Essential Stories Page 7

  Then with a week to go, without thinking he struck a bad blow. He went off to Dill to say good-bye to the boys, and the retriever followed him although Charlie called it back. The races were on at Dill, but Micky spent most of the time in the pubs telling everyone he was going back to Canada. A man hearing this said he’d change dogs with him. His dog, he said, was a spaniel. He hadn’t it with him but he’d bring it down next fair. Micky was enthusiastic.

  “I know ye will,” said Micky. “Sure ye’ll bring it.”

  “Ah, well now,” said the man. “I will bring it.”

  “ ’Tis a great country the west,” said Micky. “Will ye have another?”

  “I will,” said the man, and as he drank: “In the three countries there is not a place like this.”

  Micky returned the next day without the dog.

  “Where’s the dog?” said Charlie suspiciously.

  “Och sure,” began Micky evasively, realising for the first time what he had done. “D’you see the way it is, there is a man in Dill—”

  “Ye’ve sold it. Ye’ve sold my dog,” Charlie shouted out, rushing at his brother. His shout was the more unnerving because he had spoken so little for days. Micky drew back.

  “Ah now, Charlie, be reasonable now. Sure you never did anything for the dog. You never took it out. You didn’t care for it . . .”

  Charlie gripped a chair and painfully sat down, laying his head in his hands on the table.

  “You brought the war on me, you smash me up, you take the only things I have and leave me stripped and alone,” he moaned. “Oh, God in heaven,” he half sobbed in pleading voice, “will ye give me gentleness and peace!”

  Now the dog was gone Charlie sat still. He would not move from the house, nor even from the sitting-room except to go to bed. He would scarcely speak. Sulking, Micky repeated to his uneasy conscience, sulking, sulking. He’s either mad or he’s sulking. What could he do? They sat estranged, already far apart, impatient for the act of departure.

  When the eve of his departure came Micky was relieved to see that Charlie accepted it, and was even making it easy: and so touched was Micky by this that he found no difficulty in promising to spend that last night with Charlie alone. He remained in the house all day, and when the night came a misted moonlight gleamed on the cold roof and the sea was as quiet as the licking of a cat’s tongue. Charlie drew the curtains, made up the fire and there they sat silently listening to the clock. They were almost happy: Charlie pleased to have this final brief authority over Micky; Micky relieved by the calm, both disinterested. Charlie spoke of his plans, the work he would do in the garden, the furniture he would buy, the girl he would get in to cook and clean.

  “ ’Twould be a fine place to bring a bride to,” said Micky, giving Charlie a wink, and Charlie smiled.

  But presently they heard footsteps on the drive.

  “What’s that?” exclaimed Charlie sharply, sitting up. The mild mask of peace left his face like a light, and his face set hard.

  Without knocking at the door, in walked the schoolmaster. He was in the room before Charlie could get out. He stood up and retreated to the corner.

  “Good evening to ye,” said the schoolmaster, pulling a bottle out of his pocket, and spreading himself on to a seat. “I came to see your brother on his last night.”

  Charlie drew in his lips and gazed at the schoolmaster.

  “Will ye have a drink?” said Micky nervously.

  That began it. Gradually Micky forgot his promise. He paid no attention to Charlie’s signs. They sat drinking and telling stories. The world span round. The alarm clock on the little bamboo table, the only table in the bare room, ticked on. Charlie waited in misery, his eyes craving his brother’s, whose bloodshot eyes were merry with drinking and laughter at the schoolmaster’s tales. The man’s vehement voice shook the house. He told of the priest at Dill who squared the jockeys and long thick stories about some Archbishop and his so-called niece. The air to Charlie became profane.

  “Isn’t your wife afraid to be up and alone this time of night?” Charlie ventured once.

  “Och, man, she’s in bed long ago,” shouted the schoolmaster. “She is that.”

  And Micky roared with laughter.

  At two o’clock Charlie went to bed and left him to it. But he was awake at five when Micky stumbled into his room.

  “Before God, man,” Micky said. “I’m bloody sorry, Charlie man. Couldn’t turn out a friend.”

  “It’s too late now,” said Charlie.

  Micky left at seven to catch a man who would give him a lift to the eight-o’clock train.

  The Autumn gales broke loose upon the land a month after Micky’s departure and the nights streamed black and loud. The days were cold and fog came over the sea. The fuchsias were blown back and the under leaves blew up like silver hands. The rain lashed on the windows like gravel. There were days of calm and then the low week-long mist covered the earth, obliterating the mountains, melting all shapes. All day long the moisture dripped from the sheds and windows and glistened on the stone walls.

  At first Charlie did not change. Forced to go to the village for groceries he would appear there two or three times a week, saying little and walking away quickly. A fisherman would call and the post-boy lingered. Letters came from Micky. Charlie took little heed of all this. But as the weather became wilder he hung curtains over the windows day and night and brought his bed down to the sitting-room. He locked the doors upstairs, those that had still keys to them. He cooked on the sitting-room fire. He was narrowing his world, making a smaller and closer circle to live in. And as it grew smaller, the stranger the places beyond its boundaries seemed. He was startled to go into the empty kitchen, and looked with apprehension up the carpetless stairs to the empty landing where water dripped through the fanlight and was already staining the ceiling below. He lay awake in the night as the fire glowed in the room.

  One morning when he found the noises of his isolation supportable no more, he put on his hat and coat and packed his things and walked out of the house. He would stay no longer. But with his fear his brain had, as always, developed a covering cunning. He went up the lane to see if anyone was coming first. He wanted to be away from people, yet among them; with them, yet alone. And on this morning the Ballady sailor was reloading a load of turf that had fallen off his cart. Charlie returned into the house. He took off his hat and coat. He had not been out for a week because of this dread.

  There was still food in tins for a few days. It was the thought that he could last if he liked, that he could keep the world off, that made him satisfied. No letters came now. Micky no longer wrote; effusive in the first weeks, his letters had become rare. Now there had been no news for a month. Charlie scarcely thought of him.

  But when late in December the mists held the country finally, the twigs creaked on the drive like footsteps and the dark bushes divided in the wind as if they had been parted by hidden hands, he cowered into his beating heart, eating little, and the memories began to move and creep in his head. A letter threatened him with death. He drove alone with the bank’s money. At Carragh-cross road the signpost stood emptily gesticulating like some frightened speaker with the wind driving back the words into his mouth, and the two roads dangling from its foot. He knew what had happened at Carragh-cross road. He knew what had been found there lying with one leg out of the ditch. He saw it. And Micky, the Destroyer, with his convict’s head and his big red ears, shooting down the Holy Ghost like a beautiful bird, grinned there blowing smoke down his nose.

  These memories came and went. When they came they beat into his head like wings, and though he fought them off with prayers, they beat down and down on him and he cried out fast to the unanswering house:

  “God give me peace,” he prayed. “Holy Mother of God, give me peace for the sake of thy sweet Son . . .”

  When the beating wings went his cleverness took possession of him again. He prepared a little food, and once or twice walked aroun
d the garden within the shelter of the walls. The ground was frozen, the air still and a lace of snow was on the paths. But if the days passed in peace, his heart quickened at the early darkness, and when the turf smoke blew back down the chimney it was as if someone had blown down a signal. One night he had a terrible dream. He was dead, he had been caught at last on the road at Carragh-cross. “Here’s the man with the pro-British brother,” they cried and threw him into a bog pool, sinking deeper and deeper into soft and sucking fires that drew him down and down. He was in hell. And there in the flames calling to him was a woman with dark hair and with pale insects walking over her skin. It was the schoolmaster’s wife. “And he thinking you were in bed,” said Charlie, amazed by the justice of revenge. He woke up gasping in the glow of the sitting-room fire, and feeling that a load was still pressing down on his chest.

  In the morning the dream was still in his mind; mingling with some obscure sense of triumph it ceased to be a dream and became reality. It became like a new landscape imposed upon the world. The voice of the woman was more real to his ear than his own breathing.

  He felt free, was protected and cleansed, and his dream seemed to him like an impervious world within a world, a mirage in which he musically walked. In the afternoon he was exalted. He walked out of the house and taking the long way round by the lanes went to the schoolmaster’s. The frost still held and the air was windless, the land fixed and without colour. As it happened the schoolmaster had taken it into his head to go as far as his gate.

  “Man, I’m glad to see ye about,” cried the schoolmaster at the sight of Charlie. “I meant to see ye. Come in now. Come in. ’Tis terrible lonely for you in that place.”

  Charlie stood still and looked icily through him.

  “Ye thought she was in bed,” he said. “But I’m after seeing her in the flames of hell fire.”

  Without another word he walked away. The schoolmaster made a rush for him. But Charlie had climbed the stone wall and had dropped into the field opposite.

  “Come here. Come back. What’s that you say?” called the schoolmaster. But Charlie walked on, gathering speed as he dropped behind the hill out of sight going to his house. Then he ran for his life.

  The schoolmaster did not wait. He went in for his coat, bicycled into Ballady Post Office and rang up the Guards at Dill.

  “There’s a poor feller here might do harm to himself,” he said. “Will you send someone down?”

  But on the way back to the house Charlie’s accompanying dream and its dazed exaltation left him. Speaking had dissolved it. It lifted like a haze and suddenly he was left alone, exposed, vulnerable in the middle of the fields. He began to run, shying at every corner, and when he got to the house he clawed at the door and ran in gasping to throw himself on the bed. He lay there on his face, his eyes closed. There had been brief excitement in the run, but as he recovered his breath the place resumed its normal aspect and its horror became real as slowly he turned over and opened his eyes to it. And now they were open he could not close them again. They stared and stared. Slowly it came to him there was nothing in life left for him but emptiness. Career gone, peace gone, God gone, Micky gone, dog—all he had ever had trooped with bleak salute of valediction through his mind. He was left standing in the emptiness of himself. And then a shadow was cast upon the emptiness; looking up he saw the cold wing of a great and hovering bird. So well he knew it that in this last moment his mind cleared and he had no fear. “ ’Tis yourself, Micky, has me destroyed,” he said. He took out a razor and became absorbed in the difficulty of cutting his throat. He was not quite dead when the Guards broke in and found him.

  THE UPRIGHT MAN

  Calvert was an upright man, tall, shy, short-stepping. His eyes were lowered and his narrow shoulders square. Proud in his poverty he kept to himself, he feared to know himself to be known. He came to the office punctually, he hung up his raincoat and hat in the cloakroom reserved for the male staff, he changed into a grey jacket in order to save his better one, he used his own towel when he washed his thin hands. He did not stand as the other clerks did, with dejected buttocks to the cashier’s fire, defying him in his absence and scattering to their stools when the blowing of a nose announced that he had arrived. Calvert did not spend himself in gestures or extravagances. He kept himself apart. He went straight to his desk, took out his blotting paper, cleaned his pens, took down his books and, before all others, bent his body and bowed his head. The clerks smiled at him. He was fair.

  The carpenter bends over his bench, the cobbler over his shoe, the mechanic over his machine, the priest over his altar, the clerk over his desk. By day, the heads of all men are bowed and their bodies bent. Not one of them is upright. Yet Calvert, the first to bow, was an upright man. Soldierly in duty, remembering his mother, scrupulous in poverty, when others laughed only smiling, saying two words while others spoke ten, eating sparingly alone, secret in life and parsimonious of himself. He trod the path of a single preoccupation, an instinctive loneliness. He conserved himself, every sinew was restraining. There were iron bars to the windows of his office. Through them if a bowed man looked up, he saw not the sky but across the street the flat walls of windows where other bowed men worked.

  At first he had been restless, his mouth had the desire to speak, his legs fidgeted on the stool—the chains unfamiliar—his hands reckoning his money, his grey eyes looking at the window-bars for a space to squeeze through and escape. “Calvert,” the cashier warned him. And the chant of the office went on. He bowed his head and ducked with the rest repentant. Then cautiously at twenty-two he let a little of himself go. He lit his eyes, guiltily conscient of his mother and their poverty, permitted himself a little of the great secrecy of love. He cautiously looked up at the bars expecting to see a miracle, a vision, the appearance of an angel. For months he continued this deep espionage. No vision came. He bowed his head at last. He was an upright man.

  Now there were two women, his mother and this other. It was his duty not to look up. She and he must save themselves. They must not speak too much, nor smile too much, nor touch too much each other’s skin, in case they should love too much and exclaim out of their hearts. How long the old live! They sat in the evenings with his mother and with hers, looking through the fine lace curtains to the sky, waiting for the miracle. But there was no sky. There were the walls of lace curtains in the houses opposite and behind them invisible presences looking up. For ten years looking through lace curtains for a miracle they brought laughter to others.

  Clerks flung their lives about and committed follies. One married to a voracious wife drank on Thursdays a glass of stout. One who copied weighing slips gave imitations of the voice of the cashier. One who was bald put his hand down the blouse of his secretary and was slapped in the face. One would absent himself for twenty minutes in the morning to read the newspaper in the lavatory. One going deaf turned to an Oriental religion. One made use of the office telephone to communicate with a bookmaker. One told the Port of London Authority of an error in demurrage; it was his own. One staying after six lit his pipe. The oldest, in charge of stamps, went up in an aeroplane for a few minutes at a resort; he had married a widow. But Calvert did not so defy the gods, his gaolers.

  So the gods, his gaolers, got drunk and went mad. They opened the doors of the cell, they flung in the keys. “You are not a slave. You are not a tame man,” they whispered in his ears. “You are a beast and brute fighting for survival. You have saved yourself too long. Go outside,” they said to him, patting him on the back. “Stand out in the air, draw yourself up to your full height, take a deep breath. Do you see? You are a man already. Your pale face is tanned by the sun, your neck is golden. Your hair which had gone dead and greasy is alive again like corn. Your shoulders are like walls, your muscles are hard. Do not lower your eyes! Do not bow your head any more! That day has passed and gone. My dear fellow, those red spots in front of your eyes have nothing to do with your liver, they are made of blood.”

 
; “Blood?” murmured Calvert incredulously.

  “Yes, yes,” they said. “Blood. Life. You’re a hero. Go and kill.”

  Women, above all, they said, expected this of him. Now was the time to save nothing but to spend all.

  He mistrusted them until they said, remembering his tradition, that it was his duty. He had bowed but now at last had come the time of freedom and uprightness.

  And indeed the whole world of men was changed. The carpenter no longer bent over his bench, nor the mechanic over his screw, nor the cobbler at his last, nor the clerk at his desk. They were not many bowed men. They were all upright, bolt upright, chins up, shoulders back, forefinger on the seam of trousers, and they marched on grass under the sky. Like upright gods they marched, strong, healthy and beautiful. Women watched them. They would never go back they said. Many indeed did not.

  For it appeared that this was a trick. They were made to stand in rows in trenches as they had sat in rows at desks, but the pens they now used required two arms to lift. The cashiers had three stripes on their arms, the partners red bands to their hats. The bars of the office windows had become bars of wire. Accounts were opened and kept, but not of bales. It soon became the habit not to be an upright man, but to duck the head once more. Looking at the sky, they saw miracles but they were sulphurous, and there was a tone of hoarse, consumptive wailing in the voices of the angels as they passed over to be entertained unawares.

  But Calvert was an upright man. He had waited long with great passion. He had waited to make a life for himself. He had come to the end of his loneliness. Recklessly he talked, loudly he laughed. He entered into fellowship. He had to spend himself and all his life, to laugh with his whole body, to love and die and live again with his whole nature. This was a supreme duty. All his life he had waited, to stand in all his stature and fullness, attending the Passion. And after sundown between the lights of day and night when the bowed men stand up, he looked up through the wire bars at the sky, and the miracle occurred. He was shot by a sniper in the head.