And now the mind of the Exile turned to the episode of Norah
MacMulty--grotesque, pitiable, laughable.
Paul had pssed his seventeenth birthday, and reckoned himself a man.
He was in love again, but tentatively. He had read ‘Don Juan,’ and had
learned a thing or two. He conceived that he had rubbed off the first
soft bloom of youth, and the idea, natural to his time of life, that he
was aged and experienced had taken full hold of him.
He was not wholly certain that he adored the pretty girl at the
bonnet-shop. He had never spoken to her, for one thing, and had only
seen her from a distance, but she did well enough to moon about, and
made an excellent peg to hang verses on.
He had been away on a lovely summer evening’s ramble into the quiet of
the country. He had been verse-making or verse-polishing, and was in a
high state of mental exaltation when he reached the darkened main street
of the town about ten o’clock. He turned the corner, and walked straight
into the arms of a woman, who hugged him with a drunken ardour. Her
breath was fiery with gin, and the coarsely-sweet scent of it filled him
with an impulse of loathing.
‘Let go,’ said Paul
‘Deed I’ll not let go,’ the woman answered, in a drunken voice. ‘Ye’re
just sent here be Providence to see a poor lonely little craychure
home.’
‘Let go,’ said Paul again; but she clung and laughed, and, in a sudden
spasm of downright horror, he put out more strength than he guessed,
and wrenched himself free. The woman tottered backwards, swayed for an
instant, and then fell. The back of her head came into sharp contact
with the corner of the wall. She lay quite still, and Paul grew
frightened. ‘Here,’ he said, ‘take my hand. Let me help you up.’ He had
not expected her to answer, but her continued silence seemed dreadful.
He kneeled to look closely into her face. She was quite young--not more
than two or three and twenty at the outside--and she had a quantity of
light auburn hair, which, though untidy, had a soft beauty of its own.
Her eyes were closed, and her face was white. ‘Now, don’t lie there
pretending to be killed,’ said Paul, in an unsteady voice. She made no
movement, and he rose and looked about him in dismay.
There was not a creature in the street, and the public lamps were never
lighted in the summer-time. A long way off the windows of a gin-shop
cast a light upon the road, and nearer, on the opposite side, a red
lamp burned. With a lingering glance of fear and pity at the recumbent
figure, Paul sped towards the red lamp as fast as he could lift a leg.
In his agitation he gave such a tug at the bell that it clanged like a
fire-alarm. The doctor’s assistant, a dashing young gentleman whom Paul
knew from afar, and who was remarkable to him chiefly for an expensive
taste in clothing, came briskly to the door.
‘There’s a woman at the corner,’ said Paul, ‘badly hurt; I thought it
best to let you know.’
The assistant snatched a hat from the hall table, and came out at once.
‘Where is she?’
Paul pointed, and they ran together. The assistant had the quicker turn
of speed, and reached the corner first. He was kneeling beside the woman
when Paul reached him.
‘Got a handkerchief?’ he asked
Paul lugged half a square yard of turkey-red cotton from his pocket.
‘That’s the ticket,’ said the assistant. He folded the handkerchief..
‘Now, hold her head up whilst I get this under it.’
Paul obeyed again, but the hair was all in a warm wet mesh of blood.
‘What are you shaking at?’ the assistant asked him. ‘You’re a pretty
poor plucked un,’ he added, as he tied the bandage tight across the
woman’s forehead.
‘I’m not used to it,’ said Paul, choking with nausea and pity.
‘That’s pretty evident,’ returned the other. ‘Now, get her shawl round
her head whilst I hold her up. That’ll do. We must get her down to the
surgery. Take her by her shoulders; there. Get your arms well under her.
Heave ho! Wait a minute till I settle her dress and get a good hold of
her knees. Upsy daisy; march!’
They went staggeringly, not because of the weight, but by reason of the
giddiness which assailed Paul. He thought it had suddenly grown foggy,
for there was a mist between him and all the dimly visible objects of
the night There were coloured sparks in the mist by-and-by, and when
once they had got their burden through the open hall and had laid it
on a plain straight couch in the surgery, Paul was glad to sit down
uninvited.
‘Take a sniff at that,’ said the assistant, pressing an un-stoppered
bottle into his hand.
Paul obeyed him. The pungent ammonia brought the tears to his eyes and
took his breath away, but it dispersed the fog and stilled the wheel
which had been whirling in his head The assistant had taken off his
coat and rolled up his shirtsleeves, and was going about his task with
professional dexterity and coolness.
‘How did this happen?’ he asked.
He was Paul’s senior by three years at most, but he had as magisterial
and assured a manner as if he had been fifty.
Paul told the story just as it happened.
‘Well,’ said the assistant, ‘this is a pretty grave old case, and so I
tell you. You may find yourself in trouble over this.’
‘Find myself in trouble?’ said Paul. ‘Me?’
‘Yes,’ said the assistant; ‘you.’
‘You’ve got better work in hand than talkin’ rubbish,’ Paul retorted;
‘stick to it.’
‘Ah,’ said the budding surgeon, ‘well wait till the woman’s conscious,
if ever she is, and see what sort of a tale she has to tell.’
‘It’s the simple truf he’s tould ye,’ said the patient, in a feeble
voice. ‘What do ye be tryin’ to frighten him for?’
‘Oh, you’re coming round, are you? asked the assistant; ‘didn’t expect
it. That’s a pretty nasty crack you’ve got.’
‘Twill take more than that to kill Norah MacMulty,’ said the young
woman, struggling into a sitting posture, and beginning mechanically to
arrange her disordered dress. ‘The MacMultys is a fine fightin’ famly,
and it runs in the blood to take a cracked skull quite kindly. I’ll be
takin’ a glass at the Grapes, and then I’ll be goin’ home, but not till
I’ve thanked ye kindly. Has anybody seen me bonnut?’
‘I shan’t allow you to go to the Grapes to-night, my good woman,’ said
the assistant. ‘Where do you live?’
She named her address, a wretched little row of tenement houses some ten
score yards away.
‘What’s your trade?’
‘Me trade, is it?’ she answered, with a feeble, good-humoured laugh.
‘Tis not much of a trade, anyhow; I’m a street-walker.’
She made the statement wholly commonplace in tone, and gave it with as
little reluctance or embarrassment as if she had laid claim to the most
respectable calling in the world.
The assistant stared and laughed, but she caught Paul’s look of amazed
horror.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘why wouldn’t I be? I’ll go to hell for it, av coorse,
for that’s God’s will on all of us. Tis hard lines, too, for ‘tis none
so fine a life when ye’ve tried ut. Thank ye kindly, both of yez. I’d
pay ye for ut, but ye’d not be takin’ a poor girl’s last shillin’, I
know, from the good-tempered purty face of ye.’
‘You’re sweetly welcome,’ said the assistant, busily washing his hands
at the sink, and looking sideways at her. ‘You’re a queer fish, any
way.’
‘’Tis a queer fish I am,’ she answered, ‘an’ by-an’-by they’ll have
the cookin’ of me. Fried soul,’ she said, with a faint laugh. ‘Begobs!
that’s funny; I never thought o’that before. Fried soul!’
‘How old are you?’ the assistant asked.
‘Faith,’ she said, ‘I’m just past two-an’-twinty. ‘Tis an agein’ life,
an’ I look more; but ‘tis God’s truf I’m tellin’ ye.’
‘Very likely,’ said the assistant, towelling his hands.
‘I’ll go now,’ said Norah MacMulty. ‘I’m a trifle unsteady with the
shakin’, but the drink’s out of me, worse luck! and I’ll be able to
walk.’
‘No calling at the Grapes, mind you,’ said the assistant ‘You’d better
look in at the infirmary about eleven o’clock to-morrow.’
‘I’ll do that,’ she answered. ‘Will ye be lendin’ me your shoulder as
far as the dure, young man? I’ll be better in a minute.’
Paul did as she requested, but he crawled with repulsion beneath her
hand. The touch inspired him with loathing. He had lived a sheltered
life, and had never seen an open abandonment to shame. He wondered why
God allowed the degraded thing to live, and his heart ached with pity
at the same time. He led her to the door, and then across the road. The
assistant sent a curt ‘Good-night’ after him. He answered it, and the
door dosed.
‘Can you walk alone now?’ he asked.
‘I’ll try,’ she said, and made a staggering attempt at it.
Paul caught her, or she would have fallen.
‘Take my arm,’ he said to her, hardening his heart with an effort.
He blessed the darkness and the quiet of the street, but before they had
gone a score of yards a door opened in a house he knew, and Armstrong
came out of it.
In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred the old man would have gone by
dreaming, but he was alert enough at odd moments, and this chanced to be
one of them. He saw Paul arm-in-arm with a bandaged drunken woman, and
as he recognised his son the pair reeled together.
‘Paul!’ he cried. ‘Good God!’
‘I’m glad it’s you, father,’ said Paul. ‘This poor creature fell at the
corner yonder and cut her head terribly. I fetched young Marley to her
from Dr. Hervey’s, and he has seen to her. She wants to get home.’
‘I’ll take the other side,’ said Armstrong, and the three lurched slowly
along in the dimness.
‘Ye’re good people,’ Norah MacMulty said when they had brought her to
her door.
A slattern woman answered Armstrong’s knock, heard the news with no
discernible emotion, and helped the arrival in as if she had been a
sack of coals. Armstrong and Paul went home with few words. ‘Don’t be
startled when you see me,’ Paul said at the door. ‘I helped to carry her
to the doctor’s, and she bled horribly.’
It was not meant for an exaggeration, but he was unused to such scenes,
and the woman’s language more than anything else had helped to scare him
from his self-possession. The hour was late already, reckoning by his
custom. He washed, and went upstairs, but not to bed. He threw the
window open and let in the soft, heavy night-air. Strange thoughts made
a jumble in his mind. From his attic he could see, over the roofs of the
houses opposite, the outlines of the Quarrymore Hills, clearly defined
in the light of the rising moon. Half way between him and them the air
was dimly red with the glow of the unseen furnaces in the valley. He
heard the loud roar of the invisible fires, and now and then the clank
of iron. His thoughts were not on these things, but he was vaguely
conscious of them.
He had taken his earliest look at the real tragedy of life. The peril of
the woman’s soul was the first thing to emerge clearly from the chaos of
his thoughts. Her flippant, reckless acceptance of the certainty of
her own damnation horrified him. Out of the streets, out of the bestial
degradation of that life of shame and drink, into sheer hell? No chance?
No hope? Surely Christ had died! But only for those who owned Him,
and called upon Him! No, no, and a thousand times no! It was not to be
believed, not to be borne. It was hateful, horrible, monstrous. The poor
degraded thing had punishment enough already. She was in hell already.
The bruised reed, the smoking flax! He fell upon his knees, and his soul
seemed to melt in a flood of anguished pity. He wept passionately, with
an incoherent clamour in his heart of ‘God--God--God!’
The storm wore itself out, but he knelt there long, with his hands on
the window-sill, and his face buried in them. He had been too agitated
to find words, and now he was too tired and empty even to wish for them.
His eyes were dry, and his lips were harsh and salt with his tears.
He looked up, and the whole night had changed. The moon rode high,
and was nearly at the full. The skies were spangled with thousands on
thousands of glittering stars. He thrust out his head and looked upward
into the vast blue of the night Out from the stainless sky fell one
warm, heavy drop full on his upturned forehead. To his worn thoughts it
was like an angel’s tear. He nestled beside the open window, and gazed
from star to star, seeming idly to trace an intricate winding road of
blue amongst them. Peace came back to him, an empty peace, no more than
a mental languor. He slept at last, and awoke stiff and chill to find
the light of morning creeping along a clouded east.
All that day one purpose was present to his mind. When the day’s work
was over and he was free, he dressed and walked into the street He
roamed up and down it from end to end, and several times he diverged
from it to pace the road in which Norah MacMulty lived, and to linger
about the house into which he had helped her. He had something to say to
Norah MacMulty, but he caught no sight of her. He went home, and to bed.
Next evening he paced the streets again. There was still no sign of her,
but he encountered the assistant, who nodded to him in passing. Paul
stopped him.
‘I beg your pardon,’ he said. ‘Is there any news of that poor woman?’
‘Yes,’ said the assistant. ‘She’s in for a touch of erysipelas. They
kept her at the Infirmary to-day. If they’d left her at large she’d have
killed herself.’
‘How?’ said Paul.
‘Drink,’ returned the assistant, and went his own way.
So Paul ceased his wanderings for a while, and a fortnight had passed
before he saw the woman again.
It was a Sunday afternoon, and he was off for his customary lonely
ramble. Armstrong always went upstairs for a nap after Sunday’s dinner,
and Paul was left without companionship.
The woman was a mile away from her home, and was sitting on the lower
steps of a stile by the side of the highway. She was tidily attired, and
sober. Her recent illness had left a pensive look upon her face.
‘You’re better?’ said Paul, stopping in front of her.
She looked up in some surprise.
‘Oh,’ she answered. ‘’Tis you? I’m better, thank ye kindly. There’s not
many cares to ask.’
‘Do you remember,’ Paul demanded, with a face whiter than her own, ‘what
you said at the doctor’s the night you were hurt?’
‘No,’ she replied. ‘What was it?’
‘The doctor asked you what your trade was,’ said Paul.
‘Yes,’ she said; ‘I mind it now.’
‘Did you mean it?’ Paul asked.
‘Ye’re a trifle over-young to turn parson,’ she responded. ‘Go your
ways, child, and don’t be bothering.’
‘Don’t ask me to go yet,’ said Paul ‘I’ve something I want to say to
you.’ His voice stuck in his throat, and she turned her glance towards
him in a new surprise. ‘You said,’ he went on with difficulty, ‘that you
were sure to go to hell.’
‘I’m that,’ she answered dryly, drawing her shawl about her shoulders.
‘Well,’ said Paul, ‘you shan’t. I’m not going to let you.’ She laughed
oddly with a mere ejaculation, and stared along the road. ‘Do you ever
think what hell is like?’ he asked.
‘Would I drink if I didn’t?’ she answered without looking at him.
‘You can’t put it away by drinking.’
‘I know that,’ she answered, with a sudden sullen fierceness. Then, ‘Ye
mean well, I dare say, but ye’re wastin’ time. Go your ways.’
‘It’s no use asking,’ said Paul; ‘I can’t do it.’ She looked up at him
again, and he hurried on, with a dry husk in his throat: ‘I can’t rest
for thinking of it I can’t eat I can’t sleep. I can’t think of anything
else.’
A slight spasm contorted her lips for a mere instant, but she looked
down the road again, and answered drearily:
‘That’s a pity.’
There was a tone of tired scorn in her words, but this, as it were, was
only on the surface. There was something else below, and the sense of it
urged him on.
‘You have a good face,’ he said. ‘You were not meant----’
He checked himself.
‘Me poor boy,’ she answered, with another motion to arrange her shawl,
‘ye can’t tell me anything I don’t know.’
‘I can tell you something you’ve forgotten,’ said Paul. ‘I don’t care
what you’ve done; you’re God’s child, and while there’s life there’s
hope.’
‘Ye’re not a man yet,’ said Norah MacMulty; ‘but if ever ye mean to be
one, hould your tongue an’ go.’
‘I don’t mind hurting you if I can do you any good by it.’ ‘Ye can do me
no good, nor yourself neither. Here’s people coming along the road, and
it’s ten to one they’ll know ye. Ye’ve no right to be seen talkin’ to
the likes of me at your age.’
‘I don’t care for the people,’ he answered. ‘I don’t care for anything
but what I’ve got to say.’
‘Well,’ she said, ‘if you don’t care, I’m sure I don’t. ‘Tis no odds to
me what anybody thinks.’
The people who approached were strangers, two men and two women of the
working class. They passed the pair without notice, talking of their own
affairs.
‘I’m only two days from the hospital,’ said the girl when they were out
of hearing, ‘and me legs gives way underneath me. If ‘twas not for that,
I’d not stay here. Go now; I’m tired of ye.’
‘Look here,’ said Paul, with the dry husk in his throat again, ‘you
don’t like your life.’
‘Faith, then,’ she answered, ‘I do not.’
‘Then why not leave it?’
‘Ye’re talking like a child. How the divvle _can_ I leave it?’
‘Leave it with me,’ said Paul.
That was what he had meant to say from the first, and now that he had
spoken his word his difficulties seemed to fall away.
‘I can’t earn full wages yet, but I can get two-thirds anywhere. I can
make eighteen shillings a week, and I can live on half of it. You can
have the other half, and there will be no need, then---- You will find
something to do in time--sewing, or ironing, or something--and then it
will be easier for us both.’
‘Ye’re mad!’ said Norah MacMulty.
‘No,’ said Paul, ‘I’m not mad. I’m going to save your soul, Norah.’
She looked at him fixedly.
‘Ye mean it?’ she asked.
‘I mean it,’ he answered. ‘I mean it in God’s hearing.’
‘Well,’ she said, ‘I’m mightily obliged to ye.’
‘You’re coming, Norah?’
‘What’s your name?’
‘Armstrong--Paul Armstrong.’
‘I’ll remember that,’ she said. ‘Good-bye to ye, Paul Armstrong.’
‘No,’ said Paul, ‘you will come to me. I shall go to look for work
to-morrow, and as soon as I have found it I shall send for you, and you
will come.’
‘D’ye want me to live with ye?’ she asked.
‘No,’ he answered with a strong shudder. She saw that clearly, and her
colour changed. The swift distortion showed itself about her lips again.
It passed away in an instant, but it left the mouth trembling. ‘I want
you to be away somewhere where nobody can say a word against you. I want
to see you and talk to you sometimes, and know that you are going on
prosperously.’
‘I’m mightily obliged to ye,’ she said again. ‘Ye’re a good little fool,
but a fool you are.’
‘I am not a fool for this, Norah. Nobody is a fool who tries to do God’s
work.’
‘Anybody’s a fool that tries to do God’s work that way,’ she answered.
‘You say you are going to hell, Norah.’
‘And so I am, but not for ruinin’ a child that’s got hysterics. I can
face the divvle without havin’ that on my conscience. And I’ll tell ye
somethin’ that’ll maybe turn out useful when ye grow older. Ye think
because I folly a callin’ that no decent woman can think of and because
ye know that I drink, that I’ve no pride of me own. Ye’re mistaken, Paul
Armstrong. If ye were ten years older, and I me own woman, I’d set these
in your face. D’ye mind me now?’ She shook her hands before her for
an instant, and withdrew them under her shawl again. ‘Ye mean well, I
think, but ye’re just in-sultin’ past bearin’, an’ so you are! Would I
live on the ‘arnin’s of a child? Oh, Mary, Mary, Mother o’ God!’ ‘she
burst out, ‘look down an’ see how I’m trodden in the mud. Go away, go
away; go away, I tell ye! I know what I am. Right well I know what I am.
But d’ye think I’m that?
Black misery on your---- No. Ill not curse ye, for I believe ye meant
well. But if ye’re not gone, I’ve a scissors here, an’ I’ll do meself a
mischief.’
The outburst overwhelmed him. The man of the world who could have stood
unmoved against it would have needs been brave and cool. The torrent of
her passion swept him like a straw.
‘I beg your pardon,’ he stammered; ‘I beg your pardon with all my heart
and soul.’
‘Go!’ she said.
He obeyed her, and the episode of Norah MacMulty came to a close.
‘Paul,’ said the Solitary, waking for a moment from the dream in which
these old things acted themselves again before him, ‘you were always a
fool, but the folly of that time was better than to-day’s.’