A TORRENT DAMNED

City men are never much good in a small town like ours. They lack
tenacity. Grip is a good dog, but Holdfast is a better.

Take Tom Looney, for instance. Tom was a chemist who had served his
time in Dublin and decided to put the bit of money his father had left
him into a business of his own. There being as many chemists as
publicans in Asragh, where he came from, he thought it better to place
his talents at our disposal. This was before Johnny Desmond opened his
shop and we had no proper chemist. You couldn’t call Gorman a chemist;
the man was more of a sleepwalker, taking down his shutters at eleven
in the morning, and then putting up a notice to say he’d be back at
twelve.  Of course, he had no competition, so he couldn’t be bothered.

Looney thought it was as easy as falling off a stool, that all he had
to do was to open his doors and the whole countryside would flock in
to him. That shows how little he knew about it. Mind you, he was a
nice young fellow, tall and dark and good-looking, with a pleasant
manner and as obliging as they make them. He felt it was up to him. He
was a man with an aim in life; he wanted to get on, and no trouble was
too much for him. He would work till midnight if he had to, and then
deliver the prescriptions himself on a bicycle. Being good-looking in
a dark, strained, ferocious way which gave you the impression that he
wouldn’t stop short at murder, he did well in the flapper trade with
face packs and lipsticks, for flappers are the same everywhere; they
belong to no society and will buy what they want from anyone they
fancy without regard for the consequences. But he did not get the
good, substantial country trade that Gorman got. A farmer cannot
afford to buy a packet of cigarettes except by way of an investment,
and, no matter how nice or obliging he might be, a foreigner from
Asragh without wife, brother, father, or friends is no investment for
anyone.

Looney could not understand this. His heart was set on selling the
farmers cattle medicines, and he could not see why they wouldn’t give
him a trial. He was a nervous young man, always concerned about his
own deficiencies, and thought it must be the way his youthful
appearance was against him, so he started to grow a moustache,
Moustaches on young men are always a sign of neurosis. But all the
moustache did for him was to complete the conquest of Maudie Moynihan
in O’Brien’s Ladies Outfitters.

Maudie was a sweet girl; rather delicate, with hair between black and
red, a snub nose, and a mouth as big and soft as a tea-rose—the sort
of mouth you can’t keep off once you get used to it.  As it was the
first time she had met a man with an aim in life, she went off the
deep end about him. There was nothing steady ** about it, and Maudie
knew this and respected him the more for it.  The first time he
actually kissed her he stood back and apologized profusely, and
explained that he could not afford to think of love or marriage, and
that if he ever did marry, it would have to be someone with money. She
found his honesty captivating; she recognized that he was a man with
an aim in life, and though the aim did not then include her, it made
him endlessly interesting to her. When they were not making love, they
talked about his career. That is one of the great advantages of a man
with an aim in life; he never leaves you short of a topic of
conversation.

Maudie would slip into the shop and her first whispered endearment
would be “How’s business?”

Tom would answer with a shrug and a look of mortal agony.

“Oh, dear!” she’d say, and her face falling. “And you’d think a place
like this would be worth a fortune.”

“That’s what I thought,” Tom would mutter despairingly, and steal a
glance at the little hand-mirror he kept on the counter to see how his
moustache was coming on. Even for a young man, it was shocking; it was
scraggy and so fair as to be almost invisible in certain
lights. Feeling that no farmer would ever trust the fate of his cows
to a man without a proper moustache, Looney would spill the stuff he
was pouring out, say “Damn! Damn! Damn!”  and bare his teeth.

So far as anyone could console him for his failure, Maudie did, but
she was also useful in other ways, by indicating the things where he
went wrong from the point of view of the town. It was gradually being
borne in on Looney that the town had ways of its own, and that if a
man said no more than “Good evening” to you, it was just as well to
have a native round to translate it.

“That was ever and always the trouble with this place,” Maudie said
one day. “They grumble because there isn’t a place to get a cup of
tea, and then when Miss Redmond started the teashop, none of them
would go near it.”

“Why not?” Looney asked in surprise.

“Because she was a Protestant. Oh, dear, I do think they take things
too far. I could never be as narrow as that.”

But she had given Tom an idea, and as well as encouraging his
moustache, he took to going to morning Mass, weekly Communion and
Benediction at the convent, and joined two sodalities.  He showed
himself so fervent that it was even put about that he had failed for
the priesthood, and a lot of the flappers who had thought him a
dangerous and romantic fellow were so disgusted that they took their
custom to Asragh. (That is what I mean about the instability of the
flapper trade.)

“Oh, they’re awful,” sighed Maudie, referring to her fellow
townsmen. “Really, the way they go on about poor Mr. Dorgan, the bank
manager, would sicken you.”

“How’s that?” asked Tom, who got all his intimate information through
her and found it as astonishing as something you’d read about an
African tribe.

“Oh, I’m sure it’s all old talk, but you know the way they go on about
funerals. They’re mad on funerals. They’ll remember for years who was
there and who wasn’t—as if it mattered! They say poor Mr. Dorgan wears
a black suit and a black tie for deposits, but only the tie for a
current account, and he doesn’t turn up at all if there’s an
overdraft. I’d never believe that, would you, Tom?”

But by this time Tom was ready to believe anything, and began to see
that he might be neglecting an important side of his business, so he
started to put in an appearance at funerals, properly dressed. Even
this didn’t do. It is one thing for an established man like a bank
manager to ignore the conventions, but another thing entirely for an
upstart from outside the town to pay too much attention to them, and
there were people to say Tom went too far. When they met, Dorgan, who
was anything but the object of pity that Maudie made him out to be,
frequently gave Tom digs about what he called his “Jew’s trousers” and
made him feel self-conscious and out of place. It didn’t matter what
you did—if you didn’t turn up it was held against you; if you turned
up in your ordinary clothes it was held against you, and if you came
properly dressed you were wearing Jew’s trousers. It made Tom
irritable and touchy. Once or twice when he went off for drinks with
the other mourners, he drank too much and refused to listen to proper
criticism of his native town, a place, as everybody knows, which has
always suffered from swelled head. He said in a squeaky voice that he
couldn’t see why anyone ever wanted to leave Asragh. It was the finest
town in the world, If he liked it so much, people wanted to know, why
didn’t he go back there?

That was what he often asked himself. Why did he have to have an aim
in life? Why had he not been content with Asragh, with its Georgian
crescents and its river, its peace and civilization? In this benighted
hole, whatever he did was wrong, and it was as though the whole
population—priests, nuns, and bank managers—was sitting back, laughing
at him. “Damn! Damn!  Damn!” About that time he read a psychology book
which made him realize that his mother was entirely to blame. She had
said to him that he had no brains and that he would eventually die in
the workhouse. She was responsible for having destroyed his
self-confidence.

“I wouldn’t take it to heart, Tom,” Maudie told him. “You have to give
them a year or two to get used to you.”

“If I’m here in a year or two,” he retorted. “And, by God, if I am,
I’ll give them something to get used to.”


II

One day he was in the shop when a good-looking, well-spoken girl came
in for face cream, and, scenting a likely new customer, he nearly fell
over himself advising her. When she had gone, a poor woman looked
after her and said: “You know who that is, Mr. Looney, don’t you?”

“No,” Tom said inquisitively. “Who?”

“Hilda Doherty. Her father is Mr. Doherty, the chairman of the County
Council. The man that gets that lassie won’t get her empty-handed.”

Looney’s heart soared like a thoroughbred at a gate. This was the
nearest thing he had ever known to love at first sight. It wasn’t love
for Hilda, or even for her fortune; it was a pure, passionate,
disinterested devotion to her father, a man he had never laid eyes
on. When next Hilda called he didn’t let her leave the shop till she’d
asked him to her home.

He went there in style in a hired car—true love never counts
pennies. Mr. Doherty was a big, pasty-faced man with a great flow of
talk. He was an old Tory who believed in table wines, cricket, and
horses, and was accordingly greatly detested by Republicans.  By some
mischance, they had neglected to shoot him while the shooting was
good, and now he did not hesitate to denounce them publicly as
hooligans, corner boys, and men of no property. Unfortunately, the
County Council exacted from him the same manners as those he
denounced, and he tended to entertain guests in his charming little
Regency house rather like a buccaneer aboard a pirate vessel, and his
amiable thundering and roaring made Tom jump in his seat. However,
Tom, who was very good with machinery, mended his car for him, and it
was arranged that Hilda and himself should have dinner together next
time they came to town.

It was quite a romance. Maudie knew all about it and was dreadfully
upset, all the more because she knew Tom was upset himself. He was
very self-conscious about his relationship with Hilda, and either in
joke or in bitter earnest couldn’t keep from saying that he wasn’t
interested in anything but money. Maudie knew he was being unfair to
himself, that he was far less venal than any other man she knew but
his career wouldn’t let him live as he wanted to live. This was how
she came to chum up with a girl like Kitty Hunt, Kitty was a lively
little spark who also had an aim in life and made no secret of it. She
intended to marry well, and knew it was a sport, like big-game
hunting, in which you had to use heavy weapons and take big risks. She
was vastly entertained by Maudie’s ingenuousness, and started to walk
her out and tell her something about life.

At least, she succeeded in diverting Maudie with her talk about
big-game hunting, for at Kitty’s caricature of her great, beautiful
love for Tom she was halted dead, like a baby with a rattle, and
temporarily ceased weeping to follow the coloured bauble with her
eyes. Then—also like a baby—remembering her grief, she bawled louder
than ever.

“Ah, but Mr. Looney isn’t a bit like that, Kitty,” she protested.

“How is he different?” Kitty asked with a tolerant smile.

“He is, he is. You have no idea. I was never in the least interested
in any of the fellows here. They think of nothing only themselves.”

“And what does he think about?” Kitty asked without rancour.
“Marrying money.”

“But it isn’t the money, Kitty,” Maudie cried despairingly.  “That’s
what you don’t understand. He’s above all that. You feel it the minute
you get to know him. There’s something big about Mr. Looney.”

“There is,” Kitty said mockingly. “His ears.”

It wasn’t true about Tom’s cars, and Kitty was really more impressed
than she let on to be. In all of us, even those with an aim in life,
there is a certain doubt about our own judgments and a quality about
other people’s praise of a third party which gives it a sort of
objective firmness. That is why clever women always tend to deprecate
publicly the things they value most. It throws possible rivals off the
scent.

It must be said in Tom’s favour that Hilda Doherty was a really nice
girl, though a lot slower off the mark than Maudie.  She was gentle,
but at the same time distrustful and nervous, and like all women of
that sort, inclined to a gentle sort of nagging that needed a solider
temperament than Tom’s to prey on. Her father was mad on horses—symbol
of the real old Irish gentry— and Hilda had to ride, to satisfy him,
though she was nervous of riding and was always falling off. Tom was
not nervous of horses—not in that way. He just hated horses. He hated
them with a holy hate as spoiled, vicious, useless animals and made a
personal enemy of anyone he came near. When he was in good humour he
looked a horse in the eye and told it just what he thought of it, and
when he wasn’t he envied horses because he was always wanting to kick
them. Being an excellent mechanic, he disliked anything he couldn’t
open up and repair as he could a bicycle or a car.

But he recognized that the horses stood to him better than the
moustache. That, and the friendship of Michael Doherty. New customers
began to come in, and he found himself able to stop attending so many
funerals. Even Dorgan, the bank manager, asked him to dinner just as
though he had a deposit account.  (The bank manager invited the
deposit accounts to dinner, the current accounts to tea; and there was
nothing for those with overdrafts. The bank dealt firmly with the
townspeople, living and dead.) Gorman took fright. There were no more
notices up to say “Back at 12” and the medicines got delivered. Gorman
went even farther: he employed a new assistant—a country boy who was
proposing to start up on his own and who had excellent connections in
the eastern part of the country.

Still, Tom was nervous. He was afraid of open spaces. He knew the main
drawback of open spaces was that you couldn’t whisper something at one
side without being immediately overheard at the other. He had no
particular desire to get married, but if his career required him to
get married, he wished he could marry a girl instead of a whole
community. For a city man there is always something frightening in the
thought that you can’t have a quiet domestic quarrel that doesn’t
involve fifty or sixty hot-tempered people, all licensed to carry
firearms, At the same time, he realized that the echoing quality of
the open spaces induces a sort of deafness in the
inhabitants. Whatever Hilda might have heard about himself and Maudie,
she didn’t seem to hold it against him, and she agreed, though in a
nervous way, to marry him.

Then he had to see her father. He came with his account books all
ready to show that he was concealing nothing. Mr. Doherty was in his
clement, looking more than ever like a pirate chief, and he discussed
the Republicans for a full hour while Tom sat clutching his account
books on his knee in a fever of anxiety.

“Now, about this little business of ours,” Mr. Doherty said benignly
at last.

“I brought the books,” squeaked Tom, leaning forward and blushing.

“Never mind about the books,” said Mr. Doherty, letting his lids sink
sleepily over his eyes. “Are they good books or bad books? That’s all
I want to know.”

“They’re bloody awful books,” Tom said candidly, without apparently
disturbing the other man’s equanimity.

“What would be the reason for that?” he asked, joining his fingers and
staring at the ceiling.

‘Tom just held himself back from saying that it was because the
natives were all savages.

“I suppose because I’m a stranger,” he stammered.

Suddenly, Mr. Doherty shot out a finger and glared at him.  “Are you
capable of asserting yourself?” he snorted.

“I don’t know,” Tom said despairingly, waving his hands. “I only know
that I can work as hard as the next. I’m not clever or pushing or
anything like that.”

“Never mind that,” thundered Mr. Doherty. “Are you capable of being
master in your own house? For if you’re not, have nothing to do with
my daughter. You think she’s quiet. She is quiet.  You think she’s
affectionate and obedient. She is affectionate and obedient. And
believe me, Tom Looney, within a month—what am I saying?—within a week
of your marrying her, that girl will contradict you flat. If you ask
me how I know, I can tell you. I married her mother.” By this time he
was towering over Tom with upraised hand, and Tom was staring
desperately up at him.  Suddenly his tone changed and he shook Tom by
the hand. “I’m delighted,” he said. “Delighted. I think ye’ll get on.”

III

After that, everything went grand. As a commercial traveller for
sheep-dip and cattle medicines, Mr. Doherty was out on his own. He
canvassed his prospective son-in-law’s business as if Tom were
standing for Parliament. Tom began to realize that it wasn’t his
mother at all; it was himself. All his life he had conducted himself
_pianissimo_, and even now to hear himself rendered like this on the
brass gave him a headache, but it worked like magic.  Dorgan saw that
he was overlooking the smartest young businessman in town, and asked
Tom’s opinion of a new hotel that Tom might be able to buy an interest
in. And with Hilda’s money to back him, there was no reason why he
shouldn’t. He was in.

Then, one day, a messenger came from the hospital to say that Hilda
had been admitted there with her pelvis and right shoulder broken. The
damned horses again! Tom got so faint he had to send out for a glass
of whisky to keep himself going. Michael Doherty came in later with
fresh news. He affected a bluff heartiness which only concealed his
anxiety, and assured Tom that, whatever happened, he would not lack
for friends. Tom knew he meant that there was a good chance that Hilda
would not walk again.

He was not an unfeeling man but, like most people with an aim in life,
he tended to take a subjective view of things, and however sorry he
was for Hilda, he was sorrier still for himself.  Ever since he had
come to town, luck had been against him. He had done everything a
young businessman could do; grown a moustache, gone to church,
attended funerals, even indulged in horses and love-making, and
everywhere, in every way, he was thwarted. He knew that Hilda would
not walk again, not because of anything wrong with her pelvis but
because there was a destiny that would break a hundred pelvises to get
one swipe at him.

He was all a man in such a situation should be, but Hilda was very
difficult. As if things weren’t hard enough for him, each day he
called she told him that he shouldn’t do it, that she would never walk
again and wouldn’t dream of marrying him. She could not be satisfied
with the damage she had done to herself and insisted that the doctors
were fooling them both. “As if we didn’t know!” she said bitterly, and
Tom shrugged his shoulders despairingly. As if he didn’t know!

Maudie was full of sympathy for him. Even Kitty was touched.  She
wanted Maudie to go to the shop with her and inquire for Hilda, but
this was too much for Maudie, who thought it would look forward,

“For goodness’ sake, Maudie,” Kitty said impatiently, “don’t always be
running away for fear of what people will think of you. They’ll only
think worse.”

“Oh, Kitty, how could they think worse?” asked Maudie.

“They’ll think you’re not inquiring out of spite, and that you’re glad
of what happened.”

“I don’t believe it, Kitty,” Maudie said aghast. “People could never
be so bad.”

“You’ll see how bad people can be,” Kitty replied darkly. “You should
never be afraid of doing the big, bold thing.”

But, whatever people might think, Maudie didn’t feel big and bold
enough for that. Finally it was almost by accident that they met Tom
one evening as he came home from the hospital. He came towards them,
walking very fast, as his way was, and without noticing them.

“For goodness’ sake, look who’s coming!” Kitty exclaimed.

“Now you can ask him about Hilda without anyone’s saying anything.”

“Oh, I couldn’t, Kitty; I couldn’t do that at all,” Maudie said in
alarm.

“Very well, I will,” Kitty said scornfully, and she stood and spoke to
Tom, who started out of his day-dream and grabbed at his hat.

“How’s Hilda today, Mr. Looney?” she asked sympathetically.

“Poorly, miss,” he replied politely, clearly not knowing her from the
sky over her. “Hullo, Maudie,” he added, and turned to Kitty again
with his strained and anxious air. “Afraid she’ll never be all right
again. Dreadful, isn’t it?”

“It is dreadful,” said Maudie with tears in her eyes.

“That’s the way,” he muttered sadly. “Awful to see her lying there and
not knowing will she ever get up again.”

“Yes, and worse for you than for her,” said Kitty. “You’d nearly
prefer it to be yourself.”

“That’s true, you would,” he said with a look of surprise, realizing
that in some ways he was better equipped by his life of frustration
for such a final disaster than Hilda was, and that he would probably
endure it with more resignation. “You’re becoming a great stranger,
Maudie.”

“I haven’t the time,” she said with her head bowed and her eyes turned
up to him. “I’d like to drop in and inquire how she is though.”

“Any time,” he said; “delighted,” and was off again with a sweep of
his hat, a most gentlemanly fellow, as even Kitty admitted.

All that evening Maudie was in high spirits. It was mainly the feeling
that Tom could no longer believe her silence was malicious—or so she
persuaded herself. It was also the prospective pleasure of dropping
into the shop.

Tom really did welcome her visits. He found that he needed someone
sympathetic to talk to. He even found that he needed someone gentle to
make love to. It wasn’t much, just a few kisses and regrets, but they
made life easier. He was beginning to discover, as every man does
sooner or later, that one woman is not enough. You need one for
stability and another for sympathy Maudie wasn’t quite sure if she was
justified in extending her sympathy as far as that, so she coaxed
Kitty to come to the shop with her.

“Ah, I’m too old a hand to play gooseberry,” said Kitty.

“You know it’s nothing like that,” Maudie said in a hurt tone.  “It’s
only to keep his mind off his troubles.”

“There are better ways of keeping a man’s mind off his troubles,” said
Kitty, but she was obliged.

It was very pleasant in the evenings when the three of them chatted
behind in the dispensary, chats interrupted every few minutes by a new
customer, and the gossip that followed him.  And always there was the
perpetually renewed subject of Tom’s career. On this Kitty had
surprisingly strong views.

“You made an awful mistake, coming to this town,” she said.  “A man
should never go from a big place to a small one. If you had gone to
Cork or Limerick, you’d have a different story.”

“But they’re full,” he protested. “You have no idea. There are two
chemists’ shops in every street.”

“That makes no difference at all,” she said flatly. “You should never
be put off a job or a place because it seems to be full. The fuller
the better, if you have the ability.”

“Ah, if you have!” he said with a mournful shrug, remembering his
mother’s warning.

“If you haven’t, you can always work,” she said. “For every ten people
in one job, there’s nine that can’t work and one that can.  Going to a
small place is like trying to get into clothes you’ve grown out of.”

“You think I should look for bigger chances?” Tom asked, scratching
his head. The problem had never been put to him like that before.

“Of course you should. That’s how people get on.”

“I suppose that’s true,” he said doubtfully, looking despairingly at
the wall. “People are narrow-minded here. Now, in Asragh they mix a
lot more—even with Protestants.”

“You’re lost here,” said Kitty. “Go to Cork! Go to Dublin!
Those are the places for you.”

It all became plain to Maudie, seeing it put like that, and she
realized that the source of Tom’s troubles from the start was that he
was too big a man for the town, and that if only he could start again
in some new place, there might be a chance of his having an aim in
life that didn’t exclude her.

Maudie was too innocent to be aware that already there was talk; her
visits to the shop had been noticed, and though Tom went as before to
the hospital, there was a certain coolness between himself and the
Dohertys. It had only needed that to revive all the local mistrust of
city men and their inherently unstable character.  On the other hand,
those who had admired Tom’s adaptability were wondering whether he
hadn’t a fresh card up his sleeve to surprise them with.

He surprised them, all right. One morning, it leaked out from
Phelan’s, the solicitors, that his shop had been sold entire to
Gorman’s assistant and that Tom and Kitty were in Dublin, getting
married. He had discovered that even two women were not enough; a man
needs one for stability, one for sympathy, and a third for
inspiration. By that time Hilda was walking again.

A foolish man not to know when he was well off. But city fellows are
like that—clever enough, but lacking in tenacity.



First published: New Yorker, 1952-09-03.
Source: More Stories by Frank O’Connor. Alfred A. Knopf: New York, 1967.
URI: https://archive.org/details/morestories00ocon/