PITY Denis’s school was in the heart of the country, miles from anywhere, and this gave the teachers an initial advantage because before a boy even got to the railway station, he had the prefects on his track. Two fellows Denis knew once got as far as Mellin, a town ten miles off, intending to join the British Army, but, like fools, the first thing they did in Mellin was to go to a hotel, so they were caught in bed in the middle of the night by prefects and brought back. It was reported that they had been flogged on their knees in front of the picture of the Crucifixion in the hall, but no one was ever able to find out the truth about that. Denis thought they must have been inspired by the legend of two fellows who did once actually get on a boat for England and were never heard of afterwards, but that was before his time, and in those days escapes were probably easier. By the time he got there, it was said there was a telescope mounted on the tower and that the prefects took turns at watching for fellows trying to get away. You could understand that, of course, for the fellows were all rough, the sons of small farmers who smoked and gambled and took a drink whenever they got a chance of one. As his mother said, it wasn’t a good school, but what could she do, and the small allowance she got from his father? By this time she and his father were living apart. But one day a new boy came up and spoke to Denis. His name was Francis Cummins, and he came from Dunmore, where Denis’s mother was now living. He wasn’t in the least like the other fellows. He was a funny solemn kid with a head that was too big for his body and a great flow of talk. It seemed that his people intended him for the priesthood, and you could see that he’d make a good sort of priest, for he never wanted to do anything wrong, like breaking out, or smoking, or playing cards, and he was a marvel at music. You had only to whistle a tune to him, and he could play it after on the piano. Even the toughs in school let Francis alone. He was a fellow you couldn’t get into a wax, no matter how you tried. He took every insult with a smile, as if he couldn’t believe you were serious, so that there was no satisfaction in trying to make him mad. And from the first day he almost pursued Denis. The other fellows in Denis’s gang did not like it because if he saw them doing anything they shouldn’t be doing he started at once to lecture them, exactly like a prefect, but somehow Denis found it almost impossible to quarrel with him. It was funny the way you felt towards a fellow from your own place in a school like that, far from everywhere. And they did not know the feeling that came over Denis at times when he thought of Dunmore and his home and Martha, for all that he was forever fighting with her. Sometimes he would dream of it at night, and wake up thinking of it, and all that day it would haunt him in snatches till he felt like throwing himself on his bed and bawling. And that wasn’t possible either, with forty kids to a room, and the beds packed tight in four rows. There was also another reason for his toleration of a sissy like Cummins. Every week of Cummins’s life he got a parcel from home, and it was always an astonishment to Denis, for his parents sent him tinned meat, tinned fruit, sardines, and everything. Now, Denis was always hungry. The school food wasn’t much at the best of times, and because his mother couldn’t afford the extras, he never got rashers for breakfast as most of the others did. His father visited him regularly and kept on inquiring in a worried way if he was all right, but Denis had been warned not to complain to him, and the pound or two he gave Denis never lasted more than a couple of days. When he was not dreaming of home, he dreamt of food. Cummins always shared his parcels with Denis, and when Denis grew ashamed of the way he always cadged from Cummins, it was a sop to his conscience that Cummins seemed to enjoy it as much as he did. Cummins lectured him like an old school-mistress, and measured it all out, down to that last candy. “I’ll give you one slice of cake now,” he would say in his cheerful argumentative way. “Ah, come on!” Denis would growl eyeing it hungrily. “You won’t take it with you.” “But if I give it to you now you’ll only eat it all,” Cummins would cry. “Look, if I give you one slice now, and another slice tomorrow, and another on Sunday, you’ll have cake three days instead of one.” “But what good will that be if I’m still hungry?” Denis would shout. “But you’ll only be hungrier tomorrow night,” Cummins would say in desperation at his greed. “You’re a queer fellow, Denis,” he would chatter on. “You’re always the same. “’Tis always a feast or a famine with you. If you had your own way you’d never have anything at all. You see I’m only speaking for your good, don’t you?” Denis had no objection to Cummins’s speaking for his good so long as he got the cake, as he usually did. You could see from the way Cummins was always thinking of your good that he was bound to be a priest. Sometimes it went too far even for Denis, like the day the two of them were passing the priests’ orchard and he suddenly saw that for once there wasn’t a soul in sight. At the same moment he felt the hunger-pain sweep over him like a fever. “Keep nix now, Cummins,” he said, beginning to shin up the wall. “What are you going to do, Denis?” Cummins asked after him in a frenzy of anxiety. “I only want a couple of apples,” Denis said, jumping from the top of the wall and running towards the trees. He heard a long, loud wail from the other side of the wall. “Denis, you’re not going to steal them? Don’t steal them, Denis, please don’t steal them!” But by this time Denis was up in the fork of the tree where the biggest, reddest apples grew. He heard his name called again, and saw that Cummins had scrambled up onto the wall as well, and was sitting astride it with real tears in his eyes. “Denis,” he bawled, “what’ll I say if I’m caught?” “Shut up, you fool, or you will get us caught,” Denis snarled back at him. “But, Denis,Denis, it’s a sin!” “It’s a what?” “It’s a sin, Denis. I know it’s only a venial sin, but venial sins lead to mortal ones. Denis, I’ll give you the rest of my cake if you come away. Honest, I will.” Denis didn’t bother to reply, but he was raging. He finished packing apples wherever he had room for them in his clothes, and then climbed slowly back over the wall. “Cummins,” he said fiercely, “if you do that again I’m going to kill you.” “But it’s true, Denis,” Cummins said, wringing his hands distractedly. “’Tis a sin, and you know ’tis a sin, and you’ll have to tell it in Confession.” “I will not tell it in Confession,” said Denis, “and if I find out that you did, I’ll kill you. I mean it.” And he did, at the time. It upset him so much that he got almost no pleasure from the apples, but he and Cummins still continued to be friends and to share the parcels of food that Cummins got. These were a complete mystery to Denis. None of the other fellows he knew got a parcel oftener than once a month, and Denis himself hardly got one a year. Of course, Cummins’s parents kept a little shop, so that it wouldn’t be so much trouble to them, making up a parcel, and anyway they would get the things at cost price, but even allowing for all this, it was still remarkable. If they cared all that much for Cummins, why didn’t they keep him at home? It wasn’t even as if he had another brother or sister. Himself, for instance, a wild kid who was always quarrelling with his sister and whose mother was so often away from home, he could see why he had to be sent away, but what had Cummins done to deserve it? There was a mystery here, and Denis was determined to investigate it when he got home. He had his first opportunity at the end of term when Cummins’s father and mother came for him in a car and brought Denis back as well. Old Cummins was a small man with glasses and a little greying moustache, and his wife was a roly-poly of a woman with a great flow of talk. Denis noticed the way Cummins’s father would wait for minutes on end to ask a question of his own. Cummins’s manner to them was affectionate enough. He seemed to have no self-consciousness, and would turn round with one leg on the front seat to hold his mother’s hand while he answered her questions about the priests. A week later Martha and Denis went up to the Cummins’s for tea. Mr. Cummins was behind the counter of the shop with his hat on his head, and he called his wife from the foot of the stairs. She brought them upstairs in her excitable, chattering way to a big front room over the street. Denis and Cummins went out to the back garden with a pistol that Cummins had got at Christmas. It was a wonderful air-pistol that Denis knew must have cost pounds. All Cummins’s things were like that. He had also been given a piano accordion. Denis did not envy him the accordion, but he did passionately want the pistol. “Lend it to us, anyway, for the holidays,” he begged. “But, sure, when I want to practice with it myself!” Cummins protested in that babyish way of his. “What do you want to practice with it for?” asked Denis. “When you’re a priest, you won’t be able to shoot.” “How do you know?” asked Cummins. “Because priests aren’t let shoot anybody,” said Denis. “I’ll tell you what I’ll do with you,” Cummins said in his usual cheese-paring way. “I’ll keep it on week-days and you can have it on Saturday and Sunday.” Denis didn’t want it for Saturday and Sunday; he wanted it for keeps; and it struck him as very queer in a sissy like Cummins, being so attached to a gun that he’d be scared to use. Mrs. Cummins and the three children had tea in the front room. Then Cummins and Martha played the piano while Mrs. Cummins talked to Denis about school. “Wisha, Denis,” she said, “isn’t it wonderful for ye to be going to a beautiful school like that?” Denis thought she was joking and began to smile. “And the grounds so lovely and the house so lovely inside. Don’t you love the stained-glass window in the hall?” Denis had never particularly noticed the stained glass, but he vaguely remembered it as she spoke, and agreed. “Ah, sure, ’tis lovely, with the chapel there, to go to whenever you like. And Francis says ye have the grandest films.” “Oh, yes,” said Denis, thinking he would prefer threepence-worth at the local cinema any day of the week. “And ’tis so nice having priests for teachers in place of the rough coarse country fellows you have around here. Oh, Denis, I’m crazy about Father Murphy. Do you know, I’m sure that man is a saint.” “He’s very holy,” said Denis, wondering whether Mrs. Cummins would think Murphy such a saint if she saw him with a cane in his hand and his face the colour of blood, hissing and snarling as he chased some fellow round the classroom, flogging him on the bare legs. “Oh, to be sure, he is,” Mrs. Cummins rattled on. “And ’tisn’t that at all, Denis boy, but the nice, gentlemanly friends you can make there instead of the savages there are in this town. Look, ’tisn’t wishing to me to have Francis out of my sight with those brutes around the streets.” That finished Denis. A fellow would be a long time in Dunmore before he met savages like the two Corbetts from Cork or Barrett from Clare. But he saw that the woman was in earnest. When he returned home, he told his mother everything about their visit, and her amusement convinced him of what he had already suspected—that Mrs. Cummins didn’t know any better. She and her husband, small shopkeepers who were accustomed only to a little house in a terrace, nearly died with the grandeur when they saw the grounds and the lake and the tennis courts, just like the gentlemen’s residences they had seen before that only from the roadway. Of course, they thought it was Heaven. And it explained the mystery about Francis, because, in place of wanting to get rid of him as his mother had to get rid of Denis, they were probably breaking their hearts at having to part with him at all, and doing it only because they felt they were giving him all the advantages that had been denied to themselves. Despite his mother’s mockery, Denis felt rather sorry for them, being taken in like that by appearances. At the same time it left unexplained something about Francis himself. Denis knew that if he was an only child with a mother and father like that, he would not allow them to remain in ignorance for long. He would soon get away from the filthy dormitory and the brutal society. At first he thought that Francis probably thought it a fine place, too, and, in a frenzy of altruism, decided that it was his duty to talk to Mrs. Cummins and tell her the whole truth about it, but then he realized that Francis could not possibly have been taken in in the same way as his parents. He was a weakling and a prig, but he had a sort of country cuteness which enabled him to see through fellows. No, Francis was probably putting up with it because he felt it was his duty, or for the sake of his vocation, because he thought that life was like that, a vale of tears, and whenever he was homesick, or when fellows jeered at him, he probably went to the chapel and offered it up. It seemed very queer to Denis because when he was homesick or mad he waited till lights were out and then started to bawl in complete silence for fear his neighbours would hear. He made a point of impressing on his mother the lavishness of the Cumminses, and told her all about the accordion and the pistol and the weekly parcels with a vague hope of creating larger standards of generosity in her, but she only said that Irish shopkeepers were rotten with money and didn’t know how to spend it, and that if only Denis’s father would give her what she was entitled to he might go to the best college in Ireland, where he would meet only the children of professional people. All the same, when he went back to school there was a change. A parcel arrived for him, and when he opened it there were all the things he had mentioned to her. For a while he felt a little ashamed. It was probably true that his father did not give her all the money she needed, and that she could only send him parcels by stinting herself; but still it was a relief to be able to show off in front of the others whose parents were less generous. That evening he ran into Cummins, who smiled at him in his pudding-faced way. “Do you want anything, Denis?” he asked. “I have a parcel if you do.” “I have a parcel of my own today,” Denis said cockily. “Would you like peaches? I have peaches.” “Don’t be eating it all now,” Cummins said with a comic wail. “You won’t have anything left tomorrow if you do.” “Ah, what difference does it make?” said Denis with a shrug, and with reckless abandonment he rewarded his friends and conciliated his foes with the contents of his parcel. Next evening he was almost as bad as ever. “Jay, Denis,’ Cummins said with amused resignation, “you’re a blooming fright. I told you what was going to happen. How are you going to live when you grow up if you can never keep anything?” “Ah, boy,” Denis said, in his embarrassment doing the big shot, “you wait till I am grown up, and you’ll see.” “I know what I’ll see, all right,’ Cummins said, shaking his head sadly. “Better men than you went to the wall. ’Tis the habits we learn at this age that decide what we’re going to be later on. And, anyway, how are you going to get a job? Sure, you won’t learn anything. If you’d even learn the piano I could teach you.” Cummins was a born preacher, and Denis saw that there was something in what he said, but no amount of preaching could change him. That was the sort he was—come day, go day, God send Sunday—and, anyway, it didn’t really make much difference, because Cummins with his thrifty habits usually had enough to keep Denis going till the next parcel came. Then, about a month later as Denis was opening his weekly parcel under the eyes of his gang, Anthony Harty stood by, gaping with the rest. Harty was a mean, miserable creature from Clare who never got anything, and was consumed with jealousy of everyone who did. “How well you didn’t get any parcels last year, and now you’re getting them all the time, Halligan?” he said suspiciously. “That’s only because my mother didn’t know about the grub in this place,” Denis declared confidently. “A wonder she wouldn’t address them herself, so,” sneered Harty. “What do you mean, Harty?” Denis asked, going up to him with his fists clenched. “Are you looking for a puck in the gob?” “I’m only saying that’s not the writing on your letters,” replied Harty, pointing at the label. “And why should it be?” shouted Denis. “I suppose it could be the shopkeeper’s.” “That looks to me like the same writing as on Cummins’s parcels,” said Harty. “And what’s wrong with that?” Denis asked, feeling a pang of terror. “I suppose she could order them there, couldn’t she?” “I’m not saying she couldn’t,” said Harty in his sulky, sneering tone. “I’m only telling you what I think.” Denis could not believe it, but at the same time he could get no further pleasure from the parcel. He put it back in his locker and went out by himself and skulked away among the trees. It was a dull misty February day. He took out his wallet in which there were a picture of his mother and Martha and two letters he had received from his mother. He read the letters through, but there was no reference to any parcel that she was sending. He still could not believe but that there was some simple explanation, and that she had intended the parcels as a surprise, but the very thought of the alternative made his heart turn over. It was something he could talk to nobody about, and after lights out he twisted and turned madly, groaning at the violence of his own restlessness, and the more he turned, the clearer he saw that the parcels had come from the Cumminses and not from his mother. He had never before felt so humiliated. Though he had not realized it, he had been buoyed up less by the parcels than by the thought that his mother cared so much for him; he had been filled with a new love of her, and now all the love was turning back on him and he realized that he hated her. But he hated the Cumminses worse. He saw that he had pitied and patronized Francis Cummins because he was weak and priggish and because his parents were only poor ignorant country shopkeepers who did not know a good school from a bad one, while they all the time had been pitying him because he had no one to care for him as the Cumminses cared for Francis. He could clearly imagine the three Cumminses discussing him, his mother, and his father, exactly as his mother and he had discussed them. The only difference was that, how ever ignorant they might be, they had been right. It was he and not Francis who deserved pity. “What ails you, Halligan?” the chap in the next bed asked—the beds were ranked so close together that one couldn’t even sob in peace. “Nothing ails me,” Denis said between his teeth. Next day he bundled up what remained of the parcel and took it to Cummins’s dormitory. He had intended just to leave it and walk out, but Cummins was there himself, sitting on his bed with a book, and Denis had to say something. “That’s yours, Cummins,” he said. “And if you ever do a thing like that again, I’ll kill you.” “What did I do, Denis?” Cummins wailed, getting up from his bed. “You got your mother to send me that parcel.” “I didn’t. She did it herself.” “But you told her to. Who asked you to interfere in my business, you dirty spy?” “I’m not a spy,’ Cummins said, growing agitated. “You needed it and I didn’t—what harm is there in that?” “There is harm. Pretending my mother isn’t as good as yours—a dirty old shopkeeper.” “I wasn’t, Denis,” Cummins said excitedly. “Honest, I wasn’t. I never said a word against your mother.” “What did he do to you, Halligan?” one of the fellows asked, affecting to take Cummins’s part. “He got his people to send me parcels, as if I couldn’t get them myself if I wanted them,” Denis shouted, losing control of himself. “I don’t want his old parcels.” “Well, that’s nothing to cry about.” “Who’s crying?” shouted Denis. “I’m not crying. I’ll fight him and you and the best man in the dormitory.” He waited a moment for someone to take up his challenge, but they only looked at him curiously, and he rushed out because he knew that, in spite of himself, he was crying. He went straight to the lavatory and had his cry out there on the seat. It was the only place they had to cry, the only one where there was some sort of privacy. He cried because he had thought that he was keeping his secret so well, and that no one but himself knew how little toughness and insubordination there was in him till Cummins had come and pried it out. After that he could never be friendly with Cummins again. It wasn’t, as Cummins thought, that he bore a grudge. It was merely that for him it would have been like living naked. (1954) Source: Domestic Relations, 1957