I’d have had heaps of time to buy that hat,’ added his wife.

  The sergeant sighed and opened his evening paper. His wife looked out on the dark platform, pitted with pale lights under which faces and faces passed, lit up and dimmed again. A uniformed lad strode up and down with a tray of periodicals and chocolates. Farther up the platform a drunken man was being seen off by his friends.

  ‘I’m very fond of Michael O’Leary,’ he shouted. ‘He is the most sincere man I know.’

  ‘I have no life,’ sighed the sergeant’s wife. ‘No life at all! There isn’t a soul to speak to, nothing to look at all day but bogs and mountains and rain – always rain! And the people! Well, we’ve had a fine sample of them, haven’t we?’

  The sergeant continued to read.

  ‘Just for the few days it’s been like heaven. Such interesting people! Oh, I thought Mr Boyle had a glorious face! And his voice – it went through me.’

  The sergeant lowered his paper, took off his peaked cap, laid it on the seat beside him, and lit his pipe. He lit it in the old-fashioned way, ceremoniously, his eyes blinking pleasurably like a sleepy cat’s in the match-flame. His wife scrutinized each face that passed, and it was plain that for her life meant faces and people and things and nothing more.

  ‘Oh dear!’ she said again. ‘I simply have no existence. I was educated in a convent and play the piano; my father was literary man, and yet I am compelled to associate with the lowest types of humanity. If it was even a decent town, but a village!’

  ‘Ah,’ said the sergeant, gapping his reply with anxious puffs, ‘maybe with God’s help we’ll get a shift one of these days.’ But he said it without conviction, and it was also plain that he was well pleased with himself, with the prospect of returning home, with his pipe and with his paper.

  ‘Here are Magner and the others,’ said his wife as four other policemen passed the barrier. ‘I hope they’ll have sense enough to let us alone … How do you do? How do you do? Had a nice time, boys?’ she called with sudden animation, and her pale, sullen face became warm and vivacious. The policemen smiled and touched their caps but did not halt.

  ‘They might have stopped to say good evening,’ she added sharply, and her face sank into its old expression of boredom and dissatisfaction. ‘I don’t think I’ll ask Delancey to tea again. The others make an attempt, but really, Delancey is hopeless. When I smile and say “Guard Delancey, wouldn’t you like to use the butter-knife?” he just scowls at me from under his shaggy brows and says without a moment’s hesitation “I would not.” ’

  ‘Ah, Delancey is a poor slob,’ said the sergeant affectionately.

  ‘Oh yes, but that’s not enough, Jonathon. Slob or no slob, he should make an attempt. He’s a young man; he should have a dinner-jacket at least. What sort of wife will he get if he won’t even wear a dinner-jacket?’

  ‘He’s easy, I’d say. He’s after a farm in Waterford!’

  ‘Oh, a farm! A farm! The wife is only an incidental, I suppose?’

  ‘Well, now from all I hear she’s a damn nice little incidental.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose many a nice little incidental came from a farm,’ answered his wife, raising her pale brows. But the irony was lost on him.

  ‘Indeed, yes; indeed, yes,’ he said fervently.

  ‘And here,’ she added in biting tones, ‘come our charming neighbours.’

  Into the pale lamplight stepped a group of peasants. Not such as one sees in the environs of a capital but in the mountains and along the coasts. Gnarled, wild, with turbulent faces, their ill-cut clothes full of character, the women in pale brown shawls, the men wearing black sombreros and carrying big sticks, they swept in, ill at ease, laughing and shouting defiantly. And, so much part of their natural environment were they, that for a moment they seemed to create about themselves rocks and bushes, tarns, turf-ricks and sea.

  With a prim smile the sergeant’s wife bowed to them through the open window.

  ‘How do you do? How do you do?’ she called. ‘Had a nice time?’

  At the same moment the train gave a jolt and there was a rush in which the excited peasants were carried away. Some minutes passed; the influx of passengers almost ceased, and a porter began to slam the doors. The drunken man’s voice rose in a cry of exultation.

  ‘You can’t possibly beat O’Leary!’ he declared. ‘I’d lay down my life for Michael O’Leary.’

  Then, just as the train was about to start, a young woman in a brown shawl rushed through the barrier. The shawl, which came low enough to hide her eyes, she held firmly acro
ss her mouth, leaving visible only a long thin nose with a hint of pale flesh at either side. Beneath the shawl she was carrying a large parcel.

  She looked hastily around, a porter shouted to her and pushed her towards the nearest compartment which happened to be that occupied by the sergeant and his wife. He had actually seized the handle of the door when the sergeant’s wife sat up and screamed.

  ‘Quick! Quick!’ she cried. ‘Look who it is! She’s coming in! Jonathon! Jonathon!’

  The sergeant rose with a look of alarm on his broad red face. The porter threw open the door, with his free hand grasping the woman’s elbow. But when she laid eyes on the sergeant’s startled countenance, she stepped back, tore herself free, and ran crazily up the platform. The engine shrieked, the porter slammed the door with a curse, somewhere another door opened and shut, and the row of watchers, frozen into effigies of farewell, now dark now bright, began to glide gently past the window, and the stale, smoky air was charged with the breath of open fields.

  II

  The four policemen spread themselves out in a separate compartment and lit cigarettes.

  ‘Ah, poor old Delancey!’ said Magner with his reckless laugh. ‘He’s cracked on her all right.’

  ‘Cracked on her,’ agreed Fox. ‘Did ye see the eye he gave her?’

  Delancey smiled sheepishly. He was a tall, handsome, black-haired young man with the thick eyebrows described by the sergeant’s wife. He was new to the force and suffered from a mixture of natural gentleness and country awkwardness.

  ‘I am,’ he said in his husky voice, ‘cracked on her. The devil admire me, I never hated anyone yet, but I think I hate the living sight of her.’

  ‘Oh, now! Oh, now!’ protested Magner.

  ‘I do. I think the Almighty God must have put that one in the world with the one main object of persecuting me.’

  ‘Well, indeed,’ said Foley, ‘I don’t know how the sergeant puts up with the same damsel. If any woman up and called me by an outlandish name like Jonathon when all knew my name was plain John, I’d do fourteen days for her – by God, I would, and a calendar month!’

  The four men were now launched on a favourite topic that held them for more than an hour. None of them liked the sergeant’s wife, and all had stories to tell against her. From these there emerged the fact that she was an incurable scandal-monger and mischief-maker, who couldn’t keep quiet about her own business, much less that of her neighbours. And while they talked the train dragged across a dark plain, the heart of Ireland, and in the moonless night tiny cottage windows blew past like sparks from a fire, and a pale simulacrum of the lighted carriages leaped and frolicked over hedges and fields. Magner shut the window, and the compartment began to fill with smoke.

  ‘She’ll never rest till she’s out of Farranchreesht,’ he said.

  ‘That she mightn’t!’ groaned Delancey.

  ‘How would you like the city yourself, Dan?’ asked Magner.

  ‘Man, dear,’ exclaimed Delancey with sudden brightness, ‘I’d like it fine. There’s great life in a city.’

  ‘You can have it and welcome,’ said Foley, folding his hands across his paunch.

  ‘Why so?’

  ‘I’m well content where I am.’

  ‘But the life!’

  ‘Ah, life be damned! What sort of life is it when you’re always under someone’s eye? Look at the poor devils in court!’

  ‘True enough, true enough,’ said Fox.

  ‘Ah, yes, yes,’ said Delancey, ‘but the adventures they have!’

  ‘What adventures!’

  ‘Look now, there was a sergeant in court only yesterday telling me about a miser, an old maid without a soul in the world that died in an ould loft on the quays. Well, this sergeant I’m talking about put a new man on duty outside the door while he went back to report, and all this fellow had to do was to kick the door and frighten off the rats.’

  ‘That’s enough, that’s enough!’ cried Foley.

  ‘Yes, yes, but listen now, listen, can’t you? He was there about ten minutes with a bit of candle in his hand and all at once the door at the foot of the stairs began to open. “Who’s there?” says he, giving a start. “Who’s there, I say?” There was no answer and still the door kept opening quietly. Then he gave a laugh. What was it but a cat? “Puss, puss,” says he, “come on up, puss!” Thinking, you know, the ould cat would be company. Up comes the cat, pitter-patter on the stairs, and then whatever look he gave the door the hair stood up on his head. What was coming in but another cat? “Coosh!” says he, stamping his foot and kicking the door to frighten them. “Coosh away to hell out of that!” And then another cat came in and then another, and in his fright he dropped the candle and kicked out right and left. The cats began to hiss and bawl, and that robbed him of the last stitch of sense. He bolted down the stairs, and as he did he trod on one of the brutes, and before he knew where he was he slipped and fell head over heels, and when he put out his hand to grip something ’twas a cat he gripped, and he felt the claws tearing his hands and face. He had strength enough to pull himself up and run, but when he reached the barrack gate down he dropped in a fit. He was a raving lunatic for three weeks after.’

  ‘And that,’ said Foley, with bitter restraint, ‘is what you call adventure!’

  ‘Dear knows,’ added Magner, drawing himself up with a shiver, ‘ ’tis a great consolation to be able to put on your cap and go out for a drink any hour of the night you like.’

  ‘ ’Tis, of course,’ drawled Foley scornfully. ‘And to know the worst case you’ll have in ten years is a bit of a scrap about politics.’

  ‘I dunno,’ sighed Delancey dreamily. ‘I’m telling you there’s great charm about the Criminal Courts.’

  ‘Damn the much charm they had for you when you were in the box,’ growled Foley.

  ‘I know, sure, I know,’ admitted Delancey, crestfallen.

  ‘Shutting his eyes,’ said Magner with a laugh, ‘like a kid afraid he was going to get a box across the ears.’

  ‘And still,’ said Delancey, ‘this sergeant fellow I’m talking about, he said, after a while you wouldn’t mind it no more than if ’twas a card party, but talk up to the judge himself.’

  ‘I suppose you would,’ agreed Magner pensively.

  There was silence in the smoky compartment that jolted and rocked on its way across Ireland, and the four occupants, each touched with that morning wit which afflicts no one so much as state witnesses, thought of how they would speak to the judge if only they had him before them now. They looked up to see a fat red face behind the door, and a moment later it was dragged back.

  ‘Is thish my carriage, gentlemen?’ asked a meek and boozy voice.

  ‘No, ’tisn’t. Go on with you!’ snapped Magner.

  ‘I had as nice a carriage as ever was put on a railway thrain,’ said the drunk, leaning in, ‘a handsome carriage, and ’tis losht.’

  ‘Try farther on,’ suggested Delancey.

  ‘Excuse me interrupting yeer conversation, gentlemen.’

  ‘That’s all right, that’s all right.’

  ‘I’m very melancholic. Me besht friend, I parted him thish very night, and ’tish known to no wan, only the Almighty and Merciful God’ (here the drunk reverently raised his bowler hat and let it slide down the back of his neck to the floor), ‘if I’ll ever lay eyes on him agin in thish world. Good night, gentlemen, and thanks, thanks for all yeer kindness.’

  As the drunk slithered away up the corridor Delancey laughed. Fox resumed the conversation where it had left off.

  ‘I’ll admit,’ he said, ‘Delancey wasn’t the only one.’

  ‘He was not,’ agreed Foley. ‘Even the sergeant was shook. When he caught up the mug he was trembling all over, and before he could let it down it danced a jig on the table.’

  ‘Ah, dear God! Dear God!’ sighed Delancey, ‘what killed me most entirely was the bloody ould model of the house. I didn’t mind anything else but the house. There it was, a li
ving likeness, with the bit of grass in front and the shutter hanging loose, and every time I looked down I was in the back lane in Farranchreesht, hooshing the hens and smelling the turf, and then I’d look up and see the lean fellow in the wig pointing his finger at me.’

  ‘Well, thank God,’ said Foley with simple devotion, ‘this time tomorrow I’ll be sitting in Ned Ivers’ back with a pint in my fist.’

  Delancey shook his head, a dreamy smile playing upon his dark face.

  ‘I dunno,’ he said. ‘ ’Tis a small place, Farranchreesht, a small, mangy ould fothrach of a place with no interest or advancement in it.’

  ‘There’s something to be said on both sides,’ added Magner judicially. ‘I wouldn’t say you’re wrong, Foley, but I wouldn’t say Delancey was wrong either.’

  ‘Here’s the sergeant now,’ said Delancey, drawing himself up with a smile of welcome. ‘Ask him.’

  ‘He wasn’t long getting tired of Julietta,’ whispered Magner maliciously.

  The door was pushed back and the sergeant entered, loosening the collar of his tunic. He fell into a corner seat, crossed his legs and accepted the cigarette which Delancey proffered.

  ‘Well, lads,’ he exclaimed. ‘What about a jorum!’

  ‘By Gor,’ said Foley, ‘isn’t it remarkable? I was only talking about it!’

  ‘I have noted before now, Peter,’ said the sergeant, ‘that you and me have what might be called a simultaneous thirst.’

  III

  The country folk were silent and exhausted. Kendillon drowsed now and again, but he suffered from blood-pressure, and after a while his breathing grew thicker and stronger until at last it exploded in a snort, and then he started up, broad awake and angry. In the silence rain spluttered and tapped along the roof, and the dark window-panes streamed with shining runnels of water that trickled on to the floor. Moll Mor scowled, her lower lip thrust out. She was a great flop of a woman with a big coarse powerful face. The other two women, who kept their eyes closed, had their brown shawls drawn tight about their heads, but Moll’s was round her shoulders and the gap above her breasts was filled by a blaze of scarlet.