Collected Stories (47 page)

“No, Bill,” the landlord said, shaking his head. “Going too far, I call that.”

“Everyone is entitled to his views, but them weren't old Harry's views, were they?”

“No, Bill,” sighed the landlord's wife, “they weren't.”

“I'm for freedom,” Bill said, tapping his chest. “The night before he died, I come in here and got a quart of old and mild, didn't I, Joe?”

“Mild, wadn't it, Bill?” the publican asked anxiously, resettling his glasses.

“No, Joe, old and mild was always Harry's drink.”

“That's right, Joe,” the landlady expostulated. “Don't you remember?”

“Funny,” said her husband. “I could have swore it was mild.”

“And I said to Millie and Sue, ‘All right,' I said. ‘You got other things to do. I'll sit up with old Harry.' Then I took out the bottle. His poor eyes lit up. Couldn't move, couldn't speak, but I shall never forget the way he looked at that bottle. I had to hold his mouth open”—Bill threw back his head and pulled one side of his mouth awry in illustration—“and let it trickle down. No. If that's religion give me beer!”

“Wonder where old Harry is now?” the fat man said, removing his pipe reverently. “It's a mystery, Joe, i'nt it?”

“Shocking,” the landlord said, shaking his head.

“We don't know, do we, Charles?” the landlady said sadly.

“Nobody knows,” Bill bawled scornfully as he took up his pint again. “How could they? Parson pretends to know, but he don't know any more than you and me. Shove you in the ground and let the worms get you—that's all anybody knows.”

It depressed Mick even more, for he felt that in some way Janet's views and those of the people in the pub were of the same kind and only the same sort of conduct could be expected from them. Neither had any proper religion and so they could not know right from wrong.

“Isn't it lovely here?” Janet sang out when he brought the drinks.

“Oh, grand,” said Mick without much enthusiasm.

“We must come and spend a few days here some time. It's wonderful in the early morning.… You don't think I was too bitchy about Fanny, do you, Mick?”

“Oh, it's not that,” he said, seeing that she had noticed his depression. “I wasn't thinking of Fanny particularly. It's the whole setup here that seems so queer to me.”

“Does it?” she asked with interest.

“Well, naturally—fellows and girls from the works going off on weekends together, as if they were going to a dance.”

He looked at her with mild concern as though he hoped she might enlighten him about a matter of general interest. But she didn't respond.

“Having seen the works, can you wonder?” she asked, and took a long drink of her beer.

“But when they get tired of one another, they go off with someone else,” he protested. “Or back to the fellow they started with. Like Hilda in the packing shed. She's knocking round with Dorman, and when her husband comes back she'll drop him. At least, she says she will.”

“Isn't that how it usually ends?” she asked politely, raising her brows and speaking in a superior tone that left him with nothing to say. This time she really succeeded in scandalizing him.

“Oh, come, come, Janet!” he said scornfully. “You can't take that line with me. You're not going to pretend there's nothing more than that in it?”

“Well, I suppose, like everything else, it's just what you make of it,” she replied with a sophisticated shrug.

“But that's not making anything at all of it,” he said, beginning to grow heated. “If it's no more than a roll in the hay, as you call it, there's nothing in it for anybody.”

“And what do you think it should be?” she asked with a politeness that seemed to be the equivalent of his heat. He realized that he was not keeping to the level of a general discussion. He could distinctly hear how common his accent had become, but excitement and a deep-seated feeling of injury carried him away.

“But look here, Janet,” he protested, sitting back stubbornly with his hands in his trouser pockets, “learning to live with somebody isn't a thing you can pick up in a weekend. It's a blooming job for life. You wouldn't take up a job somewhere in the middle, expecting to like it, and intending to drop it in a few months time if you didn't, would you?”

“Oh, Mick,” she groaned in mock distress, “don't tell me you have inhibitions too!”

“Oh, you can call them what you like,” retorted Mick, growing commoner as he was dragged down from the heights of abstract discussion to the expression of his own wounded feelings. “I saw the fellows who have no inhibitions, as you call them, and they didn't seem to me to have very much else either. If that's all you want from a man, you won't have far to go.”

By this time Janet had realized that she was dealing with feelings rather than with general ideas and was puzzled. After a moment's thought she began to seek for a point of reconciliation.

“But after all, Mick, you've had affairs yourself, haven't you?” she asked reasonably.

Now, of all questions, this was the one Mick dreaded most, because, owing to a lack of suitable opportunities, for which he was in no way to blame, he had not. For the matter of that, so far as he knew, nobody of his acquaintance had either. He knew that in the matter of experience, at least, Janet was his superior, and, coming from a country where men's superiority—affairs or no affairs—was unchallenged, he hesitated to admit that, so far as experience went, Fanny and he were in the one boat. He was not untruthful, and he had plenty of moral courage. There was no difficulty in imagining himself settling deeper down onto his bench and saying firmly and quietly: “No, Janet, I have not,” but he did not say it.

“Well, naturally, I'm not an angel,” he said in as modest a tone as he could command and with a shrug intended to suggest that it meant nothing in particular to him.

“Of course not, Mick,” Janet replied with all the enthusiasm of a liberal mind discovering common ground with an opponent. “But then there's no argument.”

“No argument, maybe,” he said coldly, “but there are distinctions to be made.”

“What distinctions?”

“Between playing the fool and making love,” he replied with a weary air as though he could barely be bothered explaining such matters to a girl as inexperienced as she. From imaginary distinctions he went on to out-and-out prevarication. “If I went out with Penrose, for instance, that would be one thing. Going out with you is something entirely different.”

“But why?” she asked as though this struck her as a doubtful compliment.

“Well, I don't like Penrose,” he said mildly, hoping that he sounded more convincing than he felt. “I'm not even vaguely interested in Penrose. I am interested in you. See the difference?”

“Not altogether,” Janet replied in her clear, unsentimental way. “You don't mean that if two people are in love with one another, they should have affairs with somebody else, do you?”

“Of course I don't,” snorted Mick, disgusted by this horrid example of English literal-mindedness. “I don't see what they want having affairs at all for.”

“Oh, so that's what it is!” she said with a nod.

“That's what it is,” Mick said feebly, realizing the cat was out of the bag at last. “Love is a serious business. It's a matter of responsibilities. If I make a friend, I don't begin by thinking what use I can make of him. If I meet a girl I like, I'm not going to begin calculating how cheap I can get her. I don't want anything cheap,” he added with passion. “I'm not going to rush into anything till I know the girl well enough to try and make a decent job of it. Is that plain?”

“Remarkably plain,” Janet replied icily. “You mean you're not that sort of man. Let me buy you a drink.”

“No, thanks.”

“Then I think we'd better be getting back,” she said, rising and looking like the wrath of God.

Mick, crushed and humiliated, followed her at a slouch, his hands still in his trouser pockets. It wasn't good enough. At home a girl would have gone on with the argument till one of them fell unconscious, and in argument Mick had real staying power, so he felt she was taking an unfair advantage. Of course, he saw that she had some reason. However you looked at it, she had more or less told him that she expected him to be her lover, and he had more or less told her to go to hell, and he had a suspicion that this was an entirely new experience for Janet. She might well feel mortified.

But the worst of it was that, thinking it over, he realized that even then he had not been quite honest. He had not told her he already had a girl at home. He believed all he had said, but he did not believe it quite so strongly as all that; not so as not to make exceptions. Given time, he might quite easily have made an exception of Janet. She was the sort of girl people made an exception of. It was the shock that had made him express himself so violently; the shock of realizing that a girl he cared for had lived with other men. He had reacted that way almost in protest against them.

But the real shock had been the discovery that he minded so much what she was.

T
HEY
never resumed the discussion openly, on the same terms, and it seemed as though Janet had forgiven him, but only just. The argument was always there beneath the surface, ready to break out again. It flared up whenever she mentioned Fanny—“I suppose one day she'll meet an Irishman, and they can discuss one another's inhibitions.” Or when she mentioned other men she had known, like Bill, with whom she had spent a holiday in Dorset, or an American called Tom with whom she had gone to the Plough in Alton, she seemed to be contrasting the joyous past with the dreary present, and she became cold and insolent.

Mick gave as good as he got. He had a dirty tongue, and he had considerable more ammunition than she. The canteen was always full of gossip about who was living with whom, or who had stopped living with whom, or whose wife or husband had returned and found him or her living with someone else, and he passed it on with a quizzical air. The first time she said “Good!” in a ringing voice. After that, she contented herself with a shrug, and Mick suggested ingenuously that perhaps it took all those religions to deal with so much fornication. “One religion would be more than enough for Ireland,” she retorted, and Mick grinned and admitted himself beaten.

But, all the same, he could not help feeling that it wasn't nice. He remembered what Fanny had said about nobody's knowing the Plough better, and Janet about how nice it was in the early morning. Really, really, it wasn't nice! It seemed to show a complete lack of sensibility in her to think of bringing him to a place where she had stayed with somebody else, and made him suspicious of every other place she brought him. He had never been able to share her enthusiasm for old villages of red-brick cottages, all colored like geraniums, grouped about a gray church tower, but he lost even the desire to share it when he found himself wondering what connection it had with Bill or Tom.

At the same time, he could not do without her. They met every evening after work, went off together on Saturday afternoons, and she even came to Mass with him on Sunday mornings. Nor was there any feeling that she was critical of it. She followed the service with great devotion. As a result, before he returned home on his first leave, everything seemed to have changed between them. She no longer criticized Fanny's virginity and ceased altogether to refer to Bill and Tom. Indeed, from her conversation it would have been hard to detect that she had ever known such men, much less been intimate with them. Mick wondered whether it wasn't possible for a woman to be immoral and yet remain innocent at heart and decided regretfully that it wasn't likely. But no wife or sweetheart could have shown more devotion than she in the last week before his return, and when they went to the station and walked arm-in-arm to the end of the long, drafty platform to say good-bye, she was stiff with unspoken misery. She seemed to feel it was her duty to show no sign of emotion.

“You will come back, Mick, won't you?” she asked in a clear voice.

“Why?” Mick asked banteringly. “Do you think you can keep off Americans for a fortnight?”

That she spat out a word that showed only too clearly her intimacy with Americans and others. It startled Mick. The English had strong ideas about when you could joke and when you couldn't, and she seemed to think this was no time for joking. To his surprise, he found she was trembling all over.

At any other time he would have argued with her, but already in spirit he was half-way home. There, beyond the end of the line, was Cork, and with it home and meat and butter and nights of tranquil sleep. When he leaned out of the window to wave good-bye, she was standing like a statue, looking curiously desolate. Her image faded quickly, for the train was crowded with Irish servicemen and women, clerks and laborers, who gradually sorted themselves out into north and south, country and town, and within five minutes, Mick, in a fug of steam heat and tobacco smoke, was playing cards with a group of men from the South Side who were calling him by his Christian name. Janet was already farther away than any train could leave her.

It was the following evening when he reached home. He had told no one of his coming and arrived in an atmosphere of sensation. He went upstairs to his own little whitewashed room with the picture of the Sacred Heart over his bed and lost himself in the study of his shelf of books. Then he shaved and, without waiting for more than a cup of tea, set off down the road to Ina's. Ina was the youngest of a large family, and his arrival there created a sensation too. Elsie, the eldest, a fat, jolly girl, just home from work, shouted with laughter at him.

“He smelt the sausages.”

“You can keep your old sausages,” Mick said scornfully. “I'm taking Ina out to supper.”