Irish Portraits

by Liam O'Flaherty

  “Huh!” said Mr. Gilhooley, now smiling broadly and swelling with a consciousness of a new dignity. “I’ve got no stables.”

  “Ah! That’s all right, yer honour,” said Byrne in a tone that clearly indicated he didn’t believe a word of it.

  “Ho!” said Mr. Gilhooley again. “Did ye ever hear the like of it!”

  He now looked at Byrne in a cheerful, friendly, patronizing manner, and he really felt that he had been a landowner and a horseowner all his life. Not only that, but he suddenly developed a suspicion, a momentary one, of course, that his ancestors had really been noble and that he was only coming into his own again. Ha! An aristocrat, by Jove! As good as the best of them and better.

  “Now, yer honour,” continued Byrne, “I hope ye don’t take it bad of me accostin’ ye this way, but I’ve been out of work for six months through victimization. An’ if his honour Sir John Corcoran was alive today ’tisn’t here I’d be.”

  “Oh! ho!” said Mr. Gilhooley.

  He felt as if he had been a landlord and horse-owner all his life. Very pleasant sensation this; being solicited by a deserving poor fellow down on his luck. He mentally decided that Sir John Corcoran was the best of fellows, although he had never heard the name before. All this happened within Mr. Gilhooley’s mind during one second while Byrne prepared to continue his story.

  The story was a long one, but Byrne told it rapidly, hinting at things and giving names of horses and calling public men by their nicknames. Mr. Gilhooley kept nodding his head until Byrne had finished.

  “I’m very sorry,” he said, “but I’m afraid I can do nothing for you at the moment. Very sorry.”

  “Thanks, yer honour,” said Byrne. “I know yer honour would if he could. But if he have any loose change to help a poor fellow along I wouldn’t mind mesel’ but the children. An’ indeed, yer honour, if Sir Joseph Corcoran was alive … thanks, yer honour, thanks…..”

  Byrne uttered these thanks in anticipation, for he had seen Mr. Gilhooley’s hand moving slowly towards his right trousers pocket. The word of thanks hastened the movement of the hand. The hand entered the pocket and emerged with half a crown, which it dropped into Byrne’s outstretched hand.

  “Another one to make a pair, yer honour,” cried Byrne. “Yer honour’ll never miss it, and a fine gentleman like yer honour needs only to be asked, I know. Sir John Corcoran, God rest his sowl, never drew less than half a golden sovereign out of his pocket to tip a man. He was the elegant gentleman, yer honour. Thanks, yer honour, thanks.”

  Again Mr. Gilhooley’s hand entered his pocket. This time Mr. Gilhooley’s mind had again begun to grow suspicious, and he experienced the sensation of slowly recovering from a fit of drunkenness during which he had imagined himself a millionaire and had been flinging his money about. He dropped the second coin - it was a florin - into Byrne’s hand. Then he shrugged himself as if he had caught a chill, and set off at a smart pace. As he walked away he felt a shiver down his spine and knew that he had made a fool of himself.

  Byrne did not look after him. He just spat on both coins, hitched up his clothes, winked one eye and said in a curious, melancholy voice:

  “Jay, that fellah was an easy mark.”

  The Fall of Joseph Timmins

  It was Sunday evening. Mr. Joseph Timmins sat by his wife’s bedside. His wife, Louisa, who had become a confirmed invalid of late, was lying flat in bed, with her shoulders propped against pillows. She was reading aloud an article from The Irish Rosary. The article dealt with the “Persecution of the Church in Mexico.”

  Although it was cold outside it was very stuffy in the room. The window was shut and there was a fire. Mrs. Timmins required a warm room for her ailment. It was the heat that first began to make Mr. Timmins discontented as he sat listening. Then the tiresome crackling of the fire made him feel bored and his winter underclothing, which he had just begun to wear, irritated his flesh. Finally he became aware of his wife’s rasping and sanctimonious voice and his heart poured out all its rebellious hatred against her.

  He stole a glance at her lean, withered, spectacled face, at her clammy yellow hands, at her sunken undeveloped breasts, shaped like a flat board against the bedclothes and he realized acutely that he was fifty years old, without ever having been loved. So a pained dissatisfied expression came into his nervous face and he began to think of her with hatred. Until then he had listened to her reading without grasping the meaning of the words. Now he heard them acutely and hated them, their meaning and the persecuted Church, which represented his unhappiness. The Church was his wife, with her unsexed body and the spectacles on her nose and her horror of the marriage bed.

  The sudden upheaval in his mind was all the more violent because it terrified his conscience and he was too weak either to act upon it or to repress it. Indeed he called weakly upon the Blessed Virgin to save him from this sin, but the devil of unrest and concupiscence held his paltry personality with in strong chains, so that he heard his thoughts actually shouting in his mind and he sat listening to them, incapable of resistance.

  Indecent memories made him flush, and yet they made him hate her all the more and feel ashamed of his cowardice. He remembered how in the first year of their marriage, she had terrified him by her modesty. Yes, she had lain, twenty-five years ago, in that very same bed, their marriage bed. She had turned all the holy pictures to the walls, sprinkled him with holy water and begun to make an act of contrition when the marriage was about to be consummated. It was like being married to a nun or setting up house in a church.

  And all these barren years, without children and even without sin…. The devil now suggested to his mind, shouted it out, that even sin, strong lustful sin, would have fertilized the arid desert of his life. It would have freed him from her clammy hands and her undeveloped breasts that were shaped against the bedclothes like a flat board.

  And he himself … what was he? What did he look like in the mirror, one day after his bath, when he saw himself naked? A puny thin man with a beard streaked with grey, a nervous pale face twitching, eyes that had a monk’s woman-fear in them and bony thighs like an old man.

  Word by word, slowly, she enumerated the tortures they were suffering, the bishops and priests of Mexico and her dry lips seemed to find pleasure in the recital of their suffering, in the laceration of their whipped flesh. For their loins had never known a woman. And he, listening, rejoiced wickedly, for those atheists were crashing through the walls of steel that had bound his cowardice and with imaginary bullets he slew hordes of bishops and dashed their gourds of holy water into cesspools and smashed the holy pictures with hammers and spat upon the tablets of contrition. He heard cries of lust and triumph and he mingled with the conquering atheistic soldiers, gouging the eyes of monks and violating nuns.

  It was horrible. His irritated skin grew hot and moist with perspiration. He made a sound with his lips, like a hiss of pain. He clenched his hands together and stretched them downwards stiffly towards his thighs.

  Suddenly his wife stopped reading, put the magazine on the bed and looked at him. She looked at him down her nose over her spectacles. Her eyes, shining through the fire-brightened glasses, were cold and cruel like the eyes of a miser. They had in them all the meanness and the cruelty and the aridity of perverted sanctity, the joylessness of the woman who has killed her mother instinct, the hatred of the parasitic soul that withers the sap of nature with its clammy touch.

  “Joseph,” she said, in her dry, harsh, old-maid’s voice, “is it too much for you, dear?”

  Her voice made him start, but he did not look at her. He merely relaxed his hands and let his body go limp. Her voice silenced the devilish voice of rebellion in his mind. Like an automatic machine his conscience registered a mortal sin, the sin of taking pleasure in obscene thoughts, Her voice made him feel conscious of her power over him and of his own weakness. Just as a schoolboy when he hears the voice of the Dean of Studies, remembers his lessons with fear; so Mr. Timmins remembered hi
s work as a director of an insurance company and also the religious societies to which he belonged, especially the one for saving street women “from the scarlet sin of their unhappy life” as his wife called it. These labours and duties rose up before his mind, big and perpetually unfinished and it became obvious to him that life should mean nothing to him beyond these labours, for which he would be rewarded in the next world.

  “Yes,” he said, in a childish feminine voice, “it’s rather horrible, what people … I mean … things are turning out rather… it’s unrest, I suppose and… science.”

  Then he found courage to look at her, because, with a sudden twist, his mind had become like hers, a mind hostile to rebellion and to the desires of the flesh, only with the difference that his mind was more violent and passionate than hers and it would now like to gouge out the eyes of the atheistic soldiers and burn all Protestants and heretics in a big fire. Whereas her mind, behind the cruel cold eyes, watched suffering and torment without movement and saw that they were good.

  Her eyes turned wearily and contemptuously from her husband’s nervous twitching face. She sighed and said wearily:

  “Science, thy name is sin. No, Joseph, it’s not science, but the coming of Antichrist. I can feel it in the growing generation. It’s truly horrible, but I can even see signs in your nephew that he is becoming a prey to the immoral teachings of the College of Science. He laughs immoderately and yawns when I talk to him of his religious duties. He makes too free with the servants.”

  His eyes wandered from her face as she spoke. They rested on her undeveloped breasts that were like a flat board against the bedclothes. In a flash he smelt the sun-baked plains of Mexico and saw bronzed horsemen galloping with screaming nuns on the pommels of their gaudy saddles. “The curse of the cinema,” she had said. The hot voluptuous sun and the stretching long-grassed golden plains made his flesh throb where the new underclothing grated against it. He shuddered and said almost angrily:

  “I am at the end of my patience. Unless he mends his ways…. Well, it’s hard … my dead brother’s son … and we … God didn’t bless us with children, but … nothing but ruin can come of the company he keeps … his drinking and if what I hear is true… women.”

  “Women,” said Mrs. Timmins, “you haven’t told me anything about…”

  “My dear,” said Mr. Timmins, “I didn’t want to disturb … I’m not certain and in your condition …”

  “Joseph,” said Mrs. Timmins. “You must put your foot down. At once. It’s your weakness that’s responsible. He must leave the college at once. Take him into your office.”

  Mr. Timmins began to speak, but he became inarticulate and he wrung his hands. His face became crimson. He was trying very hard to feel violent against his nephew, but all the time he felt the impact of hot voluptuous sunrays against his irritated flesh and he had visions of wild lawless men in rolling golden plains, herding women.

  There was a knock at the door. Then the parlourmaid entered.

  “Dinner is served, sir,” she said. “Will you have your beef-tea now, ma’am?”

  “Yes,” said Mrs. Timmins. “And I think I’ll try a little chicken, Kitty. A little breast.”

  “Yes, ma’am. Do you want some more coal on the fire?”

  “Do.”

  While the maid was at the coal-scuttle, Mr. Timmins got up and kissed his wife reverently on the forehead. Her skin was yellow and clammy. His lips quivered as they touched her skin. She called him back from the door, waited until the parlourmaid had left the room and then said in a very severe tone:

  “You must speak to him. Don’t let me have to do it.”

  Then Mr. Timmins went out hurriedly. He hurried without being aware of it, fondling the tip of his little thin beard and moving his lips. When he turned the corner and came to the stairhead he realized the cause of his hurried movements. The parlourmaid was tripping down in front of him. Immediately he flushed and thought of the golden rolling plains, the swishing of the long grass and the flying hoofs of the sweating horses. Everything hot under the boiling sun. His lips grew dry as he went down the stairs in the wake of the comely silken legs and saw, resisting, conscience striken, the curve of her body and the undulating glossy hair rising from her soft white neck. And he saw that she was young and soft and round and fresh, like a young flower wet with dew, opening out its honeyed cup to a wandering bee.

  The maid went off across the hallway towards the kitchen. It was dim there where she disappeared and her tall straight figure, swaying voluptuously at the hips, became alluring among the shadows. When she disappeared something began to burn in his chest, for a few moments only, a pang of mingled joy and sadness. It was queer, both unpleasant and violently intoxicating.

  He passed the dining-room door and went into the drawing-room to look for his nephew. The drawing-room was empty. He went through to the dining-room. His nephew was standing at the sideboard and he put down something hurriedly that clinked. Mr. Timmins flared up at once.

  “Drinking?” he said, in a low tense voice.

  The nephew turned round, calmly sticking a coloured handkerchief into his outside breast pocket. He was a young man of twenty, low-sized and powerfully built. His face had already become slightly coarse. His strong neck, his curly dark hair and the contemptuous expression of his grey eyes made him attractive, in the way that stupid, strong men are attractive.

  “Hello, Unce Joe,” he said carelessly in a deep bass voice. “What’s the matter? Everybody takes a pick-me-up before dinner now. I don’t feel up to scratch. That match yesterday was a bit tough.”

  “I have a few words to say to you, Reggie,” said Mr. Timmins.

  “What about?” said the nephew.

  The parlourmaid entered with the soup. They took their seats, facing one another across the table. Mr. Timmins watched his nephew’s eyes. The nephew smiled slyly at the parlourmaid and he looked at Mr. Timmins with a vacant stare and fiddled with his napkin. As the parlourmaid leaned over his shoulder with his soup, Mr Timmins again felt that sensation of something burning in his chest. The maid left the room. Mr Timmins put down his spoon and began to speak furiously.

  “She insists on your leaving the College of Science,” he said, “and I must own … well, I quite agree with her. For your father’s sake, Reggie … Well, I tried my best to … give you your own way and to … What return do you make? What’s going to become of you, I say? Twice during the past week I have been approached by friends. Yes. Mrs. Turnbull stopped me in the street, waved her umbrella in my face and accused you of dragging her Andrew into the ways of the devil. Do you think I hear nothing? I’m told everything, even about your champagne dinner at Jammet’s with a common bookmaker.”

  The nephew broke bread and said calmly:

  “That was on a bet, uncle. Ye can’t expect a man …”

  “A man,” said Mr. Timmins. “You call yourself a man. I would forgive you for squandering my money if it was for a good purpose. I’m not mean. Your father left me a sacred trust. Lord have mercy on him, his ways were not mine and he died penniless. But I’m not mean. God didn’t bless us with children. What I have is yours. But it’s a hopeless and miserable end to a life of labour and … and self-denial to think that … Eh? What’s going to become of you? She says I’m weak and it’s time. What can I do? Have you no conscience? Football, drink and bad company are no fitting preparation for the … Do you or do you not want to?”

  The nephew pushed away his empty plate and put his arms on the table.

  “Listen, Uncle Joe,” he said calmly.

  “Sit properly in my presence,” said Mr. Timmins angrily.

  “Oh, all right,” said the nephew, “ye might let us have a meal in peace. There’s something I wanted to ask you about only I’ll wait till afterwards. Ye know it’s bad for yer digestion talking during meals. I heard Dr …”

  “Silence!” shouted Mr. Timmins.

  “Very well, only …”

  “Silence,” whispered Mr
. Timmins, blushing and shaking his fist. He heard the maid’s footsteps. Mr. Timmins did not look towards the maid. Neither did he think of her. He answered her severely when she asked him if his untouched soup had not been to his liking. He felt a meaningless anger that he had not experienced for years. Hosts of things contributed to produce this anger, trivial things like his new underwear and his wife’s yellow skin, weighty things like the consciousness of his own arid years that had never known the softness and subtle passion of love. And he wanted revenge, violent and immediate, a breaking forth that would shatter everything, even his own life and his hope of Paradise.

  His appetite was gone, but he wanted to drink. He wanted to go to the sideboard, put a decanter to his lips and spill it down his throat. But he was afraid of his nephew. The young brute. Just like his dead father, who had got drunk on the night after his young wife’s funeral and had to be brought home from an improper house.

  “He has something to say to me,” thought Mr. Timmins. “Very well. Nothing he can say will alter my determination to get even with this young ruffian. He’s laughing at me. Upon my soul he is.”

  Not a word was spoken for the remainder of the meal. The nephew ate ravenously, utterly indifferent to the twitching, angry countenance of his uncle sitting opposite him. Mr. Timmins made a pretence of eating, but each mouthful stuck in his throat. The sound of the maid’s footsteps excited him now, just as the contour of her figure had done in the hallway. And under cover of the new silent anger that had hardened his soul, he conceived an extraordinary and intoxicating desire to … Each time she bent over him he thought of it with a most diabolical pleasure. There was a soft sweet scent from her hair and even from her white apron when she bent over him. The starched apron crinkled, pressed out of shape by her bending supple figure. He was acutely conscious of every sound and movement she made and of her shape, even though he didn’t look at her. When they were finished their coffee, Mr. Timmins said: