THE MASCULINE PRINCIPLE

Myles Reilly was a building contractor in a small way of business that
would never be any larger owing to the difficulty he found in doing
sums. For a man of expansive nature sums are hell; they narrow and
degrade the mind. And Myles was expansive, a heavy, shambling man,
always verging on tears or laughter, with a face like a sunset, and
something almost physically boneless about his make-up. A harassed man
too, for all his fat, because he was full of contradictory
impulses. He was a first-rate worker, but there was no job, however
fascinating, which he wouldn’t leave for the sake of a chat, and no
conversation, however delightful, which did not conceal a secret sense
of guilt. “God, I promised Gaffney I’d be out of that place by
Saturday, Joe. I know I ought to be going; I declare to my God I
ought, but I love an intelligent talk. That’s the thing I miss most,
Joe—someone intelligent to talk to.”

But even if he was no good at sums he was great at daughters. He had
three of these, all stunners, but he never recognized his real talent
and continued to lament the son he wanted. This was very shortsighted
of him because there wasn’t a schoolboy in town who didn’t raise his
cap to Myles in hopes of impressing his spotty visage on him, so that
one day he might say to his daughters “Who’s that charming fellow from
St. Joseph’s Terrace—best-mannered boy in the town. Why don’t we ever
have him round here?” ‘There was no recorded instance of his saying
anything of the sort, which might have been as well, because if the
boys’ mothers didn’t actually imply that the girls were fast, they
made no bones about saying they were flighty. Mothers, unfortunately,
are like that.

They were three grand girls. Brigid, the eldest, was tall and bossy
like a reverend mother; Joan, the youngest, was small and
ingratiating, but Evelyn was a bit of a problem. She seemed to have
given up early any hope of competing with her sisters and resigned
herself to being the next best thing to the missing son. She slouched,
she swore, she drank, she talked with the local accent which her
sisters had discarded; and her matey air inspired fierce passions in
cripples, out-of-works, and middle-aged widowers, who wrote her formal
proposals beginning: “Dearest Miss Reilly, since the death of my dear
wife R. I. P. five years ago I gave up all hopes of meeting another
lady that would mean the same to me till I had the good fortune to
meet your charming self. I have seven children; the eldest is eighteen
and will soon be leaving home and the other six are no trouble.”

Then Jim Piper came on the scene. Nobody actually remembered inviting
him, nobody pressed him to come again, but he came and hung on. It was
said that he wasn’t very happy at home. He was a motor mechanic by
trade. His mother kept a huxter shop, and in her spare time was
something of a collector, mostly of shillings and sixpenny bits. This
was supposed to be why Jim was so glad to get out of the house. But,
as Father Ring was the first to discover, Jim had a tough streak too.

Father Ring was also a collector. Whatever pretty girls he had
banished from his conscious mind came back to him in dreams, disguised
as pound notes, except the plainer, coarser types who took the form of
ten-shilling notes. Mrs. Piper was shocked by this, and when Father
Ring came for his dues, she fought him with all the guile and passion
of a fellow collector. When Jim was out of his time Father Ring
decided that it would be much more satisfactory to deal with him; a
nice, easy-going boy with nothing of the envy and spite of his mother.

Jim agreed at once to pay the dues himself. He took out his wallet and
produced a ten-shilling note. Now, ten shillings was a lot of money to
a working man, and at least four times what his mother had ever paid,
but the sight of it sent a fastidious shudder through Father Ring. As
I say, he associated it with the coarser type of female. 

“Jim,” he said roguishly, “I think you could make that a pound.”

“I’m afraid I couldn’t, father,” Jim replied respectfully, trying to
look Father Ring in the eye, a thing that was never easy.

“Of course, Jim,” Father Ring said in a tone of grief, “’tis all one
to me what you pay; I won’t touch a penny of it; but at the same time,
I’d only be getting into trouble taking it from you. ’Twouldn’t be
wishing to me.”

“I dare say not, father,” said Jim. Though he grew red he behaved with
perfect respect. “I won’t press you.”

So Father Ring went off in the lofty mood of a man who has defended a
principle at a great sacrifice to himself, but that very night he
began to brood and he continued to brood till that sickly looking
voluptuary of a ten-shilling note took on all the radiance and charm
of a virgin of seventeen. Back he went to Jim for it.

“Don’t say a word to anybody,” he whispered confidentially. “I’ll put
that through.”

“At Christmas you will, father,” Jim said with a faint smile,
apparently quite unaware of the favour Father Ring thought he was
doing him. “The Easter dues were offered and refused.”

Father Ring flushed and almost struck him. He was a passionate man;
the lovers’ quarrel over, the reconciliation complete, the
consummation at hand, he saw her go off to spend the night with
another man—his beautiful, beautiful ten-shilling note!

“I beg your pardon,” he snapped. “I thought I was talking to a
Christian.”

It was more than a man should be asked to bear. He had been too hasty,
too hasty! A delicate, high-spirited creature like her! Father Ring
went off to brood again, and the more he brooded, the dafter his
schemes became. He thought of having a special collection for the
presbytery roof but he felt the bishop would probably only send down
the diocesan architect. Bishops, like everything else, were not what
they used to be; there was no gravity in them, and excommunication was
practically unknown. A fortnight later he was back to Jim.

“Jim, boy,” he whispered, “I’ll be wanting you for a concert at the end
of the month.”

Now, Jim wasn’t really much of a singer; only a man in the throes of
passion would have considered him a singer at all, but such was his
contrariness that he became convinced that Father Ring was only out to
get his money, by hook or crook.

“All right, father,” he said smoothly. “What’s the fee?”

“Fee?” gasped Father Ring. “What fee?”

“The fee for singing, father.”

And not one note would Jim sing without being paid for it! It was the
nearest thing to actual free-thinking Father Ring had ever
encountered, the reflection among the laity of the bishops’ cowardice,
and he felt that at last he understood the sort of man Voltaire must
have been. A fee!

Myles Reilly loved telling that story, not because he was against the
church but because he was expansive by temperament and felt himself
jailed by the mean-spiritedness of life about him. “God, I love a
man!” he muttered and turned to his pint. “A man, not a pincushion,”
he added, drinking and looking fiercely away. He liked Jim because he
was what he would have wished a son of his own to be. When Evelyn and
Jim became engaged he was deeply moved. “You picked the best of the
bunch,” he muttered to Jim with tears in his eyes. “God, I’m not
criticizing any of them because I love them all, but Evvie is out on
her own. She may have a bit of a temper, but what good is anyone
without it?”

He said the same things about Jim to the girls, but they, being
romantic, didn’t pay much heed to him, even Evelyn herself. He had no
patience with the sort of fellows they knocked round with;
counter-jumpers and bank-clerks with flannel bags and sports coats;
tennis-players, tea-party gents carrying round plates of
sandwiches—“Will you have some of this or some of that, please?” God
Almighty, how could anyone put up with it? When Jim started bringing
Evelyn ten shillings a week out of his wages to put in her Post Office
account towards the wedding, Myles drew the lesson for them. There was
the good, steady tradesman—the man, the _man_—not like the sports coats
and the flannel bags who’d have been more likely to touch them for
the ten bob, When Evelyn had two hundred saved he’d build a house for them
himself. It would be like no house they ever saw; modern, if you
wished, and with every labour-saving device, but it would be a house,
a _house_, not a bloody concrete box. The girls listened to him with
amusement; they always enjoyed their father’s temperamental grumblings
and moanings without ever taking them seriously.

“You don’t know what you’re letting yourself in for,” Evelyn said
dryly to Jim. “You may be engaged to me but you’re going to marry my
da. Greatest mistake anyone could make, getting too thick with their
in-laws.”

In fact, Jim was more popular with father than with daughters. They,
of course, were not haunted by the image of a son they could not
have. Evelyn liked Jim well enough, and, given a chance, she might
even have loved him, but the sense of inferiority towards her sisters
left her peculiarly vulnerable to their criticisms. They didn’t
understand what she could see in Jim, a poor fish of a fellow who only
came to their house because he wasn’t happy at home. The ten shillings
a week put the finishing touches to him. How any girl of feeling could
go with a man who saved ten shillings a week towards his wedding was
beyond them. Evelyn defended him as best she could, but secretly she
felt they were right, and that as usual she had got the second best
out of life, a decent poor slob of a mechanic whom her sisters would
turn up their noses at.

Then, at Christmas, she went out to do the shopping with the week’s
housekeeping in her purse, ran into a crowd of fellows home from
Dublin for the holidays, and started to drink with them. She kept
saying she had all the money in the house and must really go off and
do the shopping, but all the Reillys had a remarkable capacity for
reminding themselves of what they should be doing without doing it,
and what began as a protest ended up as a turn. The fellows said she
was a great card. When she came home half tight with only half the
shopping done Brigid smacked her face.

Evelyn knew she ought to kill Brigid, but she didn’t do that either.
Instead she went to her room and wept. Jim came up later to go to
Midnight Mass with her. He was a bit lit up too but drink only gave
Jim words without warmth. It roused his sense of abstract justice, and
instead of soothing Evelyn as he should have done he set out to prove
to her how unreasonable she was.

“My goodness,” he said with a feeble oratorical gesture, “what do you
expect? Here’s poor Brigid trying to get things ready for Christmas
and you drinking yourself stupid down in Johnny Desmond’s with
Casserley and Doyle and Maurice the Slug. Sure, of course, she was
mad.”

“That’s right,” Evelyn said, beginning to flame. “It’s all my fault as
usual.”

“There’s nothing usual about it,” Jim went on with futile
reasonableness, “only you don’t know what a good sister you have. The
girl was a mother to you. A mother! I only wish I had a mother like
her.” .

“You have time still,” said Evelyn, beside herself.

“I wouldn’t be good enough for her,” said Jim with sickly servility.

“If you’re not good enough for her you’re not good enough for me.”

“I never said I was. Are you going to make it up and come to Mass?”

“Go to Hell!” snapped Evelyn.

All through the holidays she brooded over him and over her own weak
character and rotten luck, and the day after the holidays, in the mood
of disillusionment that follows Christmas, while still feeling that no
one in the world gave a damn for her, she took out Jim’s savings and
caught the boat for London. The Reillys had friends there; a
disorderly family called Ronan who had once lived on the terrace and
had to get out of it in a hurry.

This was a scandal, if you like! The only one who really had a
tolerant word to say for Evelyn was Joan, who said that, though, of
course, it was wrong of Evelyn to have stolen the money, running away
was the only decent way out of an impossible marriage. But then, Joan,
as well as disliking Jim, loved romance and excitement. In Brigid the
romantic was subdued a little by the mother; she knew it would be her
responsibility to get Joan off her father’s hands and that it had all
been made ten times more difficult by the reports that were now going
round that the Reilly girls were really what the schoolboys’ mothers
had always proclaimed them to be.

As for Myles, he was brokenhearted, or as near brokenhearted as his
temperament permitted him to be. “The one decent boy that ever came to
the house,” he said with his face in his hands, “and he had to be
robbed, and robbed by a daughter of mine. God, Bridgie, isn’t it
cruel?” After that he began to cry quietly to himself. “I loved that
boy: I loved him as if he was my own son. I could have spent my last
days happily with him. And the little house I was going to build for
him and all—everything gone!” Then he beat the wall with his fists
and cried: “God, if only I could lay my hands on her I’d strangle her!
Evelyn, Evelyn, you were the last I thought would shame me.”

Jim took it as you’d expect a fellow like that to take it. The person
he seemed most concerned about was Myles. When he took Myles out for a
drink, the old boy sat with the tears in his eyes and then spread out
his big paws like claws and silently closed them round the spot where
he imagined his daughter’s neck to be.

“That’s what I’d like to do to her, Jim,” he said.

“Ah, you’re not still chewing over that!” Jim said reproachfully.

Myles closed his eyes and shook his head.

“What the hell else can I do?” he asked, almost sobbing. “It’s not the
money, Jim; it’s not the money, boy. I’ll pay that back.”

“You’ll do nothing of the sort,” Jim said quietly. “That’s a matter
between Evelyn and me. It has nothing to do with you.”

“No, no, it’s my responsibility, my responsibility entirely, Jim,”
cried Myles in agony, swaying to and fro. He was indignant at the very
suggestion that he wasn’t responsible; if he’d had it he would have
paid it ten times over sooner than carry the burden of it on his
mind. But Jim knew his capacity for discussing what was the right
thing to do without doing it, and indeed, without any prospect of
doing it. Within a few weeks it had boiled down to the skilled
assistance Jim would receive in any house he built for the girl who
replaced Evelyn. But Jim showed no signs of even wanting to replace
her. For months he was drinking more than he should have been.

II

Then, when all the commotion had died away, when Jim ceased to go to
the Reillys’ and there was no longer even a question of the ninety
pounds being paid back, Evelyn came home. There was no nonsense about
her slinking in the back door in the early hours of the morning. She
wore a grand new tailormade with a hat like a hoop and arrived at the
house in a car. Brigid watched her pay off the driver, and her face
looked old and grim.

“I suppose that was the last of the money?” she asked bitterly.

“What money?” Evelyn asked, on the defensive at once.

“Why? Did you rob some other man as well?” Brigid asked. “What money,
indeed?”

“That’s gone long ago,” Evelyn said haughtily. “I’m paying it back. I
suppose I can get a job, can’t I?”

“I suppose so,” said Brigid. “If Jim Piper will give you a character.”

Myles got up and stumped upstairs to his room. He was very
agitated. He told Brigid that he’d kill Evelyn with his own two hands,
and became still more agitated when Brigid told him sharply that it
would be better if he used a stick. He told Brigid that he didn’t like
being spoken to in that way. He didn’t either. The truth was that
Myles was in a very difficult position. Ever since Evelyn’s fall
Brigid had developed a high moral tone which was far too like her
mother’s to be wholesome. Unlike her mother’s it could not be
short-circuited by blandishments or embraces or even softened by
tears. The girl wanted him to keep regular hours; she wanted him,
suffering as he was from cruel responsibilities, to deny himself the
consolation of a friendly chat after his day’s work. There was a hard
streak in Brigid; she never realized the strain he was living under.

For all her faults, no one could say that of Evelyn. She might be weak
and a thief and deserve strangling, but she always knew the proper
tone to adopt to a father a bit the worse for drink who knew he had
done wrong and didn’t want to be reminded of it. He knew he had sworn
that she should never set foot in the house again, but damn it, she
was his daughter, and—though it was something he wouldn’t like to
say—he was glad to see her home.

Joan too was glad, and she showed it. She was doing a tearing line
with a bank clerk, a gorgeous fellow of violent passions, and Brigid,
regardless of the way she had behaved herself with Ben Hennessy,
chaperoned her like mad. Brigid herself had contracted a regular, a
draper called Considine, and drapers being exceedingly respectable,
she was taking no more chances. The Reillys were to be respectable if
it killed them. Again and again with her cutting tongue she made it
plain that Evelyn wasn’t wanted. Joan thought it disgusting.

Besides, Evelyn’s descriptions of life in London were a revelation to
her. It seemed that in disgust with herself and life she had begun a
sordid and idiotic love affair, and used it merely to lacerate herself
further. It was only when she realized that the man she was
associating with despised her almost as much as she despised herself
that she broke it off and came home. Joan put this down to her
sister’s unfortunate character and her inability to get the best out
of life. In Evelyn’s position she would have acted quite differently.
She wouldn’t have permitted any man to despise her; she would
certainly not have despised herself, and under no circumstances would
she have come home. It worked so much on Joan’s imagination that she
even thought of going away, just to show Evelyn how it should be done.

But there was still one thing Evelyn had to reckon with. She had to
face Jim. This is one of the tests which the small town imposes, which
cannot be avoided and cannot really be worked out in advance. One
evening late when she was coming home from a friend’s she ran into
Jim. There was no getting out of it. He was taken aback though he
tried not to show it. He raised his cap and stopped. Evelyn stopped
too. When it came to the test she found she couldn’t walk past him;
she was a girl of weak character.

“Hullo, Evelyn,” he said in a tone of surprise.

“Hullo,” she replied chokingly.

“Back for a holiday?” he asked—as if he didn’t know!

“No, for good.”

“Homesick ?” he added, still trying to make talk.

“Ah, for God’s sake,” she cried with sudden violence, “if you want to
talk, come away where we won’t have the whole town looking at us.”

She led the way, walking fast and silently, full of suppressed anger
and humiliation. Jim loped along beside her, his hands in the pockets
of his trench coat. She turned up Lovers’ Lane, a place they had used
in their courting days. It was a long, dark, winding boreen with high
walls, between two estates. Then she turned on him, at bay.

It is extraordinary what women can do in self-defence. She shouted at
him. She said it was all his fault for being such a doormat; that no
one with a spark of manliness in him could have let her be treated as
she was at home, and that he knew she was heart-scalded and hadn’t the
spirit to stand up for her. She all but implied that it was he who had
pinched her savings. He didn’t try to interrupt her.

“Well,” he said lamely when she had talked herself out, “it’s no use
crying over spilt milk.”

“Oh, if it was only milk!” she said and began to cry. “Ronans is no
better than a kip. I never meant to take your money. I meant to get a
job and send it back to you, but they kept cadging and cadging until
every penny was gone.”

“I suppose we can be thankful it was no worse,” he said, and then held
out his hand. “Anyway, are we quits now?”

She threw her arms about him and squeezed him fiercely. She was
weeping hysterically and he patted her back gently, talking to her in
a low, soothing voice. She did not tell him about the fellow in
London. She wanted to forget it, for it made her ashamed every time
she thought of it. Besides, she couldn’t see that it was any business
of Jim’s.

After that night they continued to meet, but in a peculiar way,
unknown to their families. Both were self-conscious about it. Evelyn
would not invite Jim to the house and he was too proud to invite
himself. The truth was that she felt Jim was behaving with his usual
lack of manliness. He should have cut her dead when they met or,
failing that, should have got drunk and beaten her up, all the more
because she had behaved so badly in London. The fact that she hadn’t
told him of what took place in London only made his conduct more
indefensible, and she suffered almost as much on his account as if the
fault had been her own. They met after dark in out-of-the-way places,
and it was weeks before word got round that they were walking out
again. Joan was bitterly disappointed; she had thought better of
Evelyn. Brigid, seeing a grand chance of washing out the scandal of
the stolen money, changed her tune and demanded that Jim should see
her sister at the house, but Evelyn refused sulkily. By this time her
main anxiety was to keep Jim and Joan apart so that the London scandal
mightn’t leak out: not that she thought Joan would wish to betray her
but because for some reason she was enormously proud of Evelyn’s
conduct and would be bound to boast of it. That was the worst of a
romantic sister.

“If you’re going to marry Jim Piper it’s only right,” said Brigid.

“Jim Piper didn’t say he wanted to marry me,” said Evelyn.

“Then what are ye walking out for?” cried Brigid.

“What do people usually walk out for?” Evelyn asked scornfully.

It was months before Brigid realized why Evelyn was so stubborn about
not inviting Jim to the house, and by that time it was too late. Joan
knew but Joan wouldn’t tell. Evelyn told Jim one summer evening at the
edge of a wood. She did it with an air of boyish toughness and
braggadocio, smoking a cigarette. Jim was aghast.

“Are you sure, Evvie?” he asked mildly.

“Certain,” said Evelyn. “Joan looked it up in the library.”

Jim gave a bitter, embarrassed laugh and lay back with his hands
under his head.

“That’s a bit of a shock all right,” he said. “What are we going to do
about it?”

“I suppose I’ll only have to go back to Ronan’s,” Evelyn said
lightly. “They won’t mind. What would shock them would sweat a
black.”

“I suppose so,” Jim said ruefully. “We can’t afford to rush into
anything now.”

“No one is trying to rush you into anything,” she said hotly. “Get
that out of your head.”

She was silent for a moment; then she got up quickly, brushed her
skirt and crossed the fence into the lane. Jim came after her with a
hangdog air. As he jumped down she turned and faced him, all ablaze.

“Don’t attempt to follow me!” she cried.

“Why not?” he asked in surprise.

“Why not?” she repeated mockingly. “As if you didn’t know! Oh, you
codded me nicely! You wanted to get your own back for the money and
you did, if that’s any satisfaction to you.”

“It’s no satisfaction at all to me,” Jim said, raising his
voice. There was a queer, unhappy doggedness about his air. He put his
hands in his trouser pockets and stood with his legs wide. His voice
lacked resonance. “And I wasn’t trying to get my own back for
anything, though I had plenty of cause.”

“You had; you and your old money; I wish I never saw it.”

“It’s not the money.”

“Then what is it?”

He didn’t reply. He had no need to. Under his accusing eyes she
reddened again. It had never crossed her mind that he might know.

“I suppose Joan was chattering,” she said bitterly.

“Nobody was chattering at all,” he said scornfully. “I knew all about
it from the first night I saw you. You couldn’t conceal it.”

“I wasn’t trying to conceal it,” she blazed. “I have nothing to hide
from you.”

“I’m not throwing it up at you,” he protested. “I’ll marry you just
the same when I can.”

“Marry me?” she spat. “I wouldn’t marry you if you were the last
living thing left in the world—you worm!”

Then she strode off down the lane, humiliated to the very depth of her
being. If she had gone away without saying anything to him she could
have kept her pride, but she knew that in her desperation she had as
good as asked him to marry her and, what was worse, asked him under
false pretences. This was not what she had intended when she shut up
about the London affair; then her only idea had been to protect her
own wounded sensibilities, but now she realized that if ever the story
got round, she would appear no better than any other little tart,
pretending to be innocent so as to kid a man into marrying
her. Nothing she could now do would alter that interpretation. She
went home in such a fury of rage and misery that she blurted it out in
a few sentences to Brigid.

“You’d better get some money for me somewhere. I’m going to have a
kid, and I’ll have to go to London to have it.”

“You’re going to—?” began Brigid, growing pale.

“Have a kid, I said,” shouted Evelyn savagely.

“Is it Jim Piper?”

“Never mind!”

“He’ll have to marry you.”

“He won’t. I asked him and he told me to go to hell.”

“We’ll soon see about that.”

“You won’t. I did the same thing with another fellow in London and he
found out.”

“You—so that’s what you were up to in London.”

“That’s what I was up to,” sneered Evelyn. “Anyway, I wouldn’t marry
that fellow now if he came to me on his knees.”

Then she went to bed and Joan, for once a little awed, brought up her
tea. Myles first wept and then went out and got drunk. He said if it
was anyone else he’d go out at once and kill him with his own two
hands, but a fellow who had had his savings stolen on him! That was
the real tragedy of being poor, that it destroyed a man’s self-respect
and made it impossible for him to wipe out his humiliations in
blood. _Blood_, that was what he wanted. But Brigid didn’t want anyone’s
blood. She wanted to marry Considine, the draper, and though Considine
was broadminded enough as drapers go, she didn’t want to give him
anything more to be broadminded about. She stormed out to interview
Jim’s mother.

With all her responsibilities, Brigid was still something of a
child. Standing with one hand on the table and the other on her hip,
Mrs. Piper dominated the scene from the first moment. She asked in the
most ingenuous way in the world how such a thing could happen in a
well-conducted house, and when Brigid assured her that it hadn’t
happened there Mrs. Piper said wasn’t it lucky that Evelyn didn’t get
pneumonia as well. Brigid had as much chance against her as an
innocent naked savage against a machine-gun post.

While they were arguing Jim came in and hung up his cap.

“You know what I came about, Jim,” Brigid said challengingly.

“If I don’t I can guess, Brigid,” he replied with a tight smile.

“The girl has no mother.”

“She has something as good, Brigid,” Jim replied simply, and Brigid
suddenly realized that his respect for her was something he did not
put off and on as it suited him. It gave her new dignity and
confidence.

“You’ll marry her for my sake, Jim?” she asked.

“I’ll marry her the minute I’m able, Brigid,” he said stubbornly,
putting his hands in his trouser pockets, a trick he had to give him
the feeling of stability. “I may be able to marry her in a year’s
time, but I can’t do it now.”

“A year’s time will be too late, Jim,” Brigid cried. “A girl in her
position can afford to do without a house but she can’t do without a
husband.”

“And start off in furnished rooms with a kid?” Jim replied
scornfully. “I saw too many do that, and I never saw one that came to
any good.”

Brigid looked at him doubtfully. She didn’t believe him; she felt he
was holding out on her only because of his bitterness about Evelyn’s
betrayal. It caused her to make a false move.

“I know she behaved like a bitch about that fellow in London,” she
said. “I only heard it today for the first time. But surely, seeing
the state she’s in, you’re big enough to forgive her.”

The look on Jim’s face convinced her that she was right. His
expression showed pain, humiliation, and bewilderment, but his voice
remained firm.

“If I didn’t forgive her I wouldn’t be in the fix I’m in now,” he
said.

“What’s that?” his mother cried. “What’s that about a fellow in
London? So that’s what she was up to, the vagabond! And now she’s
trying to put the blame on my innocent boy!”

“She’s not trying to put the blame on anybody,” Jim said with the
first sign of real anger he had shown. “I’m responsible, and I’m not
denying it, but I can’t marry her now. She’ll have to go to London.”

“But we haven’t the money to send her to London,” Brigid cried in
exasperation. “Don’t you know well the way we’re situated?”

“I’ll pay my share,” Jim said. “And I’ll pay for the kid, but I won’t do
any more.”

“Leave her pay for it out of what she stole!” hissed his mother. “Oh,
my, that many a fine family was reared on less!”

“I’m going straight up to Father Ring,” Brigid said desperately.

“You can spare yourself the trouble,” said Jim flatly. “Ring isn’t
going to make me marry Evelyn, nor anyone else either.”

This was strong language from a young fellow of Jim’s age, but it was
no more than Father Ring himself expected.

“Brigid,” he said, squeezing the girl’s arm sympathetically, “I’ll do
what I can but I wouldn’t have much hope. To tell you the truth I
never expected better. The best thing I can do is to see Lane.”

So off he went to interview Jim’s employer, Mick Lane, at his own
home.

“You could warn him he’d get the sack if he didn’t marry her,” he
suggested.

“Oh, begod, father, I could not,” replied Lane in alarm. “I wouldn’t
mind anyone else, but Jim is the sort of fellow would walk out the
door on me if he thought I was threatening him, and I’d be a hell of a
long time getting as good a man. I might talk to him myself in a
friendly way.”

“Mick,” said Father Ring in a disappointment, “you’d only be wasting
your time. Is it a fellow that wouldn’t sing at a parish concert
without a fee? It might be the best thing for the poor girl in the
long run.”


III

Next time Evelyn came back from London without any finery; the baby
was put out to nurse up the country and not referred to again. It
caused a lot of talk. There were plenty to say that Jim was in the
wrong, that, even allowing that the girl was damaged goods, a fellow
might swallow his pride. Better men had had to do it. But Jim in his
quiet, stubborn way went on as though he didn’t even know there was
talk.

Ultimately, it did the Reillys no great harm, because Joan became
engaged to the gorgeous passionate fellow at the bank and Brigid
married Considine. Evelyn set her teeth and stuck it out. She went
twice to see Owen, her baby, but gave it up when she realized that you
can’t retain a child’s affection by visiting him two or three times a
year.

For months she didn’t see Jim. Then one evening when she went for a
walk in the country, she came on him about a mile out of town,
studying the wreck of a car which he was trying to make something
of. It was one of those occasions when anyone is at a disadvantage;
when it depends on the weather or your digestion—or, going further
back, what sort your parents were—what you do. Evelyn was her father’s
daughter and, having no true feminine pride to direct her, she
naturally did the wrong thing.

“Hello,” she said.

“Oh, hello, Evelyn,” Jim said, raising his cap. “How are you getting
on?”

“All right,” she replied curtly, with the sinking of the heart she
would have felt anyhow, knowing that the decision of a lifetime had
been taken, and that, as usual, it was the wrong one.

“Can I give you a lift?”

“I wasn’t going anywhere in particular,” she said, realizing the
enormous effort of will it would take to restore the situation to what
it had been a moment before.

That night, crazy with rage, she wrote him a blistering letter, asking
how he had dared to speak to her and warning him that if he did it
again she would slap his face. Then, remembering the lonesome evening
she would spend if she posted it, she put it in her bag and went off
to meet him. While they were sitting on a gate up a country lane she
realized that now she would never send the letter, and the thought of
it in her bag irritated her. It was as though she saw the two women in
her fighting for mastery. She took it out and tore it up.

“What’s that?” asked Jim.

“A letter to you.”

“Can’t I see it?”

“You’d hate it.”

That extraordinary man threw back his head and laughed like a
kid. There was no doubt about it, he was a worm, but at any rate he
was her worm; he didn’t divide his attentions, and even if she didn’t
think much of him, there was no one else she thought more of. She
couldn’t merely sit at home, waiting for someone who’d overlook her
past. Fellows in Ireland were death on girls’ pasts.

But now the sense of guilt was ingrained: when she met Jim in town she
merely saluted him, and if she had anyone with her she tried to avoid
doing even that. It was funny, but she felt if she stopped to speak to
him she would suddenly be overcome by the popular feeling and tear his
eyes out. It was again that feeling that she was really two women and
didn’t know which of them she wanted to be.

As a result it was months before people knew they were walking out
again. This time there was a thundering row and the Reillys were the
most scandalized of all. Even Joan deserted her. It was all very well
for Brigid, who had her draper where he couldn’t escape, but Joan’s
bank-clerk was still a toss-up and everyone knew the unmannerly way
the banks had of prying into their officials’ business.

“Honest to God,” Joan said contemptuously, “you haven’t a spark of
pride or decency.”

“Well, neither has he, so we’re well matched,” Evelyn said
despondently.

“God knows, ’tis a pity to spoil two houses with ye.”

“It’s all very well for you, Joan,” said Evelyn, “but I have the kid’s
future to think of.”

This wasn’t true; it was a long time since Evelyn had thought of
Owen’s future because it was only too plain that he had none, but it
was the best excuse she could think of.

“You’d hate him to be an only child,” snapped Joan.

“I’m not such a fool,” said Evelyn, deeply hurt.

“Fool is the word,” retorted Joan.

Her father ignored her presence in the house. The latest scandal was
the final touch. He was disappointed in Evelyn but he was far more
disappointed in Jim, who had once shown signs of character. Up to this
he had felt it was only daughters who threatened a man’s peace of
mind; now he began to think a son might be as bad.

When Joan married it made things easier for him, though not for
Evelyn. It is always a lonesome thing for a girl when the last of her
sisters has gone and the prams have begun to come back. It was worse
on her because she had never pushed her own pram, and the babies she
fussed over were getting something her own would never get. It fixed
and confirmed her feeling of inferiority to Brigid and Joan, almost as
though she had done it deliberately. She sometimes wondered whether
she hadn’t.

But it gradually dawned on her father that if God had tried to reward
him for a well-spent life with a secure old age, He couldn’t well have
planned anything more satisfactory than a more or less unmarriageable
daughter who could never take a high moral line. If he came in drunk
every night of the week and cut her down on the housekeeping, her sins
would still outnumber his. A man like Myles in such an unassailable
position of moral superiority could not help being kind. “God’s
truth,” he muttered to his cronies, “I can’t blame the girl. I’m as
bad myself. It’s a thing you can’t talk about, but since the missis
died I had my own temptations.” Sometimes when he saw her getting
ready to go out and see Jim Piper he patted her on the shoulder,
mumbled a few words of encouragement, and went out with his eyes
wet. Myles was like that, a man of no character!


IV

One evening while he and Evelyn were having their tea the latch was
lifted and Jim Piper himself walked in. It was his first visit since
the far-away night when he had called to console Myles for his
daughter’s crime.

“God save all here,” he said and beamed at them with unusual
magnanimity.

Myles looked up, drew a deep breath through his nose and looked
away. It was all damn well condoning his daughter’s misbehaviour, but
he refused to condone Jim’s. Even Evelyn was embarrassed and cross. It
wasn’t like Jim.

“Hello,” she replied with no great warmth. “What do you want?”

“Oh, just a few words with you,” Jim replied cheerfully, placing a
chair for himself in the middle of the kitchen. “Nothing
important. Don’t interrupt yourself. Finish your supper. If you have a
paper I could look at it.”

“There you are,” she said, mystified, but no newspaper was capable of
halting Jim’s unusual flow of garrulity.

“Good evening, Mr. Reilly,” he said to her father, and then as Myles
ignored him he threw back his head and laughed. “I don’t know what’s
coming over Irish hospitality,” he added with a touch of
indignation. “You pass the time of day to a man and he won’t even
answer. Begod,” he added with growing scorn, “they won’t even ask you
to sit down. Go on with their tea overright you, and not ask have you
a mouth on you! ‘What do you want?’” he echoed Evelyn.

She realized in a flash what was the matter with him. He was
drunk. She had never seen him so bad before, and he was not the type
which gets drunk gracefully. He was too angular for that. He threw his
limbs about in a dislocated way like a rag doll. All the same it put
her at her ease. She was always more comfortable with men like that.

“Far from tea you were today, wherever you were,” she said, fetching a
cup and saucer. “Do you want tea?”

“Oh, no,” said Jim bitterly with another dislocated motion of his
arm. “I’m only making conversation. I didn’t have a bit to eat since
morning and then I’m asked if I want tea!”

“You’d better have something to eat so,” she said. “Will you have
sausages?”

“Isn’t it about time you asked me?” Jim asked with grave reproach,
looking at her owlishly.

It was only with the greatest difficulty that she kept from laughing
outright. But her father, who had recognized Jim’s condition from the
start, had the toper’s sensitiveness. He drew a deep breath through
his nose, banged his fist on the table, and exploded in a “Christ! In
my own house!” Then he got up, went upstairs and slammed the bedroom
door behind him. No doubt he was resisting the temptation to kill Jim
with his own hands. Jim laughed. Apparently he had no notion of his
peril.

“Call him back,” he said, tossing his head.

“Why?”

“I want to ask him to my wedding.”

“Go on!” she said with amusement. “Are you getting married?”

“I can’t stand this bloody bachelor life,” Jim said pathetically.

“So I noticed,” she said. “Who’s the doll?”

“One moment, please!” he said severely. “We’re coming to that. First,
I have a crow to pluck with you.”

“Go on!” she said, her smile fading. People always seemed to have
crows to pluck with Evelyn, and she was getting tired of it.

“You said you wouldn’t marry me if I was the last living thing in the
world,” he said, wagging his finger sternly at her. “I’m not a man to
bear malice but I’m entitled to remind you of what you said. As well
as that, you said I was a worm. I’m not complaining about that
either. All I’m doing is asking are you prepared—prepared to withdraw
those statements?” he finished up successfully.

“You never know,” she said, her lip beginning to quiver. “You might
ask me again some time you’re sober.”

“You think I don’t know what I’m saying?” he asked triumphantly as he
rose to his feet—but he rose unsteadily.

“Do you?” she asked.

“I banked the last of two hundred quid today,” said Jim in the same
tone. “Two hundred quid and five for Ring, and if that’s not enough
for the old bastard I’ll soon find someone that will be glad of it. I
drank the rest. You can go down the country now, tomorrow if you like,
and bring Ownie back, and tell the whole bloody town to kiss your
ass. Now, do I know what I’m saying?” he shouted with the laughter
bubbling up through his words.

It was a great pity he couldn’t remain steady. But Evelyn no longer
noticed that. She only noticed the laughter and triumph and realized
how much of Jim’s life she had wasted along with her own. She gave a
low cry and ran upstairs after her father. Jim looked after her
dazedly and collapsed with another dislocated gesture. It was useless
trying to carry on a discussion with an unstable family like the
Reillys who kept running up and down stairs the whole time.

It was her father’s turn now. He stumped heavily down the stairs,
gripping the banisters with both hands as though he were about to
spring, and then stood at the foot. This time it was clear that Jim’s
hour had come. He didn’t mind. He knew he was going to be sick anyway.

“What’s wrong with that girl?” Myles asked in a shaking voice.

“I don’t know,” Jim said despondently, tossing the limp wet hair back
from his forehead. “Waiting, I suppose.”

“Waiting?” Myles asked. “Waiting for what?”

“This,” shouted Jim, waving his arm wildly and letting it collapse by
his side. “The money is there now. Two hundred quid, and five for the
priest. You start work on that house at eight tomorrow morning. See?”

Myles took a few moments to digest this. Even for a man of expansive
nature, from murder to marriage is a bit of a leap. He stroked his
chin and looked at Jim, lying there with his head hanging and one arm
dead by his side. He chuckled. Such a story! Christ, such a story!

“And not a drop of drink in the house!” he exclaimed. “Evelyn!” he
called up the stairs.

There was no reply.

“Evelyn!” he repeated peremptorily, as though he were a man accustomed
to instant obedience. “We’ll let her alone for a while,” he mumbled,
scratching his head. “I suppose it came as a bit of shock to
her. She’s a good girl, Jim, a fine girl. You’re making no
mistake. Take it from me.” But even in that state, Jim, he realized,
was not the sort to need encouragement, and he beamed and rubbed his
hands. For more than anything else in the world Myles loved a man, a
_man_. He stood looking fondly down on his semiconscious son-in-law.

“You thundering ruffian!” he chuckled, shaking his head. “Oh, God, if
only I might have done it thirty years ago I’d be a made man
today.”


(1950)