“Thank God you’ve come, Mangan.” He pulled out a handkerchief, and mopped his forehead. His tense posture relaxed. “We can keep track of them between us. You can watch one side, and I’ll watch the other. It’s when they come from all round me that——”
He broke off, and gave me a quick, nervous grin.
“I know how things are,” he said. “I have insight—Ah, would you?” He delivered a terrific thwack at the table with his stick. “Just caught him, crawling up the leg of the table. I tell you, if you take your eyes off them for one minute——”
I pulled up a chair, and sat down beside him. This sort of thing had no terrors for me. I’d seen it often, at the barber’s and elsewhere.
“I know,” I said. “We’ll watch them together.”
He frowned.
“Don’t start humouring me, now,” he said threateningly. “Remember, I’m a doctor of medicine, and I know quite well——” he winced, and glared apprehensively about him— “I know quite well what is wrong. I know they aren’t material … with my reason. I have insight, but——”
“I know,” I said.
“You don’t know. How can you?”
“Never mind about them. Tell me what you’ve been at since I saw you last.”
“Obvious, isn’t it? Now—there! look at that one. I’m being reasonable, quite reasonable. But look at the way it’s sitting up there, putting up its head. Look at the bloated belly of it, and the white scaly patches on the cheeks. I tell you, it’s as much as I can do to sit still and watch it.”
I gave a sudden movement. He sat back with a sigh.
“That scared it,” he said. “Good man. You saw it too?”
“It was on the chair, wasn’t it?”
“Yes.” Once more he had come out in a shining sweat.
“You want sympathy when you’re this way, you know,” he said, “not persecution. You want everything calm and orderly. But that bitch must needs choose today of all days to put up a new wallpaper.”
I was taken unawares.
“Where?” I asked.
“Where? Haven’t you eyes, man? Look.”
He pointed at the wall opposite. It was the same as it had always been. I shouldn’t think it had had a new paper for thirty years.
“Look at that. Did you ever see such a flaming atrocity in all your days?”
I tried to look suitably impressed.
“Pah, you’ve no taste. I thought better of you. Aaah!”
His scream was so horrible that my blood stopped. With a gesture of furious repulsion, he clutched at something on the lapel of his coat, and flung it on the ground.
“Christ Almighty!” He lay back with closed eyes, sweating and panting. I saw with surprise that my hands were shaking.
“Tell me about the wallpaper,” I suggested, as soon as I had got control of my voice.
He opened his eyes, and tremblingly replaced his pince-nez.
“I’m sorry. I apologise. I do know what’s happening. But they’re so damned convincing.”
“Don’t bother about them. Tell me about the new wallpaper.”
“Can’t you see it?”
“Not very well. You’ve corpsed some of your lights. What’s it like?”
He adjusted his glasses, and peered attentively at the wall.
“It looks to me,” he pronounced, in judicious tones, “like what a lady hippopotamus would leave on the banks of the Nile after a feed of lettuce and gold paint. It has a pattern of butterflies’ navels and red carrots. Mangan, I have known you for years, and I tell you it is a hell of a paper. If I had a cornet here, I could play that paper to you. Or an accordion would be better, it requires more notes. It’s an outbreak, it’s an outrage, it’s a nightmare of haemorrhoids and raw liver. And it won’t keep still. It swells and writhes like bowels boiling in a cauldron. We will have to put a fence round it.”
“It sounds a very unusual sort of wallpaper,” I said.
“It’s not a wallpaper, it’s a kaleidoscope. Hottentots would revel in it. Zulus would worship it. Hairy Ainus would make local currency of it.” He took a deep breath, and looked at me, half humorous, half sulky. “I don’t like it, Mangan. I’m not able for it. Tell her to take it away.”
I got up. “Shall I arrange the lights so that you don’t see it?”
“Aye do. I’m tired of looking at it, and watching it change. It came all running with monkeys the last time I was looking at it. Monkeys and lobsters. One of the lobsters got out, and sat on the floor there, stropping its claws together like a bloody fly.”
“Flies always look to me as if they were putting on long gloves,” I said. “You know, the sort that come up to the elbow.”
“Don’t, you fool!” he cried sharply. “If you say a thing like that, they’ll do it. Do you know what you made me see then? White flies the size of surgeons, drawing on rubber gloves to prepare an operation. Oh, I know what’s the matter with me. I’m poisoned. The toxins are making me see all this bloody nonsense. Were you ever poisoned?”
“Yes.”
And I told him of my adventure with the laburnum seeds, and how Mr. Rourke came into the library weeping for Parnell’s death, and how Parnell and laburnum were all mixed up in my mind, and full of terror for me. He listened with careful attention.
“You forgot the cucumbers,” he said severely, when I stopped.
“What cucumbers?”
“What cucumbers? The cucumbers. Shall I tell you what happened to me?”
“Do,” I said.
He leaned back in his chair, and looked at the ceiling. A meditative look came into his eye. Then, without faltering for an instant, he began to talk as if he were repeating something he had learned by heart.
“But there it is. Five years ago, in a café in Rochester, I accidentally ate a sliver of cucumber in a salad with cold meat. I had expressly warned the girl that I would cut her throat if she brought me any cucumber, but this little bit escaped her. I had a hell of a time. It took the doctor, half a pint of brandy, an ocean of lime juice, and three cigars to get me right again.
“Now mark my words. On board the s.s. Godknowsitsname, Harwich to Esbjerg, on the thirteenth of June last, some fifty miles off the Norfolk coast, I sat down to supper. The first course consisted of Sm0rrebr0d—it was a Danish ship—and my table was littered with the twenty-five odd different variations of small sandwich which make up that Danish dish or feed. There were few others able as much as to look at supper, but I ate heartily of this appalling mixture, and it wasn’t long before I became cucumber-conscious. I found that I had eaten maybe a crumb of it, and, keeping a cool head, I treated myself with the appropriate remedies.”
He looked at me indignantly.
“Investigation disclosed a most amazing state of affairs. The ship was full of cucumbers. The engines were driven on cucumber oil. All the crew had cucumbers in their buttonholes, a bunch of cucumbers adorned the masthead, all the waitresses were chewing cucumbers, the Danes on board had their suitcases packed with cucumbers, my very bunk reeked of the damned things. I went to the smokeroom, to escape the persecution, and took up a Danish magazine. The very first page had a big photo of Charles Stewart Parnell, and recalled to me 1891 and your laburnum tree.
“I left the smokeroom, descended to the dining-room, and bought three Mexican cigars. The first was made of cucumber, the second of laburnum seed, and the third of laburnum and cucumber leaves mixed in the proportion of twenty-five to seventy-five per cent. The pretty waitress had laburnum-coloured hair, the tables had every one a vase of laburnum blossom, and the First Officer came in, ordered and drank off a stein of cucumber juice, his pockets all the while bulging with what cannot have been anything but cucumbers.
“How I slept that night I do not know. When the morning came—a Sunday, mind you—the quayside was littered with crates of cucumber, a goods train on the siding was bursting with wagons of cucumber, all the Customs’ officials wore laburnum blossom in their hats, the fishermen on the shore were all
chewing cucumbers, the windows of the Hotel Imperial were decorated with laburnum blossoms, the trees in the streets were all laburnums.”
His eyes gleamed. He fixed them on me with all the intensity of the Ancient Mariner’s. I sat gaping at him.
“After dinner—at which I was offered porringers of laburnum pods and trays loaded with chopped cucumber and coffee made of stewed laburnum seeds—I went to a Biergarten. A juggler from England juggled with eleven cucumbers, and a girl walked past my table reeking of laburnum scent. I went back to the hotel, took the lift to the smokeroom, and the first journal I picked up was a German weekly, not unlike Country Life, with a plate in colours on the cover of ‘Laburnums in Leipzig’.
“Out into the town with me again, to buy a book, but, begod, the first shop I came to had the whole display shelves outside stacked with a life of Parnell. I returned dismayed to my bed. When I’d undressed, and pulled up the blind to open the window, what was there but a jovial young laburnum nodding its blossoms in at the sill.
“I got into bed, and, no sooner was I in, than there was a knock on the door, and in comes a maid bringing me a glass of milk and a plate of chopped cucumbers.”
He paused impressively.
“I left the next day, and came home. What do you make of that?”
I could not answer. I had sat like a man in a trance, hearing the stuff of my own mind made, while I listened, into an alien fabric, hearing this astounding improvisation on a theme of my supplying. The effect was to make me wonder whether all the nonsense he told so glibly was in my mind or his, and how in heaven’s name he had access to it. I believe that delirium tremens, like the results of some drugs, in some unfathomed way dissociates the self from the body, or at any rate gives the sufferer an added horrible faculty for experience in another dimension. I do not know how else to explain the Doctor’s adoption of what I told him and the use he made of it.
The effort seemed to have done him good, for he was calmer after it, and his animal visitants left us in peace. At intervals he talked quite rationally, and I was able to keep him quiet till the door opened, and Mrs. Kinahan put her head in.
“The cab’s at the door,” she announced.
The Doctor pointed an unsteady finger at her.
“Tig bogskip!” he exclaimed.
“What’s that?”
“It’s the Danish for Go to hell. At least, it isn’t, but it’s good enough for her,” he added, in a loud aside.
“Are your things ready, Doctor?” I asked.
“They are,” she replied for him. “Mary Kate has them packed.”
“What!” he roared. “You dare to tell me that filthy slut has been turned loose to paw over my personal belongings!”
He stood up, but all the fire went out of him at once, and he let us see him off. He was pale and shaky, but he smiled and waved his hand as they helped him in. I went away quickly: I was in no mood for Mrs. Kinahan.
I was sad, going home in the tram. The Doctor would recover, I felt sure of that, but, if this was his second attack, it would not be long till he had a third, and a fourth. He was going to pieces, and for no good reason that I could see. Well—I could count on him no more. Indeed, I realised it as I walked from the tram to my lodgings, I could count on no one. I had only myself.
But Providence evidently did not consider I had learned my lesson. It acted with a neatness no one would dare invent in a novel. It isn’t in fiction the coincidences occur, it’s in life. One ankle had been kicked from under me: now it kicked the other. Two days after I had visited the Doctor, I came home in the evening to find a telegram propped on my bedroom mantelpiece. It was from a hotel keeper in Thomas town, and told me that Uncle John had died there early that morning.
The miserable business that followed I don’t care to think about. I looked round for an elder to guide me; and there was none. I was the responsible one, I had to act: and I hadn’t the least notion what to do. I got leave from the office, with some has been turned loose to paw over my personal belongings!”
The landlord was all for ceremony and impressiveness. He insisted that I should ring up Mr. Rooney on his newly-installed telephone. I was wary of the instrument, and said I did not know how to use it, but the landlord plunged at it with zeal, and at last, by dint of twenty minutes’ asthmatic bawling, got me Mr. Rooney.
Mr. Rooney, as represented by a small, high, nasal voice, was cordial, not surprised, and non-committal. Yes, he had heard the sad news. Yes, he was seeing to all that was needed. Was there anything he could do for me, at the moment? Wha’? Could I come and see him when I got back to Dublin, I countered. The very thing he had been about to ask me. Er—did I know had the deceased any special fancy to be buried any place in particular? I replied severely that I was sure he would wish to be buried beside his wife.
“Wha’?” yelled Mr. Rooney.
I repeated my opinion, fortissimo. A startled silence followed. The idea evidently had not occurred to Mr. Rooney. He was silent for so long that I thought the conversation was over.
“Well,” he said at last. “You’ll see to bringing him back, then, wha’?”
Panic seized me.
“But, Mr. Rooney. I’ve no idea what it will cost. I have very little money with me.”
“Oh, that’s all right. I’ll authorise ye.”
And he ceased, in a fusillade of crackles. Thankfully I laid down the receiver. My hand ached with gripping it and depressing the little lever. It had been a trying conversation, all the worse for being so hard to hear.
The landlord was exultant. He rang off with such fervour he all but dislodged the machine from the wall.
“That’ll be seven and eightpence,” he announced, “and cheap at the price. A merricle, that’s what it is. A merricle.”
Well—I brought back Uncle John, and I loathed every minute of the journey, standing like a fool, my hat in my hand, beside the van while they loaded in the coffin, with everyone staring at me and crossing themselves and murmuring pity and approval, and the same thing when we got to town and the coffin was taken out; only that wasn’t so bad, as the undertakers, bespoke by Mr. Rooney, were there to bear him off to their private mortuary, in readiness for the funeral next day. The office actually tried to stop me from going to that, on the ground that I’d had two days off already. They gave me no formal leave. I went, and hoped they’d sack me. They didn’t.
It was a wretched, farcical funeral. Uncle John’s death didn’t appear in the Irish Times till that morning, owing to some mistake, and so hardly anyone turned up. It was absurd, because he had lots of friends. There were a bare half dozen of us to see him laid in Glasnevin beside the girl whose house he had filled with mirrors thirty and more years before.
I attended the whole thing in a daze, because of the astounding information Mr. Rooney had given me an hour before. Uncle John had left me close on three thousand pounds. He had not been very prosperous of late years, but soon after my parents died, at the instigation of Uncle George, who contributed out of his own inferior resources, Uncle John had settled a considerable sum on me in trust, and had added to it, at intervals, for close on five years. I could see why Uncle George insisted on the money being settled; otherwise, it would have drained back to Uncle John’s swiftly weakening estate, and I should have had none of it.
My heart cried out at the thought that latterly he had wanted the money, and could not touch it. I said so to Mr. Rooney. The solicitor closed one eye, and tapped his nose with a nicotine-stained forefinger.
“It’s just as well,” he said. “It’s just as well. It would have gone where the rest’s gone, and you’ll make better use of it. Wha’?”
I stared at him.
“Yes,” he said. “You’ll have to go out there, and show yourself.”
“Mr. Rooney—need I? I’ve had nothing to do with—with the house. I haven’t been there for years.” I looked at him unhappily. “Did he make any provision-?”
“Provision enough. More than e
nough, if you ask me.”
“But why must I go? Can’t you do it?”
He explained that I had been left certain responsibilities with regard to the child, and that I must go. So I went. It was a wretched business. Mrs. Kerrigan eyed me with bitterness. She showed me from room to room, and kept saying that if certain people had their rights, there would be no interlopers sailing in who never troubled themselves to come near the place when himself was alive. The child was a girl of ten or eleven. Schooled by her mother, she wore a sullen expression, and would not look at me. I listed and checked the few belongings that were to go to friends, and got out of the house. I never went near it again, and I only saw the girl once afterwards, after her mother had died. She was thin, fair, silent, and not bad looking. She had a quite decent job as a lady’s companion. I don’t know what has become of her now. My responsibility ended when she was twenty-one. Poor Uncle John. I don’t like to think of his last years in that house.
The legacy was well invested, and the income it yielded me, while not enough to live on, changed the whole position. The moment I told Muriel, she sat up in bed, radiant with joy, and clapped her hands.
“Oh, Luke! Now we’ll be able to get married. You must tell Father. You must tell him at once. Mother! Mother! Come here. Luke’s uncle has left him a whole lot of money, and we can be married.”
“It’s not a lot,” I protested. “It’s only——”
But my protest was swept away in a torrent of congratulations and glad outcries. Mrs. Travers’ pleasure was so genuine that for the first time I felt an affection for her. She was wholehearted in wishing us well, in desiring our happiness. And, suddenly, my way seemed broad and plain before me, and I thought I could see the working of Providence. Yes, I said to myself, this is the road for you. Everything points to it. Uncle John is dead, the Doctor is no good to you any more. You’re alone. Everything has been removed so that you can marry Muriel and give yourself up to the new life.
I did not stop to ask myself whether Providence might perhaps have considered the Doctor’s and Uncle John’s point of view, rather than look on them solely from the angle of my welfare. I fortified myself, and went ahead.
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