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Title: Here are Ladies

Author: James Stephens

Release Date: December 19, 2006 [EBook #20127]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1

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HERE ARE LADIES


BY

JAMES STEPHENS


AUTHOR OF 'THE CROCK OF GOLD'




NEW YORK

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

1914




COPYRIGHT, 1913

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY


Set up and electrotyped. Published October, 1913

Reprinted March, 1914.




  CONTENTS


  WOMEN
  THREE HEAVY HUSBANDS
  A GLASS OF BEER
  ONE AND ONE
  THREE WOMEN WHO WEPT
  THE TRIANGLE
  THE DAISIES
  THREE ANGRY PEOPLE
  THE THREEPENNY PIECE
  BRIGID
  THREE YOUNG WIVES
  THE HORSES
  MISTRESS QUIET EYES
  THREE LOVERS WHO LOST
  THE BLIND MAN
  SWEET-APPLE
  THREE HAPPY PLACES
  THE MOON
  THERE IS A TAVERN IN THE TOWN




HERE ARE LADIES


  WOMEN

  Listen! If but women were
  Half as kind as they are fair
  There would be an end to all
  Miseries that do appal.

  Cloud and wind would fly together
    In a dance of sunny weather,
  And the happy trees would throw
  Gifts to travellers below.

  Then the lion, meek and mild,
  With the lamb would, side by side,
  Couch him friendly, and would be
  Innocent of enmity.

  Then the Frozen Pole would go,
  Shaking off his fields of snow,
  To a kinder clime and dance
  Warmly with the girls of France.

  These; if women only were
  Half as kind as they are fair.




THREE HEAVY HUSBANDS

I

He had a high nose. He looked at one over the collar, so to speak.
His regard was very assured, and his speech was that short bundle of
monosyllables which the subaltern throws at the orderly. He had never
been questioned, and, the precedent being absent, he had never
questioned himself. Why should he? We live by question and answer,
but we do not know the reply to anything until a puzzled comrade
bothers us and initiates that divine curiosity which both humbles and
uplifts us.

He wanted all things for himself. What he owned he wished to own
completely. He would give anything away with the largest generosity,
but he would share with no one--

"Whatever is mine," said he, "must be entirely mine. If it is alive I
claim its duty to the last respiration of its breath, and if it is dead
I cannot permit a mortgage on it. Have you a claim on anything
belonging to me? then you may have it entirely, I must have all of it
or none."

He was a stockbroker, and, by the methods peculiar to that mysterious
profession, he had captured a sufficiency of money to enable him to
regard the future with calmness and his fellow-creatures with
condescension--perhaps the happiest state to which a certain humanity
can attain.

So far matters were in order. There remained nothing to round his life
into the complete, harmonious circle except a wife; but as a stated
income has the choice of a large supply, he shortly discovered a lady
whose qualifications were such as would ornament any, however exalted,
position--She was sound in wind and limb. She spoke grammar with the
utmost precision, and she could play the piano with such skill that it
was difficult to explain why she played it badly.

This also was satisfactory, and if the world had been made of machinery
he would have had the fee-simple of happiness. But to both happiness
and misery there follows the inevitable second act, and beyond that,
and to infinity, action and interaction, involution and evolution,
forging change for ever. Thus he failed to take into consideration
that the lady was alive, that she had a head on her shoulders which was
native to her body, and that she could not be aggregated as chattel
property for any longer period than she agreed to.

After their marriage he discovered that she had dislikes which did not
always coincide with his, and appreciations which set his teeth on
edge. A wife in the house is a critic on the hearth--this truth was
daily and unpleasantly impressed upon him: but, of course, every man
knows that every woman is a fool, and a tolerant smile is the only
recognition we allow to their whims. God made them as they are--we
grin, and bear it.

His wife found that the gospel of her husband was this--Love me to the
exclusion of all human creatures. Believe in me even when I am in the
wrong. Women should be seen and not heard. When you want excitement
make a fuss of your husband.--But while he entirely forgot that his
wife had been bought and paid for, she did not forget it: indeed, she
could not help remembering it. A wrong had been done her not to be
obscured even by economics, the great obscurer. She had been won and
not wooed. (The very beasts have their privileges!) She had been
defrauded of how many teasing and provoking prerogatives, aloofnesses,
and surrenders, and her body, if not her mind, resented and remembered
it.

There are times when calmness is not recognised as a virtue. Of
course, he had wooed her in a way. He took her to the opera, he gave
her jewels, he went to Church with her twice every Sunday, and once a
month he knelt beside her in more profound reverences: sometimes he
petted her, always he was polite--

But he had not told her that her eyes were the most wonderful and
inspiring orbs into which a tired man could look. He never said that
there would not be much to choose between good and evil if he lost her.
He never said that one touch of her lips would electrify a paralytic
into an acrobat. He never swore that he would commit suicide and dive
to deep perdition if she threw him over--none of these things. It is
possible that she did not wish him to say or do such extravagances, but
he had not played the game, and, knowing that something was badly
wrong, she nursed a grievance, that horrid fosterling.

He was fiercely jealous, not of his love, but of his property, and
while he was delighted to observe that other men approved of his taste,
he could not bear that his wife should admire these outsiders. This
was his attitude to her: Give me your admirations, all of them, every
note of exclamation of which you are mistress, every jot and tittle of
your thoughts must be mine, for, lacking these, I have nothing. I am
good to you. I have interposed between you and the buffets of
existence. I temper all winds to the bloom of your cheek. Do you your
part, and so we will be happy.

There was a clerk in his office, a black-haired, slim, frowning young
man, who could talk like a cascade for ten minutes and be silent for a
month: he was a very angry young man, with many hatreds and many
ambitions. His employer prized him as a reliable and capable worker,
liked his manners, and paid him thirty-five shillings per week--Outside
of these matters the young man abode no more in his remembrance than
did the flower on the heath or the bird on the tree.

It happened one day that the employer fell sick of influenza and was
confined to his bed. This clerk, by order, waited on him to see to his
correspondence; for, no matter who sneezes, work must be attended to.

The young man stayed in the house for a week, and during his sojourn
there he met the lady. She fair, young, brooding! he also young,
silent, and angry! After the first look had passed between them, there
was little more to be said. They came together as though they had been
magnetised. Love or passion, by whatever name it is called, was born
abruptly. There is a force in human relations drawing too imperatively
for denial; defying self-interest, and dragging at all anchors of duty
and religion. Is it in man only the satisfaction of self? Egotism
standing like a mountain, and demanding, "Give me yourself or I will
kill myself." And women! is their love the degradation of self, the
surrender and very abasement of lowliness? or is it also egotism set on
a pinnacle, so careless and self-assured as to be fearful of nothing?
In their eyes the third person, a shadow already, counted as less than
a shadow. He was a name with no significance, a something without a
locality. His certain and particular income per annum was a thing to
laugh at . . . there was a hot, a swift voice speaking--"I love you,"
it said, "I love you": he would batter his way into heaven, he would
tear delight from wherever delight might be--or else, and this was
harder, a trembling man pleading, "Aid me or I perish," and it is
woman's instinct not to let a man perish. "If I help you, I hurt
myself," she sighed; and, "Hurt yourself, then," sighed the man; "would
you have me perish. . .?"

So the owner by purchase smiled--

"You are mine," said he, "altogether mine, no one else has a lien upon
you. When the weather is fine I will take you for drives in the
sunshine. In the nights we will go to the opera, hearkening together
to the tenor telling his sweet romanza, and when the wintry rain beats
on the windows you will play the piano for me, and so we will be happy."

When he was quite recovered he went back to his office, and found that
one of his clerks had not arrived--this angered him; when he returned
home again in the evening, he found that his wife was not there. So
things go.


II

He was one of those who shy at the _tête-à-tête_ life which, for a long
time, matrimony demands. As his wedding-day approached he grew fearful
of the prolonged conversation which would stretch from the day of
marriage, down the interminable vistas, to his death, and, more and
more, he became doubtful of his ability to cope with, or his endurance
to withstand, the extraordinary debate called marriage.

He was naturally a silent man. He did not dislike conversation if it
was kept within decent limits: indeed, he responded to it contentedly
enough, but when he had spoken or been addressed for more than an hour
he became, first, impatient, then bored, and, finally, sulky or
ill-mannered.--"With men," said he, "one can talk or be silent as one
wishes, for between them there is a community of understanding which
turns the occasional silence into a pregnant and fruitful interlude
wherein a thought may keep itself warm until it is wanted: but with a
woman!"--he could not pursue that speculation further, for his
acquaintance with the sex was limited.

In every other respect his bride was a happiness. Her good looks
soothed and pleased him. The touch of her hand gave him an
extraordinary pleasure which concealed within it a yet more
extraordinary excitement. Her voice, as a mere sound, enchanted him.
It rippled and flowed, deepened and tinkled. It cooed and sang to him
at times like the soft ringdove calling to its mate, and, at times
again, it gurgled and piped like a thrush happy in the sunlight. The
infinite variation of her tone astonished and delighted him, and if it
could have remained something as dexterous and impersonal as a wind he
would have been content to listen to it for ever--but, could he give
her pipe for pipe? Would the rich gurgle or the soft coo sound at last
as a horrid iteration, a mere clamour to which he must not only give an
obedient heed, but must even answer from a head wherein silence had so
peacefully brooded?

His mind was severe, his utterance staccato, and he had no knowledge of
those conversational arts whereby nouns and verbs are amazingly
transfigured into a gracious frolic or an intellectual pleasure. To
snatch the chatter from its holder, toss and keep it playing in the air
until another snatched it from him; to pluck a theory hot from the
stating, and expand it until it was as iridescent and, perhaps, as thin
as a soap-bubble: to light up and vivify a weighty conversation until
the majestic thing sparkled and glanced like a jewel--these things he
could not do, and he knew it. Many a time he had sat, amazed as at an
exhibition of acrobatics, while around him the chatter burst and sang
and shone. He had tried to bear his part, but had never been able to
edge more than one word into that tossing cataract, and so he fell to
the habit of listening instead of speaking.

With some reservations, he enjoyed listening, but particularly he
enjoyed listening to his own thoughts as they trod slowly, but very
certainly, to foregone conclusions. Into the silent arena of his mind
no impertinent chatter could burst with a mouthful of puns or ridicule,
or a reminiscence caught on the wing and hurled apropos to the very
centre of discussion. His own means of conveying or gathering
information was that whereby one person asked a question and another
person answered it, and, if the subject proved deeper than the
assembled profundity, then one pulled out the proper volume of an
encyclopaedia, and the pearl was elicited as with a pin.

Meanwhile, his perturbation was real. There are people to whom we need
not talk--let them pass: we overlook or smile distantly at the
wretches, retaining our reputation abroad and our self-respect in its
sanctuary: but there are others with whom we may not be silent, and
into this latter category a wife enters with assured emphasis. He
foresaw endless opportunities for that familiar discussion to which he
was a stranger. There were breakfast-tables, dinner-tables,
tea-tables, and, between these, there might be introduced those
preposterous other tables which women invent for no purpose unless it
be that of making talk. His own breakfast, dinner, and tea-tables had
been solitary ones, whereat he lounged with a newspaper propped against
a lamp, or a book resting one end against the sugar-bowl and the other
against his plate.--This quietude would be ravaged from him for ever,
and that tumult nothing could exorcise or impede. Further than these,
he foresaw an interminable drawing-room, long walks together, and
other, even more confidential and particular, sequestrations.

After one has married a lady, what does one say to her? He could not
conceive any one saying anything beyond "Good-morning." Then the other
aspect arrested him, "What does a woman find to say to a man?" Perhaps
safety lay in this direction, for they were reputed notable and
tireless speakers to whom replies are not pressingly necessary. He
looked upon his sweetheart as from a distance, and tried to reconstruct
her recent conversations.--He was amazed at the little he could
remember. "I, I, I, we, we, we, this shop, that shop, Aunt Elsa, and
chocolates." She had mentioned all these things on the previous day,
but she did not seem to have said anything memorable about them, and,
so far as he could recollect, he had said nothing in reply but "Oh,
yes" and "To be sure!" Could he sustain a lifetime of small-talk on
these meagre responses? He saw in vision his most miserable
tea-table--a timid husband and a mad wife glaring down their noses at
plates. The picture leaped at him as from a cinematograph and appalled
him. . . . After a time they would not even dare to look at each
other. Hatred would crouch behind these figures, waiting for its chain
to be loosed!

So he came to the knowledge that he, so soon to be a husband, had been
specially fashioned by nature to be a bachelor. For him safety lay in
solitude: others, less rigorously planned, might safely venture into
the haphazard, gregarious state of wedlock, but he not only could not,
but must not, do so, and he meditated an appeal to his bride to release
him from the contract. Several times the meditation almost became
audible, but always, just as he toppled on the surge of speech, the
dear lady loosed a torrent of irrelevancies which swirled him from all
anchorage, and left him at the last stranded so distantly from his
thought that he did not know how to find his way back to it.

It would be too brutally direct to shatter information about silk at
one shilling the yard with a prayer for matrimonial freedom. The girl
would be shocked--he could see her--she would stare at him, and
suddenly grow red in the face and stammer; and he would be forced to
trail through a lengthy, precise explanation of this matter which was
not at all precise to himself. Furthermore, certain obscure emotions
rendered him unwilling to be sundered from this girl.--There was the
touch of her hand; more, the touch of her lips given bravely and with
ready modesty--a contact not lightly to be relinquished. He did not
believe he could ever weary of looking at her eyes: they were grey,
widely open, and of a kindness such as he could not disbelieve in; a
radiant cordiality, a soft, limpid goodwill; believing and trustful
eyes which held no guile when they looked at him: there were her
movements, her swiftness, spaciousness, her buoyant certainty: one
remembered her hair, her hands, the way she wore a frock, and a
strange, seductive something about the look of her shoe.

The thing was not possible! It is the last and darkest insult to tell
the woman who loves you that you do not wish to marry her. Her
indignant curiosity may be appeased only by the excuse that you like
some other woman better, and although she may hate the explanation she
will understand it--but no less legitimate excuse than this may pass
sunderingly between a man and a woman.

It lay, therefore, that he must amend his own hand, and, accordingly,
for the purpose of marital intercourse, he began a sad inquiry into the
nature of things. The world was so full of things: clouds and winds
and sewing machines, kings and brigands, hats and heads, flower-pots,
jam and public-houses--surely one could find a little to chat about at
any moment if one were not ambitiously particular. With inanimate
objects one could speak of shape and colour and usefulness. Animate
objects had, beside these, movements and aptitudes for eating and
drinking, playing and quarrelling. Artistic things were well or badly
executed, and were also capable of an inter-comparison which could not
but be interesting and lengthy.--These things could all be talked
about. There were positive and negative qualities attaching to
everything, and when the former was exhausted the latter could still be
profitably mined--"Order," said he, "subsists in everything, and even
conversation must be subject to laws capable of ascertainment."

He carefully, and under the terms of badinage, approached other men,
inquiring how they bore themselves in the matrimonial dispute, and what
were the subjects usually spoken of in the intimacies of family life.
But from these people he received the smallest assistance.--Some were
ribald, some jocose, some so darkly explanatory that intelligence could
not peer through the mist or could only divine that these hated their
wives. One man held that all domestic matters should be left entirely
to the wife and that talking was a domestic matter. Another said that
the words "yes, no, and why" would safeguard a man through any
labyrinth, however tortuous. Another said that he always went out when
the wife began to speak; and yet another suggested that the only
possible basis for conversation was that of perpetual opposition, where
an affirmation was always countered by a denial, and the proving of the
case exercised both time and intelligence.

As he sat in the train beside his wife the silence which he so dreaded
came upon them. Emptiness buzzed in his head. He sought diligently
for something to speak about--the characteristics of objects! There
were objects and to spare, but he could not say--"that window is
square, it is made of glass," or, "the roof of this carriage is flat,
it is made of wood."

Suddenly his wife buried her face in her muff, and her shoulders were
convulsed. . . .

Love and contrition possessed him on the instant. He eased his husky
throat, and the dreaded, interminable conversation began--

"What are you crying for, my dear?" said he.

Her voice, smothered by the fur, replied--

"I am not crying, darling," said she, "I am only laughing."


III

He got stiffly up from his seat before the fire--

"Be hanged," said he, "if I wait any longer for her. If she doesn't
please to come in before this hour let her stop out." He stared into
the fire for a few moments--"Let her go to Jericho," said he, and he
tramped up to bed.

They had been married just six months, after, as he put it, the hardest
courtship a man ever undertook. She was more like a piece of
quicksilver than a girl. She was as uncertain as a spring wind, as
flighty as a ball of thistledown--"Doesn't know her own mind for ten
minutes together," he groaned. "Hasn't any mind at all," he'd think an
hour later. While, on the following day, it might be--"That woman is
too deep, she is dodging all round me, she is sticking her finger in my
eye. She treats me as if I wasn't there at one moment, and diddles me
as if I was Tom Fool the next--I'll get out of it."

He had got out of it three or four times--halted her against a wall,
and, with a furious forefinger, wagged all her misdeeds in her face;
then, rating her up, down and round, he had prepared to march away
complacent and refreshed like Justice taking leave of a sinner, only to
find that if the jade wept he could not go away--

"Dash it all," said he, "you can't leave a girl squatting down against
a wall, with her head in her lap and she crying. Hang it," said he,
"you feel as if there was water round your legs and you'll splash if
you move."

So he leavened justice with mercy, and, having dried her tears with his
lips, he found himself in the same position as before, with a mad
suspicion tattering through his brain that maybe he had been "diddled"
again.

But he married her, and to do that was a job also. She shied at
matrimony. She shied at everything that looked plain or straight. She
was like a young dog out for a walk: when she met a side-street she
bolted down it and was instantly surrounded by adventure and misery,
returning, like the recovered pup, thick with the mud of those
excursions. There was a lust in her blood for side-streets, laneways
and corners.

"Marriage!" said she, and she was woebegone--"Marriage will be for
ever."

"So will heaven," he retorted comfortingly.

"So will--the other place," said she, with a giggle, and crushed him
under the feeling that she envisaged him as the devil of that
particular Hades, instead of as an unfortunate sinner plucked up by the
heels and soused into the stew-pan by his wife.

He addressed himself--

"When we are married," said he, "I'll keep a hand on you, my lady, that
you won't be able to wriggle away from. If you are slippery, and faith
you are, why I'm tough, and so you'll find it." "Get rid of your kinks
before you marry," said he. "I've no use for a wife with one eye on
me, and it a dubious one, and the other one squinting into a parlour
two streets off. You've got to settle down and quit tricks. A wife
has no one else to deceive but her husband, that's all she can want
tricks for, and there's not going to be any in my house. It's all
right for a pretty girl to be a bit larky----"

"Am I really pretty?" said she, deeply interested and leaning forward
with her hands clasping her knees--"Do you really and truly think I am
pretty? I met a man one time, he had a brown moustache and blue eyes,
outside a tailor's shop in Georges Street, with a public-house on one
side, and he said he thought I was very pretty: he told me what his
name was, but I forget it: maybe, you know him: he wears a tweed suit
with a stripe and a soft hat--Let me see, no, his name began with a
T----"

"His name was Thief," he roared, "and that was his profession too.
Don't let me catch you talking with a strange man, or you'll get hurt,
and his brown eyes will be mixed up with his blue moustache."

So married they were, six months now, and the wits were nearly worried
out of him in trying to keep pace with his wife's vagaries. Matrimony
had not cured her love for side-streets, short cuts and chance
acquaintances, and she was gradually making her husband travel at a
similar tangent. When they started to go to church he would find, to
his amazement, that they were in the Museum. If they journeyed with a
Museum for an objective they were certain to pull up in the Botanic
Gardens. A call on a friend usually turned into a visit to a theatre
or a walk by the Dodder--

"Heart-scalded I am," said he, "with her hopping and trotting. She
travels sideways like a crab, so she does. She has a squint in her
walk. Her boots have a bias outwards. I'm getting bow-legged, so I
am, slewing round corners after her. I'll have to put my foot down,"
said he.

And now it was all finished. Here was twelve o'clock at night and an
absent wife--a detestable combination. Twelve o'clock at night outside
a house is an immoral hour, inside a house it is non-moral, but
respectable. There is nothing in the street at that time but dubiety.
Who would be a husband listening through the tolling of midnight for a
muffled footfall?--And he had told her not to go: had given an order,
formulated his imperative and inflexible will--

"Never mind! I'll stand by it," said he, "this is the last straw. One
break and then freedom. Surgery is better than tinkering. Cut the
knot and let who will try to join it then. One pang, and afterwards
ease, fresh air, and freedom: fresh air! gulps of it, with the head
back and an easy mind. I'm not the man to be fooled for ever--surgery!
surgery!"

His wife had wished to see a friend that night and requested her
husband to go with her--he refused--

"You're always trapsin about," said he.

She entreated.

He heaved an angry forehead at her, puckered an eye, toned a long No
that wagged vibration behind it like an undocked tail.

She persisted, whereupon he loosed his thunder--

"You're not to step outside the house this night, ma'am," said he; and
to her angry "I will go," he barked, "If you do go, don't come back
here. I'll have a dutiful wife or I'll have none--stay in or stay out.
I'm tired humouring your whimsies, let you humour mine now----"

Then a flame gathered on her face, it grew hot in her voice, flashed to
a point in her eyes--

"I'm going out to-night," said she loudly; "are you coming with me?"

"I'm not," said he.

"Then," she snapped, "I'll go by myself."

"Wherever you go to-night you can stay," he roared. "Don't come back
to this house."

"I'm not mad enough to want to," she replied. "I wish I'd never seen
your old house. I wish I'd never seen yourself. You are just as dull
as your house is, and nearly as flat. It's a stupid, uninteresting,
slow house, so it is, and you are a stupid, dissatisfied grump of a
man, so you are. I'd sooner live in a cave with a hairy bear, so I
would----" and out she ran.

Two minutes later he had heard the door bang, and then silence.

That was five hours ago, and during all these long hours he had sat
staring sourly into the fire, seeing goodness knows what burnt-up
visions therein, waiting to hear a footfall, and an entreating voice at
the key-hole; apologies and tears perhaps, and promises of amendment.
Now it was after twelve o'clock, darkness everywhere and silence. Time
and again a policeman's tramp or the hasty, light footfall of adventure
went by. So he stood up at last sour and vindictive--

"She would have her fling. She wouldn't give in. She doesn't care a
tinker's curse what I say. . . . Let her go to Jericho," said he, and
he tramped up to bed.

In his bedroom he did not trouble to get a light. He undressed in a
bitterly savage mood and rolled into bed, only to jump out again in
sudden terror, for there was some one in it. It was his wife. He lay
down with a hazy, half-mad mind. Had he wronged her? Was she more
amenable than he had fancied? She had not gone out at all--or, had she
gone out, sneaked in again by the back door and crept noiselessly to
bed. . . .?

He fell asleep at last on the tattered fringe of a debate--Had he
wronged her? or had she diddled him again?




A GLASS OF BEER

It was now his custom to sit there. The world has its habits, why
should a man not have his? The earth rolls out of light and into
darkness as punctually as a business man goes to and from his office;
the seasons come with the regularity of automata, and go as if they
were pushed by an ejector; so, night after night, he strolled from the
Place de l'Observatoire to the Font St. Michel, and, on the return
journey, sat down at the same Café, at the same table, if he could
manage it, and ordered the same drink.

So regular had his attendance become that the waiter would suggest the
order before it was spoken. He did not drink beer because he liked it,
but only because it was not a difficult thing to ask for. Always he
had been easily discouraged, and he distrusted his French almost as
much as other people had reason to. The only time he had varied the
order was to request "un vin blanc gommée," but on that occasion he had
been served with a postage stamp for twenty-five centimes, and he still
wondered when he remembered it.

He liked to think of his first French conversation. He wanted
something to read in English, but was timid of asking for it. He
walked past all the newspaper kiosks on the Boulevard, anxiously
scanning the vendors inside--they were usually very stalwart, very
competent females, who looked as though they had outgrown their sins
but remembered them with pleasure. They had the dully-polished,
slightly-battered look of a modern antique. The words "M'sieu, Madame"
rang from them as from bells. They were very alert, sitting, as it
were, on tiptoe, and their eyes hit one as one approached. They were
like spiders squatting in their little houses waiting for their daily
flies.

He found one who looked jolly and harmless, sympathetic indeed, and to
her, with a flourished hat, he approached. Said he, "Donnez-moi,
Madame, s'il vous plaît, le _Daily Mail_." At the second repetition
the good lady smiled at him, a smile compounded of benevolence and
comprehension, and instantly, with a "V'la M'sieu," she handed him _The
New York Herald_. They had saluted each other, and he marched down the
road in delight, with his first purchase under his arm and his first
foreign conversation accomplished.

At that time everything had delighted him--the wide, well-lighted
Boulevard, the concierges knitting in their immense doorways, each
looking like a replica of the other, each seeming sister to a
kiosk-keeper or a cat. The exactly-courteous speech of the people and
their not quite so rigorously courteous manners pleased him. He
listened to the voluble men who went by, speaking in a haste so
breathless that he marvelled how the prepositions and conjunctions
stuck to their duty in so swirling an ocean of chatter. There was a
big black dog with a mottled head who lay nightly on the pavement
opposite the Square de l'Observatoire. At intervals he raised his lean
skull from the ground and composed a low lament to an absent friend.
His grief was respected. The folk who passed stepped sidewards for
him, and he took no heed of their passage--a lonely, introspective dog
to whom a caress or a bone were equally childish things: Let me alone,
he seemed to say, I have my grief, and it is company enough. There was
the very superior cat who sat on every window-ledge, winking at life.
He (for in France all cats are masculine by order of philology), he did
not care a rap for man or dog, but he liked women and permitted them to
observe him. There was the man who insinuated himself between the
tables at the Café, holding out postcard-representations of the
Pantheon, the Louvre, Notre Dame, and other places. From beneath these
cards his dexterous little finger would suddenly flip others. One saw
a hurried leg, an arm that shone and vanished, a bosom that fled shyly
again, an audacious swan, a Leda who was thoroughly enjoying herself
and had never heard of virtue. His look suggested that he thought
better of one than to suppose that one was not interested in the nude.
"M'sieu," he seemed to say, with his fixed, brown-eyed regard, "this is
indeed a leg, an authentic leg, not disguised by even the littlest of
stockings; it is arranged precisely as M'sieu would desire it." His
sorrow as he went away was dignified with regret for an inartistic
gentleman. One was _en garçon_, and yet one would not look at one's
postcards! One had better then cease to be an artist and take to
peddling onions and asparagus as the vulgar do.

It was all a long time ago, and now, somehow, the savour had departed
from these things. Perhaps he had seen them too often. Perhaps a kind
of public surreptitiousness, a quite open furtiveness, had troubled
him. Maybe he was not well. He sat at his Café, three quarters down
the Boulevard, and before him a multitude of grotesque beings were
pacing as he sipped his bock.

Good manners decreed that he should not stare too steadfastly, and he
was one who obeyed these delicate dictations. Alas! he was one who
obeyed all dictates. For him authority wore a halo, and many sins
which his heyday ought to have committed had been left undone only
because they were not sanctioned by immediate social usage. He was
often saddened when he thought of the things he had not done. It was
the only sadness to which he had access, because the evil deeds which
he had committed were of so tepid and hygienic a character that they
could not be mourned for without hypocrisy, and now that he was
released from all privileged restraints and overlookings and could do
whatever he wished he had no wish to do anything.

His wife had been dead for over a year. He had hungered, he had prayed
for her death. He had hated that woman (and for how many years!) with
a kind of masked ferocity. How often he had been tempted to kill her
or to kill himself! How often he had dreamed that she had run away
from him or that he had run away from her! He had invented Russian
Princes, and Music Hall Stars, and American Billionaires with whom she
could adequately elope, and he had both loved and loathed the prospect.
What unending, slow quarrels they had together! How her voice had
droned pitilessly on his ears! She in one room, he in another, and
through the open door there rolled that unending recitation of woes and
reproaches, an interminable catalogue of nothings, while he sat dumb as
a fish, with a mind that smouldered or blazed. He had stood unseen
with a hammer, a poker, a razor in his hand, on tiptoe to do it. A
movement, a rush, one silent rush and it was done! He had revelled in
her murder. He had caressed it, rehearsed it, relished it, had jerked
her head back, and hacked, and listened to her entreaties bubbling
through blood!

And then she died! When he stood by her bed he had wished to taunt
her, but he could not do it. He read in her eyes--I am dying, and in a
little time I shall have vanished like dust on the wind, but you will
still be here, and you will never see me again--He wished to ratify
that, to assure her that it was actually so, to say that he would come
home on the morrow night, and she would not be there, and that he would
return home every night, and she would never be there. But he could
not say it. Somehow the words, although he desired them, would not
come. His arm went to her neck and settled there. His hand caressed
her hair, her cheek. He kissed her eyes, her lips, her languid hands;
and the words that came were only an infantile babble of regrets and
apologies, assurances that he did love her, that he had never loved any
one before, and never would love any one again. . . .

Every one who passed looked into the Café where he sat. Every one who
passed looked at him. There were men with sallow faces and wide black
hats. Some had hair that flapped about them in the wind, and from
their locks one gathered, with some distaste, the spices of Araby.
Some had cravats that fluttered and fell and rose again like banners in
a storm. There were men with severe, spade-shaped, most
responsible-looking beards, and quizzical little eyes which gave the
lie to their hairy sedateness--eyes which had spent long years in
looking sidewards as a woman passed. There were men of every stage of
foppishness--men who had spent so much time on their moustaches that
they had only a little left for their finger-nails, but their
moustaches exonerated them; others who were coated to happiness,
trousered to grotesqueness, and booted to misery. He thought--In this
city the men wear their own coats, but they all wear some one else's
trousers, and their boots are syndicated.

He saw no person who was self-intent. They were all deeply conscious,
not of themselves, but of each other. They were all looking at each
other. They were all looking at him; and he returned the severe, or
humourous, or appraising gaze of each with a look nicely proportioned
to the passer, giving back exactly what was given to him, and no more.
He did not stare, for nobody stared. He just looked and looked away,
and was as mannerly as was required.

A negro went by arm in arm with a girl who was so sallow that she was
only white by courtesy. He was a bulky man, and as he bent greedily
over his companion it was evident that to him she was whiter than the
snow of a single night.

Women went past in multitudes, and he knew the appearance of them all.
How many times he had watched them or their duplicates striding and
mincing and bounding by, each moving like an animated note of
interrogation! They were long, and medium, and short. There were
women of a thinness beyond comparison, sheathed in skirts as featly as
a rapier in a scabbard. There were women of a monumental, a mighty
fatness, who billowed and rolled in multitudinous, stormy garments.
There were slow eyes that drooped on one heavily as a hand, and quick
ones that stabbed and withdrew, and glanced again appealingly, and slid
away cursing. There were some who lounged with a false sedateness, and
some who fluttered in an equally false timidity. Some wore velvet
shoes without heels. Some had shoes, the heels whereof were of such
inordinate length that the wearers looked as though they were perched
on stilts and would topple to perdition if their skill failed for an
instant. They passed and they looked at him; and from each, after the
due regard, he looked away to the next in interminable procession.

There were faces also to be looked at: round chubby faces wherefrom the
eyes of oxen stared in slow, involved rumination. Long faces that were
keener than hatchets and as cruel. Faces that pretended to be scornful
and were only piteous. Faces contrived to ape a temperament other than
their own. Raddled faces with heavy eyes and rouged lips. Ragged lips
that had been chewed by every mad dog in the world. What lips there
were everywhere! Bright scarlet splashes in dead-white faces. Thin
red gashes that suggested rat-traps instead of kisses. Bulbous, flabby
lips that would wobble and shiver if attention failed them. Lips of a
horrid fascination that one looked at and hated and ran to. . . .
Looking at him slyly or boldly, they passed along, and turned after a
while and repassed him, and turned again in promenade.

He had a sickness of them all. There had been a time when these were
among the things he mourned for not having done, but that time was long
past. He guessed at their pleasures, and knew them to be without salt.
Life, said he, is as unpleasant as a plate of cold porridge. Somehow
the world was growing empty for him. He wondered was he outgrowing his
illusions, or his appetites, or both? The things in which other men
took such interest were drifting beyond him, and (for it seemed that
the law of compensation can fail) nothing was drifting towards him in
recompense. He foresaw himself as a box with nothing inside it, and he
thought--It is not through love or fear or distress that men commit
suicide: it is because they have become empty: both the gods and the
devils have deserted them and they can no longer support that solemn
stagnation. He marvelled to see with what activity men and women
played the most savourless of games! With what zest of pursuit they
tracked what petty interests. He saw them as ants scurrying with
scraps of straw, or apes that pick up and drop and pick again, and he
marvelled from what fount they renewed themselves, or with what charms
they exorcised the demons of satiety.

On this night life did not seem worth while. The taste had gone from
his mouth; his bock was water vilely coloured; his cigarette was a hot
stench. And yet a full moon was peeping in the trees along the path,
and not far away, where the countryside bowed in silver quietude, the
rivers ran through undistinguishable fields chanting their lonely
songs. The seas leaped and withdrew, and called again to the stars,
and gathered in ecstasy and roared skywards, and the trees did not rob
each other more than was absolutely necessary. The men and women were
all hidden away, sleeping in their cells, where the moon could not see
them, nor the clean wind, nor the stars. They were sundered for a
little while from their eternal arithmetic. The grasping hands were
lying as quietly as the paws of a sleeping dog. Those eyes held no
further speculation than the eyes of an ox who lies down. The tongues
that had lied all day, and been treacherous and obscene and respectful
by easy turn, said nothing more; and he thought it was very good that
they were all hidden, and that for a little time the world might swing
darkly with the moon in its own wide circle and its silence.

He paid for his bock, gave the waiter a tip, touched his hat to a lady
by sex and a gentleman by clothing, and strolled back to his room that
was little, his candle that was three-quarters consumed, and his
picture which might be admired when he was dead but which he would
never be praised for painting; and, after sticking his foot through the
canvas, he tugged himself to bed, agreeing to commence the following
morning just as he had the previous one, and the one before that, and
the one before that again.




  ONE AND ONE

  Do you hate me, you!
  Sitting quietly there,
  With the burnished hair
  That frames the two
  Deep eyes of your face
  In a smooth embrace.

  And you say naught,
  And I never speak;
  But you rest your cheek
  On your hand, a thought
  Showing plain as the brow
  Goes wrinkling now.

  Of what do you think,
  Sitting opposite me,
  As you stir the tea
  That you do not drink,
  And frown at nought
  With those brows of thought.




THREE WOMEN WHO WEPT

He was one of those men who can call ladies by their Christian names.
One day he met twenty-four duchesses walking on a red carpet, and he
winked at them, and they were all delighted. It was so at first he
appeared to her. Has a mere girl any protection against a man of that
quality? and she was the very merest of girls--she knew it. It was not
that she was ignorant, for she had read widely about men, and she had
three brothers as to whom she knew divers intimate things.

The girl who has been reared among brothers has few defences against
other males. She has acquired two things--a belief in the divine right
of man, and a curiosity as to what those men are like who are not her
brothers. She may love her brothers, but she cannot believe that they
adequately represent the other sex. Does not every girl wish to marry
the antithesis of her brother? The feeling is that one should marry as
far outside of the family as is possible, and as far outside of one's
self as may be; but love has become subject to geography, and our
choice is often bounded by the tramline upon which we travel from our
houses to our businesses and back again.

While she loved and understood her brothers, she had not in the least
understood or believed in the stories she had read, and so, when the
Young Man out of a Book came to her, she was delighted but perplexed.

It was difficult to live up to him worthily. It was difficult to know
what he would do next, and it was exceedingly difficult to keep out of
his way; for, indeed, he seemed to pervade the part of the world where
she lived. He was as ubiquitous as the air or the sky. If she went
into a shop, he was pacing on the pavement when she came out. If she
went for a walk he was standing at the place farther than which she had
decided not to go. She had found him examining a waterfall on the
Dodder, leaning over the bear-pit in the Zoological Gardens, and
kneeling beside her in the Chapel, and her sleep had been distressed by
the reflection that maybe he was sitting on her window-sill like a sad
sparrow drenched in the rain, all its feathers on end with the cold,
and its eyes wide open staring at misery.

The first time they met he spoke to her. He plucked a handkerchief
from somewhere and thrust it into her hand, saying--

"You have dropped this, I think"--and she had been too alarmed to
disown it.

It was a mighty handkerchief. It was so big that it would scarcely fit
into her muff.--"It is a table-cloth," said she, as she solemnly
stuffed away its lengthy flaps. "It is his own," she thought a moment
later, and she would have laughed like a mad woman, only that she had
no time, for he was pacing delicately by her side, and talking in a low
voice that was partly a whisper and partly a whistle, and was entirely
and disturbingly delicious.

The next time they met very suddenly. Scarcely a dozen paces separated
them. She could see him advancing towards her, and knew by his knitted
brows that he was searching anxiously for something to say. When they
drew together he lifted his hat and murmured--

"How is your handkerchief to-day?"

The query so astonished her that (the verb is her own) she simply
bawled with laughter. From that moment he treated her with freedom,
for if once you laugh with a person you admit him to equality, you have
ranked him definitely as a vertebrate, your hand is his by right of
species, scarcely can you withhold even your lips from his advances.

Another, a strange, a fascinating thing, was that he was afraid of her.
It was inconceivable, it was mad, but it was true. He looked at her
with disguised terror. His bravado was the slenderest mask. Every
word he said was uttered tentatively, it was subject to her approval,
and if she opposed a statement he dropped it instantly and adopted her
alternative as one adopts a gift. This astonished her who had been
prepared to be terrified. He kept a little distance between them as he
walked, and when she looked at him he looked away. She had a vision of
herself as an ogre--whiskers sprouted all over her face, her ears
bulged and swaggled, her voice became a cavernous rumble, her
conversation sounded like fee-faw-fum--and yet, her brothers were not
afraid of her in the least; they pinched her and kicked her hat.

He spoke (but always without prejudice) of the loveliest things
imaginable--matters about which brothers had no conception, and for
which they would not have any reverence. He said one day that the sky
was blue, and, on looking she found that it was so. The sky was
amazingly blue. It had never struck her before, but there was a colour
in the firmament before which one might fall down and worship.
Sunlight was not the hot glare which it had been: it was rich,
generous, it was inexpressibly beautiful. The colour and scent of
flowers became more varied. The world emerged as from shrouds and
cerements. It was tender and radiant, comeliness lived everywhere, and
goodwill. Laughter! the very ground bubbled with it: the grasses waved
their hands, the trees danced and curtsied to one another with gentle
dignity, and the wind lurched down the path with its hat on the side of
its head and its hands in its pockets, whistling like her younger
brother.

And then he went away. She did not see him any more. He was not by
the waterfall on the Dodder, nor hanging over the bear-pit in the Zoo.
He was not in the Chapel, nor on the pavement when she came out of a
shop. He was not anywhere. She searched, but he was not anywhere.
And the sun became the hot pest it had always been: the heavens were
stuffed with dirty clouds the way a second-hand shop is stuffed with
dirty bundles: the trees were hulking corner-boys with muddy boots: the
wind blew dust into her eye, and her brothers pulled her hair and
kicked her hat; so that she went apart from all these. She sat before
the mirror regarding herself with woeful amazement--

"He was afraid of me!" she said.

And she wept into his monstrous handkerchief.


II

When he came into the world he came howling, and he howled without
ceasing for seven long years, except at the times when he happened to
be partaking of nourishment, or was fast asleep, and, even then, he
snored with a note of defiance and protest which proved that his humour
was not for peace.

The time came when he ceased to howl and became fascinated by the
problem of how to make other people howl. In this art he became an
adept. When he and another child chanced to be left together there
came, apparently from the uttermost ends of the earth, a pin, and the
other child and the pin were soon in violent and lamentable conjunction.

So he grew.

"Be hanged if I know what to do with him," said his father as he
rebuckled on his belt. "The devil's self hasn't got the shape or match
of such an imp in all the length and breadth of his seven hells. I'm
sick, sore and sorry whacking him, so I am, and before long I'll be
hung on the head of him. I'm saying that there's more deceit and
devilment in his bit of a carcass than there is in a public-house full
of tinkers, so there is."

He turned to his wife--

"It's no credit at all the son you've bore me, ma'am, but a sorrow and
a woe that'll be killing us in our old age and maybe damning our souls
at the heel of it. Where he got his blackguardly ways from I'm not
saying, but it wasn't from my side of the house anyway, so it wasn't,
and that's a moral. Get out of my sight you sniffling lout, and if
ever I catch you at your practices again I'll lam you till you won't be
able to wink without help, so I will."

"Musha," sobbed his wife, "don't be always talking out of you. Any one
would think that it was an old, criminal thief you were instructing,
instead of a bit of a child that'll be growing out of his wildness in
no time. Come across to me, child, come over to your mother, my lamb."

That night, when his father got into bed, he prodded his foot against
something under the sheets. Investigation discovered a brown paper bag
at the end of the bed. A further search revealed a wasp's nest, inside
of which there was an hundred angry wasps blazing for combat. His
father left the room with more expedition than decency. He did not
stop to put on as much as his hat. He fled to the stream which ran
through the meadow at the back of their house, and lay down in it, and
in two seconds there was more bad language than water in the stream.
Every time he lifted his head for air the wasps flew at him with their
tails curled. They kept him there for half an hour, and in that time
he laid in the seeds of more rheumatism than could be cured in two
lifetimes.

When he returned home he found his wife lying on the floor with a
blanket wrapped about her head, groaning by instinct, for she was
senseless.

Her face had disappeared. There was nothing where it had been but
poisoned lumps. A few days later it was found that she was blind of
one eye, and there was danger of erysipelas setting in.

The boy could not be found for some time, but a neighbour, observing a
stone come from nowhere in particular and hit a cat, located the first
cause in a ditch. He brought the boy home, and grabbed his father just
in time to prevent murder being done.

It was soon found that the only thing which eased the restless moaning
woman was the touch of her son. All her unmanageable, delirious
thoughts centred on him--

"Sure he's only a boy; beating never did good to anything. Give him a
chance now for wouldn't a child be a bit wild anyhow. You will be a
good boy, won't you? Come to your mother, my lamb."

So the lad grew, from twelve to fifteen, from fifteen to twenty. Soon
he attained to manhood. To his mother he seemed to have leaped in a
day from the careless, prattling babe to the responsibly-whiskered
miracle at whom mothers sit and laugh in secret delight. This
towering, big-footed, hairy person! was he really the little boy who
used to hide in her skirts when his father scowled? She had only to
close her eyes and she could feel again a pair of little hands clawing
at her breast, sore from the violent industry of soft, wee lips.

So he grew. Breeches that were big became small. Bony wrists were
continually pushing out of coat cuffs. His feet would burst out of his
boots. He grew out of everything but one. A man may outgrow his
breeches, he cannot outgrow his nature: his body is never too big or
too small to hold that.

Every living thing in the neighbourhood knew him. When a cat saw him
coming it climbed a tree and tried to look as much like a lump of wood
as it could. When a dog heard his step it tucked its tail out of sight
and sought for a hole in the hedge. The birds knew he carried stones
in his pockets. No tree cast so black a shadow in the sunlight as he
did. There were stories of a bottle of paraffin oil and a cat that
screeched in flames. Folk told of a maltreated dog that pointed its
nose to heaven and bayed a curse against humanity until a terrified man
battered it to death with a shovel. No one knew who did it, but every
one said there were only two living hearts capable of these
iniquities--one belonged to the devil, the other to our young man, and
they acquitted Satan of the deeds.

The owner of the dog swore by the beasts in the field and the stars in
the sky that he would tear the throat of the man who had injured his
beast.

The father drove his one-eyed wife from the house, and went with her to
live elsewhere; but she left him and went back to her son, and her
husband forswore the twain.

When women saw him in the road they got past him with their breath
hissing through their teeth in fear. When men passed him they did it
warily, with their fists clenched and their eyes alert. He was shunned
by every one. The strength of his arms also was a thing to be afraid
of, and in the world there was but two welcomes for him, one from his
mother, the other from an old, grey rat that slept in his breast--

"Sure, you're all against him," his mother would say. "Why don't you
give the boy a chance? It's only the hot blood of youth that's working
in him--and he never did it either. Look how kind he is to me! never
the bad word or the hard look! Ye black hearts that blame my boy, look
among yourselves for the villain. No matter who is against you, come
to your mother, my lamb."

He was found one day at the foot of the cliff with his neck broken.
Some said that he had slipped and fallen, some said he had committed
suicide, other some pursed their lips tightly and said nothing. All
were relieved that he was gone, saving his mother only, she mourned for
her only son, and wept bitterly, refusing to be comforted until she
died.


III

She had begun to get thin. Her face was growing sharp and peaked. The
steady curve of her cheek had become a little indeterminate. Her chin
had begun to sag and her eyes to look a little weary. But she had not
observed these things, for we do not notice ourselves very much until
some other person thinks we are worthy of observation and tells us so;
and these changes are so gradual and tiny that we seldom observe them
until we awaken for a moment or two in our middle age and then we get
ready to fall asleep again.

When her uncle died, the solicitors who had administered his will handed
her a small sum of money and intimated that from that date she must hew
out her own path in life, and as she had most of the household furniture
of her late uncle at her disposal, she decided to let lodgings. Setting
about that end with all possible expedition she finished writing
"apartments to let" on a square of pasteboard, and, having placed it
prominently in a window, she folded her mittened hands and sat down with
some trepidation to await the advent of a lodger.

He came in the night time with the stars and the moon. He was running
like a youthful god, she thought, for her mind had not yet been weaned
from certain vanities, and she could not see that a gigantic policeman
was in his wake, tracking him with elephantine bounds, and now and again
snatching a gasp from hurry to blow furious warnings on a whistle.

It was the sound of the whistle which opened her eyes through her ears.
She went to the door and saw him coming framed in the moonlight, his arms
pressed tightly to his sides, his head well up and his feet kicking a
mile a minute on the pavement. Behind him the whistle shrilled with
angry alarm, and the thunder of monumental feet came near as the
policeman sprinted in majesty.

As the lodger ran she looked at him. He was a long-legged, young man
with a pleasant, clean-shaven face. His eyes met hers, and, although he
grinned anxiously, she saw that he was frightened. That frightened smile
gripped her and she panted noiselessly, "Oh, run, run!"

As he drew level he fixed his gaze on her, and, stopping suddenly, he
ducked under her arm and was inside the house in a twinkling.

The poor lady's inside curled up in fear and had started to uncurl in
screams when she felt a hand laid gently on her arm, and, "Don't make a
noise, or I'm caught," said a voice, whereupon, and with exceeding
difficulty, she closed her mouth while the scream went sizzling through
her teeth in little gasps. But now the enemy appeared round the corner,
tooting incessantly on his whistle, and whacking sparks from the
cobblestones as he ran. Behind her she could hear the laboured breathing
of a spent runner. The lodger was kneeling at her skirts: he caught her
hand and pressed his face against it entreatingly--

The policeman drew near--

"Did you see a fellow skedaddling along here, ma'am?" said he.

She hesitated for only a moment and then, pointing to a laneway opposite,
replied--

"He went up there."

"Thank you, ma'am," said the policeman with a genial smile, and he
sprinted up the laneway whistling cheerily.

She turned to the lodger--

"You had better go now," said she.

He looked at her ruefully and hesitated--

"If I go now," he replied, "I'll be caught and get a month. I'll have to
eat skilly, you know, and pick oakum, and get my hair cut."

She looked at his hair--it was brown and wavy, just at his ears it
crisped into tiny curls, and she thought it would be a great pity to cut
it. He bore her scrutiny well, with just a trifle of embarrassment and a
shyly humorous eye--

"You are the kindest woman I ever met," said he, "and I'll never forget
you as long as I live. I'll go away now because I wouldn't like to get
you into trouble for helping me."

"What did you do?" she faltered.

"I got into a fight with another man," he replied, "and while we were
hammering each other the policeman came up. He was going to arrest me,
and, before I knew what I was doing, I knocked him down."

She shook her head--

"You should not have done that. That was very wrong, for he was only
doing his duty."

"I know it," he admitted, "but, do you see, I didn't know what I was
doing, and then, when I hit him, I got frightened and ran."

"You poor boy," said she tenderly.

"And somehow, when I saw you, I knew you wouldn't give me up: wasn't it
queer?"

What a nice, gentlemanly young fellow he is, she thought.

"But, of course, I cannot be trespassing on your kindness any longer," he
continued, "so I'll leave at once, and if ever I get the chance to repay
your kindness to a stranger----"

"Perhaps," said she, "it might not be quite safe for you to go yet. Come
inside and I will give you a cup of tea. You must be worn out with the
excitement and the danger. Why, you are shaking all over: a cup of tea
will steady your nerves and give him time to stop looking for you."

"Perhaps," said he, "if I turned my coat inside out and turned my
trousers up, they wouldn't notice me."

"We will talk it over," she replied with a wise nod.

That was how the lodger came. He told her his name and his
employment--he was a bookmaker's clerk. He brought his luggage,
consisting mostly of neckties, to her house the following day from his
former lodgings--

"Had a terrible time getting away from them," said he. "They rather
liked me, you know, and couldn't make out why I wanted to leave."

"As if you weren't quite free to do as you wished," quoth his indignant
new landlady.

"And then, when they found I would go, they made me pay two weeks' rent
in lieu of notice--mean, wasn't it?"

"The low people," she replied. "I will not ask you to pay anything this
week."

He put his bandbox on the ground, and shook hands with her--

"You are a brick," said he, "the last and the biggest of them. There
isn't the like of you in this or any other world, and never was and never
will be, world without end, amen."

"Oh, don't say that," said she shyly.

"I will," he replied, "for it's the truth. I'll hire a sandwichman to
stop people in the street and tell it to them. I'll get a week's
engagement at the theatre and sing it from the stage. I'll make up a
poem about your goodness. I don't know what to do to thank you. Do you
see, if I had to pay you now I'd have to pawn something, and I really
believe I have pawned everything they'd lend on to get the money for that
two weeks' rent. I'm broke until Friday, that's my pay day, but that
night I'll come home with my wages piled up on a cart."

"I can lend you a few shillings until then," said she laughing.

"Oh, no," said he. "It's not fair. I couldn't do that," but he could.

Well the light of the world shone out of the lodger. He was like a sea
breeze in a soap factory. When he awakened in the morning he whistled.
When he came down to breakfast he sang. When he came home in the evening
he danced. He had an amazing store of vitality: from the highest hair on
the top of his head down to his heels he was alive. His average language
was packed with jokes and wonderful curses. He was as chatty as a girl,
as good-humoured as a dog, as unconscious as a kitten--and she knew
nothing at all of men, except, perhaps, that they wore trousers and were
not girls. The only man with whom she had ever come in contact was her
uncle, and he might have been described as a sniffy old man with a cold;
a blend of gruel and grunt, living in an atmosphere of ointment and pills
and patent medicine advertisements--and, behold, she was living in
unthinkable intimacy with the youngest of young men; not an old,
ache-ridden, cough-racked, corn-footed septuagenarian, but a young,
fresh-faced, babbling rascal who laughed like the explosion of a
blunderbuss, roared songs as long as he was within earshot and danced
when he had nothing else to do. He used to show her how to do
hand-balances on the arm-chair, and while his boots were cocked up in the
air she would grow stiff with terror for his safety and for that of the
adjacent crockery.

The first morning she was giving him his breakfast, intending afterwards
to have her own meal in the kitchen, but he used language of such
strangely attractive ferocity, and glared at her with such a
humorously-mad eye that she was compelled to breakfast with him.

At night, when he returned to his tea, he swore by this and by that he
would die of hunger unless she ate with him; and then he told her all the
doings of the day, the bets that had been made and lost, and what sort of
a man his boss was, and he extolled the goodness of his friends, and
lectured on the vast iniquity of his enemies.

So things went until she was as intimate with him as if he had been her
brother. One night he came home just a trifle tipsy. She noted at last
what was wrong with him, and her heart yearned over the sinner. There
were five or six glasses inside of him, and each was the father of an
antic. He was an opera company, a gymnasium, and a menagerie at once,
all tinged with a certain hilarious unsteadiness which was fascinating.
But at last he got to his bed, which was more than she did.

She sat through the remainder of the night listening to the growth of her
half-starved heart. Oh, but there was a warmth there now. . . .!
Springtime and the moon in flood. What new leaves are these which the
trees put forth? Bird, singing at the peep of morn, where gottest thou
thy song? Be still, be still, thou stranger, fluttering a wing at my
breast. . . .

At the end of a month the gods moved, and when the gods move they trample
mortals in the dust.

The lodger's employer left Dublin for London, taking his clerk with him.

"Good-bye," said he.

"Good-bye," she replied, "and a pleasant journey to you."

And she took the card with "Apartments to Let" written upon it and placed
it carefully in the window, and then, folding her mittened hands, she sat
down to await the coming of another lodger, and as she sat she wept
bitterly.




THE TRIANGLE

Nothing is true for ever. A man and a fact will become equally
decrepit and will tumble in the same ditch, for truth is as mortal as
man, and both are outlived by the tortoise and the crow.

To say that two is company and three is a crowd is to make a very
temporary statement. After a short time satiety or use and wont has
crept sunderingly between the two, and, if they are any company at all,
they are bad company, who pray discreetly but passionately for the
crowd which is censured by the proverb.

If there had not been a serpent in the Garden of Eden it is likely that
the bored inhabitants of Paradise would have been forced to import one
from the outside wilds merely to relax the tedium of a too-sustained
duet. There ought to be a law that when a man and a woman have been
married for a year they should be forcibly separated for another year.
In the meantime, as our law-givers have no sense, we will continue to
invoke the serpent.

Mrs. Mary Morrissy had been married for quite a time to a gentleman of
respectable mentality, a sufficiency of money, and a surplus of
leisure--Good things? We would say so if we dared, for we are growing
old and suspicious of all appearances, and we do not easily recognize
what is bad or good. Beyond the social circumference we are confronted
with a debatable ground where good and bad are so merged that we cannot
distinguish the one from the other. To her husband's mental
attainments (from no precipitate, dizzy peaks did he stare; it was only
a tiny plain with the tiniest of hills in the centre) Mrs. Morrissy
extended a courtesy entirely unmixed with awe. For his money she
extended a hand which could still thrill to an unaccustomed
prodigality, but for his leisure (and it was illimitable) she could
find no possible use.

The quality of permanency in a transient world is terrifying. A
permanent husband is a bore, and we do not know what to do with him.
He cannot be put on a shelf. He cannot be hung on a nail. He will not
go out of the house. There is no escape from him, and he is always the
same. A smile of a certain dimension, moustaches of this inevitable
measurement, hands that waggle and flop like those of automata--these
are his. He eats this way and he drinks that way, and he will continue
to do so until he stiffens into the ultimate quietude. He snores on
this note, he laughs on that, dissonant, unescapeable, unchanging.
This is the way he walks, and he does not know how to run. A
predictable beast indeed! He is known inside and out, catalogued,
ticketed, and he cannot be packed away.

Mrs. Morrissy did not yet commune with herself about it, but if her
grievance was anonymous it was not unknown. There is a back-door to
every mind as to every house, and although she refused it house-room,
the knowledge sat on her very hearthstone whistling for recognition.

Indeed, she could not look anywhere without seeing her husband. He was
included in every landscape. His moustaches and the sun rose together.
His pyjamas dawned with the moon. When the sea roared so did he, and
he whispered with the river and the wind. He was in the picture but
was out of drawing. He was in the song but was out of tune. He
agitated her dully, surreptitiously, unceasingly. She questioned of
space in a whisper, "Are we glued together?" said she. There was a bee
in a flower, a burly rascal who did not care a rap for any one: he sat
enjoying himself in a scented and gorgeous palace, and in him she
confided:

"If," said she to the bee, "if that man doesn't stop talking to me I'll
kick him. I'll stick a pin in him if he does not go out for a walk."

She grew desperately nervous. She was afraid that if she looked at him
any longer she would see him. To-morrow, she thought, I may notice
that he is a short, fat man in spectacles, and that will be the end of
everything. But the end of everything is also the beginning of
everything, and so she was one half in fear and the other half in hope.
A little more and she would hate him, and would begin the world again
with the same little hope and the same little despair for her meagre
capital.

She had already elaborated a theory that man was intended to work, and
that male sloth was offensive to Providence and should be forbidden by
the law. At times her tongue thrilled, silently as yet, to certain
dicta of the experienced Aunt who had superintended her youth, to the
intent that a lazy man is a nuisance to himself and to everybody else;
and, at last, she disguised this saying as an anecdote and repeated it
pleasantly to her husband.

He received it coldly, pondered it with disfavour, and dismissed it by
arguing that her Aunt had whiskers, that a whiskered female is a freak,
and that the intellectual exercises of a freak are---- He lifted his
eyebrows and his shoulders. He brushed her Aunt from the tips of his
fingers and blew her delicately beyond good manners and the mode.

But time began to hang heavily on both. The intellectual antics of a
leisured man become at last wearisome; his methods of thought, by mere
familiarity, grow distasteful; the time comes when all the arguments
are finished, there is nothing more to be said on any subject, and
boredom, without even the covering, apologetic hand, yawns and yawns
and cannot be appeased. Thereupon two cease to be company, and even a
serpent would be greeted as a cheery and timely visitor. Dismal
indeed, and not infrequent, is that time, and the vista therefrom is a
long, dull yawn stretching to the horizon and the grave. If at any
time we do revalue the values, let us write it down that the person who
makes us yawn is a criminal knave, and then we will abolish matrimony
and read Plato again.

The serpent arrived one morning hard on Mrs. Morrissy's pathetic
pressure. It had three large trunks, a toy terrier, and a volume of
verse. The trunks contained dresses, the dog insects, and the book
emotion--a sufficiently enlivening trilogy! Miss Sarah O'Malley wore
the dresses in exuberant rotation, Mr. Morrissy read the emotional
poetry with great admiration, Mrs. Morrissy made friends with the dog,
and life at once became complex and joyful.

Mr. Morrissy, exhilarated by the emotional poetry, drew, with an
instinct too human to be censured, more and more in the direction of
his wife's cousin, and that lady, having a liking for comedy, observed
the agile posturings of the gentleman on a verbal summit up and down
and around which he flung himself with equal dexterity and
satisfaction--crudely, he made puns--and the two were further thrown
together by the enforced absences of Mrs. Morrissy, into a privacy more
than sealed, by reason of the attentions of a dog who would climb to
her lap, and there, with an angry nose, put to no more than temporary
rout the nimble guests of his jacket. Shortly Mrs. Morrissy began to
look upon the toy terrier with a meditative eye.

It was from one of these, now periodical, retreats that Mrs. Morrissy
first observed the rapt attitude of her husband, and, instantly, life
for her became bounding, plentiful, and engrossing.

There is no satisfaction in owning that which nobody else covets. Our
silver is no more than second-hand, tarnished metal until some one else
speaks of it in terms of envy. Our husbands are barely tolerable until
a lady friend has endeavoured to abstract their cloying attentions.
Then only do we comprehend that our possessions are unique, beautiful,
well worth guarding.

Nobody has yet pointed out that there is an eighth sense; and yet the
sense of property is more valuable and more detestable than all the
others in combination. The person who owns something is civilised. It
is man's escape from wolf and monkeydom. It is individuality at last,
or the promise of it, while those other ownerless people must remain
either beasts of prey or beasts of burden, grinning with ineffective
teeth, or bowing stupid heads for their masters' loads, and all begging
humbly for last straws and getting them.

Under a sufficiently equable exterior Mrs. Morrissy's blood was pulsing
with greater activity than had ever moved it before. It raced! It
flew! At times the tide of it thudded to her head, boomed in her ears,
surged in fierce waves against her eyes. Her brain moved with a
complexity which would have surprised her had she been capable of
remarking upon it. Plot and counterplot! She wove webs horrid as a
spider's. She became, without knowing it, a mistress of psychology.
She dissected motions and motives. She builded theories precariously
upon an eyelash. She pondered and weighed the turning of a head, the
handing of a sugar-bowl. She read treason in a laugh, assignations in
a song, villainy in a new dress. Deeper and darker things! Profound
and vicious depths plunging stark to where the devil lodged in
darknesses too dusky for registration! She looked so steadily on these
gulfs and murks that at last she could see anything she wished to see;
and always, when times were critical, when this and that, abominations
indescribable, were separate by no more than a pin's point, she must
retire from her watch (alas for a too-sensitive nature!) to chase the
enemies of a dog upon which, more than ever, she fixed a meditative eye.

To get that woman out of the house became a pressing necessity. Her
cousin carried with her a baleful atmosphere. She moved cloudy with
doubt. There was a diabolic aura about her face, and her hair was red!
These things were patent. Was one blind or a fool? A straw will
reveal the wind, so will an eyelash, a smile, the carriage of a dress.
Ankles also! One saw too much of them. Let it be said then. Teeth
and neck were bared too often and too broadly. If modesty was indeed
more than a name, then here it was outraged. Shame too! was it only a
word? Does one do this and that without even a blush? Even vice
should have its good manners, its own decent retirements. If there is
nothing else let there be breeding! But at this thing the world might
look and understand and censure if it were not brass-browed and stupid.
Sneak! Traitress! Serpent! Oh, Serpent! do you slip into our very
Eden? looping your sly coils across our flowers, trailing over our beds
of narcissus and our budding rose, crawling into our secret arbours and
whispering-places and nests of happiness! Do you flaunt and sway your
crested head with a new hat on it every day? Oh, that my Aunt were
here, with the dragon's teeth, and the red breath, and whiskers to
match! Here Mrs. Morrissy jumped as if she had been bitten (as indeed
she had been) and retired precipitately, eyeing the small dog that
frisked about her with an eye almost petrified with meditation.

To get that woman out of the house quickly and without scandal. Not to
let her know for a moment, for the blink and twitter of an eyelid, of
her triumph. To eject her with ignominy, retaining one's own dignity
in the meantime. Never to let her dream of an uneasiness that might
have screamed, an anger that could have bitten and scratched and been
happy in the primitive exercise. Was such a task beyond her adequacy?

Below in the garden the late sun slanted upon her husband, as with
declamatory hands and intense brows he chanted emotional poetry, ready
himself on the slope of opportunity to roll into verses from his own
resources. He criticised, with agile misconception, the inner meaning,
the involved, hard-hidden heart of the poet; and the serpent sat before
him and nodded. She smiled enchantments at him, and allurements, and
subtle, subtle disagreements. On the grass at their feet the toy
terrier bounded from his slumbers and curved an imperative and furious
hind-leg in the direction of his ear.

Mrs. Morrissy called the dog, and it followed her into the house,
frisking joyously. From the kitchen she procured a small basket, and
into this she packed some old cloths and pieces of biscuit. Then she
picked up the terrier, cuffed it on both sides of the head, popped it
into the basket, tucked its humbly-agitated tail under its abject ribs,
closed the basket, and fastened it with a skewer. She next addressed a
label to her cousin's home, tied it to the basket, and despatched a
servant with it to the railway-station, instructing her that it should
be paid for on delivery.

At breakfast the following morning her cousin wondered audibly why her
little, weeny, tiny pet was not coming for its brecky.

Mrs. Morrissy, with a smile of infinite sweetness, suggested that Miss
O'Malley's father would surely feed the brute when it arrived. "It was
a filthy little beast," said she brightly; and she pushed the
toast-rack closer to her husband.

There followed a silence which drowsed and buzzed to eternity, and
during which Mr. Morrissy's curled moustaches straightened and grew
limp and drooped. An edge of ice stiffened around Miss O'Malley.
Incredulity, frozen and wan, thawed into swift comprehension and
dismay, lit a flame in her cheeks, throbbed burningly at the lobes of
her ears, spread magnetic and prickling over her whole stung body, and
ebbed and froze again to immobility. She opposed her cousin's kind
eyes with a stony brow.

"I think," said she rising, "that I had better see to my packing."

"Must you go?" said Mrs. Morrissy, with courteous unconcern, and she
helped herself to cream. Her husband glared insanely at a pat of
butter, and tried to look like some one who was somewhere else.

Miss O'Malley closed the door behind her with extreme gentleness.

So the matter lay. But the position was unchanged. For a little time
peace would reign in that household, but the same driving necessity
remained, and before long another, and perhaps more virulent, serpent
would have to be requisitioned for the assuagement of those urgent
woes. A man's moustaches will arise with the sun; not Joshua could
constrain them to the pillow after the lark had sung reveille. A woman
will sit pitilessly at the breakfast table however the male eye may
shift and quail. It is the business and the art of life to degrade
permanencies. Fluidity is existence, there is no other, and for ever
the chief attraction of Paradise must be that there is a serpent in it
to keep it lively and wholesome. Lacking the serpent we are no longer
in Paradise, we are at home, and our sole entertainment is to yawn when
we wish to.




  THE DAISIES

  In the scented bud of the morning--O,
  When the windy grass went rippling far,
  I saw my dear one walking slow
  In the field where the daisies are.

  We did not laugh and we did not speak
  As we wandered happily to and fro;
  I kissed my dear on either cheek
  In the bud of the morning--O.

  A lark sang up from the breezy land,
  A lark sang down from a cloud afar,
  And she and I went hand in hand
  In the field where the daisies are.




THREE ANGRY PEOPLE

I

He sat cross-legged on the roadside beside a heap of stones, and with
slow regularity his hammer swung up and down, cracking a stone into
small pieces at each descent. But his heart was not in the work. He
hit whatever stone chanced to be nearest. There was no cunning
selection in his hammer, nor any of these oddities of stroke which a
curious and interested worker would have essayed for the mere trial of
his artistry.

He was not difficult to become acquainted with, and, after a little
conversation, I discovered that all the sorrows of the world were
sagging from his shoulders. Everything he had ever done was wrong, he
said. Everything that people had done to him was wrong, that he
affirmed; nor had he any hope that matters would mend, for life was
poisoned at the fountain-head and there was no justice anywhere.
Justice! he raised his eyebrows with the horrid stare of a man who
searches for apparitions; he lowered them again to the bored blink of
one who will not believe in apparitions even though he see them--there
was not even fairness! Perhaps (and his bearing was mildly tolerant),
perhaps some people believed there was fairness, but he had his share
of days to count by and remember. Forty-nine years of here and there,
and in and out, and up and down; walking all kinds of roads in all
kinds of weathers; meeting this sort of person and that sort, and many
an adventure that came and passed away without any good to it--"and
now," said he sternly, "I am breaking stones on a bye-way."

"A bye-road such as this," said I, "has very few travellers, and it may
prove a happy enough retreat."

"Or a hiding-place," said he gloomily.

We sat quietly for a few moments--

"Is there no way of being happy?" said I.

"How could you be happy if you have not got what you want?" and he
thumped solidly with his hammer.

"What do you want?" I asked.

"Many a thing," said he, "many a thing."

I squatted on the ground in front of him, and he continued--

"You that are always travelling, did you ever meet a contented person
in all your travels?"

"Yes," said I, "I met a man yesterday, three hills away from here, and
he told me he was happy."

"Maybe he wasn't a poor man?"

"I asked him that, and he said he had enough to be going on with."

"I wonder what he had."

"I wondered too, and he told me.--He said that he had a wife, a son, an
apple-tree, and a fiddle.

"He said, that his wife was dumb, his son was deaf, his apple-tree was
barren, and his fiddle was broken."

"It didn't take a lot to satisfy that man."

"And he said, that these things, being the way they were, gave him no
trouble attending on them, and so he was left with plenty of time for
himself."

"I think the man you are telling me about was a joker; maybe you are a
joker yourself for that matter."

"Tell me," said I, "the sort of things a person should want, for I am a
young man, and everything one learns is so much to the good."

He rested his hammer and stared sideways down the road, and he remained
so, pursing and relaxing his lips, for a little while. At last he said
in a low voice--

"A person wants respect from other people.--If he doesn't get that,
what does he signify more than a goat or a badger? We live by what
folk think of us, and if they speak badly of a man doesn't that finish
him for ever?"

"Do people speak well of you?" I asked.

"They speak badly of me," said he, "and the way I am now is this, that
I wouldn't have them say a good word of me at all."

"Would you tell me why the people speak badly of you?"

"You are travelling down the road," said he, "and I am staying where I
am. We never met before in all the years, and we may never meet again,
and so I'll tell you what is in my mind.--A person that has neighbours
will have either friends or enemies, and it's likely enough that he'll
have the last unless he has a meek spirit. And it's the same way with
a man that's married, or a man that has a brother. For the neighbours
will spy on you from dawn to dark, and talk about you in every place,
and a wife will try to rule you in the house and out of the house until
you are badgered to a skeleton, and a brother will ask you to give him
whatever thing you value most in the world."

He remained silent for a few minutes, with his hammer eased on his
knee, and then, in a more heated strain, he continued--

"These are three things a man doesn't like--he doesn't like to be spied
on, and he doesn't like to be ruled and regulated, and he doesn't like
to be asked for a thing he wants himself. And, whether he lets himself
be spied on or not, he'll be talked about, and in any case he'll be
made out to be a queer man; and if he lets his wife rule him he'll be
scorned and laughed at, and if he doesn't let her rule him he'll be
called a rough man; and if he once gives to his brother he will have to
keep on giving for ever, and if he doesn't give in at all he'll get the
bad name and the sour look as he goes about his business."

"You have bad neighbours, indeed," said I.

"I'd call them that."

"And a brother that would ask you for a thing you wanted yourself
wouldn't be a decent man."

"He would not."

"Tell me," said I, "what kind of a wife have you?"

"She's the same as any one else's wife to look at, but I fancy the
other women must be different to live with."

"Why do you say that?"

"Because you can hear men laughing and singing in every public-house
that you'd go into, and they wouldn't do that if their wives were hard
to live with, for nobody could stand a bad comrade. A good wife, a
good brother, a good neighbour--these are three good things, but you
don't find them lying in every ditch."

"If you went to a ditch for your wife----!" said I.

He pursed up his lips at me.

"I think," said I, "that you need not mind the neighbours so very much
for no one can spy on you but yourself. If your mind was in a glass
case instead of in a head it would be different; and no one can really
rule and regulate you but yourself, and that's well worth doing."

"Different people," said he shortly, "are made differently."

"Maybe," said I, "your wife would be a good wife to some other husband,
and your brother might be decent enough if he had a different brother."

He wrinkled up his eyes and looked at me very steadily--

"I'll be saying good-bye to you, young man," said he, and he raised his
hammer again and began to beat solemnly on the stones.

I stood by him for a few minutes, but as he neither spoke nor looked at
me again I turned to my own path intending to strike Dublin by the Paps
of Dana and the long slopes beyond them.


II

One day he chucked his job, put up his tools, told the boss he could do
this and that, called hurroo to the boys, and sauntered out of the place
with a great deal of dignity and one week's wages in cash.

There were many reasons why he should not have quitted his work, not the
lightest of them being that the food of a wife and family depended on his
sticking to it, but a person who has a temper cannot be expected to have
everything else.

Nothing makes a man feel better than telling his employer that he and his
job can go bark at one another. It is the dream of a great many people,
and were it not for the glamour of that idea most folk would commit
suicide through sheer disgust. Getting the "sack" is an experience which
wearies after the first time. Giving the sack is a felicity granted only
to a few people. To go home to one's wife with the information that you
have been discharged is an adventure which one does not wish to repeat,
but to go home and hand her thirty shillings with the statement that you
have discharged yourself is not one of the pleasantest ways of passing
time.

His wife's habits were as uncertain as her temper, but not as bad. She
had a hot tongue, a red head, a quick fist and a big family--ingredients
to compose a peppery dish. They had been only a short time married when
she gave her husband to understand that there was to be only one head of
that household, and that would not be he. He fought fiercely for a
position on the executive but he did not get it. His voice in the
household economy, which had commenced with the lordly "Let this be
done," concluded in the timidly blustering "All right, have it your own
way."

Furthermore, the theory that a woman is helpmate to a man was repugnant
to her. She believed and asserted that a man had to be managed, and she
had several maxims to which she often gave forcible and contemptuous
utterance--

"Let a man go his own road to-day and he will be shaking hands with the
devil to-morrow.

"Give a man his head and he'll lose it.

"Whiskers and sense were never found in the same patch.

"There's more brains in one woman's finger than there is in the
congregated craniums of a battalion of men folk.

"Where there is two men there's one fight. Where there's three there's a
drinking match, two fights and a fine to be paid."

But while advocating peace at any price and a tax on muscles that were
bigger than a fly's knuckle she was herself a warrior of the breed of
Finn and strong enough to scare a pugilist. When she was angry her
family got over the garden wall, her husband first. She did not think
very much of him, and she told him so, but he was sufficient of a man not
to believe her.

For a long time he had been a dissatisfied person, leading a grumpy
existence which was only made bearable by gusts of solitary blasphemy.
When a man curses openly he is healthy enough, but when he takes to
either swearing or drinking in secret then he has travelled almost beyond
redemption point.

So behold our man knocking at the door, still warmed by the fray with his
late employer, but with the first tremors of fear beginning to tatter up
and down his spine.

His wife opened the door herself. She was engaged in cleaning the place,
a duty in which she was by no means remiss, one of the prime points in
her philosophy being that a house was not clean until one's food could be
eaten off the floor. She was a big comely woman, but at the moment she
did not look dainty. A long wisp of red hair came looping down on her
shoulders. A smear of soot toned down the roses of her cheek, her arms
were smothered in soap suds, and the fact that she was wearing a pair of
her husband's boots added nothing to her attractions.

When she saw her husband standing in the doorway at this unaccustomed
hour she was a little taken aback, but, scenting trouble, she at once
opened the attack--

"What in the name of heaven brings you here at this hour of the day, and
the place upset the way it is? Don't walk on the soap, man, haven't you
got eyes in your head?"

"I'm not walking on the soap with my head," he retorted, "if I was I'd
see it, and if it wasn't on the floor it wouldn't be tripping folk up. A
nice thing it is that a man can't come into his own house without being
set slipping and sliding like an acrobat on an iceberg."

"And," cried his wife, "if I kept the soap locked up it's the nice, clean
house you'd have to come into. Not that you'd mind if the place was
dirty, I'll say that much for you, for what one is reared to one likes,
and what is natural is pleasant. But I got a different rearing let me
tell you, and while I'm in it I'll have the clean house no matter who
wants the dirty one."

"You will so," said he, looking at the soapy water for a place to walk on.

"Can't you be coming in then, and not stand there framed in the doorway,
gawking like a fool at a miracle."

"I'll sail across if you'll get a canal boat or a raft," said he, "or, if
the children are kept out of sight, I'll strip, ma'm, and swim for it."

His wife regarded him with steady gloom.

"If you took the smallest interest in your home," said she, "and were
less set on gallivanting about the country, going to the Lord knows
where, with the Lord knows who, you'd know that the children were away in
school at this hour. Nice indeed the places you visit and the company
you keep, if the truth were known--walk across it, man, and wipe your
feet on the kitchen mat."

So he walked into the kitchen, and sat down, and, as he sat, the last
remnants of his courage trembled down into his boots and evaporated.

His wife came in after him--she drooped a speculative eye on her lord--

"You didn't say what brought you home so early," said she.

When a hard thing has to be done the quickest way is generally the best
way. It is like the morning bath--don't ruminate, jump in, for the
longer you wait the more dubious you get, and the tub begins to look
arctic and repellent.

Some such philosophy as this dictated his attitude. He lugged out his
week's wages, slapped it on the table, and said--

"I've got the sack."

Then he stretched his legs out, pushed his fists deep into his trouser
pockets, and waited.

His wife sat down too, slowly and with great care, and she stared in
silence at her husband--

"Do you tell me you have lost your employment?" said she in a quiet voice.

"I do, then," said he. "I chucked it myself. I told old Whiskers that
he could go and boil his job and his head together and sell the soup for
cat-lap."

"You threw up your situation yourself."

"You've got the truth of it, ma'm," he rejoined.

"Maybe you'd be telling me what you did the like of that for?"

"Because," said he, "I'm a man and not a mouse. Because I don't want to
be at the beck and call of every dog and devil that has a bit more money
than I have--a man has got to be a man sometimes," he growled.

"Sure, you're telling the truth," said his wife, nodding her head at him.
"A man should be a man sometimes. It's the pity of the world that he
can't be a man always: and, indeed, it's the hard thing for a woman to
tell herself that the man she has got isn't a man at all, but a big fool
with no more wit than a boy."

Now this was the first time he had found his wife take trouble lying
down. As a rule she was readier for a fight than he was. She jumped
into a row with the alacrity of a dog: and the change worked on him. He
looked at her listless hands, and the sight of those powerful organs
hanging so powerlessly wrought on him. Women often forget that their
weakness is really their strength. The weakest things in the world are
by a queer paradox always the strongest. The toughest stone will wear
away under the dropping of water, a mushroom will lift a rock on its
delicate head, a child will make its father work for it. So the too
capable woman will always have a baby to nurse, and that baby will be her
husband. If she buttress her womanhood too much she saps his manhood.
Let her love all she can and never stint that blessing, but a woman
cannot often be obeyed and loved at the same time. A man cannot obey a
woman constantly and retain his self-respect: the muscles of his arms
reproach him if he does, and the man with his self-respect gone is a man
with a grudge, he will learn to hate the agent who brought him low. A
day may come when he will rise and beat her in self-defence, with his
fists if he is sufficiently brutalised, some subtler, but no less
efficient, weapon if his manhood refuses to be degraded--and this was our
case. His wife had grabbed the reins and driven the matrimonial coach:
driven it well, that is true, but the driver, by right of precedent, had
sat by hurt and angry, and at last, in an endeavour to prove his manhood
among men, he had damned his employer's self and work, although in
reality all his fury was directed against the mother of his children. He
threw up his work, and the semi-conscious thought that went home with him
was--"Now she will be sorry. If she must do everything let her earn the
bread."

The woman knew what poverty meant, and she had four young children. It
was the thought of these helpless ones crying with hunger (she could hear
them already, her ears were dinned with their hungry lamentation) that
took the fibre out of her arms, and left her without any fight. She
could only sit and look with wretched eyes on the man whom she had been
demoralising, and, for the first time since he knew her, the tears came,
and the poor woman laid her head on the kitchen table and wept.

He was astonished, he was dismayed, but he could not stand her tears: he
ran to her--the first time he ever did run to her--

"Sure, darling," said he, "is it crying you are? What would you be doing
that for? If I've lost one job I can get another. I'm not afraid of
work, and I know how to do it. I'll get something to do at once, if it's
only wheeling a handcart, or selling cockles in public-houses. Wisha,
dry your eyes--they're as pretty as they ever were," said he, trying to
look at them, while his wife, with a strange shyness, would not let him
see, for she felt that there was a strange man with her, some one she did
not know. That was a man's hand on her shoulder, and she had never felt
a man's hand before, as long as she was married.

"I'll go out at once," said he, "and when I come in to-night I'll have a
job if I have to bang it out of some one with a shovel."

He slapped on his hat, kicked the soap out of the way, tramped through
the water on the floor, and when at the door he turned again and came
back to kiss his wife, a form of caress which had long fallen into
desuetude, and so, out into the street, a man again.

When he had gone his wife returned to her scrubbing, and, as she worked
she smiled at something she was remembering, and, now and again, a bit of
a song came from lips that had scolded so much. Having finished her work
she spent nearly an hour at the looking-glass doing up her hair (grand
hair it was, too) with her ears listening for a footstep. Now and again
she would run to the pot to see were the potatoes doing all right--"The
children will be in shortly," said she, "and hungry to the bone, poor
dears."

But she was not thinking of the children. The warmth of a kiss was still
on her lips. Something in the back of her head was saying--"He will do
it again when he comes in."

And the second honeymoon was pleasanter than the first.


III

She was tall and angular. Her hair was red, and scarce, and untidy.
Her hands were large and packed all over with knuckles and her feet
would have turned inwards at the toes, only that she was aware of and
corrected their perversities.

She was sitting all alone, and did not look up as I approached--

"Tell me," said I, "why you have sat for more than an hour with your
eyes fixed on nothing, and your hands punching your lap?"

She looked at me for a fleeting instant, and then, looking away again,
she began to speak.--Her voice was pleasant enough, but it was so
strong that one fancied there were bones in it--

"I do not dislike women," said she, "but I think they seldom speak of
anything worth listening to, nor do they often do anything worth
looking at: they bore and depress me, and men do not."

"But," said I, "you have not explained why you thump your lap with your
fist?"

She proceeded--

"I do not hate women, nor do I love men. It was only that I did not
take much notice of the one, and that I liked being with the other,
for, as things are, there is very little life for a person except in
thinking. All our actions are so cumbered by laws and customs that we
cannot take a step beyond the ordinary without finding ourselves either
in gaol or in Coventry."

Having said this, she raised her bleak head and stared like an eagle
across the wastes.

After I had coughed twice I touched her arm, and said--

"Yes?"

"One must live," said she quickly. "I do not mean that we must eat and
sleep--these mechanical matters are settled for many of us, but life
consists in thinking, and nothing else, yet many people go from the
cradle to the grave without having lived differently from animals. I
do not want to be one of them. Their whole theory of life is
mechanical. They eat and drink. They invite each other to their
houses to eat and drink, and they use such speech as they are gifted
with in discussing their food and whatever other palpable occurrence
may have chanced to them in the day. It is a step, perhaps, towards
living, but it is still only one step removed from stagnation. They
have some interest in an occurrence, but how that occurrence happened,
and what will result from it does not exercise them in the least, and
these, which are knowledge and prophecy, are the only interesting
aspects of any event."

"But," said I, "you have not told me why you sit for a full hour
staring at vacancy, and thumping on your knee with your hand?"

She continued--.

"Sometimes one meets certain people who have sufficient of the divine
ferment in their heads to be called alive: they are almost always men.
We fly to them as to our own people. We abase ourselves before them in
happy humility. We crave to be allowed to live near them in order that
we may be assured that everything in the world is not nonsense and
machinery--and then, what do we find--?"

She paused, and turned a large fierce eye upon me.

"I do not know," said I, and I endeavoured vainly to look everywhere
but at her eye.

"We find always that they are married," said she, and, saying so, she
lapsed again to a tense and worried reflection.

"You have not told me," I insisted gently, "why you peer earnestly into
space, and thump at intervals upon your knee with the heel of your
fist?"

"These men," said she sternly, "are surrounded by their wives. They
are in gaol and their wives are their warders. You cannot go to them
without a permit. You may not speak to them without a listener. You
may not argue with them for fear of raising an alien and ridiculous
hostility. Scarcely can you even look at them without reproach.--How
then can we live, and how will the torch of life be kept alight?"

"I do not know," I murmured.

She turned her pale eye to me again.

"I am not beautiful," said she.

But there was just a tremor of doubt in her voice, so that the apparent
statement became packed with curiosity, and had all the quality of a
question.

I did not shrug my shoulder nor raise an eyebrow--

"You are very nice," I replied.

"I do not want to be beautiful," she continued severely. "Why should
I? I have no interest in such things. I am interested only in living,
and living is thinking; but I demand access to my fellows who are
alive. Perhaps, I did not pay those others enough attention. How
could I? They cannot think. They cannot speak. They make a
complicated verbal noise, but all I am able to translate from it is,
that a something called lip-salve can be bought in some particular shop
one penny cheaper than it can in a certain other shop. They will
twitter for hours about the way a piece of ribbon was stitched to a hat
which they saw in a tramcar. They agitate themselves wondering whether
a muff should be this size or that size?--I say, they depress me, and
if I do turn my back on them when men are present I am only acting
sensibly and justly. Why cannot they twitter to each other and let me
and other people alone?"

She turned to me again--

"I do not know," said I meekly.

"And," she continued, "the power they have; the amazing power they have
to annoy other folk. All kinds of sly impertinences, vulgar evasions,
and sneering misunderstandings. Why should such women be allowed to
take men into their captivity, to sequester, and gag, and restrain them
from those whom they would naturally be eager to meet?

"What," she continued fiercely, "had my hat to do with that woman, or
my frock?"

I nodded slowly and grievously, and repeated--

"What indeed?"

"A hat," said she, "is something to cover one's head from the rain, and
a frock is something to guard one's limbs from inclement weather.--To
that extent I am interested in these things: but they would put a hat
on my mind, and a black cloth on my understanding."

We sat in silence for a little time, while she surveyed the bleak
horizon as an eagle might.

"And when I call at their houses," said she, "their servants say 'Not
at home,' a lie, you know, and they close their doors on me."

She was silent again--

"I do not know what to do," said she.

"Is that," said I, "the reason why you beat your lap with your hand,
and stare abroad like a famished eagle?"

She turned quickly to me--

"What shall I do to open those doors?" said she.

"If I happened to be you," I replied, "I would cut off my hair, I'd buy
a man's clothes and wear them always, I'd call myself Harry or Tom; and
then I'd go wherever I pleased, and meet whoever I wanted to meet?"

She stared fixedly at herself in these garments, and under these
denominations--

"They would know I was not a man," said she gravely.

I looked at her figure--

"No person in the world would ever guess it," said I.

She arose from her seat. She clutched her reticule to her breast--

"I'll do it," said she, and she stalked gauntly across the fields.




THE THREEPENNY-PIECE

When Brien O'Brien died, people said that it did not matter very much,
because he would have died young in any case. He would have been
hanged, or his head would have been split in two halves with a hatchet,
or he would have tumbled down the cliff when he was drunk and been
smashed into jelly. Something like that was due to him, and everybody
likes to see a man get what he deserves to get.

But, as ethical writs cease to run when a man is dead, the neighbours
did not stay away from his wake. They came, and they said many
mitigating things across the body with the bandaged jaws and the sly
grin, and they reminded each other of this and that queer thing which
he had done, for his memory was crusted over with stories of wild,
laughable things, and other things which were wild but not laughable.

Meanwhile, he was dead, and one was at liberty to be a trifle sorry for
him. Further, he belonged to the O'Brien nation, a stock to whom
reverence was due. A stock not easily forgotten. The historic memory
could reconstruct forgotten glories of station and battle, of terrible
villainy and terrible saintliness, the pitiful, valorous, slow descent
to the degradation which was not yet wholly victorious. A great stock!
The O'Neills remembered it. The O'Tools and the MacSweeneys had
stories by the hundred of love and hate. The Burkes and the Geraldines
and the new strangers had memories also.

His family was left in the poorest way, but they were used to that, for
he had kept them as poor as he left them, or found them, for that
matter. They had shaken hands with Charity so often that they no
longer disliked the sallow-faced lady, and, so, certain small gifts
made by the neighbours were accepted, not very thankfully, but very
readily. These gifts were almost always in kind. A few eggs. A bag
of potatoes. A handful of meal. A couple of twists of tea--such like.

One of the visitors, however, moved by an extraordinary dejection,
slipped a silver threepenny-piece into the hand of Brien's little
daughter, Sheila, aged four years, and later on she did not like to ask
for it back again.

Little Sheila had been well trained by her father. She knew exactly
what should be done with money, and so, when nobody was looking, she
tip-toed to the coffin and slipped the threepenny-piece into Brien's
hand. That hand had never refused money when it was alive, it did not
reject it either when it was dead.

They buried him the next day.

He was called up for judgment the day after, and made his appearance
with a miscellaneous crowd of wretches, and there he again received
what was due to him. He was removed protesting and struggling to the
place decreed.

"Down," said Rhadamanthus, pointing with his great hand, and down he
went.

In the struggle he dropped the threepenny-piece, but he was so bustled
and heated that he did not observe his loss. He went down, far down,
out of sight, out of remembrance, to a howling, black gulf with others
of his unseen kind.

A young seraph, named Cuchulain, chancing to pass that way shortly
afterwards, saw the threepenny-piece peeping brightly from the rocks,
and he picked it up.

He looked at it in astonishment. He turned it over and over, this way
and that way. Examined it at the stretch of his arm, and peered
minutely at it from two inches distance--

"I have never in my life seen anything so beautifully wrought," said
he, and, having stowed it in his pouch along with some other trinkets,
he strolled homewards again through the massy gates.

It was not long until Brien discovered his loss, and, suddenly, through
the black region, his voice went mounting and brawling.

"I have been robbed," he yelled. "I have been robbed in heaven!"

Having begun to yell he did not stop. Sometimes he was simply angry
and made a noise. Sometimes he became sarcastic and would send his
query swirling upwards--

"Who stole the threepenny-bit?" he roared. He addressed the
surrounding black space--

"Who stole the last threepenny-bit of a poor man?"

Again and again his voice pealed upwards. The pains of his habitation
lost all their sting for him. His mind had nourishment and the heat
within him vanquished the fumes without. He had a grievance, a
righteous cause, he was buoyed and strengthened, nothing could silence
him. They tried ingenious devices, all kinds of complicated things,
but he paid no heed, and the tormentors were in despair.

"I hate these sinners from the kingdom of Kerry," said the Chief
Tormentor, and he sat moodily down on his own circular saw; and that
worried him also, for he was clad only in a loin cloth.

"I hate the entire Clan of the Gael," said he; "why cannot they send
them somewhere else?" and then he started practising again on Brien.

It was no use. Brien's query still blared upwards like the sound of
the great trump itself. It wakened and rung the rocky caverns,
screamed through fissure and funnel, and was battered and slung from
pinnacle to crag and up again. Worse! his companions in doom became
interested and took up the cry, until at last the uproar became so
appalling that the Master himself could not stand it.

"I have not had a wink of sleep for three nights," said that harassed
one, and he sent a special embassy to the powers.

Rhadamanthus was astonished when they arrived. His elbow was leaning
on his vast knee, and his heavy head rested on a hand that was acres
long, acres wide.

"What is all this about?" said he.

"The Master cannot go to sleep," said the spokesman of the embassy, and
he grinned as he said it, for it sounded queer even to himself.

"It is not necessary that he should sleep," said Rhadamanthus. "I have
never slept since time began, and I will never sleep until time is
over. But the complaint is curious. What has troubled your master?"

"Hell is turned upside down and inside out," said the fiend. "The
tormentors are weeping like little children. The principalities are
squatting on their hunkers doing nothing. The orders are running here
and there fighting each other. The styles are leaning against walls
shrugging their shoulders, and the damned are shouting and laughing and
have become callous to torment."

"It is not my business," said the judge.

"The sinners demand justice," said the spokesman.

"They've got it," said Rhadamanthus, "let them stew in it."

"They refuse to stew," replied the spokesman, wringing his hands.

Rhadamanthus sat up.

"It is an axiom in law," said he, "that however complicated an event
may be, there can never be more than one person at the extreme bottom
of it. Who is the person?"

"It is one Brien of the O'Brien nation, late of the kingdom of Kerry.
A bad one! He got the maximum punishment a week ago."

For the first time in his life Rhadamanthus was disturbed. He
scratched his head, and it was the first time he had ever done that
either.

"You say he got the maximum," said Rhadamanthus, "then it's a fix! I
have damned him for ever, and better or worse than that cannot be done.
It is none of my business," said he angrily, and he had the deputation
removed by force.

But that did not ease the trouble. The contagion spread until ten
million billions of voices were chanting in unison, and uncountable
multitudes were listening between their pangs.

"Who stole the threepenny-bit? Who stole the threepenny-bit?"

That was still their cry. Heaven rang with it as well as hell. Space
was filled with that rhythmic tumult. Chaos and empty Nox had a new
discord added to their elemental throes. Another memorial was drafted
below, showing that unless the missing coin was restored to its owner
hell would have to close its doors. There was a veiled menace in the
memorial also, for Clause 6 hinted that if hell was allowed to go by
the board heaven might find itself in some jeopardy thereafter.

The document was dispatched and considered. In consequence a
proclamation was sent through all the wards of Paradise, calling on
whatever person, archangel, seraph, cherub, or acolyte had found a
threepenny-piece since midday of the tenth of August then instant, that
the same person, archangel, seraph, cherub, or acolyte, should deliver
the said threepenny-piece to Rhadamanthus at his Court, and should
receive in return a free pardon and a receipt.

The coin was not delivered,

That young seraph, Cuchulain, walked about like a person who was
strange to himself. He was not tormented: he was angry. He frowned,
he cogitated and fumed. He drew one golden curl through his fingers
until it was lank and drooping; save the end only, that was still a
ripple of gold. He put the end in his mouth and strode moodily chewing
it. And every day his feet turned in the same direction--down the long
entrance boulevard, through the mighty gates, along the strip of carved
slabs, to that piled wilderness where Rhadamanthus sat monumentally.

Here delicately he went, sometimes with a hand outstretched to help his
foothold, standing for a space to think ere he jumped to a further
rock, balancing himself for a moment ere he leaped again. So he would
come to stand and stare gloomily upon the judge.

He would salute gravely, as was meet, and say, "God bless the work";
but Rhadamanthus never replied, save by a nod, for he was very busy.

Yet the judge did observe him, and would sometimes heave ponderous lids
to where he stood, and so, for a few seconds, they regarded each other
in an interval of that unceasing business.

Sometimes for a minute or two the young seraph Cuchulain would look
from the judge to the judged as they crouched back or strained forward,
the good and the bad all in the same tremble of fear, all unknowing
which way their doom might lead. They did not look at each other.
They looked at the judge high on his ebon throne, and they could not
look away from him. There were those who knew, guessed clearly their
doom; abashed and flaccid they sat, quaking. There were some who were
uncertain--rabbit-eyed these, not less quaking than the others, biting
at their knuckles as they peeped upwards. There were those hopeful,
yet searching fearfully backwards in the wilderness of memory, chasing
and weighing their sins; and these last, even when their bliss was
sealed and their steps set on an easy path, went faltering, not daring
to look around again, their ears strained to catch a--"Halt, miscreant!
this other is your way!"

So, day by day, he went to stand near the judge; and one day
Rhadamanthus, looking on him more intently, lifted his great hand and
pointed--

"Go you among those to be judged," said he.

For Rhadamanthus knew. It was his business to look deep into the heart
and the mind, to fish for secrets in the pools of being.

And the young seraph Cuchulain, still rolling his golden curl between
his lips, went obediently forward and set down his nodding plumes
between two who whimpered and stared and quaked.

When his turn came, Rhadamanthus eyed him intently for a long time--

"Well!" said Rhadamanthus.

The young seraph Cuchulain blew the curl of gold away from his mouth--

"Findings are keepings," said he loudly, and he closed his mouth and
stared very impertinently at the judge.

"It is to be given up," said the judge.

"Let them come and take it from me," said the seraph Cuchulain. And
suddenly (for these things are at the will of spirits) around his head
the lightnings span, and his hands were on the necks of thunders.

For the second time in his life Rhadamanthus was disturbed, again he
scratched his head--

"It's a fix," said he moodily. But in a moment he called to those
whose duty it was--

"Take him to this side," he roared.

And they advanced. But the seraph Cuchulain swung to meet them, and
his golden hair blazed and shrieked; and the thunders rolled at his
feet, and about him a bright network that hissed and stung--and those
who advanced turned haltingly backwards and ran screaming.

"It's a fix," said Rhadamanthus; and for a little time he stared
menacingly at the seraph Cuchulain.

But only for a little time. Suddenly he put his hands on the rests of
his throne and heaved upwards his terrific bulk. Never before had
Rhadamanthus stood from his ordained chair. He strode mightily forward
and in an instant had quelled that rebel. The thunders and lightnings
were but moonbeams and dew on that stony carcass. He seized the seraph
Cuchulain, lifted him to his breast as one lifts a sparrow, and tramped
back with him--

"Fetch me that other," said he, sternly, and he sat down.

Those whose duty it was sped swiftly downwards to find Brien of the
O'Brien nation; and while they were gone, all in vain the seraph
Cuchulain crushed flamy barbs against that bosom of doom. Now, indeed,
his golden locks were drooping and his plumes were broken and tossed;
but his fierce eye still glared courageously against the nipple of
Rhadamanthus.

Soon they brought Brien. He was a sight of woe--howling, naked as a
tree in winter, black as a tarred wall, carved and gashed, tattered in
all but his throat, wherewith, until one's ears rebelled, he bawled his
one demand.

But the sudden light struck him to a wondering silence, and the sight
of the judge holding the seraph Cuchulain like a limp flower to his
breast held him gaping--

"Bring him here," said Rhadamanthus.

And they brought him to the steps of the throne--

"You have lost a medal!" said Rhadamanthus. "This one has it."

Brien looked straitly at the seraph Cuchulain.

Rhadamanthus stood again, whirled his arm in an enormous arc, jerked,
and let go, and the seraph Cuchulain went swirling through space like a
slung stone--

"Go after him, Kerryman," said Rhadamanthus, stooping; and he seized
Brien by the leg, whirled him wide and out and far; dizzy, dizzy as a
swooping comet, and down, and down, and down.

Rhadamanthus seated himself. He motioned with his hand--

"Next," said he, coldly.

Down went the seraph Cuchulain, swirling in wide tumbles, scarcely
visible for quickness. Sometimes, with outstretched hands, he was a
cross that dropped plumb. Anon, head urgently downwards, he dived
steeply. Again, like a living hoop, head and heels together, he spun
giddily. Blind, deaf, dumb, breathless, mindless; and behind him Brien
of the O'Brien nation came pelting and whizzing.

What of that journey! Who could give it words? Of the suns that
appeared and disappeared like winking eyes. Comets that shone for an
instant, went black and vanished. Moons that came, and stood, and were
gone. And around all, including all, boundless space, boundless
silence; the black, unmoving void--the deep, unending quietude, through
which they fell with Saturn and Orion, and mildly-smiling Venus, and
the fair, stark-naked moon and the decent earth wreathed in pearl and
blue. From afar she appeared, the quiet one, all lonely in the void.
As sudden as a fair face in a crowded street. Beautiful as the sound
of falling waters. Beautiful as the sound of music in a silence. Like
a white sail on a windy sea. Like a green tree in a solitary place.
Chaste and wonderful she was. Flying afar. Flying aloft like a joyous
bird when the morning breaks on the darkness and he shrills sweet
tidings. She soared and sang. Gently she sang to timid pipes and
flutes of tender straw and murmuring, distant strings. A song that
grew and swelled, gathering to a multitudinous, deep-thundered harmony,
until the over-burdened ear failed before the appalling uproar of her
ecstasy, and denounced her. No longer a star! No longer a bird! A
plumed and horned fury! Gigantic, gigantic, leaping and shrieking
tempestuously, spouting whirlwinds of lightning, tearing gluttonously
along her path, avid, rampant, howling with rage and terror she leaped,
dreadfully she leaped and flew. . . .

Enough! They hit the earth--they were not smashed, there was that
virtue in them. They hit the ground just outside the village of
Donnybrook where the back road runs to the hills; and scarcely had they
bumped twice when Brien of the O'Brien nation had the seraph Cuchulain
by the throat--

"My threepenny-bit," he roared, with one fist up--

But the seraph Cuchulain only laughed--

"That!" said he. "Look at me, man. Your little medal dropped far
beyond the rings of Saturn."

And Brien stood back looking at him--He was as naked as Brien was. He
was as naked as a stone, or an eel, or a pot, or a new-born babe. He
was very naked.

So Brien of the O'Brien nation strode across the path and sat down by
the side of a hedge--

"The first man that passes this way," said he, "will give me his
clothes, or I'll strangle him."

The seraph Cuchulain walked over to him--

"I will take the clothes of the second man that passes," said he, and
he sat down.




  BRIGID

  (AFTER THE IRISH)

  Do not marry, Breed, asthore!
  That old man whose head is hoar
  As the winter, but instead
  Mate with some young curly-head;
  He will give to you a child,
  He will never leave your side,
  And at morning when you wake
  Kiss for kiss will give and take.

  I wish that I had died, I do,
  Before I gave my love to you;
  Love so lasting that it will
  While I live be with you still:
  And for it what do I get?
  Pain and trouble and regret,
  The terrors of the aspen-tree
  Which the wind shakes fearfully.

  If this country could be seen
  As it ought--then you had been
  Living in a castle grand
  With the ladies of the land:
  The friend and foe, the gael and gall,
  Would be cheering, one and all,
  For yourself, and, this is true,
  I would be along with you.

  You promised, 'twas a lie, I see,
  When you said you'd come to me
  At the sheep-cote; I was there,
  And I whistled on the air,
  And I gave our settled call--
  But you were not there at all!
  There was nothing anywhere
  But lambs and birds and sunny air

  When it is dark you pass me by,
  And when the sun is in the sky
  You pass me also--night or day
  You look away, you walk away!
  But if you would come to me,
  And say the word of courtesy,
  I would close the door, and then
  I'd never let you out again.

  But do not marry, Breed, asthore!
  That old man; his heart is hoar
  As his head is: you can see
  Winter gripping at his knee:
  His eyes and ears are blear and dim,
  How can you expect of him
  To see or hear or pleasure you
  Half as well as I would do?




THREE YOUNG WIVES

I

She was about to be a mother for the second time, and the fear which is
the portion of women was upon her. In a little while she would be in
the toils, and she hated and feared physical pain with a great hatred
and a great fear. But there was something further which distressed her.

She was a soft, babyish creature, downy and clinging, soft-eyed and
gentle, the beggar folk had received gifts at her hand, the dogs knew
of her largesse. Men looked on her with approval, and women liked her.
Her husband belonged to the type known as "fine men," tall,
generously-proportioned, with the free and easy joviality which is so
common in Ireland. He was born a boy and he would never grow out of
that state. The colour of his hair or the wrinkles on his cheek would
not have anything to do with his age, for time was powerless against
the richness of his blood. He would still be a boy when he was dying
of old age; but if protestations, kisses and homage were any criterion
then the fact that he loved his wife was fixed beyond any kind of doubt.

But he did not love her.--He was as changeable as the weather of his
country. Swift to love he was equally swift to forget. His passions
were of primitive intensity, but they were not steadfast. He clutched
with both hands at the present and was surprised and irritated by the
fact that he could in nowise get away from the past: the future he did
not care a rap about. Nobody does: there is, indeed, no such thing as
the future, there is only the possibility of it, but the past and the
present are facts not to be gotten away from. What we have done and
what we are doing are things which stamp us, mould us, live with us and
after us: what we will do cannot be counted on, has no part in us, has
only a problematical existence, and can be interfered with, hindered,
nullified or amplified by the thousand unmanageable accidents of
futurity.

He had married thanking God from a full heart for His goodness, and
believing implicitly that he had plucked the very Flower of Womanhood,
and the Heart of the World, and, maybe, he had.--There are many Flowers
of Womanhood, all equally fragrant, and the Heart of the World can beat
against the breast of any man who loves a woman.

Some time previously their little boy had contracted small-pox, and his
mother, nursing him, took it from him. When they recovered her beauty
was gone. The extraordinary bloom which had made her cheek a shrine to
worship and marvel at was destroyed for ever, while, by a curious
chance, the boy was unmarked.

Now the only love which he had to give was a physical love. He did not
love a woman, he loved the husk. Of the woman herself he knew nothing
and cared less. He had never sought to know his wife, never tried to
pierce beneath her beauty and discover where the woman lived and what
she was like at home. Indeed, he knew less of his wife than his
servants did, and by little and little she had seen how the matter
stood. She had plucked the heart from his mystery and read him to the
bones, while remaining herself intact. But she held him still,
although by the most primitive and fragile of bonds, by the magnetism
of her body, the shining of her eyes, the soft beauty of her cheeks;
and, behold! she was undone. The disease had stamped on her face, and,
in the recoil, had stamped on her husband's love.

How many nights of solitary tears she had known! she alone could count
them, a heavy knowledge. How many slights, shrinkings, coldnesses she
had discerned! the tale of them was hot in her brain, the index heavy
on her heart.

She knew her loss on the day that her husband looked at her after her
recovery when all fear of infection had passed--the stare, the flush,
the angry disgust. Her eyes were cameras. She had only to close them
and she could see again in dismal procession those dismal details.

And now, as she lay helpless on the bed, she watched him. She was
racked with pain, and he was mumbling that it would be all right again
in a little time. "A week from now," said he, "and you will have
forgotten all about it."

But she, looking at him with fearful eyes, traced this sentence at the
back of his brain, "I hope that she will die," and the life within her
which had been sown in happiness and love, and had grown great through
misery and tears was now beating at the gates of entrance. . . . She
might die: so many people die in labour, and she was not strong. With
a new clairvoyant gaze she saw Death standing by the bed, hooded,
cloaked and sombre; his eyes were fixed on her and they were peaceful
and kindly eyes. Had there been nothing else to care for she would
have gone gladly to the Dark One; but there remained her little son.
What heart was he to rest on when she was gone? Whose arms could open
so widely as the mother's when he fled from the terrible things which
haunt Babyland?--it was an arrow in her heart.

She knew well that her husband would marry again. He was of those men
who are inveterate husbands--and that new woman!--Who was she? What
was she like? What would be her attitu