The Best of Frank O'Connor

by Frank O'Connor

  ‘That’s as I’d expect, sir,’ said Whelan stolidly, studying his nails.

  ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake!’ exclaimed Devine, exasperated by the old man’s boorishness. ‘You see, captain,’ he said patiently, bending forward with his worried air, his head tilted back as though he feared the pince-nez might fall off, ‘this girl, as I said, is one of Father Whelan’s parishioners. She’s not a very good girl – not that I mean there’s any harm in her,’ he added hastily, ‘but she is a bit wild, and it’s Father Whelan’s duty to keep her as far as he can removed from temptation. He is the shepherd and she is one of his stray sheep,’ he added with a faint smile at his own eloquence.

  The captain bent forward and touched Devine lightly on the knee.

  ‘You are a funny race,’ he said. ‘I have travelled the whole world. I have met Englishmen everywhere, but I will never understand you. Never!’

  ‘But we’re not English, man,’ said old Whelan with the first sign of interest he had so far displayed. ‘Don’t you know what country you’re in? This is Ireland.’

  ‘Ah,’ said the captain with a shrug, ‘it is the same thing.’

  ‘Oh, but surely, captain,’ protested Devine gently with his head cocked, sizing up his man, ‘surely we admit some distinction?’

  ‘No, no,’ said the captain vigorously, shaking his head.

  ‘At the Battle of the Boyne you fought for us,’ said Devine persuasively. ‘We fought for you at Fontenoy and Ramillies.

  When on Ramillies bloody field

  The baffled French were forced to yield,

  The victor Saxon backward reeled

  Before the charge of Clare’s Dragoons.’

  He recited the lines with the same apologetic smile he had adopted in speaking of sheep and shepherds, as if to excuse his momentary lapse into literature, but the captain waved him aside impatiently.

  ‘No, no, no, no, no,’ he said with a shrug and a groan. ‘I know all that. You call yourselves Irish and the others call themselves Scotch, but there is no difference. You all speak English; you all behave like English; you all pretend to be very good boys. You don’t do nothing, eh? You do not come to me as man to man and say, “The cure’s daughter is on the ship. Send her home.” Why?’

  ‘Perhaps,’ suggested Devine sarcastically, ‘because she doesn’t happen to be the cure’s daughter.’

  ‘Whose daughter?’ asked Whelan with his mouth hanging.

  ‘Yours,’ said Devine drily.

  ‘Well, well, well,’ the old man said in real distress. ‘What sort of upbringing had he at all? Does he even know we can’t get married?’

  ‘I should say he takes it for granted,’ replied Devine over his shoulder even more drily than before. ‘Elle n’est pas sa fille,’ he added to the captain.

  ‘C’est sûr?’ asked the captain suspiciously.

  ‘C’est certain,’ said Devine with a nod.

  ‘Sa maîtresse alors?’ said the captain.

  ‘Ni cela non plus,’ replied Devine evenly, with only the faintest of smiles on the worn shell of his face.

  ‘Ah, bon, bon, bon,’ said the captain excitedly, springing from his seat and striding about the cabin, scowling and waving his arms. ‘Bon. C’est bon. Vous vous moquez de moi, monsieur le curé. Comprenez-vous, c’est seulement par politesse que j’ai voulu faire croire que c’était sa fille. On voit bien que le vieux est jaloux. Est-ce que je n’ai pas vu les flics qui surveillent mon bateau toute la semaine? Mais croyez-moi, monsieur, je me fiche de lui et de ses agents.’

  ‘He seems to be very excited,’ said Whelan with distaste. What’s he saying?’

  ‘I’m trying to persuade him that she isn’t your mistress,’ Devine couldn’t refrain from saying with quiet malice. ‘He says you’re jealous and that you’ve had spies watching his ship for a week.’

  ‘Well, well, well,’ Father Whelan cried, colouring up like a girl and trembling with the indignity that had been put on him. ‘We’d better go home, Devine. ’Tis no use talking to a man like that. It’s clear that he’s mad.’

  ‘He probably thinks the same of us,’ said Devine, rising. ‘Venez manger demain soir et je vous expliquerai tout,’ he added to the captain.

  ‘Je vous remercie, monsieur,’ said the captain with a shrug which Devine knew he could never equal; ‘c’est très aimable de votre part, mais je n’ai pas besoin d’explications. Il n’y a rien d’inattendu, mais,’ with a smile, ‘vous en faites toute une histoire.’ He clapped his hand jovially on Devine’s shoulder and almost embraced him. ‘Naturellement, je vous rends la fille, parce que vous la demandez, mais comprenez bien que je le fais à cause de vous, et non pas’ – he drew himself up to his full height and glared at old Whelan, who stood there in a dumb stupor – ‘à cause de monsieur et de ses agents.’

  ‘Oh, quant à moi,’ said Devine with weary humour, ‘vous feriez mieux en l’emmenant où vous allez. Et moi-même aussi.’

  ‘Quoi?’ shouted the captain in desperation, clutching his forehead. ‘Vous l’aimez aussi?’

  Non, non, non,’ said Devine good-humouredly, patting him consolingly on the arm. ‘It’s all very complicated. I really wouldn’t try to understand it if I were you.’

  ‘What’s he saying now?’ asked Whelan with sour suspicion.

  ‘Oh, he thinks she’s my mistress as well,’ said Devine pleasantly. ‘He thinks we’re sharing her so far as I can gather.’

  ‘Come on, come on,’ said Whelan in dull despair, making for the gangway. ‘My goodness, even I never thought they were as bad as that. And we sending missions to the blacks!’

  Meanwhile the captain had rushed aft and shouted down the stairway. The girl appeared, small, plump and weeping too, and the captain, quite moved, slapped her encouragingly on the shoulder and said something to her in a gruff voice which Devine suspected was in the nature of advice about choosing younger lovers for the future. Then the captain went up bristling to Sullivan, who was standing by the gangway, leaning on his folded umbrella, and with fluttering hands and imperious nods ordered him off the vessel.

  ‘Allez-vous-en,’ he said curtly, ‘allez, allez, allez!’

  Sullivan went and Sheridan followed. Dusk had crept suddenly along the quays and lay heaped there the colour of blown sand. Over the bright river mouth, shining under a bank of dark cloud, a star twinkled. Devine felt hopeless and lost, as though he were returning to the prison-house of his youth. The parish priest preceded him down the gangway with his old woman’s dull face sunk in his broad chest. At the foot he stopped and stood with his hands still clutching the gangway rail and gazed back up at the captain, who was scowling fiercely at him over the edge of the ship.

  ‘Anyway,’ he said heavily, ‘thanks be to the Almighty God that your accursed race is withering off the face of the earth.’

  Devine with a bitter little smile raised his battered old hat and pulled the skirts of his old coat about him as he stepped up on to the gangway.

  ‘Vous viendrez demain, monsieur le capitaine?’ he said in his gentlest, most ingratiating tone.

  ‘Avec plaisir. A demain, monsieur le berger,’ replied the captain with a knowing look.

  THE FRYING-PAN

  FATHER FOGARTY’S only real friends in Kilmulpeter were the Whittons. Whitton was the teacher there. He had been to the seminary and college with Fogarty, and, like him, intended to be a priest, but when the time came for him to take the vow of celibacy, he had contracted scruples of conscience and married the principal one. Fogarty, who had known her too, had to admit that she wasn’t without justification, and now, in this lonely place where chance had thrown them together again, she formed the real centre of what little social life he had. With Tom Whitton he had a quiet friendship compounded of exchanges of opinion about books or wireless talks. He had the impression that Whitton didn’t really like him and considered him a man who would have been better out of the Church. When they went to the races together, Fogarty felt that Whitton disapproved of having to put
on bets for him and thought that priests should not bet at all. Like other outsiders, he knew perfectly what priests should be, without the necessity for having to be that way himself. He was sometimes savage in the things he said about the parish priest, old Father Whelan. On the other hand, he had a pleasant sense of humour and Fogarty enjoyed retailing his cracks against the cloth. Men as intelligent as Whitton were rare in country schools, and soon, too, he would grow stupid and wild for lack of educated society.

  One evening Father Fogarty invited them to dinner to see some films he had taken at the races. Films were his latest hobby. Before this it had been fishing and shooting. Like all bachelors, he had a mania for adding to his possessions, and his lumber-room was piled high with every possible sort of junk from chest-developers to field-glasses, and his library cluttered with works on everything from Irish history to Freudian psychology. He passed from craze to craze, each the key to the universe.

  He sprang up at the knock, and found Una at the door, all in furs, her shoulders about her ears, her big, bony, masculine face blue with cold but screwed up in an amiable monkey-grin. Tom, a handsome man, was tall and self-conscious. He had greying hair, brown eyes, a prominent jaw, and was quiet-spoken in a way that concealed passion. He and Una disagreed a lot about the way the children should be brought up. He thought she spoiled them.

  ‘Come in, let ye, come in!’ cried Fogarty hospitably, showing the way into his warm study with its roaring turf fire, deep leather chairs, and the Raphael print above the mantelpiece, a real bachelor’s room. ‘God above!’ he exclaimed, holding Una’s hand a moment longer than was necessary. ‘You’re perished! What’ll you have to drink, Una?’

  ‘Whi-hi-hi —’ stammered Una excitedly, her eyes beginning to pop. ‘I can’t say the bloody word.’

  ‘Call it malt, girl,’ said the priest.

  ‘That’s enough! That’s enough!’ she cried laughingly, snatching the glass from him. ‘You’ll send me home on my ear, and then I’ll hear about it from this fellow.’

  ‘Whiskey, Tom?’

  ‘Whiskey, Jerry,’ Whitton said quietly with a quick conciliatory glance. He kept his head very stiff and used his eyes a lot instead.

  Meanwhile Una, unabashably inquisitive, was making the tour of the room with the glass in her hand, to see if there was anything new in it. There usually was.

  ‘Is this new, father?’ she asked, halting before a pleasant eighteenth-century print.

  ‘Ten bob,’ the priest said promptly. ‘Wasn’t it a bargain?’

  ‘I couldn’t say. What is it?’

  ‘The old courthouse in town.’

  ‘Go on!’ said Una.

  Whitton came and studied the print closely. ‘That place is gone these fifty years and I never saw a picture of it,’ he said. ‘This is a bargain all right.’

  ‘I’d say so,’ Fogarty said with quiet pride.

  ‘And what’s the sheet for?’ Una asked, poking at a tablecloth pinned between the windows.

  ‘That’s not a sheet, woman!’ Fogarty exclaimed. ‘For God’s sake, don’t be displaying your ignorance!’

  ‘Oh, I know,’ she cried girlishly. ‘For the pictures! I’d forgotten about them. That’s grand!’

  Then Bella, a coarse, good-looking country girl, announced dinner, and the curate, with a self-conscious, boyish swagger, led them into the dining-room and opened the door of the sideboard. The dining-room was even more ponderous than the sitting-room. Everything in it was large, heavy and dark.

  ‘And now, what’ll ye drink?’ he asked over his shoulder, studying his array of bottles. ‘There’s some damn good Burgundy – ’pon my soul, ’tis great!’

  ‘How much did it cost?’ Whitton asked with poker-faced humour. ‘The only way I have of identifying wines is by the price.’

  ‘Eight bob a bottle,’ Fogarty replied at once.

  ‘That’s a very good price,’ said Whitton with a nod. ‘We’ll have some of that.’

  ‘You can take a couple of bottles home with you,’ said the curate, who, in the warmth of his heart, was always wanting to give his treasures away. ‘The last two dozen he had – wasn’t I lucky?’

  ‘You have the appetite of a canon on the income of a curate,’ Whitton said in the same tone of grave humour, but Fogarty caught the scarcely perceptible note of criticism in it. He did not allow this to upset him.

  ‘Please God, we won’t always be curates,’ he said sunnily.

  ‘Bella looks after you well,’ said Una when the meal was nearly over. The compliment was deserved so far as it went, though it was a man’s meal rather than a woman’s.

  ‘Doesn’t she, though?’ Fogarty exclaimed with pleasure. ‘Isn’t she damn good for a country girl?’

  ‘How does she get on with Stasia?’ asked Una – Stasia was Father Whelan’s old housekeeper, and an affliction to the community.

  ‘They don’t talk. Stasia says she’s an immoral woman.’

  ‘And is she?’ Una asked hopefully.

  ‘If she isn’t, she’s wasting her own time and my whiskey,’ said Fogarty. ‘She entertains Paddy Coakley in the kitchen every Saturday night. I told her I wouldn’t keep her unless she got a boy. And wasn’t I right? One Stasia is enough for any parish. Father Whelan tells me I’m going too far.’

  ‘And did you tell him to mind his own business?’ Whitton asked with a penetrating look.

  ‘I did, to be sure,’ said Fogarty, who had done nothing of the sort.

  ‘Ignorant, interfering old fool!’ Whitton said quietly, the ferocity of his sentiments belied by the mildness of his manner.

  ‘That’s only because you’d like to do the interfering yourself,’ said Una good-humouredly. She frequently had to act as peacemaker between the parish priest and her husband.

  ‘And a robber,’ Tom Whitton added to the curate, ignoring her. ‘He’s been collecting for new seats for the church for the last ten years. I’d like to know where that’s going.’

  ‘He had a collection for repairing my roof,’ said the curate, ‘and ’tis leaking still. He must be worth twenty thousand.’

  ‘Now, that’s not fair, father,’ Una said flatly. ‘You know yourself there’s no harm in Father Whelan. It’s just that he’s certain he’s going to die in the workhouse. It’s like Bella and her boy. He has nothing more serious to worry about, and he worries about that.’

  Fogarty knew there was a certain amount of truth in what Una said, and that the old man’s miserliness was more symbolic than real, and at the same time he felt in her words criticism of a different kind from her husband’s. Though Una wasn’t aware of it she was implying that the priest’s office made him an object of pity rather than blame. She was sorry for old Whelan, and, by implication, for him.

  ‘Still, Tom is right, Una,’ he said with sudden earnestness. ‘It’s not a question of what harm Father Whelan intends, but what harm he does. Scandal is scandal, whether you give it deliberately or through absent-mindedness.’

  Tom grunted, to show his approval, but he said no more on the subject, as though he refused to enter into an argument with his wife about subjects she knew nothing of. They returned to the study for coffee, and Fogarty produced the film projector. At once the censoriousness of Tom Whitton’s manner dropped away, and he behaved like a pleasant and intelligent boy of seventeen. Una, sitting by the fire with her legs crossed, watched them with amusement. Whenever they came to the priest’s house, the same sort of thing happened. Once it had been a microscope, and the pair of them had amused themselves with it for hours. Now they were kidding themselves that their real interest in the cinema was educational. She knew that within a month the cinema, like the microscope, would be lying in the lumber-room with the rest of the junk.

  Fogarty switched off the light and showed some films he had taken at the last race meeting. They were very patchy, mostly out of focus, and had to be interpreted by a running commentary, which was always a shot or two behind.

  ‘I suppose ye wouldn’t kn
ow who that is?’ he said as the film showed Una, eating a sandwich and talking excitedly and demonstratively to a couple of wild-looking country boys.

  ‘It looks like someone from the Country Club,’ her husband said dryly.

  ‘But wasn’t it good?’ Fogarty asked innocently as he switched on the lights again. ‘Now, wasn’t it very interesting?’ He was exactly like a small boy who had performed a conjuring trick.

  ‘Marvellous, father,’ Una said with a sly and affectionate grin.

  He blushed and turned to pour them out more whiskey. He saw that she had noticed the pictures of herself. At the same time, he saw she was pleased. When he had driven them home, she held his hand and said they had had the best evening for years – a piece of flattery so gross and uncalled-for that it made her husband more tongue-tied than ever.

  ‘Thursday, Jerry?’ he said with a quick glance.

  ‘Thursday, Tom,’ said the priest.

  The room looked terribly desolate after her; the crumpled cushions, the glasses, the screen and the film projector, everything had become frighteningly inert, while outside his window the desolate countryside had taken on even more of its supernatural animation: bogs, hills, and field, full of ghosts and shadows. He sat by the fire, wondering what his own life might have been like with a girl like that, all furs and scent and laughter, and two bawling, irrepressible brats upstairs. When he tiptoed up to his bedroom he remembered that there would never be children there to wake, and it seemed to him that with all the things he bought to fill his home, he was merely trying desperately to stuff the yawning holes in his own big, empty heart.

  On Thursday, when he went to their house, Ita and Brendan, though already in bed, were refusing to sleep till he said good-night to them. While he was taking off his coat the two of them rushed to the banisters and screamed: ‘We want Father Fogey.’ When he went upstairs they were sitting bolt upright in their cots, a little fat, fair-haired rowdy boy and a solemn baby girl.

  ‘Father,’ Brendan began at once, ‘will I be your altar boy when I grow up?’

  ‘You will to be sure, son,’ replied Fogarty.