by James Hanley
It seemed ages before she spoke. “Well, Winifred,” she said, and gave me a smile.
“Well,” I replied, astonishing myself.
“What a time ago it seems to-day, Winifred, since you first came here.”
“It is a long time,” I said, “the best part of my life, Miss Downey—excuse me,” I said, for I was never able to get into the habit of calling her Mrs. Fury, it was always Miss Downey to me.
“Do we owe you anything, Winifred?” she asked, and I must say that question really made me sit up. It was some minutes before I answered it.
“How different you look to-day, ma’m,” I said suddenly, “but maybe it’s the effect of this light in the room.”
I could almost feel her stiffening in the chair.
“I’m asking you a question, Winifred?”
She folded her arms then, she put her elbows on the table. I didn’t reply, I couldn’t. It seemed such a curious question to ask me. Was I owed anything, as if I were the coalman waiting to be paid. I’m sure she could see the very nerves working in me.
“Well, no,” I said, and at once she realized that I knew what was coming along fast. “I always got my wages regularly, from the day your father went off to England. Not directly from him, of course, but from his bank. But why ask me, you know that already, Mrs. Fury.”
“I’m glad of that,” she said.
I had to come to the point, I had to ask my own question then. “Did you wish to say something, ma’m, maybe something you don’t like to say? Don’t mind me. In my life I got used to queer things, queerer changes in people,” and I said it to her like I might be her sister, just one of the family. “You look so grave about something. What is it?”
She loosened up, she sat back in her chair, the expression altered. I knew she didn’t like me. But it wasn’t new. This was only a reminder. “My father may be returning here shortly,” she said. She let that sink in, was silent a while, and I expect she just thought there was a lot more peasant in me than she had originally bargained for.
“When he arrives,” she said, “I do not wish you to be in the house. Is that clear?”
“Clear enough to me, it was a direct order. I’m not that stupid.”
“My father’s an old man, and you are an old woman, but I remember when you were not old, and neither was he. You understand?”
My nerves stiffened up.
“I’ve done my duty by this family for long years now, ma’m, perhaps longer than you remember. And, if I may say so, there are not many people who would have stayed on all these years, and I only did that to keep the old place breathing as it were. Even bricks and mortar can expect the minimum of loyalty. I knew the day you left here that you would return. Your poor mother knew, too, and as for what your father knew, well that is none of my business, none at all.”
“How long d’you suppose you could have stayed on here, Winifred?” she asked.
“It’s my home as well as yours. I’ve spent my life here, and I’ve served your family well, though sometimes when I sit back and think about the whole miserable lot of it, I can’t see that your family should have been made an exception of. Better places than this went up in flames, because in this country some people had at last come to their senses, and realized that they were too much of a weight to carry, no matter how broad the back. And I can remember that not many months ago I stood in that hall one darkish night, and persuaded some mad and drink-sodden men to pour the petrol down the drains that would have splashed about this fine place. If you used fewer words, ma’m,” I said, “I’d have the answer out of your mouth, which I’ve got already in any case, and it’s that you wish me to go away from here.”
“You’ve a sister,” she said, “and I think she’d be glad of your company. You are all she has; she is all you’ve got. Your cottage still stands where it stood the day you came here at my mother’s request. Why shouldn’t you go back to it, go back and live your life with your sister. She is as lonely as you may be. It is your home as well as hers. You have served the family well, we know it, and we don’t have to be told about it now. We appreciate it, and we have always respected loyalty, and we never forget it either. But everything has a limit, and the time has come now, Winifred, for you to return to where you came from, and to do your duty by your only sister. This family has had servants before this, and when the time has come they have gone away, though not with empty hands. My father will continue to pay you on the third Friday of every month. We will miss you, Winifred,” she said.
And that was all, and that was the end of that, said her fine upthrust head, and her lovely eyes, and her white hand with the rings on it, and her lovely dress, and her greying hair that’s hardly less grey than mine, and I was never more glad to see her looking as grey as a pigeon’s feather, and no better than me after all. Just another lady that had lain flat on her back. I could have spat at her, and I could have laughed at her, and I could have struck her. I just sat there, stiff, still, and I knew that what she really wanted was to get me out so that she could lie more comfortably under the weight of a man. The fineness of blood, and the coarseness of blood make no distinctions. When I looked at her again her head had lowered a bit, whether with shame or embarrassment I wouldn’t rightly know, and it doesn’t matter, and perhaps she was staring down at her fine rings, and perhaps she was staring down at her own changed person. No matter. I got up and turned away, and left the dining-room, and I still hated her, and I suddenly didn’t care about anything, and I left the door wide open behind me, and God himself wouldn’t have made me shut it, for that’s how I felt as I went up to my room. “God Almighty! It’s true. That’s just how I felt,” Miss Fetch reflected, as once more the poker in her hand struck at the black coals of the fire.
“I could undress, I could say my prayers, but I couldn’t sleep. I won’t sleep. Something has woken up in me, and it won’t let me alone. I was always a good-living woman, but there are people in this world that just won’t leave you alone, as though you were their mortal and immortal business, won’t leave you until they’ve felt for something, and struck for something, and got it. And Mother of God, and I could be struck stone dead where I sit, in this very moment, but when I came to this place I received the first lesson that was out of school. I came to the Downeys at the behest of my father. God rest his soul, but he was a good, hard-working, and an honourable man what followed the holy and chancy trade that was St. Peter’s himself with the nets. I remembered the lesson that was given me by a man that was twice times old enough to be my own father, and suddenly struck my life another way, and I remember it was in the little room above the one I’m sitting in now, and then it was a moon-white place, with the window tight shut, and a door locked on me. He pressed hard upon me and the words came out of his whisky mouth, and he told me that girls should part their legs before they parted their lips, and he parted mine by an unnatural strength, and I was full of my own hanging horror then, and might have been the first bitch in this part of the country that I rarely look at now with the same eyes. I shiver when I think of it. And I was small and round then, and the pigtails half hanging down my back. For I was just after leaving school at the expense of the great, and the pressure of my own father. Strange it was what I thought then, for it wasn’t about an Irish gentleman at all, but the lovely thoughts that I had locked up inside me, and a fancy dream of one day going away into a splendid town, and that was Dublin town, and for me it was full of palaces, and great noises of trains at the station, and the people swinging along the streets, and all the colours of the day. I used to see that town through the window of my father’s cottage. Those two things were as close to me as my own skin, and I remember the one, and I will never forget the other.”
Coals fell to the hearth with the sound of gunshots. Her head nodded, and her hands shook, and after a while the poker fell with a clatter.
“And that’s the man that’s returning here shortly, and I dare say that after all this fine time, and his great exper
ience of London, he’ll walk in through his own door on bent bones, though I doubt very much if, on sight of me, his conscience would be cleared by a cloud of light. I won’t be here, no, I’ll be gone off, back to my own cottage to sit with my sister that was always too stupid to marry, and afraid to marry, for what’s natural in a green land is often a sin, and what’s unnatural is buried so deep down that you’d never understand it.”
Suddenly she started to cough, she was seized by a fit of coughing, and she imagined that it could be heard from one end of the house to the other. She put a hand to her mouth, she held her breath. And after a while the fit passed. The clock on the mantelpiece told her the wrong time. She might have got up and filled the little pan with milk from the bottle, and boiled it on the fire. And taken three arrowroot biscuits from the coloured tin that was a present last Christmas, but she never boiled it, and she never removed the lid. She watched the fire die down.
“Here’s a fine house indeed, that was, I ought to say, that has enough rooms in it to sleep half the gentlemen in Cork, and yet I’ve got to go walking away back to an old cottage that may still be smelling of fish, and look out of the same window that will be as small as it was then, like a nun’s cell glass. For I remember that was where I was standing that lovely April morning when I got my father’s heavy hand on my own shoulder, when he told me that the Downeys wanted a fine, hard-working girl that would run up and down, and round and about for them, and in and out for them, and this and that way for them, and running when they called, and doing what they said. Because that was the thing to do, my father said, as though, stinking of fish as he was, he was planting upon me the grace of God. Why I was only there for a week when I was dragging my way back home on my first afternoon off, and the sin in me that was burning as fierce as flames. And when I cried, it was on its way out. I remember that, and I remember the age I was. And that very night I had the weight of my father’s hand on me again, and the flat of it across my two eyes, and before I slept a belt across the sitting part of me, and was again christened in the name of bitch by my own father, as much as ever I was by Patrick Aloyious Downey Esq. It’s a strange thing to me that I should be sitting here in the middle of the night, and remembering those things that are so far away, and yet now as I think about them seem no more distant to me than my own hand. I’m so used to my room, so fond of being in it, so fond of peace, and the quiet in it, and the things I do. I could have lived here for ever and never given a thought to a single one of them. I’d surely love to know why she left that great, rearing, clumsy bucko of a husband, and I remember him well. Desmond his name was. He came across to this place just a few years ago. I waited on him, I served him his meals, and got him put comfortable between fine sheets that you never see the like of these days, and whenever I was near enough to him why I could tell how full he was of the reeking town. I’ve no doubt at all that on his first morning here, he was very surprised indeed to discover that grass was green. God forgive me, the things I’m saying.”
She should have knelt down a minute after she entered her room, and by the iron law of her own making, said three Our Fathers, and three Hail Marys before the altar that no longer shone, and threw its glow to the opposite wall. And she should have said her prayer for the damned and cursed of Ireland, and the army of the ignorant that chattered to strange gods in the jungles of Africa, and she should have said a special prayer for the repose of her father’s soul. She should have undressed as slowly as ever she did before, as though this were ritual and the nicest half of another law, and she should have put on the cold nightdress that carried with it the chill and the penance of leather. She should have blessed herself in front of the fire, and carried an old bone brooch as carefully as though it were a jewel of gold, and laid it in the topmost drawer of her little desk, where stood, as resolute as an army of soldiers, the books that had pressed so often into her evening hours. She should have lain on her back in the iron bed, and as she always did, composed her body for the sheet, and her soul for the journey of the night. The beads should have clung to the bone, entwined and held fast the hands, the lips should have closed on always remembered words, the eyes upon the dying day. She should have slept the sleep of the just, and of one who had never asked too much, and never was pained at too little. She should have laid the small black Book on the table by her bedside, Master and Mystery, chain and anchor.
But she did none of these things; did nothing except to sit rock-still, and watch the fire die down, and the coals turn and fall. The clock did not tick, and she did not notice, and never once looked up, and never thought of winding it. Miss Fetch was washed, and tossed, and stranded, on the wide shore of some now far distant days.
“Unaccountable,” reflected Miss Fetch. “An extraordinary thing to do. And it still seems so to me. Not a word to her parents, just clears off and marries the first man she meets. And into such a family. No wonder her poor mother nearly died of the shock of it. I mind Mary Doolan telling me how she bumped into Miss Downey and that husband of hers, I suppose I should say Mrs. Fury, but somehow I can’t. I never could. Saw both of them one afternoon in that Gelton place. A terrible town, Mary said, a terrible place. But what a family to have got mixed up with. The mother seemed a complete fool of a woman, the mad things she did, loading the family with debt just to realize her own ambitions. And look at the ambition to-day. Yes, look at it. An overcoatless wretch out of the night. Just got out after doing years of gaol for plunging a knife into some miserable woman’s neck. I think she was a moneylender lady that had the family tied up in every kind of knot. Poor silly creature. From what I heard she always thought the sun shone out of the backside of the failed priest. Sending him into a place that was fit only for better men. And in the end he ran away from it, and played the fool with his days, when some real hard work might have made a man of him. Man did I say. God help us. It reminds me of the old father. Now there’s a man that worked. Always away on ships, sailing some old sea or other, labouring and sweating and earning his money hard. A nice home life I call that. I expect he was glad to see the back of the house. He reminds me of the old bullock that presses so hard against the gate that will never open. Poor, stupid, downtrodden man that he was. A perfect fool of a wife. Drove all her family away from her in the end. And the way that spoiled son carried on with Miss Downey after she married his brother. I expect he thinks we know nothing in these parts. The little birds that flew over from England brought news enough about the goings on. But what is a sensible woman to think of it now. The daughter back home after years, and this man sheltering here. She’s like an oyster, she wouldn’t give you a clue. I’m sure I’m right, though. Yes, I’m sure I’m right. She’s left her husband. The moment I set eyes on her I realized it. Yes, indeed, and I said to myself, ‘Here she is then, with her childless arms’. T’would have pleased her mother, I’m sure. How she dreaded a child of that marriage.”
Before the blackening fire Miss Fetch cogitated, Miss Fetch explored. “Wants me to go back to my sister. And what on earth would I do sitting around in an old cottage? Sure I see her once a fortnight, and we’re both agreed that’s often enough. This is my home, and that cottage is hers. That’s the way of it. ‘Go back to your home,’ said she, as though she were ordering sugar from the grocer. Why I was dragged out of my home when I was a child, before I was able to learn that it was my home, that my parents died in it, that I was born there. I never learned the meaning of it. This room’s my home. I’m happy here, content. And look at this place as big as a palace. Sure who’d ever notice me in an odd corner of it, a worry to nobody. No. And my sister wouldn’t want me either, for she’s as independent as I am myself, and lives her own life, and goes out every day to work at the Murphy’s farm, and she’s ten years younger than meself, and may marry Murphy’s Sean before she’s fifty, if he’s the mind to it. The world moves slowly on its old axis in these parts. I remember my father saying to me when I was twelve that there’s always a duty you owe somebody and there’s a
lways somebody you can do without. I locked the words up in my head, and I’ve never forgotten them, for only a little while after that I was sent up to this place because he could do without me, and I came where there was lots of bread to eat. Ah well!”
She got up and began walking around the room. She took a book from her shelf and opened it; she held the page close to the lighted candle, and for a few minutes she read aloud that Job was no comforter. She put back the book and crossed the room to where lay her sewing basket. She lifted out of it the needles and the thread, and a long, cloud-like piece of lace that seemed to float into the air, and carried this to her chair, and again sat down. She had often sewed, yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that, and it was like loving, and it was like building for the Faith, and it was like hoping. The needle and the thread moved through the hours of many a silent night, and wrote upon the air that each day was useful, and each day was grace.
“Upset though I am, I’d like to do a little sewing now, but I don’t know why, and I wished I knew why, and I wished I knew why I wanted to cry my heart out. No, I don’t know, I don’t know. I ought to get up and make my hot milk and have the biscuits like I always did. And I ought to say my prayers and go to bed, and forget that Cullen won’t come any more, and I ought to remember that I’m an old woman. Should I walk out of this place and go to a cottage and disturb my sister that has the peace of a nun, and sit with her, and talk about the things that happened long ago? No. No. This is my room, my home.”
She rolled up the lace and carried it back to the workbasket. She went and stood where the altar’s shadow lay to the wall; she knelt down and said quickly, “God, what shall I do?” She undressed, climbed into bed, and covered herself up. She closed her eyes. Once she had lain like this, and a man had come into her room, and opened them. She remembered the man.