The Bay

by L. A. G. Strong

  How much of all this I perceived at that moment I can’t say, for I had several years in which to become familiar with the picture, and my observations and mental comments were probably cumulative. But I have a photographic memory, in that I can go back to the moment I first saw it, and I clearly remember the effect it produced on me. All my life I’ve had an instinct for what was first rate and what was nonsense, even in a medium I did not know: and my youthful mind, raw and distressed as it was, arrived at an immediate verdict.

  I was still gazing at this masterpiece when the Doctor’s voice roused me.

  “Tell me now, Mangan. Give me the weight of your opinion. Do you think that picture would be valuable?”

  If I had been less uncomfortable and less desperate, I might have sunk into servility and made a fool of myself. As it was, I gulped unhappily and said “No”.

  “No?” The room began to slide away sideways under me. The Doctor swelled in the heat and glare. “No? Why not?”

  “It doesn’t make sense.”

  His eyes narrowed, his face grew crimson, and I prepared to jump to my feet and run from the explosion. I looked wildly to the door, calculating my chance of getting clear before he could grab me. A queer sound hit my dazed ears, and the next moment the Doctor was shaken with seismic laughter. He shook till the tears ran down his face. He gasped, threw back his head, and uttered a series of staccato peals. I began to smile uneasily. Had I committed a terrible blunder? Even so, it was better than to have him angry.

  As if reading my thought, he sat forward, and shook his head. A fit of coughing came, and his glasses fell off his nose. I started forward to get them, collided with a globe, set it swinging madly, grabbed at it to stop it, became dazzled, stooped to grope for the glasses, cracked my head against the Doctor’s—and then, how I don’t know, I was sitting on a chair opposite him, laughing, laughing. The pair of us laughed like lunatics. I still can’t trace how that transference came from misery to laughter, but the relief was so great I could have laughed myself into hysterics.

  The Doctor leaned forward and patted my arm.

  “Bravo, Mangan, my lad. Good for you. Valuable! It’s the damnedest bloody nonsense you ever saw in your life.”

  He went off into a fresh fit, short staccato roars, like the bursts of a machine gun. I never heard another man laugh in quite that way. So we sat, laughing, dizzy, weak, opposite one another, mad as the picture that had set us off.

  “I got that picture,” said the Doctor presently, wiping his eyes with a yellow silk handkerchief, “at Newtownmount-kennedy, at an auction. I paid thirty shillings for it. It wasn’t worth threepence, but I think I got a bargain. That was eleven years ago; and the amusement I’ve had out of that work of art, you can’t imagine. At least, you can.”

  He sat back, adjusting his pince-nez.

  “It’s my talisman, that picture. It separates the sheep from the goats. It catches the insincere and the pretentious. It gets them every time. You stood the test well, Mangan. Small blame to you if you hadn’t, for you’re young yet, and shy. I debated whether it was fair to try you with it, but you didn’t disappoint me. Good man.” He patted my arm again. “You’re an honest man, Mangan, and I’ll remember it to you.”

  He got up, went to the tantalus, and poured himself out a tumblerful of neat whiskey. The rest of the evening passed in a daze. I was lightheaded from relief and affection, and the Doctor was soused. We sat, protesting our friendship. I confided in him all about my Aunt Edith, and was half shocked, half delighted by the terms in which he spoke, of her conduct. At the end of this he closed his eyes and gave a magnificent performance of Malvolio’s speech in the garden, from Twelfth Might. I often heard him do it since, and was astonished each time at the quality of his rendering. From this he passed to King Lear. Rising from the ottoman, to give himself full scope for the scene in the storm, he hit one of the globes, swore, backed away, and became entangled with another. He swore again, swayed on his short thick legs, and, before I could stop him, he sat down on the range and said “Jesus”. I pulled him off, and assisted him to lie down. He was very drunk now, and put an arm round me.

  “Good man, Mangan. You’re an honest man. You didn’t disappoint me. Good man.”

  His grip slackened, his voice sank to a murmur. In two minutes he was asleep. I looked helplessly at all the lights, but didn’t know how to turn them off. I tiptoed out into the hallway, which seemed black as pitch by contrast, and was standing there uncertain, when a door opened at the end of the passage.

  “Is he quite?” asked a woman’s voice.

  I realised that she meant “quiet”, and that she was speaking to me.

  “Doctor Geoghegan has gone to sleep,” I said, my voice sounding loud and foolish in the empty space.

  “Ah, God bless him,” the voice replied: and then, “Mary Kate. Go and turn off them lights.”

  Mary Kate appeared, a shadowy figure in the darkness. I felt rather than saw her amiable grin, and fumbled my way towards the door. I could not find the knob.

  “Here,” she said softly, and pushed past me. “I’ll let ye out.”

  I felt her fingers slide over mine, and find the knob. She stood for a second or two close beside me, and I heard her snuffly breathing. She gave a little giggle. I stiffened in alarm. Once again life was turning unknown and strange. Regretfully, she slid the knob, and opened the door. “Good night now,” she said.

  “Thank you,” I gasped. “Good night”—and ran down the steps. Never had the air seemed so cool and sweet. Too much had happened for me to take in yet another experience.

  That evening was the first of many. Mary Kate and I soon became friends and allies, and often we collaborated in keeping the Doctor from drinking too much before he fell asleep. Queer training, again, for a boy in his teens; but what I learned from that man can never be justly computed. There were masses of odd knowledge in that decaying brain. He had travelled all over Europe, and knew all manner of men and women: and though you can’t know much about human beings except in your own person, from your own experience, Doctor Marcus put me in the way of knowing: for which I bless his memory always.

  But I must come back to the barber’s. After Martin himself, the Doctor was, I suppose, our chief ornament, yet another man ran him close: and that was Captain Callaghan. Next to Martin, the Captain was the best loved man in Kingstown. He was certainly known to a far greater number of people, for his professional activities took place very much in the public eye, and were a delight to generations of visitors, as well as to the natives. Everywhere along the waterfront you mentioned his name, you drew a glow from the eye of your vis-à-vis and elicited an invariable reply.

  “Ah, sure, isn’t he the bloody fine man. And hasn’t he the best job in Ireland.”

  The best job in Ireland was simple. It consisted of setting out in a tiny launch some fifteen minutes before the departure of the mail boat, with the object of clearing a way for it. Every morning and every evening the little launch fussed off, bustled in a vague circular manner out of the harbour, took a round of a mile, warned a few lazy yachts and a row boat or so, and staggered back: whereon the mail boat gave a terrifying blast, the gangways were pulled ashore, and she glided out, with the little launch standing by in reverent attention.

  Captain Callaghan was an immense man, all of twenty stone, tall, broad, massive, elephantine, ruddy of countenance and blue of eye: my Uncle John could have been his younger brother. He was the soul of good nature, a tower of rectitude, and, insofar as one can say it of a man one never saw in circumstances that demanded nobility, he was noble. There was about him a simplicity as massive as his body, a controlled energy, a quiet gusto, which made it a joy to watch him. Wherever he went, except in the middle of the day, when he ambled home for his dinner and for a siesta, his crew of three went with him. I do not know what else they did, but it is a fact that in all my years there I only once saw one of them, the engineer, without him.

  The Captain and his sa
tellites did not come every night to the barber’s, but they could be counted on to appear two nights a week, or even three, and always, for some inscrutable reason, on a Friday. There was only one seat that could accommodate the Captain. He sat in the larger of the two barber’s chairs, magisterially presiding, by his very bulk, over our assembly. He would have been much shocked had this idea been suggested to him, for he was modest and unassuming on land, though fearless on the water, rebuking a millionaire’s pleasure yacht with the same stentorian authority as he would a terrified clerk who had hired one of Mr. Rogan’s row boats to take his mother round the harbour.

  Captain Callaghan came to us before the evening boat went out. He did not gossip, as the rest of us did, but he took a lively interest in his fellow citizens. At any account of impropriety or grave misconduct he would frown: not, I soon discovered, because he was prudish, but because he did not like to hear of such things in real life, among people he knew. You could see, even so, that censure came hardly to his nature. He would listen anxiously for any shadow of excuse that could be offered.

  “But sure,” the narrator would say, of some wife beater or worse, “he had drink taken.”

  Whereupon the Captain would shake his head sympathetically, and his face would clear: not because he condoned drink, but because he was glad the wrongdoer was not wholly responsible for his actions, and therefore need not be blamed as severely.

  Dearly though Martin loved him, the Captain was in one respect a trial to him. It meant we must have the clock going, and approximately right. If it were not, some member of the crew would be sent out every few minutes to take a look at the clock in the Town Hall. This proceeding never failed to limit conversation and disrupt the company, since everyone began to talk at once, some saying there was no hurry yet, some taking an alarmist note, and all having a theory one way or the other. Captain Callaghan would look from one to another, frowning gravely, then pull out his own turnip watch and consult it, cupping it in his other hand. What relation its reading bore to the real time, I never discovered. I made many surreptitious efforts to look over his shoulder, always without success. At any rate, he never relied on it, but required corroboration. He mistrusted our clock too, rightly at one period, for it developed serious irregularities, being cured finally by Dennis, who left it for a day and a night at the bottom of the paraffin can. After this its face was so discoloured one had often to strike a match in order to read the time, and it would only go on its side: but it went much better than before. The Captain took weeks to be persuaded that its aberrancy was ended.

  Still, each evening a moment would come, however uneasy the prelude, when the Captain would give his watch a last covert glance, sigh, heave himself out of his chair, cry “All aboard, min,” and lumber off, followed by his crew. As he made his progress to the shore, a crowd of small boys followed admiringly at his heels, growing with each few yards until he reached the jetty. And well they might, for the ceremony was a sight for the gods.

  First of all, the two members of the crew stooped and held on to the little dinghy, one at the bow, the other at the stern. The engineer stood on the steps; a little wizened man, he braced himself, his legs wide apart, as the Captain placed on his shoulder a hand the size of a ham, and, with the slow precision of an elephant, raised one foot and put it into the dinghy. A pause followed, during which the faces of the crew grew tense with care, while the Captain’s, in contrast, assumed a vague and innocent blankness. Then the other foot followed, and, stooping swiftly, the Captain grasped each thwart and lowered himself to the stern. The crew then clambered in precariously forward, and the dinghy, low in the water except for her bows, felt her way slowly like a dubious beetle to the launch. The launch lay at anchor some seventy yards out, a wreath of faint blue smoke ascending through her chimney from the fires which the engineer had carefully banked some three hours, before.

  Then came the spectacle that all had gathered to see, the engineer and the crew hoisting their captain aboard. The dinghy rocked with the strain of so much weight being lifted, the launch leaned all askew as Captain Callaghan heaved one vast foot aboard, and sank well below her Plimsoll line as, with a final skilled convulsion, the whole of his bulk was shipped. Then came the further ritual, less spectacular but intricate, of tying up the dinghy to the buoy. This the Captain never watched, but kept his gaze resolutely ahead on the harbour. When it was accomplished, one of the crew saluted and said, “Ready, sor,” whereupon the Captain bellowed in a terrible voice, “All clear,” and the launch beat up the water and turgidly departed.

  To see that launch puff and waddle its way out on a fine evening, its bow breaking the sunset light spilled large upon the waters, little being visible of launch and complement but the funnel and the Captain’s belly, with half the alphabet in white letters across a jersey that had room for them all; to hear the Captain’s mellow roar as he addressed a row boat, to watch for his return in the glimmering dusk, to witness his disembarkation, with the little engineer holding faithfully to the seat of the gallant Captain’s breeches, and the crew each with a faithful grip of the gallant Captain’s arms, what time he roared directions in a voice that made the very Town Hall shudder; this was a joy on every level. It was nobly impressive to the young and the intuitive, it was a diversion to the tourists grinning from the mail boat’s rail. As I see the Captain, huge in the golden light of evening, as I hear that unforgettable voice ringing over the water and echoing off the jetty steps, as I think of his majesty of mien and the simple goodness of his heart, he takes place for me with the heroes of Homer and Vergil.

  No more will Captain Callaghan struggle and haul out his turnip watch in the barber’s. No more will the cry of “All aboard, min,” rouse his crew. No more will that solemn procession take its way down to the jetty with the growing crowd behind it. Many years have passed since the Captain missed his way one night in his dreams, and boarded Charon’s craft in place of his own. In the morning, when I made one of a sad procession that came to see him lying mountainous in his bed, there was on his face a look of such serenity as I have never seen.

  “He’s come to port, God rest him,” said a little man behind me: and the utter calm of the face made even that comment unnecessary.

  I like to think of the Captain, trying at first to find his watch, shaking his head, accepting the change, and then, unperturbed by the suddenness of his translation, lending a hand with the crossing, consoling fellow passengers, taking a hand with the tiller in the difficult parts of the Styx… . Few men were mourned as much, and leave such a legend.

  The third and last of our institutions was with us all the time, as much a fixture in the shop as the basins, the two chairs, and the picture of Robert Emmet: and that was Dennis Darcy.

  This hopeless, helpless, and irreclaimable creature haunted the shop for all of twenty years. Well educated, gently spoken, a thriftless, witless wastrel of a man, with his fluttering rags, his broken boots, his grey sockless feet, his pale blue frightened eyes that flickered when you spoke to him, and the rest of the time stared glassily at nothing, he was in the shop or near it at all times of the day, twitching on his bench like a shot bird, staggering in and out on errands, or trying ineffectually to be of use with a dirty cloth or a moulted broom. Nine tenths of the time he was drunk. Nothing but drink could control his twitching or thaw the glacial misery in his eyes. Without a drink, he jerked so that he could hardly sit or lie, and you felt he must shake to pieces. You could hear his joints hit the bench.

  “For God’s sake,” someone would cry, unable to bear it any longer, and bring out the money to get poor Dennis a dram. And Dennis, clutching and gasping in an ecstasy of gratitude, would subside gradually, a fluttering bundle of rags, and we could forget him and talk or drink at peace.

  To this articulated piece of human wreckage Martin was father, mother, and brother. He fed him as best he could. He allowed him to sleep in the shop on one of the padded benches. In return, Dennis was faithful as a dog, though much les
s useful. He essayed to clean the shop, he looked after it during the brief intervals when Martin was out, and he tottered off on his errands to Kelly’s the bookmakers. I used to think it cruelty to send him, till Martin told me it was the only way to persuade him to go out and get a breath of fresh air in his lungs: and that Doctor Marcus had advised it be on no account given up.

  We all knew Dennis’s story, or part of it. The rest did not come out till afterwards. He was, as anyone could tell from his speech and the shape of his hands and feet, a man of good connections. By what process of weakness, calamity, or wrongdoing he had degenerated to his present pass remained a mystery: but there he was. There were several families of Darcy to whom he might have belonged, but, if anyone cross-questioned him, he grew at first vague, then hysterically resentful. It was easy enough to see. The poor creature had still some pride, and did not want to disgrace his people. Dennis was all we ever called him. The other name he hid, though many of us knew it.

  And yet, for all his wish to save his family the shame of owning him, the poor devil was at pains to remind us that he was well connected and that he had expectations. He needed to recall this, for it offered him his only hope to repay Martin for so many years of shelter, food, and kindness.