and began to scrub. She worked very deliberately, sometimes cleaning
the same place two or three times. Now and again she sighed, but
without any consciousness of trouble. These were sighs which did not
seem to belong to her. She knew she was sighing, but could not
exactly see how the dull sounds came from her lips when she had no
desire to sigh and did not make any conscious effort to do so. Her
mind was an absolute blank, she could think of nothing but the bubbles
which broke on the floor and in the bucket, and the way the water
squeezed down from the cloth. There was something she could have
thought about if she wanted to, but she did not want to.
Mrs. O'Connor came out in, a few minutes, inspected the hall and said
it would do. She paid Mary her wages and told her to come again the
next day, and Mary went home. As she walked along she was very careful
not to step on any of the lines on the pavement; she walked between
these, and was distressed because these lines were not equally distant
from each other, so that she had to make unequal paces as she went.
XIX
The name of the woman from next door was Mrs. Cafferty. She was big
and round, and when she walked her dress whirled about her like a
tempest. She seemed to be always turning round; when she was going
straight forward in any direction, say towards a press, she would turn
aside midway so sharply that her clothing spun gustily in her
wake--This probably came from having many children. A mother is
continually driving in oblique directions from her household employments
to rescue her children from a multitude of perils. An infant and a
fireplace act upon each other like magnets; a small boy is always trying
to eat a kettle or a piece of coal or the backbone of a herring; a
little girl and a slop bucket are in immediate contact; the baby has a
knife in its mouth; the twin is on the point of swallowing a marble, or
is trying to wash itself in the butter, or the cat is about to take a
nap on its face. Indeed, the woman who has six children never knows in
what direction her next step must be, and the continual strain of
preserving her progeny converts many a one into regular cyclones of
eyes and arms and legs. It also induces in some a perpetual good-humored
irritability wherein one can slap and cuddle a child in the same
instant, or shout threateningly or lovingly, call warningly and murmur
encouragingly in an astonishing sequence. The woman with six children
must both physically and mentally travel at a tangent, and when a
husband has to be badgered or humored into the bargain, then the life
of such a woman is more complex than is readily understood.
When Mary came home Mrs. Cafferty was sitting on her mother's bed, two
small children and a cat were also on the bed, two slightly bigger
children were under the bed, and two others were galloping furiously
up and down the room. At one moment these latter twain were runaway
horses, at another they were express trains. When they were horses
they snorted and neighed and kicked, when they were trains they backed
and shunted, blew whistles and blew off steam. The children under the
bed were tigers in a jungle, and they made the noises proper to such
beasts and such a place; they bit each other furiously, and howled and
growled precisely as tigers do. The pair of infants on the bed were
playing the game of bump; they would stand upright, then spring high
into the air and come crashing down on the bed, which then sprung them
partly up again. Each time they jumped they screamed loudly, each time
they fell they roared delighted congratulations to each other, and
when they fell together they fought with strong good humor. Sometimes
they fell on Mrs. Makebelieve; always they bumped her. At the side of
the bed their mother sat telling with a gigantic voice a story wherein
her husband's sister figured as the despicable person she was to the
eye of discernment, and this story was punctuated and shot through and
dislocuted by objurgations, threats, pleadings, admirations, alarms
and despairs addressed to the children separately and en masse, by
name, nickname, and hastily created epithet.
Mary halted in amazement in the doorway. She could not grasp all the
pandemonium at once, and while she stood Mrs. Cafferty saw her.
"Come on in, honey," said she. "Your ma's as right as a trivet. All
she wanted was a bit of good company and some children to play with.
Deed," she continued, "children are the best medicine for a woman that
I know of. They don't give you time to be sick, the creatures! Patrick
John, I'll give you a smack on the side of the head if you don't let
your little sister alone, and don't you, Norah, be vexing him or
you'll deserve all you get. Run inside, Julia Elizabeth, cut a slice
of bread for the twins, and put a bit of sugar on it, honey. Yes,
alanna, you can have a slice for yourself, too, you poor child you,
well you deserve it."
Mrs. Makebelieve was sitting up in the bed with two pillows propping
up her back. One of her long thin arms was stretched out to preserve
the twins from being bruised against the wall in their play. Plainly
they had become great friends with her, for every now and then they
swarmed over her, and a hugging match of extreme complexity ensued.
She looked almost her usual self, and all the animation that had been
so marked a feature of her personality had returned to her.
"Are you better, mother?" said Mary.
Mrs. Makebelieve took her daughter's head in her hands and kissed her
until the twins butted them apart clamoring for caresses.
"I am, honey," said she. "Those children done me good. I could have
got up at one o'clock, I felt so well, but Mrs. Cafferty thought I'd
better not."
"I did so," said Mrs. Cafferty. "Not a foot do you stir out of that
bed till your daughter comes home, ma'am, said I. For do you see,
child, many's the time you'd be thinking you were well and feeling as
fit as a fiddle, and nothing would be doing you but to be up and
gallivanting about, and then the next day you'd have a relapse, and
the next day you'd be twice as bad, and the day after that they'd be
measuring you for your coffin maybe. I knew a woman was taken like
that--up she got; I'm as well as ever I was, said she, and she ate a
feed of pig's cheek and cabbage and finished her washing, and they
buried her in a week. It's the quare thing, sickness. What I say is
when you're sick get into bed and stop there."
"It's easy saying that," said Mrs. Makebelieve.
"Sure, don't I know, you poor thing you," said Mrs. Cafferty, "but
you should stay in bed as long as you are able to anyhow."
"How did you get on with Mrs. O'Connor?" said Mrs. Makebelieve.
"That's the mistress, isn't it?" queried Mrs. Cafferty; "an ould
devil, I'll bet you."
Mrs. Makebelieve rapidly and lightly sketched Mrs. O'Connor's leading
peculiarities.
"It's queer the people one has to work for, God knows it is," said
Mrs. Cafferty.
At this point a grave controversy on work might have arisen, but the
children, caring little for conversation, broke into so tumultuous
play that talk could not be proceeded with. Mary was enticed into a
game composed in part of pussy-four-corners and tip-an-tig, with a
general flavor of leap-frog working through. In five minutes her hair
and her stockings were both down, and the back of her skirt had crawled
three-quarters round to the front. The twins shouted and bumped on the
bed, upon which and on Mrs. Makebelieve they rubbed bread and butter
and sugar, while their mother roared an anecdote at Mrs. Makebelieve
in tones that ruled the din as a fog horn rules the waves.
XX
Mary had lavished the entire of her first day's wages on delicate
foods wherewith to tempt her mother's languid appetite, and when the
morning dawned she arose silently, lit the fire, wet the tea and
spread her purchases out on the side of the bed. There was a slice of
brawn, two pork sausages, two eggs, three rashers of bacon, a bun, a
pennyworth of sweets and a pig's foot. These, with bread, and butter,
and tea, made a collection amid which an invalid might browse with
some satisfaction. Mary then awakened her, and sat by in a dream of
happiness watching her mother's eye roll slowly and unbelievingly from
item to item. Mrs. Makebelieve tipped each article with her first
finger and put its right name on it unerringly. Then she picked out an
important looking sweet that had four colors and shone like the sun,
and put it in her mouth.
"I never saw anything like it, you good child you," said she.
Mary rocked herself to and fro and laughed loudly for delight, and
then they ate a bit of everything, and were very happy.
Mrs. Makebelieve said that she felt altogether better that morning.
She had slept like a top all through the night, and, moreover, had a
dream wherein she saw her brother Patrick standing on the remotest sea
point of distant America, from whence he had shouted loudly across the
ocean that he was coming back to Ireland soon, that he had succeeded
very well indeed, and that he was not married. He had not changed in
the slightest degree, said Mrs. Makebelieve, and he looked as young
and as jolly as when he was at home with her father and herself in the
County Meath twenty-two years before. This mollifying dream and the
easy sleep which followed it had completely restored her health and
spirits. Mrs. Makebelieve further intimated that she intended to go to
work that day. It did not fit in with her ideas of propriety that her
child should turn into a charwoman, the more particularly as there was
a strong--an almost certain--possibility of an early betterment of her
own and her daughter's fortunes.
Dreams, said Mrs. Makebelieve, did not come for nothing. There was
more in dreams than was generally understood. Many and many were the
dreams which she herself had been visited by, and they had come true
so often that she could no longer disregard their promises,
admonishments or threats. Of course many people had dreams which were
of no consequence, and these could usually be traced to gluttony or a
flighty inconstant imagination. Drunken people, for instance, often
dreamed strange and terrible things, but, even while they were awake,
these people were liable to imaginary enemies whom their clouded eyes
and intellects magnified beyond any thoughtful proportions, and when
they were asleep their dreams would also be subject to this haze and
whirl of unreality and hallucination.
Mary said that sometimes she did not dream at all, and at other times
she dreamed very vividly, but usually could not remember what the
dream had been about when she awakened, and once she had dreamed that
some one gave her a shilling which she placed carefully under her
pillow, and this dream was so real that in the morning she put her
hand under the pillow to see if the shilling was there, but it was
not. The very next night she dreamed the same dream, and as she put
the phantom money under her pillow she said out loudly to herself, "I
am dreaming this, and I dreamt it last night also." Her mother said if
she had dreamt it for the third time some one would have given her a
shilling surely. To this Mary agreed, and admitted that she had tried
very hard to dream it on the third night, but somehow could not do it.
"When my brother comes home from America," said Mrs. Makebelieve,
"we'll go away from this part of the city at once. I suppose he'd want
a rather big house on the south side--Rathfarnham or Terenure way, or,
maybe, Donnybrook. Of course he'll ask me to mind the house for him
and keep the servants in order, and provide a different dinner every
day, and all that; while you could go out to the neighbors' places to
play lawn tennis or cricket, and have lunch. It will be a very great
responsibility."
"What kind of dinners would you have?" said Mary.
Mrs. Makebelieve's eyes glistened, and she leaned forward in the bed;
but just as she was about to reply the laboring man in the next room
slammed his door, and went thundering down the stairs. In an instant
Mrs. Makebelieve bounded from her bed; three wide twists put up her
hair, eight strange billow-like movements put on her clothes; as each
article of clothing reached a definite point on her person Mary
stabbed it swiftly with a pin--four ordinary pins in this place, two
safety pins in that: then Mrs. Makebelieve kissed her daughter sixteen
times and fled down the stairs and away to her work.
XXI
In a few minutes Mrs. Cafferty came into the room. She was, as every
woman is in the morning, primed with conversation about husbands, for
in the morning husbands are unwieldy, morose creatures without joy,
without lightness, lacking even the common, elemental interest in
their own children, and capable of detestably misinterpreting the
conversation of their wives. It is only by mixing amongst other men
that this malignant humor may be dispelled. To them the company of men
is like a great bath into which a husband will plunge wildly, renouncing
as he dives wives and children, all anchors and securities of hearth and
roof, and from which he again emerges singularly refreshed and capable
of being interested by a wife, a family, and a home until the next
morning. To many women this is a grievance amounting often to an
affront, and although they endeavor, even by cooking, to heal the
singular breach, they are utterly unable to do so, and perpetually seek
the counsel of each other on the subject. Mrs. Cafferty had merely asked
her husband would he hold the baby while she poured out his stirabout,
and he had incredibly threatened to pour the stirabout down the back of
her neck if she didn't leave him alone.
It was upon this morning madness she had desired to consult her
friend, and when she saw that Mrs. Makebelieve had gone away her
disappointment was quite evident. But this was only for a moment.
Almost all women are possessed of a fine social sense in relation to
other women. They are always on their best behavior towards one
another. Indeed, it often seems as if they feared and must by all
possible means placate each other by flattery, humor or a serious
tactfulness. There is very little freedom between them, because there
is no real freedom or acquaintance but between things polar. There is
nothing but a superficial resemblance between like and like, but
between like and unlike there is space wherein both curiosity and
spirit may go adventuring. Extremes must meet, it is their urgent
necessity; the reason for their distance, and the greater the distance
between them, the swifter will be their return and the warmer their
impact: they may shatter each other to fragments or they may fuse and
become indissoluble and new and wonderful, but there is no other
fertility. Between the sexes there is a really extraordinary freedom
of intercourse. They meet each other something more than half way. A
man and a woman may become quite intimate in a quarter of an hour.
Almost certainly they will endeavor to explain themselves to each
other before many minutes have elapsed; but a man and a man will not
do this, and even less so will a woman and a woman, for these are the
parallel lines which never meet. The acquaintanceship of the latter,
in particular, often begins and ends in an armed and calculating
neutrality. They preserve their distances and each others' suffrage by
the exercise of a grave social tact which never deserts them, and
which more than anything else has contributed to build the ceremonials
which are nearly one-half of our civilization. It is a common belief
amongst men that women cannot live together without quarreling, and
that they are unable to get work done by other women with any of the
good will which men display in the same occupations. If this is true,
the reason should not be looked for in any intersexual complications,
such as fear or an acrid rivalry, but only in the perpetually
recurring physical disturbances to which, as a sex, they are
subjected; and as the ability and willingness of a man to use his
fists in response to an affront has imposed sobriety and good humor
towards each other in almost all their relations, so women have placed
barriers of politeness and ceremonial between their fellow-women and
their own excoriated sensibilities.
Mrs. Cafferty, therefore, dissembled her disappointment, and with an
increased cordiality addressed herself towards Mary. Sitting down on
the bedside she discoursed on almost every subject upon which a woman
may discourse. It is considered that the conversation of women, while
incessant in its use, is rigorously bounded between the parlor and the
kitchen, or, to be more precise, between the attic and the scullery,
but these extremes are more inclusive than is imagined, for the attic
has an outlook on the stars while the scullery usually opens on the
kitchen garden or the dust heap--vistas equal to horizons. The
mysteries of death and birth occupy women far more than is the case
with men, to whom political and mercantile speculations are more
congenial. With immediate buying and selling, and all the absolute
forms of exchange and barter, women are deeply engaged, so that the
realities of trade are often more intelligent to them than to many
merchants. If men understood domestic economy half as well as women
do, then their political economy and their entire consequent
statecraft would not be the futile muddle which it is.
It was all very interesting to Mary, and, moreover, she had a great
desire for companionship at the moment. If she had been left alone it
might have become necessary to confront certain thoughts, memories,
pictures, from which she had a dim idea it would be wise to keep her
distance. Her work on the previous day, the girl she had met in the
house, the policeman--from all or any of these recollections she
swerved mentally. She steadily rejected all impressions that touched
upon these. The policeman floated vaguely on her consciousness not as
a desirable person, not even as a person but as a distance, as an
hour of her childhood, as a half-forgotten quaintness, a memory which
it would be better should never be revived. Indeed her faint thought
shadowed him as a person who was dead, and would never again be
visible to her anywhere. So, resolutely, she let him drop down into
her mind to some uncomfortable oubliette from whence he threatened
with feeble insistence to pop up at any moment like a strange question
or a sudden shame. She hid him in a rosy flush which a breath could
have made flame unbearably, and she hid from him behind the light
garrulity of Mrs. Cafferty, through which now and again, as through a
veil, she saw the spike of his helmet, a wiry bristling moustache, a
surge of great shoulders. On these ghostly indications she heaped a
tornado of words which swamped the wraith, but she knew he was waiting
to catch her alone, and would certainly catch her, and the knowledge
made her hate him.
XXII
Mrs. Cafferty suggested that she and Mary should go out together to
purchase that day's dinner, and by the time she had draped her
shoulders in a shawl, buried her head in a bonnet, cautioned all her
brood against going near the fireplace, the coal box and the slop
bucket, cut a slice of bread for each of them, and placed each of them
in charge of all the rest, Mary's more elaborate dressing was within
two stages of her hat.
"Wait until you have children, my dear," said Mrs. Cafferty, "you
won't be so pernickety then." She further told Mary that when she was
herself younger she had often spent an hour and a half doing up her
hair, and she had been so particular that the putting on of a blouse
or the pinning of a skirt to a belt had tormented her happily for two
hours. "But, bless you," she roared, "you get out of all that when you
get children. Wait till you have six of them to be dressed every
morning, and they with some of their boots lost and the rest of them
mixed up, and each of them wriggling like an eel on a pan until you
have to slap the devil out of them before their stocking can be got
on: the way they screw their toes up in the wrong places! and the way
they squeal that you're pinching them! and the way that they say
you've rubbed soap in their eyes!"--Mrs. Cafferty lifted her eyes and
her hands to the ceiling in a dumb remonstrance with Providence, and
dropped them again forlornly as one in whom Providence had never been
really interested--"You'll have all the dressing you want and a bit
over for luck," said she.
She complimented Mary on her hair, her complexion, the smallness of
her feet, the largeness of her eyes, the slenderness of her waist,
the width of her hat and of her shoe strings: so impartially and
inclusively did she compliment her that by the time they went out Mary
was rosy with appreciation and as self-confident as a young girl is
entitled to be.
It was a beautiful gray day with a massy sky which seemed as if it
never could move again or change, and, as often happens in Ireland in
cloudy weather, the air was so very clear that one could see to a
great distance. On such days everything stands out in sharp outline. A
street is no longer a congery of houses huddling shamefully together
and terrified lest any one should look at them and laugh. Each house
then recaptures its individuality. The very roadways are aware of
themselves and bear their horses, and cars, and trams in a competent
spirit, adorned with modesty as with a garland. It has a beauty beyond
sunshine, for sunshine is only youth and carelessness. The impress of
a thousand memories, the historic visage becomes apparent: the quiet
face which experience has ripened into knowledge and mellowed into the
wisdom of charity is seen then: the great social beauty shines from
the streets under this sky that broods like a thoughtful forehead.
While they walked Mrs. Cafferty planned, as a general might, her
campaign of shopping. Her shopping differed greatly from Mrs.
Makebelieve's, and the difference was probably caused by her necessity
to feed and clothe eight people as against Mrs. Makebelieve's two.
Mrs. Makebelieve went to the shop nearest her house, and there entered
into a stanch personal friendship with the proprietor. When she was
given anything of doubtful value or material she instantly returned
and handed it back, and the prices which were first quoted to her and
settled upon became to Mrs. Makebelieve an unalterable standard from
which no departure would be tolerated. Eggs might go up in price for
the remainder of the world, but not for her. A change of price threw
Mrs. Makebelieve into so wide-eyed, so galvanic, so power fully-verbal
and friendship-shattering an anger that her terms were accepted and
registered as Median exactitudes. Mrs. Cafferty, on the other hand,
knew shopkeepers as personal enemies and as foes to the human race,
who were bent on despoiling the poor, and against whom a remorseless
warfare should be conducted by all decent people. Her knowledge of
material, of quality, of degrees of freshness, of local and distant
prices was profound. In Clanbrassil Street she would quote the prices
of Moore Street with shattering effect, and if the shopkeeper declined
to revise his tariff her good-humored voice toned so huge a
disapproval that other intending purchasers left the shop impressed by
the unmasking of a swindler. Her method was abrupt. She seized an
article, placed it on the counter and uttered these words, "Sixpence
and not a penny more; I can get it in Moore Street for five pence half
penny." She knew all the shops having a cheap line in some special
article, and, therefore, her shopping was of a very extended
description, not that she went from point to point, for she
continually departed from the line of battle with the remark "Let's
try what they have here," and when inside the shop her large eye took
in at a glance a thousand details of stock and price which were never
afterwards forgotten.