I
Young Mr. O'Grady was in love. It was the first time he had been in
love, and it was all sufficiently startling. He seemed to have leaped
from boyhood to manhood at a stroke, and the things which had pretended
to be of moment yesterday were to-day discovered to have only the very
meanest importance. Different affairs now occupied him. A little
while ago his cogitations had included, where he would walk to on the
next Sunday, whether his aunt in Meath Street would lend him the price
of a ticket for the coming Bank Holiday excursion, whether his brother
would be using his bicycle on Saturday afternoon, and whether the
packet of cigarettes which he was momently smoking contained as many
cigarettes as could be got elsewhere for two pence.
These things were no longer noteworthy. Clothing had assumed an
importance he could scarcely have believed in. Boots, neck-ties, the
conduct of one's hat and of one's head, the progress of one's
moustache, one's bearing towards people in the street and in the house,
this and that social observance--all these things took on a new and
important dignity. He bought a walking-stick, a card-case, a purse, a
pipe with a glass bottom wherein one could observe one's own nicotine
inexorably accumulating.--He bought a book on etiquette and a pot of
paste for making moustaches grow in spite of providence, and one day he
insisted on himself drinking a half glass of whisky--it tasted sadly,
but he drank it without a grimace. Etiquette and whisky! these things
have to be done, and one might as well do them with an air. He was in
love, he was grown up, he was a man, and he lived fearlessly up to his
razor and his lady.
From the book on etiquette he exhumed a miscellany of useful and
peculiar wisdom. Following information about the portage of knives and
forks at incredible dinners he discovered that a well-bred person
always speaks to the young lady's parents before he speaks to the young
lady. He straightened his shoulders.--It would be almost as bad, he
thought, as having to drink whisky, but if it had to be done why he
would not shrink from this any more than he had from that. He set
forth on the tingling errand.
Mr. O'Reilly was a scrivener, a husband and a father. He made copies
of all kinds of documents for a living. He also copied maps. It has
been said that scriveners have to get drunk at least twice a week in
order to preserve their sanity; but the person whose miserable
employment is to draw copies of maps is more desperately environed than
an ordinary scrivener. It was Mr. O'Reilly's misfortune that he was
unable to get drunk. He disliked liquor, and, moreover, it disagreed
with him. He had, to paraphrase Lamb, toiled after liquor as other
people toil after virtue, but the nearer he got the less did he like
it. As a consequence of this enforced decency the ill-temper, which is
the normal state of scriveners, had surged and buzzed around him so
long that he had quite forgotten what a good temper was like.--It might
be said that he hated every one, not excepting his wife and daughter.
He could avoid other people, but these he could never escape from.
They wanted to talk to him when he wanted to be let alone. They
worried him with this and that domestic question or uproar. He would
gladly have sold them both as slaves to the Barbadoes or presented them
to the seraglio of any eastern potentate. There they were! and he
often gnashed his teeth and grinned at them in amazement because they
were there.
On the evening when young Mr. O'Grady sallied forth to ask him for the
hand of his daughter in marriage he was sitting at supper with his
consort--
Mr. O'Reilly took the last slice of bread from under his wife's hand.
It was loot, so he ate it with an extra relish and his good lady
waddled away to get more bread from cupboard--
"Everything's a trouble," said she, as she cut the loaf. "Doesn't it
make you think of the hymn 'I'm but a stranger here, heaven is my
home'?"
"No, ma'm," said her husband, "it does not. Where is Julia Elizabeth?"
and he daringly and skilfully abstracted the next slice of bread while
his wife was laying down the butter knife.
"I wish," said she, as she reached for the knife again, "I wish you
would give me a chance, O'Reilly: you eat much quicker than I do, God
help me!"
"I wish," rapped her husband fiercely, "that you would give a plain
answer to a plain question. Now then, ma'm, in two words, where is
that girl? My whole life seems to be occupied in asking that question,
and yours seems to be spent in dodging the answer to it."
"I don't know," replied his wife severely, "and that's three words."
"You don't know!" he looked around in helpless appeal and condemnation.
"What sort of an answer is that for a mother to give about her
daughter?" and under cover of his wrath he stole the next slice of
bread.
His wife also became angry--she put her plate in her lap and sat up at
him--
"Don't barge me, man," said she. "A nice daughter to have to give such
an answer about. Leave me alone now for I'm not well, I say, on the
head of her. I never know where she does be. One night it's (she
endeavoured to reproduce her daughter's soprano) 'I am going to a
dance, mother, at the Durkins'----'"
"Ha'penny hops!" said her husband fiercely. "Can't you cut me a bit of
bread!"
"And another night, 'she wants to go out to see Mary Durkan.'"
"I know her well, a big hat and no morals, a bankrupt's baggage."
"And the night after she 'wants to go to the theatre, ma.'"
"Dens of infamy," said he. "If I had my way I'd shut them all up and
put the actors in gaol, with their hamleting and gamyacting and
ha-ha'ing out of them."
"I can't keep her in," said his wife, wringing her hands, "and I won't
try to any longer. I get a headache when I talk to her, so I do. Last
night when I mentioned about her going out with that Rorke man she
turned round as cool as you please and told me 'to shut up.' Her own
mother!" and she surveyed Providence with a condemnatory eye--
At this point her husband swung his long arm and arrested the slice of
bread in his wife's lap--
"If she spoke to me that way," he grinned, "I'll bet I'd astonish her."
His wife looked in amazement from her lap to his plate, but she had
ability for only one quarrel at a time--
"And doesn't she talk to you like that? You never say a word to her
but she has a look in her eye that's next door to calling you a
fool.--I don't know where she is at all to-day."
"What time did she go out?"
"After breakfast this morning."
"And now it's supper-time--ha! that's good! Can't you give me a bit of
bread, or do you want to eat the whole loaf yourself? Try to remember
that I do pay for my food."
With an angry shake of the head his wife began to cut the loaf, and
continued speaking--
"'Where are you going to, Julia Elizabeth?' said I. 'Out,' said she,
and not another word could I get from her. Her own mother, mind you,
and her best clothes----"
Mr. O'Reilly ate the last slice of bread and arose from the table.
"I suppose," said he, "she is loafing about the streets with some young
puppy who has nothing of his own but a cigarette and a walking-stick,
and they both borrowed. I'll have a talk with her when she comes in,
and we'll see if she tells me to shut up."
The door banged, the room shook, and Mrs. O'Reilly settled to her
frustrated tea, but her thoughts still ran on her daughter.
It was at this point that, directed by love and etiquette, Mr. O'Grady
knocked at the door. Mrs. O'Reilly was again cutting the loaf in an
exasperation which was partly hunger and partly maternal, and, as she
cut, she communed with herself--
"As if," said she, "I haven't enough trouble trying to keep a cranky
man like her pa in good humour, without being plagued by Julia
Elizabeth"--she paused, for there was a knock at the door.--"If," said
she to the door, "you are a woman with ferns in a pot I don't want you,
and I don't want Dublin Bay herrings, or boot-laces either, so you can
go away.--The crankiness of that man is more than tongue can tell. As
Miss Carty says, I shouldn't stand it for an hour--Come in, can't
you--and well she may say it, and she a spinster without a worry under
heaven but her suspicious nature and her hair falling out. And then to
be treated the way I am by that girl! It'd make a saint waxy so it
would.--Good heavens! can't you come in, or are you deaf or lame or
what?" and in some exasperation she arose and went to the door. She
looked in perplexity for one moment from her food to her visitor, but
as good manners and a lady are never separate she welcomed and drew the
young man inside--
"Come in, Mr. O'Grady," said she. "How are you now at all? Why it's
nearly a week since you were here. Your mother's well I hope (sit down
there now and rest yourself). Some people are always well, but I'm
not--it's (sit there beside the window, like a good boy) it's hard to
have poor health and a crotchety husband, but we all have our trials.
Is your father well too? but what's the use of asking, every one's well
but me. Did your aunt get the pot of jam I sent her last Tuesday?
Raspberry is supposed to be good for the throat, but her throat's all
right. Maybe she threw it out: I'm not blaming her if she did. God
knows she can buy jam if she wants it without being beholden to any one
for presents and her husband in the Post Office.--Well, well, well, I'm
real glad to see you--and now, tell me all the news?"
The young man was a little embarrassed by this flood of language and
its multiplicity of direction, but the interval gave him time to
collect himself and get into the atmosphere.--He replied--
"I don't think there is any news to tell, ma'm. Father and mother are
quite well, thank you, and Aunt Jane got the jam all right, but she
didn't eat it, because----"
"I knew she didn't," said Mrs. O'Reilly with pained humility, "we all
have our troubles and jam doesn't matter. Give her my love all the
same, but maybe she doesn't want it either."
"You see," said the young man, "the children got at the jam before she
could, and they cleaned the pot. Aunt Jane was very angry about it."
"Was she now?" said the instantly interested lady. "It's real bad for
a stout person to be angry. Apoplexy or something might ensue and
death would be instantaneous and cemeteries the price they are in
Glasnevin and all: but the children shouldn't have eaten all the jam at
once, it's bad for the stomach that way: still, God is good and maybe
they'll recover."
"They don't seem much the worse for it," said he, laughing; "they said
it was fine jam."
"Well they might," replied his hostess, with suppressed indignation,
"and raspberries eightpence the pound in Grafton Street, and the best
preserving sugar twopence-three-farthings, and coal the way it is.--Ah,
no matter, God is good, and we can't live for ever."