“Go to your room.”
Nora went out, still sobbing gratitude for her deliverance. Mr. Duigan then transferred his attention to me, glaring in the most alarming manner, his eyebrows shooting up and down.
“Mr. Duigan—she’s telling lies. I swear there wasn’t a word of truth in it. She came in here, and said there was a rat in her room. I never touched her——”
It was useless. Even I saw it was useless. The words died in my mouth. Mr. Duigan’s jaw stood out at a mad angle. He shot his lips out at me like a lizard.
“I have been waiting for this,” he said. “I saw at once the sort you were. We have that unfortunate orphan girl under our roof, and it is our sacred duty to protect her. I have listened, for many nights. I knew that you were planning some such assault. I hoped I was wrong, I hoped and prayed I was wrong. I even began to relax my vigilance. Silence! do not say a word. This is the last night you spend under my roof.”
And, with a sudden absurd nimbleness, he skipped out of the room and locked me in.
I need not describe my feelings that night. As it happened, the next day was a Sunday. Otherwise I don’t know what would have happened, for I would have had to go to my work, and Mr. Duigan assuredly would not have let me out. I got up, I dressed, I banged on the door, I shouted, but all to no purpose. At last, when I was half mad with anxiety and temper and starvation, I heard steps, and the sound of a tray being put down.
“Is that you, Nora?” I asked.
There was a silence, and the steps went away. Then came the stiff step of Mr. Duigan, and the sound of the key turning in the lock.
“Here is some food,” he said. “Though you do not deserve it.”
I was so worn down and abashed that I picked up the tray, and allowed him to lock me in again. I ate the food, and sat apathetically on my bed. I don’t know what time of day it was when I heard, loud and unmistakably angry, the voice of Uncle John. There was a pause, sounds as of argument, and then Uncle John’s step on the stairs. I groaned. Uncle John wouldn’t believe me either. He had told me himself not to get up to any games with Nora. I was done for. I had lost his goodwill for ever.
Uncle John was swearing to himself as he came to the door. The key stuck in the lock. He rattled it angrily, and said something unrepeatable, then flung the door open. I raised miserable eyes to him. His face was aflame.
“Wait you here,” he said to me, then turned and stamped his way downstairs. I heard a second burst of argument, and crept out to listen.
Uncle John was magnificent in his rage.
“What do you mean,” he roared, “locking my nephew in his room? Are you aware, sir—are you aware that by so doing you have laid yourself open to legal action? Are you aware that we can proceed against you for wrongful detention and imprisonment?”
Mr. Duigan spluttered.
“I had to protect—the house was no longer safe——”
“Blather, man, blather! Come out and apologise. Come out and apologise.” He put all the accent on the last syllable. “Come out, do you hear me!”
I heard protests and struggles, looked over the banisters, and saw that Uncle John had Mr. Duigan by the lapels of his coat, and was pulling him out on the landing in a series of mighty jerks.
“Apologise!” roared Uncle John, shaking him.
Breaking violently away, Mr. Duigan straightened himself. He was taller than Uncle John, and not without dignity.
“I shall do no such thing,” he said, his voice high and trembling. “You do yourself no credit, sir, by assaulting me.”
“Assaulting you!” Uncle John looked him up and down in large contempt. “If I started to assault you, you’d break in ten bits.”
Mr. Duigan’s eyelids snapped, and his Adam’s apple jerked. I had a momentary vision of poor Dennis, but the likeness was gone as soon as it arose.
“I do not understand the attitude you are taking up. I do not understand it at all. I detect your nephew in the act of rape, and——”
“Rape! Sure, you couldn’t rape that one. She has her mouth hanging open for it.”
“Sir! You asperse——”
“Asperse my arse! talk sense, man. That piece of perishable goods falls flat on her back at the sight of a pair of breeches. Be human, man. Have sense. Sure, how can ye blame the young lad, and it thrown up in his face? I’d have done it myself.”
Mr. Duigan’s face became livid. He glared.
“What, sir! You encourage—you condone——”
“Ah, go to hell!” Uncle John stepped back, and added an unmentionable recommendation. “Here—Luke! Luke! Ah, there you are. Pack up your things, and let’s get out of this godly tabernacle. I’d think better of the man,” he went on, for Mr. Duigan’s benefit, “if it was just plain jealous he was, and he kept the girl for himself. Maybe, now, after all”—he surveyed the outraged man—”them tall, thin, dry fellas, you know, they sometimes-No. No. He hasn’t it in him.”
Mr. Duigan pointed a bony, trembling forefinger.
“Get out of my house. Get out of my house, you—you whore-master.”
Uncle John gave a bellow of laughter.
“Go on up, Luke,” he said. “We want to be off out of this.”
I ran up, and bundled my things together, hearing all the time banter from Uncle John, and the high indignant tones of Mr. Duigan. I must say, at this distance, I think the poor man had every right to be indignant: and, even as I packed, my joy at Uncle John’s deliverance and championship of me was qualified by the fact that he quite obviously thought me guilty. This worried me terribly. I wasn’t a prude, I had a sensitive eye for a girl, and, ever since that kiss the Angel gave me, I had a deep instinct of response to women. But there was nothing crude about it. I wasn’t at all prepared for it on this animal level.
I hadn’t many things to pack, and I didn’t take long tumbling them into my bag and dear Ann Dunn’s holdall. When I came down, Uncle John was still standing at the foot of the stairs, his strong legs wide apart, and Mr. Duigan was still angrily confronting him. Uncle John was now in great good humour. As I appeared, he was recommending specifics to improve Mr. Duigan’s sexual potency. Without taking his eyes from the now inarticulate zealot, he reached out a great hand and took the holdall from me.
“Come on out of this,” he said: and then, epitomising Mr. Duigan, “Two prongs of celery and a sniff.”
We went downstairs, and, as we reached the hall, a door opened and the face of Mrs. Duigan, horrified and fascinated, peeped out. Slight though the sound was, Uncle John heard it. He turned, put down the holdall, and raised his hat.
“My condolences, Madam,” he said, jerking his thumb towards the landing above.
Mrs. Duigan hurriedly withdrew, whereupon he picked up the holdall, took my arm with his free hand, and pushed me out into the street.
“Well, son. We’re well out of that. Eh?”
“Yes, Uncle John.”
“That was a terrible place to go put you. I thought you’d be all right there. Ah well, you can never be sure. You can never be sure. Never mind, son.” He gripped my arm again. “We’ll find you some other place.”
“Uncle John.”
“Yes?”
“Uncle John—it wasn’t true, what the girl said. I didn’t do it.”
“Not a word. Not another word about it. Sure, I was young myself once. I’m not dead yet, either.”
“But, Uncle John—may I tell you, please, what happened?”
“If you want to, son. But I don’t care, you know: I’m with you. I’m on your side.”
Tears smarted at the back of my eyes.
“I know you are, Uncle John. I know. And I’m terribly grateful. But I would like you to know. I’d tell you the truth, whatever it was. You’ve made it easy for me to do that, always.”
Something in the way I said this affected Uncle John. He looked straight ahead of him, pulled out his handkerchief, and blew his nose. This necessitated stopping, putting down the holdall, and going throu
gh the entire ritual of mopping and polishing.
“It’s good of you to say that, son,” he said, when the processes were ended, and the vast yellow handkerchief was tucked away. “It’s good of you to say that. I’d like—here. Let’s go in a minute. I want a wet, after talking to that dry pious divil. God—how I hate a man with no pith in him.”
We turned into a public house, and, to please Uncle John, I took a half pint of porter. Uncle John drank deeply, then set down his glass.
“Now listen, little son. We are good friends, you and I, and I pray God we always remain so. I don’t ask you to tell me anything about yourself but what you want to tell me. I’m not by any stretch of thinking a good man, and I have done and I do many things that I regret and that I’m ashamed of. But I’m not, I hope, a hard man: I’m not a man that is unapproachable. I’ve been through a bit in my life, and I’ve learned a thing or two about the world. I’m not easy shocked and I’m not easy surprised. In the years to come you will I hope meet many better men than me, men whose opinion you’ll respect, and whose good regard you will value. If ever you get in a scrape, maybe you’ll find it awkward to go to them for help and advice, for the very reason that you want to keep their good opinion, and they might be a bit hard, you see, and you might lose it. But you can always come to me, son. You won’t lose my good opinion: and I’ll understand, whatever it is you’ve done.”
The effect of this speech upon me was so great that I was almost sorry I had not tried to rape Nora, so that I could confess it to him and so show my trust and appreciation. It seemed almost a rebuff to have to insist that I had done nothing to be ashamed of. I looked at him in total love and trust, and put out my hand. He grasped it, making me wince and catch my breath with the pain of his powerful squeeze.
“Enough said, little son. Enough said.”
All the same, I felt obliged to tell him what had really happened in that bleak great box of a bedroom. He listened, his eyes focussed and acute, nodding.
“I see, son. I see. Oh, she was that sort all right. Sure, I could tell that, the moment I clapped eyes on her.”
Yes, said my mind treacherously, and it wasn’t only your eyes you clapped on her: and I was at once horrified at this disloyalty of my mind, and tried to repress it, telling myself what a filthy ungrateful wretch I was, to smirch one of the best and deepest moments of understanding I ever had with Uncle John by remembering this against him.
We sat for some time in that snug, talking man to man, and then Uncle John got up with the loudly expressed resolution of finding me a new place to live. He obviously had the vaguest idea of how to go about it, and, after standing undecided in the middle of the bar, proceeded to consult the landlord, with the result that inside ten minutes we were knocking at a door only two streets off. It was a lucky chance, a providence, or whatever you like to call it, for the place thus recommended proved to be decent, clean, and comfortable. I stayed there four years. The woman who owned it did everything herself, so there were no domestics or any other to molest my seclusion or to tempt my virtue.
So began my life in Dublin, a strange life, lonely at first. I made friends at my work, and one of them, a young fellow two and a half years older than myself, volunteered to show me the way around. But I had learned odd tastes. Anyone who had been a member of Martin’s was not going to take kindly to the callow loutish diversions of young fellows of the undergraduate and medical student type. I had a taste for low company. It was Muriel who first put it that way, and she meant it as a reproach. I speak it to my praise. I can’t claim credit for it, since Providence brought me to the barber’s, but I had at least perceptions that enabled me to recognise the goodness of the men who used it, imagination to appreciate the Homeric quality of such men as Captain Callaghan, and poetry to relish the richness of phrase and the amazing flights of fancy you could hear in a hundred pubs and on a score of waterfronts and, more than ever, in the country places.
So, hankering after low company, and having little time after my day’s labours to get out to Kingstown and see Martin, I tried the pubs, where, for a modest half pint—and porter thus moderately taken does a young fellow nothing but good —I could sit by the hour and listen. I found that the quayside pubs were the best. Hegarty’s, to which Uncle John had introduced me long ago, had fallen on dull days. Maybe it had always been dull. Anyway, I found little life in it. Better, and far less respectable, was a place farther down the river, where Billy Daniels, my office friend, took me. Billy frequented it for the wrong reasons, because he thought it disreputable and dashing, and it made him feel a man. I recognised it as a place where people were alive. It was the haunt of some of the most disreputable and the most lively and amusing and pitiable human beings I have ever seen. More picturesque than the barber’s, it had the added attraction of feminine patrons— another reason for Billy’s attendance. Half the quayside drabs came there, and marvellous some of them were. I don’t mean in their professional capacity, though the men that had recourse to them spoke of them highly enough. Some scruple of fear or religion or fastidiousness kept me from them. I hated the idea of forcing myself on them because I had a little money —damn little!—I endowed them with a sensibility they didn’t possess, thinking how distasteful it must be to them to take someone they wouldn’t have chosen freely. As a matter of fact, several of them offered me their services in sheer motherly goodwill, but, as I said, I was too shy or too something-or-other to accept. Besides, I was frightened of hell fire and, more immediately, of disease. There were certain object lessons … but I had better tell my story my own way.
Of all the girls who frequented this little pub, the most dashing and gallant and spectacular went by the name of Eily. Her beat lay up near the point of the North Wall. She was much beloved by the entire merchant service, and was so popular that she could command a drink in any of the quayside pubs at any time, free gratis and for nothing, since sooner or later some lovelorn sailor would pay for it and for many more. Eily had blue-black hair, eyes of shining grey, and, for a year or so, a marvellous skin. She stood about five feet six, and specialised in the loveliest boots I ever saw on a woman. They fitted as if they had been moulded on her, went well up the calf, and had queer fascinating high heels. They don’t make that kind of boot now: or, if they do, I never see them. Eily was clean in her person, unlike most of her competitors, and she revelled in the most voluminous white rustling lingerie. In the dusk she affected a beautiful Spanish shawl, the gift of a third mate, which completed her seductiveness and made vice seem virtue.
I knew Eily well, and was truly fond of her. She took a fancy to me on sight. I remember she led me off behind a warehouse one night and told me I was too young to be in such places, and asked me to promise not to go with any of the other girls. I promised her readily, and she kissed me, and the kiss let something loose in me, so that I clung to her tight and kissed her and damn nearly blubbered down her neck. Of all the girls of her kind, I treasure her memory as a thing apart. She had more individuality than ninety-nine women out of a hundred. I’ve never had any patience with the talented, literary, demi-reps you find in books, nor with the silly pretence that a prostitute is just the same as a normal woman. She isn’t, or she wouldn’t be a prostitute. It’s not a normal life, it’s a wholly abnormal and unnatural life, and those who take to it have always a germ, a want, a weakness, a something which, misfortune apart, keeps them where they are. I’m the last man to be sentimental about prostitutes. But Eily was vivid, memorable, lovely, a personality, a character. She was positive. She was independent. She was herself. She had a natural friendliness and gaiety which infected everyone. She never wore a hat, and after the third or fourth drink she was open to argument on the subject of credit. She could curse and pray and say the most awful things, and then melt on your shoulder in a fashion that would unman a saint. She had that peculiar quality of being able to make a client see something almost divine in a brief worship of Venus, though it were adjacent to the most unlikely altar, a
pile of railway sleepers or sacks of Argentine grain. Many’s the time she led off sailors who had confessed terrible crimes to her to see the priest.
It was Billy Daniels introduced me to her, the best thing he ever did for me. Billy usually owed her five or six shillings for services rendered, and many’s the time I and a company of half inebriated sailors held audits on the account, with Eily laughing and swinging a provocative leg from the top of a barrel, and the landlord, who was mad in love and wanted, it was said, to marry her, fooling with her in his slow hippopotamus-like way.
She was stabbed in the breast one Christmas by a German off an oil tanker, and taken to Jervis Street hospital. There Billy and a fellow called Jack Sullivan and I and a Finnish sailor, who had somehow attached himself to our party, visited her in state. In a hoarse voice she begged us for Christ’s sake to get her a noggin, and Jack Sullivan slipped out and got it. Jervis Street was much scandalised, and had her out of it as speedily as possible, for a lot of shipping was held up while she was there, and sailors came in relays to see her breast all covered up with bandages in the hope of getting a glimpse of the other one.
I knew her for years there, and never forgot her, though she drank all her loveliness away. Some years ago, in a haggard place, I heard and saw her singing ballads for coppers. Her person held no attraction for men by that time and her voice was raucous. I stepped up to her and paid her a shilling for a penny copy of the ballad she was singing. I asked her had she a sheet with Mick M’Gilligan’s Daughter Mary Anne, and she said be jasus, then, she had not. She never remembered me, thank God, but she flashed a little of her old self at me and said, “Thank ye, boss,” not mechanically, but with an echo of her authentic quality. From the look and sound of her, I didn’t give her much longer. I never saw her again. She must be dead now.
Eily, and what I have told you, made up my whole experience of girls till I met Muriel. I kept clear of the other quayside girls, and soon I left off even kissing Eily, because of another scare I got. You remember my telling you of Guntey and his henchman Siff, the pair who moved Ann Dunn’s things from Fitzwilliam Street? Well, before I’d been at work in the city more than a couple of years, that partnership broke up—literally.
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