Communion in a few days. This is a very important ceremony for a young
girl and for her mother. A white muslin dress and a blue sash, a white
muslin hat with blue ribbons, tan shoes, and stockings as germane to
the color of tan as may be--these all have to be provided. It is a
time of grave concern for everybody intimately connected with the
event. Every girl in the world has performed this ceremony: they have
all been clad in these garments and shoes, and for a day or so all
women, of whatever age, are in love with the little girl making her
first Communion. Perhaps more than anything else it swings the passing
stranger back to the time when she was not a woman but a child with
present gayety and curiosity, and a future all expectation and
adventure. Therefore, the suitable appareling of one's daughter is a
public duty, and every mother endeavors to do the thing that is right,
and live, if only for one day, up to the admiration of her
fellow-creatures.
It was a trial, but an enjoyable one, to Mrs. Cafferty and Mary, this
matching of tan stockings with tan shoes. The shoes were bought, and
then an almost impossible quest began to find stockings which would
exactly go with them. Thousands of boxes were opened, ransacked and
waved aside without the absolute color being discovered. From shop to
shop and from street to street they went, and the quest led them
through Grafton Street en route to a shop where months before Mrs.
Cafferty had seen stockings of a color so nearly approximating to tan
that they almost might be suitable.
As they went past the College and entered the winding street Mary's
heart began to beat. She did not see any of the traffic flowing up and
down, or the jostling, busy foot passengers, nor did she hear the
eager lectures of her companion. Her eyes were straining up the street
towards the crossing. She dared not turn back or give any explanation
to Mrs. Cafferty, and in a few seconds she saw him, gigantic, calm,
adequate, the monarch of his world. His back was turned to her, and
the great sweep of his shoulders, his solid legs, his red neck and
close-cropped, wiry hair were visible to her strangely. She had a
peculiar feeling of acquaintedness and of aloofness, intimate
knowledge and a separation of sharp finality caused her to stare at
him with so intent a curiosity that Mrs. Cafferty noticed it.
"That's a fine man," said she, "he won't have to go about looking for
girls."
As she spoke they passed by the policeman, and Mary knew that when her
eyes left him his gaze almost automatically fell upon her. She was
glad that he could not see her face. She was glad that Mrs. Cafferty
was beside her: had she been alone she would have been tempted to walk
away very quickly, almost to run, but her companion gave her courage
and self-possession, so that she walked gallantly. But her mind was a
fever. She could feel his eyes raking her from head to foot, she could
see his great hand going up to tap his crinkly moustache. These things
she could see in her terrified mind, but she could not think, she
could only give thanks to God because she had her best clothes on.
XXIII
Mrs. Makebelieve was planning to get back such of her furniture and
effects as had been pawned during her illness. Some of these things
she had carried away from her father's house many years before when
she got married. They had been amongst the earliest objects on which
her eyes had rested when she was born, and around them her whole life
of memories revolved. A chair in which her father had sat and on the
edge whereof her husband had timidly balanced himself when he came
courting her, and into which her daughter had been tied when she was a
baby. A strip of carpet and some knives and forks had formed portion
of her wedding presents. She loved these things, and had determined
that if work could retrieve them they should not be lost forever.
Therefore, she had to suffer people like Mrs. O'Connor, not gladly,
but with the resignation due to the hests of Providence which one must
obey but may legitimately criticise. Mrs. Makebelieve said definitely
that she detested the woman. She was a cold-eyed person whose only
ability was to order about other people who were much better than she
was. It distressed Mrs. Makebelieve to have to work for such a person,
to be subject to her commands and liable to her reproofs or advice;
these were things which seemed to her to be out of all due proportion.
She did not wish the woman any harm, but some day or other she would
undoubtedly have to put her in her proper place. It was a day to which
she looked forward. Any one who had a sufficient income could have a
house and could employ and pay for outside help without any particular
reason for being proud, and many people, having such an income, would
certainly have a better appointed house and would be more generous
and civil to those who came to work for them. Everybody, of course,
could not have a policeman for a nephew, and there were a great many
people who would rather not have anything to do with a policeman at
all. Overbearing rough creatures to whom everybody is a thief! If Mrs.
Makebelieve had such a nephew she would certainly have wrecked his
pride--the great beast! Here Mrs. Makebelieve grew very angry: her
black eyes blazed, her great nose grew thin and white and her hands
went leaping in fury. "You're not in Court now, you jackanapes
you,--said I, with his whiskers and his baton, and his feet that were
bigger than anything in the world except his ignorant self-conceit.
'Have you a daughter, mam, said he, what's her age, mam, said he, is
she a good girl, mam, said he?'--but she had settled him,--and that
woman was prouder of him than a king would be of his crown! never
mind," said Mrs. Makebelieve, and she darted fiercely up and down the
room, tearing pieces off the atmosphere and throwing them behind her.
In a few minutes, however, she sat down on the floor and drew her
daughter's head to her breast, and then, staring into the scrap of
fire, she counseled Mary wisely on many affairs of life and the
conduct of a girl under all kinds of circumstances--to be adequate in
spirit if not in physique: that was her theme. Never be a servant in
your heart, said she. To work is nothing; the king on his throne, the
priest kneeling before the Holy Altar, all people in all places had to
work, but no person at all need be a servant. One worked and was paid,
and went away keeping the integrity of one's soul unspotted and
serene. If an employer was wise or good or kind Mrs. Makebelieve was
prepared to accord such a person instant and humble reverence. She
would work for such a one until the nails dropped off her fingers and
her feet crumpled up under her body; but a policeman or a rich
person, or a person who ordered one about...! until she died and was
buried in the depths of the world, she would never give in to such a
person or admit anything but their thievishness and ill-breeding. Bad
manners to the like of them, said she, and might have sailed
boisterously away upon an ocean of curses but that Mary turned her
face closer to her breast and began to speak.
For suddenly there had come to Mary a vision of peace: like a green
island in the sea it was, like a white cloud on a broiling day; the
sheltered life where all mundane preoccupations were far away, where
ambition and hope and struggle were incredibly distant foolishness.
Lowly and peaceful and unjaded was that life: she could see the nuns
pacing quietly in their enclosed gardens, fingering their beads as
they went to and fro and praying noiselessly for the sins of the
world, or walking with solemn happiness to the Chapel to praise God
in their own small companies, or going with hidden feet through the
great City to nurse the sick and to comfort those who had no other
comforter than God--to pray in a quiet place, and not to be afraid any
more or doubtful or despised...! These things she saw and her heart
leaped to them, and of these things she spoke to her mother, who
listened with a tender smile and stroked her hair and hands. But her
mother did not approve of these things. She spoke of nuns with
reverence and affection. Many a gentle, sweet woman had she known of
that sisterhood, many a one before whom she could have abased herself
with tears and love, but such a life of shelter and restraint could
never have been hers, nor did she believe it could be Mary's. For her
a woman's business was life, the turmoil and strife of it was good to
be in, it was a cleansing and a bracing. God did not need any
assistance, but man did, bitterly he wanted it, and the giving of
such assistance was the proper business of a woman. Everywhere there
was a man to be helped, and the quest of a woman was to find the man
who most needed her aid, and having found him to cleave to him
forever. In most of the trouble of life she divined men and women not
knowing or not doing their duty, which was to love one another and to
be neighborly and obliging to their fellows. A partner, a home and
children--through the loyal co-operation of these she saw happiness
and, dimly, a design of so vast an architecture as scarcely to be
discussed. The bad and good of humanity moved her to an equal ecstasy
of displeasure and approbation, but her God was Freedom and her
religion Love. Freedom! even the last rags of it that remain to a
regimented world! That was a passion with her. She must order her
personal life without any ghostly or bodily supervision. She would
oppose an encroachment on that with her nails and her teeth; and this
last fringe of freedom was what nuns had sacrificed and all servants
and other people had bartered away. One must work, but one must never
be a slave--these laws seemed to her equally imperative; the structure
of the world swung upon them, and whoever violated these laws was a
traitor to both God and man.
But Mary did not say anything. Her mother's arms were around her, and
suddenly she commenced to cry upon a bosom that was not strange. There
was surely healing in that breast of love, a rampart of tenderness
against the world, a door which would never be closed against her or
opened to her enemies.
XXIV
In a little city like Dublin one meets every person whom one knows
within a few days. Around each bend in the road there is a friend, an
enemy, or a bore striding towards you, so that, with a piety which is
almost religious, one says "touch wood" before turning any corner. It
was not long, therefore, until Mary again met the big policeman. He
came up behind her and walked by her side, chatting with a pleasant
ease, in which, however, her curious mind could discover some obscure
distinctions. On looking backwards it seemed to Mary that he had
always come from behind her, and the retrospect dulled his glory to
the diminishing point. For indeed his approach was too consistently
policemanlike, it was too crafty; his advent hinted at a gross
espionage, at a mind which was no longer a man's but a detective's
who tracked everybody by instinct, and arrested his friends instead of
saluting them.
As they walked along Mary was in a fever of discomfort. She wished
dumbly that the man would go away, but for the wealth of the world she
could not have brought herself to hurt the feelings of so big a man.
To endanger the very natural dignity of a big man was a thing which no
woman could do without a pang; the shame of it made her feel hot: he
might have blushed or stammered, and the memory of that would sting her
miserably for weeks as though she had insulted an elephant or a baby.
She could not get away from him. She had neither the courage nor the
experience which enables a woman to dismiss a man without wounding
him, and so, perforce, she continued walking by his side while he
treated her to an intelligent dissertation on current political events
and the topography of the city of Dublin.
But, undoubtedly, there was a change in the policeman, and it was not
difficult to account for. He was more easy and familiar in his speech:
while formerly he had bowed as from the peaks of manly intellect to
the pleasant valleys of girlish incompetence he now condescended from
the loftiness of a policeman and a person of quality to the quaint
gutters of social inferiority. To many people mental inferiority in a
companion has a charm, for it induces in one's proper person a feeling
of philosophic detachment, a fine effect of personal individuality and
superiority which is both bracing and uplifting--there is not any
particular harm in this: progress can be, and is, accelerated by the
hypocrisies and snobbishness, all the minor, unpleasant adjuncts of
mediocrity. Snobbishness is a puling infant, but it may grow to a
deeply whiskered ambition, and most virtues are, on examination, the
amalgam of many vices. But while intellectual poverty may be forgiven
and loved, social inequality can only be utilized. Our fellows,
however addled, are our friends, our inferiors are our prey, and since
the policeman had discovered Mary publicly washing out an alien hall
his respect for her had withered and dropped to death almost in an
instant; whence it appears that there is really only one grave and
debasing vice in the world, and that is poverty.
In many little ways the distinction and the difference was apparent to
Mary. The dignity of a gentleman and a man of the world was partly
shorn away: the gentleman portion, which comprised kindness and
reticence, had vanished, the man of the world remained, typified by a
familiarity which assumed that this and that, understood but not to be
mentioned, shall be taken for granted: a spurious equalization perched
jauntily but insecurely on a non-committal, and that base flattery
which is the only coin wherewith a thief can balance his depredations.
For as they went pacing down a lonely road towards the Dodder the
policeman diversified his entertaining lore by a succession of
compliments which ravaged the heavens and the earth and the deep sea
for a fitting symbology. Mary's eyes and the gay heavens were placed
in juxtaposition and the heavens were censured, the vegetable, animal
and mineral worlds were discomfited, the deep sea sustained a reproof
and the by-products of nature and of art drooped into a nothingness
too vast even for laughter. Mary had not the slightest objection to
hearing that all the other women in the world seemed cripples and
gargoyles when viewed against her own transcendent splendor, and she
was prepared to love the person who said this innocently and happily.
She would have agreed to be an angel or a queen to a man demanding
potentates and powers in his sweetheart, and would joyfully have
equalized matters by discovering the buried god in her lover and
believing in it as sincerely as he permitted.--But this man was not
saying the truth. She could see him making the things up as he talked.
There was eagerness in him, but no spontaneity. It was not even
eagerness, it was greediness: he wanted to eat her up and go away with
her bones sticking out of his mouth as the horns of a deer protrude
from the jaws of an anaconda, veritable evidence to it and his fellows
of a victory and an orgy to command respect and envy. But he was
familiar, he was complacent and--amazedly she discovered it--he was
big. Her vocabulary could not furnish her with the qualifying word,
or, rather, epithet for his bigness. Horrible was suggested and
retained, but her instinct clamored that there was a fat, oozy word
somewhere which would have brought comfort to her brains and her hands
and feet. He did not keep his arms quiet, but tapped his remarks into
her blouse and her shoulder. Each time his hands touched her they
remained a trifle longer. They seemed to be great red spiders, they
would grip her all round and squeeze her clammily while his face
spiked her to death with its moustache.... And he smiled also, he
giggled and cut capers; his language now was a perpetual witticism at
which he laughed in jerks, and at which she laughed tightly like an
obedient, quick echo: and then, suddenly, without a word, in a dazing
flash, his arms were about her. There was nobody in sight at all, and
he was holding her like a great spider, and his bristly moustache
darted forward to spike her to death, and then, somehow, she was free,
away from him, scudding down the road lightly and fearfully and very
swiftly. "Wait, wait," he called, "wait," but she did not wait.
XXV
Mrs. Cafferty came in that evening for a chat with Mrs. Makebelieve.
There were traces of worry on the lady's face, and she hushed the
children who trooped in her wake with less of good humor than they
were accustomed to. Instead of threatening to smack them on the head
as was usual she did smack them, and she walked surrounded by
lamentations as by a sea.
Things were not going at all well with her. There was a slackness in
her husband's trade so that for days together he was idle, and
although the big woman amended her expenditure in every direction she
could not by any means adjust eight robust appetites to a shrunken
income. She explained her position to Mrs. Makebelieve:--Children
would not, they could not, consent to go on shorter rations than they
had been accustomed to, and it seemed to her that daily, almost
hourly, their appetites grew larger and more terrible. She showed her
right hand whereon the mere usage of a bread-knife had scored a ridge
which was now a permanent disfigurement.
"God bless me," she shouted angrily, "what right have I to ask the
creatures to go hungry? Am I to beat them when they cry? It's not
their fault that they want food, and it's not my poor man's fault that
they haven't any. He's ready to work at his trade if anybody wants him
to do so, and if he can't get work and if the children are hungry
whose fault is it?"
Mrs. Cafferty held that there was something wrong somewhere, but
whether the blame was to be allocated to the weather, the employer,
the government or the Deity, she did not know, nor did Mrs.
Makebelieve know; but they were agreed that there was an error
somewhere, a lack of adjustment with which they had nothing to do, but
the effects whereof were grievously visible in their privations.
Meantime it had become necessary that Mrs. Cafferty should adjust
herself to a changing environment. A rise or fall in wages is
automatically followed by a similar enlargement or shrinkage of one's
necessities, and the consequent difference is registered at all points
of one's life-contact. The physical and mental activities of a
well-to-do person can reach out to a horizon, while those of very poor
people are limited to their immediate, stagnant atmosphere, and so the
lives of a vast portion of society are liable to a ceaseless change, a
flux swinging from good to bad forever, an expansion and constriction
against which they have no safeguards and not even any warning. In
free nature this problem is paralleled by the shrinking and expansion
of the seasons; the summer with its wealth of food, the winter
following after with its famine, but many wild creatures are able to
make a thrifty provision against the bad time which they know comes as
certainly and periodically as the good time. Bees and squirrels and
many others fill their barns with the plentiful overplus of the summer
fields, birds can migrate and find sunshine and sustenance elsewhere,
and others again can store during their good season a life energy by
means whereof they may sleep healthily through their hard times. These
organizations can be adjusted to their environments because the
changes of the latter are known and can be more or less accurately
predicted from any point. But the human worker has no such regularity.
His food period does not ebb and recur with the seasons. There is no
periodicity in their changes and, therefore, no possibility for
defensive or protective action. His physical structure uses and
excretes energy so rapidly that he cannot store it up and go to sleep
on his savings, and his harvests are usually so lean and disconnected
that the exercise of thrift is equally an impossibility and a mockery.
The life, therefore, of such a person is composed of a constant series
of adjustments and readjustments, and the stern ability wherewith
these changes are met and combated are more admirably ingenious than
the much-praised virtues of ants and bees to which they are constantly
directed as to exemplars.
Mrs. Cafferty had now less money than she had been used to, but she
had still the same rent to pay, the same number of children to feed,
and the same personal dignity to support as in her better days, and
her problem was to make up, by some means to which she was a stranger,
the money which had drifted beyond the reach of her husband. The
methods by which she could do this were very much restricted. Children
require an attention which occupies the entire of a mother's time,
and, consequently, she was prevented from seeking abroad any
mitigation of her hardships. The occupations which might be engaged in
at home were closed to her by mere overwhelming competition. The
number of women who are prepared to make ten million shirts for a
penny are already far in excess of the demand, and so, except by a
severe under-cutting such as a contract to make twenty million shirts
for a halfpenny, work of this description is very difficult to obtain.
Under these circumstances nothing remained for Mrs. Cafferty but to
take in a lodger. This is a form of co-operation much practiced among
the poorer people. The margin of direct profit accruing from such a
venture is very small, but this is compensated for by the extra
spending power achieved. A number of people pooling their money in
this way can buy to greater advantage and in a cheaper market than is
possible to the solitary purchaser, and a moderate toll for wear and
tear and usage, or, as it is usually put, for rent and attendance,
gives the small personal profit at which such services are reckoned.
Through the good offices of a neighboring shopkeeper Mrs. Cafferty
had secured a lodger, and, with the courage which is never separate
from despair, she had rented a small room beside her own. This room,
by an amazing economy of construction, contained a fireplace and a
window: it was about one square inch in diameter, and was undoubtedly
a fine room. The lodger was to enter into possession on the following
day, and Mrs. Cafferty said he was a very nice young man indeed and
did not drink.
XXVI
Mrs. Cafferty's lodger duly arrived. He was young and as thin as a
lath, and he moved with fury. He was seldom in the place at all: he
fled into the house for his food, and, having eaten it, he fled away
from the house again, and did not reappear until it was time to go to
bed. What he did with himself in the interval Mrs. Cafferty did not
know, but she was prepared to wager her soul, the value of which she
believed was high, on the fact that he was a good young man who never
gave the slightest trouble, saving that his bedclothes were always
lying on the floor in the morning, that there was candle grease on one
corner of his pillow, and that he cleaned his boots on a chair. But
these were things which one expected a young man to do, and the
omission of them might have caused one to look curiously at the
creature and to doubt his masculinity.
Mrs. Makebelieve replied that habits of order and neatness were rarely
to be found in young people of either sex; more especially were these
absent in boys who are released in early youth by their mothers from
all purely domestic employments. A great many people believed, and she
believed herself, that it was not desirable a man or boy should
conform too rigidly to household rules. She had observed that the
comfort of a home was lost to many men if they were expected to take
their boots off when they came into the house or to hang their hats up
in a special place. The women of a household, being so constantly
indoors, find it easy and businesslike to obey the small rules which
comprise household legislation, but as the entire policy of a house
was to make it habitable and comfortable for its men folk all domestic
ordinances might be strained to the uttermost until the compromise
was found to mollify even exceptional idiosyncrasies. A man, she held,
bowed to quite sufficient discipline during his working hours, and his
home should be a place free from every vexatious restraint and wherein
he might enjoy as wide a liberty as was good for him.