The Bay

by L. A. G. Strong

  I suddenly remembered Janey.

  “Uncle John. What will we do about Ann Dunn’s cat?”

  “That’s all right. A neighbour has it, and will keep it out of respect for her.”

  I was relieved. Janey wasn’t a very friendly or exciting cat. I didn’t want her myself. I returned to Uncle John’s ménage.

  “Who looks after Jeremy and the cats when you’re away, Uncle John?”

  “Mrs. Kerrigan.” His face was blank and shuttered. “Sure, who else?”

  He fell silent after that, and I felt he was watching me. Oh, what a lot I have to guess about him. How dearly I would love to have him back again, and question him as a man of his own age, from whom he’d have nothing to hide.

  Our meal was nearly done now, and it became evident to me that Uncle John was lingering on purpose. I suggested it was time we went to see the Doctor, and that he would be expecting us. Uncle John’s response was to order himself some more porter, and to begin a very leisurely and thorough picking of his teeth. I thought of the difficulty I had had to bring them together, and the idea that Uncle John might be going to back out at the last minute made me desperate. I controlled myself as well as I could, and gave Uncle John a reasonable time. Then I got up.

  “We must be off, Uncle John. We’re nearly half an hour late as it is.”

  “Late? Late, son? What do you mean? Sure, the man isn’t the mailboat, is he?”

  “No. But he’ll have everything ready for us, and it wouldn’t do to look discourteous to him.”

  Uncle John’s expression changed at once. It assumed a professional solemnity.

  “Oh, indeed, there must be no question of discourtesy. None at all. Discourteous—sure, that is the last thing we must be. Come along, son, so. Here—waiter! Waiter! Where the divil has the fella got to! Evidently they think you have all night in this place.”

  He was in such a hurry to be gone, and so noisy in his proclamation of it, that once more he drew everyone’s attention upon us. When the youth brought us our bill, Uncle John read him a lecture on punctuality and the need to consider the requirements of his customers, until the kitchen hatch opened, and two faces peered curiously through, all eyes and foreshortening. I was thankful when we were out of the place.

  Uncle John blew, hit himself in the small of the back, belched loudly twice, said “That for ye” to the spire of the Mariners’ Church, and took my arm.

  “Now, son. Where does this fella live?”

  “This way. It isn’t far.”

  “Bedad, that’s a good job, anyway.”

  Uncle John couldn’t see, in the darkness, the squalor of the terrace. He could only see its size, and I could feel that it impressed him. He came slowly and meditatively up the steps. I held on to him as I rang the bell, in case he should bolt.

  Mary Kate let us in. Uncle John ogled her, and out of the corner of my eye I saw him reach a surreptitious hand for her as she showed us in. It was a flash only, so quick that I couldn’t afterwards be sure I hadn’t imagined it. Then we were blinking in the full blaze of the Doctor’s illuminations. How much all those things cost him, I dare not guess. We had no electric light in Kingstown in those days. He must have contrived it himself, dynamo and all.

  Uncle John’s face at the sight of all this was marvellous. It went utterly blank, a red expressionless round, the eyes gone small and dull, the mouth a little open. The Doctor rose grandly and greeted him in terms of the deepest ceremony. I saw with consternation that he was already very drunk. He professed it an honour to entertain the relative of his young friend Mangan, and only deplored the sad nature of the occasion that had brought them together. Finally, with a stately gesture towards the tantalus, he said that Uncle John must immediately join him in a ball of malt, to the repose of the departed, and to their own better acquaintance.

  At this greeting an extraordinary gleam came into Uncle John’s eye. This was a language he well understood: and in reply he treated the Doctor to a speech of such sonority, such roundness, such Johnsonian weight, that the Doctor, who had taken his stand over the tantalus, drew himself more and more erect till I was terrified he would overbalance backwards on the stove. Fortunately, Uncle John’s oration stopped just in time, the Doctor righted himself with a jerk, bowed ceremoniously, and poured out a glass for Uncle John and another for himself.

  They sat down then, and I thought all was well. On the contrary, they eyed each other as warily as boxers, and I perceived that this had been a preliminary exchange only. Still maintaining the utmost politeness, they proceeded to indulge in a sort of stilted and grandiloquent small talk, of which I regret to say I cannot remember a word.

  From this they passed to scholarship. The Doctor cited Aesculapius, and Uncle John retorted with Giraldus Cambrensis. This gave the Doctor a wholly erroneous view of Uncle John’s erudition, and he proceeded to move with circumspection, deferring to the knowledge Uncle John, as I well knew, did not possess. But with nods and approving noises, “Oho”, and “Aha”, and an appearance of urbane sagacity, Uncle John managed to keep his end up. I feared an orgy of Shakespeare, knowing the prowess of both men in quotation. Moreover, as the Doctor was not always quite word perfect, I knew Uncle John would correct him, and I visualised a nightmare rumpus. But, miraculously, nothing of the kind happened.

  At last the Doctor appeared to be satisfied. He got up, refilled Uncle John’s glass, and, instead of sitting up at the table, lowered himself upon the ottoman.

  “One of the many reasons I wanted you to come here,” he said to Uncle John, in a perfectly normal tone, “was that you are a skilled judge of furniture and antiques. I have a few things here, and I would be glad of your opinion on them.”

  Uncle John’s quick eye had been round the room already, as well as it could for the glare of the dangling lights. He did not disclaim the Doctor’s compliment, but looked around as if seeing the room for the first time.

  The Doctor stretched out an arm, and caused a great scurrying and dancing of the globes. Uncle John’s face once more lost all expression. He started slightly as one of them jerked erratically past his nose, and swayed into a new position high over his head.

  “Easily adjusted, you see,” said the Doctor. “I can, without moving from my place, strongly illuminate any part of the room I wish.”

  “Begod, I believe you,” said Uncle John.

  “Now, in the course of your profession, I daresay you are often compelled to examine a piece of furniture in a very poor light. Here, if you do me the favour of examining mine, you will be under no such disability. For instance—that wardrobe.”

  He reached again, and two bulbs jerked into action, jogged arthritically towards the wardrobe, and hung, swaying wildly, just above it.

  “Mother of God,” said Uncle John. The Doctor did not seem to hear.

  “Now, sir. If you care to examine the wardrobe, you will be able to see what you are doing.”

  Uncle John looked at me with a face of such comical astonishment that, despite my sense of the solemnity of the occasion, I had to turn away not to be seen grinning. He got up, and, with a respectful eye upon the globes, as if he suspected they might at any minute swoop upon his head, he went across to the wardrobe.

  The instant he reached it, his indecision vanished. He tapped it, peered closely, scratched a corner of the varnish with his fingernail, and looked round.

  “A nice wood,” he said. “Oregon pine. Twenty-five years old or thereabouts. The room is a bit hot for it.”

  He looked sharply at the Doctor, as if challenging him to contradict. The Doctor bowed.

  “I knew it was pine,” he said, “and you’re probably right as to the age. But that door was a shade warped when I got it.”

  “What did you pay for it?”

  “I didn’t. I got it by barter. It was a good deal. I did well.”

  “I’m sure you did.”

  Uncle John ducked swiftly under one of the globes, before the Doctor could move it, and made for a c
urious composite piece, wardrobe and chest of drawers combined. He went over it with the quick intentness of a terrier. Suddenly he stopped short, and, to my amazement, pulled off his thumbstall and ran his thumb caressingly over the wood. The Doctor watched in approval.

  “A nice mahogany, is it not?”

  Uncle John looked round.

  “A very nice mahogany. Spanish. Unless I’m mistaken, it comes from Andalusia.” He fixed round eyes on the Doctor. “A shipload of that wood was unloaded on Sir John Rogerson’s quay in 1874. A lot was made up by Brown’s in Crow Street. I believe you have a piece of it here.”

  The Doctor tilted his head back, and inspected Uncle John.

  “This is knowledge,” he proclaimed. “This is exposition, such as my soul loveth. Sir—I drink to your good health, and to our better acquaintance.”

  “Thank you,” said Uncle John. “But you’re ruining it here. You have it too near the fire.”

  The Doctor’s manner chilled a little. “You mean I should move it nearer the window?”

  “By rights it shouldn’t be in here at all. The room is too warm—for the wood, I mean.”

  The Doctor took a drink, and said nothing. Uncle John looked at him, then resumed his investigation of the room. Inside ten minutes he had appraised every piece of furniture it contained, always with precise details of price and origin: and of these ten minutes at least five were taken up with a discreditable anecdote about one of the dealers involved. This anecdote made the Doctor restive, and I was afraid the dealer was perhaps a friend of his.

  “I never buy from dealers,” he said, as soon as he could get in a word. “I pick my stuff up at auctions and the like.”

  “To be sure,” said Uncle John, and went on examining. He worked round the walls, and came to a full stop in front of the picture. The Doctor made a sign to me to say nothing.

  “Now,” he said, “do me a last favour, before you sit down, and give me your opinion on that painting. Would it be of any value, do you think?”

  Uncle John eyed it cautiously.

  “I can give you no opinion worth having as to whether it’s good or not,” he said, “but in the saleroom it wouldn’t fetch about twenty-five or thirty shillings.”

  The Doctor rose to his feet.

  “Excellent!” he cried. “Oh, this is magnificent! Sir, you are a wonder. Mangan, salute your uncle. Thirty shillings is the exact sum I paid for it.”

  “Well,” said Uncle John, unmoved, “they didn’t cheat you.”

  The Doctor continued to compliment him, made him sit down, and refilled his glass. Uncle John looked surprised at his enthusiasm, but a gratified expression began to rise in his face. He took some whiskey, put his hand in his waistcoat pocket, took out the thumbstall, and made to put it on again.

  I could contain myself no longer.

  “Uncle John. Your thumb. I often wanted to ask you.”

  He smiled in a shamefaced, sheepish sort of way.

  “Oh, that,” he said. “Sure, I keep that thumb for tapestries and some sorts of furniture. It keeps it thin-skinned and sensitive. I never let the skin grow thick.” He looked at the Doctor. “I can twig a fake tapestry or a bad veneer in an instant with this thumb. And—you won’t believe me—I can tell real silver with it. An old Limerick man put me wise to the idea. A trade secret. It cost me a few drinks one night.”

  So that was the secret of the thumbstall that had puzzled me for so long. I had formed many a theory to account for it, and had to discard them all. Seeing the amount Uncle John smoked, and that he always used cut plug, cutting it up in the palm of his hand with an exquisitely sharp penknife, I had thought that he might use the thumbstall for pressing down his tobacco in his pipe once it was alight, for cut plug has a way of curling up in the bowl of a pipe and falling out on your trousers or your waistcoat. But, sitting with my eyes fixed on him when we would be together, studying every flutter of his eyelids, every twitch of his mouth, every movement of his thick fingers, I was obliged to give up my theory, since I saw that he never used either of his thumbs for this purpose. Well, I knew now—and somehow the loss of the mystery made me sad. I thought of Ann Dunn, and a lump rose in my throat.

  Meantime the two men were getting on famously, so that I was able to withdraw into my sorrow. The exchange of compliments became more fervent, there was more and more recourse to the tantalus, and, as the Doctor’s speech grew more and more magniloquent, Uncle John’s became more colloquial and easy and his accent broadened.

  Suddenly the Doctor nudged Uncle John, and I saw that they were looking at me.

  “Mangan,” the Doctor said, “I will arrogate to myself the rôle of your medical adviser, and suggest that you retire to your bed. You have had a long day, and a trying time generally. Moreover, your uncle and I have your future to discuss, and your presence would be something in the nature of an embarrassment. Good night.”

  I got up at once. “Good night, Doctor. Good night, Uncle John.”

  He looked at me, owlish, uncertain. I felt his blue eyes focus. A smile of pure sweetness lit his face.

  “Good night, little son.”

  I went up to bed, and was soon asleep. Once or twice, vaguely, as if in my dreams, I heard bursts of raucous song, and later, unless I imagined it, an elephantine shuffling and staggering: but they were momentary impressions only, and when I woke I could not be sure I had heard them at all.

  I slept the clock round, and did not wake till very late. When I got down, feeling rather ashamed of myself, and not relishing the grins of Mary Kate, I found the Doctor sitting by his fire, looking yellow and liverish. He greeted me curtly, and for a while said nothing at all. Then he pulled his wire, the lid of the range rose, he spat, waited to hear the spit hiss on the coals, let the lid fall with a clatter, and lay back on his cushions.

  “Your uncle’s a boozer,” he said at last. “I thought as much. You can’t depend on him.”

  I sat still.

  The Doctor heaved himself into a better position.

  “That’s the real tragedy of a boozer. You can’t depend on him. The women who are married to boozers don’t mind their coming home soused on Saturday night, they don’t mind a black eye now and then, they don’t mind their bad temper the next morning and the stink of their breath. What breaks their heart and drives them desperate is that they can’t depend on their man. He’s no good. I know, I’m a boozer myself.”

  He raised to me a face haggard and drooping as a bloodhound’s.

  “You’ve never asked me what brought me to this.”

  I stared, my mouth dry. He made a gesture of impatience.

  “Get on, man, don’t look blank. You’re not a child any longer. You must often have wondered.”

  I shook my head. The thought had never once come into my mind.

  “Well,” he said, “it wasn’t a woman.”

  A long silence followed. I looked unhappily at the range. It was making contented noises to itself. Mary Kate slopped down the stairs outside. She hesitated on the landing, and there was the faint clank of a bucket.

  “Get me a match,” said the Doctor.

  I rose, went to the sideboard, and fetched a box. The light gleamed on the picture as I passed it, the Florentine lady simpering on her couch with her preposterous instrument.

  The Doctor lighted his pipe, and did not speak till it was going well. When he spoke, it was as if he had said nothing about Uncle John at all.

  “We have been discussing your case, your uncle and I, and we have come to what is I think a very sensible conclusion. We think you’ve been at that school long enough. You are old for your years, you’ve had a better education than most young chaps of your age, and we think you’d be happier to give up pretending to be a boy and go straight into a position in the city.”

  The moment he said this, my heart leaped with relief. I knew now that I wanted nothing more than to be off with the old life altogether, to make a clean cut and meet the world anew.

  Chapter VIr />
  This chapter is going to be difficult to write, and the difficulty is my own fault, for it contains, or should contain, so much that I have no intention of writing about. That’s a thing I’ve found out, in this first attempt of mine to write a book. You say to yourself, I’ll only write the parts of my story that are important, I’ll miss out what doesn’t interest me: and then you find that, as a sheer matter of architecture, you have to put in or at least to mention some of the very things you were determined to miss.

  So, in order to keep this chapter from being a mere ragbag, a collection of odds and ends labelled “Youth in Dublin,” or some such blather, I will have to put in a bony structure of what I was at and what took me there. For you can’t write a book about your mind and your growth alone. You’ll tell me, I daresay, that I’m talking nonsense, and instance God knows what Russian masterpiece to prove it. But I set out believing I could do that and intending to do it: and I find that the book I am writing, my book, has a form and laws of its own, which I am compelled to acknowledge.

  One thing, however, I will not do, and that is write about the “position in the city” that was found for me soon after the events in the last chapter.

  I have spoken up to now as if I had no relations but my two uncles and my aunt. In fact, there was a whole family of others, relatives of my father, who lived all together at a big place down not far from Kilcool. I have said nothing about them because, except on this one occasion, they played no part in my life. They had disapproved violently of my father’s marriage, holding that he was marrying beneath him, and we saw nothing of them save when, once or twice a year, they held a sort of family reunion to which even we were bidden. My father took me two or three times, and all I remember is sitting down to a large table, some twenty of us, with Uncle John as the hero of the. hour. Then it was that his prodigious skill in carving would be revealed: and I have a permanent picture of him, looking up from joint or birds, his round face crimson and shining with sweat and happiness, calling out invitations to this or that lady of the party, offering titbits, persuading, cajoling, acknowledging compliments, dominating the company. My father’s relatives regarded Uncle John as a vulgarian, and I daresay from their point of view they were right: but they acknowledged his prowess with the carving knife, and tolerated him as a character. There is no doubt about it, he made a party go. He amused the men, and delighted the ladies.