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MARY, MARY
BY JAMES STEPHENS
INTRODUCTION BY PADRAIC COLUM
BONI AND LIVERIGHT, INC.
PUBLISHERS NEW YORK
_Printed in the United States of America_
1912, BY SMALL, MAYNARD AND COMPANY (INCORPORATED)
TO
BETHEL SOLOMONS, M.B.
MARY, MARY
INTRODUCTION
If any of James Stephens' books might be thought to have need of an
Introduction it would be the delightful story that is called "Mary,
Mary" on one side of the Atlantic Ocean and "The Charwoman's Daughter"
on the other. It was written in 1910, when the author was known as the
poet of "Insurrections" and the writer of a few of the mordant studies
that belong to a later book, "Here Are Ladies."
In 1911 four people came together to establish "The Irish Review."
They were David Houston, Thomas MacDonagh, James Stephens and the
present writer. James Stephens mentioned that he could hand over some
stuff for publication. The "stuff" was the book in hand. It came out
as a serial in the second number with the title "Mary, A Story," ran
for a twelvemonth and did much to make the fortune (if a review that
perished after a career of four years ever had its fortune made) of
"The Irish Review."
From the publication of its first chapters the appeal of "Mary"
was felt in two or three countries. Mary Makebelieve was not just
a fictional heroine--she was Cinderella and Snow-white and all
the maidens of tradition for whom the name of heroine is big and
burthensome. With the first words of the story James Stephens put us
into the attitude of listeners to the household tale of folk-lore.
"Mary, Mary" is the simplest of stories: a girl sees this and that,
meets a Great Creature who makes advances to her, is humiliated,
finds a young champion and comes into her fortune--that is all there
is to it as a story. But is it not enough to go with Mary to Stephens'
Green and watch the young ducks "pick up nothing with the greatest
eagerness and swallow it with the greatest delight," and after that
to notice that the ring priced One Hundred Pounds has been taken
from the Jewellers' window, and then stand outside the theatre with
her and her mother and make up with them the story of the plays from
the pictures on the posters?--plays of mystery and imagination they
must have surely been.
Then, of course, there is always Mary's mother; and Mrs. Makebelieve,
with her beaked nose, and her eyes like pools of ink, and her
eagle-flights of speech would give a backbone to any story. Mrs.
Makebelieve has and holds all the privileges of the poor and the
lonely. Moreover, she is the eternal Charwoman. "She could not remain
for any length of time in peoples' employment without being troubled
by the fact that these folk had houses of their own and were actually
employing her in a menial capacity." Mrs. Makebelieve is, I think, a
typical figure. She is the incarnation of the pride and liveliness and
imaginative exuberance that permit the poor to live.
How poor are Mary and Mrs. Makebelieve? We know their lack by the
measure of their desire. Mrs. Makebelieve, always generous, would have
paid her servants Ten Shillings per Week each, and their Board. And we
know that she had often observed desolate people dragging themselves
through the streets, standing to glare through the windows of bakeries
and confectioners' shops, with little children in some of their arms,
and that thinking of such things every morsel she ate would have
choked her were it not for her own hunger. By our being brought to
desire what Mary and her mother desired we come to know the things
they lacked.
Yes, poverty was the state in which Mary and Mrs. Makebelieve existed,
but freedom was the other side of that poverty. They had not to set
the bounds of realization upon their wishes. They were not shut off,
as too many of us are, from the adventure and the enchantment that are
in things. A broken mirror upon the wall of a bare room! It is, after
all, that wonder of wonders, a thing. But one cannot convey to those
who have not known the wonder, how wonderful a mere thing is! A child
who has watched and watched the face of a grandfather's clock, stopped
before he was born, feels this wonder. To grown folk and to those
who have many possessions the things they own are lumber, some more
convenient, some more decorative than others. But to those who have
few possessions things are familiars and have an intimate history.
Hence it is only the poor or only unspoiled children that have the
full freedom of things--who can enter into their adventure and their
enchantment. Mary and her mother have this franchise. And for this
reason also "Mary, Mary" has an inner resemblance to a folk-tale. For
the folk-tale, shaped as it has been by the poor and by unspoiled
people, reveals always the adventure and the enchantment of things.
An old lamp may be Aladdin's. A comb might kill a false queen. A key
may open the door of a secret chamber. A dish may be the supreme
possession of a King. The sense of the uniqueness of things--the sense
that the teller of the folk-tale has always, and that such a poet of
the poor as Burns has often, is in "Mary, Mary." And there is in it
too the zest that the hungry--not the starved but the hungry--have for
life. James Stephens says of the young man who became Mary's champion,
"His ally and stay was hunger, and there is no better ally for any
man: that satisfied and the game is up; for hunger is life, ambition,
good will and understanding, while fulness is all those negatives
which culminate in greediness, stupidity, and decay."
The scene of the story is that grey-colored, friendly capital--Dublin.
It is not the tortuous, inimical, Aristotlian-minded Dublin of James
Joyce's "Portrait of the Artist"--it is the Dublin of the
simple-hearted Dubliner: Dublin with its great grey clouds and its
poising sea-birds, with its hills and its bay, with its streets that
everyone would avoid and with its other streets that everyone
promenades; with its greens and its park and its river-walks--Dublin,
always friendly. It is true that there are in it those who, as the
Policeman told Mary, are born by stealth, eat by subterfuge, drink
by dodges, get married by antics, and slide into death by strange,
subterranean passages. Well, even these would be kindly and humorous
the reader of "Mary, Mary" knows. James Stephens has made Dublin a
place where the heart likes to dwell.
And would to God that I to-day
Saw sunlight on the Hill of Howth,
And sunlight on the Golden Spears,
And sunlight out on Dublin Bay.
So one who has known Dublin might well exclaim on reading "Mary, Mary"
east or west of Eirinn.
James Stephens brought a fresh and distinctive element into the new
Irish literature--an imaginative exuberance that in its rush of
expression became extravagant, witty, picturesque and lovely. His work
began to appear about 1906. Like the rest of the young Irish writers
he made his appearance in the weekly journal "Sinn Fein," contributing
to it his first poems and his mordant or extravagant essays and stories.
At once he made a public for himself. His first poems were published
in a volume called "Insurrections" and his public became a wide one.
"Mary, Mary" brought out in 1912 was his first prose book. His next, the
unclassifiable "Crock of Gold," was given the De Polignac Prize in 1914.
Since then he has published two other prose books--"Here Are Ladies" and
"The Demi-Gods," with three books of verse, "The Hill of Vision," "Songs
from the Clay," and "The Rocky Road to Dublin."
"Insurrections," written just before "Mary, Mary," has vivid
revelations of personality. "I saw God--do you doubt it?" says Tomas
an Buile in the "pub."--
I saw God. Do you doubt it?
Do you dare to doubt it?
I saw the Almighty Man. His hand
Was resting on a mountain, and
He looked upon the World and all about it:
I saw Him plainer than you see me now,
You mustn't doubt it.
He was not satisfied;
His look was all dissatisfied.
His beard swung on a wind far out of sight
Behind the world's curve, and there was light
Most fearful from His forehead, and He sighed,
"That star went always wrong, and from the start
I was dissatisfied."
He lifted up His hand--
I say He heaved a dreadful hand
Over the spinning Earth, then I said "Stay,
You must not strike it, God; I'm in the way;
And I will never move from where I stand."
He said, "Dear child, I feared that you were dead,"
And stayed His hand.
His God is never a lonely God--he has need of humanity, and the quick
champion of humanity springs straight into the love of God. Such is
the intuition that is in all James Stephens' books.
He is the only author I have ever known whose talk is like his books.
The prodigality of humour, intuition and searching thought that he
puts into his pages he also puts into what he says. And he is the only
man I ever met who can sing his stories as well as tell them. Like the
rest of the Irish writers of to-day, what he writes has a sense of
spiritual equality as amongst all men and women--a sense of a
democracy that is inherent in the world.
[Illustration: signature: Padraic Colum]
New York, September, 1917.
MARY, MARY
I
Mary Makebelieve lived with her mother in a small room at the very top
of a big, dingy house in a Dublin back street. As long as she could
remember she had lived in that top back room. She knew every crack in
the ceiling, and they were numerous and of strange shapes. Every spot
of mildew on the ancient wall-paper was familiar. She had, indeed,
watched the growth of most from a grayish shade to a dark stain, from
a spot to a great blob, and the holes in the skirting of the walls,
out of which at nighttime the cockroaches came rattling, she knew
also. There was but one window in the room, and when she wished to
look out of it she had to push the window up, because the grime of
many years had so encrusted the glass that it was of no more than the
demi-semi-transparency of thin horn. When she did look there was
nothing to see but a bulky array of chimney-pots crowning a next-door
house, and these continually hurled jays of soot against her window;
therefore, she did not care to look out often, for each time that she
did so she was forced to wash herself, and as water had to be carried
from the very bottom of the five-story house up hundreds and hundreds
of stairs to her room, she disliked having to use too much water.
Her mother seldom washed at all. She held that washing was very
unhealthy and took the natural gloss off the face, and that, moreover,
soap either tightened the skin or made it wrinkle. Her own face was
very tight in some places and very loose in others, and Mary
Makebelieve often thought that the tight places were spots which her
mother used to wash when she was young, and the loose parts were
those which had never been washed at all. She thought that she would
prefer to be either loose all over her face or tight all over it, and,
therefore, when she washed she did it thoroughly, and when she
abstained she allowed of no compromise.
Her mother's face was the color of old, old ivory. Her nose was like a
great strong beak, and on it the skin was stretched very tightly, so
that her nose shone dully when the candle was lit. Her eyes were big
and as black as pools of ink and as bright as the eyes of a bird. Her
hair also was black, it was as smooth as the finest silk, and when
unloosened it hung straightly down, shining about her ivory face. Her
lips were thin and scarcely colored at all, and her hands were sharp,
quick hands, seeming all knuckle when she closed them and all fingers
when they were opened again.
Mary Makebelieve loved her mother very dearly, and her mother returned
her affection with an overwhelming passion that sometimes surged into
physically painful caresses. When her mother hugged her for any length
of time she soon wept, rocking herself and her daughter to and fro,
and her clutch became then so frantic that poor Mary Makebelieve found
it difficult to draw her breath; but she would not for the world have
disturbed the career of her mother's love. Indeed, she found some
pleasure in the fierceness of those caresses, and welcomed the pain
far more than she reprobated it.
Her mother went out early every morning to work, and seldom returned
home until late at night. She was a charwoman, and her work was to
scrub out rooms and wash down staircases. She also did cooking when
she was asked, and needlework when she got any to do. She had made
exquisite dresses which were worn by beautiful young girls at balls
and picnics, and fine, white shirts that great gentlemen wore when
they were dining, and fanciful waistcoats for gay young men, and silk
stockings for dancing in--but that was a long time ago, because these
beautiful things used to make her very angry when they were taken from
her, so that she cursed the people who came to take them away and
sometimes tore up the dresses and danced on them and screamed.
She used often to cry because she was not rich. Sometimes, when she
came home from work, she liked to pretend that she was rich; she would
play at imagining that some one had died and left her a great fortune,
or that her brother Patrick had come back from America with vast
wealth, and then she would tell Mary Makebelieve of the things she
intended to buy and do the very next day. Mary Makebelieve liked
that.... They were to move the first thing in the morning to a big
house with a garden behind it full of fruit trees and flowers and
birds. There would be a wide lawn in front of the house to play lawn
tennis in and to walk with delicately fine young men with fair faces
and white hands, who would speak in the French language and bow often
with their hats almost touching the ground. There were to be twelve
servants--six of them men servants and six of them women servants--who
would instantly do as they were bidden and would receive ten shillings
each per week and their board; they would also have two nights free in
the week, and would be very well fed. There were many wonderful
dresses to be bought, dresses for walking in the streets and dresses
for driving in a carriage, and others again for riding on horseback
and for traveling in. There was a dress of crimson silk with a deep
lace collar, and a heavy, wine-colored satin dress with a gold chain
falling down in front of it, and there was a pretty white dress of the
finest linen, having one red rose pinned at the waist. There were
black silken stockings with quaint designs worked on them in red silk,
and scarves of silver gauze, and others embroidered with flowers and
little shapes of men and women.
When her mother was planning all these things she was very happy, but
afterwards she used to cry bitterly and rock her daughter to and fro
on her breast until she hurt her.
II
Every morning about six o'clock Mary Makebelieve left her bed and lit
the fire. It was an ugly fire to light, because the chimney had never
been swept, and there was no draught. Also they never had any sticks
in the house, and scraps of paper twisted tightly into balls with the
last night's cinders placed on them and a handful of small coals
strewn on the top were used instead. Sometimes the fire blazed up
quickly, and that made her happy, but at other times it went out three
and four, and often half a dozen times; then the little bottle of
paraffin oil had to be squandered--a few rags well steeped in the oil
with a newspaper stretched over the grate seldom failed to coax enough
fire to boil the saucepan of water; generally this method smoked the
water, and then the tea tasted so horrid that one only drank it for
the sake of economy.
Mrs. Makebelieve liked to lie in bed until the last possible moment.
As there was no table in the room, Mary used to bring the two cups of
tea, the tin of condensed milk, and the quarter of a loaf over to the
bed, and there she and her mother took their breakfast.
From the time she opened her eyes in the morning her mother never
ceased to talk. It was then she went over all the things that had
happened on the previous day and enumerated the places she would have
to go to on the present day, and the chances for and against the
making of a little money. At this meal she used to arrange also to
have the room re-papered and the chimney swept and the rat-holes
stopped up--there were three of these, one was on the left-hand side
of the fire grate, the other two were under the bed, and Mary
Makebelieve had lain awake many a night listening to the gnawing of
teeth on the skirting and the scamper of little feet here and there on
the floor. Her mother further arranged to have a Turkey carpet placed
on the floor, although she admitted that oilcloth or linoleum was
easier to clean, but they were not so nice to the feet or the eye.
Into all these improvements her daughter entered with the greatest
delight. There was to be a red mahogany chest of drawers against one
wall and a rosewood piano against the wall opposite. A fender of
shining brass with brazen furniture, a bright, copper kettle for
boiling water in, and an iron pot for cooking potatoes and meat; there
was to be a life-sized picture of Mary over the mantelpiece and a
picture of her mother near the window in a golden frame, also a
picture of a Newfoundland dog lying in a barrel and a little wee
terrier crawling up to make friends with him, and a picture of a
battle between black people and soldiers.
Her mother knew it was time to get out of bed when she heard a heavy
step coming from the next room and going downstairs. A laboring man
lived there with his wife and six children. When the door banged she
jumped up, dressed quickly, and flew from the room in a panic of
haste. Usually then, as there was nothing to do, Mary went back to bed
for another couple of hours. After this she arose, made the bed and
tidied the room, and went out to walk in the streets, or to sit in the
St. Stephen's Green Park. She knew every bird in the Park, those that
had chickens and those that had had chickens, and those that never had
any chickens at all--these latter were usually drakes, and had reason
on their side for an abstention which might otherwise have appeared
remarkable, but they did not deserve the pity which Mary lavished on
their childlessness, nor the extra pieces of bread with which she
sought to recompense them. She loved to watch the ducklings swimming
after their mothers: they were quite fearless, and would dash to the
water's edge where one was standing and pick up nothing with the
greatest eagnerness and swallow it with delight. The mother duck swam
placidly close to her brood and clucked in a low voice all kinds of
warnings and advice and reproof to the little ones. Mary Makebelieve
thought it was very clever of the little ducklings to be able to swim
so well. She loved them, and when nobody was looking she used to cluck
at them like their mother, but she did not often do this because she
did not know duck language really well, and feared that her cluck
might mean the wrong things, and that she might be giving these
innocents bad advice, and telling them to do something contrary to
what their mother had just directed.
The bridge across the big lake was a fascinating place. On the sunny
side lots of ducks were always standing on their heads searching for
something in the water, so that they looked like only half ducks. On
the shady side hundreds of eels were swimming about--they were most
wonderful things; some of them were thin like ribbons, and others were
round and plump like thick ropes. They never seemed to fight at all,
and although the ducklings were so tiny the big eels never touched any
of them, even when they dived right down amongst them. Some of the
eels swam along very slowly, looking on this side and on that as if
they were out of work or up from the country, and others whizzed by
with incredible swiftness. Mary Makebelieve thought that the latter
kind had just heard their babies crying; she wondered, when a little
fish cried, could its mother see the tears where there was already so
much water about, and then she thought that maybe they cried hard
lumps of something that was easily visible.
After this she would go around the flower-beds and look at each; some
of them were shaped like stars, and some were quite round, and others
again were square. She liked the star-shaped flower-beds best, and
next she liked the round ones, and last of all the square. But she
loved all the flowers, and used to make up stories about them.
After that, growing hungry, she would go home for her lunch. She went
home down Grafton Street and O'Connell Street. She always went along
the right-hand side of the street going home, and looked in every shop
window that she passed, and then, when she had eaten her lunch, she
came out again and walked along the left-hand side of the road,
looking at the shops on that side, and so she knew daily everything
that was new in the city, and was able to tell her mother at nighttime
that the black dress with Spanish lace was taken out of Manning's
window and a red gown with tucks at the shoulders and Irish lace at
the wrists put in its place; or that the diamond ring in Johnson's
marked One Hundred Pounds was gone from the case and that a slide of
brooches of beaten silver and blue enamel was there instead.
In the nighttime her mother and herself went round to each of the
theaters in turn and watched the people going in and looked at the big
posters. When they went home afterwards they had supper and used to
try to make out the plots of the various plays from the pictures they
had seen, so that generally they had lots to talk about before they
went to bed. Mary Makebelieve used to talk most in the nighttime, but
her mother talked most in the morning.
III
Her mother spoke sometimes of matrimony as a thing remote but very
certain; the remoteness of this adventure rather shocked Mary
Makebelieve; she knew that a girl had to get married, that a strange,
beautiful man would come from somewhere looking for a wife and would
retire again with his bride to that Somewhere which is the country of
Romance. At times (and she could easily picture it) he rode in armor
on a great bay horse, the plume of his helmet trailing among the high
leaves of the forest. Or he came standing on the prow of a swift ship
with the sunlight blazing back from his golden armor. Or on a grassy
plain, fleet as the wind, he came running, leaping, laughing.
When the subject of matrimony was under discussion her mother planned
minutely the person of the groom, his vast accomplishments, and yet
vaster wealth, the magnificence of his person, and the love in which
he was held by rich and poor alike. She also discussed, down to the
smallest detail, the elaborate trousseau she would provide for her
daughter, the extravagant presents the bridegroom would make to his
bride and her maids, and those, yet more costly, which the
bridegroom's family would send to the newly married pair. All these
wonders could only concentrate in the person of a lord. Mary
Makebelieve's questions as to the status and appurtenances of a lord
were searching and minute, her mother's rejoinders were equally
elaborate and particular.
At his birth a lord is cradled in silver, at his death he is laid in
a golden casket, an oaken coffin, and a leaden outer coffin until,
finally, a massy stone sarcophagus shrouds his remains forever. His
life is a whirl of gayety and freedom. Around his castle there spread
miles upon miles of sunny grass lands and ripened orchards and waving
forests, and through these he hunts with his laughing companions or
walks gently with his lady. He has servants by the thousand, each
anxious to die for him, and his wealth, prodigious beyond the
computation of avarice, is stored in underground chambers, whose low,
tortuous passages lead to labyrinths of vaults, massy and impregnable.
Mary Makebelieve would have loved to wed a lord. If a lord had come to
her when she paced softly through a forest, or stood alone on the
seashore, or crouched among the long grass of a windy plain, she would
have placed her hands in his and followed him and loved him truly
forever. But she did not believe that these things happened nowadays,
nor did her mother. Nowadays! her mother looked on these paltry times
with an eye whose scorn was complicated by fury. Mean, ugly days,
mean, ugly lives, and mean, ugly people, said her mother, that's all
one can get nowadays, and then she spoke of the people whose houses
she washed out and whose staircases she scrubbed down, and her
old-ivory face flamed from her black hair and her deep, dark eyes
whirled and became hard and motionless as points of jet, and her hands
jumped alternately into knuckles and claws.
But it became increasingly evident to Mary Makebelieve that marriage
was not a story but a fact, and, somehow, the romance of it did not
drift away, although the very house wherein she lived was infested by
these conjoints, and the streets wherein she walked were crowded with
undistinguished couples.... Those gray-lived, dreary-natured people
had a spark of fire smoldering somewhere in their poor economy. Six
feet deep is scarcely deep enough to bury romance, and until that
depth of clay has clogged our bones the fire can still smolder and be
fanned, and, perhaps, blaze up and flare across a county or a country
to warm the cold hands of many a shriveled person.
How did all these people come together? She did not yet understand the
basic necessity that drives the male to the female. Sex was not yet to
her a physiological distinction, it was only a differentiation of
clothing, a matter of whiskers and no whiskers: but she had begun to
take a new and peculiar interest in men. One of these hurrying or
loitering strangers might be the husband whom fate had ordained for
her. She would scarcely have been surprised if one of the men who
looked at her casually in the street had suddenly halted and asked her
to marry him. It came on her with something like assurance that that
was the only business these men were there for, she could not discover
any other reason or excuse for their existence, and if some man had
been thus adventurous Mary Makebelieve would have been sadly perplexed
to find an answer: she might, indeed, have replied, "Yes, thank you,
sir," for when a man asks one to do a thing for him one does it
gladly. There was an attraction about young men which she could not
understand, something peculiarly dear and magnetic; she would have
liked to shake hands with one to see how different he felt from a
girl. They would, probably, shake hands quite hard and then hit one.
She fancied she would not mind being hit by a man, and then, watching
the vigor of their movements, she thought they could hit very hard,
but still there was a terrible attraction about the idea of being hit
by a man. She asked her mother (with apparent irrelevance) had a man
ever struck her; her mother was silent for a few moments, and then
burst into so violent a passion of weeping that Mary Makebelieve was
frightened. She rushed into her mother's arms and was rocked fiercely
against a heart almost bursting with bitter pride and recollection.
But her mother did not then, nor did she ever afterwards, answer Mary
Makebelieve's question.
IV
Every afternoon a troop of policemen marched in solemn and majestic
single file from the College Green Police Station. At regular
intervals, one by one, a policeman stepped sideways from the file,
adjusted his belt, touched his moustache, looked up the street and
down the street for stray criminals, and condescended to the duties
of his beat.
At the crossing where Nassau and Suffolk streets intersect Grafton
Street one of these superb creatures was wont to relinquish his
companions, and there in the center of the road, a monument of
solidity and law, he remained until the evening hour which released
him again to the companionship of his peers.
Perhaps this point is the most interesting place in Dublin. Upon one
vista Grafton Street with its glittering shops stretches, or rather
winds, to the St. Stephen's Green Park, terminating at the gate known
as the Fusiliers' Arch, but which local patriotism has rechristened
the Traitors' Gate. On the left Nassau Street, broad and clean, and a
trifle vulgar and bourgeois in its openness, runs away to Merrion
Square, and on with a broad ease to Blackrock and Kingstown and the
sea. On the right hand Suffolk Street, reserved and shy, twists up to
St. Andrew's Church, touches gingerly the South City Markets, droops
to George's Street, and is lost in mean and dingy intersections. At
the back of the crossing Grafton Street continues again for a little
distance down to Trinity College (at the gates whereof very
intelligent young men flaunt very tattered gowns and smoke massive
pipes with great skill for their years), skirting the Bank of Ireland,
and on to the River Liffey and the street which local patriotism
defiantly speaks of as O'Connell Street, and alien patriotism, with
equal defiance and pertinacity, knows as Sackville Street.
To the point where these places meet, and where the policeman stands,
all the traffic of Dublin converges in a constant stream. The trams
hurrying to Terenure, or Donnybrook, or Dalkey flash around this
corner; the doctors who, in these degenerate days, concentrate in
Merrion Square, fly up here in carriages and motor cars, the vans of
the great firms in Grafton and O'Connell streets, or those outlying,
never cease their exuberant progress. The ladies and gentlemen of
leisure stroll here daily at four o'clock, and from all sides the
vehicles and pedestrians, the bicycles and motor bicycles, the trams
and the outside cars rush to the solitary policeman, who directs them
all with his severe but tolerant eye. He knows all the tram-drivers
who go by, and his nicely graduated wink rewards the glances of the
rubicund, jolly drivers of the hackneys and the decayed Jehus with
purple faces and dismal hopefulness who drive sepulchral cabs for some
reason which has no acquaintance with profit; nor are the ladies and
gentlemen who saunter past foreign to his encyclopedic eye. Constantly
his great head swings a slow recognition, constantly his serene finger
motions onwards a well-known undesirable, and his big, white teeth
flash for an instant at young, laughing girls and the more matronly
acquaintances who solicit the distinction of his glance.
To this place, and about this hour, Mary Makebelieve, returning from
her solitary lunch, was wont to come. The figure of the massive
policeman fascinated her. Surely everything desirable in manhood was
concentrated in his tremendous body. What an immense, shattering blow
that mighty fist could give! She could imagine it swinging vast as the
buffet of a hero, high-thrown and then down irresistibly--a crashing,
monumental hand. She delighted in his great, solid head as it swung
slowly from side to side, and his calm, proud eye--a governing,
compelling and determined eye. She had never met his glance yet: she
withered away before it as a mouse withers and shrinks and falls to
its den before a cat's huge glare. She used to look at him from the
curbstone in front of the chemist's shop, or on the opposite side of
the road, while pretending to wait for a tram; and at the pillar-box
beside the optician's she found time for one furtive twinkle of a
glance that shivered to his face and trembled away into the traffic.
She did not think he noticed her, but there was nothing he did not
notice. His business was noticing: he caught her in his mental
policeman's note-book the very first day she came; he saw her each
day beside, and at last looked for her coming and enjoyed her
strategy. One day her shy, creeping glance was caught by his; it held
her mesmerized for a few seconds, it looked down into her--for a
moment the whole world seemed to have become one immense eye--she
could scarcely get away from it.
When she remembered again she was standing by the pond in St.
Stephen's Green Park, with a queer frightened exaltation lightening
through her blood. She did not go home that night by Grafton Street,
she did not dare venture within reach of that powerful organism, but
went a long way round, and still the way seemed very short.
That night her mother, although very tired, was the more talkative of
the two. She offered in exchange for her daughter's thoughts pennies
that only existed in her imagination. Mary Makebelieve professed that
it was sleep and not thought obsessed her, and exhibited voucher yawns
which were as fictitious as her reply. When they went to bed that
night it was a long time before she slept. She lay looking into the
deep gloom of the chamber, and scarcely heard the fierce dreams of her
mother, who was demanding from a sleep world the things she lacked in
the wide-awake one.
V
This is the appearance of Mary Makebelieve at that time:--She had fair
hair, and it was very soft and very thick; when she unwound this it
fell, or rather flowed, down to her waist, and when she walked about
the room with her hair unloosened it curved beautifully about her
head, snuggled into the hollow of her neck, ruffled out broadly again
upon her shoulders, and swung into and out of her figure with every
motion; surging and shrinking and dancing; the ends of her hair were
soft and loose as foam, and it had the color and shining of pure,
light gold. Commonly in the house she wore her hair loose, because her
mother liked the appearance of youth imparted by hanging hair, and
would often desire her daughter to leave off her outer skirt and walk
only in her petticoats to heighten the illusion of girlishness. Her
head was shaped very tenderly and softly; it was so small that when
her hair was twisted up on it it seemed much too delicate to bear so
great a burden. Her eyes were gray, limpidly tender and shy, drooping
under weighty lids, so that they seldom seemed more than half opened
and commonly sought the ground rather than the bolder excursions of
straightforwardness; they seldom looked for longer than a glance,
climbing and poising and eddying about the person at whom she gazed,
and then dived away again; and always when she looked at any one she
smiled a deprecation of her boldness. She had a small white face, very
like her mother's in some ways and at some angles, but the tight beak
which was her mother's nose was absent in Mary; her nose withdrew
timidly in the center and only snatched a hurried courage to become
visible at the tip. It was a nose that seemed to have been snubbed
almost out of existence. Her mother loved it because it was so little,
and had tried so hard not to be a nose at all. They often stood
together before the little glass that had a great crack running
drunkenly from the right-hand top corner down to the left-hand bottom
corner, and two small arm crosses, one a little above the other, in
the center. When one's face looked into this glass it often appeared
there as four faces with horrible aberrations; an ear might be curving
around a lip or an eye leering strangely in the middle of a chin. But
there were ways of looking into the glass which practice had discovered,
and usage had long ago dulled the terrors of its vagaries. Looking into
this glass Mrs. Makebelieve would comment minutely upon the two faces
therein, and, pointing to her own triumphantly genuine nose and the fact
that her husband's nose had been of quite discernible proportions, she
would seek in labyrinths of pedigree for a reason to justify her
daughter's lack; she passed all her sisters in this review, with an
army of aunts and great-aunts, rifling the tombs of grandparents and
their remoter blood, and making long-dead noses to live again. Mary
Makebelieve used to lift her timidly curious eye and smile in
deprecation of her nasal shortcomings, and then her mother would kiss
the dejected button and vow it was the dearest, loveliest bit of a nose
that had ever been seen.
"Big noses suit some people," said Mrs. Makebelieve, "but they do not
suit others, and one would not suit you, dearie. They go well with
black-haired people and very tall people, military gentlemen, judges
and apothecaries; but small, fair folk cannot support great noses. I
like my own nose," she continued. "At school, when I was a little
girl, the other girls used to laugh at my nose, but I always liked it,
and after a time other people came to like it also."
Mary Makebelieve had small, slim hands and feet: the palms of her
hands were softer than anything in the world; there were five little,
pink cushions on her palm: beginning at the little finger there was a
very tiny cushion, the next one was bigger, and the next bigger again,
until the largest ended a perfect harmony at the base of her thumb.
Her mother used to kiss these little cushions at times, holding back
the finger belonging to each, and naming it as she touched it. These
are the names of Mary Makebelieve's fingers, beginning with the
Thumb:--Tom Tumkins, Willie Winkles, Long Daniel, Bessie Bobtail and
Little Dick-Dick.
Her slight, girlish figure was only beginning to creep to the deeper
contours of womanhood, a half curve here and there, a sudden softness
in the youthful lines, certain angles trembling on the slightest of
rolls, a hint, a suggestion, the shadowy prophecy of circles and half
hoops that could not yet roll: the trip of her movements was troubled
sometimes to a sedater motion.
These things her mother's curiosity was continually recording,
sometimes with happy pride, but oftener in a kind of anger to find
that her little girl was becoming a big girl. If it had been possible
she would have detained her daughter forever in the physique of a
child; she feared the time when Mary would become too evidently a
woman, when all kinds of equalities would come to hinder her
spontaneous and active affection. A woman might object to be nursed,
while a girl would not; Mrs. Makebelieve feared that objection, and,
indeed, Mary, under the stimulus of an awakening body and a new,
strange warmth, was not altogether satisfied by being nursed or by
being the passive participant in these caresses. She sometimes thought
that she would like to take her mother on her own breast and rock her
to and fro, crooning soft made-up words and kissing the top of a head
or the half-hidden curve of a cheek, but she did not dare to do so
for fear her mother would strike her. Her mother was very jealous on
that point, she loved her daughter to kiss her and stroke her hands
and her face, but she never liked her to play at being the mother, nor
had she ever encouraged her daughter in the occupations of a doll. She
was the mother and Mary was the baby, and she could not bear to have
her motherhood hindered even in play.
VI
Although Mary Makebelieve was sixteen years of age she had not yet
gone to work; her mother did not like the idea of her little girl
stooping to the drudgery of the only employment she could have aided
her to obtain--that was, to assist herself in the humble and arduous
toil of charing. She had arranged that Mary was to go into a shop, a
drapery store, or some such other, but that was to be in a sometime
which seemed infinitely remote. "And then, too," said Mrs.
Makebelieve, "all kinds of things may happen in a year or so if we
wait. Your uncle Patrick, who went to America twenty years ago, may
come home, and when he does you will not have to work, dearie, nor
will I. Or again, some one going along the street may take a fancy to
you and marry you; things often happen like that." There were a
thousand schemes and accidents which, in her opinion, might occur to
the establishment of her daughter's ease and the enlargement of her
own dignity. And so Mary Makebelieve, when her mother was at work
(which was sometimes every day in the week), had all the day to loiter
in and spend as best she liked. Sometimes she did not go out at all.
She stayed in the top back room sewing or knitting, mending holes in
the sheets or the blankets, or reading books from the Free Library in
Capel Street: but generally she preferred, after the few hours which
served to put the room in order, to go out and walk along the streets,
taking new turnings as often as she fancied, and striking down strange
roads to see the shops and the people.
There were so many people whom she knew by sight; almost daily she saw
these somewhere, and she often followed them for a short distance,
with a feeling of friendship; for the loneliness of the long day
often drew down upon her like a weight, so that even the distant
companionship of these remembered faces that did not know her was
comforting. She wished she could find out who some of them
were.--There was a tall man with a sweeping brown beard, whose heavy
overcoat looked as though it had been put on with a shovel; he wore
spectacles, and his eyes were blue, and always seemed as if they were
going to laugh; he, also, looked into the shops as he went along, and
he seemed to know everybody. Every few paces people would halt and
shake his hand, but these people never spoke because the big man with
the brown beard would instantly burst into a fury of speech which had
no intervals, and when there was no one with him at all he would talk
to himself. On these occasions he did not see any one, and people had
to jump out of his way while he strode onwards swinging his big head
from one side to the other, and with his eyes fixed on some place a
great distance away. Once or twice, in passing, she heard him singing
to himself the most lugubrious song in the world. There was another--a
long, thin, black man--who looked young and was always smiling secretly
to himself; his lips were never still for a moment, and, passing Mary
Makebelieve a few times, she heard him buzzing like a great bee. He did
not stop to shake hands with any one, and although many people saluted
him he took no heed, but strode on smiling his secret smile and buzzing
serenely. There was a third man whom she often noticed: his clothing
seemed as if it had been put on him a long time ago and had never been
taken off again. He had a long, pale face, with a dark moustache
drooping over a most beautiful mouth. His eyes were very big and lazy,
and did not look quite human; they had a trick of looking sidewards--a
most intimate, personal look. Sometimes he saw nothing in the world but
the pavement, and at other times he saw everything. He looked at Mary
Makebelieve once and she got a fright; she had a queer idea that she had
known him well hundreds of years before and that he remembered her also.
She was afraid of that man, but she liked him because he looked so
gentle and so--there was something else he looked which as yet she could
not put a name to, but which her ancestry remembered dimly. There was a
short, fair, pale-faced man, who looked like the tiredest man in the
world. He was often preoccupied, but not in the singular way the others
were. He seemed to be always chewing the cud of remembrance, and looked
at people as if they reminded him of other people who were dead a long
time and whom he thought of but did not regret. He was a detached man
even in a crowd and carried with him a cold atmosphere; even his smile
was bleak and aloof. Mary Makebelieve noticed that many people nudged
each other as he went by, and then they would turn and look after him
and go away whispering.
These and many others she saw almost daily, and used to look for with
a feeling of friendship. At other times she walked up the long line of
quays sentineling the Liffey, watching the swift boats of Guinness
puffing down the river and the thousands of sea-gulls hovering above
or swimming on the dark waters, until she came to the Phoenix Park,
where there was always a cricket or football match being played, or
some young men or girls playing hurley, or children playing
tip-and-tig, running after one another, and dancing and screaming in
the sunshine. Her mother liked very much to go with her to the
Phoenix Park on days when there was no work to be done. Leaving the
great, white main road, up which the bicycles and motor cars are
continually whizzing, a few minutes' walk brings one to quiet alleys
sheltered by trees and groves of hawthorn. In these passages one can
walk for a long time without meeting a person, or lie on the grass in
the shadow of a tree and watch the sunlight beating down on the green
fields and shimmering between the trees. There is a deep silence to be
found here, very strange and beautiful to one fresh from the city, and
it is strange also to look about in the broad sunshine and see no
person near at all, and no movement saving the roll and folding of the
grass, the slow swinging of the branches of the trees or the noiseless
flight of a bee, a butterfly, or a bird.
These things Mary Makebelieve liked, but her mother would pine for the
dances of the little children, the gallant hurrying of the motor cars,
and the movement to and fro of the people with gay dresses and colored
parasols and all the circumstance of holiday.
VII
One morning Mary Makebelieve jumped out of bed and lit the fire. For a
wonder it lit easily: the match was scarcely applied when the flames
were leaping up the black chimney, and this made her feel at ease with
the world. Her mother stayed in bed chatting with something more of
gayety than usual. It was nearly six o'clock, and the early summer sun
was flooding against the grimy window. The previous evening's post had
brought a post-card for Mrs. Makebelieve, requesting her to call on a
Mrs. O'Connor, who had a house off Harcourt Street. This, of course,
meant a day's work--it also meant a new client.
Mrs. Makebelieve's clients were always new. She could not remain for
any length of time in people's employment without being troubled by
the fact that these folk had houses of their own and were actually
employing her in a menial capacity. She sometimes looked at their
black silk aprons in a way which they never failed to observe with
anger, and on their attempting (as they always termed it) to put her
in her proper place, she would discuss their appearance and morals
with such power that they at once dismissed her from their employment
and incited their husbands to assault her.
Mrs. Makebelieve's mind was exercised in finding out who had
recommended her to this new lady, and in what terms of encomium such
recommendation had been framed. She also debated as to whether it
would be wise to ask for one shilling and ninepence per day instead of
the customary one shilling and sixpence. If the house was a big one
she might be required by this new customer oftener than once a week,
and, perhaps, there were others in the house besides the lady who
would find small jobs for her to do--needlework or messages, or some
such which would bring in a little extra money; for she professed her
willingness and ability to undertake with success any form of work in
which a woman could be eminent. In a house where she had worked she
had once been asked by a gentleman who lodged there to order in two
dozen bottles of stout, and, on returning with the stout, the
gentleman had thanked her and given her a shilling. Incidents parallel
to this had kept her faith in humanity green. There must be plenty of
these open-handed gentlemen in houses such as she worked in, and,
perhaps, in Mrs. O'Connor's house there might be more than one such
person. There were stingy people enough, heaven knew, people who would
get one to run messages and almost expect to be paid themselves for
allowing one to work for them. Mrs. Makebelieve anathematized such
skinflints with a vocabulary which was quite equal to the detailing
of their misdeeds; but she refused to dwell on them: they were not
really important in a world where the sun was shining. In the
nighttime she would again believe in their horrible existences, but
until then the world must be peopled with kind-hearted folk. She
instanced many whom she knew, people who had advanced services and
effects without exacting or indeed expecting any return.