A Set Variations on a Borrowed Theme

Kate Mahoney was sixty when her husband died and, like many another
widow, she had to face the loss of her little home. Her two daughters,
Nora and Molly, were married, and even if either of them had been in a
position to offer her a home, she would have hesitated over it. As she
said in her patient long-suffering way to her old crony Hanna Dinan,
they shouted too much. Hanna raised her head in mock surprise and
exclaimed, “You don’t say so, ma’am!” Kate looked at her reproachfully
for a moment and then murmured with almost sensual bliss, “Oh, you
cheeky thing.” The truth was, as Hanna implied, that Kate shouted
enough for a regimental sergeant-major, and the girls, both gentle and
timid, had learned early in life that the only way of making
themselves heard was to shout back. Kate didn’t mind that; in fact,
she rather enjoyed it. Nor did she shout all the time. She had another
tone, which was low-pitched and monotonous, and in which she tended to
break off a sentence as though she had forgotten what she was
saying. But low-pitched or loud, her talk was monumental, like
headstones. Her hands and legs were knotted with rheumatics, and she
had a battered, inexpressive country woman’s face, like a butcher’s
block, in which the only good feature was the eyes, which looked
astonishingly girlish and merry. Maybe it would be only later that you
would remember the hands—which were rarely still—fastening or
unfastening a button on her blouse.

Her cottage was in a lane outside Cork. There was high rocky ground
behind it that could never be built on, and though as a result it got
little or no sunlight and another row of cottages between her and the
roadway shut off the view, it was quiet and free of traffic. She
wanted to die there, in the bed her husband had died in, but with the
rheumatics she couldn’t go out and do a day’s work, as other widows
did. It was this that made her think of taking in a foster child. It
was a terrible comedown—more particularly for her, a respectable woman
who had brought up two honest transactions of her own, but at her age
what else could she do? So she took her problem to Miss Hegarty, the
nurse.

Miss Hegarty was a fine-looking woman of good family, but so
distracted with having to deal with the endless goings on of male and
female that there were times she didn’t seem right in the
head. “Ahadie!” she would cry gaily to a woman in labor. “Fun enough
you got out of starting it. Laugh now, why don’t you?”

But Kate found her a good friend. She advised Kate against taking
foster children from the local authorities, because they paid so badly
that it was no better than slavery. The thing to do was to take the
child of a girl of good family who could afford to maintain it.

“Ah, where would I meet a girl like that?” Kate asked humbly, and
Miss Hegarty gave a loud, bitter laugh and stood up to lean against
the mantelpiece with her arms folded.

“’Tis easy seen you don’t know much about it, Mrs. Mahoney,” she
said. “What chance, indeed, and the whole country crawling with
them!”

“Oh, my!” said Kate.

“But I warn you, ma’am, that you can’t rely on any of them,” said Miss
Hegarty. “They’re so mad for men they’ll go anywhere for them. And
for all you know, a girl like that would be off next month to London
and you might never hear of her again. The stick, ma’am, the stick is
what the whole lot of them want.”

Kate, however, decided to take the risk; there was something that
appealed to her in the idea of a child of good family, and Miss
Hegarty knew the very girl. She was the manageress of a store in
Waterford, who had got entangled with a scoundrel whose name nobody
even knew, but indeed he couldn’t be much good to leave her that
way. When Kate told her daughters, Nora, the flighty one, didn’t seem
to mind, but Molly, who was more sensitive, wept and begged her mother
to come and live with them instead. “Oh yes, what a thing I’d do,”
said Kate, whose mind was made up. From Nora, who now had children of
her own, she borrowed back the old family perambulator, and one spring
morning it appeared again outside the door in the lane, with a baby
boy asleep in it. “My first!” Kate shouted jocosely when any of the
neighbors commented on it, and then she went on to explain, in the
monotonous voice she used for solemn occasions, that this was no
ordinary baby such as you’d get from the workhouse, without knowing
who it was or where it came from, but the child of a beautiful
educated girl from one of the best families in Waterford. She went on
to tell how the poor child had been taken advantage of, and the
neighbors tch-tch’d and agreed that it was a sad, sad story and didn’t
believe a word of it. The young married women didn’t even pretend to
believe in Kate’s rigmarole. They muttered fiercely among themselves
that you couldn’t let decent children grow up alongside the likes of
that, and that the priest or the landlord should put a stop to it. But
they didn’t say it too loud, for however embarrassed Kate might be by
her situation she was a very obstinate old woman, and she had a dirty
tongue when she was roused.

So Jimmy Mahoney was allowed to grow up in the lane along with the
honest transactions, and turned into a fat, good-looking, moody boy,
who seemed to see nothing peculiar in his mother’s being a cranky old
woman with a scolding tongue. On the contrary, he seemed to depend on
her more than the other kids did on their mothers, and sometimes when
she left him with Hanna Dinan and went off to see one of her
daughters, he sat and sulked on the doorstep till she got home. One
day when Hanna’s back was turned, he went after Kate, right across the
city to Molly’s house on the Douglas Road. Kate, talking to Molly,
glanced up and saw him glaring at her from the doorway and
started. thinking that something must have happened to him and
this was his ghost. “Oh, you pest!” she shouted when she saw that it
wasn’t. Then she gave him a grin. “I suppose it was the way you
couldn’t get on without me?”

Molly, a beautiful, haggard woman, gave him a smile of Christian
charity and said quietly, “Come in, Jimmy.” It was a thing she would
not have wished for a pound, for it would have to be explained to her
neighbors, and she felt it degraded them all. But after that, whatever
she or Nora might think, Kate had to bring Jimmy with her by the
hand. It didn’t look right—their old mother in her black hat and coat
hobbling up to the door with a child younger than their own by the
hand.

Even then Jimmy wasn’t satisfied. He wanted a brother or sister as
well—preferably a brother. He had a great weakness for babies and was
mad jealous of other boys who had babies to look after. “Every
bloomin’ fella in the road have a brudder or sister except me,” he
said to Kate. But she told him roughly that they couldn’t afford it.

All the same, he got his wish. One evening Miss Hegarty came to her
and asked if she would take in the child of a well-to-do girl in
Bantry. The mother was engaged to marry a rich Englishman, but at the
last moment she had thrown herself into a wild affair with a married
man who had courted her when she was only seventeen. “Oh, my, my, the
things that go on,” sighed Kate.

“Mrs. Mahoney,” Miss Hegarty cried, “don’t talk to me about it! If you
knew the half of it, it would make you lose your faith in religion.”

Then and there Kate accepted. Later she felt she had been hasty. She
needed the money, but not as badly as all that. When Nora came to see
her and Kate told her what she had done, there was a terrible scene.

“Ah, Mammy, you’re making a holy show of us!” Nora cried.

“I’m making a show of ye?” Kate pointed at her bosom with the
mock-innocent air that had so often maddened her daughters. “I do my
business, and I don’t cost ye a penny. Is that what ye call making a
show of ye?”

“Ah, you’d think we were something out of a circus instead of an old
respectable family,” Nora said. “That I can hardly face the neighbors
when I come up the lane! Ahadie, ’tis well my poor daddy can’t see
what you’re making of his house! He’s the one that would deal with
you. A woman of sixty-five! I suppose you think you’re going to live
forever.”

“God is good,” Kate muttered stiffly. “I might have a couple of years
in me yet.”

“You might,” Nora said ironically. “And I suppose you imagine that if
anything happens you, Molly and I will carry on the good work.”

“Ye mightn’t be asked,” said Kate. “Their people have plenty—more
than you’ll ever be able to say.” This was a dirty thrust at Nora,
whose poor husband was not bright. “And how sure you are of yourself!
My goodness, that we’d never do anything if we were to be always
thinking of what might happen us. And what about my rent? Are you
going to pay it?”

“Ah, ’tisn’t the rent with you at all,” Nora said. “Nor it never
was. You only do it because you like it.”

“I like it? An old woman like me that’s crippled with the rheumatics?
Oh, my, that ’tis in a home I ought to be if I had my rights. In a
home!”

“Ah, I’d like to see the home that would keep you,” Nora replied
contemptuously. “Don’t be making any more excuses. You love it,
woman. And you care more about that little bastard than you ever did
about Molly or me.”

“How dare you?” Kate cried, rising with as much dignity as the
rheumatics permitted. “What way is that to speak to your own mother?
And to talk about a poor innocent child in my house like that, you
dirty, jealous thing! Yes, jealous,” she added in a wondering whisper
as though the truth had only dawned on her in that moment. “Oh, my! Ye
that had everything!”



The scene upset her, but not because of the row with Nora; the
Mahoneys always quarrelled like that, at the top of their lungs, as
though they all suffered from congenital deafness, and they got the
same pleasure out of it that a baby gets out of hammering a tin
can. What really mortified her was that she had given herself away in
front of Nora, whose intelligence she had no respect for. It was true
that she had taken Jimmy in for perfectly good mercenary reasons; and
it was very wrong of Nora to impute sentimental considerations to
her—a determined, managing woman, who had lived that long with no
thanks to anybody. But all the same, Nora wasn’t altogether
wrong. Motherhood was the only trade Kate knew, and though her
rheumatics were bad and her sight wasn’t what it used to be and she
had to get Jimmy to thread her needles for her, she felt the older she
got the better she practiced it. It was even true to say that she
enjoyed Jimmy more than she had enjoyed her own children, but this was
natural enough, because she hadn’t the same anxieties about him. If
you had pressed her hard enough, she would have said that if there was
a better boy on the road she didn’t know him. And was there anything
wrong with that? You could say what you liked, but there was something
in good blood.

She might have got angry if you had accused her of being an old
dreamer who was really attracted by the romance and mystery of Jimmy’s
birth—something she had missed in her own sober and industrious
life—but that was what she and Hanna enjoyed speculating about over a
little glass when Jimmy was in bed. And later, when she had covered
him for the night and lay awake in the next room saying her rosary,
she would often forget her prayers and imagine how she would feel if
one stormy night—one of those nights when the whole harbor seemed to
move in on the town and try to push it down—there came a knock to the
door and she saw Jimmy’s father standing outside in the lane, tall and
handsome, with a small black mustache and the tears in his
eyes. “Mr. Mulvany,” she would say to the teacher (she was always
making up ideal names and occupations for Jimmy’s father), “your son
wants nothing from you.” Or, if she was in a generous mood, “Senator
MacDunphy, come in. Jimmy was beginning to think you’d never come.”

Nora was right. Stupid or not, Nora had seen through her. She was an
old fool. And when Miss Hegarty had dangled the extra money in front
of her, it wasn’t the money that appealed to her so much as the girl
who had been ready to throw away her chances with the rich Englishman
for the sake of one wild fling with an old sweetheart. “An old fool,”
Kate said to herself. She didn’t feel repentant, though.

But dreamers are forever running into degrading practical realities,
and there was one thing about her extraordinary family that Kate could
do nothing about. Before she even laid eyes on him, the second boy was
also christened James, and, so that Jimmy shouldn’t be too upset and
that she herself should do nothing against the law, she called him
James—an unnatural name for any child, as she well knew. James was a
baby with a big head, a gaping mouth, and a sickly countenance, and
even from the first day he seemed to realize that he was in the world
only on sufferance, and resigned himself to it. But Jimmy could see
nothing wrong with him. He explored the neighborhood to study all the
other babies, and told Kate that James was brighter than the whole lot
of them. He adopted a possessive attitude, and wheeled the
perambulator up and down the main road so that people could see for
themselves the sort James was. When he came back, he reported with
great satisfaction that three people, two men and a woman, had stopped
him to admire his baby brother.



A couple of times a year, Jimmy’s real mother, whom he knew as Aunt
Nance, came to stay with the friends in Cork who had arranged with
Miss Hegarty for his being boarded out, and then Jimmy visited there
and played with the two children, Rory and Mary. They were altogether
too polite for Jimmy, but he liked his Aunt Nance a lot. She was tall
and plump and good-looking, with a swarthy complexion and dark, dark
hair. She talked in a crisp, nervous, almost common way, and was
always forgetting herself and saying dirty words, like “Cripes!”’ and
“Damn!,” that only men were supposed to know. Kate liked him to go
there, and when he got home, she asked him all sorts of questions
about his visit, like how many rooms there were in the house, what he
ate, what sort of furniture there was and the size of the
garden—things that never interested Jimmy in the least.

When James began to grow up, he too asked questions. He wanted to know
what school Rory and Mary went to, what they learned there, and
whether or not Mary played the piano. These too were questions that
did not interest Jimmy, but it dawned on him that James was lonely
when he was left behind and wanted to see the Martins’ place for
himself. This seemed an excellent idea to Jimmy, because James was a
steady quiet kid who would get on much better with Rory and Mary than
he did, but when he suggested it Kate only said James was too young
and Aunt Nance said she’d see.

It ended by his suspecting that there was something fishy about
James. There always had been something unusual about him—as though he
weren’t a member of the family at all. He didn’t like rough games and
he preferred little girls to little boys. Jimmy didn’t know how you
did become a member of the family, but from what he could see your
mother had either to go to the hospital or lie up in the house, and he
couldn’t remember that Kate had done either. James had just been there
one morning when he woke. The more he thought of it, the surer he
became that James was adopted. He didn’t know what “adopted” meant,
except that kids it happened to lived with people who weren’t really
related to them, and he found the idea of this very stimulating.

One evening, when Kate was complaining of her rheumatics, he asked her
if she hadn’t gone to hospital with it.

“Oye, why would I go to hospital?” she asked sourly. “I was never in
one in my life and I hope I’ll never have to go there.”

James was sitting by the window, scribbling, and Jimmy didn’t say
anything more. But later, when James was in bed, he asked her
casually, “You’re not James’s mother, are you, Mammy?”

He was surprised at the way she turned on him. “What’s that you

say?”

“Nothing, only that you’re not James’s mother.”

“Who told you that?” she asked angrily.

“Nobody told me,” he said, becoming defensive, “but you never went to
hospital, like Mrs. Casey. You told me yourself.”

“Don’t let the child hear you saying things like that, you caffler!”
she hissed.

“I never told him anything,” he said sullenly. “But it’s true, isn’t
it? That’s the reason you get the money.”

“Mind your own business!” she retorted.

Still, she was frightened. “Oh, my! The cunning of him!” she said next
day to her old crony. “The way he cross-examined me—that poor Jack
Mahoney never did the like! And what am I to say to him? Who will I
get to advise me?”

Hanna, who had an answer for everything, was all for telling Jimmy the
whole truth at once, but what did Hanna know about it and she an old
maid? The other neighbors were inclined to think it was a judgment on
Kate for her foolishness. And all the while, Jimmy’s behavior got
worse. At the best of times it wasn’t very good. Though sometimes he
was in high spirits and entertained herself and James telling funny
stories, more often he was low-spirited and lay on his bed sulking
over a comic. After that, he would go out with other boys and return
with a guilty air she could spot from the end of the lane, and she
would know he had been up to mischief and broken a window or stolen
from a shop. At times like that, she was never free of anxiety for
him, because apart from the fact that she had a holy terror of the
law, she knew his naughtiness threatened the sufferance the neighbors
extended to him on her account, and that they would be only too ready
to say that it was all you could expect of a boy like that.

Finally, she decided to take Hanna Dinan’s advice. But when James was
asleep and she and Jimmy were sitting together in the darkness over
the fire, she lost courage. She had no notion of how he would take it,
and if he took it badly, she’d get the blame. She told him, instead,
about James and his mother. She told him how some people, like
herself, were lucky, because their fancy never strayed from the one
person, while others, like James’s mother, had the misfortune to love
someone they couldn’t marry. She was pleased by Jimmy’s silent
attention. She thought she had impressed him. But his first words
startled her. “All the same, Mammy,” he said, “James should be with
his own mother.”

She was astonished at the maturity in his tone. This was no longer any
of the Jimmys she had known, but one who spoke with the sort of
authority poor Jack had exercised on the rare occasions when he
had called his family to order.

“Ah, how could he be with her?”

“Then she ought to tell him who he is and why she can’t have him.”

“Is it to be upsetting the child?” she asked complainingly.

“If she doesn’t upset him, somebody else will,” he said with his
brooding, old-mannish air.

“They will, they will, God help us!” she sighed. “People are bad
enough for anything. But the poor child may as well be happy while he
can.”

But it wasn’t of James that she was thinking. James might get by, a
colorless, studious, well-behaved boy who never gave offense to
anybody, but one day Jimmy would beat up another boy or steal from a
shop, and some woman would spite him by using the word Kate now
dreaded—the word she had so often used lightly herself when she had no
one to protect from it. Again she was tempted to tell him the whole
truth, and again she was too afraid.

Meanwhile, for a short time at least, she had given Jimmy a purpose in
life. Jimmy was always like that, either up or down, either full of
purpose or shiftless and despondent. Now he took James over
personally. He said it was bad for James to be so much alone, and took
him along with him when he went down the Glen with the bigger
boys. James didn’t like being with the bigger boys. He liked to go at
his own slow pace, gaping at everything, and he didn’t in the least
mind being left alone, but he was flattered by Jimmy’s attention. When
he came home he repeated his adventures to Kate in the manner of a
policeman making a report. “Jimmy showed me a blackbird’s nest. You
can’t touch a bird’s nest, because the bird would know and leave the
little eggs to die. I think it is wrong to rob a bird’s nest, don’t
you, Mammy?” James collected bits of information, right and wrong,
apparently thinking that they would all come in handy someday, and to
each he managed to attach a useful moral lesson. No wonder he made
Jimmy laugh.

But Jimmy still continued to worry about James’s future. He waited
till Aunt Nance came to Cork, and when he got her to himself he poured
it all out to her in his enthusiastic way. He had managed to persuade
himself that Kate didn’t understand the seriousness of the situation
but that Aunt Nance would. Before he had even finished, Aunt Nance
gave him a queer look and cut him off. “You’re too young to understand
these things, Jimmy,” she said.

“But don’t you think he should be with his mother?” he asked
indignantly.

“I don’t know a thing about it, and if I did I wouldn’t be able to do
anything.”

Jimmy left her in one of his mutinous, incoherent fits of rage.
Instead of taking the bus, he walked, and when he reached the river he
stood on the bank in the darkness throwing stones. It was late when he
got home, but Kate was waiting up for him. He tossed his cap on the
chair and went upstairs.

‘What kept you?” she asked after him.

“Nothing.”

“Don’t you want a cup of tea?”

“I don’t.”

“He knows about it,” Kate muttered to herself. “She must have told
him. Now what’ll I do?”

After a time she went upstairs to bed, but she heard him from the
little attic room next door, where he and James slept, tossing and
muttering to himself. She lit the candle and went in. He sat up in bed
and looked at her with mad eyes.

“Go away!” he said. “You’re not my mother.”

“Oye!” she whimpered, sleepy and scared. “You and your goings on.”

“You’re not, you’re not, you’re not,” he muttered. “I’m like James,
only you wouldn’t tell me. You tell me nothing but lies.”

“Whisht, whisht, and don’t wake the child!” she whispered
impatiently. “You ought to be ashamed, a big boy like you. Come into
the other room.”

He stumbled out ahead of her, and she sat on the edge of her bed and
put her arm round him. He was shivering. She no longer felt capable of
handling him. She was old and tired and bothered in her head.

“What made you think of that, child?”

“Aunt Nance,” he said with a sob.

“What did she tell you?”

“She wouldn’t tell me anything, only I saw she was afraid.”

“What was she afraid of?”

“I asked her to get James’s mother to bring him home and she got
frightened.”

“Oh, oh, oh, you poor misfortunate child!” she said with a wail. “And
you only did it for the best.”

“I want to know who my mother is,” he cried despairingly. “Is it Aunt
Kitty or Aunt Nance?”

“Look, child, lie down here and you can sleep with Mammy.”

“How can I sleep?” he asked frantically. “I only want to know who my
mother is, and ye all tell me lies.” Then, turning suddenly into a
baby again, he put his head in her lap and bawled. She put her hand
under his nightshirt and patted his fat bottom.

“Oh, you poor putog, you’re perished,” she sighed. Then she raised
him onto the bed and pulled the covers about his shoulders.

“Will I get you a cup of tea?” she asked in a loud voice, and as he
shook his head she muttered, “I will, I will.”

She threw an old coat round her and went downstairs to the kitchen,
where the oil lamp was turned low. There was still red ash in the
grate, and she blew on it and boiled the kettle. Then her troubles
seemed to get the better of her, and she spoke to herself in a loud,
angry, complaining tone. “’Twas the price of me for having anything
to do with them—me that was never used to anything but decent people.”
When she heard herself she was ashamed. And then she shrugged, and
whined, “I’m too old.” As she climbed awkwardly back up the stairs
with the two big mugs of tea, she heard him still sobbing, and
stopped, turning her eyes to the ceiling. “God direct me!” she said
aloud.

She sat on the edge of the bed and shook him. “Drink this!” she said
roughly.

“I don’t want it,” said Jimmy. “I want to know who my mother is.”

“Drink it, you dirty little caffler!” she said angrily. “Drink it or I
won’t tell you at all.”

He raised himself in the big bed and she held the mug to his lips,
though he could not keep himself from shivering and the tea spilled
over his shirt and the bedclothes. “My good sheet,” she muttered, and
then took up her own cup and looked away into a corner of the room as
if to avoid his eyes. “She is your mother, your Aunt Nance,” she said
in a harsh, expressionless voice, “and a good mother she is, and a
good woman as well, and it will be a bad day for you when you talk
against her or let anyone else do it. She had the misfortune to meet a
man that was beneath her. She was innocent. He took advantage of
her. She wasn’t the first and she won’t be the last.”

He said nothing for a while, then he asked in a low voice, “And who
was my daddy?”

“How would I know who he was? Whoever he was, he wasn’t much.”

“When I find out I’m going to kill him.”

“Indeed you’ll do nothing of the sort,” she said sharply. “Whatever he
did, he is your father and you wouldn’t be here without him. He’s
there inside you, and the thing you will slight in yourself will be
the rock you will perish on.”

“And why did Aunt Nance like him if he was what you said?”

“Because she had no sense,” said Kate. “What sense have any young
girl? ’Tis unknown what they expect. If they had more sense they would
be said by their fathers and mothers, that know what life is like, but
they won’t be said nor led by anyone. And the better they are the more
they expect. That was all that was wrong with your mother, child. Shee was too innocent and too hopeful.”



The dawn came in the window, and still she rambled on, half dead with
sleep. Later, when she reported it to Hanna, she said that it was
nothing but lies from beginning to end, and what other way could it be
when she hadn’t a notion how a girl like that would feel, but at the
time it did not seem to be lies. It seemed rather as though she were
reporting a complete truth that was known only to herself and God. And
in a queer way it steadied Jimmy and brought out the little man in
him.

“Mammy, does this mean that there’s something wrong with James and
me?” he asked at last, and she knew that this was the question that
preoccupied him above all others.

“Indeed, it means nothing of the sort,” she cried, and for the first
time it seemed to herself that she was answering in her own
person. “It is nothing. Only bad, jealous people would say the likes
of that. Oh, you’ll meet them, never fear,” she said, joining her
hands, “the scum of the earth with their marriage lines and their
baptismal lines, looking down on their betters. But mark what I say,
child, don’t let any of them try and persuade you that you’re not as
good as them. And better! A thousand times better.”

Strange notions from a respectable old woman who had never even
believed in love!

What it all meant was brought home to her when Jimmy was fourteen and
James between eight and nine. Jimmy’s mother married a commercial
traveller from Dublin who accepted Jimmy as a normal event that might
happen to any decent girl, and he had persuaded her they should have
Jimmy to live with them. It came as a great shock to Kate, though why
it should have done so she couldn’t say, because for years it was she
who had argued with Hanna Dinan that the time had come for Jimmy to
get a proper education and mix with what she called his equals. Now
she realized that she was as jealous and possessive as if she were his
real mother. She had never slighted Jimmy’s mother, or allowed anyone
else to do so, but she did it now. “She neglected him when it suited
her, and now when it suits her she wants him back,” she said to Hanna,
and when Hanna replied that Kate wasn’t being fair, she snapped, “Let
them that have it be fair. Them that haven’t are entitled to their
say.”

Besides, Jimmy provoked her. He had no power of concealing his
emotions, and she could see that he had thoughts only for the
marvellous new world that was opening up before him. He returned in
high spirits from an evening with his mother and his new stepfather,
and told Kate and James all about his stepfather’s car, and his house
outside Rathfarnham, at the foot of the Dublin Mountains. He told Kate
blithely that he would always come back for the holidays, and
comforted James by saying that his turn would come next. When Kate
burst out suddenly, “Yourself is all you think about—no thought for me
or the child,” he got frantic and shouted, “All right, I won’t go if
you don’t want me to!”

“Who said I didn’t want you to go?” she shouted. “How could I keep you
and me with nothing? Go to the well-heeled ones! Go to the ones that
can look after you!”

By the time he left, she had regained control of herself, and she and
James went with him to the station. They were stopped several times by
old neighbors, who congratulated Jimmy. At the station he broke down,
but she suspected that his grief wouldn’t last long. And she had the
impression that James felt the parting more deeply, though he was a
child who didn’t show much what he felt. He seemed to have come into
the world expecting this sort of thing.

And yet, curiously, next day, when she woke and remembered Jimmy was
gone, she had a feeling of relief. She realized that she wasn’t the
one to look after him. He was too big and noisy and exacting; he
needed a man to keep him in his place. And besides, now that she had
become old and stiff and half blind, the housekeeping was more of a
trial. She would decide to give the boys a treat, and go to town to
get the stewing beef, and suddenly realize when she got back to the
kitchen that she didn’t remember how to make stew. Then she would
close her eyes and pray that God would direct her how to make stew as
she made it when she was a young married woman—“delicious” poor Jack
used to say it was. James was an easier proposition altogether, a boy
who would live forever on tea and sweet cakes, so long as he got the
penny exercise books for his writings and drawings.

The loss of Jimmy showed her how precarious was her hold on James, and
in the evenings, when they were alone, she sat with him before the
kitchen fire and let him hold forth to her on what he was going to be
when he grew up. It seemed, according to himself, he was going to be a
statue, and sometimes Kate suspected that the child wouldn’t notice
much difference, because he was a bit that way already. Jimmy had been
a great boy to raise a laugh, particularly against himself, and James
seemed to think it was his duty to do the same, but if she was to be
killed for it she couldn’t laugh at James’s jokes. And yet she knew
that James was gentler, steadier, and more considerate. When you asked
him to do anything you had to explain to him why, but you never had to
explain it twice. “Jimmy have the fire, but James have the character”
was how she put it to Hanna.

And yet she fretted over Jimmy as she wouldn’t have fretted over
James. From Dublin he had sent her one postcard, that was all, and he
hadn’t replied to either of the letters James wrote to him. “As true
as God, that fellow is in trouble,” she said.

“It’s not that, Mammy,” said James, “it’s just that he doesn’t like
writing.”

“Who wants him to write? All I want is to know how he is. If he was
dying that vagabond wouldn’t tell me!”

It was a queer way for a woman to feel who had been congratulating
herself on having got rid of him.

Then, one morning, she heard a hammering at the front door and knew
that the thing she had been dreading had happened. Without even asking
who it was, she stumbled down the stairs in the darkness. When she
opened the door and saw Jimmy, she threw her arms about his neck. “Oh,
child, child!” she whimpered. “Sure, I thought you’d never come home!
How did you get here?”

“I came on the bike,” he said with a swagger.

“You did, you did, you divil you, you did,” she muttered, seeing the
bicycle against the wall. And then, her voice rising to a squeal of
anguish. “Are them your good trousers?”

‘Who is it, Mammy?” James shouted from upstairs.

“Come down yourself,” she said, and went to lay the fire. James came
down the stairs sedately in his nightshirt. Jimmy went up to him with
a grin, and it startled her to see how big and solid he looked beside
the frail, spectacled boy.

“Hallo, James,” Jimmy said, shaking hands. “I suppose you’re sorry I’m
back?”

“No, Jimmy,” James said in a small voice, “I’m glad you’re back. The
house isn’t the same without you.”

“Put on your topcoat, you little divil!” cried Kate. “How often have I
to be telling you not to go round like that? That fellow,” she said to
Jimmy, “he have the heart scalded in me. I’d want ten eyes and hands,
picking things up after him. ... Go on, you little gligeen!”

It was a joyous reunion in the little kitchen when the sun was just
beginning to pick out the high ground behind the house. Kate marvelled
how she had managed to listen to James all that time and the way Jimmy
could tell a story. Whatever James told you, the point of it always
seemed to be how clever he was. Jimmy’s stories always showed him up
as a fool, and somehow it never crossed your mind that he was a fool
at all. And yet there was something about him this morning that didn’t
seem right.

“Never mind about that!” Kate cried at last. “Tell us what your mother
said.”

“How do you mean?” asked Jimmy, turning red.

“What did she say when you told her you were coming back?”

“She didn’t say anything,” Jimmy replied with a brassy air. “She
doesn’t mind what I do.”

“She doesn’t, I hear,” Kate retorted mockingly. “I suppose ’twas
jealous you were?”

“What would I be jealous of?” Jimmy asked defiantly.

“Your stepfather, who else?” she said, screwing up her eyes in mockery
at him. “You wanted all the attention. And now she’ll be blaming it
all on me. She’ll be saying I have you spoiled. And she’ll be right. I
have you ruined, you little caffler! Ruined!” she repeated
meditatively as she went and opened the back door. The whole hill
behind was reflecting the morning light in a great rosy glow. “Oh,
my!” she said as though to herself. “There’s a beautiful morning,
glory be to God!”

Just then she heard the unfamiliar sound of a car in the lane, and it
stopped outside the front door. She knew then what it was that had
seemed wrong in Jimmy’s story, and turned on him. “You ran away from
home,” she said. “Is that the police?”

Jimmy didn’t seem to be listening to her. “If that’s my stepfather,
I’m not going back with him,” he said.

Kate went to the front door and saw a good-looking young man with
large ears and the pink-and-white complexion she called “delicate.”
She knew at once it was Jimmy’s stepfather.

“Mrs. Mahoney?” he asked.

“Come in, sir, come in,” she said obsequiously, and now she was no
longer the proud, possessive mother whose boy had come back to her but
the old hireling who had been caught with property that wasn’t hers.

The young man strode into the kitchen with a confident air and stopped
dead when he saw Jimmy.

“Now, what made me think of coming here first?” he shouted
good-humoredly. “Mrs. Mahoney, I have the makings of a first-class
detective, only I never got a chance.”

When Jimmy said nothing, he tossed his head and went on in the same
tone. “Want a lift, Jimmy?”

Jimmy glared at him. “I’m not going back with you, Uncle Tim,” he
said.

“Oh, begod, that’s exactly what you _are_ going to do, Jimmy,” his
stepfather said. “If you think I’m going to spend the rest of my days
chasing you round Ireland, you’re wrong.” He dropped into a chair and
rubbed his hands, as though to restore the circulation. “Mrs.
Mahoney,” he asked, “what do we have them for?”

Kate liked his way of including her in the conversation. She knew,
too, he was only talking like that to make things easier for Jimmy.

“I don’t want to go back, Uncle Tim,” Jimmy said furiously. I want to
stop here.”

“Listen to that, Mrs. Mahoney,” his stepfather said, cocking his head at
Kate. “Insulting Dublin to a Dublin man! And in Cork, of places!”

“I’m not saying anything against Dublin!” Jimmy cried, and again he was a
child and defenseless against the dialectic of adults. “I want stay
here.”

Kate immediately came to his defense. “Wisha, ’tis only the way he got
a bit homesick, sir. He thought he’d like to come back for a couple of
days.”

“I don’t want to come back for a couple of days!” Jimmy shouted. “This
is my home. I told Aunt Nance so.”

“And wasn’t that a very hard thing to say to your mother, Jimmy?” his
stepfather asked. He said it gently, and Kate knew he liked the boy.

“It’s true,” Jimmy said. “I knew I wasn’t wanted.”

“You really think that, Jimmy?” his stepfather asked reproachfully and
Jimmy burst into wild tears.

“I didn’t say _you_ didn’t want me. I know you did want me, and wanted
you. But my mammy didn’t want me.”

“Jimmy!”

“She didn’t, she didn’t.”

“What made you think she didn’t?”

“She thought I was too like my father.”

“She said you were too like your father?” his stepfather asked
incredulously.

“She didn’t have to say it,” sobbed Jimmy. “I knew it, every time she
looked at me when I done something wrong. I reminded her of him, and
she doesn’t want to think of him. She only wants to think of you. And
it’s not my fault if I’m like my father, but if she didn’t want me to
be that way she should have took me sooner. She shouldn’t have left it
so late, Uncle Tim.”

His stepfather said nothing for a moment and then rose in a jerky
movement and walked to the back door. “You might be right there son,”
he said with a shrug. “But you’re not going the right way about it,
either.”

“All right, Uncle Tim,” Jimmy cried. “What is the right way? I’ll do
whatever you tell me.”

“Talk it over properly with your mother, and then come back here after
the holidays,” his stepfather said. “You see, old man, you don’t seem
to realize what it cost your mother to bring you to live with
her at all. Now, you don’t want her explaining why you ran away after a
couple of weeks, do you?”

“He’s right, Jimmy boy, he’s right,” Kate pleaded. “You could never go
back there again, with all the old talk there’d be.”

“Oh, all right, all right,” Jimmy said despairingly, and went to get
his cap.

“Sit down, the pair of ye, till I make a cup of tea!” cried Kate. But
Jimmy shook his head.

“I’d sooner go now,” he said.

And it was real despair, as she well knew, not sham. Of course, he
showed off a bit, the way he always did, and didn’t kiss her when he
was getting into the car. And when James in his gentle way said,
“You’ll be back soon,” Jimmy only drew a deep breath and looked up at
the sky.

But she knew he really meant it, and that day she had great boasting
over it among the neighbors. “A boy of fourteen, ma’am, that was never
away from home all the days of his life, coming back like that, on an
old bicycle, without food or sleep. Oh, my! Where would you find the
likes of him?”

The neighbors, too, were impressed. “Well, Jimmy,” they said, when he
came back at the end of the holidays, to go to school. “You couldn’t
do without us, I see.”

There was only one change in the relationship between Kate, James, and
Jimmy. The day after his return, Jimmy said, “I’m not going to call
you Mammy any more.”

“Oye, and what are you going to call me?” she asked with sour humor.

“I’m going to call you Granny,” he said. “The other sounds too silly.”

After a few weeks James said “Granny,” too. Though she didn’t
complain, she resented it. Stumbling about the house, talking to
herself, she would suddenly say, “Glad enough they were of someone to
call Mammy.”


After Jimmy had been back for a year or so, Kate’s health began to
break up. She had to go to hospital, and Nora and Molly offered to
take one of the boys each. But neither Jimmy nor James would agree to
this. They didn’t want to leave the house and they didn’t want to be
separated, so they stayed on, and each week one of the girls came to
clear up after them. They reported to Kate that the mess was
frightful. But it wasn’t this that really worried her, it was the wild
streak in Jimmy.

In the evenings, instead of doing his lessons like James, he was
tramping the city with wild young fellows. He had no sense of the
value of money, and when he wanted it thought nothing of stealing from
herself or James.

She came home before she should have, but even then she was too late
to prevent mischief. While she was away, Jimmy had left school and got
himself a job in a packing store.

“Oh, you blackguard, you!” she said. “I knew well you’d be up to
something when my back was turned. But to school you go tomorrow, my
fine gentleman, if I have to drag you there myself.”

“I can’t go back to school,” Jimmy said indignantly. “They could have
the law on me if I didn’t give a month’s notice.” He knew she was very
timid of policemen, lawyers, and officials and even at her age was in
great dread of being dragged off to jail for some crime she didn’t
even know she had committed.

“Who’s the manager?” she said. “I’ll see him myself.”

“You can’t,” said Jimmy. “He’s on holidays.”

“Oh, you liar,” she muttered. “The truth isn’t in you. Who is it?”

“Anyway, I have to have a job,” said Jimmy. “If anything happened you
while you were in hospital, who was going to look after James?”

She was taken aback, because that was something that had been all the
time on her own mind. She knew her James, and knew that if she died
and he was sent to live with some foster mother who didn’t understand
him, he would break his heart. In every way he was steadier than
Jimmy, and yet he was far more defenseless. If you took Jimmy’s home
away from him, he would fight, steal, or run away, but James would
only lie down and die. Still, though she was impressed by Jimmy’s
manliness, she wasn’t taken in by it. She knew that in an emotional
fit he was capable of these big gestures, but he could never live up
to them, and in no time he would be thinking how he could turn them to
his own advantage.

“’Tisn’t James at all with you,” she said. “’Tis more money you want
for yourself. Did you tell your mother first?”

“I’m working till after six every night!” he cried, confounded by her
injustice. “What time have I to write to my mother?”

“Plenty of time you have to write to her when ’tis something you
want,” she said. “Sit down and write to her now, you scamp! I’m not
going to be taking the blame for your blackguarding.”

Jimmy, with a martyred air, sat at the table and agonized over a note
to his mother. “How do you spell ‘employment’?” he asked James.

“Listen to him!” Kate said, invoking Heaven. ‘He wants to give up
school and he don’t know how to spell a simple word.”

“All right, spell it you, so,” he said.

“In my time, for poor people, the education was not going,” she
replied with great dignity. “Poor people hadn’t the chances they have
now, and what chances they had, they respected, not like the ones that
are going today. Go on with your letter, you thing!”


Again his Uncle Tim came and argued with him. He explained patiently
that without an education Jimmy would get nowhere. Unless he finished
his schooling, he couldn’t go to the University. Jimmy, who couldn’t
stand gentleness in an argument, broke down and said he didn’t want to
go to the University, he only wanted to be independent. Kate didn’t
understand what Jimmy’s stepfather meant, but she felt that it was
probably only the old conflict in a new form: Jimmy’s stepfather
wanted him to be one of his own class, and Jimmy didn’t. Leaving
school at that age was what a working-class boy would do. Except for
the occasional brilliant boy who was kept on at the monks’ expense,
there was no education beyond sixth book.

His stepfather seemed to realize it, too, for he gave in with a
suddenness that surprised her. “Oh, all right,” he said. “But you’d
better let me try and find you something better than the job you
have. And for God’s sake go to night school and learn office work.”

When he left, Jimmy accompanied him to the car, and they had a
conversation that made Kate suspicious.

“What were you talking to your stepfather about?” she asked.

“Nothing,” said Jimmy. “Only asking him who my father was.”

“And did he tell you?”

“He said he didn’t know.”

“How inquisitive we’re getting!” said Kate.

“He said I was entitled to know,” Jimmy said defensively. “He told me
to ask Nance the next time I go up to them.” She noticed that
sometimes he said “Mother” and sometimes “Nance,” and both sounded
awkward.

When next he came back from a holiday in Dublin he had discovered what
he wished to know. As he described the scene with his mother, Kate was
again overcome by a feeling of the strangeness of it all. At first his
mother had refused point-blank to tell him anything. She had been
quite cool and friendly about it, and explained that she had been only
a girl when it all happened and when she had been deserted had cut
Jimmy’s father out of her life. She hadn’t spoken his name since and
never proposed to speak it. When Jimmy persisted, arguing and pleading
with her, she had grown furious. “Christ, boy,” she said, “it’s my
life as well as yours!” Then she had wept and said she never wanted
him in the house again. At this moment, her husband had walked into
the room, looking like murder, Jimmy said, and snapped, “All right,
Jimmy. Beat it!” He had closed the door after Jimmy, and Jimmy heard
the pair of them arguing from the kitchen. Finally, his stepfather had
come out and shouted, “Your mother wants to see you, Jimmy,” and
rushed upstairs. When Jimmy went into the living room, she was
standing by the fireplace, pale and dry-eyed. “Your father’s name is
Tom Creedon,” she said coolly. “He had a business in Tramore, but he’s
left it for years. The last I heard of him he was in London. If you
want any more information, you’ll have to ask one of his friends. A
man called Michael Taylor in Dungarvan is your best chance.” And then
she, too, had gone out and followed her husband upstairs, and Jimmy
had sat by the fire and sobbed to himself till it was nearly out and
the whole house was silent. He felt he had outraged two people who
cared for him for the sake of someone who had never inquired whether
he was alive or dead.

When he had finished his story, Kate felt the same. “And what use is
it to you, now you know it?” she asked maliciously.

“I had to know it,” Jimmy said with easy self-confidence. “Now I can
go and see him.”

“You can what?” she asked wearily.

“I can go and see him. Why wouldn’t I?”

“Why wouldn’t you, indeed, and all the attention he paid to you,” she
said sourly. “You’re never right.”

There were times when she almost thought he wasn’t right in the
head. For months on end he never seemed to think at all of his
parentage, and then he would begin to daydream till he worked himself
up into a fever of emotion. In a fit like that she never knew what he
might do. He was capable of anything—of anything, that is, except
writing a letter. One weekend he set off on his bicycle for County
Waterford and came back with his father’s address. After that it was
only a question of getting a friend on the cross-Channel boat to fix
him a passage for nothing.

All the time he was away Kate fretted, and, being Jimmy, he didn’t
even send her as much as a picture postcard. She had the vague hope
that he wouldn’t be able to locate his father. She thought of it all
as if it were something she’d read in a newspaper—how in a terrible
fit of anger Jimmy struck and killed his father and then turned
himself in to the police. She could even see his picture in the paper
with handcuffs on his wrists. “Ah,” Hanna Dinan said, “God is good!”
But this didn’t comfort Kate at all.

And then, one autumn morning after James had left for school, Jimmy
walked in. He had had no breakfast, and she fumbled blindly about the
little kitchen getting it ready for him, and cursing old age that made
it seem such a labor. But all the same, her heart was light. She knew
now that she had only been deceiving herself, pretending to think that
Jimmy and his father might disagree, when all she dreaded was that
they would agree too well.

“Well,” she said fondly, leaning on the kitchen table and grinning
into his face. “Now you seen him, how do you like him?”

“Oh, he’s all right,” Jimmy said casually—too casually, for her
taste. “He’s drinking himself to death, that’s all.” And instantly she
was ashamed of her own pettiness, and tears came into her eyes.

“Wisha, child, child, why do you be upsetting yourself about them?”
she cried. “They’re not worth it. There’s no one worth it.”

She sat in the kitchen with him while he unburdened himself about it
all. It was just as when he had described to her how he had asked his
mother for his father’s name, as though he were saving up every
detail—the walk across England, the people who had given him lifts,
the truck driver who had given him a dinner and five bob after Jimmy
confided in him, till the moment he knocked at the door of the shabby
lodging house near Victoria Station and an unshaven man with sad red
eyes looked out and asked timidly, “Yes, boy, what is it?” As though
nobody ever called on him now with anything but bad news.

“And what did you say?” Kate asked.

“I said, ‘Don’t you know me?’ and he said, ‘You have the advantage of
me.’ So I said, ‘I’m your son.’”

“Oh, my!” exclaimed Kate, profoundly impressed, though she had
resolved to hate everything she heard about Jimmy’s father. “And what
did he say to that?”

“He didn’t say anything. He only started to cry.”

“’Twas a bit late in the day for him,” said Kate. “And what did he
say about your mother?”

“Only that she didn’t miss much when she missed him.”

“That was one true word he said, anyway,” said Kate.

“He paid for it,” said Jimmy.

“He deserved it all,” said Kate.

“You wouldn’t say that if you saw him now,” said Jimmy, and he went on
to describe the squalid back room where he had stayed for a week with
his father, sleeping in the same dirty bed, going out with him to the
pub. And yet through Jimmy’s disillusionment Kate felt a touch of
pride in the way he described the sudden outbursts of extravagant
humor that lit up his father’s maudlin self-pity. He described
everything, down to the last evening, when his father had brought him
to Paddington Station, forced him to take the last five shillings he
had in the world, tearfully kissed him, and begged him to come again.

She knew from Jimmy’s tone that it was unlikely that he would go
again. His father was only another ghost that he had laid.



When he was eighteen, Jimmy took up with a girl of his own, and at
first Kate paid no attention, but when it went on for more than six
months and Jimmy took the girl out every Friday night, she began to
grow nervous. Steady courting of one girl was something she had never
thought him capable of. When she learned who the girl was, she
understood. Tessie Flynn was an orphan who had been brought up by a
staid old couple on the road as their own daughter. They had brought
her up so well that every other young fellow on the road was in dread
to go near her, and when the old couple discovered that she was
actually walking out with Jimmy they didn’t talk to her for days. She
wasn’t allowed to bring Jimmy to the house, and Kate, for the sake of
her own self-respect, was forced to invite her instead.

Not that this made her like Tessie any the more. She dreaded Friday
evenings, when Jimmy would come in from work, and shave, and strip to
wash under the tap in the back yard, and then change into his best
blue suit and put cream on his hair.

“You won’t be late tonight?” she would ask.

“Why wouldn’t I be late?” Jimmy would ask cheerfully.

“You know I can’t sleep while you do be out.”

It was true. Any other night of the week she could sleep comfortably
at her proper time, but when she knew he was out with “that vagabond,”
as she called poor Tessie, she would lie awake worrying and saying her
rosary. Even James reproved her. One Friday evening, he closed his
book carefully, raised his big glasses on his forehead, and said,
“Granny, you worry too much about Jimmy and his girl friend. Jimmy is
much steadier than you think.”

But James didn’t realize, as she did, that even in his choice of a
girl Jimmy was only reliving the pattern of his own life. To anyone
else he might seem the most ordinary of young fellows, but she could
watch the fever mount in him, and always she was taken aback at the
form it took. Once, he lit out on his bicycle to a little town eighty
miles away, where his father’s brother had a grocery shop. Another
time, with the help of his sailor friend, he crossed again to
Fishguard and cycled through southern England to the little seaside
town in Dorset where he had been born. And she knew that whatever she
might say he would go on like that to the end of his days, pursued by
the dream of a normal life that he might have lived and of a normal
family in which he might have grown up.

James observed it, too, but with a deep disapproval. He thought Jimmy
cheapened himself.

“Ah, that’s only because you can get away from them, boy,” Jimmy said
with his toughest air. “Boy, if my family was living in England, I
wouldn’t worry about them, either.”

“Well, your father is living in England, and you went to see him,”
said James. “I daresay I’ll see my family, too, one day, but I don’t
want to see them now, thank you.”

“If you have any sense you’ll have nothing to do with them,” said
Jimmy. “They’ll only look down on you.”

“I don’t think so,” said James. “At the moment they might, but if they
meet me when I’m a professor at the University, or a senior civil
servant, they’ll behave differently. You see, Jimmy,” he went on in
the tone he would use when he was a professor at the University,
“people like that pay far too much attention to public opinion, and
they won’t neglect anyone who can be useful to them.”

Kate felt that there was a sad wisdom in what James said. While Jimmy,
who had something of his father’s weakness and charm, might prove a
liability to those who didn’t understand him, James would work and
save, and only when he was established and independent would he
satisfy his curiosity about those who had abandoned him. And, though
she mightn’t live to see it, James would make quite certain that
nobody patronized him. She would have given a great deal to see how
James dealt with his family.

But she knew that she wouldn’t see it. She fell ill again, and this
time Molly came to the house to nurse her, while Nora, who looked
after Molly’s children, came in the evenings, and sometimes one of the
husbands. Molly made an immediate change in the house. She was swift
and efficient; she fed the boys and made conversation with callers,
leaning against the doorpost with folded arms as though she had no
thought in the world but of them, though occasionally she would slip
away into the front room and weep savagely to herself for a few
minutes before returning to her tasks.

The priest came, and Molly invited him into the front room and chatted
with him about the affairs of the parish. After he had left, Kate
asked to see Jimmy and James. They went up the stairs quietly and
stood at either side of the bed. Her eyes were closed and her hands
outstretched on the bed. Jimmy took one, and after a moment James took
the other. James was never a boy for a deathbed. 

“Don’t upset yeerselves too much over me,” she said. “I know ye’ll
miss me, but ye have nothing to regret. Ye were the two best boys a
mother ever reared, and I’m proud of ye.” She thought hard for a
moment and then added something that shocked them all. “And yeer
father is proud of ye, I’m sure.”

Molly, who was standing with Nora behind James, leaned forward and
said urgently, “Mammy, ’tisn’t who you think. ’Tis Jimmy and James.”

Kate opened her eyes for a moment and looked straight at her, and her
eyes were no colder than the words she spoke. “Excuse me, child, I
know perfectly well who I have.” Her eyes closed again, and she
breathed noisily for what seemed a long, long time, as though she were
vainly trying to recollect herself. “Don’t either of ye do anything
yeer father would be ashamed of. He was a good man, and a kind man,
and a clean-living man, and he never robbed anyone of a ha’penny.
... Jimmy,” she added in a voice of unexpected strength, “look after
your little brother for me.”

“I will, Mammy,” Jimmy said through his tears.

Something in that sudden reversion to the language of childhood made
Molly break down. She left the room and took refuge in the parlor
downstairs. Nora, realizing that something had upset her sister,
followed and shouted at her as all the Mahoneys had always shouted at
one another. “Wisha, Molly, will you have a bit of sense? Sure you
know poor Mammy’s mind was wandering.”

“It was not wandering, Nora,” Molly said hysterically. “She knew
perfectly well what she was saying, and Jimmy knew it, too. They were
her real children all the time, and we were only outsiders. Oh, Nora,
Nora, how could she do that to us?”

That night, when Kate was quiet at last in her brown shroud, with her
hands clutching the rosary beads on her breast, and the neighbors were
coming from all parts into the little front room to say a prayer for
her, people in every little house around were asking the same question
that Molly had been asking herself, though they asked it with a touch
of envy. How could a woman who was already old take the things the
world had thrown away and out of them fashion a new family, dearer to
her than the old and finer than any she had known? Hanna Dinan had the
last word. Having sat there for an hour, she took a last look at her
old crony on the bed, then pulled her coat about her and said
casually, “Wisha, wasn’t she a great little woman! She had them all
against her and she bested them. They had everything, and she had
nothing, and she bested them all in the end.”


155
(1960)
Source: Collected Stories, 1981