THE UGLY DUCKLING

Mick Courtney had known Nan Ryan from the time he was fourteen or
fifteen. She was the sister of his best friend, and youngest of a
family of four in which she was the only girl. He came to be almost as
fond of her as her father and brothers were; she had practically lost
her mother’s regard by inheriting her father’s looks. Her ugliness
indeed was quite endearing. She had a stocky, sturdy figure and
masculine features all crammed into a feminine container till it
bulged. None of her features was really bad, and her big, brown,
twinkling eyes were delightful, but they made a group that was almost
comic.

Her brothers liked her spirit; they let her play with them while any
of them were of an age for play, and, though she suffered from
night-panics and Dinny broke the maternal rule by letting her into his
bed, they never told. He, poor kid, would be wakened in the middle of
the night by Nan’s pulling and shaking. “Dinny, Dinny,” she would hiss
fiercely, “I have ’em again!” “What are they this time?” Dinny would
ask drowsily. “Li-i-ons!” she would reply in a bloodcurdling tone, and
then lie for half an hour in his arms, contracting her toes and
kicking spasmodically while he patted and soothed her.

She grew up a tomboy, fierce, tough, and tearless, fighting in Dinny’s
gang, which contested the old quarry on the road with the hill-tribes
from the slum area above it; and this was how Mick was to remember her
best—an ugly, stocky little Amazon, leaping from rock to rock, hurling
stones in an awkward but effective way, and screaming deadly insults
at the enemy and encouragement to her own side.

He could not have said when she gave up fighting, but between twelve
and fourteen she became the pious one in a family not remarkable for
piety, always out at Mass or diving into church on her way from school
to light candles and make novenas. Afterwards it struck Mick that it
might have been an alternative to getting in Dinny’s bed, for she
still suffered from night-fears, only now when they came on she
grabbed her rosary beads instead.

It amused him to discover that she had developed something of a crush
on himself. Mick had lost his faith, which in Cork is rather similar
to a girl’s loss of her virtue and starts the same sort of flutterings
among the quiet ones of the opposite sex. Nan would be waiting for him
at the door in the evening, and when she saw him would begin to jump
down the steps one by one with her feet together, her hands stiff at
her sides, and her pigtail tossing.

“How are the novenas coming on, Nan?” he would ask with amusement.

“Fine!” she would reply in a shrill, expressionless voice. “You’re on
your way.”

“I’ll come quietly.”

“You think you won’t, but I know better. I’m a fierce pray-er.”

Another stiff jump took her past him.

“Why don’t you do it for the blacks, Nan?”

“I’m doing it for them, too, sure.”

But though her brothers could ease the pangs of childhood for her,
adolescence threw her on the mercy of life. Her mother, a roly-poly of
a woman who went round a great deal with folded arms, thus increasing
the impression of curves and rolls, was still a beauty, and did her
best to disguise Nan’s ugliness, a process that mystified her husband,
who could see nothing wrong with the child except her shaky
mathematics.

“I’m no blooming beauty,’ Nan would cry, with an imitation of a
schoolboy’s toughness, whenever her mother tried to get her out of the
rough tweeds and dirty pullovers she fancied into something more
feminine.

“The dear knows you’re not,” her mother would say, folding her arms
with an expression of resignation. “I don’t suppose you want to
advertise it, though.”

“Why wouldn’t I advertise it?” Nan would cry, squaring up to her. “I
don’t want any of your dirty old men.”

“You needn’t worry, child. They’ll let you well alone.”

“Let them!” Nan would say, scowling. “I don’t care. I want to be a
nun.”

All the same, it made her self-conscious about friendships with girls
of her own age, even pious ones like herself. They, too, would have
boys around, and the boys wanted nothing to do with Nan. Though she
carefully avoided all occasion for a slight, even the hint of one was
enough to make her brooding and resentful, and then she seemed to
become hideous and shapeless and furtive. She slunk round the house
with her shoulders up about her ears, her red-brown hair hanging
loose, and a cigarette glued loosely to her lower lip. Suddenly and
inexplicably she would drop some nice girl she had been friendly with
for years, and never even speak of her again. It gave her the
reputation of being cold and insincere, but as Dinny in his shrewd,
old-mannish way observed to Mick, she made her real friends among
older women and even sick people—“all seventy or paralysed,” as he put
it. Yet even with these she tended to be jealous and exacting.

Dinny didn’t like this, and his mother thought it was awful, but Nan
paid no attention to their views. She had become exceedingly obstinate
in a way that did not suit either her age or her sex, and it made her
seem curiously angular, almost masculine, as though it were the
psychological aspect of her ugliness. She had no apparent shyness and
stalked in and out of a room, swinging her arms like a boy. Her
conversation changed, too, and took on the tone of an older
woman’s. It was not dull—she was far too brainy to be dull—but it was
too much on one key— “crabbed” to use a local word—and it did not make
the sharp distinctions young people’s conversation makes between
passion and boredom. Dinny and Mick could be very bored indeed in one
another’s company, but suddenly some topic would set flame to their
minds, and they would walk the streets by the hour with their coats
buttoned up, arguing.

Her father was disappointed when she refused to go to college. When
she did go to work, it was in a dress shop, a curious occupation for a
girl whose only notions of dress were a trousers and jersey.

II Then one night something happened that electrified Mick. It was
more like a transformation scene in a pantomime than anything in his
experience. Later, of course, he realized that it had not happened
like that at all. It was just that, as usual with those one has known
too well, he had ceased to observe Nan, had taken her too much for
granted, and the change in her had come about gradually and
imperceptibly till it forced itself on his attention in the form of a
shock.

Dinny was upstairs, and Mick and she were arguing. Though without
formal education, Mick was a well-read man, and he had no patience
with Nan’s literary tastes, which were those of her aged and invalid
acquaintances —popular novels and biographies. As usual, he made fun
of her and, as usual, she grew angry. “You’re so damn superior, Mick
Courtney,” she said with a scowl and went to search for the book they
had discussed in the big mahogany bookcase, which was one of the
handsome pieces of furniture her mother took pride in. Laughing, Mick
got up and stood beside her, putting his arm round her shoulder as he
would have done at any other time. She misunderstood the gesture, for
she leaned back on his shoulder and offered herself to be kissed. At
that moment only did he realize that she had turned into a girl of
startling beauty. He did not kiss her. Instead, he dropped his arm and
looked at her incredulously. She gave him a malicious grin and went on
with her search.

For the rest of the evening he could not take his eyes from her. Now
he could easily analyse the change for himself. He remembered that she
had been ill with some type of fever and had come out of it white and
thin. Then she had seemed to shoot up, and now he saw that during her
illness her face had lengthened, and one by one each of those awkward
lumps of feature had dropped into place and proportion till they
formed a perfect structure that neither age nor illness could any
longer quite destroy. It was not in the least like her mother’s type
of beauty, which was round and soft and eminently pattable. It was
like a translation of her father’s masculinity, tight and strained and
almost harsh, and she had deliberately emphasized it by the way she
pulled her hair back in a tight knot, exposing the rather big
ears. Already it had begun to effect her gait, for she no longer
charged about a room swinging her arms like a sergeant-major. At the
same time she had not yet learned to move gracefully, and she seemed
to drift rather than walk, and came in and went out in profile as
though afraid to face a visitor or turn her back on him. And he
wondered again at the power of habit that causes us to live with
people historically, with faults or virtues that have long disappeared
to every eye but our own.

For twelve months Mick had been going steadily with a nice girl from
Sunday’s Well, and in due course he would have married her. Mick was
that sort, a creature of habit who controlled circumstances by
simplifying them down to a routine—the same restaurant, the same
table, the same waitress, and the same dish. It enabled him to go on
with his own thoughts. But whenever anything did happen to disturb
this routine it was like a convulsion of Nature for him; even his
favourite restaurant became a burden, and he did not know what to do
with his evenings and week-ends. The transformation of Nan into a
beauty had a similar effect on him. Gradually he dropped the nice girl
from Sunday’s Well without a word of explanation or apology and went
more and more to the Ryans’, where he had a feeling of not being
particularly welcome to anyone but Dinny and—sometimes at least—Nan
herself. She had plenty of admirers without him. The change was there
all right. Mr. Ryan, a tall, bald, noisy man with an ape-like
countenance of striking good-nature, enjoyed it as proof that sensible
men were not put off by a girl’s mathematics—he, poor man, had noticed
no change whatever in his daughter. Mrs. Ryan had no such
pleasure. Naturally, she had always cared more for her sons, but they
had not brought home with them attractive young men who were compelled
to flirt with her, and now Nan took an almost perverse delight in
keeping the young men and her mother apart. Beauty had brought out
what ugliness had failed to do—a deep resentment of her mother that at
times went too far for Mick’s taste. Occasionally he saw it in a
reversion to a heavy, stolid, almost stupid air that harked back to
her childhood, sometimes in a sparkle of wit that had malice in
it. She made up for this by what Mick thought of as an undue
consideration for her father. Whenever he came into the room,
bellowing and cheerful, her face lit up.

She had ceased to wear the rough masculine tweeds she had always
preferred, and to Mick’s eye it was not a change for the better. She
had developed a passion for good clothes without an understanding of
them, and used powder and lipstick in the lavish tasteless manner of a
girl of twelve.

But if he disapproved of her taste in dress, he hated her taste in
men. What left Dinny bored made Mick mad. He and Nan argued about this
in the same way they argued about books. “Smoothies,” he called her
admirers to her face. There was Joe Lyons, the solicitor, a suave,
dark-haired young man with mysterious slit-like eyes, who combined a
knowledge of wines with an intellectual Catholicism, and Matt Healy, a
little leprechaun of a butter merchant, who had a boat and rattled on
cheerfully about whiskey and “dames.” The pair of them could argue for
a full half-hour about a particular make of car or a Dublin hotel
without, so far as Mick could see, ever uttering one word of sense,
and obviously Lyons despised Healy as a chatter-box and Healy despised
Lyons as a fake, while both of them despised Mick. They thought he was
a character, and whenever he tried to discuss religion or politics
with them they listened with an amusement that made him furious.

“I stick to Mick against the day the Revolution comes,” said Healy
with his leprechaun’s laugh.

“No,” Lyons said, putting his arm patronizingly about Mick, “Mick will
have nothing to do with revolutions.”

“Don’t be too sure,” said Healy, his face lit up with merriment. “Mick
is a sans-culotte. Isn’t that the word, Mick?”

“I repeat no,” said Lyons with his grave smile. “I know Mick. Mick is
a wise man. Mind,” he added solemnly, raising his finger, “I didn’t
say an intelligent man. I said a wise one. There’s a difference.”

Mick could not help being angry. When they talked that way to Dinny,
he only blinked politely and drifted upstairs to his book or his
gramophone, but Mick stayed and grew mad. He was hard-working, but
unambitious; too intelligent to value the things commonplace people
valued, but too thin-skinned to ignore their scorn at his failure to
do so.

Nan herself had no objection to being courted by Mick. She was still
under the influence of her childish infatuation, and it satisfied her
vanity to be able to indulge it. She was an excellent companion,
active and intelligent, and would go off for long walks with him over
the hills through the fields to the river. They would end up in a
public house in Glanmire or Little Island, though she soon stopped him
trying to be extravagant in the manner of Healy and Lyons. “I’m a
whiskey-drinker, Mick,” she would say with a laugh. “You’re not a
whiskey-buyer.” She could talk for an hour over a glass of beer, but
when Mick tried to give their conversation a sentimental turn she
countered with a bluff practicality that shocked him.

“Marry you?” she exclaimed with a laugh. “Who died and left you the
fortune?”

“Why, do I have to have a fortune?” he asked quietly, though he was
stung by her good-natured contempt.

“Well, it would be a help if you’re thinking of getting married,” she
replied with a laugh. “As long as I remember my family, we never seem
to have been worried by anything else.”

“Of course, if you married Joe Lyons, you wouldn’t have to worry,” he
said with a hint of a sneer.

“From my point of view, that would be a very good reason, she said.

“A classy car and St. Thomas Aquinas,” Mick went on, feeling like a
small boy, but unable to stop himself. “What more could a girl ask?”

“You resent people having cars, don’t you?” she asked, leaning her
elbows on the table and giving him a nasty look. “Don’t you think it
might help if you went and got one for yourself ?”

The worldly, middle-aged tone, particularly when linked with the Ryan
go-getting, could be exceedingly destructive. There was something else
that troubled him, too, though he was not sure why. He had always
liked to pose a little as a man of the world, but Nan could sometimes
shock him badly. There seemed to be depths of sensuality in her that
were out of character. He could not believe that she really intended
it, but she could sometimes inflame him with some sudden violence or
coarseness as no ordinary girl could do.

Then one evening when they were out together, walking in the Lee
Fields, he noticed a change in her. She and another girl had been
spending a few days in Glengarrifte with Healy and Lyons. She did not
want to talk of it, and he had the feeling that something about it had
disappointed her. She was different—brooding, affectionate, and
intense. She pulled off her shoes and stockings and sat with her feet
in the river, her hands joined between her knees, while she gazed at
the woods on the other side of the river.

“You think too much of Matt and Joe,” she said, splashing her
feet. “Why can’t you feel sorry for them?”

“Feel sorry for them?” he repeated, so astonished that he burst into a
laugh.

She turned her head and her brown eyes rested on him with a strange
innocence. “If you weren’t such an old agnostic, I’d say pray for
them.”

“For what?” he asked, still laughing. “Bigger dividends?”

“The dividends aren’t much use to them,” she said. “They’re both
bored. That’s why they like me—I don’t bore them. They don’t know what
to make of me. ... Mind,” she added, laughing in her enthusiastic way,
“I love money, Mick Courtney. I love expensive clothes and flashy
dinners and wines I can’t pronounce the name of, but they don’t take
me in. A girl who was brought up as I was needs more than that to take
her in.”

“What is it you need?” asked Mick.

“Why don’t you go and do something?” she asked with sudden gravity.

“What?” he replied with a shrug.

“What?” she asked, waving her hands. “What do I care? I don’t even
know what you like. I don’t mind if you make a mess of it. It’s not
failure I’m afraid of. It’s just getting stuck in the mud, not caring
for anything. Look at Daddy! You may not think so, but I know he’s a
brilliant man, and he’s stuck. Now he hopes the boys will find out
whatever secret there is and do all the things he couldn’t do. That
doesn’t appeal to me.”

“Yes,” Mick agreed thoughtfully, lighting a cigarette and answering
himself rather than her. “I know what you mean. I dare say I’m not
ambitious. I’ve never felt the need for being ambitious. But I fancy I
could be ambitious for someone else. I’d have to get out of Cork
though. Probably to Dublin. There’s nothing here in my line.”

“Dublin would do me fine,” she said with satisfaction. “Mother and I
would get on much better at that distance.”

He said nothing for a few moments, and Nan went on splashing gaily
with her feet.

“Is that a bargain then?” he asked.

“Oh, yes,” she said, turning her big soft eyes on him. “That’s a
bargain. Don’t you know I was always mad about you?”

Their engagement made a big change in Mick. He was, as I have said, a
creature of habit, a man who lived by associations. He really knew the
city in a way that few of us knew it, its interesting corners and
queer characters, and the idea of having to exchange it for a place of
no associations at all was more of a shock to him than it would have
been to any of us; but though at certain times it left him with a lost
feeling, at others it restored to him a boyish excitement and gaiety,
as though the trip he was preparing for was some dangerous voyage from
which he might not return, and when he lit up like that he became more
attractive, reckless, and innocent. Nan had always been attracted by
him; now she really admired and loved him.

All the same, she did not discontinue her outings with her other
beaux. In particular, she remained friendly with Lyons, who was really
fond of her and believed that she wasn’t serious about marrying
Mick. He was, as she said, a genuinely kind man, and was shocked at
the thought that so beautiful a girl should even consider cooking and
washing clothes on a clerk’s income. He went to her father about it,
and explained patiently to him that it would mean social extinction
for Nan, and he would even have gone to Mick himself but that Nan
forbade it. “But he can’t do it, Nan,” he protested earnestly. “Mick
is a decent man. He can’t do that to you.” “He can’t, like hell,” said
Nan, chuckling and putting her head on Lyons’s chest. “He’d send me
out on the streets to keep himself in fags.”

These minor infidelities did not in the least worry Mick, who was
almost devoid of jealousy. He was merely amused by her occasional lies
and evasions, and even more by the fits of conscience that followed
them.

“Mick,” she asked between anger and laughter, “why do I tell you all
these lies? I’m not naturally untruthful, am I? I didn’t go to
Confession on Saturday night. I went out with Joe Lyons instead. He
still believes I’m going to marry him, and I would, too, if only he
had a brain in his head. Mick, why can’t you be attractive like that?”

But if Mick didn’t resent it, Mrs. Ryan resented it on his behalf,
though she resented his complaisance even more. She was sufficiently
feminine to know she might have done the same herself, and to feel
that if she had, she would need correction. No man is ever as
anti-feminist as a really feminine woman.

No, it was Nan’s father who exasperated Mick, and he was sensible
enough to realize that he was being exasperated without proper
cause. When Joe Lyons lamented Nan’s decision to Tom Ryan as though it
were no better than suicide, the old man was thunder-struck. He had
never mixed in society himself, which might be the reason that he had
never got anywhere in life.

“You really think it would come to that, Joe?” he asked, scowling.

“But consider it for yourself, Mr. Ryan,” pleaded Joe, raising that
warning finger of his. “Who is going to receive them? They can always
come to my house, but I’m not everybody. Do you think they’ll be
invited to the Healys’? I say, the moment they marry, Matt will drop
them, and I won’t blame him. It’s a game, admitted, but you have to
play it. Even I have to play it, and my only interest is in
philosophy.”

By the end of the evening, Tom Ryan had managed to persuade himself
that Mick was almost a ne’er-do-well and certainly an adventurer. The
prospect of the Dublin job did not satisfy him in the least. He wanted
to know what Mick proposed to do then. Rest on his oars? There were
examinations he could take which would insure his chances of
promotion. Tom would arrange it all and coach him himself.

At first Mick was amused and patient; then he became sarcastic, a
great weakness of his whenever he was forced on the defensive. Tom
Ryan, who was as incapable as a child of understanding sarcasm, rubbed
his bald head angrily and left the room in a flurry. If Mick had only
hit him over the head, as his wife did whenever he got on her nerves,
Tom would have understood that he was only relieving his feelings and
liked him the better for it. But sarcasm was to him a sort of silence,
a denial of attention that hurt him bitterly.

“I wish you wouldn’t speak to Daddy like that,” Nan said one night
when her father had been buzzing about Mick with syllabuses he had
refused even to look at.

“I wish Daddy would stop arranging my life for me,” Mick said wearily.

“He only means it in kindness.”

“I didn’t think he meant it any other way,” Mick said stiffly. “But I
wish he’d get it into his head that I’m marrying you, not him.”

“I wouldn’t be too sure of that either, Mick,” she said angrily.

“Really, Nan!” he said reproachfully. “Do you want me to be pushed
round by your old man?”

“It’s not only that,” she said, rising and crossing the room to the
fireplace. He noticed that when she lost her temper, she suddenly
seemed to lose command of her beauty. She scowled, bowed her head, and
walked with a heavy guardsman’s tread. “It’s just as well we’ve had
this out because I’d have had to tell you anyway. I’ve thought about
it enough, God knows. I can’t possibly marry you.”

Her tone was all that was necessary to bring Mick back to his own
tolerant, reasonable self.

“Why not?” he asked gently.

“Because I’m scared, if you want to know.” And just then, looking down
at him, she seemed scared.

“Of marriage?”

“Of marriage as well.” He noticed the reservation.

“Of me, so?”

“Oh, of marriage and you and myself,” she said explosively. “Myself
most of all.”

“Afraid you may kick over the traces?” he asked with affectionate
mockery.

“You think I wouldn’t?” she hissed with clenched fists, her eyes
narrowing and her face looking old and grim. “You don’t understand me
at all, Mick Courtney,” she added with a sort of boyish braggadocio
that made her seem again like the little tomboy he had known. “You
don’t even know the sort of things I’m capable of. You’re wrong for
me. I always knew you were.”

Mick treated the scene lightly, as though it were merely another of
their disagreements, but when he left the house he was both hurt and
troubled. Clearly there was a side of her character that he did not
understand, and he was a man who liked to understand things, if only
so that he could forget about them and go on with his own
thoughts. Even on the familiar hill-street, with the gas lamp poised
against the night sky, he seemed to be walking a road without
associations. He knew Nan was unhappy and felt it had nothing to do
with the subject of their quarrel. It was unhappiness that had driven
her into his arms in the first place, and now it was as though she
were being driven out again by the same wind. He had assumed rather
too complacently that she had turned to him in the first place because
she had seen through Healy and Lyons, but now he felt that her
unhappiness had nothing to do with them either. She was desperate
about herself rather than them. It struck him that she might easily
have been tempted too far by Lyons’s good looks and kindness. She was
the sort of passionate girl who could very easily be lured into an
indiscretion, and who would then react from it in loathing and
self-disgust. The very thought that this might be the cause moved him
to a passion of protective tenderness, and before he went to bed he
wrote and posted an affectionate letter, apologizing for his rudeness
to her father and promising to consider her feelings more in the
future.

In reply, he got a brief note, delivered at his house while he was at
work. She did not refer at all to his letter, and told him that she
was marrying Lyons. It was a dry note and, for him, full of suppressed
malice. He left his own house and met Dinny on the way up to call for
him. From Dinny’s gloomy air Mick saw that he knew all about it. They
went for one of their usual country walks, and only when they were
sitting in a country pub over their beer did Mick speak of the breach.

Dinny was worried and his worry made him rude, and through the
rudeness Mick seemed to hear the voices of the Ryans discussing
him. They hadn’t really thought much of him as a husband for Nan, but
had been prepared to put up with him on her account. At the same time
there was no question in their minds but that she didn’t really care
for Lyons and was marrying him only in some mood of desperation
induced by Mick. Obviously, it was all Mick’s fault.

“I can’t really imagine what I did,” Mick said reasonably. “Your
father started bossing me, and I was rude to him. I know that, and I
told Nan I was sorry.”

“Oh, the old man bosses us all, and we’re all rude,” said Dinny. “It’s
not that.”

“Then it’s nothing to do with me,” Mick said doggedly.

“Maybe not,” replied Dinny without conviction. “But, whatever it is,
the harm is done. You know how obstinate Nan is when she takes an idea
into her head.”

“And you don’t think I should see her and ask her?”

“I wouldn’t,” said Dinny, looking at Mick directly for the first
time. “I don’t think Nan will marry you, old man, and I’m not at all
sure but that it might be the best thing for you. You know I’m fond of
her, but she’s a curious girl. I think you’ll only hurt yourself worse
than you’re hurt already.”

Mick realized that Dinny, for whatever reasons, was advising him to
quit, and for once he was in a position to do so. With the usual irony
of events, the job in Dublin he had been seeking only on her account
had been offered to him, and he would have to leave at the end of the
month.

This, which had seemed an enormous break with his past, now turned out
to be the very best solace for his troubled mind. Though he missed old
friends and familiar places more than most people, he had the
sensitiveness of his type to any sort of novelty, and soon ended by
wondering how he could ever have stuck Cork for so long. Within twelve
months he had met a nice girl called Eilish and married her. And
though Cork people might be parochial, Eilish believed that anything
that didn’t happen between Glasnevin and Terenure had not happened at
all. When he talked to her of Cork, her eyes simply glazed over.

So entirely did Cork scenes and characters fade from his memory that
it came as a shock to him to meet Dinny one fine day in Grafton
Street. Dinny was on his way to his first job in England, and Mick at
once invited him home. But before they left town they celebrated their
reunion in Mick’s favourite pub off Grafton Street. Then he could ask
the question that had sprung to his mind when he caught sight of
Dinny’s face.

“How’s Nan?”

“Oh, didn’t you hear about her?” Dinny asked with his usual air of
mild surprise. “Nan’s gone into a convent, you know.”

“Nan?” repeated Mick. “Into a convent?”

“Yes,” said Dinny. “Of course, she used to talk of it when she was a
kid, but we never paid much attention. It came as a surprise to us. I
fancy it surprised the convent even more,” he added dryly.

“For God’s sake!” exclaimed Mick. “And the fellow she was engaged to?
Lyons.”

“Oh, she dropped him inside a couple of months,” said Dinny with
distaste. “I never thought she was serious about him anyway. The
fellow is a damned idiot.”

Mick went on with his drink, suddenly feeling embarrassed and
strained. A few minutes later he asked, with the pretence of a smile:

“You don’t think if I’d hung on she might have changed her mind?”

“I dare say she might,” Dinny replied sagaciously. “I’m not so sure it
would have been the best thing for you, though,” he added kindly. “The
truth is I don’t think Nan is the marrying kind.”

“I dare say not,” said Mick, but he did not believe it for an
instant. He was quite sure that Nan was the marrying kind, and that
nothing except the deep unhappiness that had first united and then
divided them had kept her from marrying. But what that unhappiness was
about he still had no idea, and he saw that Dinny knew even less than
he did.

Their meeting had brought it all back, and at intervals during the
next few years it returned again to his mind, disturbing him. It was
not that he was unhappy in his own married life—a man would have to
have something gravely wrong with him to be unhappy with a girl like
Eilish—but sometimes in the morning when he kissed her at the gate and
went swinging down the ugly modern avenue towards the sea, he would
think of the river or the hills of Cork and of the girl who had seemed
to have none of his pleasure in simple things, whose decisions seemed
all to have been dictated by some inner torment.

III Then, long after, he found himself alone in Cork, tidying up
things after the death of his father, his last relative there, and was
suddenly plunged back into the world of his childhood and youth,
wandering like a ghost from street to street, from pub to pub, from
old friend to old friend, resurrecting other ghosts in a mood that was
half anguish, half delight. He walked out Blackpool and up Goulding’s
Glen only to find that the big mill-pond had all dried up, and sat on
the edge remembering winter days when he was a child and the pond was
full of skaters, and summer nights when it was full of stars. His
absorption in the familiar made him peculiarly susceptible to the
poetry of change. He visited the Ryans and found Mrs. Ryan almost as
good-looking and pattable as ever, though she moaned sentimentally
about the departure of the boys, her disappointment with Nan, and her
husband’s growing crankiness.

When she saw him to the door she folded her arms and leaned against
the jamb.

“Wisha, Mick, wouldn’t you go and see her?” she asked reproachfully.

“Nan?” said Mick. “You don’t think she’d mind?”

“Why would she mind, boy?” Mrs. Ryan said with a shrug. “Sure the girl
must be dead for someone to talk to! Mick, boy, I was never one for
criticizing religion, but, God forgive me, that’s not a natural life
at all. I wouldn’t stand it for a week. All those old hags!”

Mick, imagining the effect of Mrs. Ryan on any well-organized convent,
decided that God would probably not hold it too much against her, but
he made up his mind to visit Nan. The convent was on one of the steep
hills outside the city, with a wide view of the valley from its front
lawn. He was expecting a change, but her appearance in the ugly
convent parlour startled him. The frame of white linen and black veil
gave her strongly marked features the unnatural relief of a
fifteenth-century German portrait. And the twinkle of the big brown
eyes convinced him of an idea that had been forming slowly in his mind
through the years.

“Isn’t it terrible I can’t kiss you, Mick?” she said with a
chuckle. “I suppose I could, really, but our old chaplain is a
terror. He thinks I’m the New Nun. He’s been hearing about her all his
life, but I’m the first he’s run across. Come into the garden where we
can talk,” she added with an awed glance at the holy pictures on the
walls. “This place would give you the creeps. I’m at them the whole
time to get rid of that Sacred Heart. It’s Bavarian, of course. They
love it.”

Chattering on, she rustled ahead of him on to the lawn with her head
bowed. He knew from the little flutter in her voice and manner that
she was as pleased to see him as he was to see her. She led him to a
garden seat behind a hedge that hid them from the convent, and then
grabbed in her enthusiastic way at his hand.

“Now, tell me all about you,” she said. “I heard you were married to a
very nice girl. One of the sisters went to school with her. She says
she’s a saint. Has she converted you yet?”

“Do I look as if she had?” he asked with a pale smile.

“No,” she replied with a chuckle. “I’d know that agnostic look of
yours anywhere. But you needn’t think you’ll escape me all the same.”

“You’re a fierce pray-er,” he quoted, and she burst into a delighted
laugh.

“It’s true,” she said. “I am. I’m a terror for holding on.”

“Really?” he asked mockingly. “A girl that let two men slip in—what
was it? a month?”

“Ah, that was different,” she said with sudden gravity. “Then there
were other things at stake. I suppose God came first.” Then she looked
at him slyly out of the corner of her eye. “Or do you think I’m only
talking nonsense?”

“What else is it?” he asked.

“I’m not, really,” she said. “Though I sometimes wonder myself how it
all happened,” she added with a rueful shrug. “And it’s not that I’m
not happy here. You know that?”

“Yes,” he said quietly. “I’ve suspected that for quite a while.”

“My,” she said with a laugh, “you have changed!”

He had not needed her to say that she was happy, not did he need her
to tell him why. He knew that the idea that had been forming in his
mind for the last year or two was the true one, and that what had
happened to her was not something unique and inexplicable. It was
something that happened to others in different ways. Because of some
inadequacy in themselves—poverty or physical weakness in men, poverty
or ugliness in women—those with the gift of creation built for
themselves a rich interior world; and when the inadequacy disappeared
and the real world was spread before them with all its wealth and
beauty, they could not give their whole heart to it. Uncertain of
their choice, they wavered between goals—were lonely in crowds,
dissatisfied amid noise and laughter, unhappy even with those they
loved best. The interior world called them back, and for some it was a
case of having to return there or die.

He tried to explain this to her, feeling his own lack of
persuasiveness, and at the same time aware that she was watching him
keenly and with amusement, almost as though she did not take him
seriously. Perhaps she didn’t, for which of us can feel, let alone
describe, another’s interior world? They sat there for close on an
hour, listening to the convent bells calling one sister or another,
and Mick refused to stay for tea. He knew convent tea parties, and had
no wish to spoil the impression that their meeting had left on him.

“Pray for me,” he said with a smile as they shook hands.

“Do you think I ever stopped?” she replied with a mocking laugh, and
he strode quickly down the shady steps to the lodge-gate in a strange
mood of rejoicing, realizing that, however the city might change, that
old love affair went on unbroken in a world where disgust or despair
would never touch it, and would continue to do so till both of them
were dead.


(1957)
Source:  Domestic Relations, 1957